<p>I wonder how many 6s and 6 plus’s they produced and shipped for the first round of orders.</p>
<p>Apple will let us know. They have their faults but they are the only one of these companies that’s transparent about sales. Amazon won’t break out any numbers - you have to find estimates of sales backed into from web usage stats. MS is little better. Samsung has been caught lying so many times, their numbers are only useful if you’re looking backwards a few quarters. But Apple will tell us how many have been sold. Not shipped into channel inventory but sold.</p>
<p>I didn’t preorder and hope I don’t regret it. I have a 4 and have been waiting to replace it with a 6. My power button is totally out of service. Just laziness. I hope when I am ready to just walk in and buy one. I don’t think I want the plus.</p>
<p>My brother just gave up his pager a couple of years ago and bought a non-smart phone kicking and screaming. If I text him, he’ll call me back not realizing that although I love him to death, maybe I texted because I didn’t feel like chatting. </p>
<p>Odder because he’s a self-employed consultant in an information ethnology field. Impressive that he can pull it off successfully with Luddite technology. </p>
<p>how gauche of him! Why, you could do an ethnological study on different communication norms and expectations!</p>
<p>We all have the iPhone 4s. They work fine, meet our needs and help with so many organizational issues as others have noted. I have no desire to upgrade and my kids don’t care either.</p>
<p>DH, on the other hand, just sat down next to me to discuss the iphone 6 for him, primarily for the extra storage.</p>
<p>I have an iPhone 4S and cannot upgrade yet (constrained by my work), but I’m more intrigued by the Apple Watch (and yes I know it requires a 5 or above). </p>
<p>"The iPhone camera is good for what it is, but the dinosaur looking cameras are still good for what they do. The best camera can be the one you have with you when you need it, and the cellphone cameras fit that criteria. "</p>
<p>I travel all over the world, and just take pretty much the usual touristy type pictures - nothing grand. But I get comments on how good the quality is when I post them on FB, where people are often viewing them blown up, and it’s just a iphone (4 in my case). For someone who isn’t into photography (lenses and the like). I think the iphone has essentially made the camera obsolete. I have 2 “good” cameras with a layer of dust on then, as they are harder to use and too bulky to carry internationally. </p>
<p>Garland - I got iPhones for my kids when they were in hs (upgrading from Motorola Razr) and thinking ahead to college. My S really didn’t want it - and now he can’t live without it. It is SO useful in ways you don’t realize til you have it. </p>
<p>You can get very good results from a phone camera and I’m expecting that to get much better soon. To focus on Apple, the built-in camera app isn’t much but you can add functionality through different apps. My favorite is probably Camera+ because it has a simple method for setting focus and exposure separately: touch a point and a box appears, pull at the edge and it splits into a box for focus and a circle for exposure. You can move the exposure meter around and the picture lightens or darkens. Other apps - like VSCO - do this as well. Camera+ also has a slider for zooming. Beginning with the 5S, the built-in app takes bunches of pictures, but you can create this ability with an app like Fast Camera, which operates as burst mode - which you can customize. Many of these apps also include fairly sophisticated adjustment controls, not merely pre-set filters.</p>
<p>Apple is opening up more camera bits to developers. </p>
<p>@Pizzagirl, I agree to a certain extent. On my last vacation, I didn’t take my camera, because for taking photos in sunlight, of slow-moving objects, some of which I would want to post to FB conveniently to be viewed by friends, the iPhone is not only acceptable, but somewhat preferable, since it will be the camera I’ll have with me almost everywhere. </p>
<p>Otoh, my “real” camera is not obsolete, since physics still matters, and the light-gathering of a large sensor trumps that of a tiny sensor, a lot of glass will focus better than a bit of plastic, and the control over depth of field simulated in software still looks obvious and doesn’t match that of a large lens wide open. </p>
<p>Horses for courses.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/technology/smartphones-the-corporate-personality-test.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=Moth-Visible&module=inside-nyt-region®ion=inside-nyt-region&WT.nav=inside-nyt-region”>Smartphones: The Corporate Personality Test - The New York Times;
<p>I don’t disagree, ixnay - I just think that for 90% of photographers and 90% of situations, the iPhone types of cameras will serve quite fine. No one is saying use an iPhone for your wedding photos 
</p>
<p>As for the “grander” types of tourist pictures, I agree my iPhone has had some limitations in being able to take in vistas, or focus on small details that are far away, etc. that a “real” camera would have. I used to know how to do all of that, took photography, my family considered building a darkroom, etc. years ago. But I’ve lost that skill. But I guess the thing is – I don’t feel it’s necessary for <em>me</em> to be able to take some of those pictures, because I can go on the internet and find amazing photos of anything I’ve visited / toured, even if I wasn’t the one taking them. It takes the pressure off, in a sense. I mean, it’s not as though I can’t find fabulous pictures of the Grand Canyon or Notre Dame or some such even if I don’t take them! So I think fine photos are still appreciated, just not necessarily being taken by the “everyday” person. </p>
<p>Any news on the new and improved iPads? </p>
<p>Cell phone cameras are junk - they have nice CCD’s but the optical path is about as bad as you can get. Cell phone camera designers are like that guy who thinks that all a fast car needs is a big engine, and then get surprised when someone with half the horsepower smokes them on the track. Actually that’s not fair - those designers are probably pretty good, just constrained by the installation, but still.</p>
<p>That having been said, I don’t care. I am a big believer in experiencing life rather than documenting it, take few photos unless prompted, and don’t like the idea therefore of carting around a real camera when I barely want to use one. I have a big camera, and for those photos that I DO care about I whip it out and take a GOOD picture.</p>
<p>The very fact that picture-taking has exploded since iPhones have been introduced tells you that they serve most people’s / most situational needs better than traditional cameras. If the pictures look good enough for the end user, then that’s the definition of meeting needs - even if it’s not good enough for Ansel Adams. The distinctions are lost on the average person. It’s like bemoaning than MP3’s aren’t as good as vinyl – it’s a distinction that’s lost on most people. </p>
<p>“I am a big believer in experiencing life rather than documenting it” - get over it! People who take more pictures than you are enjoying themselves, and you’re enjoying yourself. There’s no need to proclaim your own superiority. </p>
<p>PG, I am with you on the camera vs iPhone. By the way, the picture of the Barcelona bakery looked great. </p>
<p>
Just to be as pedantic as possible, picture-taking first started exploding with the introduction of consumer digital cameras, well before they made their way into cell phones - removing the incremental cost of taking individual pictures encouraged people to take far more pictures than they had in the past, especially when the cameras could easily fit in coat pockets and purses. Further, the iPhone was hardly the first cell phone with a camera in it, and since the market share of the iPhone has never (to the best of my knowledge) beaten 15% (usually much less), I would credit the second surge in picture taking to cell phones in general, and not this one particular brand.</p>
<p>
I wasn’t proclaiming my own superiority - I do that from 6-8pm on alternating Thursdays at open mike night, and daily at trees and fire hydrants around the neighborhood. I did not say you or your simpaticos were inferior or not enjoying yourselves, I didn’t throw my hands up in outrage that you were taking pictures when I was not, I didn’t shake my fist at all you young’uns and scream at you to get off my lawn. Having said that cell phone cameras are of poor quality, I was just trying to show why it didn’t really matter to me - taking pictures gets in my way when I am trying to experience things.</p>
<p>One of the nifty things about the smartphone is being able to carry around all the photos you would like to in one compact place, even if you don’t take those pictures with your phone. We had a professional photographer duo at my son’s wedding, and they took hundreds of digital shots with a camera fitting of the pros that they were. I was able to download as many as I wanted from my computer to my iphone, having them at hand pretty much all the time. I also have an album of prints, but I find that I’m pulling out my iphone to show interested friends about 20x more often than anyone looks at the traditional album. I know people who do the same with pictures of their kids, their pets, etc.</p>
<p>Not sure why this thread leads to the comparison of cellphone camara and traditional camera. Each has its own usage.
I used to keep a digital camera in my car to take pictures in emergency situation like car accident,… But once in a while I have to take it out to recharge. Now with the cellphone, I don’t have to worry about recharging anymore.</p>
<p>I will wait until Christmas to upgrade my D’s Sammung S3 to iPhone 6.</p>