How Bad Reporting Is Ruining The Washington Post →
John Gruber dissects The Washington Post’s dumb article claiming that Siri, specifically, is dramatically increasing data usage based on a study that only says:
iPhone 4S users are the “hungriest” data consumers, demanding twice as much data as iPhone 4 users and three times as much as iPhone 3G users.
Granted, this is an old argument by now, but most reports connecting high 4S data usage to presumed Siri usage missed what I thought was an obvious point: What else, besides Siri, is different about the iPhone 4S, especially if it might also explain the data-usage difference between the 3G and 4? (And, presumably, the 3GS?)
The camera, of course. Every iPhone after the 3G has shipped with a higher-resolution camera than its predecessor. People capture and share a lot of photos on their iPhones, so a very likely culprit for higher data usage, controlling for OS version and tethering abilities, is that the photos are simply much larger with each new iPhone.