Disclaimer: Everybody that ever talked to me about mobile knows that I prefer Android in almost all aspects. I don’t want to use Apple personally but I am grateful that they invented the Appstore, a business model which puts food on my table. I am sad that their “innovation” lately was based around new Icons and slimmer phones instead of ground breaking products like the original iPod and iPhone.
The new iPhone 5S
I did not expect any big changes. Seems like I was wrong. Most of the consumer specs are 1:1 copies of the last iPhone5 which is what I pretty much expected. The things that blew my mind are two: 64 bit (the positive change) and the fingerprint reader (the really bad change).
64 bit
64 bit is an awesome change because we will need it sooner than later. With 32 bit you can only address 4 gibibytes of RAM (2^32 = 4,294,967,296 bytes 4,294,967,296 / (1,024 x 1,024) = 4,096 MB = 4GiB) while with 64 bit we can potentially address some 16 exbibytes (that’s a LOT - by the way, I just learned that you must not call gibibytes gigabytes anymore - thanks Wikipedia!). My guess is that we will need those possibilities really soon and I really want (and expect) Android manufacturers to jump on the 64 bit train.
Fingerprint reader
The bad change is the fingerprint reader. The tech behind it is cool for sure and the idea is great. It’s well thought out and has a ton of potential use cases.
It’s also absolutely ripe for abuse.
Apple said it won’t be uploaded to the cloud, the system is secure, everything is fine and dandy and please trust us because we are an awesome company that never works with the bad guys. But all it takes is some secret law that forces Apple to patch the system to upload the fingerprint to the NSA cloud - and users would not even be able to tell because iOS is not open sourced. I’m not saying that they do that already, I am just saying that it’s very well possible and plausible to happen. Playing the devil’s advocate I have to say: The placement is diabolic. Most people I talked to expected the fingerprint reader to be implemented at the back side. Placing it on the home button automatically forces you to use it and you can’t do much about it (well, you can: buy an Android and use an open source, non stock OS) On a side note, the new front camera is also great - now you can take high resolution face shots of people that just handed you your fingerprint. This are really low hanging fruits for folks like the NSA so please be on your guard.