Apple Event Fall 2015: The Best and Worst Innovations

[Mark Spoonauer]

The Apple Event proved that the company can still out-innovate the competition, but there were some misses, too.

Apple Event Fall 2015: The Best and Worst Innovations : Read more

 

[jakjawagon]

What I want to know is how much RAM the new iPhones have. The 6 and 6 Plus only had 1GB, which was disappointing considering most decent Android phones at the time had 3GB. I sometimes run out of the 2GB of RAM on my Nexus 5, so if I were to get an iPhone, it would need more than that.

I also have concerns about the Pencil. It looks like it will stick out the side of the iPad Pro awkwardly while charging. I'm predicting a lot of broken Lightning connectors. A graphics tablet-like stylus is a good idea, but Nvidia did it two years ago with the Tegra Note 7. I'll be interested to see how this compares.

If this double or triple posts, it's the new site design's fault.

 

[LePhuronn]

B+? That's generous at best. I do not see a single success here.

The iPhone juggernaught continues with predictable incremental updates that loosely match the hardware advancements Android devices see, yet once again devoid of innovation. 3D Touch? Why? I don't want to press my phone screen harder or softer to get additional actions because how can you guarantee precision beyond touch, hold and squeeze on a device that small and when on the move (because, after all, it IS a phone)? iPhone uses 3D Touch to do a long press which triggers alternate actions? That's a purely software feature than has been around for ages.

The 4K shooting video vs Apple TV lack-of-4K isn't a "disconnect", it's an amateurish blunder at best, blatant and direct consumer rip-off at worst when the 4K-capable Apple TV is released shortly thereafter.

The Pencil, despite being a gloriously-engineered piece of technology, is largely pointless - only the iPad Pro has the surface (no pun) area to benefit from the precision and the artistic direction, yet the iPad Pro is still an iOS device so doesn't have actual proper software on it - Adobe can flaunt their cut-down Photoshop toys all they want, it's still not actual Photoshop or actual Illustrator - so at best you have a 13" tablet with a nice stylus that you use for digital sketching and concept work while you're away from your actual workstation.

And to make it worse, the entire iPad Pro and Pencil is unmistakably Microsoft Surface, yet missing the fundamental point about what Surface is.

How is Siri integration on the Apple TV such a breakthrough? It's voice recognition mapped to software actions. Yes, voice as a UI is increasingly impressive and natural - and credit to Apple for how they're developing Siri - but any "innovation" is very thin marketing fluff.

...no one said Apple's innovations needed to be original to have a big impact...

Um...

innovation: a new method, idea, product, etc.

So yes, Apple's innovations need to be original in order to be innovative. Perhaps a more suitable word is "implementation" or "adoption" because Apple haven't done an original thing in most of their history. Except the unified cooling column design of the Mac Pro.

 

[fios-dave]

I would like to see a comparison of the current Siri against Microsoft's Winphone 10 Cortana.
I believe that Cortana can go levels deeper than Siri, for example, "What is today's weather?", then, "Tomorrow's?", then "The next day", then, "The day after?". Also, the pressure sensitive screen is nice,
but with the Windows OS, the live tiles show current info. Arranging your tiles with the Weather, Calendar, News and local gas prices in a row, gives you almost all the information you need without touching a thing!