The guts of the iPhone 3GS
One of the standard features of buying a Mac is looking over the hardware specs -- and, if you're buying it from Apple's online store, tweaking those specs to your liking. When your computer arrives, you'll know exactly how fast the processor is, how much RAM it has, what video card it sports, etc. But there really isn't much of an equivalent when you buy an iPhone. Now that Apple's selling two models at once, you can choose between the iPhone 3G and the 3GS, and you can choose how much storage you want, but that's about the extent of it. How much faster is the 3GS than its predecessor? How much RAM does it have? Who knows?
Well, some people know, obviously, from taking the things apart if nothing else. AnandTech has a pretty good breakdown of what's inside both models if you want the gory details -- basically, they've moved from the ARM equivalent of a 486 to the ARM equivalent of a first-generation Pentium. And a leak on T-Mobile's Web site revealed that the new model has 256 MB of RAM (more than double what my Power Computing desktop had ten years ago).
Perhaps more interesting than the raw numbers is the question of why Apple doesn't use them in its marketing. AppleInsider has a fairly detailed discussion of it. The short version is that in truth the iPhone, like most cell phones even at the high end, is based on commodity hardware. As I've noted, the magic of the iPhone is really in the system software and the apps it runs -- so it's those features that Apple empahsizes as it aims to sell the phone. In fact, since touting the hardware capabilities of a device often tempts developers to push those limits, such marketing could actually make it harder to keep the iPhone a uniform platform -- something Apple will want to do as long as possible.
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plus who cares?
Well, sure, people that read (and write) columns like this one care. But are most people who are buying a smart phone interested in how fast its processor is, or how much RAM it has? Most people don't know or care about that for their computer, but it's always advertised because it always has been advertised, going all the way back to when the only people who bought computers were nerds who demanded the hardware specs. Now it's become a race to show who has the bigger numbers, even though most consumers don't know what the numbers even mean.That's never been the case with cell phones, so the numbers would be even more meaningless, with nothing to compare them to, so why introduce the useless marketing baggage?
(Captcha text: "wino TV")
theres always a bigger fish...
who cares? im sure some nerds out there are shaking their heads at some of your comments, they live by the numbers, they memorize all that stuff, down to the type of wires it uses and what the components are made out of, so of course some people want to know how much power that lil piece of machinery has in the palm of their hand, while i do agree, the common people do not, they just like the flash and the glitter. i for one seek a happy balance between presentation, and knowing the hardware specs and details, i quite enjoy it. sure the 3g s is boasting twice the speed and power, as well as storage space then the 3g, not to mention the voice command software and the inbuilt compass, faster web browsing and better graphics for games, thats nice, but, is it really worth getting if you already own a 3g? the new 3.0 os update is coming up on the 19th, so hopefully that will improve alot of performance of the 3g, and with the release of the 3g s, and the major price slash of the 3g goin to $99 now, which phone do u think people will buy more of, and not care about the specs and the ram and the processing power of the new 3g s?Who Cares or Doesn't Care
I'm not sure who cares or not, but my wife and I just bought two iPhones. A 3G for her and a GS for me. Side by side we notice a considerable difference in the runnig of Apps. My GS loads everything much faster and streams video cleaner?So I'm only saying? We see the difference and we care. We are sorry we opted for the 3G for her.