Geez, this thread is all about mis-information and fanboyism to the extreme! Yet, it is these same folks who call out Apple fanboys! Instead of blatant ignorance, we need to be more open-minded!
For me, Apple is like Toyota. They do copy and that is clear with iOS7...just like Toyota copying Germans' tech. Difference is that Toyota makes the tech smoother and more reliable. This is what Apple does...and ever so often, does indeed innovate.
I will address a few points:
1. TouchID is far more advance than the clunky unreliable Moto Atrix fingerprint reader. Remember, Apple is aiming for businesses. They won't release something that can be bypass easily. This ain't Face Unlock. No, you can't cut a finger!
2. Camera. Yes, it is still 8MP. But, Apple did many behind the scenes to improve it. And yeah, 8MP may in fact be better than 13MP because of what Apple did with the sensor and pixel size. Why?
Ask Anandtech:
AnandTech | Some Thoughts about the iPhone 5S Camera Improvements
Or:
A Photographer
Read it and educate please!
3. A7 processor. No, 64 bit is not useless on a smartphone...and yes, it does provide better performance...marginal to significance all depending on how complex (either mathematical and/or graphics) the program/app is. The more complex, the more A7 shines. According to CHAIR (maker of Infinity Blade series), A7 is
almost 5 times faster than A6 when a game/app/program is coded for 64-bit with Apple compiler, such as Infinity Blade 3.
READ:
Apple's iPhone 5s, the A7 Chip, and That 64-Bit Question - John Paczkowski - Mobile - AllThingsD
Here is another post that addresses this:
"The performance advantages of going to 64-bit very much depend on the entire software stack (kernel, drivers, compilers, apps) being optimized for 64-bit. The ability to address more than 4GB of memory is one clear advantage. But even if the smartphones today don't have 4GB of memory, there are some other performance advantages as well - provided that the entire software stack is optimized for 64-bit processing. The data paths, register files, caches, etc. are now 64-bit, so more data can be processed per clock than with 32-bit architecture - but the key here is that the compiler (part of the software development kit) must know how to take advantage of the wider data paths and 64-bit resources. If the compiler is optimized, then the kernel, drivers, and apps (which are compiled with that compiler) will see performance boost. I would expect that integer operations, and especially floating point operations (which often need 64-bit data representation), would be faster. Data-intensive games in particular will stand to gain the most if they are properly compiled and optimized.
If the compiler is not optimized, then there is really not much performance gain by just merely going from 32-bit to 64-bit.
When Apple said that the iOS kernel, drivers, etc. have been "re-engineered for 64-bit", I suspect that they did a lot of performance tuning that I mentioned above.
In addition, note that Apple also doubled the sizes of the register files in the A7. This means that more data can be kept in the register files, which can be accessed by the processor's computational units much quicker than the data in memory (or even in caches).
Note also that Apple mentioned "modern instruction set". I suspect that this means that the 64-bit instructions are optimized with the underlying 64-bit hardware. This is different from the Intel world where the performance of the existing x86-64 architecture is severely hindered by the old legacy stuff.
Having said that, I suspect that, in order to get the 2X performance gain over A6, Apple might also do something else in the A7, such as adding more computational units, tweaking pipelines, memory fetching units, cache / branch prediction, etc. Of course, this is just pure speculation as I have no inside knowledge of what Apple has done.
By the way, I think the rest of the industry is moving to 64-bit soon. I heard that Samsung will have 64-bit processors in their smartphone lineup next year (2014). If there is no performance gain for moving to 64-bit, then Samsung and others would not do it. Note also that the AllThingsD article points out that the road to 64-bit for Android will be harder and longer than for Apple.
With Google acquiring Motorola and Microsoft doing the same with Nokia, I think the rest of the industry recognizes that the tight integration of hardware and software has some good values after all...."
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BTW, this is what the A7 is based on:
ARM Launches Cortex-A50 Series, the World?s Most