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.

iPhone 6 and iPhone 5. Apple adds the Health app, lower left.

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:

• 80% charged out of the box
• The Stocks app is noticeably faster than iP 5. My favorite app, of course!
• Very slim – reminds me of the elegant design of iP1
• Health app looks very interesting – have to input data first. Fried food devotees south of the Mason-Dixon need not apply.
• Protruding rear camera bezel is no big deal – looks far worse in pictures – but still ugly
• Recovery of all iP 5 data from iCloud was very fast and seems complete – I was up and running in 18 minutes – 12GB download over 802.11ac wifi
• Predictive word suggestions when typing in iOS8 are far superior to the mess in iOS7
• The keyboard is noticeably easier to use owing to better key spacing
• One hand use is as simple as ever, provided your hands are not tiny
• (Just) fits my old iP 5 belt case!
• It’s not so large that you look like a dork making a phone call (not sure the same can be said for iP 6+)

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.

Surely the dumbest advertising byline of 2014?

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.

Ummm, (2.4/2.2)^2 is + 19%, Cupertino.

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.

What were they thinking?

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.

iPhone 6 belt holster – click the image to go to Amazon.

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.

iCloud changes and iCloud Drive.

Now all I have to do is wait.

Disclosure: Long AAPL stock.

Tech product of the century.

Mock ups of forthcoming iPhones.

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:

AAPL since the iPhone came to market. Up almost 400%.

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.

A relaxing place.

I make it a point to visit the magnificent National Trust property Filoli frequently, and wander the grounds and do some reading after enjoying an excellent Panini sandwich in the café.

Such a trip washes away the day’s concerns and one comes home recharged. It doesn’t hurt that the journey is all back roads except for a short blast on California’s most beautiful freeway, the 280 on the way down to Woodside.

I generally end my sojourn in the conservatory which has comfortable seating and is a haven of peace and quiet.

The Conservatory at Filoli. iPhone 5.

An excellent camera.

I wrote about how I believe Apple is managing inventory of the iPhone 5 in Part I.

‘Limited’ as in none. iPhone 4S snap in the Apple Store.

So while there may be a bit of a wait until the floodgates open in Q4/2012, it’s worth it. If you consider your cell phone camera as the one you always have with you, you will want to upgrade.

Let’s retrace. The iPhone 3GS camera was so-so, meaning slow and noisy, as was the one in iPhone 4. Then a quantum leap occurred in iPhone 4S when the sensor jumped to 8 megapixels and the responsiveness of the shutter button was greatly improved. I have already illustrated panoramas using iOS6 in the iPhone 4S and the quality in the iPhone 5 remains excellent. Determined to try out the rumored enhanced low light capability of the iPhone 5’s camera I took it to my country home (aka Filoli – you know, the place my 10 year old son wants to buy) and repaired to the poorly lit interiors.

My first snap startled me. The delay between shutter press and the taking of the picture has been dramatically reduced. I jumped, not expecting this, then proceeded to cycle the shuter as fast as I could. Lightroom 4 reports that I banged off 3 pictures in one second and 4 would have been easily achievable. This compares to maybe 1 per second with the iPhone 4S. It’s quite extraordinary, comparing well with the shutter response in a film rangefinder Leica – where you have to wind the film between snaps – and as good as a better grade DSLR like the Nikon D700, where the cycling rate is comparable in single shot mode. This means the camera is almost directly wired to the photographer’s eye. See an image and snap!, it’s yours.

I determined the optimum import settings in LR4 to be as follows, and saved these to an import preset:

iPhone 5 LR4 import settings.

To reduce noise in big prints these are the related settings:

iPhone 5 LR4 noise settings.

The drawing-room at Filoli. 1/20th second.

The camera was focused on the green vases on the mantlepiece by touching the display at the appropriate location. Though the display is now 16:9, up from 4:3 thanks to the taller dimension, still image files remain 4:3, as before. The original JPG file size is 2.7MB.

Here’s a section which would make a 30″ x 24″ print:

Section of above image.

The develop settings in the two panels above have been applied, together with a little boost from the Clarity and Vibrance sliders. Outstanding.

Now you don’t get the dynamic range available in a RAW file and I did not use the HDR function, though for very high contrast subjects that would make sense.

The camera is now so good that no excuse need be made for large print images. I routinely printed 13″ x 19″ from the 4S and feel confident in saying that 18″ x 24″ with the best images would be easily achieved, no excuses needed.

A friend wrote “I bet Apple has four or five camera prototypes in the lab” after I had shared my findings with him. I so hope that is the case. The design clearly incorporates real world usage needs, not something concoted by the dopes at Fuji.

The main drawback in poor light is that a support is needed. There’s nothing worse than having to hold a camera several inches from your face in a poorly lit room than holding it a foot away from your face. The above image was at 1/20th second, and I got lucky, as it’s razor sharp at the focus point. As with the iPhone 4S, the zoom function, accomplished by ‘unpinching’ – you know, the patented technology Android stole from Apple – will simply make a noisier image, so I don’t bother using it; the same result can be accomplished at the processing stage.

In conclusion, if you are happy with a fixed 33mm FFE lens this is an excellent photographic tool, if not blessed with the greatest ergonomics. Can’t be bothered to drag the monster DSLR along? The iPhone 5 does just fine. I would think that a real optical zoom cannot be too far away. Maybe in iPhone 6?

And before I forget, want to see why any sane SF Bay user should be getting a Verizon LTE iPhone 5 rather than an AT&T one with LTE scarcely to be found? Here are the cellular speeds at Filoli, which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere:

Cellular speeds – Verizon LTE, iPhone 5

In town I routinely get 20MBS download.

Getting out of your AT&T contract: Verizon is known to be very rigid on enforcing contract terms, but AT&T is weak. I had one year left on my 2 year iPhone 4S contract with AT&T and was offered two choices. Cancel the contract for $215 or sell the 4S back to AT&T for $227, then pay $449 for the iPhone 5 on a new 2 year contract. Such a deal. A quick check of eBay disclosed an average selling price of $335 for a 16GB 4S. Mine had some rub marks on one side so I listed it for $295 ‘Buy It Now’ with free US Priority shipping. It sold 60 seconds after listing, net cash to me being some $262, less the $215 contract cancellation payment to AT&T, meaning $47 left. I applied that to my new Verizon 16GB iPhone 5 ($199 + $53 CA sales tax), for a net outlay of $205, which I will deduct as business expense on my tax return. Assuming I have taxable income this year the net after-tax cost is lower still.

Disclosure: Long AAPL, BRCM, QCOM.