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Ding! Ding! Ding!

I suppose it probably won't be long before the jailbreak community gets Siri running on the 4 seamlessly. That would be something I would jailbreak my phone for. I'm just excited for iOS 5. That'll keep me happy enough with the 4 until someone gets Siri on it. The 4S is hardly worth an upgrade in my opinion, which works out perfect since I still have a year and a half left on my Verizon contract. I like the fact that Apple now seems to put major upgrades on a 2 year cycle.
If you look at the benchmarks of the iP4S vs. the iP4, it's perfectly obvious that the iteration of Siri that's integrated into iOS 5 would seriously bog down the iP4, worse than iOS 4.0 on an iPhone 3G.
 
1-battery power
2-no point having it with the 4 otherwise people will ask whats the point in upgrading?
 
the reason Siri is still considered in BETA is as of release it only supports a few languages with more to come. if you actually listened to the keynote when they talked about Siri they explained that
 
the reason Siri is still considered in BETA is as of release it only supports a few languages with more to come. if you actually listened to the keynote when they talked about Siri they explained that

They actually said "more languages and more features to come." They were pretty vague on what 'more features' meant.
 
Which developer?

Also, I can see why so many of you seem to agree with the more critical of my friends. In the past, however, I see no similar examples of Apple using somewhat sleazy tactics to sell more new products. There's always been a good reason why something that by all appearances *should* also work on older hardware instead of just on the latest product being released... does not. As far as I can remember, it's always been a hardware limitation of old hardware. I believe this to be the case here, as well.

illjazz, they have done this in the past. Notably with iPhone 1. The only difference between the iPhone original and the iPhone 3G was the inclusion of the 3G chip. Meaning, that I completely understand that the original iPhone did not have 3G and did not have GPS. That's fine. But then, they also made it so that you could not send MMS from your original iPhone. Now, sending an MMS, is nothing ridiculous. However, they disabled it from the original iPhone even though time and time again, the jailbreakers got it to work.

So they have done this in the past.

That being said, I did go from iPhone OG -> iPhone 3G -> iPhone 3GS -> iPhone 4S. The only reason I skipped out on 4 was cause they tried to charge me $700 for it.
 
But then, they also made it so that you could not send MMS from your original iPhone. Now, sending an MMS, is nothing ridiculous. However, they disabled it from the original iPhone even though time and time again, the jailbreakers got it to work.

It is possible they had more of a reason to disable MMS in the original iPhone. A jailbreak tool was available that added that functionality, but It totally killed the battery, and each MMS took the battery life down almost 5%. Not sure how much better native support from Apple would work.
 
I have no doubt that Siri could run on an iPhone 4, but I'm guessing that at least part of it was that it simply ran much more smoothly on the iPhone 4S's faster processor. User experience is paramount to these guys.
 
I don't doubt that Apple was looking for a feature that would make the iPhone 4S stand out. It's obviously possible to get something like Siri running on the iPhone 4 and iPad, just look at the Siri standalone application for evidence!

That said, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Siri experience wasn't assisted significantly by additional hardware. Apple did talk about a new DSP being used to enable face detection when using the camera, and there are certainly APIs for doing signal processing that can offload to specialized processors. If I was designing Siri I'd try to "pre digest" what the user says with some local analysis to reduce the amount it needs to send to the cloud and reduce the workload on the server side as well.
 
I just got off the phone with Apple and have confirmed that those of us with an iPhone 4 can in fact run Siiri, but there are a few hoops to jump through. Depending on how much memory want, you just need to pay Apple $199, $299, or $399, sign a new contract, and they will throw in a free upgraded camera and processor along with the Siri.
 
Because without Siri being specific to the 4S, the only 'upgrade' would be a faster processor and a nicer camera.

Hardly worth an extra $100 or a new contract.

Google voice recognition works on phones less powerful than the iPhone4, I see no reason why Siri wouldn't work on a regular iphone 4

Well I suppose it depends on one's perspective. I think the upgraded video and camera is the iPhone 4Ss best feature. It has the potential to turn the iPhone from a camera of convenience to a main camera thereby eliminating the need to ever buy another pocket camera or camcorder.

Siri is cool but I'm still waiting to see if it's a "killer feature". Socially it has limitations because one would look like a total douche barking commands into a phone in public, and that in itself limits Siri's usefulness.

But as to why Siri is iPhone 4S only I can't say. Why was the Compass iPhone 3GS only at the time, and who would upgrade just for a compass? I did upgrade to the 3GS but only because I skipped the 3G and was ready for a new phone. I suspect most 4S buyers are upgrading from non-iPhones or 3Gs or 3GSs, not from 4s.
 
there have been indications that Siri would eventually come to the iPad.

It really is hard to say without knowing the specifics of how siri works. If there is a lot of 'internal' processing going on, then maybe I understand. It might work on an iPhone4, but might be too glitchy to be up to apple standards. However, if it's almost all being shipped out to the NC server farm for processing, why does the A5 chip matter?

I think part of Apple's reasoning when it comes to the iPad is that that's not how they really want you to use your iPad (it's not like Apple are control freaks or anything). They view the iPad as mostly a content consumption device and the iPhone as mostly a personal tool that also plays games (remember when the iPhone first came out, Jobs indicated that he sort of hated the idea of it as a gaming device, but I guess the huge checks changed his mind). I think Siri will come to the iPad eventually, but probably not until it can do things like 'play the next episode of Arrested Development that I haven't watched on Netflix' and such.

As for now I think Apple believes people would just get frustrated by the fact that Siri doesn't play very well with third party apps, which are comparatively more important on the iPad than the iPhone, because of all the third party media content. It's not all that often that people are going ot use their iPads to schedule meetings and such. They probably want to wait for it to send to iPad when it's really ready for prime time, ie no longer beta.

That all being said, I think we're all kidding ourselves if we believe that at least PART of the exclusivity to 4S isn't a marketing ploy. Apple famously hates selling products on specs. If they were a garden variety PC maker, they'd have no problem selling the 4S as a massively spec'd up device and thinking people would buy based on that. Apple is playing psychologist, which they do very well, and realizing that while the 4S may be a huge upgrade internally, people won't go out and buy it unless they have something semi-tangible they can point to. So, I think it's several factors all adding together. Marketing + genuine usability issues + Apple defining how they view their iOS ecosystem (iPhone as a personal assistant and occasional gamer iPad as a content consumption device iPod touch as a mini content consumption device and gamer).

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how could you jailbreak to get Siri though, without straight up ripping off Apple's code? Apple has kind of sort of tolerated jailbreakers to this point, but if people were straight up ripping off Apple code to put in their phones, you'd start seeing Apple aggressively seek and destroy the jailbreaking community.

Nobody would be ripping off code. The difference would be someone enabling it just like they enabled multitasking on the 3g
 
It's clearly a marketing decision. The processor argument doesn't hold up; all of the processor-intensive work is being done server-side.

Apple needed to differentiate the 4S with more than just a processor/graphics speed bump, and Siri was the answer.

From a business standpoint, I understand the decision, but as an iPhone 4 owner, I'm not happy about it.
 
the simplest explanation I have heard goes something like this:

when you bought the iPhone 4, you didn't do it anticipating Siri. Apple does not "owe" you Siri (this comes out as admonishment, I know, but bear with me)...Apple spent money buying Siri, they spent money developing it, etc. Giving it to you for free won't earn them anything for that investment. Using it as a "ploy" to sell new hardware will allow them to recoup their expenditure
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Why does everyone think that Siri would be released for the iPad? In several years from now, maybe. But Siri requires the use of an Internet connection and the iPad doesn't always have one. Maybe they will release this feature on the iPad 3G version only but apple is the company that thinks about user experience, and Siri on an iPad would not be a great one.
 
Ding! Ding! Ding!

I suppose it probably won't be long before the jailbreak community gets Siri running on the 4 seamlessly. That would be something I would jailbreak my phone for. I'm just excited for iOS 5. That'll keep me happy enough with the 4 until someone gets Siri on it. The 4S is hardly worth an upgrade in my opinion, which works out perfect since I still have a year and a half left on my Verizon contract. I like the fact that Apple now seems to put major upgrades on a 2 year cycle.

I bet it is marketing but at the same time I do not see the jailbreakers getting around it because it has to be uploaded to Apple's servers and Apple can just as easily block it there. There is no way around that little bit and I easily see Apple doing it for the marketing reasons.
 
Because Apple wants to sell you the new iPhone duh! Companies do this all the time in order to entice users to upgrade. I'm sure that Siri will be available on iPhone 4 via jailbreak anyways.
 
Don't get me wrong, I liked the idea of the teardrop aluminum, but within a few weeks, an massively faster processor and a massively better camera will make more of a difference.

This spec jump will be necessary within several months when all the apps that really leverage the new processor fully hit. Yes, I realize that the A5 has been out a while, but developing for things designed to take advantage of the A5's power just got a lot more attractive to developers.

"Massively" faster? I don't think so. "Snappier" is more like it. Remember the 4S is SLOWER than the iPad 2, which is fast, but not MASSIVELY faster.

Also, its unlikely you'll see many A5 required apps. Even when the 3GS came out, 99% of the apps released afterwards worked on both 3G and 3GS. They loaded quicker on the 3GS, but thats about it. I expect the same with the 4S. You'll get a couple 4S only apps (i.e. Infinity Blade 2), and the rest will just load a bit quicker.

The A5 is attractive to developers who crave power (many of them), but the larger market of iP4, 3GS and iPod Touch owners is attractive for developers who crave money (all of them). Which do you think will get the apps?

There's a reason why most of the reviewers are suggesting iP4 owners don't upgrade. It won't be worth it for them. They're not gaining a whole lot for their money, whether it be $200 or $700.
 
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