Gee whiz, Tim.
Tuesday, October 13th, 2020
We bought new iPhones 11 Pro last year because we saw a real improvement in the camera from what we were toting before. Apple just announced a bunch of iPhone 12s in various configurations, and they managed to do their classic “improved 10% here, and 17% there, and you can hurl it to the ground 4x harder, and…”
They also seriously touted 5G as a thing that will “change the game” in so many ways. They brought out Verizon’s CEO Hans Vestburg, who (apparently) got within 18 feet or so of Tim Cook on stage…keep your distance there Hans! (Maybe it was all VFX, but then I would have taken the extra time to Americanize Vestburg’s pronunciation of ‘5G’.)
It all smelled of Extremely Big Corporate Behind The Scenes Deal. I keep reading about all kinds of “it isn’t quite there” complaints about 5G (especially the Millimeter Wave 5G that Verizon has spent mucho to install in a small handful of large American cities.) And I know that the national 5G buildout hasn’t reached rural areas struggling with overcrowded towers and dead zones.
Reading between the lines of the presentation, I was reassured that Apple has been working hard on the quirks and weaknesses of 5G (sounds like the steel antenna edge was far from just cosmetic), and that one day, it will be a useful and ubiquitous thing. And of course there wasn’t a word about how much all this more quickly delivered data will cost the end user. Shoot those raw photos! Slam those videos into the cloud! Who needs wifi! No wonder why Verizon’s stock went up after the presentation.
Arrgh. Too many G.
So I went on a short walk away from the online reality distortion fields and casually shot a picture on a beautiful autumn afternoon with my still pristine 11 Pro, and, y’know what? Ahhhh. It was nice. Nice pixels. Good job, phone.
