Apple Q1 results show why the iPhone doesn’t have LTE—yet

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/apple-q1-results-show-why-the-iphone-doesnt-have-lteyet.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Apple Q1 results show why the iPhone doesn’t have LTE—yet

By Chris Foresman | Published about 4 hours ago

Apple released its iPhone 4S without high-speed LTE capabilities amidst a sea of high-profile LTE Android handsets. While technophiles complained about lack of support for the next-generation wireless standard, there are multiple reasons Apple has so far shied away from the technology. Poor battery life and lack of a suitable baseband processor to fit the iPhone’s form factor are two reasons that have been cited by Apple in the past. But the company’s most recent financial results offer another clear reason: the majority of iPhones sold today are in areas without 4G networks of any kind.

The US has one of the only significant LTE rollouts in the world. A few major cities in Canada, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia account for most of the rest of the global LTE network availability. Nearly all of Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia lack any LTE service outside of tiny test markets.

After looking at Apple’s results for its fiscal first quarter of 2012, there’s no question that the iPhone continues to be a success. The company sold a record 37 million handsets—as much as the two previous quarters combined, including the record 20 million sold in fiscal third quarter 2011. A large majority of those iPhones were sold outside the US.

(more at the link above …)

* So Apple did the numbers and enough of the market for iPhone 4S didn’t have LTE available … Or so they say. And it would have been a little difficult to squeeze LTE in there. * It would have been nice … LTE … with fallback to 3G(+) and such for those that don’t have it yet. The ownership time of an iPhone 4S has got to be a year or two, right? By the time owners have had it for awhile … the excuse that LTE isn’t available everywhere fades pretty quickly.

I use my iPhone mostly on WiFi anyway … to cut down on the Cellular Data usage. Some things in the phone bitch when I turn off the Cellular Data … For example I can’t use Visual Voice Mail - I would have to call voicemail the old fashioned way.

* It begs the question - How are they handling users being able to download at 50 Megabits/Second or faster? If users can reach their 5 Gigabyte per month limit at 3G on a regular basis … How much is it going to cost the users when they can easily use 10 x or 50 x that amount of data from the 4G Cellular network in a month? Also how are CPU and Storage Space keeping up with that capability? You would also think you would start seeing the bottlenecks in the rest of the Internet when you reach those speeds. The whole infrastructure from your phone (or computer when you are on a computer) would have to handle that speed. It’s not hard to max the file storage space on even a 32 Gigabyte iPhone 4S - I’m already down to around 3.5 Gigabytes on /dev/disk0s1s2 mounted on /private/var out of a total of around 28.8 Gigabytes - according to an app called SysInfoPlus. I might have to dump some music to make room for other things I might need storage space for on the phone. Also some pictures and video need to be take off and archived on my desktop.

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Alan Spicer

This entry was posted on 26. January 2012 at 05:52 and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.