Apple Introduces iPhone 5

Thinnest, Lightest iPhone Ever Features All-New Aluminum Design, Stunning 4-Inch Retina Display, A6 Chip & Ultra-fast Wireless

The thinnest and lightest iPhone ever, completely redesigned to feature a stunning new 4-inch Retina™ display; an Apple-designed A6 chip for blazing fast performance; and ultra-fast wireless technology*—all while delivering even better battery life. iPhone 5 comes with iOS 6, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system with over 200 new features including: the all new Maps app with Apple-designed cartography and turn-by-turn navigation; Facebook integration; Passbook® organization; and even more Siri® features and languages.

“iPhone 5 is the most beautiful consumer device that we’ve ever created,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We’ve packed an amazing amount of innovation and advanced technology into a thin and light, jewel-like device with a stunning 4-inch Retina display, blazing fast A6 chip, ultrafast wireless, even longer battery life; and we think customers are going to love it.”

iPhone 5 is the thinnest smartphone in the world, with an all-new 7.6 mm anodized aluminum body that is 18 percent thinner and 20 percent lighter than iPhone 4S. Designed with an unprecedented level of precision, iPhone 5 combines an anodized aluminum body with diamond cut chamfered edges and glass inlays for a truly incredible fit and finish.

The new 4-inch Retina display on iPhone 5 delivers even more pixels than iPhone 4S, making the already incredible Retina display even better. By making the screen taller, not wider, iPhone 5 is just as easy to use with one hand so you can tap, type and scroll the same way you always have, while enjoying even more of your content including amazing apps optimized for the larger Retina display, widescreen HD video, a full five days of your Calendar and more of every web page.

iPhone 5 supports ultrafast wireless standards including LTE and DC-HSDPA, so you can browse, download and stream content even faster. To support the latest LTE technology, Apple has pioneered a unique single-radio LTE solution that provides blazing fast speeds while fitting perfectly into the new remarkably thin design. iPhone 5 features dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi support for a wireless experience up to 150 Mbps.***

The all-new A6 chip was designed by Apple to maximize performance and power efficiency to support all the incredible new features in iPhone 5, including the stunning new 4-inch Retina display—all while delivering even better battery life. With up to twice the CPU and graphics performance, almost everything you do on iPhone 5 is blazing fast for launching apps, loading web pages and downloading email attachments.

The 8 megapixel iSight® camera is the most popular camera in the world and with iPhone 5, it’s even better. The new camera is completely redesigned with incredible optical performance, yet amazingly it’s 25 percent smaller than the camera in iPhone 4S. The new iSight camera in iPhone 5 features a sapphire crystal lens cover that is thinner and more durable than standard glass with the ability to provide crystal clear images. The new panorama feature lets you capture jaw-dropping panorama images of up to 28 megapixels by simply moving the camera across a scene in one smooth motion. New video features include improved stabilization, video face detection for up to 10 faces and the ability to take still photos as you record. A new FaceTime® HD front facing camera makes FaceTime calls incredibly clear and can also be used for self portraits and recording 720p HD video. iPhone 5 also allows you to share photos with friends and family using iCloud’s Shared Photo Streams.

iPhone 5 features the new Lightning™ connector that is smaller, smarter and more durable than the previous connector. The all-digital Lightning connector features an adaptive interface that uses only the signals that each accessory requires, and it’s reversible so you can instantly connect to your accessories. The Lightning-to-30-pin Adapter is also available to connect iPhone 5 to legacy 30-pin accessories.

iPhone 5 introduces new enhanced audio features including a new beam-forming, directional microphone system for higher quality sound, while background noise fades away with new noise canceling technology. iPhone 5 now includes support for cellular wideband audio for crisper word clarity and more natural sounding speech. Wideband audio will be supported by over 20 carriers worldwide at launch. iPhone 5 comes with the new Apple EarPods™ featuring a breakthrough design for a more natural fit and increased durability, and an incredible acoustic quality typically reserved for higher-end earphones.

iPhone 5 comes with iOS 6, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system with over 200 new user features including: an all new Maps app with Apple-designed cartography, turn-by-turn navigation and an amazing new Flyover™ view; Facebook integration for Contacts and Calendar, with the ability to post directly from Notification Center; Passbook, the simplest way to get all your passes in one place; new Siri features, including support for more languages, easy access to sports scores, restaurant recommendations and movie listings;***** Siri and Facebook-enabled apps like Photos, Safari® and Maps; and Shared Photo Streams via iCloud®.

10 Famous Software Disasters

We all know software bugs can be annoying, but faulty software can also be expensive, embarrassing, destructive and deadly.  Following are 10 famous software “disasters” in chronological order:

​1.  Mariner Bugs Out (1962)

​Cost: $18.5 million

​Disaster: The Mariner 1 rocket with a space probe headed for Venus diverted from its intended flight path shortly after launch.  Mission Control destroyed the rocket 293 seconds after liftoff.

​Cause: A programmer incorrectly transcribed a handwritten formula into computer code, missing a single superscript bar.  Without the smoothing function indicated by the bar, the software treated normal variations of velocity as if they were serious, causing faulty corrections that sent the rocket off course.

2.  Hartford Coliseum Collapse (1978)

​Cost: $70 million, plus another $20 million damage to the local economy

​Disaster: Just hours after thousands of fans had left the Hartford Coliseum, the steel-latticed roof collapsed under the weight of wet snow.

​Cause: The programmer of the CAD software used to design the coliseum incorrectly assumed the steel roof supports would only face pure compression.  But when one of the supports unexpectedly buckled from the snow, it set off a chain reaction that brought down the other roof sections like dominoes.



3.  CIA Gives the Soviets Gas (1982)

Cost: Millions of dollars, significant damage to Soviet economy

Disaster: Control software went haywire and produced intense pressure in the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline, resulting in the largest man-made non-nuclear explosion in Earth’s history.

​Cause: CIA operatives allegedly planted a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased by the Soviets to control their gas pipelines.  The purchase was part of a strategic Soviet plan to steal or covertly obtain sensitive U.S. technology.  When the CIA discovered the purchase, they sabotaged the software so that it would pass Soviet inspection but fail in operation.



4.  World War III… Almost (1983)

Cost: Nearly all of humanity

​Disaster: The Soviet early warning system falsely indicated the United States had launched five ballistic missiles.  Fortunately the Soviet duty officer had a “funny feeling in my gut” and reasoned if the U.S. was really attacking they would launch more than five missiles, so he reported the apparent attack as a false alarm.

​Cause: A bug in the Soviet software failed to filter out false missile detections caused by sunlight reflecting off cloud-tops.



5.  Medical Machine Kills (1985)

​Cost: Three people dead, three people critically injured

​Disaster: Canada’s Therac-25 radiation therapy machine malfunctioned and delivered lethal radiation doses to patients.

​Cause: Because of a subtle bug called a race condition, a technician could accidentally configure Therac-25 so the electron beam would fire in high-power mode without the proper patient shielding.



6.  Wall Street Crash (1987)

​Cost: $500 billion in one day

​Disaster: On “Black Monday” (October 19, 1987), the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 508 points, losing 22.6% of its total value. The S&P 500 dropped 20.4%.  This was the greatest loss Wall Street ever suffered in a single day.

​Cause: A long bull market was halted by a rash of SEC investigations of insider trading and by other market forces.  As investors fled stocks in a mass exodus, computer trading programs generated a flood of sell orders, overwhelming the market, crashing systems and leaving investors effectively blind.



7.  AT&T Lines Go Dead (1990)

​Cost: 75 million phone calls missed, 200 thousand airline reservations lost

​Disaster: A single switch at one of AT&T’s 114 switching centers suffered a minor mechanical problem and shut down the center.  When the center came back up, it sent a message to other switching centers, which in turn caused them to shut down and brought down the entire AT&T network for 9 hours.

​Cause: A single line of buggy code in a complex software upgrade implemented to speed up calling caused a ripple effect that shut down the network.





8.  Patriot Fails Soldiers (1991)

Cost: 28 soldiers dead, 100 injured

​Disaster: During the first Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile system in Saudi Arabia failed to intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The missile destroyed an American Army barracks.

​Cause: A software rounding error incorrectly calculated the time, causing the Patriot system to ignore the incoming Scud missile.

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9.  Pentium Fails Long Division (1993)

​Cost: $475 million, corporate credibility

​Disaster: Intel’s highly-promoted Pentium chip occasionally made mistakes when dividing floating-point numbers within a specific range. For example, dividing 4195835.0/3145727.0 yielded 1.33374 instead of 1.33382, an error of 0.006%.  Although the bug affected few users, it become a public relations nightmare.  With an estimated 5 million defective chips in circulation, Intel offered to replace Pentium chips only for consumers who could prove they needed high accuracy.  Eventually Intel replaced the chips for anyone who complained.

​Cause: The divider in the Pentium floating point unit had a flawed division table, missing about five of a thousand entries and resulting in these rounding errors.





10.  Ariane Rocket Goes Boom (1996)

​Cost: $500 million

​Disaster: Ariane 5, Europe’s newest unmanned rocket, was intentionally destroyed seconds after launch on its maiden flight.  Also destroyed was its cargo of four scientific satellites to study how the Earth’s magnetic field interacts with solar winds.

​Cause: Shutdown occurred when the guidance computer tried to convert the sideways rocket velocity from 64-bits to a 16-bit format.  The number was too big, and an overflow error resulted.  When the guidance system shut down, control passed to an identical redundant unit, which also failed because it was running the same algorithm