iPhone SE: better battery life than iPhone 6s? (Credit: Apple)
The iPhone SE, which masks impressive specs under a ho-hum 4-inch exterior, may be turning out to be one of the best deals Apple AAPL -0.45% has ever offered in an iPhone. Here’s another reason to put it on your shopping list: battery life.
We already know it’s Apple’s cheapest phone (starting at $399), uses a fast A9 processor, and has the latest Apple camera tech. And now we’re getting our first indications that it has excellent battery life.
The Wall Street Journal’s early review said the “standout news is battery life.” Based on the Journal’s stress test, the SE lasted 10 hours. That beats both the iPhone 6s and iPhone 5s by two hours and is about three hours longer than the Galaxy S7, according to the Journal.
It is important to note that the iPhone SE has a lower-resolution (1,136-by-640) display compared to the iPhone 6s’ larger 4.7-inch (1,334-by-750) screen. And considerably lower resolution than the Galaxy S7′s 5.1-incher (2,560-by-1,440), as pointed out by Mac Rumors. Typically, the larger and higher-resolution the display, the bigger the impact on battery life. The iPhone SE also does not come with 3D Touch support — albeit a feature that relatively few consumers would notice.
AUSTIN – Science and technology have always cut with double-edged swords, capable of both propelling humanity to new achievements while threatening us with potential catastrophe.
That chilling theme was explored by two leading technologists at SXSW Interactive, a festival that has seen its share of humans rising up against the machines.
While no protests were in evidence so far this year - in 2015 a group called Stop the Robots demonstrated against an automated future – there’s still time. The 30th edition of SXSW is rife with provocative sessions such as Can AI Systems Really Think? and Androids and Future Life.
In separate talks, the promise and pitfalls of bothDNA sequencing and artificial intelligence were laid out by quantum physicist turned human genome expert Riccardo Sabatini, and telcom veteran turned entrepreneur Dag Kittlaus, who developed the virtual personal assistant Siri and sold it to a persistent Steve Jobs in 2010.
“It is important to prevent the bad side,” Kittlaus, 49, said during his cheerfully titled talk, Will AI Augment or Destroy Humanity? “It’s a good idea to keep an eye on this.”
When the moderator, tech author Steven Levy, asked Kittlaus if in fact supercomputers might not take over for entrepreneurs, using their digital brains to create things faster than humans, Kittlaus nodded.
“Yes, it will happen,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when.”
Kittlaus, it can be argued, is hastening the arrival of that day. Later this year, he will unveil Viv, an open source and cloud-based personal assistant that will allow humans “to talk to the Internet” and have the Internet talk back.
“The more you ask of Viv, the more it will get to know you,” he said. “Siri was chapter one, and now it’s almost like a new Internet age is coming. Viv will be a giant brain in the sky.”
Kittlaus said Viv would differ from Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Echo by being able to make mental leaps.
For example, asking Viv “What’s the weather near the Super Bowl” would cause it to “write its own program to find the answer, one that first determines where the Super Bowl is, and then what the weather will be in that city,” he said.
Levy laughed. “So,” he said, “if I stumble out of a bar and just say ‘I’m drunk,’ will it call me an Uber?”
Kittlaus smiled. “It might, or it might order you another drink."
PRIVACY ISSUES LOOM FOR SMART MACHINES
Such levity aside, privacy and security issues pop to mind when considering a cloud-based system that’s gobbling up data to create a digitized picture of our lives.
Apple’s current battle with the FBI over providing code to crack open a killer’s iPhone is one matter; granting access to a thinking machine that is privy to a person’s smallest details would be quite another.
Kittlaus’ answer to a question about secure data was less than convincing: “It will be up to you to tell it what you want to tell it.”
The issue of machine learning outgunning human brainpower currently is on bold display in South Korea, where an AI machine called AlphaGo is thrashing a champion Go player Lee Se-dol. AlphaGo is a program created by DeepMind, a British company that was bought by Google two years ago.
Ironically, Kittlaus is working on a novel that features dangerous AI.
“It’s a Siri out of control scenario,” he explained with a smile as the packed room laughed. “The machine seems to be right all the time in its predictions, so the question becomes, how do you trust that machine when you don’t know how it’s making its decisions.”
THE DILEMMA OF CREATING SUPERBABIES
On the topic of DNA sequencing, humans will have to bear the responsibility of ethically handling the coming leaps, said Sabatini, 34, a researcher who captivated TED 2016 last month with a lecture that found him hauling 175 thick books on stage – the full genetic make-up of DNA-sequencing pioneer J. Craig Venter. Sabatini works for Venter's company, Human Longevity Inc.
“We should as a species get informed, because this is a controversial topic,” said the Italian scientist. “We need to come to an ethical understanding, or we might get to an unhealthy story.”
Sabatini said that as we understand more about our genetic makeup – of which “only about 1% is clear to us” – there will be the opportunity not only to check for potential diseases before they ravage the body, but also to genetically modify a future human to have more appealing traits. Call it man-made Darwinism.
Specifically, Sabatini said that it is possible based on current genetic sequencing to see what lines of our human code correspond to not just physical features, but also to so-called superpowers that include the ability to sleep just three hours the night and see well in the dark.
