iPhone 8 Apple 2017

I have this feeling too. Strongly.

Sure, existing Blu-Ray 1080p is not H.265 but UHD already is, of course. So streaming 1080p with H.265 is plenty viable.

Streaming 4k is … a joke, really. Way too bandwidth intensive unless you choke the bitrate down so far that the quality would be crap. But hi-res crap!

I agree with @stusser that the vanilla iPhone 8 is really a 7s. I suspect supply constraints, plus difficulty of doing touchid on an “all screen” phone, forced them into this X scenario.

7s gives it too much credit. It’s a 6sss.

None of the S upgrades are that compelling, so it is fair to call it a 7s. It’s faster, better camera, basically par for the S course.

6s was the S for the 6. Incremental upgrade.
7 was the S for the 6s. Incremental upgrade.
8 is the S for the 7. Incremental upgrade.

It’s the 6sss, because that description encompasses how the iPhone has failed to evolve in the past 4 generations. Calling it the 7s only implies it failed to evolve for one generation.

This makes me feel better about going to a 6ss+ from my 6s+

I don’t follow. Even with the blu-ray examples you provided above on physical disc, you are talking about 30GB/hr. Why is that so unreasonable? That’s what, roughly 70 Mbps (or did I botch the math)?

Just ordered an 8 (I’m a Luddite I guess) online for my wife, upgrading from a regular 6. Also switching from AT&T to Verizon since we’ve moved since she got the last phone and Verizon has better coverage in our new neighborhood.

Delivery is scheduled for 9/22 so I agree that demand for the non X version is probably not excessive.

Um 70Mbps is a lot, and it’s making a lot of assumptions about how well your bandwidth actually works.

Just because your internet company claims to give you a certain speed doesn’t mean you will get that speed reliably (even discounting net neutrality stuff). On Spectrum I get 300Mbps downstream on most speed tests, but Netflix’s Fast.com (which is meant to simulate streaming from netflix) I get 71Mbps. So by that I can barely keep up a 70Mbps downstream to Netflix for a single video, god forbid my wife wants to watch something else in the other room.

The most reliable way I’ve gotten high transfers is through BitTorrent because it can spread the transport over many different TCP connections. It’s pretty easy for latency to cause a single TCP connection to get backed up enough to make maintaining 70Mbps difficult for a single long lasting connection.

Ok, but even in your case, out just said you are borderline capable with no compression. So, with modest compression you’d think it would be quite doable. So, how is 4K streaming a joke?

I uhh… want to live where you do if you think 300mbps is a common internet offering.

I only get 810Mbps on fast.com. :(

Right I"m borderline, and I’m paying EXTRA for that 300Mbps, which will only barely allow me to do 4k streaming… The next package down (nothing in between) they offer is 60Mbps, which means I can’t support a single 4k stream, and even if it gets downgraded to 60Mbps that means my downstream is 100% capped off.

Half the neighborhood I’m in is paying for AT&T Uverse, which maxes out at 18Mbps down because of the distance to the node. My last house I had no choice but choosing the 18/2 package because the house was never hooked up for coax.

Comcast in other parts of Orlando offer 3 mainstream packages, 10Mbps, 25Mbps, 75Mbps., and 150Mbps. Only the latter can support 4k streaming without utilizing the entirety of your download bandwidth.

So yes, 70Mbps is a lot for normal consumers.

I get that it won’t be a thing for everyone right away, but think we’d agree that the number that would have access to such a thing is likely to increase quite a bit over the next few years. I find the specific situation a bit surprising (drop from 300 to 60), since I’ve been on Comcast for the last 15 years and different places and they have a 150 tier. I’m inclined to think that if there’s a reason for more people to want higher speeds and providers can milk more money from people, they will jump to do so (capacity willing and the creek don’t rise)

I would actually disagree. I don’t want to turn this into a political discussion but the way things are going it’s less likely bandwidth is going to go up. Competition is going down, ISPs are expanding data caps (Let’s see how quickly you tear through your 1TB Comcast cap with 70Mbps streaming), Net Neutrality is looking more likely to be killed (thus allowing ISPs to limit Netflix/Hulu bandwidth), government is getting rid of bandwidth requirements saying that 10-20Mbps is enough to be called high speed internet, etc…

The whole internet climate here in the US is pointed towards bandwidth being lower not higher.

Aren’t all video codecs compressed already? Unless you’re streaming uncompressed video, an additional layer of compression can actually make files larger. The only way compression helps is if the original method was less efficient than a generic compression.

Yeah, think I misread the bit about h.265 earlier.

@KallDrexx interesting points. I wasn’t even aware Comcast had a data cap, tbh.

I was listening to ATP this week and their comments about the screen size made me convinced I am doing the correct thing and getting the 8+. The screen is not plus-sized on a smaller body. The width is the same as a non-plus 7, and is longer than the Plus. It almost feels like the screen stretch with the 5.

I’m really happy with the form-factor of the Plus.

30 gigabytes per hour, and I have a 1 TB / month bandwidth cap from Comcast. That is, let’s see, 33 hours per month. Assuming I use zero internet for say downloading steam or Xbox games.

As I mentioned above, I wasn’t aware of the cap.

When I asked why you thought it was a joke, I was trying to understand the comment, not questioning the validity of it. I’m not set up for 4K and don’t have a horse in the race, just curious.

From my point of view, 4K seems kind of silly. Many of the HD broadcasts aren’t taking advantage of 1080p, let alone 4K (thinking of NFL, especially. Games frequently look like crap). And you see 4K on laptops and things where I don’t think it would make a difference but give you a lower frame rate.

As you said earlier, I think HDR is a much bigger deal in terms of improving quality.

I am not sure what the problem with it being longer is. The 5 stretched the screen compared to the 4 and it was fine. I decided I am getting the X, so I’ll just see for myself.

Listening to ATP as I type this, but not to the X part yet. I tend to side with Casey on things though, the other 2 go way overboard on their gripes. And Casey was completely right on the $10/month for watch LTE is too much. It’s just not worth that for me. At least give me more data.