xenadu

I can accept your points.  I cannot accept the point of 70% share that was being offered by the poster.  Apple never hit 70% share in the U.S., or any major country.  Every percentage point over 50% is extremely difficult.  For any company.

 

Robert

Oh yeah, I absolutely agree.

No way in the world that 70% of all of AT&T and Verizon smartphone sales are iPhones in 2013. No way in the world. Apple probably couldn't even muster 70% of all sales the month after a new product launch, let alone every month of the year. iOS has steadily lost share over time. They are not gaining it.

 

Robert

That's not correct in the US market. The iPhone always takes a larger share when a new model is released, then sales slack off around this time as we await a new model. However Android has been stuck around 50% in the US market, give or take 3%, for some time. The iPhone has continued it's climb and hit 42% recently. http://bgr.com/2013/07/08/t-mobile-iphone-sales/

 

Over the Christmas quarter the iPhone accounted for more than half of all new phone sales: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57565106-37/iphone-wins-51-percent-of-u.s-smartphone-sales-says-report/

 

 

iOS is, in fact, gaining US marketshare. That's been the long-term trend since it was introduced and continues to be the case. You have to watch out because idiot analysts have changed their definitions of the mobile phone market over time, yielding misleading headlines. The Smartphone market is pretty much the phone market in the US now, and iOS continues to climb. Android just climbed to its current spot faster. The reality is both have done so by eating everyone else (including feature phones), but rarely at the expense of one another.

It would cost a lot of money.  That is why Verizon stopped expanding in my state ran out of funds.  Last time I heard fiber was 3 or 4 something a foot.  I don't know how many pairs but lets say you have 200 foot run to your house.  Then inside fiber they need to run.  They do run fiber to business that require it and local companies run fiber for cell towers.  I know sprint is using local compies 

 

Verizon stopped deploying FIOS because they shifted that CapEx money into profit to boost the quarterly numbers and signed a non-compete agreement with the cable companies. That's why the cable company consortium dumped all the spectrum they spent billions acquiring with the intention of starting their own cell service to compete with Verizon. They've all decided to apportion TV to DirecTV/Comcast/TWC and wireless to VZW.

 

Verizon doesn't pay 3-4 per foot for fiber; the FIOS cables to the home are standard lengths up to 150ft (IIRC), so they get them for *literally* dollars each for the average home. We're talking about a one-time investment that will continue to throw off cash for a hundred years or more... but it won't goose the quarterly numbers so they don't care.

Was reading afar until I saw this comment...  anyone who continues to bring up the fragmentation comment today is an absolute idiot as they have no idea what they are talking about.  They should pull their heads out of the sand/apple sauce as this hasn't been the case for a long time.

 

  

 

Jeez, chill out man. I don't know where you get your information, but 94% of all iOS devices are running iOS 6. Half of all Android devices are still on 2.x. Those are just facts. I write software, lest you forget. I like to think I know a little bit more about the state of fragmentation than almost everyone else on this forum because I have to deal with it on a daily basis.

 

Android is harder to develop and test for partly due to version fragmentation and device fragmentation. There are tools and techniques that help and it certainly isn't the end of the world, but it is harder and no amount of hand waving will change that. It does mean there are a wider variety of devices, so its a trade-off.

 

On the flip side, to get apps in the Apple App Store you have to submit them for approval. As a developer, that can be annoying at times, but for users it means no malware or reluctance to try new apps so again its a trade-off.

 

If the Android fanboys want a real talking point, you should try arguing that Apple needs a more modern language than Objective-C. That's a legit issue, but like fragmentation won't make or break the platform.

 

 

 

what do you guys think about the facetime voice only call option?

not that it may be disruptive for the carriers but some frugal parents may hold on off on getting lil johnny on their plan when they can do it this way.

  

 

It is interesting. I think it may be aimed more at Skype and that ilk, though knowing Apple they probably did it because people click or tap FaceTime and expect it to do voice or video calls, not due to any overarching competitive strategy. Sometimes I wish they'd go after other companies and undercut their business, but they don't seem to. (Eg make iAds available on the web and attempt to cut into Google's ad revenue).

 

 

This.  And then some.

 

Apple makes a living off forcing you to upgrade.  Android has such a fragmentation because really, unless you are a power user, the reason to upgrade is minimal.  Android doesnt pull half the crap iOS does with what device can do what.

 

What universe did this post come from? The list of Android hardware on sale today that doesn't have some hardware feature or doesn't have the horsepower to run something (eg a game) is a mile long because every OEM decides what grab-bag of stuff to implement. With the exception of a few new features, Apple generally makes updates available for older devices for years and releases them to everyone on the same day.

 

Apple says that Siri requires hardware audio processing not present on the iPhone 4. Chipworks broke down the SoC and did find such a unit. Maybe Siri could work but not as well in noisy environments. But everything else has a legit reason. The devices not getting the camera filters are because those filters require newer GPUs. The devices not getting AirDrop are because AirDrop uses the new WiFi Direct support built into the 802.11ac chips which allow peer-to-peer connections with no base station or setup and Apple doesn't want the feature to be hamstrung by who is connected to what WiFi network or who is on cellular. And in fact those are the only features restricted to certain models that I know of... Your three year old iPhone 4 will get everything else, for free, the same day it is released. No one can claim that on Android, period. No three year old Android phone gets updated, ever.

 

Apple has a captive fan base. If they wanted to force people to upgrade, they wouldn't bother releasing OS updates for the older devices. If they wanted to rip you off, they wouldn't replace your dropped under contract iPhone 5 for 229 (assuming no AppleCare), way way less than the retail price the carriers pay. Tell me... Does Samsung extend that courtesy for Galaxy owners or do you pay 500-600 for it?

 

 

 

And for actual relevant info, iOS and OS X now have a Bluetooth game controller framework. Methinks the console makers may have problems if Apple got serious about AppleTV as a game console, especially in the casual gamer market (not hardcore gamers).

There are new APIs in core telephony that support reading the radio type, signal strength, and cell ID directly so no more hacks.

 

Also looks like they integrated cross-app audio directly so digital instrument apps can pipe audio to a mixing app.

 

The multitasking enhancements are smart... You have to register for what you want (periodic background time to download updates vs wake the app up when a push notification is received), but the OS waits for good signal strength or when the user wakes the device to do something else, then it takes advantage of the really strong signal or the user waking the device to also do the background updates. The OS also learns which apps you use frequently and gives them priority, so an app you haven't used in six months won't ever have its background updates scheduled (presumably).

 

Plenty more but NDA so I can't comment. I actually sell apps on the App Store so I'd like to keep my developer account in good standing.

 

 

P.S. Apple has now paid out 3X as much money to developers as all others (Google, MS, etc) combined. They also said over 90% of all iOS devices are running iOS 6, compared to the laughable situation on Android.

What I want to know is whether this is a signed profile or he just found a way to install an unsigned one, because this is just a compressed bundle and it contains the PRL, etc. If this works unsigned, then it means we can change the PRL without jailbreaking.

 

This isn't a PRL. It is a carrier update file which is what allows for some low level customization of the phone (such as FaceTime over cellular, hotspot functionality, and things like that).

 

Sent from my iPhone 5 using Tapatalk

 

How many times do I have to tell people, I'm an iOS developer. The file is in fact an OS X compressed bundle, which you can open to find carrier.prl among other files. Normally, the phone will only accept the bundle if signed by Apple, ensuring none of the files are corrupt or tampered with. This "hack" simply appears to use a debug loading mechanism to bypass that check, so in theory we can modify the PRL. I will try it later and report back.

I'm an iOS developer so I don't need to install any apps to track memory usage, I debug the phone with Instruments and LLDB (among others).

 

I forgot to include GPS apps in the list of apps that can run in the background, my bad.

 

The point still stands: it is mostly a waste of time.

What I want to know is whether this is a signed profile or he just found a way to install an unsigned one, because this is just a compressed bundle and it contains the PRL, etc. If this works unsigned, then it means we can change the PRL without jailbreaking.

I'd rather SprintLink get spun off and remain a company in its own right. SprintLink has loops in areas that no one else does, and it is a viable option for affordable Tier 1 access.

Please, NO! Sprint needs to invest in that business and keep it strong. Having a seat at the Tier-1 table is invaluable and critical to the health of the wireless business. It allows them to peer (they don't pay for their traffic, once it is on their network they can transmit it to any of their peers at zero cost).

 

Remember, they spun off the POTS business, giving up their ILEC footprint, thus negating any negotiating leverage they had with Verizon and AT&T, both of whom scratch each other's backs with backhaul in their respective territories. That will prove to be a huge mistake in the future. Besides the fact that in those areas backhaul for wireless would be effectively free, something that helps VZW and AT&T tremendously.

 

Of course my dream is someone (Sprint, Google, whoever) starts rolling out gigabit fiber nationwide by overbuilding the ILECs. It sure would cut the legs out from under those a**holes, especially if you started vastly undercutting their business POTS and backhaul services. You can stick to the cities >100,000 population and hit 80% of the US population at reasonable cost (the last 20% is the rural areas that have vastly higher deployment costs).

 

If I were Sprint, as soon as I was financially healthy I would be working on a way to be mostly self-sufficient in backhaul because that's certainly part of the long game by biggest competitors are playing.

I don't think we've seen how they will manage this stuff in the new NV system, given that adding spectrum is just a couple of clicks.

 

On the other hand, since they outsourced everything to Ericsson, it probably works like the IT outsourcing contracts where every little adjustment costs them thousands of dollars.

 

My theory is that outsourcing actually works by making everything so difficult that people avoid doing anything, thus "saving" money (in the short term). I realized this when I found out one of our customers who uses outsourced IT has to pay $1500 and wait three weeks to create a new database instance on the database server they already own because the consulting company has to do it. As a result, the internal departments simply don't make any changes.

Reporting from another thread because we need to stamp out this huge waste of time!

iOS automatically manages apps. It forces them to shutdown after ten minutes in the background (the app has to explicitly ask for this grace period, the default is less than a minute before the OS kills the app for being rude).

If there is plenty of RAM, it will leave them in memory in suspended-animation so switching back is instant, but they aren't running and can't waste battery life. If another app needs the RAM, it dumps them automatically. Only apps currently playing audio, performing navigation, or VoIP can run continuously past the 10 minute mark.

Push notifications, iCloud sync, even listening for incoming VoIP calls... These are all handled efficiently by the OS on behalf of the apps so the apps themselves don't need to be constantly running wasting battery life. Apps cannot install background services (ala Android) so they can't waste your battery.


The app drawer is just a list of apps used recently. The apps may be running, may be suspended, or may already be completely shutdown and unloaded. There is no indicator of the status because you aren't meant to manually manage them. Go ahead - restart your iPhone and you will see the app drawer is still populated on a freshly booted OS with no apps running, because it is just a list of recently used apps, not a list of running apps.

The only thing the app drawer has to do with running apps is if you tap the X, and the app just so happens to be running, iOS will ask the app to close. That's it. iOS also automatically kills apps that stop responding for a certain period of time.


I see now why Apple tends not to provide lots of dials and knobs to fuss with. People make up nonsense about what they do, then perpetuate cargo-cult actions like an information virus, causing thousands (millions?) of people to waste time in their day doing stuff like clearing the app drawer.

Save your fingers, stop messing with the app drawer unless you need to force one specific app to restart for some reason.

 

 

edit: A quick update. There is a trick some VoIP apps can use where they can ask the OS to wake them up to send a keep-alive to the server. It appears Facebook messenger uses this to wake up every 15 minutes, which seems a bit ridiculous to me but there you go... so if the app is a VoIP app, it can affect battery life if the developers are stupid about it. Location apps and audio apps are the only other two, though location apps that only request coarse location data don't impact battery as that comes from the cell tower for free.

 

There are some changes coming in iOS 7, as detailed in a post further below, but the concept of the OS managing it for you remains - apps requesting to be woken for background downloads will be woken up when the OS decides you have a good cell signal or the device was turned on by the user for something else anyway, they can't just sit around wasting battery all day. Further, apps that aren't used very often will not have their requests honored... only apps that you use regularly will be allowed more frequent wakeups.

I have upgraded to OS 6.1.4 and have not had any issues with battery life.  I do make sure that at least twice a day that I double click the home button and fully close the apps that I have opened.  Some apps will continue to run in the background and drain the battery rather quickly.

 

If I am running LTE full time, it will drain the battery quickly as well, probably three times faster than WiFi or 3G.

 

No, NO, NO! Please stop perpetuating this cargo-cult nonsense! iOS automatically manages apps. It forces them to shutdown after ten minutes in the background. If there is plenty of RAM, it will leave them in memory in suspended-animation so switching back is instant, but they aren't running and can't waste battery life. If another app needs the RAM, it dumps them automatically. Only apps currently playing audio can run continuously past the 10 minute mark.

 

The app drawer is just a list of apps used recently. The apps may be running, may be suspended, or may already be completely shutdown and unloaded. There is no indicator of the status because you aren't meant to manually manage them. Go ahead - restart your iPhone and you will see the app drawer is still populated on a freshly booted OS with no apps running.

 

The only thing the app drawer has to do with running apps is if you tap the X, and the app just so happens to be running, iOS will ask the app to close. That's it.

 

iOS also automatically kills apps that stop responding for a certain period of time.

 

 

I see now why Apple tends not to provide lots of dials and knobs to fuss with. People make up nonsense about what they do, then perpetuate cargo-cult actions like an information virus, causing thousands (millions?) of people to waste time in their day doing stuff like clearing the app drawer.

Apple contributes a lot to open source.

 

WebKit, the engine that drives Safari and Google's Chrome was an Apple-created project.

 

Apple helps lead the LLVM/Clang compiler project.

 

The kernel of OS X and iOS is called Darwin and is open-source.

 

 

They just don't give away the UI bits and apps. If you mean Apple allowing any apps to be installed from anywhere, not a chance... Malware, badly written apps installing background services, etc would proliferate and Apple won't allow it.

 

 

Robert didn't answer, so here are some estimates:

 

Kentucky-Fried-Chicken-for-Robert Account: 56%

 

Jewelry-for-Robert's-wife-so-she-doesn't-take-away-all-his-phones-and-demand-he-spend-at-least-a-few-minutes-every-day-with-his-family Account: 34%

 

Bail-Bond-for-AJ Account: 9.4%

 

Operating Expenses: 0.6%

 

Value to Sprint LTE fanatics: Priceless!

 

 

You joke, but Robert (and the site writers) do a lot of work, I have no opposition to them getting a paycheck of some kind.

 

I only ask because renting a server with a cloud hosting provider is relatively cheap; these guys charge for selling a pre-packaged solution but if it costs 500/month then we can do it for less than half that and easily support a thousand simultaneous users. If they are charging 100/month then it isn't worth the effort to look elsewhere.

I would have assumed that the mechanical steering is only for gross adjustments and the majority of the steering is in the DSP processing. Maybe it isn't that advanced yet but you can use the interference from multiple antennas and a lot of horsepower to steer the signal or even pick out multiple transmitters on the same frequency at the same time by discriminating in the spatial dimension. Anyone stuck in the old world of basic antenna design and mechanical tilt adjustments is far behind the times

 

 

Anyone with deeper knowledge of LTE and how the new NV equipment works have more info? Are they at this level yet?

Hey Robert, can you give a breakdown of the monthly charges and whatnot? I'm curious what these people are charging you for hosting a community site, if you have to pay for extra bandwidth, etc. If it is too ridiculous we might explore other options to save money.

 

Either way I sent in a few more bucks.

Should be a clear warranty replacement issue.

 

 

For the record, I never manually manage apps or reboot my iOS devices. It shouldn't be necessary and generally isn't. When I originally came from Windows Mobile I had to get used to not baby-sitting my phone.

By that time the upgrade cycle will be hitting for the original Sprint iPhone 4S customers, plus whatever the next two iPhones are. Sprint won't have any problem meeting their obligations. People greatly underestimated the 4S because they didn't take into account contracts. The next iPhone will be even bigger than the iPhone 5 for the same reason, even though it is likely to be an evolutionary device.

 

Plus Q1 is always the low point because everyone blew their wad at Christmas

I can stream just fine with my iPhone 5 on the DFW LTE network, so YMMV.

 

The only time LTE has let me down is at the Rangers stadium, but that's fairly common with all the carriers, as there are just too many devices crammed into a small area.

More proof we could have nationwide gigabit (at least in major metro markets) if we didn't leave it in the dualopoly's hands.

 

Around here Verizon just has to flip a switch to turn on gigabit... Ensuring we'll never see it because who wants to compete? AT&T is easy pickings, with their antiquated DSL network.

Qualcomm royalties have nothing to do with it. OEMs purchase parts from Qualcomm (or other vendors), and any/all royalties are already built in to the prices paid for those parts. You really seem to be stretching and contorting to avoid placing blame where it lies with your beloved Apple and with AT&T, Apple's partner in crime. Apple and AT&T conspired to keep the iPhone as incompatible as possible with T-Mobile until T-Mobile yielded and agreed to offer the iPhone itself.

 

AJ

 

That's flatly not true though; Apple pays more for the same chip on the CDMA-enabled model because the CDMA feature is enabled. I thought this was well-known? Intel does something similar... An 8-core chip with two defective cores is marked down to be a four-core chip and the two excess cores are disabled in microcode. Once the production process improves, defects drop, almost all the 4-core chips are 7 or 8 core chips with cores disabled. It's cheaper to make one part then charge based on the usage.

 

 

I'm not saying it wasn't a business decision at the time, but now that the deal is done the number of people bringing a new (under contract) iPhone 5 to Tmobile will be so small as to be a rounding error. There is zero chance Apple gives that much of a shit.

 

OK, I actually looked this up and it appears the newer A1428 is just a firmware change, the FCC filing says its the same hardware, so the amps, etc aren't changing. It also appears the only change is enabling WCDMA (HSPA) on AWS; LTE was already enabled.

 

So I have to think this is a result of QualComm royalties and Apple doesn't want to pay for all the existing handsets with a new iPhone just around the corner.

 

I also saw someone saying the Tmobile update will allow that iPhone to work on more Canadian carriers, but I don't know if that is true.

Doh, sorry my bad. It's a carry-over habit from last year.

Much like the USSR in its heyday, China has been actively trying to steal technology and info, mostly through hacking and similar attacks. Or rather I should say certain elements of Chinese society, possibly some military factions, maybe some domestic companies looking for a leg up. No one really knows.

 

The USSR did things like wear sticky-soles when touring a Boeing plant to get metal shavings so they could analyze alloys. Of course we started feeding them bad info, including a faulty control chip that caused the world's largest oil pipeline explosion. I can only hope we are being as generous with the Chinese; much like the USSR, we won't know it publicly for many, many years as such operations would be classified and they wouldn't publicize their own failures.

 

 

Part of the problem with manufacturing in China is you lose the critical skill of manufacture-design-improve iterations and you teach your future competitor how to compete against you. Ask Dell how well outsourcing everything to ASUS went. GE is moving a lot of appliance production back to the states. The best example I saw was those heat pump water heaters where the Chinese unit cost 1599 and the US-built unit cost 1299 because once the designers, union workers, and managers got into a room together they redesigned the thing to be simpler & quicker to make, 10% more efficient, and lower priced. That's the sort of thing you can't do when you outsource because the Chinese company just builds what you tell them to build and if they have any better ideas they'll use them on their own in-house brand in the Chinese market.

You might have a point about Apple trying to make people buy new devices, except Apple is the only OEM who regularly updates their old phones. Look at how long they've provided software updates for the 3GS. That thing came out in 2009 but still got iOS 6 in 2012. How many other vendors are shipping their latest OS for a 3-4 year old phone? (Hint: none). Half of all Android devices are still on freakin Gingerbread!

 

Apple explicitly holds back some revenue recognition on their devices to apply toward future updates (because they can then offset salaries as R&D expenses). You don't do that unless you plan to support your devices for a long time. If they just wanted to force people to upgrade, they could simply stop providing updates after a year. That would generate far, far more "forced" device sales than the few people who are going to jump from AT&T to Tmobile with an unlocked device.

 

 

I don't know what the change is or why. Has anyone checked the FCC filings to see if they had to submit any updates? Maybe there is a minor hardware tweak. Maybe they have to pay Qualcomm extra royalties so it would cost millions to enable it on the previously shipped devices... Maybe they asked Tmobile to pay for the recertification and they declined? Maybe it was a favor to AT&T. Maybe they had to swap an amplifier chip but otherwise kept the same hardware design? No one knows the answer right now. When iFixit does a teardown then we'll get to see if there are any obvious hardware differences.

 

 

Apple's track record of device support is ample reason to give them the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.