Yearly Archives: 2012

The iPhone 5 camera

iPhone

After the hype fest.

Now that Apple has finished telling the world how it innovates features the competition has had for ages, my iPhone 5 preview was right on the money. There’s very little new here and the 4S owner has little reason to upgrade.

The Hypephone 5.

The camera lens is now 33mm FFE down from 35mm. Immaterial. The definition remains 8mp but is actually lower than in the 4S as the same number of pixels is distributed over a larger area. Apple claims the reaction time is 40% faster and that is meritworthy, though the 4S is no slouch. And the panorama mode, where you hose the camera around and it stitches the images, is exciting, though Sony had it years ago. Heavens, even the klutzes at Fuji, who would not know good code if it hit them, had it in the X100 two years ago. The camera can now record still images while making a movie. Don’t see who would need that.

But there is one bit of really exciting news for iPhone 4S owners. On September 19 iOS6 becomes available and will add the panorama mode to the 4S. Now that is worth waiting for.

As for Apple, they really need to think different, as their ads once had it. There are at least two trillion dollar businesses crying out for the company’s design chops. Domestic appliances – everything from thermostats to kitchen controls, and in car systems. Both are ergonomic wastelands (have you ever tried the catastrophic iDrive in a modern BMW? It should be called iCrash). Think different or die.

And how about taking some of that $120 billion in cash and buying one of the major TV studios? Anti-trust be damned. Politicians are cheap. With one studio providing content for an Apple TV set, the others will quickly sign distribution agreements. (Please, no Fox ‘News’ though). C’mon Apple. Wake up. The Jobs product pipeline does not have far to run and you are sitting on your laurels with incremental product upgrades which are easily mimicked by the competition.

Ummm, diversification, anyone?

Design

Photography

Realities.

Jony Ive, the genius designer of all things Apple, keeps an Aston Martin DB9 in his San Francisco garage. It’s not that he drives it, you understand. It’s because it is right. By his own admission, when he seeks inspiration, he treks down to the garage and just stares at it. Because it is right.

Sir J’s non-ride.

This weekend is about Monza. The Italian Grand Prix. The home of Ferrari.

And win or lose, you know who I am rooting for. Because great design is obvious, whether it’s a toilet (where Sir Jony got his start) or a red bolide boasting seven hundred Italian horses.

The F12. Great design is obvious.

So, you ask, where’s yours? It’s not like you can’t afford it.

Well, the answer is simple. Take that other design masterpiece which it took me two years to save for as a kid. The Leica M3. Perhaps the most perfect marriage of form and function in the analog photography world. That one was a no brainer. I knew it would make me a better photographer and I knew I could make it sing.

The M3.

But put me in the F12 and two tragedies would result. My son an orphan and the Maranello masterpiece stuffed in the local redwood on Skyline Drive.

But I have only pleasant memories of the Leica and vicarious ones of the Ferrari.

Don’t take my word for it. Go to the medieval armor room in NY’s Met and you will see how nations think. German – lugubrious, heavy, brutal. English – practical, workmanlike, functional. Italian – beauty, subtlety, art.