Apple iPhone 5S | Hacker News Reader

Apple iPhone 5S

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25 pointsZaheer15 comments

I love my MBA because of the battery life. All day battery, not having to worry, is a great thing. My iPhone 5...not the same at all. It will definitely run out with heavy usage, and with iOS7 multitasking I'm quite concerned. The face that the 5S didn't boast improved battery life makes me think that in reality, running iOS7 on the new iPhone won't make it all day, and I will have to keep using a mophie case. I'd love to see battery life extended by 50% to truly make it "All day battery" (they could call it 2 day).

They claim 10hrs talk time on 3G on the iPhone 5S vs. 8hrs on the iPhone 5 so supposedly a 25% increase.

There are some improvements in iOS7 that should improve battery life, though it's hard to say by how much compared to decreases from introducing more multi-tasking. This includes batching LTE network access from multiple apps. Though we can't know the full impact of the new APIs until apps start taking advantage of them, many who used beta 4 and 5 claimed better battery life than on iOS 6.

For me being able to very quickly turn off wifi, bluetooth, and lower brightness via the control panel has probably made the biggest positive difference. I'm more likely to leave bluetooth off most of the time for instance since I know it takes less than a second to turn it back on.

I'm somewhat dubious of the performance claims from the switch to a 64-bit architecture. That doesn't seem like it has been a bottleneck for a lot of processes and applications on mobile historically, but I could be wrong. Can any devs offer any insight on whether the 64-bit switch could make a real difference at anywhere but super high-throughput operations like, as Epic demonstrated, swapping a huge amount of data into RAM?

The performance claims are marketing speak: they say the new 64 bit CPU is now twice as fast as the old 32 bit CPU. But this isn't too strange, the previous 32 bit CPU was also about twice as fast as the predecessor to that one.

So what he's actually saying is (1) the CPU is now 64 bit and (2) the CPU is faster than the old one. Seems a lot clearer when you split it up like that, yeah? It's clever use of language. (1) is useful for future proofing the iOS architecture for >4GB of RAM in upcoming devices and lets developers start compiling their apps now for 64 bit. (2) is just the usual improvements and faster clock speed that is obvious for a new generation of devices.

Yeah, I assumed that the big performance gains, comparable to previous proc updates, were due to just being a faster chip. The quotes were "up to 2x faster," which is of course not untrue but still a bit misleading. Hopefully a few benchmarks and real-world tests will bear out the actual differences.

Any more info available on the "M7 Motion Coprocessor" chip? That's the most interesting addition IMO.

I'm curious too. For one thing, I'd want to know where and how the historical data is stored, since it essentially provides an always-on record of my movements, and with only one or two reference points, it could prove extremely revealing if accessed. But I do think a dedicated motion chip is a great idea.

It says it would be able to capture gesture movements like walking, driving etc. It will help health, fitness apps. Nike has already made an app for it.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/10/4710706/apple-demoes-nike-...

My guess it's a rebranded Cortex-M3, which would be low-power enough to run continuously. The fitbit flex uses a M3 and it claims 5 days of battery life. I'd guess it stores collected data on chip and iOS copies it over when it wakes up.

An alternative approach is that it acts essentially as an off chip interrupt. Every time an event occurs it wakes up the main CPU and sends the data over. The main CPU then goes back to sleep. In other words, instead of the CPU having to poll for environmental data, it can be pushed. It may have a small buffer to batch data or it might even be programmable (subscribe to motion events over X intensity). Or it could be just a simple data collector like you described.

My guess is that it would do both of those things. Moves App is something that seems it could make use of both, they've already said they think it is interesting: https://twitter.com/movesapp/status/377507455489433600

If it's $199 for a 16G with contract, how much would it be for a 16G without contract?

$649. Add $100 per storage bump. Basically, the 5C is an incredible rip-off. It's only $100 cheaper than the 5S, and you have a plastic case, much slower CPU, and no fingerprint sensor. Very disappointing pricing.

Ok, which phone company sells phone covers! Jobs, the real Apple fans are missing you!

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