Apple's Kaiann Drance promotes 5G speeds in iPhone 12 interview

Vice President of iPhone Marketing, Kaiann Drance, has given an extended interview discussing the new iPhone 12, and iPhone 12 Pro, dealing principally with 5G, battery life, and MagSafe.

As the new iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro arrive in stores, Apple's Kaiann Drance has addressed user questions about the new devices. Speaking on the Rich on Tech Podcast, she broadly repeated the talking points from Apple's "Hi, Speed" event, but did speak more about Apple's process for getting the new phones to customers.

"If you do show up as a walk-in," said Drance on the podcast, "we may give you an appointment to come back at a later time. But certainly you may expect to wait a little longer because of occupancy in the stores and physical distancing. We may not be able to get everyone in as quickly as possible."

Regarding the concerns over battery life being considerably reduced when using 5G, she insisted that the new phones will adapt to balance battery charge and speed.

"We're able to make a bunch of software optimizations throughout the entire system to make battery life even better," she said, "and on top of that we added a new feature called 'Smart Data mode' that will allow you to manage your 5G usage and battery life a bit better, so you can use 5G speeds when it really matters, and then for places where maybe it doesn't matter as much it will revert to 4G LTE speeds to save your battery life."

As well as Apple's own optimization, she added that it is "really important" to know that the company has worked with carriers. "They're also optimizing their settings together with iPhone to optimize for battery life," she said.

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Drance also addressed the issue that Apple has dropped the power adapter from the iPhone box — and included a Lightning to USB-C cable instead of the previous Lightning one.

"You can still use your old Lightning cables and any of those power adapters [that you have] will still work," she said. "In fact, we encourage you to still use those as well. If you're an Apple user and you happen to have a Mac or an iPad, we've also included those USB-C power adapters in recent years... and the computer ports themselves include USB-C, so those are other options for you."

While Drance was interviewed in time for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro becoming available, her comments also apply to the forthcoming iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 Pro Max. These will be available to pre-order from November 6.

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12 Comments

avon b7 20 Years · 8046 comments

About 4 years ago

Even so, and in spite of the optimisations in software and hardware, a bigger battery capacity would have been welcome for purchasers of the larger phones. Time will tell if users end up getting through more cycles faster and needing replacements earlier as a result.

Battery size is one of the key usage pillars in modern phones. I can't help but think that they skimped a bit in this case. At least on the face of it.

elijahg 18 Years · 2842 comments

I still don't see the point in 5G. Seems very much like a marketing fad to push phone upgrades. 4G speeds are plenty fast enough for a phone, no one needs gigabit speeds to a phone.

Rayz2016 8 Years · 6957 comments

She’s got her work cut out for her. I’m sure the phone’s great; I’m just not convinced people care that much about 5G

davesmall 16 Years · 118 comments

elijahg said:

I still don't see the point in 5G. Seems very much like a marketing fad to push phone upgrades. 4G speeds are plenty fast enough for a phone, no one needs gigabit speeds to a phone.

Depends on your usage and setup. For example, Apple has recently made it much easier to use your iPhone as a personal WiFi Hotspot. This means you can quickly and effortlessly get online with a computer, iPad, Apple watch, or other WiFi enabled device. 5G speeds are very helpful. This also means that it may not be nearly so important to pay the added cost to purchase cellular connectivity for all those other devices.

davesmall said:

elijahg said:

I still don't see the point in 5G. Seems very much like a marketing fad to push phone upgrades. 4G speeds are plenty fast enough for a phone, no one needs gigabit speeds to a phone.

Depends on your usage and setup. For example, Apple has recently made it much easier to use your iPhone as a personal WiFi Hotspot. This means you can quickly and effortlessly get online with a computer, iPad, Apple watch, or other WiFi enabled device. 5G speeds are very helpful. This also means that it may not be nearly so important to pay the added cost to purchase cellular connectivity for all those other devices.

I've been tethering my phone since the iPhone 3G, and if we were talking about 3G speeds, I'd agree we need better. 3G was slow with 150ms+ latency, but 4G is plenty quick enough for tethering. If you need to download a big file at high speed, use wifi. In any case, at least to my iPhone X, tethering only works over 2.4Ghz and maxes out at about 50Mbps. Until I got fibre, 4G was much faster than my ADSL connection. Most people are happy with a 50Mbps home connection often with multiple people sharing, so 1000Mbps to the phone really seems premature for the foreseeable future.

Analysts seemed to think 5G would be a driving factor behind iPhone 12 upgrades, but personally, I think not.