By Nigil Lee, News Correspondent
Every year, Apple hosts major events during which it releases new products and usually a new version of iOS to go along with them. This year, Apple showed off the iPhone 5S and 5C which the company hopes will allow it to maintain its dominant market share among mobile phone manufactures, in addition to the iOS 7.
The new OS brings with it new features such as a control center to allow users quick access to settings that they find important, along with a revamped notification center.
One of the features that Apple has been advertising the most is the new look of the operating system. The new system utilizes a style based on sleek 3D icons, coupled with fancy animations, rather than the previous skeuomorphic style, in which apps were designed to look like whatever they were representing. Where the old newsstand app was supposed to resemble a pine bookshelf, Apple has ditched that in favor of simple 2D designs – the newsstand is now colorful block representations of magazines.
Ever since Tim Cook succeeded Steve Jobs a year ago, Apple has been faced with increasing claims that they are running out of new ideas and falling behind competition from Microsoft and Samsung. Many of the “new” features that Apple brought to users with iOS 7, such as notification and control centers, have been built into Android phones for over a year.
“My friends on Android have had a dashboard for their settings for a few years, so it doesn’t seem like that much of an improvement,” sophomore mechanical engineering major Elliot Palestine said.
Prices of Apple’s stock have dropped from a high $705.07 in September of last year to a current price of around $486, due in part to a lack of confidence from investors in the company’s ability to produce products that interest their target consumers. A large amount of Apple’s revenue comes from mobile development and investors fear that Apple would not fare well should one of their products fail to attract new consumers or continue to entice current ones.
According to mobile analytics site Mixpanel, around 72 percent of people have adopted iOS 7 as of Oct. 7. Northeastern sophomore pharmacy major Susannah Franco is one of the 28 percent who haven’t switched. She says that though she’s excited about new features such as the dashboard and being able to make events directly from text messages, she hasn’t found the new features to be enough of an incentive to go through the process of making space on her phone to install the new operating system.
Also included in the new iOS is the free iWork suite, which will allow users the ability to work directly off of their devices.
