The Ars article reads like it was written to justify Apple holding off for a year.
They did the same thing with LTE and 3G using the same justification. Both times competent products were on the market a year or more before Apple was on the market.
I owned the first 4G (WiMax) phone in the US, the HTC Evo 4G. It's cousin, the HTC Thunderbolt, was the third commercially available LTE phone but the first flagship-tier offering (the first and second were garbage-tier phones from MetroPCS).
Both the Evo and Thunderbolt had significant compromises in battery life in particular, but also other areas, to support their 4G radios that most of us couldn't even use. In the time I had my Evo I actually used the 4G capabilities maybe a half dozen times.
The second generation of 4G devices were much better.
That's not justifying Apple's decision to hold off though, I wasn't paying attention to them during the 4G switch but look at their first 3G attempt compared to the second (3GS). Those who waited were much better off. No matter when a particular vendor switches, it's best to wait for generation 2 unless you have a use case that really benefits from the new technology.
Not really. 5G is going to take many years more to truly roll out and be beneficial. If your friends are impressed with "I have 5 Gs" and you get a warm feeling from basking in the glow of their adoration then get a 5G phone. If you just want a phone that works then do not get a 5G phone yet. Neither approach is right or wrong. You have to decide for yourself if you are going to pay extra as a first adopter and subsidize the new tech for others, or is your phone working just fine as is and you can wait 4 or 5 years till your phone breaks and you get a new one.
Yup, I needed a new iPhone this year and I opted for an 8+, the X series are just priced way too high and don’t bring meaningful improvements. That extra $$$ for the X phones means hard pass now that phones aren’t subsidized. My really nice 8700k PC cost less than some of the models wtf
Easy, I am no longer upgrading phones every two years. The iPhone battery scandalgate taught me that I can get even longer life from an iPhone by replacing the battery.
Therefore my maxed out XS Max will be hanging out for 3 or 4 years to get a new battery and then another 3 or 4 years before replacement or inability to upgrade to the new iOS, whichever comes first. Spread over 6-8 years it is the cheapest iPhone I have ever purchased AND it finally has enough memory for my entire music collection. Also waterproof, so there is no new phone feature I care about or will want etc.
"...$200-$300 more than current flagship devices."
Lovely. I know people that are throwing over $300 USD at phone bills for a family of four due in part to the +$1k cost of each phone that is rolled into the price of service. Sure said people are shooting themselves in the proverbial feet, but I can see the personal finance news articles a decade from now telling people that the shouldn't have porked their futures up the backside by dumping almost $4K a year into phone service instead of a 401K.
99.99% of users even not noticed smooth hidden change from 100mbit to 1gigbit ethernet in all our PCs in recent years. These chips now cost pennies. Or any difference in anything moving from 150-300mbit to 1 gigabit in WiFi. And QCOM now thinks people will notice any change at all from 4G to 5G in mobiles ? At $300+ ?? :)))))))))) ROTFLOL I need help laughing to death.
They didn't notice it because for most people it didn't make any difference for their actual effective internet speed, as their outside network was the limiting factor in that. Having 100Mbit/1Gbit ethernet doesn't matter when you were getting less than 20Mbit from your ISP. Even now that people can get gigabit speeds from their ISP it would matter. This is more akin to going from tens of Mbit speed cable to hundreds of Mbit or even gigabit speed speed fiber. There are other advantages as well (reduced latency is a big deal), and yes it'll take awhile to get them. But this is no different from any other tech, where it comes out expensive and through improvements in the technology and adoption rate drives costs down.
I can't believe there are still so clueless people here commenting who are claiming that 5G does not have any benefits because speed. "My 300baud modem is still rocking!". If you dont want in-depth information about how cellular network and mobile phones evolve read something else then Anandtech.
5G is all about sharing the bandwidth and using it so more people have more speed with smaller ping. If you would be alone in a 4G network than that 1-2Gig would be enough, but your not alone and bandwidth gets slower when more people use it at the same time. 5G helps with this.
There are tons of articles about 4G vs 5G that explain this better than me with my morning coffee. Maybe anandtech could do article about ?
Great that you can write while still sweet dreaming. Next time drink coffee first and bring us here at least one application you were dreaming about. I give you in your dreams even not 5G but 100G (don't touch supercomputers)
I really like that they'll keep two separate product lines. 5G needs time to mature and I definitely don't want to be paying extra just to be a guinea pig for the telcos. 855 looks really interesting without 5G and it's great you can have it without the additional modem.
At 100Mbit/s down and 26Mbit/s up on LTE, I simply fail to see, why I should care about 5G on a phone, which refuses to support desktop replacement or feeding a 4k screen. Why should I pay extra for a potential I cannot imagine using. I've started at 300 Baud, so I value my bandwidth, but after "enough" I have other things to spend money on.
I love my 10Gbit home LAN and the 100Gbit LAN in the lab. I'd take Gbit Internet up and down for my home, if they didn't charge extra over the 280/25 Mbit I have now, but that's Steam updates for a dozen PCs on games reaching tripple GByte sizes, which doesn't include the phone just yet.
What am I missing? I cannot really see value beyond my OnePlus 5, even if I try hard.
5G means more aggregate tower bandwidth. To the end user more overall bandwidth and thus less congestion, throttling, and capping is the advantage not some higher peak speed.
In other words: I am lucky today, that I get these speeds (which I regularly measured, not projected from specs), but tomorrow I could be stuck in an LTE traffic jam, which I can only avoid by jumping on 5G? I keep thinking that available bandwidth is merely a question of cell density and that whenever the aggregate bandwidth in a mobile cell isn't good for the averate population, you increase the density. Of course there are limits ultimately, just don't know how close we are to the point where 5G is the only solution left. It feels a bit like UMTS to LTE: TelCos may be motivated to thin out older technology and force the end users to upgrade because it's cheaper for them (and I guess some TelCos still sell phones).
When I watch people in Lyon trams these mornings, everybody is already glued to their cell, watching videos or similar high-bandwidth stuff, so the network is holding up just fine. Unless all these autonomous cars start filling the airwaves with their V2V chattering (and drivers become passenger just like their kids who can now also watch videos), I just don't see who or what would raise it to orders of magnitude higher bandwidth. As much as I like VR and 4K, I don't quite see everybody on the road turning into full VR zombies.
Is it really so unrealistic to think that bandwidth requirements might not continue on exponential growth paths, when nobody seems to have more time to give to their phones and receives as much resolution as he can ingest? Where would it stop then?
you hit the root cause right on it's head: the imminent IoT explosion is what will blowup 4G capacity. See, while LTE can be speedboosted to 5G relatively easily, it seems (I haven't seen the spec, or work at a mobile carrier to know for sure) like 4G LTE has limitations on concurrent device count.
For you and me, and even the people glued to their phones streaming 4K Netflix, the 4G to 5G should bring nothing for actual real-world usage, and that's how it should be, unlike the 3G/UMTS/HSPA to 4G LTE transition, which was honestly insanely overdue.
As for why it's being marketed the hell out of.. well, marketing gon' market. I, for one, have no intention of even caring about 5G tech for the short term. gonna wait for it to become common, ordinary tech first :D
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melgross - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link
What a joke! 5G is a mess, and will be for years to come. Buying a 5G phone next year is insane. Even in 2020 it will be premature..Read the article in Arstechnica Technica today. It’s a very good roundup of the problems.
Sahrin - Saturday, December 15, 2018 - link
The Ars article reads like it was written to justify Apple holding off for a year.They did the same thing with LTE and 3G using the same justification. Both times competent products were on the market a year or more before Apple was on the market.
wolrah - Monday, December 17, 2018 - link
@Sahrin counterpoint:I owned the first 4G (WiMax) phone in the US, the HTC Evo 4G. It's cousin, the HTC Thunderbolt, was the third commercially available LTE phone but the first flagship-tier offering (the first and second were garbage-tier phones from MetroPCS).
Both the Evo and Thunderbolt had significant compromises in battery life in particular, but also other areas, to support their 4G radios that most of us couldn't even use. In the time I had my Evo I actually used the 4G capabilities maybe a half dozen times.
The second generation of 4G devices were much better.
That's not justifying Apple's decision to hold off though, I wasn't paying attention to them during the 4G switch but look at their first 3G attempt compared to the second (3GS). Those who waited were much better off. No matter when a particular vendor switches, it's best to wait for generation 2 unless you have a use case that really benefits from the new technology.
Azethoth - Monday, December 17, 2018 - link
Not really. 5G is going to take many years more to truly roll out and be beneficial. If your friends are impressed with "I have 5 Gs" and you get a warm feeling from basking in the glow of their adoration then get a 5G phone. If you just want a phone that works then do not get a 5G phone yet. Neither approach is right or wrong. You have to decide for yourself if you are going to pay extra as a first adopter and subsidize the new tech for others, or is your phone working just fine as is and you can wait 4 or 5 years till your phone breaks and you get a new one.shabby - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link
Qualcomm can only dream we will spend 2-300 more.CheapSushi - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link
This. Well all of the companies are. For the folks spending $800+ on their phones. How are you justifying it?Icehawk - Sunday, December 16, 2018 - link
Yup, I needed a new iPhone this year and I opted for an 8+, the X series are just priced way too high and don’t bring meaningful improvements. That extra $$$ for the X phones means hard pass now that phones aren’t subsidized. My really nice 8700k PC cost less than some of the models wtfAzethoth - Monday, December 17, 2018 - link
Easy, I am no longer upgrading phones every two years. The iPhone battery scandalgate taught me that I can get even longer life from an iPhone by replacing the battery.Therefore my maxed out XS Max will be hanging out for 3 or 4 years to get a new battery and then another 3 or 4 years before replacement or inability to upgrade to the new iOS, whichever comes first. Spread over 6-8 years it is the cheapest iPhone I have ever purchased AND it finally has enough memory for my entire music collection. Also waterproof, so there is no new phone feature I care about or will want etc.
iwod - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link
I would be happy if we stick to 4.9G for years to come. eLAA, Massive MIMO etc.PeachNCream - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link
"...$200-$300 more than current flagship devices."Lovely. I know people that are throwing over $300 USD at phone bills for a family of four due in part to the +$1k cost of each phone that is rolled into the price of service. Sure said people are shooting themselves in the proverbial feet, but I can see the personal finance news articles a decade from now telling people that the shouldn't have porked their futures up the backside by dumping almost $4K a year into phone service instead of a 401K.
SanX - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link
99.99% of users even not noticed smooth hidden change from 100mbit to 1gigbit ethernet in all our PCs in recent years. These chips now cost pennies. Or any difference in anything moving from 150-300mbit to 1 gigabit in WiFi. And QCOM now thinks people will notice any change at all from 4G to 5G in mobiles ? At $300+ ?? :)))))))))) ROTFLOL I need help laughing to death.darkswordsman17 - Friday, December 14, 2018 - link
They didn't notice it because for most people it didn't make any difference for their actual effective internet speed, as their outside network was the limiting factor in that. Having 100Mbit/1Gbit ethernet doesn't matter when you were getting less than 20Mbit from your ISP. Even now that people can get gigabit speeds from their ISP it would matter. This is more akin to going from tens of Mbit speed cable to hundreds of Mbit or even gigabit speed speed fiber. There are other advantages as well (reduced latency is a big deal), and yes it'll take awhile to get them. But this is no different from any other tech, where it comes out expensive and through improvements in the technology and adoption rate drives costs down.juhatus - Saturday, December 15, 2018 - link
I can't believe there are still so clueless people here commenting who are claiming that 5G does not have any benefits because speed. "My 300baud modem is still rocking!". If you dont want in-depth information about how cellular network and mobile phones evolve read something else then Anandtech.5G is all about sharing the bandwidth and using it so more people have more speed with smaller ping. If you would be alone in a 4G network than that 1-2Gig would be enough, but your not alone and bandwidth gets slower when more people use it at the same time. 5G helps with this.
There are tons of articles about 4G vs 5G that explain this better than me with my morning coffee. Maybe anandtech could do article about ?
SanX - Saturday, December 15, 2018 - link
Great that you can write while still sweet dreaming. Next time drink coffee first and bring us here at least one application you were dreaming about. I give you in your dreams even not 5G but 100G (don't touch supercomputers)crotach - Saturday, December 15, 2018 - link
I really like that they'll keep two separate product lines. 5G needs time to mature and I definitely don't want to be paying extra just to be a guinea pig for the telcos. 855 looks really interesting without 5G and it's great you can have it without the additional modem.abufrejoval - Monday, December 17, 2018 - link
At 100Mbit/s down and 26Mbit/s up on LTE, I simply fail to see, why I should care about 5G on a phone, which refuses to support desktop replacement or feeding a 4k screen. Why should I pay extra for a potential I cannot imagine using. I've started at 300 Baud, so I value my bandwidth, but after "enough" I have other things to spend money on.I love my 10Gbit home LAN and the 100Gbit LAN in the lab. I'd take Gbit Internet up and down for my home, if they didn't charge extra over the 280/25 Mbit I have now, but that's Steam updates for a dozen PCs on games reaching tripple GByte sizes, which doesn't include the phone just yet.
What am I missing? I cannot really see value beyond my OnePlus 5, even if I try hard.
namechamps - Monday, December 17, 2018 - link
5G means more aggregate tower bandwidth. To the end user more overall bandwidth and thus less congestion, throttling, and capping is the advantage not some higher peak speed.abufrejoval - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
In other words: I am lucky today, that I get these speeds (which I regularly measured, not projected from specs), but tomorrow I could be stuck in an LTE traffic jam, which I can only avoid by jumping on 5G? I keep thinking that available bandwidth is merely a question of cell density and that whenever the aggregate bandwidth in a mobile cell isn't good for the averate population, you increase the density. Of course there are limits ultimately, just don't know how close we are to the point where 5G is the only solution left. It feels a bit like UMTS to LTE: TelCos may be motivated to thin out older technology and force the end users to upgrade because it's cheaper for them (and I guess some TelCos still sell phones).When I watch people in Lyon trams these mornings, everybody is already glued to their cell, watching videos or similar high-bandwidth stuff, so the network is holding up just fine. Unless all these autonomous cars start filling the airwaves with their V2V chattering (and drivers become passenger just like their kids who can now also watch videos), I just don't see who or what would raise it to orders of magnitude higher bandwidth. As much as I like VR and 4K, I don't quite see everybody on the road turning into full VR zombies.
Is it really so unrealistic to think that bandwidth requirements might not continue on exponential growth paths, when nobody seems to have more time to give to their phones and receives as much resolution as he can ingest? Where would it stop then?
ZeDestructor - Sunday, December 23, 2018 - link
you hit the root cause right on it's head: the imminent IoT explosion is what will blowup 4G capacity. See, while LTE can be speedboosted to 5G relatively easily, it seems (I haven't seen the spec, or work at a mobile carrier to know for sure) like 4G LTE has limitations on concurrent device count.For you and me, and even the people glued to their phones streaming 4K Netflix, the 4G to 5G should bring nothing for actual real-world usage, and that's how it should be, unlike the 3G/UMTS/HSPA to 4G LTE transition, which was honestly insanely overdue.
As for why it's being marketed the hell out of.. well, marketing gon' market. I, for one, have no intention of even caring about 5G tech for the short term. gonna wait for it to become common, ordinary tech first :D
Vazi - Saturday, December 29, 2018 - link
5G deployment is still at least 2 years away. Buying a 5G phone in 2019 is a waste of money.Gabriel028 - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
OnePlus mistake indicates that its next smartphone will not actually be the first with a Snapdragon 855 process but only among the first.