Apple's event is going on right now - and most of the new stuff already leaked weeks and months ahead of time. So, we're getting an iPhone 5S, an iPhone 5C, and iOS7 will be available later this month. I like the design of the 5C more than of the 5S; it's more playful, colourful - harking back to the coloured iMacs and PowerMac G3s. Too bad it doesn't come in red.
The fingerprint sensor in the 5S is interesting, but I wonder how accurate it will be in the real world; on top of that, with all the NSA news, I'm not particularly keen on Apple reading my fingerprint all the time. Supposedly, applications don't have access to it and it's not stored in the cloud, but I have little to no trust for companies.
The biggest news for me is the fact that the iPhone 5S has a new chip - the A7 - which has the honour of being the first 64bit chip inside a smartphone. iOS7 and first party Apple applications are all 64bit, and Xcode obviously supports it. While this obviously future-proofs the platform for more RAM, I wonder what other motives are involved here. ARM desktops and laptops, perhaps?
I doubt 64bit will provide much benefit today, but you have to hand it to Apple: at least they're done with the transition before it's even needed.
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Member since:
2010-03-08
I'm pretty sure that FAT32 is safe to use as long as one doesn't implement support for short file names, which regular consumers have stopped using for decades anyway. For a more modern FS that has decent cross-platform support, one can look at NTFS through NTFS-3G. Main problems being that there probably is some grey patent area here too, and that the performance of the open-source driver is remarkably bad.
I suspect that the latter is due to the fact that Tuxera, who develop NTFS-3G, also separately sell better-performing drivers for a hefty price and want to protect their bottom line. So I don't expect it to change anytime soon, unless someone in the open source community decides to fork the open-source NTFS-3G and apply some serious optimizations to it. Still, even with those two issues in mind, there's at least something when one has to share data with Apple and Microsoft operating systems.
Edited 2013-09-13 07:38 UTC