K9 rules!
This is straight-out-of-camera … errr, iPhone 6.
The iPhone opted to turn HDR on and, as is clear, a tremendous dynamic range is retained. The iPhone also opted for a very low ISO and examination of the 1:1 image in Lightroom confirms that a perfect 13″ x 19″ print would be trivial to make. An outstanding camera.
And yes, only Beverly Hills police have cleaner cars. As Woody Allen once put it, BH is so clean because they put all their garbage on television.
An impressive camera.
Apple has done the right thing with the rear-facing main camera in iPhone 6. Instead of whoring the latest megapixel count they have concentrated on delivering excellent picture quality. The camera has the same 8mP of the iPhone 5S but uses a new sensor and lens. While time lapse and movies hold no interest for me, performance as a street snapper is important and, despite the awkward ergonomics of using a cell phone as a camera, the results are excellent. It’s still easy to get your finger to intrude over part of the field of view, especially in landscape snaps, and the tapered edges of iPhone 6 make hand holding a bit trickier than the slab sides of iPhone 5, and the thing is as slippery as an eel. There will be lots of repair bills with this model!
These snaps were taken in overcast lighting using the following Lightroom 5 import settings – essentially just a tad of sharpening:
I did not turn on HDR and maybe should have done so, as the burned out highlights in the terrier’s coat suggest:
Shutter response is excellent. Essentially instantaneous with definition easily adequate for 13″ x 19″ prints and noise in the shadows noticeably improved over the camera in my previous iPhone 5:
Two hours before opening the line was again beginning to form for iPhone 6 at the local Apple Store this morning:
Colors are straight out-of-camera and as vibrant and natural as can be.
If the point-and-shoot camera was in dire straits with iPhones 4 and 5 it can now be buried. iPhone 6 excels at such impromptu duties.
First impressions.
I picked mine up two days late from the Apple Store as the early lines even for those with reservations were daunting. As stress free an experience as you can imagine from the masters of US retail. Chatting with a couple of oldies on this Sunday afternoon who also recall the iPhone 1 roll out, we all thought the lines for iP 6 were far longer than for iP 1. I put it down to disillusioned Android users returning to the fold from Samsung.
The new phone harkens back to the elegant design of the iPhone 1 and while the camera’s protruding bezel is no big deal in the latest device (the iPhone 1 had no camera!) it’s the only ugly touch to a device which otherwise recaptures the elegance of the original. My white-fronted version has a chromed rear plate and is quite remarkably thin, not to mention lighter than iPhone 5.
This is my first iPhone with TouchID and it works really well – I have programmed two of my fingers in and one of my son’s. This will revolutionize point-of-sale security and the sales clerk in the Apple Store told me all their stores will be using it by October with some 200,000 US stores of all ilks adopting the technology by December, presumably in conjunction with Apple Pay for credit card-free payments. No more Russkie credit card thieves at Target/Home Depot/Neiman Marcus/you name it. Another Cold War victory for American technology. So perfect is the implementation that the technology becomes invisible after a couple of uses. (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke)
Other first impressions:
I bought the 16GB model and that may have been a mistake. The Apple Store person told me I can upgrade to the 64GB model ($100) within 14 days as long as they have them for sale. The odds of that being possible are decent as it’s the bigger iPhone+ which is supply constrained. (Update: I upgraded to the 64GB model a couple of days later; this will provide adequate space for the usual iOS code bloat as well as more room for games for my 12 year old son! And yes, like the previous two, my iPhone was just sold to the inevitable Russkie on eBay – $245 net of fees. Enjoy it, comrade).
Two years ago when I migrated from iPhone 4 (AT&T) to iPhone 5 (VZ) I had to visit the Verizon store to have my telephone number rolled over, a process which made a root canal or appendectomy fun occasions by comparison. This time I decided to stick with VZ and the Apple Store migrated my number in 3 minutes with no need to transplant SIM cards from the old phone. Nice. The phone worked immediately when I checked it in the Apple Store.
I recommend adoption of Two Factor ID verification, wherein a code is sent to one of your devices when you change key settings in your iPhone (passwords, account access, etc.). I have been using Two Factor ID for several months on all my Apple devices and it’s far more secure than the simple passwords all those Hollywood nudists use. One more step in keeping Ivan at bay and helping to protect The American Way. If you already use two factor security, be sure to take one other device, like an iPad, to the Apple Store if you want them to set up your new iPhone. Without the other device Apple will be unable to retrieve the two factor code to set up the iPhone.
You can elect 6 rows of icons compared with 5 but they appear small; I prefer the ‘zoomed’ view which sticks with 5 rows, but much larger.
More on the camera – which now adds time lapse and single picture HDR, next time.
Bumper:
If you dislike bulky cases as much as I do – be it for phones or cameras – I recommend a bumper like this:
Available for a few dollars from Amazon, it keeps the plane surfaces off anything flat surface place the phone on, while materially improving the grip owing to the rubberized edges. The iPhone 6 is far more slippery than any iPhone which came before it, and easily dropped.
Disclosure: Long AAPL.
Coming real soon.
US supplies of the iPhone 6 Plus, the 5.5″ monster, are already backordered 4 weeks but I snagged my 4.7″ (38% more screen area than the iPhone 5) online yesterday and will pick it up at the local Apple Store next Friday, 9/19. I also checked the local Verizon store but the sales ‘help’ there was so hard sell and oily I felt more like a shower than a new phone after leaving in disgust. Suffice it to say that my 2 year contract on the iPhone 5 just expired, so the new one at $200 + tax will be paid for by the proceeds of sale of the old on eBayski, doubtless selling to Ivan Bollockoffski and his oligarch friends as has every previous one I have recycled there. Good luck with the embargo, comrade, and thanks for the $275. I’m sticking with Verizon as the 4G coverage on the west coast is good and as there is no price competition among US carriers. Do the math on Sprint’s lying ‘ownership’ offers and you will come to the same conclusion, not to mention the worst coverage of any of the major carriers. The only compelling reason I can see to choose AT&T over Verizon – coverage is comparable – is if you want to use voice and web browsing simultaneously. Verizon’s CDMA cellular technology prohibits that whereas AT&T’s works fine.
The camera lens in iPhone 6 is f/2.2, which makes it an immaterial 19% faster than the F/2.4 in iPhone 5, despite Apple’s hype to the contrary. Disappointingly, still picture OIS is only available on the 5.5″ iPhone6 (both models carry over movie stabilization from iPhone 5) but the addition of the thumbprint scanner, first seen in the iPhone 5S, is welcome for this user. You can’t forget to take your thumb with you and if the iPhone is stolen, the new Apple Pay credit card information can be disabled from any iOS (or Windows, for the clueless) device using Find My iPhone, without disabling the credit cards themselves. Apple Pay will so obviously take the world of retail by storm that I find it amusing to read pundits saying otherwise. The fact that Google’s earlier attempt failed miserably is irrelevant.
The still camera in iPhone 5 was excellent and the one in iPhone 6 promises further improvements. Suffice it to say that I have made many 13″ x 19″ prints from the iPhone 5 with ease, if not impunity, and if ever you needed confirmation that the point-and-shoot was dead, this fact will testify to that in spades. Further, given that no more than 0.001% of iPhone users make 13″ x 19″ prints, it’s not like image quality is lacking for the remaining 99.999%, prints being far more demanding than any other display medium.
Confirming that the Shadow of Steve has long faded, Apple has managed to make an ugly protruding bezel for the lens in iPhone 6; the sounds you hear are those of El Jobso spinning in his grave. That said, some serious kaizen-like effort has gone into incremental improvements and the addition of time-lapse, better exposure control and a host of other features shows just how seriously Apple is taking the photography aspect of the iPhone. And with just cause. There’s a huge retention aspect to making users happy with their camera …. err, phone.
Wi-fi in the iPhone 6 now boasts 802.11ac technology and the result is strictly limited to boasting. My tests with the latest Apple wi-fi router and the 2014 MacBook Air, which share this technology, show that data throughput is unchanged compared with 802.11n. Oh! well.
Some snaps from the iPhone 6 once I have my hands on one next week. Best of all, the larger screen should see no more squinting at the oft used one in my iPhone 5 while retaining the ability of using a small belt holster, not a realistic choice for the 5.5″ model.
As before, I have opted for the 16GB model, the bottom-of-the-line; with iCloud Drive recently announced (cloud storage for all your files, not just music and videos) and with iTunes increasingly residing in the cloud, there seems little reason to buy an iPhone with more, costly, internal storage.
Now all I have to do is wait.
Disclosure: Long AAPL stock.
Tech product of the century.
The iPhone went on sale 7 years ago today and transformed a flailing enterprise into the world’s largest capitalization public company.
After its recent 7:1 split, the stock has risen from $20 to $90 in that time:
I well recall watching Steve Jobs’s earlier product demonstration and it was breathtakingly good. I bought my iPhone on July 1, 2007 from the San Luis Obispo Apple Store – no crowds – and have never looked back. Back then there was no AppStore and what few apps there were ran over the air as widgets, slow and clunky. Look at the AppStore today. One million apps and counting and a like number of jobs created in China. Trillions in wealth have been created, whether for the manufacturers, Apple, its investors, developers, serial thieves (Samsung, Google, etc.) and the many connected factions. An event comparable in magnitude to the creation of the railroads, the automobile and air travel.
It has since leaked just how early the prototype Jobs displayed really was. Much of the presentation was faked, many functions did not work but the master showman got away with it and somehow Apple managed to bring a perfected device to market by the end of June.
That first iPhone had scant memory, no camera and cost an astounding $600, though Apple later issued $200 rebate coupons to early buyers like me, as well as to the unwashed herds of unemployed who camped out at Apple stores across the nation. AT&T (Cingular back then) was the only carrier choice for years. The telco subsidy model had not yet been crafted and, once in place, the price dropped to $200 with AT&T paying AAPL the difference of $400 and recovering the cost through inflated monthly use charges. When it comes to lack of integrity you need look no further than US telcos. When the two year subsidy contract expires do they drop their charges as they are no longer paying for the hardware? Of course not. Thus only a fool refuses to upgrade his iPhone every two years as the old one can be sold for $400 to some Russkie on eBay and the latest technology procured for $200. Apple of course loves this pricing/subsidy model for obvious reasons.
I can’t wait to get my larger iPhone this fall. Apple has been slow to market here, but you can bet the product will be every bit as perfect as was the original, 7 years ago. And in two years I’ll be selling mine.
Disclosure: Long AAPL bull call spreads.