It's absolutely stunning what smartphones can do these days and Apple makes an excellent product. It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models "boring".
The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I'll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.
She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.
You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter. Her only awareness of features is when she accidentally enables one and doesn't know how to get back.
You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn't notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn't know they even exist.
All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.
You might assume my girlfriend is perhaps lowly educated or just not tech savvy. Wrong, she's highly educated, even works in IT, although not in an engineering role. It's not that she's unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn't care.
It's becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies. Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.
I think this is also why Apple put many Pro features into the regular model. Most people don't buy the pro and they're desperate for selling points in the regular model.
If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.
I don't know that I completely agree. To some degree, sure — most folks probably don't notice the year-to-year updates in e.g. computing power.
But my 70yo mother, who is pretty far from being technologically savvy, uses continuity every day to copy one-time-use codes from her phone to her computer, even though she'd have no idea what the term "continuity" means in this context. She notices that it's easier to snap better pictures in more conditions than it was a few years back (and that pictures she receives are better looking on average, too). She uses 1Password with FaceID, which I set up for her, because it's so easy to just look at your phone to unlock that there's very little in the way of enabling and using that, and she doesn't need to write down passwords anymore.
I think some of the magic of the Apple ecosystem is that you don't have to know about these things in order to use them. Someone shows you how to do something (Apple could certainly improve on the organic discoverability of many of these features! Some are impossible to find without looking), and then it often just works. And these things do keep getting closer to that ideal over time, with each generation. When I first started using continuity — long before my mother did — it definitely did not work all the time, and I persisted because I'm a techie early adopter. Eventually, though, it reached a state where once folks learn about it, they can just use it.
I'm also not sure about the 3-4 year number, at least from personal experience, fwiw. We pass down phones in my family, and it easily takes 5-6 generations for them to reach the end of that chain and be in use for a year or two before they're switched out for the next model. Battery has never been the reason someone in that chain switched phones.
Nearly all of the things you describe there aside from the camera are software/services based and don’t require improved hardware year-on-year at all. This is a problem for a company that makes its money selling expensive hardware.
Even the camera quality could be improved with post-processing like upscaling and color correction, which have somewhat recently become much better.
Although my understanding is that the new cameras are incredible, so while you could get a "decent" photo on an old phone, unlike the other features it would be noticeably worse than the new phone.
It’s not the cameras that are bad. In fact, I sold my Canon with a 24-70mm f2.8 L because the iPhone photos were great!
The HUGE L by Apple is their shitty Photo App. It’s great if you have under 1Gb of photos, but over 100Gb - forget it - it is fucking. God. Aweful. PAINFUL!
And then they have the nerve of once in a while having a non-compatible Photo database format and so your WHOLE photo collection has to be converted… over 4 days wtf!
I specifically learned Rust so I could make a better Photo app. Sadly, time has shelved that project like many others, but man I would like be for someone to solve the iPhone -> Laptop photo management problem.
… and no, cloud backups? Not for > 400Gb thanks. All it takes is for Apple to kill your account and then ALL your family photos are gone. F that.
I use PhotoSync to sync all photos to MiniO s3 docker container on my desktop pc. The only issue is the initial upload that I slowly did over a week (only synced when charging etc). Works quite well as a iCloud replacement for photos. I use syncthings for anything else like my keepassxc files.
Yeah, I use PhotoSync to sync back to FileRun. FileRun places all files in a basic share, which I access by smb on-prem and via FileRun's webdav server elsewhere. When I'm at home, transferring over LAN direct to storage was the fastest option for offloading volleyball videos, which I can then promptly share with others without waiting for upload to a service like iCloud or OneDrive.
Why would Apple delete your photos, and why would your solution for storing them be more robust than Apple’s?
I rarely relate to issues people paint about Apple products. The Photos app is great, and moving stuff around between my MacBook and iPhone is seamless.
You’ve never heard of people getting locked out of their accounts? Or companies shutting down services? Apple is no different.
How many hundreds of gigs is your Apple Photo library? And have you used it long enough that you’ve had to bare the pain of an Apple Photo database upgrade?
> Even the camera quality could be improved with post-processing like upscaling and color correction, which have somewhat recently become much better.
Sorry, but this is the one feature I hate (not being able to turn off) on today's phones. All the wannabe HDR, noise reduction, upscaling, color corrections that make the pictures look plasticky and overly colorful and just plain kitsch when compared to the same scene taken with a 10-15yo pocket camera.
Agree. But the company also pays a large chunk of its services R&D and operations by bundling it with the hardware and have people pay upfront for it.
New hardware would not be needed for most of it, but then Apple would have to make every iOS user a fixed yearly fee for a generic package of "some services at our disclosure". And that's quite impossible to achieve and stay competitive...
Here’s the rub though: convincing customers to pay for something they used to think they got as part of the hardware package isn’t going to be easy.
People love the seamless integration of hardware, software, and services that Apple provides, but introducing a mandatory yearly fee would erode that goodwill pretty much instantly.
I think you hovered over something significant: yes, most of the "new features" of the new phones are software features … but the line between "what is software and what is hardware" may not be crystal clear to a lot of the population.
Imagine the effect of a TV spot touting a new OS feature on the new iPhone. Do I need the new phone to get that feature? As soon as you've asked the question, you're at the doorstep of "I wasn't thinking about it, but I will need to replace the battery soon ($$) and it's been getting slower …"
You may learn the feature is available in an OS update, but it's inconsequential: you've already rolled the idea of a new phone around and remember how nice it is to start fresh. This one may not get you, but next year's definitely will.
Some confusion around hardware -vs- software is key to draw people in.
> Imagine the effect of a TV spot touting a new OS feature on the new iPhone. Do I need the new phone to get that feature? As soon as you've asked the question, you're at the doorstep of "I wasn't thinking about it, but I will need to replace the battery soon ($$) and it's been getting slower …"
I’d say this works exactly once - Apple will get a one time hit out of customers upgrading to an AI enabled phone, which will have a SOC capable of running AI (customers don’t need to know what a SOC is).
For anything beyond that, the media will likely pick up that it’s not strictly necessary and you’ll already have pocketed a lot of the benefit from having your first AI integrated phone.
I've nursed my wife's SE along until this past week when we bought a used 13 Mini. She has small hands ( not exceptionally small, just small ) and the larger sizes just weren't appealing to her. I've replaced screens, even have a battery for it ready, but the lightning connector finally wearing out and impending End of Support made her upgrade.
You will get held back by software updates in ios then apps long before the device is useless. I have a few perfectly good iphones in a drawer like this. Can’t use any apps anymore.
Yep, Apple has made a lot of marketing around the concept of updates and all that jazz but the reality is that the primary beneficiary are them.
Even when you are potentially interested by features update there is always a weighting to be made about slowdowns or things that change that you wish didn't.
In the end I don't think updates should be much of a thing, apart from security updates. You should buy a device with a set of capabilities and it should stay mostly the same all its life.
And then we should make laws about the minimum amount of time a device has to be supported with its original software.
The problem with computer technology is that we always go with updates, just because we could even though we need to ask if we should. In some ways it's a problem the internet created, the expectation of always being connected to bring in new stuff.
I had no idea this was possible, but yeah, going to “battery health” in my Settings shows battery health is degraded, and provides a link to schedule a replacement.
Battery replacements are priced <100 CAD for for all supported Apple phones. In my opinion, it's a pretty good option given the support period these devices enjoy now.
I had two apple US$49 battery replacements both of my iPhone 8 phones before my wife and I jumped to a 14 pro max.
I preferred touchid over faceid. Sure, there was always the SE option, but if I was buying a newer phone then it was going to be new one, damn it.
What pushed the needle in the upgrade vs repair decision for me was wear concerns on the nand flash. I've encountered plenty of stories of flash failures after the 4th, 3rd or even 2nd battery replacement. I never found a way to get a meaningful health check for iphone flash lifetime but I really didn't want to find out the hard way.
That was in addition to 5G vs LTE. LTE in our area is a quagmire.
I went 8 -> 13 mini recently and I strongly preferred Touch ID also. It doesn’t require light, the right angle, or a button press to confirm the intentionality of actions like a purchase.
But yeah overall it’s bonkers how similar the two devices are for purportedly between four generations apart.
Main issue for me in bed is failure to identify face smooshed into pillow. Raise head and unlock fine, even in full dark. Still requires neck muscle actuation that wasn't required with touch id.
Depending on where you sit on the conscience/security sliding scale you might want to considering turning off “Require attention”. That solves 90% of glasses/sunglasses related issues.
I do it all the time, fwiw, but my girlfriend cannot get it to work reliably. So your mileage might vary, but in my experience ambient light does not matter.
No, but for me it often fails when outside in bright sunlight, especially if the sun is low in the sky, as it often is in my latitude. Perhaps it might work better if I try training it on my squinting face.
Sort of the same experience in some specific lighting conditions.
What I found out though is that it's because in such lighting conditions I don't blink, compounded by the fact that if it doesn't unlock I unconsciously keep on not blinking to... see it hopefully unlock! So when this happens I consciously blink and it unlocks immediately, which is kind of cognitively dissonant.
Unknown if that would apply to your situation, YMMV but I thought I'd throw this one out.
There's also a kind of annoying recurring situation where I want to look at stuff on the lock screen but don't want to actually unlock...
I do wish they'd have reintroduced Touch ID in the camera control button sensor (or just in the power button, as for the iPad Air) but I guess cases would cause a problem.
To me the best iPhone was the iPhone 7, with TouchID but no physical button. If I wanted, there was a completely silent mode that didn't have that "clunk" when you press that button.
I preferred the physical button. I hate the feel of "fake" clicks.
I used to think I wanted FaceID over TouchID, because TouchID would regularly fail to recognise my thumb if I'd recently washed my hands, or was a little dehydrated. Anything that affected my skin tension.
In practice, FaceID fails way more often, and also "resets" (the phone decides it wants a passcode before it'll trust my face again) multiple times a day. TouchID almost never did that.
You can disable "Require Attention for Face ID" under Settings > Face ID & Passcode. That makes Face ID far more reliable and consistent in my experience (assuming you're okay with the reduced security tradeoff).
If you have an Apple Watch, you can also configure it to unlock your phone automatically when an obstruction prevents Face ID from recognizing your face.
I'd never go back to Touch ID. Face ID works in the dark, at pretty much any angle, and requires zero interaction.
> You can disable "Require Attention for Face ID" under Settings > Face ID & Passcode. That makes Face ID far more reliable and consistent in my experience (assuming you're okay with the reduced security tradeoff).
I have had it in this mode for years. It's still very fragile and/or skittish regarding making me use my passcode. Intuitively, it feels like about 10-15% of logins require the code rather than my face.
> If you have an Apple Watch, you can also configure it to unlock your phone automatically when an obstruction prevents Face ID from recognizing your face.
That's a very expensive solution.
> Face ID works in the dark, at pretty much any angle, and requires zero interaction.
Yeah, my experience is very similar. Unlike the other replier I don't think there was much gained with FaceID in the end, especially with that stupid notch would made their remove useful information. Also considering the added cost and the even worse repairability than TouchID it's not a very good deal for the consumer.
Especially since it makes many operations a 2-step process when it was much smoother before; like for example Apple Pay where you find yourself looking at your phone like an idiot instead of doing it all in a single movement.
When my girlfriend saw the new camera button, she thought Touch ID had been added to the new iPhone, just like on her iPad mini. She got super excited for a moment, and I felt bad having to tell her that the new button doesn’t have Touch ID.
I feel the same way. If there’s one feature I miss, it’s toichid.
On the other hand, my parents, who are older, find Face ID to be a lifesaver since their fingerprints have mostly worn out.
I switched to Samsung partly because of the lack of Touch ID. Face ID was annoying, it didn't work well with masks (even with the special option turned on), it didn't work well in the morning when I'm lying in bed, it didn't work well when I was carrying my son in a carrier because the angle was wrong.
My memories of Android phones are bad enough that I can’t imagine actually switching back over this feature — there’s just way too much else I appreciate about the Apple ecosystem. But respect to you!
I'd say it's significantly better... I did a brief stint with android a long time ago but didn't like it, but now I've been using it for 3 yearsish and I actually get annoyed when I use my wife's iphone. There's a lot to like from F-Droid, the fact that the quick settings menu is better (just a recent example, you long press on the hotspot button you get sent to the settings showing you the hotspot password),...
Yeah, I think the hardware has improved so much that now the more complexe software can now be much more useful.
This is what Apple has missed in my opinion; the iPhone is no longer a no-nonsense, simple as it gets, with a strict selection of features (both hardware and software) to meet a palatable price point, device that it once was.
But then in comparaison to modern Android it feels like at the same time it is too complicated but also missing a lot of options/features/freedom.
Apple is working hard to add all kinds of "missing" features and complexity all over the place, all while raising the price of the device as much as possible. But in the end, what kind of client will be satisfied with this approach but noy with an Android?
Not a whole lot I believe.
I’m not saying you’re making the wrong move, but if you’re willing to go with a carrier like ATT, you can get $1000 trade-in value for that iPhone 13 Pro towards a new iPhone 16 Pro. You can even just buy an unlocked iPhone 12 off of eBay (for about $250) and get the same $1000 trade-in credit for you son. There are some caveats. For example, the credits are paid out evenly over 24 months, but if you plan to keep it for 2 years, you basically get a $250 iPhone 16 Pro.
Again, it might not be the right decision for you, but I thought you might like to be aware of the option.
I've tended to buy iPhones that are 2 or 3 generations old from eBay and Swappa for my family and use Mint or Tello for cheap cellular service. Our costs might be $350 for a phone and $100 - $150 per year for service.
We do get them a nice new phone when they graduate high school.
I consider that state of the art and brand new. I just inherited an iPhone XS and the battery is at 91%. I figure I can go at least another 3 years. For reference I was using a Oneplus 3T which is still going strong.
I have that same phone and have been using it now for six years, and according to the battery health in the settings, the battery is still in good shape, there’s no notice of it being degraded.
I used the same OnePlus 3T that I bought used, until it was stolen. Would have probably considered a new OnePlus but all their models were too big and expensive at the time, so went Pixel 7 near the end of the cycle. Even though I've been a mac user for about 12 years, iPhones have never made it into the realm of consideration.
It is indeed the most comfortable of the phones in the last decade perhaps. I am still rocking it. Recently my battery died and they replaced it but that battery too wouldn’t charge for hours and then would charge by a trickle. They said they’d just replace my phone so now I have a brand new XS max ready for another 5 years.
I do at least one battery replacement on all my iphones. It extends the life by years IMO. I'm currently coming up on 5 years with my current phone and it's still on the first battery. Seems iPhone battery tech has gotten better.
Same same, 12 mini here (with small battery), still going strong, but I have to say, I have chargers everywhere and when traveling I grab one of my Makita batteries with the USB cap which can charge it 6-7 times (5 Ah). So honestly I wouldn't know how long the battery actually lasts, I suspect less than a full day, or just about a day.
Battery is at 78%, as Apple says: Degraded considerably...
I hope to get it a new bat when I goes to my son in a few years. Really hope the new SE models are the mini form factor...
It has, they don't intentionally ruin your battery when you plug it in at night now at least.
It's pretty common knowledge that most (not all) batteries shouldn't be charged past 80%. Which isn't really true either, but it has to do with voltage going up when the battery gets hot, meaning overvolting your battery and causing bad things to happen.
I'm disappointed in my Fairphone 4 not having an option to limit charge to 80%, though the battery is very replaceable.
I pay very little attention to features on phones, especially things like improved cameras, but I finally upgraded my iPhone X to an iPhone 15 (one of my kids needed a phone). I've noticed that I've been able to take some stunning pictures out of planes when flying, as well as low-light photos.
I agree that even when they aren't explicitly highlighted, they do make a substantial difference, especially when comparing models over a span of a few years.
your grandma is certainly a small minority. I am a software developer and i barely know or care about most features on my ios phone. If my apps are not slow and require me to update and my battery is good, i have no reason to get a new iphone. Apple knows it since they require their apps to be updated every year so that it won't be supported on older devices.
By design, 1Password always makes you re-authenticate every time you lose focus on the app. But Face ID (or Touch ID) makes reauthenticating a lot less painful.
Setting FaceId is the first step, but you can also decide how often you have to reenter your password for reauthentication, or just so you don’t forget it. Directly beneath the face-id option.
Not exactly - you can lose focus without a problem
Recently 1Password has change on IOS (and I assume Android) to ask every two weeks for the password even if you use FaceId/TouchId - it says so on the app. This is probably what the poster was complaining about - I agree it is a nuisance.
For macOs and Windows it asks for the password every time the screen saver or sleep happens.
My grandma is 80-ish old and she watches youtube, tiktok, reads “google”, does banking, e-shopping (a lot), messengers, puzzles. All that on a serious level.
When she visits friends and tells stories, they always lament that they refused to learn “these computers”. She’s around 6 years into her tablet which I brought her spontaneously. She collected questions (we write everything down as a rule) and I had to find the way to manage the learning complexity at each visit.
Don’t look at age, just go and buy it for them. With a little help they’ll figure it out just fine.
That's so cool! I had no idea about universal copy/paste and I struggle a lot with one time codes across devices since I don't have universal iMessage set up for privacy reasons. I usually just send them to myself via telegram for simplicity.
Significantly less secure at that. I imagine GP has iMessage disabled on their computer because other people use their computer, and they don't want iMessages/SMS going anywhere other than their phone.
Well, Telegram is by definition not as a secure as iMessage. Telegram messages are by default not encrypted on the server. Even when it is encrypted on the server, telegram has the keys and can decrypt it.
Telegram isn't as private as iMessage, but that doesn't mean it's not as secure. Security-wise, exploiting iMessage is easier than exploiting telegram, since iMessages has some special privileged access. Security doesn't mean privacy.
This is true (one is talking about zero-click zero days, the other is talking about “privacy,” not sure if they mean privacy against Facebook or privacy against other users of their device).
But the comment that kicked off the thread was the one about privacy.
I think they mostly targeted font/image/url parsing which are used across the OS. iMessage was somewhat privileged at some point in the back but was compartmentalized later and media processing was the only escape, but that’s out of process now too I believe.
This kind of proves the point? Presumably your mother didn't buy the latest phone for "continuity" or camera improvements. The features and additional hardware improvements might be noticeable after being used, but are they driving sales to people who aren't tech enthusiasts?
> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.
Battery replacement costs at Apple are $69-99 and offered all the way back to the iPhone SE 1st Generation. That's the all-in cost where you bring it in, they open it up, swap it out, and give your phone back to you.
An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.
Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years hardly seems like it's going to nuke their business from orbit.
My thing is the battery timeline matches pretty closely to when I’m just ready for something new. I go bare, no case, so by 3-4 years my screen is scratched and scuffed enough to just do full replacement. I usually notice the speed leap too and how certain apps were severely unoptimized for my older device. So that’s nice too. But it’s not ever felt like a “upgrade” in a very long time because I don’t have any new features unlocked (not any that I use), so I’m my mind it’s a “replacement”.
The one consumable much harder to replace is the oleophobic coating. There are drops you can buy and apply, they seem to work alright, but don't last nearly as long as the factory coating.
By year two, the screen just gets grubbier and grubbier. By year three its just plan nasty.
If you get AppleCare+ the screen replacement is $29. I usually get it replaced right before I can hand it off to my family. It's not as good a deal obviously if you don't plan on getting AppleCare+ anyways.
I buy them in packs of 3-5 on ebay for $5-10. (no need to buy the really expensive brands) They are quick to replace, have a nice oleophobic coating on them, and can be replaced as frequently as desired.
I’ve gone back to no case since the Ceramic Shield and it’s been great. Excited for the improvements in the next model. I hate cases and will no go back.
I tried that for a while, but I find my iPhone 13 Pro Max to be easier to operate with one hand when it has a case. The iPhone is a bit too slippery for me without it.
I used to hate the cases until I recently got one that can hold my ID and credit cards. This allowed me to retire my wallet which was very much worth it. Do you still use a wallet?
That sounds good and convenient until you loose or a thief robs you of your phone and wallet at the same time in one go. I need to use a wallet because I live in a cash first country but even of otherwise I'd still carry a wallet because I don't want a single point of failure. Like what else am I gonna do with an now empty pocket if I give up on the wallet?
The other pocket usually has my car keys. For theft, I in fact rarely use my phone to pay but usually my watch. I can do pretty much anything with the watch except CarPlay and taking photos. It has its own cel connection as well.
Aside from what the sibling says regarding theft, I still use a wallet and what I hate most about the combined wallet + phone combo is the thickness of it.
My iPhone barely fits in my jeans pocket as is. Piling 3-4 credit cards and some cash on top of that is way too much.
Not surprising because only the edges of the back glass are glued for iPhone 15 so most of the surface is just floating there without support. On prior generations the entire panel is glued.
Not sure what the justification for the change would be, if anything it does make changing the back glass much faster as there is no need to scrape or laser blast the entire surface to remove all the adhesive. It would be interesting to see if this is also the case for the 16th gen.
I’ve had the 15 Pro since launch day, and it is incredibly durable. No case, no screen protector. The screen is slightly scratched around the edges, there are a couple ~1mm^2 dings in the titanium, but aside from that, no problems. I’ve dropped it probably a hundred times, including probably a dozen or two on concrete or tile. The titanium (and whatever they’re doing with screens these days) really makes a difference.
My phone has a couple (literal 2) scratches slightly under the notch bubble, that I am fairly certain were caused by laying the phone face-first on a desk that had some kind of dirt on it, and removing the phone by sliding it off the desk (rubbing the dirt against the screen, causing the scratches). The rest of the main screen surface is pretty much scratch-free, and only the corners and edges have notable scratches (from inserting and removing the phone from my pocket - the corners pretty much always catch on the metal rivets on my jeans). I don’t keep anything in the same pocket as my phone though.
The reason screens scratch more now than in the past is the tradeoff between shatter resistance and scratch resistance. Generally speaking, it’s very hard to make glass that is both resistant to scratching and shattering at the same time - you can trade off one for the other, but you can’t have both. (Of course as material science progresses the baseline improves - I’m talking about a given point in time at a given price point). In general, it’s much easier to live with light scratches in a screen than with a shattered screen, so the majority of mid-to-high-end phones make the trade off to favour shatter resistance over scratch resistance.
Next time you’re on public transit, or in line at a restaurant, or somewhere else people frequently use phones, take note of how many have cracked screens. Compare that to a decade+ ago where it was fairly common (for me at least) to see broken phone screens. Obviously anecdotal, and could be due to a number of compounding factors, but I very rarely see broken phone screens these days.
> Next time you’re on public transit, or in line at a restaurant, or somewhere else people frequently use phones, take note of how many have cracked screens
Cool anecdotal evidence, it does actually seem to be correct based on my experiences as well.
Though imo a screen protector is very little price (in terms of losing out on stuff, not monetary wise) to pay to have that scratched instead of the screen.
I think it depends a lot on how you handle your phone. I used to have screen protectors, which would always end up scratched, coming off, etc. It was a total PITA to replace them. The last one I had was on my iPhone 7. Took it off for the last 4 years of use I've got out of that phone. The screen is still like new. For mew new phone, I didn't bother with a screen protector. It's a year and a half old now, and no scratch to report.
Weird. I get no scratches either. I do try and keep my keeps in an opposite pocket, but not always and this year as my place has been under construction, the phone has shared the pocket with all sorts of metal screws, bolts, junk, etc. still nothing.
Obviously anecdotal but yeah, this is by far the most durable phone I’ve owned. My 11 was the first I went caseless with, and it got pretty beat up in the first year. My 13 Pro was better, but still worse for wear after a year. The 15 Pro is probably in similar shape compared to the 11 after 3-4 months, and I have not been careful at all with this phone whereas with the 11 I most certainly was.
A few years ago I cracked my iPhone7+ screen in several places (dangerous to use any swipe features) but I wanted to wait the few months until the next iPhone revision so I just put a screen protector on it and honestly, it was quite usable. I even skipped the next refresh because you could hardly tell it was cracked with the screen protector and using the phone through that - it felt almost new.
Interestingly i felt like my last replacement was actually a downgrade.
Had the X (10) for years and it was great and compact but the face-id broke, upgraded to the 13 (because i didn't need anything in the 14/15) and now i have a phone that's too bulky, and not as comfortable to hold.
The X was simply thinner, more rounded and a way better experience, also i feel almost no difference doing day to day stuff.
I too prefer the more rounded exteriors. It feels better in the hand. I think it's just a cyclical fashion choice, was an adjustment period when it was iPhone 3 (rounded) to iPhone 4 (squared) too and it more noticeable when not cased.
It's interesting that you perceive the X to have been thinner. It's actually very slightly thicker (by 0.05mm) than the 13. The 13 is longer (by 3.1mm) and wider (by 0.6mm) though.
Same and totally agree with the timeline. This is the first time I have gone 3 years though and the screen hasn’t cracked, the back hasn’t cracked, the battery life is decent. These features the last 3 years haven’t sold me. I’m not spending over 1k, at least on launch day… for the first time in a very long time
Agreed. Apple phones are quite repairable (just not DIY-able), no one is dropping 1000 dollars on a new phone because their current one has a cracked back glass.
Watching their live feed, one of Apple's selling points on such an expensive phone is that it will last a long time and have a higher re-sale value than other phones. It's not a case of planned obsolescence.
There are absolutely cases where they have artificially gated features to new devices, even when the hardware is capable (I'm thinking around Handoff/Continuity, etc.). Where the initial reaction is "maybe it's a new BT chip or ..." but it can be shown that the functionality is perfect when some trickery is done to fool the OS its running on more modern hardware.
This is a consequence of Apple’s deeply ingrained (and hugely successful) product design culture.
When you’re trying to develop a vertically integrated feature across a synchronized release requiring potentially new silicon, a new device, new OS frameworks, new app code… you have to express your requirements precisely. Either the M1 is being designed to support three displays or it’s being designed to support two. Not “as much display support as we can squeeze in where performance is still OK end-to-end”. By the time you know if end-to-end looks good for all the features you built up depending on lower layers in the stack, it’s too late.
You’re also likely not to trust “hey, seems like our tolerances were excessive and it works great on older hardware”. And building up that trust is time-consuming and difficult, so they rarely go back to do it without a strong market justification. Stage Manager being the most recent—somewhat odd—example.
They originally claimed it was going to be supported only on the most recent SoC’s, then backtracked.
Which is weird because who really cared about stage manager? I guess they decided the media kerfuffle was making owners of unsupported recent hardware feel put down.
There was also that instance where Siri was gated from the iPhone 4. It was later shown that it was possible to install the Siri interface on the iPhone 4 through a Jailbreak - the only thing that prevented full functionality was a device serial number embedded in the request to the Siri server.
There are cases, but credit where its due, I think they are generally very generous in bringing new features to older devices, compared to plenty other companies that basically forget about they ever released another device the moment a new one drops.
E.g. the apple watches really “inherited” a good chunk of all the new features to the point that there are several versions that are basically identical. Like, I have the 6, and besides the on-screen keyboard (for which I guess the screen was too small based on their testings) and temperature-sensor reliant features, it does almost everything the new 10 will be able to do.
Eh, sometimes. Other times, a newer piece of internal hardware has no new “feature” but just works better and has fewer failures. This is particularly true with every kind of wireless networking, including Bluetooth. It may work, but not have hit the quality bar.
Almost anything can kinda work on older devices. But lots of little details make the difference between a good experience and a poor one. Which simd instructions did it support. What’s the battery impact on that BT chipset. Did the ANE support NN layer style X?
Apple has a great track record of brining new features to old hardware. I don’t see example here or elsewhere that I think were purely greed and not quality driven.
Unless I'm mistaken, stage manager requires running 5 apps simultaneously when iPads were previously limited to 1 or 2? That includes 5 render pipelines (way more pixels to push than exist on the physical display). There would be hardware load on pretty much every key piece of hardware (GPU, CPU, memory, caches, disk), and by a non trivial factor.
Same reason. Rendering more apps at full screen in real time takes a ton of GPU. Adds ~5x the pixels, and 5x screen scale transforms+effect. All the optimizations for “that’s hidden”/“that’s background” go out the door.
Apple also has to develop technology at their own pace. I used to get an iPhone every year. Eventually it stopped making sense and I just now had to check to see which one I had .(14 Pro)I remember noticing a big difference when I bought this iPhone with the camera.
I know whenever I upgrade it will always be to a current state of Apple”s art because of these incremental consistent upgrades.
I”m very tempted to buy a new one. The last time I waited till it broke to upgrade.
Having replaced the screen, battery and home button on my 1st gen iPhone SE myself I can confidently say that Apple do not make these easy to repair yourself, and arguably make it more difficult to drive business for their own repair service. Lots of tiny screws requiring particular tools of different lengths that can't be mixed up, lest you permanently damage the phone. Glue that needs to be carefully removed or you risk dangerously damaging the battery. Just look at their repairability scores on iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit... .
Repairability was bad but has gone up a lot, they did a big internals redesign for iPhone 15 to make it easier to swap batteries and replace screens. Still not something they want user serviceable, I imagine mostly because it creates headaches for everyone involved. Most people struggle fixing big things, let alone sub-mm precision things. But this helps the 3rd party repair shops a lot.
And at the time they were comparable to a flashlight in terms of complexity, not running AAA games with raytracing and a camera pipeline of untold complexity. It’s almost like having anything this complex working requires insane engineering and miniaturization, this is not due to “planned obsolescence”, especially if you take a look at the second hand market. No other brand has even remotely similar resell value.
Assuming those prices are correct and the procedure is that convenient, it doesn't practically exist if most people aren't aware of it. From my casual observations most people suffer with bad batteries until buying a new model.
At what point are people responsible for their own actions or ignorance? Apple hardly makes the battery replacement option a secret, and there are plenty of 3rd party retailers that advertise them too. Anyone who bought a new iPhone because they didn't realize they could get the battery replaced has failed to do even the most cursory research into what options are out there for solving their problem. It would be one thing if we were talking the 1st generation iPhone days, when the "battery replacement" option was the usually "out of warranty" device replacement that was effectively Apple's entire repair process for the phone at the time. Then your "battery replacement" costs were ~50% of the cost of a new phone, and that definitely gets into the "buy a new phone instead of replacing the battery" territory. But the ~$100 battery replacement option has been around since at least 2010[1], now 14 years later there's no excuse for not being aware, or becoming aware when you need it.
My SE battery will cost $80 to replace, but since I only paid $120 for the phone it's not a good deal. I'll just wait a bit and get another used SE for $120 when the battery life gets too annoying. I doubt that many other customers are ignorant or irresponsible.
You can google it, go to the website, go to any of their stores or authorized dealers, or click the link the phone gives you in the battery health view.
Short of apple beating down your door, what more do you expect
It's a psychological game. People are primed to want new things, and more investment into something old is hard to justify even if it's financially right. Also OS's lose supprt, softwares bloat, and bundled offers from carriers are toward replacement. You'd have to be really disciplined to not succumb to upgrade pressure when you go into an Apple Store of all places where the entire setup is to generate sales.
An Apple Store is one of the least sales oriented retail environments. You can go in and play with stuff for hours, chat with people who work there who can’t even make sales, and drop things off for them to repair. They don’t even have cash registers in most of them.
Most of the time I go into an Apple Store I don’t buy anything, and I’ve never gone in and bought something that I didn’t plan on buying before I arrived.
Of course they gross more money than a jewelry store. That sounds impressive, but really isn't if you think about it. They sell very popular items that almost everyone in any mall in the country owns some version of that people WANT to buy every few years at most(computer, phone, headphones). Jewelry stores sell items that a lot of people will never own, and they sell items that people might buy every 5 years if they are really good customers.
The phones and software don't stop working when they aren't supported anymore. They just don't get more free updates. You can keep using the device in perpetuity with the same software that you have on it right now. Its a relatively recent phenomenon that the OS and all updates are free.
You used to have to pay for the OS on your hardware at each update. If I wanted to go from OSx Tiger to OSX leopard on my first Macbook, it cost me $99 at the time. That computer still works fine with Leopard. It does everything Apple said it would do when they sold it to me. Why would I be entitled for it to do the things that the latest macbook does?
Again, the phone won't stop working. It will still do everything that it did the day you bought, and in many cases more. It will connect to any 2g/3g network that you subscribe to, and connect to any server that operates on the same protocols that existed on the last day it was supported.
You can't blame Apple that network and site providers don't continue to provide service, anymore than model T drivers can be upset that their local tire store doesn't stock tires for their car.
How is any company supposed to provide updates in perpetuity for technology advances that wasn't even planned at the time of purchase.
The fact that Apple has teams of developers providing free seamless updates to my iphone 11 from 6 years ago is a modern miracle. What other item in the market can you expect the maker to provide free maintenance and functional improvements for years after purchase?
I am not blaming Apple. But I am saying that older phones will stop functioning as phones eventually.
Apple isn’t supporting older phones out of the goodness of their hearts. The larger the installed based, the more they can sell you. There biggest revenue increases are coming from Services
I agree with you, the fact that they are providing security updates for a phone that came out in 2015 as a recently as two months ago is remarkable
Were you around during the first 17 years of personal computers?
A computer from 1986 would be useless in 1996. A computer from 1996 would be useless in 2006.
Computers were getting so much faster so fast back then, that obsolescence was really a big deal.
There is physically no hardware support for 32 bit software on modern iPhones. Do you suggest that Apple still supports 32 bit iPhones and 64 bit iPhones?
Would third party developers want to support phones back to the iPhone 6 that is 6x slower and has 1/8 the RAM of a modern iPhone?
Should Apple support phones like the 3GS that doesn’t support LTE and has 256KB of RAM?
They do. You're notified when battery health is either unknown or reaching EOL. It points you towards replacement, not upgrade.
"If battery health has degraded significantly, the below message will also appear:
Your battery’s health is significantly degraded. An Apple Authorized Service Provider can replace the battery to restore full performance and capacity. More about service options…"
Apple provides a warning and a link to battery replacement options from the Battery Health screen when it detects that it's been degraded too much. So... they do provide this?
The battery gets bad after 4 years. That’s usually the moment I want to buy a new phone already, why invest $99 in a phone that I won’t be using in a year? Better deal with a bad battery for a few months or a year, then already go on and buy a new one.
I never heard of someone who bought a new phone _solely_ for a new battery
>I never heard of someone who bought a new phone _solely_ for a new battery
I did.
I had a Samsung Galaxy s10e, and I have an s23 now, which I got on its launch. The only reason I got a new phone is because they don't have legit batteries to replace my shitty s10e battery in my country of residence (very shitty European country). No Samsung support, no iFixIt (they don't ship here), nothing. Just shady shops selling shady batteries.
I preferred the smaller size of the s10e, and software-wise it did everything I needed it to do. Plus I didn't have to rely on Bluetooth earbuds when I need(ed) to wear some earbuds.
Oh, and the battery has gotten noticeably worse in the past year and a half, and the _only_ reason why I will buy a new phone in a year, year and a half is that I know for a fact the battery life will become (even more) unbearable, and there aren't any official/legit channels through which I could replace the battery.
I know I'm talking about Samsung, but the same would apply to Apple here, and any other brand.
If this wasn't an issue for me, I could see myself using the same phone for 5-6 years, probably even longer if set up lineageOS on it -- but after +5 years I imagine I would like to use some new phone with its "new" features... which I will likely never really use in the first place
One problem with extending life of your phone with lineageOS is trouble using banking apps on a rooted device. If you are lucky you could get it working with Magisk/Shamiko or similar but sometimes there will be some stubborn apps
> If you are lucky you could get it working with Magisk/Shamiko
It's a lot more nowadays. Magisk, lsposed, play integrity fork, shamiko, trickystore, custom keybox.xml, zygisk next... and with news of google now forcing certain apps (eg. chatgpt) to be installed from the Play Store + the device being of at least DEVICE integrity it's slowly all falling apart.
I don't understand this. Why not trying the "shady battery" for cheap before buying a whole new phone? Even if you somehow don't trust their batteries, I see s10e batteries on ebay for ~10€. Just buy one of those and have them install it?
Every device I've ever wanted to keep after its battery started degrading (mostly laptops, but has happened with a phone too) I've either ordered one from ebay and replaced myself or went to a cheap local shop.
I've had friends take their phones in for a battery replacement, and let's say the results were not better than before they took their phones in.
As with buying a battery from ebay, it's still not gonna be an OEM battery (or am I wrong?). OEM stuff is more important for phones than for laptops, I have found
$16 doesn't sound huge to you because you are living in a bubble.
It is for everyone that has is bank account in the red for half of their month. Which is a lot of people regardless if they live in a developing country or not. And those that can save money do not necessarily save money for a smartphone. They do it for their own financial safety. Even the streaming accounts are usually shared accross friends and families and said services don't crack down on them because they know they would simply lose their customers completely anyway. They would rather keep money in case their home need a reparation or their car they are using to go to work break down.
So when the time comes that their phone has issue, many of them are faced with a non scheduled financial issue. They will definitely repair their phone if it is more affordable than buying a new one. No wonder their are lots of repairing phones shops in every city. Where I live you can literally see a queue on the sidewalk during the opening hours. The alternative would be buying a second hand cell phone with the risk of ending up with one whose battery is already in average conditions.
> That's $16 per month. Easily affordable for most of developing world.
This argument sounds a lot like a used car salesman.
I think focusing on the monthly payment is deceptive. Especially with a device like a phone which could easily meet its doom before the 5.2 years used in your calculation are up.
It's reasonable to compare the total cost of ownership or the up front price. Your choice is a $1000 phone or (say) a $600 phone (new iPhone 14, no tax). There's $400 difference there. That's your money making the choice.
The question of whether it's worth it is something else.
$16 a month is close to the cost of financing a basic motorbike over its expected lifetime. People in developing world mostly drive 125/150 cc and expected lifetime is ~10 years
If you look up battery health and it shows as degraded (or you follow the notification to get there), it gives you support options to schedule an appointment or send it in for repair.
I’ve never seen a literal “this product sucks because I refuse to learn about it” given as an explicit argument before, usually it’s just implicit, thank you for this
The issue is probably chips or cracks on the back glass or sometimes the front.
They almost didn’t work on my daughter’s phone because of a tiny nick on front corner for fear of it spiderwebbing when they opened it. And some phones broken back glass is game over since it’s all glued to that surface.
Most people will refuse to go to the doctor when they have serious symptoms themselves. I don’t think stupid/lazy human behavior can be blamed on apple.
The Pixel 6 was one of those awful designs where you have to go in from the front and risk damaging the screen in order to get to the battery, it's no wonder getting it replaced was expensive. That price has to factor in a potential screen replacement if they mess it up. Thankfully later Pixels can be opened from the back instead.
> An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.
I've done four or five battery replacements on various Pixel phones, each time battery was 15$ max. I've done the replacement myself, but I know that in an (unauthorized, obviously) repair shop the work costs maybe 10-15$ and takes twenty minutes. The math is the same for iPhones, maybe 10$ more.
I really don’t like this “unauthorised” language - when you change light, washing machine or the whole kitchen in your house, so we cal it ‘unauthorised?’ Both are your property
And sometimes they rip the display cable while they’re trying to swap out the battery, and you end up with an entirely new SE2 in the end. Happened to us about 1-2 months ago.
Last couple of times I have done this, I used Apple’s online system to schedule the battery replace at a locally owned Apple dealer or at the nearest Best Buy. Same price and warranty as at the Apple Store. Turn around time was 2 hours.
Lucky you. I would need to drive to another country for an Apple store... And I don't live in Third World either (theoretically), but in Central Europe.
> Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years hardly seems like it's going to nuke their business from orbit.
Apple's business model partially depends on selling people a new phone every few years. If people switch to battery replacements in place of new phones in large quantities, that is going to significantly hurt their business model.
That’s not an accident, they spent a lot of effort building up their portfolio when this trend was obviously unavoidable. They’d love it if you buy a new phone every year but they’re almost as happy if you keep the same phone for 5 years, buy apps, and subscribe to Apple One. One of the really big questions is what impact the EU DMA will have on this strategy: a lot of what’s kept them ahead of Android on things like CPUs is the geyser of App Store cash stabilizing revenue for long-term commitments.
Interestingly, it was recently revealed that 22% of their services income is comprised of payments from Google to keep their search engine as the default in iOS / Safari. Soon to disappear given the antitrust case.
If this becomes the dominant source of revenues, it makes sense for them to make the phone more repairable and to have a longer lifetime - but then this dominance have to really show, otherwise it is a future revenue instead of a present one.
To note, that's a regional thing. It seems to stop at gen2 for Asian countries for ex.
> Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years
iPhone batteries become subpar way faster than that, especially the older models who get more strained as they bear the heavier OS. Once every year and a half looks more realistic to me.
FWIW I got a launch iPhone X I gave to my dad with original battery now at 73% health, OLED screen burn in, and a broken charging port (wireless charging still works), and he’s still using it as a daily driver lol.
So while batteries certainly can go subpar faster, they can and do last much longer sometimes.
I also babied it and rarely charged above 80 or fell below 25, which may have played a part but who knows.
Most batteries are made in China (or even cheaper places) now, so they simply do not last. I have iPad 2s that still last for MONTHs without charging. Nowdays iPhone batteries start heavy degradation about 2 years in. That 20-25% loss means all day battery to needing to charge at least once before going to bed for many.
Source: I replace more batteries now than screens.
To go for the official rating, up to the iPhone 14 it was 80% of the original charge after 500 cycles [0] and got improved (1000 !) later.
500 cycles can be a lot if you mostly keep it as a standby device to stay reachable, but not that much if you actually use the phone everyday.
That's less than 2 years if you completely drain the phone at least once a day. Our kid easily goes through two full charges in a day, especially on weekends. It really depends on what you use your phone for.
Also I think some people live with a < 70% battery without really minding it much. That's IMO only viable if you don't have a winter, where the battery efficiency becomes so worse. That's the combination of weak battery + poor weather that triggered the phone shutdown for me when BatteryGate was the rage.
I use an iPhone SE2 that I got refurbished in the past 6 months by Apple. I couldn't replace just the battery, because the rear glass had a crack in it. This thing is a mess, refurbishing it feels like a waste of money. It runs out of battery almost daily, has terrible multi-second camera lag when I open the camera app from the lockscreen. Often the phone will just have like a quarter second of UI lag for no obvious reason. The experience is overall very slow and frustrating, an enormous degradation from when I got it as a gift 4 years ago (part of why I'm still using it).
It's a shame, because I like the phone a lot otherwise.
On the battery thing, that might depend how much games are run on it. We hand down devices, and replace the battery if its life is below the 70% mark so to somewhat refresh the device. The SE 2nd gen we handed down already had two battery replacements at this point and I'll probably ask for a third before it falls off the support list.
On third party repairs...it's sure getting better, hopefully in other regions as well.
You missed the user bit of what you're replying to.
There are android phones that have this ability, I have one. New batteries are ~20 bucks, and they take about 5 minutes to swap, most of which is shutdown/boot time. I can take my phone out innawoods and use offline GPS all day, and as a flashlight at night, by just bringing a pocketfull of batteries.
When a battery goes bad, I toss it in the recycle bucket, and buy a new one. I currently have 10 of them and they're on rotation.
What that means is, I get a new phone when apps stop working, and I use very few apps, so, that's been 5+ years since I adopted this model. It'd certainly be better for the environment and better for the consumer if manufacturers were on-board with this idea, but, it'd be far worse for their margins, so, these devices only exist on the periphery.
That said, I do think that Apple could make this work for the masses. Simply pair the batteries with the phone, keep everyone in the walled garden, don't allow 3rd parties in willy nilly, and then charge more for new batteries. That that system and spin the hell out of it, make android/google/et al look like evil megacorps filling the earth with chemicals leached from 1-time use android phones, and call it a day.
"The masses" do not want to carry a bag of spare batteries. The masses don't want to have to think about it.
The latest generation devices are mostly "don't have to think about it" on batteries.
> New batteries are ~20 bucks
Gotta love those after-market or counterfeit high density inflammable energy packs crammed against your body or the bagful of 9 spares left in your car...
I want real ones from a real company spending real money on R&D, that I "know where they live" if it's a problem.
Speaking of quality, I can use current iPhone off grid with offline GPS all day, and use it again the next day — without taking any battery packs.
The new "max" devices clock effectively two day battery life if you are conscious of what you're using it for (say, camping out off grid instead of doomscrolling Insta, for instance). I find even 3 or 4 sometimes if you're not picking it up and are in low energy and low data mode. Definitely 3 - 4 if you shut it off while asleep. It's nuts.
> Gotta love those after-market or counterfeit high density inflammable energy packs crammed against your body or the bagful of 9 spares left in your car.
You see sir, when manufacturers compete on price we call that free market, and when you try to stop that we call that overregulation or protectionism.
But when talking about apple we suddenly call it ‘counterfeit’
Regardless of safety/counterfeit, you do realise that the OP has like 2 weeks supply of batteries for camping or apocalypse, and if ‘off grid living’ is your use case, it’s a slam-dunk?
For camping and off grid living, recharging spare LiPo batteries via a ribbon cable or contact pins sounds like a massive pain in the ass. Give me a standard USB C based power bank, the thing that Solar Generators and many panels have supplied connections for, and can be used for any USB C device. Plus the phone never has to be opened and be vulnerable to ingress of moisture or debris.
And for apocalyptic scenarios your LiPos will naturally degrade collectively together in a few years even if they sit unused. An external battery with a more stable long term chemistry would be better.
Back when Samsung phones had user replaceable batteries they also sold separate battery chargers. This was super convenient because I could just grab a fresh battery from the charger on my way out the door. No need to carry a separate USB power bank. And moisture wasn't a problem, they had water resistant models. It's really a shame that phones have gone backwards in that area while advancing in most others.
I have little battery dock things, really dumb devices, but, USBC goes in, battery docks in, and it slow charges in about 8 hours. I've got 3 of them.
Also if you're talking about the world being dark for 3 years, not sure batteries are the thing to stock up on friend. We'd be well into mad-max mode after a few months I'd think, and after a year or so of that, well, nothing's going to come back for a good long time.
I'm much more concerned with making it, say, a week without being able to charge, which, I can easily do without thinking too much.
I can also go several weeks off grid with literally any phone, a moderately sized power bank and a 40w solar panel hanging off my pack or over a tent without thinking too much. It's far more versatile for powering other devices and I never have to reboot my phone. If you want to carefully buy stuff you can even get a fully IP65 rated or better setup, which makes it actually survivable to the elements.
I can't see how juggling internal batteries is anything but the worst possible option. I can upgrade or replace any one component without obsoleting the rest. How many future phones will accept your stockpile of batteries?
For the little bank, something like Anker Solix PS30 Solar Panel charges like a wall wart with just a couple hours' midday sun in northern U.S. or southern E.U.:
North of 40th, combo can get us through strings of rainy days off grid while not thinking about it.
To cost less, on Alibaba you can match case style, plug placements, and feature/functions to find the same OEM models as well-known portable power and solar brands for a fraction of price if one doesn't mind ship time.
* That said, this is all one's power eggs in one power basket. To your point, a bag full of batteries means one can fry half a dozen and still have a few juicy eggs to suck dry, but don't lose tools or phone bits and bobs on field replacements and one will still want a panel or two to top them off!
Sure sure, and I lose the ability to keep a phone going 6+ years because the battery is glued into the case. So I'm making 3x the e-waste for... really nothing honestly.
In terms of power banks, I'm currently hoarding my friend's disposable vapes which all have fairly high output LiPO batteries in them. All I need once I'm done harvesting is a few 3D printed parts, a aliexpress BMS, and some wiring, and I'll have way more capacity than I know what to do with for very, very cheap. BMS is the most expensive part really, the rest is a few bucks, and, if I kill a cell, well, there's an abundance of disposable vape batteries available.
>you do realise that the OP has like 2 weeks supply of batteries for camping or apocalypse, and if ‘off grid living’ is your use case, it’s a slam-dunk?
I will admit, the main bottleneck is that I only have 3 battery dock chargers. So unless I'm planning on needing it, half of those batteries are charging or dead at any given time.
I'd bet I could be camping for a month or so with the batteries I have if I really put my mind to it.
To others' point here, they even make solar topped rucksacks now. One of those, feeding a powerbank, and you top off your trailmap-photo-gps-emergency-sat-beacon gizmo on walkabout, no fiddling.
>"The masses" do not want to carry a bag of spare batteries. The masses don't want to have to think about it.
False, most people I know are already doing this, they're just doing it with a big lithium pouch cell coupled with a BMS/charge controller called a "battery bank"
>Gotta love those after-market or counterfeit high density inflammable energy packs crammed against your body or the bagful of 9 spares left in your car...
Never had one pop, never left anything lithium powered in a car. A black car on a very hot day in a very hot region can reach ~160f, which is hotter than the recommended storage temp of lithium batteries. Most places with a non-black car won't get hot enough to be a problem. Lithium batteries are fine to store up to ~140F. Do understand that the air in your car being 160f doesn't mean your batteries are, just that they will be eventually. How long is eventually? Ultra-situational. Put your batteries in a cooler, you're probably good forever. Put them loose on the dashboard, probably not good for very long. Same thing goes for your phone, or anything else with a lithium battery. They're not the boogyman, they're not magic, they're subject to the laws of thermodynamics just like everything else.
The reason for caution really is that you don't know the condition of your batteries. They could have been damaged but still function just fine until you put them into some marginal condition and then they're very not fine very quickly.
That's not specific to the batteries I carry in my backpack, that's the battery in your iphone too, and a quick google for "iphone battery fire" is proof of that enough.
That said, if your iphone sets your pants on fire, what're you realistically going to do? Sue apple? You know, the multibillion dollar a year company with so many lawyers that they have them setup in a huge building all their own? Good luck, you have exactly the same amount of recourse I do, ie, none. You also probably have auto insurance, and renters/homeowners insurance, so, it burning down your car/house/etc is well covered at least.
>effectively two day battery life if you are conscious
What people actually don't like doing is being forced to be 'conscious' of their devices. They don't really even like having to charge their devices. Throw a small standby battery in an iphone, have it pop the back off, swap in an iBattery that lives in your iBattery dock (which is also insulated and keeps your iBatteries charged up), and you're off to the races. Apple could make this a really good system.
They won't, because they exist to be as anti-consumer as possible while not pissing them off so much that they look elsewhere because that's what is profitable.
> most people I know are already doing this, they're just doing it with a big lithium pouch cell coupled with a BMS/charge controller called a "battery bank"
Precisely. That means you can "not think about it" 4x as much as without it. One of those with USB-C in and a solar charger has gotten us by off grid for years, as well as perfect for long haul travel. No five minutes replaceable mucking about needed.
It's one thing, not a bag of 10, it packs slim, won't slow you down on an all-day all-night "Midnight Madness" scavenger hunt in NYC, and won't get you pulled out of line at the aeroport.
I wouldn't want to backpack with it to be honest. In my car? Sure, why not have a cooler sized battery with some solar panels, perfect solution really.
Also never had trouble flying with batteries. They're always in a ziplock and tossed into a bin, then back into my carryon. You can't check anything with a lithium battery, or, you're not supposed to at least.
> When a battery goes bad, I toss it in the recycle bucket, and buy a new one. I currently have 10 of them and they're on rotation.
not to pick on you but it’s baffling the way some people clothe themselves in right to repair and then bust out some shit like this. this is absolutely insane from an e-waste and frankly just regular-waste perspective.
I’m sure it’s very convenient and granted everyone needs batteries, but still, “they fail and I throw them away and buy new ones, I currently have 10” is objectively insane and I have to think that buying shitty non-oem batteries is a major part of why you churn batteries so much.
“I said it sounds like he’s just feeding e-waste to landfills and hackernews started crying”
maybe think about buying some 18650 batteries and a power bank or something, idk. You can get cold-weather 18650 cells which improve outdoors performance a lot, and good quality 18650s last a half decade or more.
Really disappointing how right to repair just turned out to be a fashion accessory for most people, and the actual boots-on-the-ground aspects like oem parts availability and not using disposable junk batteries didn’t sink in, people are literally happy to have a backpack full of 10 Amazon batteries they change out every 6 months if it means they get to bash apple and feel smug about it. The discussion around usb-c vs lightning went much the same way - people were exuberant at the prospect of filling the landfills full of discarded cables (on a port that's been around for a decade), as long as they were the right cables. People bashed the self-service/OEM parts availability for being some kind of plot or conspiracy. People bashed it because the OEM factory repair tools apple will rent or sell you are too big and clunky.
There really, really ought to be a real attempt to account and attribute some of these total lifecycles, independently of some of the fandom and some of the actors involved with R2R with their own personal foibles and financial interests. Specifically thinking of component-level repair as not being in the interest of certain major backers of R2R, for example. There should be an accounting of what the actual cost is for that decision, vs the aspects of R2R increasing the churn on these essentially-disposable amazon batteries and other junk and so on. Those things need to be attributed in the total lifecycle cost too, if bunches of people keep doing the same thing you are that's a real social problem. Ten batteries, and I just swap them out when they fail and buy new ones to throw away. One of the most polluting and dangerous and toxic parts of the phone. Good lord.
I hope you are at least sending them for proper disposal, but even that is not currently even close to full recycling efficiency iirc.
>not to pick on you but it’s baffling the way some people clothe themselves in right to repair and then bust out some shit like this. this is absolutely insane from an e-waste and frankly just regular-waste perspective.
It's a lithium recycle bucket at my local library. I'll admit, I don't really know what the service is that they use, but I do assume that those batteries are getting turned into new batteries somewhere. They could end up landfilled though, your guess is as good as mine. I'm not really sure why you thought "recycle bucket" meant "where the aluminum cans go"...
>buying shitty non-oem batteries is a major part of why you churn batteries so much.
Funny enough, the OEM batteries are LION, and the replacements are LIPO, so, the replacements actually have a fair bit more capacity than the originals, at like half the cost. I've only replaced 3 of them in 5 years, and I bought 10 when I bought the phone. I do have a couple I have sharpie'd red because they are down on capacity but still usable, but they still get me a full day without any drama. That's my benchmark for replacement, if it doesn't make it a day, into the bucket it goes, and back to amazon for a new one.
Something you're missing though is, I can get aftermarket batteries for my phone, and, I have at least 3 different designs in my possession, so, there's good competition in that space. It's china-based competition, but, it seems to have yielded good results here.
Do understand that, I'm likely keeping this phone 2-3x as long as most people keep their phones, basically until an app I use stops working because the android version I have is too old. So maybe I go through a few batteries, but, I'd end up doing that regardless. What I don't go through is any of the other components, so far less waste there. Not why I do it, but, a nice side effect nonetheless.
>There really, really ought to be a real attempt to account and attribute some of these total lifecycles
I couldn't agree more honestly. I think the 2-3 year phone churn is absolutely abhorrent for many reasons. I also think $1000+ phones are equally abhorrent given their lifecycle, and how features continue to be stripped out of phones and sold as features. Sure, consumers are of middling intelligence (objectively), that doesn't mean companies aren't also a little evil. I also don't think that the current incentive structure is going to allow for any of that to change, no matter how well presented any argument to the contrary is. You effectively have zero competition in the phone space, because they've made it intentionally difficult to switch between flavors of phone. That alone should be a multi-billion dollar antitrust lawsuit against anyone who does it.
Then you can go after things like glued-in screens and soldered/glued in batteries and charging ports that are PCB mounted to the mainboard. Get rid of those things and you probably wind up with something that'll last a very, very long time. You also probably get rid of incremental tech improvements altogether because they won't be worth the R&D dollars. Hard to tell what the unintended consequences of that would be.
I am an engineer at a big tech company. I’m not a “normie”.
Even for me the new features aren’t compelling. They don’t really help me do anything I actually want to do. They don’t solve a problem or scratch an itch. And features change so often and so drastically I don’t really care to learn. I used to have an optical zoom but now I have super wide angle. My Fidelity widget used to show my balance but now it doesn’t so I just never bother swiping to that page. I assume the current iteration of widgets will go away or be replaced soon so I don’t bother trying to fix it. Whatever, doesn’t matter.
Smartphones are essentially solved at this point. It’s an appliance. And just like my washing machine and dishwasher the buttons are arbitrary and clunky but work well enough. I tolerate it. Like I tolerate that burner on the cooktop that doesn’t always work.
The only thing that would get me excited is text editing and spellcheck that work correctly.
I don’t get the assumption (not just in your comment, all over this post) that engineers and programmers are more likely to appreciate the changes.
I’m a programmer, apple devices have had the cpu grunt to run ssh or vi for ages. Therefore, I don’t really notice much generation to generation. I wonder if it will ever catch up to the Raspberry Pi in usability.
I expect a photographer, or maybe someone who opened big spreadsheets, or a social media person, or one of those coffee-shop authors, might be more likely to notice the difference.
How can you call it "solved" when such basics as text editing are broken?
The dishwasher comparison is also way off, the level of dishwasher interaction is primitive and the frequency thereof is very very low, so it's much easier to tolerate bad design
> How can you call it "solved" when such basics as text editing are broken?
I just want to be able to hold backspace in my URL bar until my link is 'polite' enough to share with someone else. I want it to stop clearing the entire field when I'm only halfway through removing the trailing crap.
So true. With so much advancement in phone tech I’m still not typing as fast as 15 years ago when phones had physical keyboards. Copy paste undo redo is unnecessarily clumsy. The list goes on.
This makes a lot of sense for tablets - but Apple decided they won't allow it in order not to cannibalize sales. For phones, the value is arguably smaller, at least for people like me who hate doing anything remotely complex on a tiny screen.
Total pipe dream. I like GNOME’s design but gtk and its desktop apps at large will never be appealing to mobile users, so I wholeheartedly disagree with you.
well not fully solved. That's why I was watching foldable phones carefully and seeing how they iterate. That was indeed the first thing in a long time that both excited me and easily had me imagining various improvements (horizontal folds for productivity, vertical to minimize space. Both to built-in protect the screen).
The real advancements majority of users would notice:
- Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones
- More battery life.
- Better camera (arguably already achieved)
- lesser issue but fix the stupid bugs with storage/duplication with pictures and messages. I am already paying for a TB level plan with iCloud. How can my phone possibly run out of storage?
That’s it. All the AI stuff is marginal at best and useless at worst. The new UI stuff they introduced sometime ago? Doesn’t really get used by anyone I know. Control center was probably the last useful feature added. If they did a release where they removed features to simplify iOS I would upgrade.
> Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones
I don't think iMessage is big anywhere outside the US (which appears to account for about 9% of iPhone users). I don't think a majority of global users even knows there are different colors.
Completely not a thing in the UK. The app is a portal for SMS based auth and that's it. Everyone uses WhatsApp or other social network based messengers.
I'm a US iphone user and I had no idea what iMessage colors meant until journalists started making a big deal of it. Not that I doubt the stories about green-shaming, it just never occurred to me.
RCS is a new green? If you’re referring to the existing SMS green, that was Apple’s original color for messaging. They adopted blue to represent the transition to iMessage. So you can’t say they picked a poor color on purpose; it was representing their own product originally before they even came up with iMessage.
Yeah, it wasn't always a bad green. They absolutely chose a bad color on purpose - arguably the world's best design company accidentally uses a painful high-saturation low-contrast background color that violates their own design guidelines for like 8 years by mistake? Give me a break.
Originally it was because iMessages were free, while SMS were $0.15-$0.20 each. So glad Apple broke that monopoly, along with many other anti-consumer wireless provider restrictions.
Did Apple really break that monopoly? WhatsApp was released 2009 with the explicit pitch that it was "free SMS". iMessage launched 2011, and with the anti-consumer Apple lock-in, and isn't even much used outside US.
Also free/unlimited SMS was prevalent in many countries before WhatsApp or iMessage. And there were plenty of IMs before that too.
That 10% of the customers pays a lot more per customer than most do. We are likely responsible for far, FAR more than 10% of the revenue or 10% of the profit of apple.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's ass about bubble colour and just use SMS, including for sharing pictures.
I don't have WhatsApp and literally nobody ever asked me to use it, even if I know they have it. they just flat out don't care as long as a message gets across.
Countries where telecom competition lead to unlimited sms early enough and/or iPhone/iMessage adoption meant people weren’t motivated to install third party apps. The US and to a lesser extend the UK are the only countries I’m aware of this happening? But the UK plans added unlimited sms later and so WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there unlike the US.
(responding to both) France. We've had unlimited SMS plans since what, 2005? It's been a guaranteed solid 10-15+ years nobody thinks that SMS used to be a paid-per-unit (whether you got a package or not) thing.
Sure people use a variety of messenger apps, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat. Since you don't have a guarantee that any one person is using this or that the default messaging app (Messages on iOS, whatever it is on Android) SMS is the safest bet that always works. That's typically what people use when they get someone 's contact: hand over phone, ask to type number in focused input field, send $firstname SMS; bam, handshake done.
> WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there
Lots of people here have WhatsApp. Doesn't mean it's their go-to, they still don't ditch SMS[0] nor dunk on "green bubbles". And then if both parties have an iPhone it just so happens that they obliviously converse over iMessage as a side effect.
[0] Except for group chats. But then they just create groups in whatever's at hand, which may or may not be WhatsApp. And that's mostly because SMS group messaging is thoroughly broken (as in it works more like email than IRC and people want the latter). But for 1:1? SMS is brutally consistent.
Apps like Whatsapp provide (a) groups, (b) picture messages, (c) end-to-end encryption, (d) very low spam rate and (e) free messaging, even internationally.
So there's often motivation to install your country's dominant messaging app beyond just the cost of SMS.
it’s a very real friction to install a third party app and ensure the people you want to talk to install it too, when all you really want to do is send short texts and images.
A good indicator is how expensive SMS was back when smartphones were brand new.
If they were expensive, users jumped ship right away. If they were nearly free, people just kept using them on brand new devices as there were no compelling enough arguments to switch.
To answer your question more directly, Sweden comes to mind.
I’m not sure where you are, but when I first got a phone in maybe 1998 SMS was completely free. No concept of limits at all. It was only when it became popular that network operators started charging for them. Now nobody uses them for anything except receiving 2FA codes
I don't care if you personally use Whatsapp or not, it's beyond the point. Whatsapp is by far the most used messenger app in the world. The US is unique in the developed world for using iMessages or SMS.
You make it sound like someone was arguing for the green text issue specifically not to be solved, rather than just stating that that's only primarily relevant to US consumers.
I feel the later generation of phones went back a bit as they have more aggressive processing. It can work great, but the hit or miss ratio is worse, in particular noise processing can be way off.
That's crazy the budget Pixel a lone gets overall better photos than a top of the line iPhone.
I’ve searched and searched for a way to turn off the extra processing. The only methods are third party camera apps or doing burst mode for every picture.
I preferred it when they saved the original and processed photos. Now there is no way to turn it off.
Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered.
> Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered.
This has happened to me way too many times. I take a picture, it looks great, then shortly after it gets processed so badly it's all blurred up with no return because of some forced long exposure low light compensation feature that cannot be disabled.
If you want to try out the “fix” goto camera settings and turn on “prioritize faster shooting” then in the camera app on the take picture button: tap, hold, drag left. It should stay white and play a shutter sound. There is a chance to do a similar action that just starts a recording but the button goes red for that.
Thank you! This fixes the after-shot blur. Now I just need to find a way to disable HDR/color enhancements without a 3rd party app and I'm perfectly set.
Halide. If you don't mind subscriptions or the lifetime $75 the app I found that did everything I wanted is Halide. The pain of the problem for me didn't cross the threshold for me to buy the app but the trial of it worked. Funny I have several dozen selfies of me testing it out compared to the Camera app with all the options toggled.
For AirDrop, at least, I've found it to be very reliable, with one caveat that always tripped me up before I realized it: *the recipient's phone needs to be unlocked*. This completely changed the game for me, and now me and my wife use it all the time.
The AI stuff could be useful if it makes Siri more useful.
Like when I'm listening to a Spotify playlist and I want to like the song or save it to a playlist while driving, it would be amazing if I could just tell Siri to do it for me. As-is, sometimes it tells me it doesn't how to play songs on Spotify.
Or they were showing how you would be able to look for photo by describing it.
> Like when I'm listening to a Spotify playlist and I want to like the song or save it to a playlist while driving, it would be amazing if I could just tell Siri to do it for me
Unfortunately adding to a playlist would require Spotify to add that capability. Siri doesn't learn how to navigate third party UI and infer potential actions, the context of what is currently going on and the actions which can be performed need to be codified by the developer.
Siri is a hybrid dictation and command-and-control system (at least today), which is why it sometimes decides the closest action to what you said is something obviously different from what you asked for. Unfortunately this is done via a dynamic vocabulary, so it leads to situations where something you were able to ask for before (like the local weather) suddenly changes behavior because you installed an app with "weather" in its metadata.
This also poses a unique problem for streaming and downloading media services, because the valid targets for the command aren't locally known - it's all the media on Spotify in this case. So "play enter sandman" won't know to infer whether you are asking to play an album in the cloud vs a game which hasn't been installed vs the "Sandman" series on Netflix - it may instead decide the best guess was you meant you wanted to "read" the books you have locally installed.
For the Pro Model. Yes. Not for the normal iPhone though. 2x Optical Zoom is barely enough. Especially when I default to taking photos with 1.8x which fits my view point a lot better. So when I get 5x optical zoom it is more like 2.5x only.
And if there is one thing I would add to the list is weight. The Pro model is too heavy.
How about getting rid of that stupid back button in the top left corner when an app opens another app? It drives me crazy seeing it every time I click a link in a message. It's the most useless thing. There's already a good app switcher. What is the point of the back button?
I would hate that change. I usually hold my phone in my left hand, and can reach the back button with my thumb. Using the swipe gesture at the bottom of the screen to switch apps would require switching to a two-handed grip for that one common action.
It's not ideal; I'd like to see more attention given to multitasking in general, the re-arranging deck of cards system has always been counterintuitive and clumbsy in my opinion.
So is it mainly for lefties? I hold my phone with my right hand and that button is inaccessible. Based on the downvotes, I feel like I must be missing something.
iOS is kinda a mess when it comes to what's easy for people who hold their phones in their left versus right hands. That back button is definitely for left-handers, but then the control center is clearly better for right-handers. The slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-back gesture is only usable in the left hand, and the slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-forward gesture is only usable with the right hand. My conclusion is that iOS is only really designed to be used with both hands gripping the edges of the phone, which meshes with their ever-increasing screen sizes. The new Pro Max is 6.9"!! That's basically a tablet.
i am surprised (am i really?) that apple never implemented a toggle to E2EE your icloud backup, just like you can backing up locally through itunes. thankfully you can just completely disable iCloud Backup.
RCS brings plenty of new monetization and spam opportunities but doesn't bring feature parity. Or did Google decide to open up their proprietary extensions to non-Google RCS clients?
You know better than I - can I ask what RCS is doing that leads Google to disable it on devices with unlocked bootloaders? Are devices meant to only accept messages that have been signed by a vendor or something? I thought it was just a new messaging standard but I guess there's a lot that goes into the security of it. But why can Signal run e2ee messages on unsavory devices but googles won't let me send a text message unless they've signed the whole stack?
This is entirely possible with MMS but for most carriers refusing to adopt 3GPP's current recommendations. This is also entirely possible with other messaging apps available on iOS but for American android users refusing to use other apps.
That's like suggesting it's entirely to run jumbo frames it's just ISPs don't support it.
Like, sure, yeah it's possible but all the stacks in between are too heavily ossified.
> but for American android users refusing to use other apps.
As if it's just those pesky Android users that won't just use another app. Lots of my contacts only want iMessage. Show me the APK signed by Apple, the Google store page managed by them, and I'll install it.
You realize it's not me, the Android user, being unwilling to use something other than iMessage/SMS? It is the iPhone users I wish to communicate with that don't want to use Whatsapp/Signal/LINE/Facebook Messenger/Element/Telegram/WeChat/Threema/Viber/GroupMe/Discourd/Teams/Allo/Discord.
Give me an app that actually directly supports iMessage on Android and I'll use it. Not something which is trying to proxy through some other device. Something either made or directly blessed by Apple.
Messages is the app. It currently supports SMS/MMS and iMessage protocols. It will soon also support RCS. So soon all those people who will only use Messages on their phones will be able to send and receive high quality videos and images with me. I'm quite excited for the change.
Suggesting RCS doesn't bring any new features other than advertising and spam is being extremely disingenuous. Larger attachments and other extensions, while not quite feature parity with iMessage, are leagues ahead of what was available by SMS and MMS. Effectively available, not just what was theoretically allowable by a spec but not actually possible due to limitations with service providers.
Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones
Do you mean green background? Because the non-iMessage bubbles are the white text on a green background for outgoing messages only. Given that the most vocal folks seem to be Android users who care about the background color of someone else's messages I doubt the majority of iPhone users care, would notice, or are even using the Messages app in the first place. Certainly if you're calling it green text you're not paying much attention either.
Better camera (arguably already achieved)
Apple can still get rid of that hideous camera bump.
I'm a technically sophisticated user, and I don't want a new phone. I would almost certainly like it less than my current four year old phone.
It would have a faster CPU, more RAM, and more storage, but it's rare I run into any of those limits. It would have a better camera than my current phone, but it would still be worse than my Olympus. It would have a bigger screen, but I wouldn't have a bigger hand and that would make it harder to use. It would have a bigger battery, but it would need a bigger battery. It wouldn't have a headphone jack, and I use mine. It might have an AI thing, but I don't want an AI thing.
For about a decade after the current era of smartphones launched, they weren't good enough to do all the things people wanted them to, so most people were eager to upgrade when possible. Now they are, and an upgrade usually brings more hassle than excitement.
> It would have a better camera than my current phone, but it would still be worse than my Olympus.
This is actually one of the reasons why I changed my phone last year. I don't know about your Olympus, but mine doesn't fit in my jeans pocket, even though it's one of the smaller models.
I don't always what to carry a dedicated camera with me, even though I bought a m4/3 specifically because of how portable it was. But I do like to be able to take good enough pictures, and the iPhone enables me to do that.
My camera isn't pocketable, but if I'm doing photography such that I really care about the result, I bring it. If I'm not, I usually use the phone camera to document things I want to remember or show other people, and doing that slightly better is not very valuable to me.
I'll admit to occasionally contemplating a Ricoh GR III, which is quite pocketable.
It seems to me that it's based more on the use cases than the speed of improvements to the technology itself.
There were times when a CPU four times as fast changed what I could do with a PC. For a long time, with Moore's Law in full swing, we reliably got that sort of improvement every three years, and PCs older than that were widely seen as obsolete. Today that would only speed up batch jobs for me and have no impact on any of my workflows.
Some sort of on-device AI thing is probably the next threshold for PCs. I don't think there's anything production-ready and compelling right now, but I can imagine useful automation features when it gets good enough.
It's also that software back in the day was much more fine-tuned to use the very limited resources as well as possible, so getting a better CPU would visibly speed up things.
Somewhere in the late 2000s, the CPUs got powerful and cheap enough (in the sense of "cents per MHz") that it shifted from having to be creative to get your programs to perform at acceptable speed, to not having to and instead focusing on delivering marketable software faster.
The only thing nowadays I can imagine requiring a substantial amount of raw processing power would be on-device AI processing, but that doesn't seem to be the case here, as large parts of the processing is still done in the cloud.
Editing high-resolution video comes to mind as an example of something that will still stress most PCs. Being able to scrub through footage and preview the effect of edits in real time without using low-res proxy files demands a lot of performance. I think higher-spec modern PCs are there for 4K, but I'm not sure about higher.
Heck, I have friends in tech that in the past did iPhone 4, 6, 8, whether you were an "even number" or an "odd number" iPhone buyer became something of a label. One of these guys is on the 11 Pro, has the 16 Plus in his cart, but is actively texting the group chat whether or not to go through with it.
If you feel Apple isn't actively facing a xx% risk to their business by 2030, you're beside yourself. Its not that people are switching away, or that Apple overtly missed some major tech trend; people just aren't upgrading anymore. They need to come up with something a lot more drastic to keep people motivated toward spending $1000+/year with them; its not ungrateful, its not cynical, its the market. AI is not it.
It's the camera for me, especially 5x zoom lens in the big phone instead of the enormous phone. But if I do go through with it I'll be coming from a 4 year old phone, so I'm already not in the $1000/year market.
If they're able to figure out a mass market VR headset that will give them another push for new phone sales. I hear the "spatial photos/videos" are very cool.
VR also isn't it. The best case scenario for Vision is that it becomes a <$10B/quarter market similar to the iPad, but it costs substantially more to build and evolve (more complicated hardware and software, lower margins, less software sharing with iPhone). The more likely outcome is that it doesn't even reach $5B by 2030 (that would be ~6% revenue).
I think the broader problem is that no one knows what "it" is; what comes next. We had web3, crypto, AR, VR, now AI, but none of these things feel like they have the horsepower to launch another $30B in quarterly or even annual revenue for Apple.
Real AR with very lightweight glasses that work outdoors and don't use camera passthrough would be a massive market. The problem is that we are still far away from that point.
I'm not convinced the next "it" is a new hardware product any time soon. You can do a lot with a screen, battery, and cellular connection. All the stuff that AI pins and necklaces can do will end up in phones, watches, and earbuds, and Apple will keep selling all those existing product lines for years. They might even find a way to squeeze an "Apple Intelligence Plus" subscription in there somewhere, with their recent focus on chasing services revenue to make up for slower phone sales.
Just because phones are maturing doesn't necessarily mean a new computing paradigm is right around the corner.
- 20% chance they continue to iterate on the Vision Pro or its successors for the next 5+ years
- 40% chance they release one more non-pro model that’s maybe half the cost and nobody buys it
- 40% chance it’s already dead and the Vision Pro is all we see of that whole product line.
If I were CEO I would definitely kill it now and lay off everyone involved. It was an experiment and it didn’t work out. Nobody wants or needs VR. Hardly anyone even remembers that it exists.
> If I were CEO I would definitely kill it now and lay off everyone involved. It was an experiment and it didn’t work out. Nobody wants or needs VR. Hardly anyone even remembers that it exists.
I have no idea if AR/VR will ever really be a thing, but this is hardly the first time Apple has launched a product that struggled with fit initially. It's also the first time they've launched so expensive of a consumer "gadget" as the initial foray into a market as a core product - the original iPhone was "only" $900ish in today-dollars, so the vision pro is nearly 4x in price, and apple slashed the price to $600ish in today-dollars shortly after launch. (Obviously they've had expensive computers, but the pricing wasn't out of the norm for the industry)
The original iPhone also totally flopped outside of the US. Total worldwide sales a year in were about 4 million, almost entirely all in the US. That's quite a bit better than the AVP, but, phones are also quite a bit more ubiquitous than the AVP. Smartphones were also already much more mainstream of a concept at the time the iPhone launched - you already had half a decade of Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, etc. devices out there. VR stuff has existed too, but it's remained much more niche.
The Watch and HomePod's initial versions had slow starts. The watch is obviously a big deal to them now, and the homepod has done OK with the mini.
Sometimes it takes 2-3 generations to figure out a product fit. If Apple cut products every time the first generation product didn't meet expectations, we'd certainly have fewer Apple products.
I think it depends on whether they can find a useful mass market niche for it. The original Apple Watch was envisioned as a multipurpose wrist computer phone but after a few years turned out to be more marketable as a fitness tracker with pretty watch faces and available bonus features that aren’t widely used.
They’ve now discovered that $3500 device for a solitary person to watch 3D Disney movies isn’t it.
But personally I would bet they give it a runway to try and figure out how to make VR happen.
It came up in passing when they said that the base iPhone 16 would be able to take 3D images. When they showed someone viewing the images, they were using a Vision Pro.
For phones, I think foldable screens are good for a couple more generations of updates. I've had a Flip for a couple of years and won't go back, when they make them lighter I'm in the market for the next one.
Apple AI selfie drone with a monthly contract for your own livestream channel to stream everything you do, with Siri as the AI stream moderator, and an asset/app store to upgrade different parts of your streams. Maybe even 30% cut of the donations from stream fans.
If there's an Apple exec reading this, you can pay me for this idea before committing billions to develop and subsequently cancel it when everybody realizes it's dumb.
It doesn't look like Apple needs people to be upgrading every other year to do well. Not anywhere close.
Apple sold 232M iPhones in 2023, and had 1.83B active iPhone users.
Doing a little math, they'd need their existing users to upgrade every six years to keep selling them at the current rate. Your friend would still be ahead of the curve for Apple if he goes forward with that upgrade.
It doesn't matter, second hand or not every day devices like phones do not last for say 10 years on average even iPhones.
Apple only needs a device to last 6 years(on average) to keep current sales levels, that includes all the irreparably damaged, or irrecoverably lost and bricked ones after theft etc.
Even if a device did last 10 years on average, Apple will still sell 183M units a year, iPhone is only 50% of the total revenues, so roughly 5% of their total revenue would be impacted, that is also ignoring additional revenue generated due to service and parts and batteries needed for older phones between 6-10 years.
A net impact of say 3-4% of revenue while significant wouldn't really change their fundamental numbers or long term market value. The market has already accounted for no further iPhone sales growth in the models anyway for last few years.
They need to only convince people over the next few years on the value of Apple Intelligence not with 16 right way to upgrade, coupled with lightening to USB switch since 15, it will be enough of motivator for 11 to 14 users to switch during the 17/18 cycle and beyond.
I agree. I do think Apple is thrilled with the sudden AI hype as this gives them 1-2 generations of new "selling points" as they were truly running out.
But still, it masks the problem of an underlying demand that will stagnate if not decline. They're aware of this danger, hence to pivot to earn more from services.
“Even” or “odd” number isn’t as applicable as it sounds, though I do remember if you were an “s” year or not. It was iPhone 3G, 3G S, 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, 6S, 7, 8/X, XS, 11, and standard annual numbering from the 11 on. In early days you’d ask if you were an “S” year or not. Only since the 11 could you ask whether you were “even” or “odd” without it meaning upgrades every 4 years.
What’s changed is that Apple increments the model number every year instead of every two years, and you can probably blame Samsung for that a bit. Your friends probably still upgrade every 4 years like we almost always used to. I remember getting the 3G for the network improvement, the 3G S for the speed bump and video recording, the 4 for Siri, the 4S for a speed bump, … back then it was often the case that the non-S model was a new design with last year’s chip, and the S model was a speed bump with last year’s design.
If anything’s changed, it’s that they often spec bump the processor every year in minor ways, instead of every 2 years, and the increases are steadily more incremental than they used to be. If you ask me, it’s because Apple doesn’t have competition in the mobile phone CPU space yet. (Or ever, while Qualcomm holds so many patents…)
Also it’s more clear than ever before that the iPhone X, Max, Pro series are all ways to ask for more money for the exact same chip/product. Some years the Pro is significantly faster because it gets the new CPU first, but by the next year both Pro and non-Pro end up getting the same CPU for cost reasons. It’s telling that most years Apple doesn’t claim a speed increase between the Pro and non-Pro models. For example, if I recall correctly the only difference for the iPhone 13 was actually software. Likewise in this generation (16) it feels like the only difference between Pro and non-Pro is the SoC binning and the binning of the quality of the OLED in minor ways.
I figure Apple hasn't depended on latest model upgrades every year for a while now. Hell I'm going 12 to 16 Pro because I'm sick of not being able to photograph birds well.
I feel like Apple is in danger of missing the foldable market. It has matured on Android to the point that the quirks have been ironed mostly out, the inventions necessary has been made, etc. Meanwhile Apple has made nothing at all in that area.
I really hope the vast majority will never upgrade every year, regardless of those poor Apple stockholders and their incentives. What a bunch of capitalist driven excess that would be. I say that and I write code for iOS.
Even as an iOS app developer, there's a huge amount of stuff that stock iOS can do that I'm unaware of.
At this point, I'm not going to be interested (dead battery isn't "interested") in the upgrade cycle until there's a new kind of sensor, e.g. thermal imaging or (technically possible in software) repurposing the WiFi as a wall penetrating radar.
Even on the dev side, WWDC for the last few years feels more like "here's an even more complicated way to create a simple app" instead of "this will make your life easier because x" or "y is increasing important, use tool z to support it".
I am an iOS developer too and I use an iPhone 13 before which I used an iPhone 6 until its support was dropped. I prefer developing with older devices as it helps me ensure my apps work well on slower devices. I haven't seen any reason to upgrade for the last 3 years. Switching from iPhone 6 to 13 was the most needed change for me due to the change in safe area insets (notch).
> I prefer developing with older devices as it helps me ensure my apps work well on slower devices.
Similar reasoning even before I stopped being excited.
I've got an SE 3, which makes me aware how many UI teams don't design and/or test for narrower displays.
(But also, the move away from touch ID to face ID feels worse to me; when I do finally replace this phone, I'll likely return to using my actual cards for contactless payments rather than Apple Wallet with face ID).
The iPhone mini is an issue for devs not testing as well. I sent feedback to one to ask if the mini was still being supported. They told me yes, and they were able to reproduce the bug I was seeing related to the screen size. Over a year later and the bug remains. I don’t think it’s getting fixed.
Have you used FaceID? I was skeptical of it, but within the first day or two I was sold. It’s so seamless, and there are some safe guards. If you’re not looking at the camera with your eyes open, it won’t work. You can also repeatedly mash the lock button to disable it. I haven’t needed to do this, but if I ever see a potential situation coming, I’d likely reach into my pocket and quietly kill FaceID, but I’d want to do the same with TouchID as well.
I’m curious, why would you use your cards over an iPhone with FaceID? The card seems more vulnerable, as anyone could use it (unless you’re in a country where a pin is the norm for credit).
Owing to my carriers not supporting e-SIM, I have two phones — the other is an iPhone XR with Face ID. Unless I'm travelling to the UK, for which I need the other SIM, the XR serves a similar role as an iPad mini would if I were in any sense a "normal person".
The technical stuff is all fine, and it works as you say (I noticed the "look at screen" requirement myself a while back); my dislike is purely the practical issues, not the technical, as the arrangement of the contactless mechanisms in stores means the camera can either face me or the device can be close enough to the reader to work, but not both. Also, I'm still wearing masks quite often (not 100% of the time as when I bought the SE, but quite often) and for that, Touch works better than Face.
I suppose theoretically I could set up the Wallet on the Apple Watch, but I find the watch to be disappointingly difficult to get on with, again for UX reasons. (On screen buttons are too small and often reject touches entirely, everything is so slow to respond it might as well be going via a random website).
Regarding security, there's inherent (and fairly low) limits to the maximum payment, and cards can be disabled in banking apps if they go missing.
(I'd count your anecdote as "UI team": developer-designer collaboration rather than siloing each speciality).
I've been using it since I got my iPhone 13 when it first came out and I can confirm it's not as fast nor as reliable as TouchID was. It often fails, asking me to type in the passcode, to asking me to type it in "preventively", to various small things like not being able to hand someone my phone while I'm driving without looking at it first (which, by the way, is when I find FaceID least reliable).
Also an iOS developer, upgraded last week from iPhone 12 to 15 Pro Max. I also preferred running my apps on the 12, to make sure app is very performative.
inspecting home for thermal leaks in winter, checking temperature if sick, checking temperature of cake in oven, inspecting dark holes in roof for hornets/wasp nest, utility when camping
I've been working in tech for 25 years, and I'm sure I hardly use any of the new features. Camera? Click, maybe crop it or turn it into a loop if it's funny. I play some games on it. I browse some social crap on it. I occasionally tell Siri to set a reminder. That's... about it. I'm really not sure what else I'm supposed to be doing.
I’m on the same boat as you. I do most of my productive work on my computer. But I started teaching kids recently and realised that kids do EVERYTHING on their phone these days. Write essays, edit videos, play games, make musics etc. A lot of them can’t type well on their keyboards and it’s the main source of frustration for kids when learning coding.
I use mine to measure things, replaced my measuring tape. It is also my flashlight. I use it to find my wallet and keys as they have air tags in them. Its my wallet, credit cards, hotel room key, subway/metro pass. I have an app that implements OpenAIs CLIP on my phone and can instantly search my photos thats better any other image search out there and it runs on the device.
You don’t use maps for looking around? For navigation while driving? You’re allowed to have in-car satnav or not drive.
You don’t use the camera for QR codes? Fine you don’t want to scan things for information. You don’t use the image recognition in the camera app to select people and copy them out of the background? That’s fine you don’t participate selfies and party photos. To do OCR on text in photos? It’s fine that you never want it. To select e.g. plants and search for what they are on Google? It’s fine that you know what everything is/don’t care/don’t photograph plants. To search your photo library by text for things and people recognised in the pictures? Fine that you know where all your pictures are. To describe photos by voice? Fine that you have good eyesight.
You don’t use the builtin daily steps tracker, or any third party running or cycling or exercise mapping / route trackers, or any Garmin style route planners? Fine that you don’t have other devices for that kind of thing or don’t go out.
You don’t use the weather app, or a third party one? Fine that you don’t want to.
You don’t use any remote terminal, Remote Desktop, programming, Jupyter, anything? Fine that you have a laptop which does everything you need.
Kindle, any ebook reader, any podcast app? Fine that you have paper and don’t listen to posts.
Any music player? Fine that you don’t listen to music.
Any Netflix style video or TV show app, BBC iPlayer? Fine that you don’t even own a TV.
Any third party camera app such as night eyes or webcam stacking, or use the phone as a wireless webcam on another computer? Fine that you aren’t interested in photo novelties.
No Evernote or OneNote cloud synced notebooks or todo lists? Calendar? Email? Fine that you only ever write plain text in a plain text file and you don’t have meetings or appointments.
No local train, tram, bus, library, cinema, schedule app? Fine that you drive everywhere or go nowhere.
No educational apps? Fine that you learn things in other ways. No Chatgpt? Fine that you don’t ask LLMs things. No Google or phind or kagi search? Also fine.
Look, 25 years in tech, am I really writing out a list of “things people do on phones” as if I genuinely believe that you’ve never heard of any of this stuff while also adding how it’s fine because I’m totally expecting you to do the “too cool for school” dismissal of everything?
Has your 25 years in tech been Bronze Age tech? You must be 40 ish, and lived through the era of dumb phones being new and everyone talking about nothing but what contract texts and minutes they had, the time when everyone had Blackberries, the time when features were things like a compass, clock, snake game, custom ringtones, FM radio, and people were doing endless comparisons of their new phone to their old one, the first camera phones, when data went from WAP to GPRS to 2G and web browsers, when “location based services” were called out on TV adverts, and all through the smartphone years nobody ever showed you the cool app they just found, when translating foreign signs was coded in assembly on a 3GS to being just a built in thing in Google camera, when Evernote was a tech darling as people realised the cloud sync convenience, when “no Wi-Fi less space than a nomad” gave way to “all previous gadgets are now one” and the rise of smart tv and smart homes and appliances with their own apps and streaming, every app launched on “show HN” or linked,
you missed everything for fifteen years and “don’t really know what people do with phones anyway?”
That’s got to be a troll comment where you know very well what people do and are pretending not to because you look cooler if you’re disaffected and uninvolved… Right?
Why else would you have no interest in phones but be in an iPhone 16 launch thread? and think your comment on how you don’t even use a phone anyway is a good comment worth posting?
Or you have main character syndrome and think the only things which exist should be for you to use need nothing else matters?
Assume good faith… are you … hoping someone can share a list of “things phones can do?” then here is another partial one.
Wow, you're really offended. How dare I speak of my smartphone use.
Of course I use a few other things, just very rarely. I do my programming on a laptop, I watch my tv on a tv, I read my books on my kindle, and use my car's nav for maps.
I hope you realize the irony of your "main character syndrome" accusation whilst writing a massive diatribe denouncing a random post on the internet. You could have just disagreed and moved on.
As a member of GenZ I find it a fun challenge to answer to this - especially since my generation is supposed to have a significantly higher amount of applications (and smartphone usage in general!) as opposed to others [saw a study on this once albeit I cannot recall where, so no link].
>You don’t use maps for looking around? For navigation while driving? You’re allowed to have in-car satnav or not drive.
I do indeed use Waze, with the occasional PoC/location check in Google Maps in the browser.
>You don’t use the camera for QR codes? Fine you don’t want to scan things for information. You don’t use the image recognition in the camera app to select people and copy them out of the background? That’s fine you don’t participate selfies and party photos. To do OCR on text in photos? It’s fine that you never want it. To select e.g. plants and search for what they are on Google? It’s fine that you know what everything is/don’t care/don’t photograph plants. To search your photo library by text for things and people recognised in the pictures? Fine that you know where all your pictures are. To describe photos by voice? Fine that you have good eyesight.
Google Lens and Assistant serve these tasks for me. Especially useful when I need to find something on the Chinese web.
>You don’t use the builtin daily steps tracker, or any third party running or cycling or exercise mapping / route trackers, or any Garmin style route planners? Fine that you don’t have other devices for that kind of thing or don’t go out.
My watch does that and I sync it every other month with its app (which is complete useless bloat, but oh well).
>You don’t use the weather app, or a third party one? Fine that you don’t want to.
I do that in the browser.
>You don’t use any remote terminal, Remote Desktop, programming, Jupyter, anything? Fine that you have a laptop which does everything you need.
I occasionally do use RDP to check on my server, although it's so rare that I usually don't even have the RDP app installed. Wish there was some client for RDP that could run in the browser instead, similarly to qBitTorrent's GUI (not neccessarily hosted locally, it might as well be a web app that connects to the local network - IF that's possible, that is).
>Kindle, any ebook reader, any podcast app? Fine that you have paper and don’t listen to posts.
Nope, not in the target demographic for any of these...
>Any music player? Fine that you don’t listen to music.
Spotify, YouTube and Tidal. Occasionally, I also use Telegram and Poweramp for FLAC playback, although I don't have Poweramp installed at this moment and Telegram is not something I often think about when it comes to audio playback.
>Any Netflix style video or TV show app, BBC iPlayer? Fine that you don’t even own a TV.
YouTube exclusively. If I want to watch some show I do it via shady, but legal (in Poland) websites in the browser. Android can handle HTML5 players just fine, although I slightly prefer iOS' unified player, especially when it comes to hiDPI.
>Any third party camera app such as night eyes or webcam stacking, or use the phone as a wireless webcam on another computer? Fine that you aren’t interested in photo novelties.
A Google Camera modification is my single camera app. Does almost everything - good night shots, way better day shots than the default Xiaomi camera etc. - remote webcam is the only thing I don't have, but I have an old phone that sometimes serves this purpose.
>No Evernote or OneNote cloud synced notebooks or todo lists? Calendar? Email? Fine that you only ever write plain text in a plain text file and you don’t have meetings or appointments.
Nope - I only have an e-mail client out of those. Calendar - well, I do have the built-in one, but I exclusively use it to check which day of the week is day X going to be. I don't really have appointments, and when I do I fixate on them so much it's hard to forget them.
>No local train, tram, bus, library, cinema, schedule app? Fine that you drive everywhere or go nowhere.
IF I rarely need to check the schedule (public transport/cinema) for anything I do it via the browser. No need for Yet Another App (TM) that doubles the web app they release regardless.
>No educational apps? Fine that you learn things in other ways. No Chatgpt? Fine that you don’t ask LLMs things. No Google or phind or kagi search? Also fine.
I ask the LLM questions... in the browser! The ChatGPT mobile site is absolutely sufficient for all of my needs. Google - I do have the app but I do searches exclusively in browser as well.
You misunderstand the business case: she is not the target demographic/user, filmmakers are (as seen on the presentation). Apple's product marketing is 2nd to none.
To break it down: iPhone 16 is for photographers, Pro for filmmakers; Watch for sport and health enthusiasts, Ultra for athletes; iPad for media consumers, Pro for artists; MacBook Air for everyday consumers, Pro for working professionals; SEs for newbies to grab competitor market share with price penetration, etc.
The implication is 'if it's good enough for a photographer/videographer, it will be excellent for me if I want to take photos and videos of my hobby/kids/travels'.
But professional photographers aren't giving up their DSLR's for an iPhone anytime soon.
I think the iPhone Pro is for anyone who wants extra flexibility with the camera, photo or video. The normal iPhone is for people who couldn’t tell you the difference between macro and telephoto, or don’t care enough to pay extra for it on their phone. I’ve been using an iPhone mini since the 12 came out. I really miss the telephoto and will be getting a 16 Pro (as much as I hate the size) to get the telephoto lens back. I used it fairly often when I had it; I almost never use the wide angle, other than to experiment to see why it exists (I’m sure realtors love it). I would not even call myself a photographer, I just take some picture when I go on vacation, just to remember stuff. However, I like more flexibility than the normal iPhone gives me. I also despise digital zoom.
The MacBook Pro is only for working professionals if they happen to be professionals in some kind of graphics (editing videos, digital artist, etc). Work gives me a MacBook Pro, and it’s pretty pointless. I write code; I’m not touching the GPU. On CPU tasks, the Air as the MacBook Pro are going to perform the exact same, assuming there is no thermal throttling going on… and there isn’t. I’ve never heard the fan on Apple Silicon; it used to be on all day every day with Intel. I’d actually prefer if work gave me a MacBook Air.
> She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.
I find this example interesting, because on the android side I would rank these two in the top 10 _most_ notable improvements made to phones in the last 5-10 years.
I have had multiple "normies" use my phone in the last few years and ask why it felt so smooth - and every time the difference between my phone and theirs has been a higher refresh rate display (what apple calls "ProMotion").
The lack of distinction between LCD and OLED can be explained. The specific condition in which OLED thrives rarely occurs. You'd need deep blacks in low ambient light viewing conditions for it to really stand out.
iOS, most apps, most websites, even most video isn't mastered as such and not consumed in those conditions.
I wonder if watching TV/movies on phones in bed at night is a normal use case. I thought it was a normal thing that many/most people do, but this comment suggests that perhaps my social circle is odd in that way.
TV shows and movies aren't mastered like that either.
I have an incredible TV. OLED with increased brightness, the latter being new tech. The combination of OLED and HDR is jaw dropping to witness. To me and to everybody that I show it to.
What do I show them? A Youtube list with TV demo videos that specifically demonstrate the effect. Deep blacks with locally bright highlights. Not to mention very deep vibrant colors.
I watch the demo videos every 2 months or so to remind myself that I have an awesome TV. Because I most certainly do not experience anything remotely like that on ordinary TV channels, streaming services, the like.
> I most certainly do not experience anything remotely like that on ordinary TV channels, streaming services, the like.
Streaming services absolutely have HDR programming. My GF has been incredibly impressed as a normie.
Probably more impressed than me because I consider OLED to be relatively meh for HDR. Not really bright enough for me, I only care about OLED largely for black depth / lack of glow and motion quality for games, I rarely watch TV/movies in comparison.
"I consider OLED to be relatively meh for HDR. Not really bright enough for me"
Hence my remark on OLED with increased brightness. In the TV world, they're called OLED.EXT panels. The new iPad Pro uses a different technique (layered panels) to achieve the same thing.
Infinitely deep blacks combined with high local brightness is god-like to experience.
> I wonder if watching TV/movies on phones in bed at night is a normal use case.
Your GP and optometrist would certainly prefer you don't do it. I can't speak to the frequency of how much other people do it, but my wife and I try to avoid it, not always successfully.
My biggest complaint is that the lenses aren’t flush with the back. I hate having cases on my phone, and their design makes wireless charging somewhat useless because it’s not flush with the charging mat.
They would if they could. Optical physics is one factor that prevents the lenses from being flush with the back. If you want to support advanced optical features the lenses need depth.
Thats the thing, I don’t care about the optical features they rolled out. I have an interchangeable lens camera that is the tool for that job, 10 years old and still works great.
> All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.
Gonna disagree with this one. Tell me, does using an iPhone today feel significantly faster than the top model 2-3 years ago or even 10 years ago? Does the battery last a lot longer than it did back then? Apple certainly claims this is the case in their marketing every year. The answer however is no, because with every increase in computing power and battery size, the OS and all the apps on it get that much more resource hungry. The entire ecosystem is designed to get users to need to upgrade every ~2-3 years, otherwise they will start to feel the lag.
> does using an iPhone today feel significantly faster than one from 2-3 years ago?
Yes. Absolutely. We just forget that opening an app--or restarting the device, or recovering from airplane mode--was an action that incurred a noticeable delay once and does not tend to anymore.
> an iPhone 12 mini daily-driver who also owns a 15 Pro Max (which I use exclusively to shoot video), I have to disagree
Out of curiosity, where? I went from the 12 something to the 15 Pro and the speed in connecting to networks and rendering pages was memorable. Now I don't notice it anymore; the old phone is just slow.
In fairness I'm not a heavy iPhone user. Hence still having a 12 mini. It's rare (~never) that I'm 'browsing the web' on it. If I'm in Safari it's for some functional reason and I'm in and out.
Still, I can't say I've ever thought, jeez, this thing is slow to render a page.
> the speed in connecting to networks
I'm not even sure what you mean. Connecting to 4G? a) mine's practically instant and b) how often are you doing this?!
(Not being snarky there. Genuinely don't understand how this is a thing someone would notice. But you may have a different use-case to me.)
I have come to the same conclusion, users like you just don't percive it.
I see a lot of "this 200€ phone is as good as the 1000€ one"
Sister, i would kill someone to not have to use Google maps on a phone 10% slower.
In 2020 i returned my samsung A7 (decent phone for the era) because i just couldn't support how laggy it was. Thst phone was better than most phones around me but i felt the slowness. (ended up with a Huawei mate 20 pro)
Mostly that's because RAM has increased enough to let the OS do things while multiple apps stay resident. Phones from 5 years ago were still handheld supercomputers, just hobbled by limited memory and code bloat.
Is opening an app on an iPhone 13 actually noticeably slow? What you're saying is true if you go back to a distant enough horizon, of course, but... 2-3 years? I don't really see it.
I'm on the other side of the fence, and just replaced a Pixel 7 with a 9. And quite frankly I bought it because I was Supposed To. I'm sure there are benchmarks to say otherwise, but routine use is basically instant on both and absent a professional desire I quite frankly would have just waited until I broke it.
> Completely wrong. As an iPhone 12 User there is 0 perceived difference to iPhone 15 in day to day usage performance
This obviously revolves around what one perceives. Data speeds on mobile are objectively faster on their newer devices [1]. But we normalise those speeds without needing additional cruft; waiting for a page to load just ceases to be a thing one notices except when it doesn't work.
Speed is both an objective metric and a user perception, which is a very subjective thing.
I’ve done performance tuning long enough to develop some rules of thumb:
Just about everyone will detect a 3x performance difference if told about it. (5x even if they’re not told.)
Only gamers and some IT pros will notice a 50% difference.
Nobody will notice 20% or less.
Anything under 10% is hard to even measure.
One career trick is that if you have three changes that provide a 20% boost each, release them at the same time instead of trickling them out one at a time. Sure, this is more risky for the company but is great at review time because otherwise your contributions would go unnoticed. Unethical? Maybe, but this is the incentive structure. Hate the game, not the player.
I would love to take a few people who claim to notice the speed differences and have them do the Pepsi Challenge to prove it. Get iPhones from the past 8 years, put them in big cases that only show the display and hide which vintage they are, and ask people to see if they can guess which phone is which, or rank them in order by year. I bet most people, including the self-professed experts, can't.
The 120 Hz displays are very noticeable when side-by-side. For example, my iPhone switches to 60 Hz on low power mode and it suddenly feels like it's a fast slideshow instead of "smooth".
There is also an adaptation factor: Good performance is only noticeable in contrast to poor performance. You get used to it very fast and stop noticing, unless you go back to the old system which suddenly feels "broken", even though you may have considered it perfectly acceptable before.
But the relevant part here is user delay /overall latency, not some intermediate measure like download speed, which is missing from the link
For example, if the first visible paragraphs takes the same time to show up, but the rest of the page is slower (but still not slow enough to be visible even if the user starts to scroll right away), then there is objectively 0 improvement on user interaction
As an iPhone 12 user, I'm getting sick of the limited memory in this device. It's difficult to leave an app for more than a few seconds without the memory manager purging it.
>Tell me, does using an iPhone today feel significantly faster than the top model 2-3 years ago or even 10 years ago?
You are on a platform where 99% of comments at one point were suggesting VSCode is fast enough or feels as fast as Sublime when it first launched, i.e before a lot of optimisation.
There are a lot of people just dont feel the difference or simply dont care about that tiny difference. And for someone like me who is latency sensitive, it bothers me a lot.
I've noticed overall improvements in responsiveness as well as the number of apps that can stay in memory without some getting evicted, though the latter is most noticeable when using smaller indie sorts of apps (think Ivory for Mastodon, Narwhal for Reddit, etc) which are on average built more efficiently and aren't dragging around a metric ton of tracking garbage.
This is what I notice as the only frustration with my 12 mini.
A lot of apps don't handle state changes to background well, especially social media apps where there's no reason to cache what content you were viewing.
The camera app is usually the culprit for things getting sent to the background for me.
Eh, iPhones are pretty fast. I think a lot of older model just need a battery replacement. I was using an iPhone 6S until last year and it was certainly slower than the latest models, but not dramatically so. The bigger difference was the camera quality which has improved dramatically in 7 years.
> You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn't notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn't know they even exist.
there's no manual to read. apple does not inform you in any way. finding out new features is by word of mouth.
so annoying.
i should not have to discover features on my very expensive phone by random chance via watching a tiktok video!
Indeed. A typical major iOS version has hundreds of new features.
New iOS features are typically announced at the WWDC event. Which is a developer event that surely no normie watches. But even if they did, it's still a summary featuring like 5% of new features.
Normies may not know or suddenly discover features introduced a decade ago.
When you sell phones to most of the population, it’s not only about the need of average users, but about the needs of everyone.
You live close to another country and switch languages all the time? (Very normal in many places in the world) well, then you’re happy translating photos or copying text on them work without cell coverage.
You have some disabilities and can’t see much anymore? Local AI can describe what your phone sees, ans help you navigate places more easily.
You like photography, but your neck hurts because you carry that DSLR everywhere? Better cameras on your phone mean more people stop carrying those.
When you sell to everyone, a niche feature for some is a crucial feature for others. It’s no longer about averages.
I've been in tech for 35+ years. I've built CPU architectures, I can write device drivers, I can layout an 8 layer PCB, I can design an RF power amplifier.
I like the iPhone because it is easier to use than Android. My iPhone 4 was perfect. I'd still be using it if they haven't deprecated the OS and the battery died.
I have exactly 6 non-apple Apps on my current phone.
I want FEWER features. Integrated it or hide it. Don't make me have to learn about a new button, or switch, or setting or some magical tweak to use the basic features. If enthusiasts want to sniff and twiddle every last setting, go for it: give them dozens of settings until they burst. Just bury those settings away from me, or better yet: have a pro-mode setting that fills the GUI with all these features.
I want something easy to use with as few knobs as possible, and the ability to factory reset every app in case I screw up and accidentally flip some esoteric setting.
All of my college buddies and age-equivalent work peers (mid/late 50s) feel exactly the same way.
I think there's massive divide between people who just want a basic device vs (particularly kids) for whom iPhone is primary device.
Mixing them together is probably healthy to each other, but definitely annoying both.
Quick story - me and my partner were confused why none of the pics you take appear in the gallery. Turns out she filtered to show Shared Photos only...
You and I both want the phonepliance, I work in tech on highly complex distributed systems, and I use an iPhone because its an appliance, it works, I dont need or want to hack my phone, I just want a phone that works.
I just bought my first iPad, going on a work trip next week, gonna give it a whirl, and try that out.
The problem with smartphones is that we are all, with few exceptions "normies". I dropped the ball on smartphones, my last one is a $300 Samsung that is actually quite decent for all I use it for.
It doesn't take the best pictures but it is not a blurry mess either, more than enough to complement my terrible skills as a photographer, and by that I mean the skill of pointing the camera in the right direction, not that of fiddling with the settings.
It doesn't run "heavy" apps, like 3D games, but I don't play these on my phone, the controls and small screen are not great. So I don't need that massive computing power. In fact, I only need these gigabytes of RAM because of how terribly bloated mobile apps have become.
And the worst part is that I can't even use my phone as a general purpose computer. Despite being the more open of the two platforms, Android is so locked down that I can't have fun with the hardware and still use it as a daily driver.
A smartphone is like a game console, like the Nintendo Switch. The Switch is an underpowered device by today's standards, but who cares about the hardware, its only value is the games it plays, and Nintendo makes damn good games in that power budget, making it a damn good console. Same idea for smartphones, they are defined by the apps they run, and the apps I want to run run on low end smartphones, so why buy an expensive phone For real work, I use a PC, with a large screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and an OS with a usable filesystem, that PC, while decent, is actually cheaper than a flagship phone.
And yes, the camera, pretty much the only thing worth getting expensive phones for for most people, but still, there are limits to what these tiny sensors can do. And as I said before, we have already passed to point where for most people the real improvement can only come from the one taking the picture.
Not only when the battery runs bad. That can be renewed (sometimes, my 1st gen SE from the last batch runs the second battery pack, probably the last batch of batteries available).
Also when you are forced by apps you need that want the newest hardware by some reason. I mean when most of them, because some could be missed for a while, but when most you use are just refuse to work, then it is time to get a new one.
Not like you need the new app, it is the same like with the iPhone 'features' you mention, but when your bank app cannot connect the bank when it is the newest version minus 2, then it becomes a nuisance.
Not like I am afraid of tech, I have cool interconnected home appliances built from raspberrys and make my living on developing desktop tools, but the rampage of the mobile industry is just too much to handle. It does not worth the money and time they demand, getting in the way of my life as much as helping it. By now. It was better but getting worse as we speak.
I'm still using a phone that's only a few years old and maxes out at 4G. Lately it's started sporadically losing connection entirely in locations where it previously worked perfectly... meanwhile everyone around me has a five bar 5G signal on their newer models. They've started to do to 4G what they did to E, H and 3G, complete bandwidth reduction to fuckin zero so the latest protocol can hog all frequencies. Planned obsolescence or what? Upgrade or we will slowly reduce your device to a useless brick.
> Making everyone switch every 8-9 years is reasonable.
Not for the users, no!
Who the f cares what G is that if it does what is needed? Replacing is only reasonable for those who want to push through new things (to sell, keep themselves in their position, be paid). Technical barriers have overcome creatively in countless situations in history and we do not need ever increasing bandwith after a satisfactory level reached. Using old spectrums scarcely used should be possible in alternative manner but not f up the life of customers who pay for the whole thing if can be avoided!!
Customers have spoken and said the speed isn't satisfactory yet. And very few of them have complaints about this advancement rate. You have been outvoted.
4G and 5G can share to a good extent but it's not worth making every tower do both.
> we do not need ever increasing bandwith after a satisfactory level reached
Who says 4G was satisfactory for even the majority of customers? It wasn't satisfactory to me. Sure, useable, but there were (and still are) a number of things that aren't reliable enough that I'd like to do with the wireless networks available today.
You only feel conflicted about this because (I assume) you lived through the phase where smart phones were changing every year and the updates from one phone to the next were regularly pretty ground breaking. People who lived through that era were conditioned to feel that every generation was a massive leap forward and that you were missing out on cool things if you didn't upgrade every year.
That's not the case anymore, but it's a hard feeling to shake, especially when companies are still trying to convince us that it's true because it benefits their top line. The truth is that smart phones are just small computers at this point. Most people don't feel conflicted about not buying a new computer every year and you shouldn't feel that way about smart phones.
At this point the only people who need (I use that term very loosely) a new smart phone every single year are people who see having the most recent version as a status symbol.
Adding features to smartphones for the last few generations is akin to more buttons in the MS Office ribbon/menu. Or any other commoditized product that adds gimmick features.
Its compelling in the sense that these organizations feel compelled to continually release things. No other real reason exists. You could probably classify much of product development for smartphones as bullshit jobs at this point. They are as useful to society as someone adding features to an ERP system.
I am professional android developer for more than 10 years. And even i dont care about the features anymore. Outside my work i just want good battery life and big screen. I have iphone 12 and dont plan to upgrade until it stops working. Probably professional exhaustion. But i honestly care about the newest buzz.
My daily is an iPhone 12 Pro and I work on bleeding edge tech daily. I don't need to upgrade. It works fine. Had to replace it when it had a battery problem. There are no features I need from the newer models.
Man I work in IT as a developer and I have absolutely no clue what most of my devices (can) do, and truth to be told I couldn't care less, because if I need something I find out how to do it.
My main phone is a 2019 Xiaomi midrange phone, and I just can't tell how's the Iphone 14 I use to test our apps should be better, and I played with it some.
I read the economist, hackernews watch some YouTube, play chess and occasionally use messaging apps or check banking stuff.
I couldn't care less about editing photos on a phone nor mobile gaming.
I know I live in a bubble, but I don't see users around me do much more than I do with the phone.
It's not like these products are bad, and I think that people that live on their phone will benefit from all of this. But I'm just not one of them.
You are already spending $800 for the 16; the 16 Pro is $200 more and you get better camera, better battery life, and slightly bigger screen. It is a tempting proposition if you want the new tech. If you don't care about latest/greatest get the SE at 1/2 the price.
This is apples strategy across the whole of their product portfolio.
Make a cheaper crippled base device, and a model with higher specs just within reach of that price so that most people will upgrade because 'why not?'.
If they just made the base model have half decent specs, a lot less people would upgrade to the higher end models.
> It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models "boring".
The church of American consumerism is so galling to me. This is a trillion dollar corporation that famously involves itself in tax schemes to avoid paying the face value rate that any other smaller corporation would have to pay.
You feel "ungrateful" or "cynical" because they aren't innovating?
A more optimistic reading of that sentence is that OP respects the accomplishments the engineers were able to make, but they aren’t impressed. I tend to agree with your sentiment, but reading the whole original post in context does not give me the same take away that you got :)
Same here… I understand the advances and even like reading about them, but in the end I don’t care about having them- the phones are mature tech that still do the same thing.
The annoying thing is that somehow they manage to make it so the same apps doing the same thing either get too slow or stop working over time, so you have to upgrade to get the same functionality. I usually keep a device until it cannot do something I need that it could do just fine the day before….
There’s also the security update thing but I think that is overblown. Ironically, if you have a very old device it ages out of being targeted for attacks. I have never had a very old device get compromised.
I'm waiting for 10X optical. There are times where I borrow my wifes s21 Ultra to get a shot i just can't on iphone. Everything else isn't really needed. I haven't even upgraded to iOS17 on my 13. I also have a 14 Pro Max as my gamer but hate the island so i'm sticking to my 13 Pro as daily driver at least 1-2 more years.
>The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I'll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.
>She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.
I recently had a similar realization. Last year I finally bit the bullet and decided to build out a decent 'home office' setup. I have a tendency to research something to death before I make a purchase. I read all about monitor resolution, viewing distance, field of view and viewing angle. I had multiple different calculators. I measured my typical sitting / viewing distance down to a fraction of an inch.
After doing all this, I initially thought surely, I needed a 32" 4k 144hz screen. Nothing else would do. Then at the last second after reading up on fractional scaling issues with linux, I decided on a 27" 1440p screen. It's fine.
It turns out I am not the discerning conesour of pixels I thought I was. Yes, I can see them if I look hard enough, but I don't really care. I should have known. The most productive I have ever been as a dev was as a teen coding away on a 800x600 crt!
Maybe I'll eventually get a 4k screen if I upgrade to a 5090 or whatever, but I have found that buying n-1 off the bleeding edge is the absolute sweet spot when it comes to capability.
I came to a similar realization when I had to go back to a non retina macbook a couple years ago (after using retina). Other than the larger display scaling you really can’t tell or see the pixels at the distance you would comfortably use a laptop. Same thing with my TV. Its 1080p and I can’t see the pixels. I’d have to spend hundreds upgrading my tv and xbox to 4k and for what? It wouldn’t look any better 10 feet away on the couch.
I'm probably as techie as they get, but I'm 100% with your girlfriend. I don't care. The smartphone industry has not delivered anything truly novel in a decade or more, it's been endless fussing about notch vs no notch, which slightly-different form factor is back in fashion, etc. And on a lot of fronts has made things worse - bloated many-GB apps, ads, spyware, attention sucking practices of all kinds, poorly policed and overloaded app stores, etc.
They have overloaded the buttons and swipe actions so much that it is impossible for most people to remember (or discover) a bunch of features. Zero points on usability and user-centered design.
The ONLY reason I stick with iPhone is Apple's approach to policing privacy and security. Other than that, it was done for me a few generations ago (maybe iPhone 4-ish). I have a 15 now, only because my iPhone 4 started to get weird. I can't see upgrading until iPhone 20 ore beyond.
If Microsoft got their heads out of their behinds and came out with a next-generation MS Phone (please don't call is Windows Phone) with true deep integration with desktop Windows as well as the security and privacy features, I would jump over in a microsecond. Sadly, they it seems they never understood this value proposition.
There a few simple things. iPhone has broken listening to music and they simply refuse to fix it. Own a large CD library that I have fully digitized into Windows Media Player. I can listen to an album as an album, from start to finish, in order, without doing anything special. Pink Floyd? Bach? Mozart? Just select the record play it as it was written. I can't do that on an iPhone. Or, at least, I have not been able to do it for multiple generations of iOS. To the point where I gave up and have not checked if anything has changed in a while. They model is selling you songs. Which is fine of one hit wonders. I get it. However, Mozart's Requiem isn't something that you should listen to or experience in "shuffle" mode or as songs.
Apple is engaging in feature-bloat to protect the $1000 price point. That's all that's going on here.
Phones (particularly iPhones0 have stubbornly resisted getting cheaper. That's by design. Features get added simply to make it more expensive.
We saw this with the Macbooks about a decade ago. The Macbook Air was fantastic because it was cheap. For Apple it was too cheap. So we got Touch bar. Did it solve any user problems? No. I know a few will say they like it but it was a dismal failure.
The only reason the Touch Bar existed was to make Macbooks more expensive.
I have been frustrated with subsequent iOS updates because it gets less and less intuitive. Even Safari has a lot of touch points on the screen that do stuff I don't care about. On the iPad there's now split screen. I bet you've triggered this acccidentally or had to solve this for a friend or relative who had. We replaced private browsing mode with "tab groups". Does anyone actually need this? If you don't (and I would posit that's most people) then it's now an extra tap to switch modes.
Cut and paste just seems to get worse and worse. It tries to be cleve by selecting a word. It can be difficult and involve several taps to get around this. The original implementation of this was (IMHO) far superior and more intuitive.
Ridiculous, iPhones are getting cheaper all the time. Yesterday a base model iPhone 15 was $799, today it's $699. In 2022 a base model iPhone 14 was also $799, today that same phone is $599. Sure today the iPhone 15 is no longer the top of the line model, but that phone is absolutely cheaper today than it was yesterday, and if it was good enough at that price yesterday, there's no reason it's not good enough at a cheaper price today. Either the new features are compelling additions that make it worth spending more money on or they're added "simply to make it more expensive", in which case the 15 is right there, 12.5% cheaper today than it was 24 hours ago.
> The Macbook Air was fantastic because it was cheap. For Apple it was too cheap. So we got Touch bar. Did it solve any user problems?
Do you remember the same Macbook Air I do? The first one was $1,799 retail, and probably the biggest complaint in reviews was that it was too expensive for what it was. The MBA didn't drop below $1000 until 4 revisions later with the introduction of the 11 inch model. In 2014 that dropped to $899 for the 11 inch model. The cheapest the 13 inch model ever got was $999 for the last intel and the first M1 model. Today it's $1099, hardly a change from the "too cheap" $999 of its heyday. Also to the best of my knowledge, no MBAs shipped with a touch bar.
> Today it's $1099, hardly a change from the "too cheap" $999 of its heyday.
It's cheaper if you consider inflation. $999 in 2020 dollars is about $1,210 today.
The original iPhone was $499 in 2007; around $750 today. The iPhone 16 starts at $799, so it's a bit more expensive in adjusted dollars. It's also enormously better, of course.
You would really do yourself a favor if you weren't so combative, aggressive and overly pedantic.
> iPhones are getting heaper all the time. Yesterday a base model iPhone 15 was $799, today it's $699.
Last year's model. It's going to have a year less life in terms of software support too. It should be $100 less. Probably more. You are (probably intentionally) missing the point.
> Do you remember the same Macbook Air I do?
The very first one in 2008 was a POS. The good one was released in 2010-2011, which simply needed a newer screen in later models but Apple pushed the POS 12" Macbook instead, because the 2010-2014 (2015?) MBA was simply too cheap (for Apple) to be interested in.
> Also to the best of my knowledge, no MBAs shipped with a touch bar.
MBPs shipped with a Touch Bar. Stop being overly pedantic. That's actually the point. They killed the old MBA form factor and replaced it with one they could charge more for. The 12" Macbook wasn't a replacement (too many compromises like only one port). They eventually had to bring the MBA back because it was such a good compromise between price, power, size and weight.
Doesn't matter, your argument was that the new features of the current year model are "added simply to make it more expensive." If that's true, the fact that its "last year's model" shouldn't make a difference to you. You wanted the phone to get cheaper, it did.
> You are (probably intentionally) missing the point.
Realistically if I'm missing it, it's because your point is obtuse. You seem to be complaining simultaneously that iPhones never get cheaper, but also you want them to get cheaper without any of the attendant things that make technology cheaper (like older technology or potentially less support lifetimes). The iPhone 15 bought today has exactly the same support lifetime as an iPhone 15 bought yesterday. But for some reason the fact that a new iPhone model was released today means for you that the 15 did not in fact get cheaper over the last 24 hours.
> The good one was released in 2010-2011, which simply needed a newer screen in later models but Apple pushed the POS 12" Macbook instead, because the 2010-2014 (2015?) MBA was simply too cheap (for Apple) to be interested in.
>They killed the old MBA form factor and replaced it with one they could charge more for.
I really have no idea what you're talking about. The Macbook Air received annual refreshes every year except once in 2016. The 12 inch Macbook was released in April 2015, one month AFTER the 2015 MBA refresh. That 2015 Macbook which did come with a "retina" display retailed for $1299, the 2015 13 inch MBA retailed for $999. The MBA was never "killed", its form factor was never retired.
I think what you're trying to say is that the missed 2016 update and the fact that it took to 2018 for the MBA to see a retina screen is some attempt by Apple to not have low price point laptops. The problem with that interpretation from my point of view is:
1) Apple continued to sell the MBA the entire time, compare to the Macbook moniker which was discontinued from 2011 until the 2015 model because they did supplant it with the MBP 13 inch instead
2) Apple released the 2015 MBA literally a month before the 2015 Macbook, if the goal was to replace the MBA, it would have been simpler to not release the same model year MBA for folks to compare against
3) The 2015 Macbook used the Intel M series processors, compared to the Core series in the MBA at the time. The M series allowed producing a computer in the MBA form factor that didn't have fans (something they couldn't make work in the MBA with the Core series chips until the last revision before the M1 MBA.
To me that time period reads as Apple trying to make a MBA form factor machine that could run fanless and cooler, potentially by using a different chip set from Intel, but they were unsure if customers would accept the tradeoffs required to make that work. Certainly if the goal was just "more expensive" computers, Apple could have just raised the price of the MBA, which they did in 2018 with the retina model ($1199), before subsequently dropping the price each year after, until we'd hit the lowest base MBA price of $799 in 2020.
None of that really suggest to me a company that is "engaging in feature-bloat to protect [a] price point" or thought the MBA "was too cheap". If cost was the driver, if "The only reason the Touch Bar existed was to make Macbooks more expensive", then why did Apple lower the prices on the MBA after raising them with the switch to Retina? Why release the 2015 MBA at all? Why do a refresh in 2017? Sure you might say "because their customers weren't buying the 2015 Macbook" but why bother with that at all? They could have just raised the prices along with a processor bump. They could have discontinued the MBA all together and the customer's would have been forced to choose between the 2015 MB and the MBPs, which were even more expensive. Why go back to a price point you claim they had no interest in serving and why continue to this day to come in at a mere $100 over that price point when the Apple M series chips would have been the perfect excuse to simply jack all the prices up and never look back?
I haven't had a Mac with touch bar but I can see the point of the idea:
You have a keyboard and mouse as inputs to a Mac. why not a mini touch screen as well? but instead of rendering the app content there you render the controls. this way you don't need to remember shortcuts because common actions for an app are displayed there.
IMO the idea makes sense but needs further refinement in execution. maybe even better haptic feedback
This ignores the issue that physical keys have tacticle feedback that touch screens do not.
This is a big issue with modern cars (particularly Teslas). People generally hate touch screens because you have to look at them to use them. For driving in particular, that's a real problem. Compare this to a more normal car where you can feel the AC button or the volume or whatever.
Companies like touch screens because it lets them punt on UI/UX design and selecting controls, which means they basically never get done. It's purely a cost issue.
Now with Macbooks, I did like that I could slide my finger for the volume. That's it. And that wasn't worth losing the Escape key for. Or function keys for that matter.
But that's so specific that I'd rather just have a volume control. A slider would be ideal but that takes up a lot of space. The best compromise is a "roller" (like on the Corsair K70 keyboard) as you can get precision and speed. You absolutely don't want to repeatedly hit a volume up or down button.
I agree that the top row on a macbook keyboard shouldn't be replaced because some of the keys are essential there.
I'm imagining a touch screen right next to the trackpad that displays the short cuts to common functions of the current app that's open.
For example, I don't mind having common controls of, say Google sheets or Photoshop near the keyboard. Maybe the trackpad could be that touchscreen. idk but I feel there's something to explore in this space.
Or alternatively, individual keys on a keyboard can be LCD screens and show you app specific controls. this way you get the haptic feedback too.
So basically a stream deck. Those things are pretty tempting, I must admit. When similar functions are shrunk down and integrated into regular keyboards, my wallet will be in trouble.
Although this reminds me, my old Logitech G15 from 2008 already had an LCD screen and a bunch of app-customisable buttons.
I have huge hands. This phone is too big for them.
My second biggest complaint is that the 5g modem eats an insane amount of battery when it has weak single (20% in 10 minutes. I set an automation to force airplane mode.)
My third complaint is that the se3 is missing the UWB radio (and I actually use it!), so when this phone dies, I’ll need to get a refurbished phone.
My typical budget for a phone refresh is $1000, but apparently my money isn’t good enough these days.
you might have better luck with battery life if you switch voice and data to "5G auto" instead of "5G on" in cellular options which chooses to only use 5g only when needed for performance to optimize battery life.
I don't really see these upgrades as being for iPhone 15 users. If you smash your phone or whatever, you get this years model and it's mostly like last year's model except it's not samashed.
I upgraded from the X to the 15 Pro Max and it was a nice improvement. Much better camera. Much speedier. Better wireless charging. USB-C. I wouldn't upgrade to the 16, though; looking at the comparison chart, pretty much nothing changes. It can charge faster and record better 4K video. I have no complaints about charging speed and don't know what Dolby Pro Motion even is.
When the iPhone 20 comes out, I'm sure I'll be tempted to upgrade. Every 5 years is a totally reasonable upgrade cycle, and enough stuff changes that it feels worthwhile. So for that reason, I don't view the yearly announcements as being anything relevant unless you need a new phone today for some reason. (Though I was in the Apple Store last weekend and saw people happily buying full-price 15s, not knowing Apple's release schedule. That's a shame for them.)
> She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED
There are no LCDs in current lineup, I think.
> nor would she notice Pro-motion
This is kind of like "no one notices reduced air pollution". Yeah, but some people actually notice and even for those who don't it is a quality of life improver.
> All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest
Then she didn't need the Pro version or even iPhone 16 at all. I have a friend who does photo/video as hobby and photos he takes are mega cool. He will benefit from pro camera. Another friend does commercial video and only shoots on iPhone. He will benefit from pro video capabilities. Most people will not benefit from a pro. By definition. That's why it's pro.
> It's becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies
Is that a problem? I use iPhone 11. It works. I don't feel like I need the 16 or the pro. What's wrong with not having to buy latest devices if they are built to last?
I think people absolutely notice new screens and scrolling, but the thing is with their current setup they have accepted the conditions. It's one of those things when you've tried the new thing, you don't want to go back to the old thing because scrolling will seem laggy, and screen will seem bad. So it's not necessarily that you need it, but once you have it, you can't go back.
I think people don't actively notice most of these things. But they sure as hell notice when you take them away after. A good example of this is ProMotion. People don't notice high refresh rate when they first get a Pro. but they do notice when you use it for a few weeks and then go back to 60hz. Same for a lot of other things.
> She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.
Most people do notice a difference there, maybe not instantly with a few second glance, but using one over another is definitely visible. I do think it is not a reason to upgrade for most people.
I consider myself quite technical, and I also upgrade fairly rarely - with 14 Pro I will either wait for next year or the year after that.
I think there is a main point people usually forget - new phones are not for people who have bought an iPhone in the last few years, rather than people who have 5-6 year old phones, Android users, new people coming into smartphone market. That market is huge and the differences for those people is definitely perceivable. With non-pro version having a lot of the features from a pro version from the years before, it is a great time to buy the latest phone.
I'm probably a lot like your girlfriend, and I've been in tech for 40+ years. I'm still very active in tech, but I got over being interested in smartphones after my 3rd one, and I was a very early adopter. My needs were satisfied a long time ago. If I have internet access, and can remote into any of my other dozens of machines, the phone has satisfied most of its purpose for me - allowing me to access all of my computing stuff while away from my main computers. Oh, I also take the occasional call on the phone, but that's very, very rare.
The biggest upgrade for me in the last 19 years is the fold-able phone with a much larger screen area. But honestly, the old HTC Wizard that I started with does 80% of what I need a mobile device to do.
I don't need or want AI following me around, especially not in my mobile device.
I can understand and relate to this perfectly. In the past, I used an iPhone 11 or 12. At some point, I got fed up of the issues around FaceID with face mask and/or glasses. I switched to an older iPhone SE with a fingerprint button.
The switch didn't feel like a downgrade at all. I didn't miss any of the new fancy features. The only real downside that I ever noticed is the camera, which doesn't have night mode.
The thing about infinite growth, is that at some point things are "good enough" for users, and they have no reason to upgrade. So companies have to create problems to force them to upgrade, like device locking down the device and not offering new software support, or preventing users from swapping batteries.
The joke I want to make is they make phones that are as fragile as glass and that's why people replace them so often... but they actually make phones out of glass that are stupidly fragile. It's equally stupid that you have to buy this thing and put a protective case on it that increases it's size x%.
Why is the back of my phone glass. Why does the front of my phone have 0 protection from the glass hitting whatever it is dropped on?
This has to be on purpose. Or maybe in an opposite direction, their stock would likely drop a considerable amount if they made a phone you could drop on concrete with only minor blemishes.
I have been using the iPhone without a case since the iPhone 6. I think the fragility of iPhone displays is incredibly overblown. The idea that Apple is purposefully making the displays "weak" is unfounded.
People buy cases because they feel their $1,000 slab of metal must be protected.
Hit concrete in the right corner on an iPhone and it will break.
For me, it's just not worth it. Had iPhones break while on trips and it's just an absolute hassle dealing with replacements, especially when there aren't Apple stores for hours, while I can just put on a protector and done.
(Plus I think a clear case looks really nice and brings a retro Casio vibe.)
The iPhone is not fragile. It's astonishing how sturdy it is. Even without a case you can drop it on concrete and most of the time you get nothing more than a scuff. With a case a phone can take an absurd amount of abuse. Many people don't even bother with a case anymore. I suspect people would be a lot more careful with their iPhone if they shared your opinion.
I use a slim Spigen case, because I find the naked iPhone is too slippery to handle safely. And I don’t have to worry about laying the phone down on its face.
You just reminded me my favorite fit and finish was the Essential PH1, titanium edge, ceramic back, felt twice as luxurious as anything I'd held previously
Diamond and ceramic are however more prone to shattering. Sapphire like they use for the camera lenses and watch face might be ideal.
Contrarian opinion on the AirPods. Apple says that they think the new noise cancellation "auto adjust" is better on the "human" side of things, and the social - they showed an interaction where the barista started talking to the wearer, and the AirPods adjusted so the barista could be heard.
To me, that's not social, I think it's actually anti-social. It moves the onus onto anyone who wants to or needs to interact with you to assume that you can hear them, that you're focused on the conversation, etc.
It really wouldn't kill you to remove an airpod (or any headphone) if you are in public initiating interactions with someone, for just a few moments.
> It really wouldn't kill you to remove an airpod (or any headphone) if you are in public initiating interactions with someone, for just a few moments.
Actually, I've found this creates more social friction, not less. I spent a while listening to some books while working, and originally had noise canceling turned on. Every time someone came over to talk about something, whether I paused and turned noise canceling off or removed the ear pieces, there was always an awkward moment for the person talking to me while they had to stop what they were starting to say, wait for me and then usually apologize for interrupting. It felt extremely anti-social, and I think a part of that is that headphones were for a very long time considered anti-social and the act of removing them was often a signal that someone was interrupting you (and that you didn't really want to be interrupted). But when you're using headphones in a shared space, it's usually less about not wanting to be interrupted and more being considerate that not everyone wants to listen to the same things you're listening to.
Eventually I left them in transparency mode and kept the volume low enough that I could carry on a conversation over it, and could subtly reduce the volume while still holding a conversation. No more awkward pausing and restarting, no more apologies and the "hardest" thing I have to do is maybe rewind a bit after I'm done with the conversation. So much less anti-social feeling all around.
I was doing retail work around COVID and there were many many people who didn't have the decency to hold phone calls while checking out let alone taking off headphones.
> It really wouldn't kill you to remove an airpod (or any headphone) if you are in public initiating interactions with someone, for just a few moments.
you can just do this. but sometimes your hands are full, or you dont have use of them, or you dont want to drop your airpod.
This is a massive pet peeve of mine. When the f** did it become socially acceptable to wear earbuds when interacting with someone? At least with wired buds or headphones its obvious that you're being an anti-social prick when talking to me, but now you have these hidden things that seem to be in everyones ears always.
And dont even get me started on the robots that are talking into the void when out in public. I have no idea if they are trying to talk to me or on a phone call because their airpods are hidden.
> You can add a million features to the camera app
there was a huge jump in the quality of my photos when I upgraded to an iPhone 13 (my current) from an iPhone 8. I've seen iPhone 15 photos and they're even better. And I'm not a pro photographer.
I’m with you. My wife is a bit like this but she actually cares for the new features just doesn’t bother to actively look for them. When they showed of all the ways the camera button works I thought: “No normal user will use this to change settings / zoom”. The main usage I see will be: open the camera app. And maybe, maybe take a photo.
I’ve been on vacation and used my Apple Watch as a remote for the camera for a group photo. People looked at me as I came down from mars.
And it’s not like Apple tries to sell these features. I think their videos and ads are on of the best. I mean they managed to teach pinch and zoom in an ad :)
Im there with you, my wife as well as myself are in fact like your girlfriend and I work an highly educated software engineering role. I simply don’t care, still on my iPhone 11
Pro Max which I got as a present from my parents at the time.
I think battery power drain is even not fast enough for phone companies to sustain the selling
Model. My guess is sooner or later they realize the real control point is software updates and they forcefully shorten OS and specially OS security updates under a bullshit reason they still can get away with to get us all back in line of buying regular phone upgrades in fear of hacked internet banking.
> sooner or later they realize the real control point is software updates
That's why I'm in the market for an iphone (and a new service provider), my pixel 5a5g got its final "guaranteed" security update in August. Nothing wrong with the device. Time to de-google I guess..
Its like wine. I can tell the difference between a $4 bottle of wine and a $14 bottle of wine, but I couldn't tell the difference between a $14 bottle of wine and a $140 bottle of wine if my life depended on it.
I also like wine, but it’s rare that I’ve had a $140 bottle of wine that wasn’t actually a $30 bottle, but I was at a restaurant. It is real easy to be underwhelmed by a $30 bottle.
I’d also put a bottle of Trader Joe’s 2 buck chuck ($4 cab) up against 75% of the $30 bottles and I bet in a blind taste test it would win.
That isn’t to say that people’s taste buds don’t work. I’ve spent a bit of time tasting wine essentially blind (to price) at vineyards, brought that same wine home and been underwhelmed again… I learned that even 30min in a hot car trunk (140F) can change wine. The wine I tasted from the storage cave that was great, sucks when I got it home. I actually tested after I got it home and saw this.
I think a lot of the “wine flavors being mysterious and psychosomatic” is actually poor storage. I know Reddit disagrees with me, but now that I climate control my wine when I bring it home, I haven’t had the same issues.
This is a fact for beer (hoppy beer specifically) that is well known and pasted all over the Russian River Pliny the elder label. I believe it’s a fact for wine as well. Because I’ve had a couple $100 bottles that were stored well, and the memory of that taste is still with me. I want to find a way to repeat it. (Without spending $100 for a bottle)
> even works in IT, although not in an engineering role.
What an accurate profile! I work in an engineering role in IT, and I'm like your girlfriend when it comes to the phone. Like, I don't even know whether my iphone is max or max pro, as it does not make a difference to me. The top apps that I use are Kindle, Books, Chrome (for tracking my progress on dreamingspanish.com), Podcast, Spotify, Maps, and as everyone else: some social/messaging apps. Everyone of such apps seems work just fine on a much older phone.
I feel the same way, both in the sense of not feeling most features really add value to users, but also in feeling a little ungrateful and guilty for not caring about this kind of innovation.
Recently, I've been valueing repairability more in tech that I buy and it feels like such a breath of fresh air and a bit of an antidote. Particularly, products like fairphone (a smart phone where almost every part can be replaced with a screwdriver) make me really excited, and feel like amazing innovation solving actual problems.
At the beginning of the year, I upgraded to a Galaxy S24 from an LG V35, a phone that came out in 2018.
Can my new phone do anything my old one couldn't? Sure. The telephoto lens is really helpful for my blog, and I can shoot in raw format which is also really helpful. Circle-to-search is an astonishing accomplishment.
Do I actually do anything with my S24 that I couldn't do with my V35? Not really. All the improvements are nice to have. I could still take adequate photos for my blog with my V35, even if the S24's photos are better. I think I used circle-to-search to find a Chinese candy online once.
The simple reality is that I'd still have my V35, and I'd still be perfectly happy with it, if AT&T had ever updated their shitware-riddled fork to Android 9. I was stuck on Android 8. Slack stopped supporting it, which was an inconvenience that I could work around. But, then one of my banks stopped supporting Android 8, and at that point the only reasonable solution was a new phone.
The funny thing is, the V35 is noticeably better in several ways. It's lighter and thinner. It has a 1440p display in the same footprint as the S24's 1080p display. It has a headphone jack, and a really good one at that - LG was pushing their hi-fi DAC when Samsung and Apple were dropping the feature entirely.
I'm not conflicted at all. All these normies pay top dollar for things they don't need or really want. But the advances are real. And now we have dual stacked oled with insane brightness. We have a supremely high end CPU gpu combo in the m3 Max CPU. Something I do care about.
Basically apple was able to fund enthusiast level R&D by asking people who don't care about to pay for it. Every enthusiast should be grateful.
I have flashbacks from the time first LED screens appeared. They had lower resolution and overall quality (at least for gaming) than the CRT monitors I was using. I knew it will take time before they get on a par with CRT monitors (and overtake them since that market was basically abandoned) but wondered who will pay for all this R&D? Well, everybody did. Everybody were buying crap monitors for decades and at some point these became quite decent - at least models like Apple displays for example.
I think this was really well written and insightful, but I disagree about the extent to which your girlfriend is representative (and not based on her education or anything). Most normies do notice dramatic improvements in battery life, camera quality, and screen quality. My tech-illiterate family may not know what OLED is or how it works, but they definitely prefer the OLED TV to the LCD. Similarly, they can tell a stark difference between a 5X telephoto and a 5X “digital zoom” photo or a macro photo versus an attempt to take a close-up photo without the macro lens. Similarly they will notice the improvements in low light conditions over models that are 6+ generations older. Further, the AI features (enabled by new hardware), for better or worse, will probably be a dramatic change in how people engage with their phones. I’m writing this from an iPhone 11 and I’m sure I’ll notice some stark differences if I upgraded to the 16, and I even notice big differences when I use others’ newer phones as well.
I sincerely admire your girlfriend’s penchant for simplicity, I just don’t think that represents most people IMHO.
If the only reason people buy new iPhones is that the batteries in their old iPhones go bad, why does Apple bother constantly iterating and improving them?
Competition. Once the battery has gone bad and the user has decided that they are going to get a new phone to replace it, they are going to evaluate Apple's offering against all other phones they can buy. If Apple's device doesn't look as compelling as Samsung's (or whatever), the person is apt to buy something else.
But if the battery was working as well as it did when it was new, it is unlikely that the person would have started shopping in the first place. It is the catalyst that sees them move beyond "what I've got is good enough" to "this isn't serving my needs anymore".
If there is meaningful competition in the smartphone market, and what you say about consumer preferences is true, then surely at least one competitor would make a user-replaceable battery and capture what is supposedly the vast majority of the market.
If what I say is true, the people are still apt to buy a new phone instead of a new battery. As before, once you've overcome the friction of having to buy something new, you're going to evaluate all the options.
But let's assume what the OP says is true. It is still not clear why anyone would do what you suggest? The investment required to be that player would be intense and knowing that you only have one product lifecycle to recoup it... Highly unlikely anyone is that daring. Competition sees players seek to be the winner, not the first loser.
I’m pretty sure there would be plenty of players willing to make the investment necessary to capture the majority of the iPhone market even for only a couple of years.
Apple sells around 200 million model year units at a profit of around $400 per device. That's $80 billion in potential profit, less R&D costs.
You think you can build something at least as compelling as the iPhone from the ground up for less than $80 billion? Apple is spending $30 billion on R&D a year just to improve what they already have! Good luck...
And you only get one year to capitalize on that investment, more or less. By year two, without even more investment, the competition will have you smoked with their latest offerings. You might not even get a whole year if they see you as a credible threat. Nothing says the iPhone must be released on a yearly schedule.
Agree with what you wrote. That said quality of life things such as pro motion and increase battery life are noticeable.
Scrolling at 120hz is butter smooth and improves the UX quite a lot. While battery life is peace of mind that you don't have to worry about.
What ticks me off is OpenAI integration in my private life. I really like chatGPT as a daily google box but I hate the idea of it meddling in my private information. That's a big no no.
People have not been responding to text messages or browsing their entire music library in their cars for years. Siri also doesn't have to be safer than buttons, it just has to be safer than touching your phone for it to make sense as a UX requirement.
I don't believe people have used buttons in their cars specifically to control their phones, though.
I do agree that it would be nice to know whether voice control is safer, but unfortunately I can't find any studies that compare voice vs tactile control (all I can find is studies on touch vs tactile)
If the voice control was reliable it would absolutely be safer, it's like telling your passenger to change the AC, except they don't have to move and bother you.
If the voice control is bad and you are never sure if it heard it correctly then it wouldn't be safer.
It's not just in the car. I don't want Siri enabled at all. Why should I have to enable a constant snooping device just because I wan't to connect the apps on my phone to the display in my car?
> You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn't notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn't know they even exist.
Which seems totally fine to me since those features probably don't solve any real problems that she has. It's weird to me that the tech industry has this implicit idea that every product has to get better every year and users are missing out if they don't follow along. Not all products work that way indefinitely and that approach is driven more by corporate financial reasons than by anything else.
Apple starts from a position of "How can we continually increase our sales of this product", not "How can we make the best possible product for users". There can be a lot of overlap there, but not always. The number one rule with corporate product and sales is: Number Go Up. Consumers shouldn't have any obligation to follow along though.
> ”Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.”
I am exactly like this. But I am also use it as an opportunity to upgrade the hardware.
For some time it was memory, although now I am pretty done for 256gb. I don’t need more. Recently it was the new processor+camera. I am not big into photography, but I like to take pictures. And I like them to look great, focused, even with bad light, without doing any setting myself (cause I am ignorant how to do it). Just regular picture of trips, or night with friends. I like the 2x and 0.5x zoom a lot also.
It is also nice for the new updated apps I use to run fast. My 4 yo iPhone SE not only had a bad battery, but it was very slow already.
And, occasionally, some gimmick is actually useful to me, like the notch. I turn off notifications of almost every app, including Uber and food delivery. For those the in-screen info in the notch is very useful.
I’ll probably only buy the iPhone 18 next, but it will be nice have the 5x zoom (maybe more by then) at the least.
For memory I've found that I'm much happier setting up a backup to my machines. Currently I'm on a pixel but looking to switch to iPhone. I do my backups with termux, so does anyone know a good alternative on iPhone? I see termus but it requires an account? Can I access my photos from these emulators? Just being able to have a few bash scripts really empowers these devices.
And your assertion that their business would collapse is false. You can already replace batteries through Apple and their business model hasn't collapsed. It's just not "true" enough for you so that you can end your post with a dramatic flair.
This effect has been compounding too. I used to upgrade almost every cycle but have been on 11 Pro now and haven't been motivated to upgrade until this 16. It takes the combined changes of about 4 cycles to match the level of interest in upgrading single cycles did in the first 10 years.
If I do get a 16 Pro the only thing I can even think of from an upgrade perspective that would make it last less than 5 years would be if on device inference becomes a major thing and there are huge and relevant improvements, everything else is basically mature and I can't see being motivationally better in a few years.
People bring up battery as a big thing for upgrading but with the smarter charging that has changed a lot, my 11 Pro is still at 80% max after 4+ years which isn't materially different on a day to day basis for me.
You are lucky, or have excellent battery discipline. I just had to trade my 11 for a 15, the battery life was terrible (enough to force me, knowing the 16 was imminent). Also backgrounded apps would reload almost every time I swapped, maybe I am just using memory-hungry apps though.
I would agree on say 14->15 but I find it somewhat ironic that this version contains what could be one of the biggest changes in many years; Apple Intelligence is putting local-first LLMs into the OS.
I predict that in retrospect this will be considered a watershed moment in computing.
Yes, this is the right take on future phone/assistants. We will be entering a new world of search and much better Q&A. I’m hooked in Claude on my phone and having some local mini AI help could be a game changer
Sounds like she would love the new camera control.
AI is also normie feature. A big one. Say what you will about its limitations and inadequacies but to a normie, GPT is a search engine with superpowers and an intuitive UI. Improved autocorrect and call screening, smart reply in Mail, transcripts and summaries for audio recordings in notes or from phone calls… these are all things normies will love. The technical crowd will dismiss them, afraid of inaccuracy or the model hallucinating. To a normie, it’s just the computer being helpful with everyday tasks. The only real hurdle will be how simple the UI is. Some of these features will be easy to access, while others might not be obvious.
> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.
For me it's slightly more complicated than that. I would probably still be using my 2016 iPhone SE with its headphone jack and size if (a) it was still receiving OS updates and (b) iOS bloat didn't make it slow.
Would love it if the battery swap were easy for the end user to do, but TBH paying $100 to have it done every few years is doable for me.
Better camera capability is the only other thing that even registered for me. The jump to the iphone 12 mini that I made last year did have some nice benefits on that front and got me some performance I'd lost back. Other than that, the main reason I upgraded is that I was forced to by the iOS obsolescence treadmill.
Sorry, jumping in here. I don’t think it’s so much iOS gloat as much as app gloat. Take a look at their sizes, it’s absolutely bonkers and unjustified.
App bloat really is out of control, to the point that I wonder if maybe Apple shouldn't somehow incentivize developers to minimize bundle size and resource consumption. Maybe well-crafted, efficient apps get an "eco friendly" badge and their own section of the App Store or something.
People like new and shiny things even if they don’t use any of the shiny features. There is a contingent buying new cars every decade- those people are buying iPhones every other year. Apple may not sell the most phones but they do make the most money selling phones.
I seriously wish I could just use my iPhone 3GS still. I mean, maybe with a slightly newer iOS than it supported, but otherwise, for me that was the perfect form factor, and it was such a "focused" product back then.
I'd say this goes one step further. We hand down older devices to our parents. They are completely happy with a device several generations back. The current product philosophy has completely cut them out as purchasers. They are product users, but will never purchase again.
In fact, without planned obsolescence/battery degradation I suspect they would be happy never replacing their phones until they physically broke. It's a shame that they continually slow down to such a degree - the decreased speed is actually the only Apple 'feature' they notice.
I think She will notice one thing, and that is battery life. The new OLED, new SoC, new Modem, along with slightly better battery all means that you should be getting 20-30% more battery life when all things being equal.
But what you said is true I think a lot of people would be happy with the upcoming iPhone SE, which is basically a iPhone 14 with single camera, Apple modem and A18. On the assumption that the Modem isn't too bad. ( Not too sure if it will be 8GB or 6GB memory, which could mean getting Apple intelligence support or not )
I agree largely. I have a p30 pro, and it's a great phone despite being 4 or 5 years old . It's so good, recently it got water damaged and I as faced with replacing it. I couldnt find a phone for under 500 that could beat it, and especially the 2 day battery life. So I didn't, I instead paintakingly dried it out over 3 weeks and it's pretty much fully functional. That's how much I didn't want to change phone, and how the new sparkly features don't really matter as much as battery life, and utility.
> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.
Oh yes. Switched from the iPhone X to a 13 Pro only because the battery life became unbearable.
Overall, the size/format/handling of the X was *way better*.
Even the camera was *better on the X* except in low-light pictures which I don't really care about. The difference is noticeable on 4K screens and print, pictures were truthful without complex image enhancement algorithms that you can't disable (even not in RAW). Etc.
I’m still on the X after a $90 battery swap by an Apple shop. I got tired of the small payback doing them myself - and even the iFixit batteries don’t last as long as OEM.
> Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.
The "upgrade every year" concept never made sense to me, and while I agree that a battery might be the trigger, I think a reasonable number (not all) would still upgrade every ~4-5 years.
While there's generally no single groundbreaking feature year to year, over 4-5 releases there are likely enough smaller incremental features/improvements that someone would still upgrade.
Statistics indeed show that 3-4 years is the typical time people switch their phones at, but I don’t think your reasoning is sound. You can cheaply replace the battery at any number of repair shops.
It’s simply that 3 small, incremental upgrade does make up for a more significant one in the end, though in the future it might end up 4 or 5 years instead, as the changes from generation to generation are smaller and smaller.
"Normie"? Anecdotally and fro
personal experience, I'd say the contrary: it's normies that (pushed by advertising budgets bigger than actual product development budgets) are in love with these yearly churn and ditch their Samsung S74 to buy the new and identical Samsung S75.
Tech people, on the over hand, are some of the most borderline luddite people I know (me included!)
> It's not that she's unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn't care.
Honestly that feels deep to me. I wonder to what extend all of the recent LLM advancements are lost on most people.
I also wonder if over a long enough time horizon, the "normies" as you call them catch up, or it goes the other way and the "techies" also start to not care (?)
> You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn't notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since.
Not a chance. I think she would immediately notice because the web of today is always going to be far more bloated than the web of eight generations ago.
Trying any dated browser+hardware combo on the modern web is noticeable to all users I feel.
> It's becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies.
It's not just "normies". I'm a senior engineer and I drive an 3rd gen SE. I was perfectly happy with my 2nd gen SE and only replaced it because I wanted more memory. In fact, I preferred the 2nd gen because of the square sides. The 3rd gen keeps squirting out of my hands.
I am going to have to disagree. You do not have to be a techie to appreciate beauty and enjoy an OLED screen even if you can't tell the technical difference.
There is certainly a segment where "it takes photos" is a boolean, not a scale (my mum being in that group), and they will be perfectly happy with cheap Androids.
What people notice are the folding phones. People look at mine when I unfold it in the subway and I'm convinced that a folding phone user using their unfolded phone in public is going to be a massive marketing phenomena and convert a lot of people. iPhones are not cool anymore, they're just small legacy phones.
> You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter.
Even the most lax laymen of photographer would notice the tremendous difference in photo quality between an 8 year old iPhone and today. I’d argue even from 13-15 it was a big bump, but certainly going back 8 generations.
I hope she never reads this, or you are in for a "fun" talk. Claiming your gf, who works in IT, wouldn't notice if she suddenly were set back to iOS 9, is a rather bold claim. I am sure you only feel confident writing this because you somehow suspect you aren't being watched :-)
>The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I'll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.
Children and teens drive this, not existing adults. If existing adults is how we evaluated usefulness, we’d all still be using the command line on dot matrix screens.
They have to keep adding new features because what to do otherwise? I have long lost interest of the mobile world. Battery life and some rams to run some apps are all I need.
The general customers definitely want more. They are getting excited by AI in camera apps (existed before the AI hype) and other stuffs.
True , for the matter if jsut like a privacy feature , we can turn off certain features which are not required and it can significantly maintain the battery. Yes, we do have Iphone battery power save mode but I am just curious how efficiently it can optimise battery power saving
I surprised an 18 year old, intelligent and fairly tech savvy, when I showed him the share>find on page search function in Safari. Figured everyone knew that, or at least he and his demo would. No idea how wide spread it is, anecdotal etc.
I’ve have photos on this phone (12 pro) dating back to 2012 through a series of iPhones.
The pictures they take when you press the button have gotten better and better. That’s not even considering the live photos, which are a new thing entirely.
Maybe this is the upgrade cycle it’ll flatten out, but I sort of doubt it.
I have an iPhone 11 Pro. One of the lenses is broken and it makes a weird snaring sound while recording video. Battery life is still okay at about 80% capacity. It does everything I need it to do without fail.
If it weren’t for those defects I’d keep it at least for another year.
Apple uses software updates to drive hardware sales.
There are some relatively minor iOS features that appear here and there that make me want to upgrade the OS. And one day I find myself with hardware that works for me, but I can no longer upgrade to the latest version of iOS.
There are just 5 major use-cases for this thing, and they don't change since 2008: calling, messaging, navigating, camera, note-taking. The rest of what you can do is mostly time-burning and satisfying addictions, which makes the most of the profit I guess.
That's true, tbh I totally forgot about it since I completely stopped using my phone for audio when they started removing 3.5mm jacks. Adapters don't stick for long with me, and BT headphones I just don't find too convenient.
In the end I found my 2008 walkman and it works perfectly to this day. It's built like a tank. It has a replacable 64GiB SD card just for the music. And my latest macbook can now again work with this card perfectly for syncing. No upgrades needed for 16 years.
I also don't like the concept of renting the music for listening, instead I prefer to buy it, as directly from the author as possible – so I never used Spotify or whatever.
A lot of people are like this actually, I personally know a dozen who won't even listen to digital formats, only physical copies on vinyl, cd, tape, etc. – so it's a bit of an exaggeration to say "everyone is using X"
I completely agree. I've worked in tech as a coder for 27 years and I find all the features of the iPhone annoying and inhibitive. When the settings app has 8 pages of scroll, something's gone sideways. I'm running an XS Max currently.
Faster performance per watt means fewer watts for the same performance.
That is not lost on even casual users. It’s not that they need or want a faster phone; it’s that their existing daily runtime can be in a lighter and thinner device, or a same size device can run longer.
I'm a senior front end React dev and I also don't care about most of the features on my phone. Notes, email, phone, text, maps and my bank. Other than that, I don't care much about other features on my phone.
There aren't major innovations in chairs or mugs that make you throw out your whole collection every few years. Smartphones are just becoming a commodity and there's nothing wrong with that.
The software mute was the last thing that made a difference in my day to day usage (but didn’t upgrade for it). The next thing I would love and upgrade instantly for is a sealed, waterproof design
I honestly feel that. I love programming like crazy, I use Linux, but I genuinely just don't care one iota what features my phone or TV has... I just want to browse reddit, read webnovels, call my friends and family, watch and listen to music/videos, and take a few pictures. Sometimes I play with Termux. All these other features are just not important.
I think the thing I like most about my phone is the OLED screen, which has been basically the only feature I've cared about.
I'm just thankful for the people that do upgrade to every new model, it keeps the used market alive for those of us that want a 2 year old phone for cheap.
Perhaps with Apple intelligence your girlfriend will just be able to tell Siri what she wants the phone to do and it will get done using a feature she never knew she had
Yeah, okay, hardware releases are incremental now. We get it.
But someone somewhere has a 5 year old phone with a busted screen and a dead battery and it'll be nice for them to get this phone or another similar new, highly capable device. And they'd probably like to know that this 5-year-newer phone has a whole bunch of new capabilities when they spend a big chunk of money replacing a big purchase.
Sure, I don't want to buy a new car. They're expensive and they depreciate. I would like to just keep driving mine, it's fine. But when the time comes that I do buy a new car I do want to know that it has a whole bunch of new, better things than the one I am replacing.
Don't forget that Apple makes the perfect phone for your girlfriend: the iPhone SE. The flashy marketing videos are for high-value high-vanity customers who throw money at them. She could buy that type of low-mid-range phone at $400 and run it into the ground until she is forced to upgrade by hardware failure.
>If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.
I was with you up to there. Do you really think that people are so lazy or stupid that they wouldn't go to any of the zillion battery replacement places (including Apple Stores) rather than buying a new $1K-$1.5K device?
Yes. Because it’s a giant pita to drop your phone off and be without it for an indefinite period of time (if something goes wrong). For a device worth a couple hundred dollars it typically makes more sense to trade it in and simply upgrade.
Especially if you are paranoid and refuse to hand a third party your phone full of private data. If I need to wipe and restore that is a huge time sink I’d rather future proof against.
I don’t know where you live but I get the battery swapped while I’m standing there. It’s insane that you’d rather spend $800 than be without your phone for a few hours.
I live in the US. I've had friends without their phone for days due to a bad swap. I wasn't really talking about myself (I have a spare phone at all times I can simply switch to in an emergency) - but the average person doesn't have spares laying around.
It works until it doesn't.
It's also rarely spending "$1,000" - it's usually a $200-400 price difference after trade-in depending on how often you upgrade. Apple typically gives extremely aggressive pricing on trade-ins, or at least has over the past few years. I sent my wife in for a battery swap and it ended up being $150 more to simply swap phones and upgrade 3 generations to reset the obsolescence clock. No-brainer at that point.
I have a 2015 Macbook pro and an iphone 11 that works great save for that they don't hold a charge.
I would happily spend a several hundreds dollars to save these and continue to use them, or give one to my parents or kid, but I can't find someone who will do a battery replacement. I live in Austin TX and have called 3-5 different apple repair shops. If I can't find someone to do it in a city with the second largest Apple office in the world, I don't think anyone else will be able to.
>Mac laptops may be eligible for an extended battery-only repair period for up to 10 years from when the product was last distributed for sale, subject to parts availability.
Probably makes sense, if you're organized enough, to get a battery swap while it's still in coverage if you'll use. My 2015 MacBook had a battery that got swollen a few years ago. Got it replaced and continue to use it as basically a browser and it's perfectly usable.
I've replaced the battery on my 2015 MacBook Pro with one from iFixit [1]. They're a huge pain though, since they're glued to the inside of the case and requires using a solvent to get the battery out.
It has held a charge for the last few years well. The other issue I had with a laptop this old was cooling. Ended up swapping out the fans and heatsink/heatpipe and am expecting to get another couple years out of it.
Do I believe that? Absolutely. Never underestimate how lazy people are. I very commonly hear battery health as the reason for replacement. In fact, I'd say it's the most common reason heard. A 3 year old iPhone is still excellent, why else would you replace it?
Besides effort, there's also trust issues. I once had a battery replacement done but the "new" one was just as bad as the old one.
Because people want a new phone and a battery that's not 100% is as good an excuse as anything. The couple times I've had a battery replacement done, I've had Apple do it. Probably worth the premium. If the battery is really the only issue--even if it's just to use the device as a backup of some sort--it's stupid not to get it done.
My biggest peeve with iOS or iPadOS is that if you sync photos or SMS with your iPad, you will eventually run out of storage. I don't know why Apple doesn't do a "rolling" storage for these apps, it feels so broken. I'm never buying another iPad if they don't fix this, I'll pay their competitors instead who sanely allow you to decide which photos to download for offline viewing, and which ones to keep. I will always have way more storage on my phone than my tablet.
There will also be a time where my iCloud Photos storage will surpass the available physical storage Apple gives you for your phone, so I don't understand this weak design.
Worse is the Messages app, which insists on downloading every gif, photo and video I share to my iPad as well, as if I need them available for offline use all the time, no Apple, if I needed to see any of it, I would download them manually.
iOS and iPad OS need to be smarter about their Photos and Messaging apps, they're really dumb. What's the point of iCloud if it forces everything downstream when I'm not asking for it.
New features aren't for users. They're for the media so the company gets publicity and we have conversations like this and don't forget about them.
Imagine if Apple said "we're done, users have all they need", but Samsung kept putting out new features nobody wants or needs, and press releases and launch events... It's obvious what would happen to Apple, right?
Your average user has no idea what the buzzwords mean either, and that's for a reason. God knows why I need titanium, but I know it's strong and probably expensive so helps justify the price. 120fps? Who knows, but it's more than 24 or 60 so it must be good, etc. The features page goes on and on, gushing with how easy things are, high pro quality, time saving, etc.
Features are there to bamboozle buyers and overwhelm them with "benefits" to justify the high price. Frequent releases are for regular publicity. Heaven forbid any of this is actually because users want any of this stuff.
Don't know about "hating", but I do wonder how she would feel if she were to read his comment. I couldn't be in a relationship with a woman I consider a "normie" whose use of a phone is sharing cat videos on Facebook. Jeez.
This is missing the point. It's not about the functionality. It's about the marketing.
Apple aren't going to all this effort so you have an amazingly functional product that will solve all your real world needs. They're doing it so you think you need it to solve problem you don't have. Classic FOMO.
Yeah that’s how I feel. I feel like the iPhone 7 could handle all the daily use cases just fine. Every phone after is cool but doesn’t accomplish anything
This is such an absurd attitude to have, on a site for startup news, no less.
Having a frequent, iterative release cycle has a number of benefits:
- Everyone in the ecosystem knows the rough cadence of when releases will occur
- The people and companies involved in those releases have a steady stream of work
- If something isn’t ready, it can more likely be dropped without the consequences becoming overwhelming, which would force the company to push back a release and screw up the schedule of many other things
- If something isn’t working, it can be quickly removed in a subsequent release rather than having to push out an out-of-band release
- There will always be people looking to casually buy a phone, and this ensures they’ll probably always get something reasonably current rather than it depending greatly on when they buy.
- People are much more likely to delay a phone purchase for most of a year rather than switch ecosystems for a killer feature. If it’s two years, they’re probably more likely to switch ecosystems (and if it misses that next release, they would have to wait four)
- Holidays come annually, this ensures gifts are “this year’s watch” and not “last years’s watch”
Really, I think Apple should be commended for tweaking and refining things, rather than making big BS lateral changes to justify a product release.
Also, not all the changes were “incremental”. The camera changes and SoC improvements are pretty significant for people who make use of them. I saw 30% and 2x bandied about for some things.
As for “she opens it and presses the shutter”. That’s pretty much the optimal UI for a casual user, no? There’s a ton of work going into making it that easy to use for everything that goes into the picture that comes out.
The whole point is that people aren’t aware of it. They don’t know how fast the lens is or the resolution of the camera, they just know if they get a newer device the pictures will be a little better than the previous device. And that’s probably all they care to know.
No one is making you or your girlfriend upgrade every year. It looks like phones as far back as the 6s or the 8 are still supported, so by all means, keep using a phone until it’s 8 generations old.
As others have pointed out, you can replace the battery for a reasonable cost, too. Of course Apple doesn't want to - their whole business position is that it’s a premium product for people who are purchasing an “experience”.
They’d rather have the freedom to customize the internals to optimize performance than be limited by affordances sufficient to allow non-tech-savvy users to replace the battery. The latter of which is probably at odds with it being simple, waterproof, durable, and thin (eg a tiny screw or some kind of latching mechanism ).
I don't really get the confusion people have. It's understood that most people don't constantly upgrade every year. They are improving their product, and when you do need a new phone it will have a many features and be competitive with other devices. Yes, there has not been a killer-app in a long time that forces upgrades.
I used to care about my photos a lot. After accumulating a few decades worth of photos I've gotten to the point where I don't care about my photos at all.
I used to obsess over megapixel count, portrait mode, FPS, lighting, and so forth, because I used to think that these amazing images would be priceless in the future. Well, the future came and went, and to me they actually ended up being worthless.
At one time I cared about other people on the Internet seeing pictures of me and my friends and family doing things and being places. Now I don't want anyone on the Internet seeing pictures like that. I especially don't want bots to scrape the photos to build a dossier on my activities that data brokers can add to my profile that they then turn around and sell to whoever's buying.
So these days I don't ever bother even taking photos of anything any more. Instead what I do is try to be 100% "in the moment." I try to notice the small details, feel the emotions, immerse myself in the experience. I look for the things that make an impression. I find that a camera will always -- I mean, always -- detract from that.
I suppose that's my way of saying that there hasn't been a camera feature for a phone that I've cared about for many years now. For me the 2017 Pixel 2 was the point where phone camera technology got "good enough" for anything I ever wanted to use it for. Which, these days, is almost nothing.
I doubt that the descendants will be that interested to be honest. It's not like we today pour over the images that exist of our parents and grandparents.
Having thousands upon thousands of images to look at does not make it better.
It's nice to have a couple from each year maybe, but the huge amount of pics we have today is just ruining the experience and value of the pics somehow.
As they are stored somewhere digital on a device or cloud makes them also somehow less accessible even though technically they are more accessible. If they lay around in an album on a coffee table or a book shelf makes them more visible. It makes it also a nice way of talking about the pictures with friends or relatives when someone pics up the album.
> It's not like we today pour over the images that exist of our parents and grandparents.
I do this. And I look over these pictures to get a sense of what their life was like. And where they lived. I found a small book of photos of my great grandfather and his family and they really made me happy to see.
We might not want to look at photos right now. But photos aren’t everyday items, they are long tail items. They are used infrequently, but when they are used, their impact is great.
Just because I don’t want something right now doesn’t mean I’ll never want it. Or that someone important to me won’t want it.
Suppose instead your great grandfather had an iPhone back then and you now had access to his library of 10s of thousands of food pics and random selfies in bars, on vacation, etc. Would you still be as excited?
Oh my god, yes! I would love to not only understand my great grandfather as a real life person but also to have context of the world in which he lived.
Hell, I wish I had home movies of myself with my parents as a toddler/child that included audio. All our home movies were on soundless 8mm film.
I'd go through them faster for sure but absolutely. Things changed so much in the last 100 years, even just the car pictures would be super cool to see.
Might be cultural or even a me thing though, I grew up with a grand-aunt that loved talking about how they survived the winter every year.
I never thought about that, but honestly that sounds super cool, imagine our grand grand children 300 hundred years from now, if somehow they have access to our cloud images they can basically check out how their ancestor fully lived their lives, a true door to the past.
Sounds super cool for them, of course, we have been born to early for this, so from our perspective we still shouldn't give a dam. As probably we won't be ghost behind checking how they enjoy that portal to the past.
It's cool conceptually, but I think for family I haven't known, for family I have known and is aging/deceased that would make me pretty sad so I probably wouldn't use it.
If there was more material, you could do more with it - create a model of their house using photogrammetry. Create panoramic images if the pictures intersect. Try to spot interesting historical details that might not have seemed significant back then, etc. :)
You never know - I had some contact with people gathering old photos and post cards or people trying to piece together what a particular part of the town or their home village looked like say 100 years ago and surprisingly little information is sometimes available.
i think the difference from when i grew up is that there were many baby photos of me but they were hard to find and view, you needed to go to the persons house and look through all their photos to find them.
if i look at my brothers kids, their phones will be full to the brim with 1000's of photos of them. we have whatsapp groups filled with their photos.
i wonder how interested they'll be when they're 40 to see these photos. perhaps a few, but all of them?
We do this with the family, come Christmas time when everyone's together, everyone gets to pick 50 to 100 pictures to cast to the Apple TV and go over each picture. It's a lot of fun seeing people's highlight of the year.
We may need to revise the 100 picture limit because as the family grows it's getting a bit long for one sitting :^)
> And then on a yearly basis I select the ones 10-50 photos that evoke the best memories and emotions.
Picking 1 photo per week could be a good base to aim for. A slice of daily/weekly life.
Then perhaps a few more photos for each special event where lots of folks get together: birthdays, holidays, births/deaths, weddings, graduations, etc.
Probably end up with <100 photos, and if you print US 4x6/EU A6, probably fit in one album.
This is probably a great use case for apple intelligence. There are many apps that try to organize your photos. But iOS itself could do that curating, removing duplicate, finding the timeless shots and organizing them into events. It already does something close to this, with Memories. Now we just need it to cleanup. But this might not be an incentive they have bc it will reduce storage needs.
I think that for every deceased family member there’s one random photo in a frame somewhere in the house. We have piles and piles of old photo albums from family that has passed. Those will never get looked at again.
I go through a large box of photos of my dead mother at least once a year. It helps keep her alive in the minds of my young sons who never got to meet her.
the thing that changes is when you get kids. I take a lot of photos of them and love it when google photos reminds me daily about them. but even that changes as they get older, the frequency goes down.
You can already see this in action - I love when my iPhone brings up those little curated albums from events or people. I can only imagine how much better those will become with more and more photos and better intelligence.
That's why it's important to document your house and your town (all of it, not just the glamorous bits), rather than travelling to exotic locations to take photos like some lame "influencer".
This has nothing to do with the iPhone and more with your social life. You went from a pro social network stance to a pro privacy one. That change meant you are taking less photos.
This is not happening in the real world, though. Everyone is on tiktok today and they need these powerful cameras more than ever.
Really interesting observation, but I would say there are still moments that can delight like we restored an old iPhone of my partner's and came across videos and live photos of our oldest when they were a toddler.
Whether this is actually worth the many, many thousands we have spent on our smartphones to preserve rare moments that matter amongst many that really don't is another question. If smartphones never had cameras at all we'd almost certainly preference our own "lower resolution" memories over carrying a small, cheap, lightweight digital camera everywhere in case of something special.
It’s not even about terribly special moments. Stitched together, those videos and Live Photos of even small moments help me remember what they were like then.
This comment seems completely at odds with history and how people actually acted prior to the smartphone revolution.
Film camera sales proceeded on a steady incline from their invention until the introduction of the digital camera.
Digital camera sales increased year on year for every year of their existence prior to the introduction of the smartphone.
Approximately everybody wants to have photos of their precious memories, and the idea that people wouldn't have kept buying digital cameras if smartphones didn't incorporate them is, to be frank, a little bit silly.
The primary difference between digital cameras and smartphones was that every family I knew had a digital camera, where every person I know has a smartphone. And every single person I know uses the camera on their smartphone very regularly.
> Approximately everybody wants to have photos of their precious memories
I guess the idea is all your memories are precious. What the parent poster said certainly resonated with me: most of them are not.
Writing is also a big part of history, which also gave us the ability to preserve our most special events since over 6,000+ years ago. This is the first century that isn't permeated with unknowns because few made any deliberate attempt to record things - and we had the option to paint on a cave wall for 10,000s of years before that too.
That's not my point at all. My point is rather more mundane than that: People like cameras and taking photos. That's why they kept buying them as standalone devices until smartphones were good enough to replace having a standalone camera.
If the king of the universe suddenly decreed cameras on phones verboten, people would go back to buying standalone cameras, not back to floral written descriptions, commissioning a portrait on canvas, or cave paintings.
> The primary difference between digital cameras and smartphones was that every family I knew had a digital camera, where every person I know has a smartphone
The real difference is the rise of social media. Digital camera photos were taken for you, for your family and close friends.
In the post-facebook world we live in now, smartphone photos are taken for other people - a curated snapshot of your life to show off to acquaintences and strangers. Something of the intimacy of photography has been lost.
Honestly I just have an RX100, physics means that it will always be able to take optically better photos than an iPhone even though the post processing is definitely “worse”. It fits in my pocket just as easily as a phone and I can take both normal photos and selfies pretty easily. It’s not the cheapest option but I appreciate having better image quality in a form factor I can easily shove in my pocket.
You don't have kids then, at least no in kids age.
I did first part of the curve like you - full frame nikon, amazing photos, milky way in the night camping etc. Now I just carry around phone (Samsung in my case, use that 10x physical zoom quite a bit).
The stuff I can snap or record, most of it would be uncatchable with camera - I would have to run around with it constantly like an idiot and shove it in everybody's face, missing much more from those unique moments. Its not so much for me but for everybody else not being there, ie grandparents, so the question is - do you care more about you being in the moment, or sharing the moment with your closest ones. Its amazing how better connected they are with whats happening to their grandchildren living not so close to them, compared to a generation ago.
Also, how much of these memories our kids will have once adults - 'you know, daddy wanted to be in the moment so sorry not many photos or videos from important moments of your childhood' is pretty lame to me, but thats me. I still see purpose of photography as service to others rather than me, me and me all the way down.
Since kids are so active, there are some cool things like very slow mo videos that give completely new perspective - process it in 30s if needed at all and share. Completely unavailable even in current 5000$+ cameras. And yes on big screen you see various errors and less quality, but nobody I know watches it on big screens anymore.
I don't take pictures for the internet, I take them for the memories and to try to add a little artistry to the things in my life.
I also think cameras can be a positive part of "the moment" wherever that is. Photography and dealing with a camera can be a meditative way to see reality.
Ironically the only photos I connect with are the ones I took (and I'm still taking) with my dad's 35mm slr from the 80s. It's the one he used to take all my childhood pictures and I'm confident I will be able to take pics of my kid(s) with it.
I shoot maybe one roll of film a month on average, so about 400 pics a year, 1/10th are keepers, that's 40 good pics per year and I remember where I took every single one of them since I started this in 2018.
I got a crappy 25 year old Kodak that takes 110 cartridge film at a thrift store for $5. Those 24 pictures seem more real than the 1000's on my phone. Remembering where you take them is cool
I used to not take photos because I never went back to see them. And even if I did, one the best moments to review THAT photo is when I am talking to someone else about a related memory.
Now with Google photos, if we are talking about that one time when I was a kid driving a tractor, I search for tractor in photos app and presto, like magic the conversation about that memory has a nostalgic photo to boost the moment.
These days, most of the photos I take are with disposable cameras that I buy whenever I go on a trip. Despite the name, the high cost of the camera makes each shot more precious, and I much prefer the low-fi film grain style to whatever black magic is going on in my smartphone sensor. Also, the novelty/nostalgia makes people smile when you ask them to take a picture of you. And then there's the anticipation of sending the film off for development, not knowing what will turn out well and what will be an underexposed mess. Highly recommended.
I haven’t cared about megapixels for a long time. My “real” camera is a decade old and has just a 16 megapixel sensor.
With the right lens(es) it still destroys every iPhone.
I don’t see myself getting rid of it for a phone camera any time soon. If anything, I feel the opposite and want my camera with me (rather than just my phone) more of the time.
That said, I also still take loads of photos on my phone and look forward to that camera becoming more capable. And I completely hear and am on board with the argument about enjoying things in the moment and not getting stuck behind a camera, or worse, obsessing over posting to social media.
I feel this but I also just google photos and it will show me slideshows from trips or moments in my life in the past and I'm like wow I forgot about that wonderful moment. Please keep photographing.
For that reason, I bought some Fuji X100 and just take pictures with it if I need, for at least it's a fun exercise for actually thinking about what exactly do I really want to capture and why.
Honestly, the more photos I take with my phone, the more I find myself craving a film camera.
It's not just the look of film which I find more appealing than digital photos, the physicality of the whole thing. Operating a film camera (especially older ones like Leica rangefinders or large format view cameras) is a very hands-on and deliberate process. You don't take a photo with an old camera, you make a photo.
This means you need to spend a lot more time composing the shot, focusing on the subject, metering the light (or using the zone system [1] if you want to go really old-school), setting the lens aperture and shutter speed, and finally taking the picture. In the case of a large format camera, you find yourself ducking under a dark cloth and focusing the (upside-down) image on a piece of ground glass, even using a magnifying glass for critical focusing!
The deliberate process doesn't stop with exposing the image. It continues into the dark room with creative control over the development and printing processes. From a single negative you can spend hours making test prints and playing with the exposure of the final print, using techniques such as dodging, burning, and masking. You can also do some crazy things with an enlarger; even producing wall-sized prints at home!
- photos/album search now includes video understanding, which imo seems very good from the first 2 examples they showed. includes scroll to exact time of the moment you describe.
- Mail and Notifications will show summaries instead of str[:x]
- Siri now knows iPhone, becomes the ultimate manual on how to use the increasingly complicated iOS 18. and can read your texts (!) to suggest actions with Personal Context Understanding (also it will try to advertise apple tv shows to you... i'm SURE it will be totally objective and aligned to your preferences amirite)
- new iphone 16 camera control button is PRIME real estate - notice how OpenAI/ChatGPT is now next to Google search, and both are secondary clicks to Apple's visual search, which comes first
- camera adds events to calendar!
- "all done on device" and on cloud (though craig doesnt say that haha)
overall i think insanely good ideas on ai + phone integrations.
With the months of nonstop and over-the-top hype of "Apple Intelligence" these all seem underwhelming.
Even in the idealized world of demoware there's no killer feature, not to mention that none of it is even available to real customers yet.
I was expecting something only Apple could do with their vast ecosystem of IP and partnerships, the must-have cool new thing that would stimulate a leap in demand for iPhone.
It's hard to see how any of this is enough to trigger a new upgrade cycle instead of just waiting until battery life goes to shit or the screen cracks so you have to upgrade.
True. All the whining was coming from lazy "industry observers" who never mustered up an example of what, exactly, they expected Apple to be doing with "AI."
Apple was notoriously quiet on AI until they recently revealed Apple Intelligence, it made sense to me since iPhones already have access to all of the user's data, and data is the core of all of the best use cases for AI.
The sources in those articles are user conversation and speculation from Reddit, Twitter, and Discord. There's very little information in that massive article that actually came from Apple.
I think you're seriously underestimating the impact of actually-useful and reliable AI features at your fingertips. This is what everyone imagined computers would be, since I don't know... the 80s?
Sure, but this isn’t one of those AI startups like Humane where you’re expected to drop $800 on a brand new thing. Most people aren’t buying the top end models and they probably aren’t paying full price due to promos, trade-ins, etc.
That means Apple has a much simpler problem: they don’t need to convince you that AI as a concept is worth hundreds of dollars, they just need to convince you that the hundreds of dollars you were already going to spend on a smartphone should go to them instead of Samsung or Xiaomi.
Are you sure ? People do not move in significant numbers from Android anymore, a lot of people just do not want to learn a new interface and workflows and happy with their ecosystem.
Anecdotally I tried to get my dad to a iPhone 14 and shift from Android, he basically kept using his Android and never switched,so my mom is using that device now(along with an Android) not too happily just cause no else one is using it and will switch back to Android fully next upgrade. There are plenty of people who simply prefer the Android interface or by now so used to it that don't want to change and vice-versa. I myself use and need both and cannot imagine exclusively committing to one ecosystem.
> photos/album search now includes video understanding, which imo seems very good from the first 2 examples they showed. includes scroll to exact time of the moment you describe.
This is a killer feature. Everyone can understand the usefulness of just describing the video moment you want to find. Digging through years worth of photos and videos looking for that one specific moment can be a huge chore when you want to show it to someone.
You know when you go to a restaurant and the menu is like 3 different cuisines, it's 12 pages, and each page has 20+ items?
The Intelligence section of the presentation felt a bit like that.
Generally, I was surprised how lightly Intelligence featured into the keynote: it wasn't a standalone talking point, nothing on the Apple site talks to it directly. It's conspicuous, given that they've dedicated hardware real estate to it ... and the hype cycle.
I go to a restaurant and look at the menu/see a commercial on TV, I can usually order the item now (other than films).
Apple Intelligence - certain feature(s) (can't recall now) are US-only in November, rolling out to other English-speaking countries in December. No idea when non English-speaking countries will get that feature.
Who knows what Apple Intelligence features are in the device on day 1?
I thought you were going to say the iPhone would be able to load the QR code for that menu, summarize it, sort it by ingredient or calories and give you a recommendation without you having to read it... Now I'm kinda bummed out.
Apple rarely ever innovates, so it's not surprising these new features seem underwhelming. What Apple does best is to perfect (others') existing ideas so that they work more much more reliably than the competition. The number one pain point of technology today is that hardly any of it consistently works correctly more than 95% of the time. But when Apple releases a feature, it works 99% of the time instead. That's their key differentiator.
The action button being prime real estate I think shouldn't be understated.
It's a button that'll be in the hands and pockets of >1 billion people soon.
Each press allows these billion people to connect with a supplier of Intelligence. Whether it's ChatGPT, Google's search, Apple AI or whatever supplier. Apple controls the hardware.
Just think of Apple's contract with Google that nets them $20 billion a year in profit. For comparison, Walmart, Amazon, NVIDIA, Volkswagen, VISA, all had about 20 billion in net income in 2023.
Or think of the appstore as an analogy. Apple controls the gateway between consumer and supplier, and gains from it. This action button will be no different.
1) i am as ready to shit on apple and siri as the next guy, but imo the HN cynicism is overbearing here. apple isnt building to impress internet neckbeards like us. they are building for the normies. features they understand intuitively and cannot fuck up. maybe wait til it gets in the normies hands to judge. ~none of us here know what its like to work on a hardware/software platform for >1 billion? people.
2) i actually do think dedicated visual intelligence button IS a killer feature. suddenly phone is ai's view into the world. yes probably v1 today will disappoint. but 5 years from now the kids will laugh when we say we had to take photos and upload them to an app back in our day. or manually enter in any information from the real world into our calendars and emails and texts.
As a "tech person" I feel like we've all been told for 20+ years that we can't have UX that makes any sense to us, or lets us do simple things we want to do, because we are power users and software has to cater to some imagined demographic of incredibly dumb people who can't understand basic computing metaphors. It can get frustrating.
I'm a Growth Engineer. What that actually means is "make the UI so incredibly simple people who are functionally illiterate somehow make their way to the place you want them to be so you can eventually monetize them".
I view users moving through interfaces in a mass abstracted form like electrical or hydrological currents. My job is to widen the pipes.
Well, cynically that fits with my own experience. :) But I don't know if I'd say it's simpler, just that you don't have any choices. For me Apple UX often feels complicated and I can't figure out how to do what I want, or figure out what is going to happen when I accept some dialog they want me to accept. But I guess I end up going through the pipe eventually, out of frustration.
My impression of my non-tech friends is that they aren't too dumb to follow instructions, they just don't enjoy operating a computer like I do, so they are more okay with their choices being restricted if they don't have to waste time doing something they find boring.
Shortcuts.app exists, you can even tie those scripts to a hardware button now or ask Siri to execute them or place them as app-like icons or as interactive widgets on your home screen or Lock Screen, or tie them to automation events (schedules, but even more fine grained like "when I get a message from this person, send them an email", or "when I get home, log the current weather to a new line in a table on a spreadsheet". A script gallery even exists where scripts can easily be shared and ran by anyone or shared across iMessages.
Not everything is available like on a rooted Android of course, but I can at least create a Shortcut script and give it to any iOS user regardless of their technical expertise and they can utilize it, which is leagues ahead of the situation amongst non-rooted Android and non-technical Android users.
Agreed, and Apple's differentiator has always been seamless integration. With the iPhone, they own the boundary layer between the physical and digital worlds. It's an obvious place to introduce AI for daily tasks without requiring any behavioral changes from the users.
> apple isnt building to impress internet neckbeards like us. they are building for the normies. features they understand intuitively and cannot fuck up. maybe wait til it gets in the normies hands to judge.
Apple has lost its way, just look at how the "normies" and the "neckbeards" responded to the Vision Pro. Apple doesn't know how to innovate anymore, just how to market, and mass produce things, which is honestly good enough to keep making money for now.
> Apple has lost its way, just look at how the "normies" and the "neckbeards" responded to the Vision Pro.
Such people are likely confused. The AVP makes sense as a high end POC and dev kit. It takes a minute for a new modality of computing to make sense to people, even for Apple's own devs to figure out how people can use it, to iterate the OS and default app suite for a few years.
you’re suggesting apple planned to sell a $3.5k headset to normies? That doesn’t make sense. Sure, many normies had an opinion on it. Most normies never tried it so i don’t care what they think. It’s like asking a normie 20 years ago about what driving an electric car is like.
Vision pro was an over-hyped dev kit that offers a taste of the future. That’s it.
They have classes full of "normies" trying them out every time I pass by my local store. Sure looks like its meant to be something other than a dev kit to me.
Asking when your moms flight gets in, to pull up the picture of you and your partner on vacation at the beach or to take a picture of a restaurant from afar at 5x zoom and get reviews is insanely nice.
What? How could you possibly say that? They can take a picture of something and then auto make a note, or a reminder, or an email, or find out what it is.
Normies struggle with the nuance of devices. They understand what they want, they don't understand steps, like start here then do this, then go here and copy this, then go there. This SKIPS all the steps. This is huge for them, but (probably) just mildly convenient for others.
It remains interesting to me how much we have been able to do, already, with technology. But discoverability, walled gardens, and <hand waving>marketing/positioning/hype</hand waving> have obscured awareness/adoption.
Semantic search was always going to be the killer feature of this AI boom. But it’s just a cherry on top of existing software and requires training users to expand what they think is possible.
As far as I can tell, AI is one of several features that have actively made search worse. There are a handful of novel things it does well enough, but I'd rather engage those in their own LLM sandbox than have the facilities formerly available in a searchbox replaced with a guessbox.
What kind of search has it made worse? I’m not talking about Google search. I’m talking about searching your personal collection of emails or photos or text messages.
Technically it's an iOS 18 feature rather than a phone feature, except the only previous phone model with the hardware for all of it is the iPhone 15 Pro, so it doesn't really feel like an iOS 18 feature
Like what? People have been whining "where's the innovation" for years about phones, totally ignoring the fact that this is a mature product category.
Where's the innovation in word processors?
At this point, we're often talking about regression. Apple removed the audio output from its best-selling music player. It removed TouchID. It removed the SIM slot.
You know what would be "innovative?" Making a goddamned phone that can withstand being used for its primary purpose. The failure of the iPhone's design has been confirmed by millions upon millions of people, who have concluded that they must bury their "thin, elegant" phones in bulky, tacky cases. You have to shake your head at Apple's breathless announcement of NEW COLORS!!!! when the vast majority of them will never be seen.
Then there's the fact that Apple ignores an entire market: men who don't wear cargo pants all day every day. Maybe some of us don't want to look like a schlub with a TV tray jammed into his pocket (again, made even worse with a dumb case).
I mean ‘could do’ is subjective. The ROI that apple receives on R&D is substantial, so on that basis, include a portable projector in phones such that I can replace my tv with my phone - not being able to use my phone while watching tv wouldn’t be nice, so add anti-shake gyroscopes such that as long as my phone is pointing in vaguely the correct direction, the projection stays stable.
Possible with current tech? Hell no. But within the realms of reality for handhelds to do this in the next 15 years? I think so. Probably less valuable over health and other potential device functions, I don’t think about these things and so I wouldn’t know.
Thus, we are not at a point where portable computers should be considered ‘mature’ from an innovation standpoint, even if current innovation is slow.
I'm on iOS 18.0 on my iPhone 15 Pro, rather that the 18.1 with the "AI". Recently had an eye doctor appt for one of my children and they scheduled a follow-up, giving me a little card with the details. I was in a hurry so took a picture of it intending to enter the calendar event later, and it immediately pulled up a fully-filled in, completely accurate new calendar event. Little affordance that is just so nice.
Indeed, in general the camera is getting...crazy. We have a pair of Maine Coon kittens and every picture is tagged with Maine Coon, despite the cats barely even coming into the breed's features yet. Constantly amazed at the stuff the built in camera is identifying.
I have a hilarious list of animals that my cat has been misclassified as by my iPhone. Everything from a beetle to a nematode. It doesn't give me a lot of confidence in these features!
As opposed to Adobe [R] Photoshop [R] Lightroom [TM]* Classic's person identification feature which has identified my dog as no fewer than 5 different members of my family, ranging from ~5 years old to > 90 years old.
on device text recognition, and on device text pattern recognition allows you to call phone numbers, select dates, copy text, copy qr codes, etc.
but few times, there are instances where it doesn't recognize the date and time. I guess this is now a supported feature, instead of accidental feature.
Yeah I took a photo of a weird moth in my house the other day, and accidentally scrolled up the next day to realise that the iPhone had categorised it as the exact species - a Poplar Hawk Moth. I was stunned. Didn’t even have to google for 5 minutes, the camera already knew.
They have their big generative AI push with 18.1, broadly called Apple Intelligence, but they've been building so many AI inference features for a few iterations now, with the camera and Photos getting loads of those additions. Object detection, subject identification, text extraction, etc, though this was the first time I've taken a picture of an appointment card and had it automate extraction like this.
I feel like loads of these features just quietly appear to be randomly discovered by users.
So it's AI, but not the big hype stuff that gets most of the attention.
I have this sinking suspicion that the AI segment today was so quick, so high level, and so future-tense ("Siri will be able to..."), identical to the similar segment at WWDC; I have to wonder how many of these features we'll actually see. I'm getting vibes like the old "Facetime will be an open protocol" promise; its like someone is making them do this, their soul isn't in it, and for that reason they still don't have one narrative for why I should care. Instead, they have a quickfire list of twenty features, the titles of twenty epics from their jira.
The iPhone 16's camera button will gain the ability to soft-press to lock focus "later this year". Their software teams are so incredibly far behind, the new phone has literally one new feature, a feature medically prescribed to induce drowsiness, yet they can't even get the software for it finished for release.
Apple will be one of the least impacted once the market corrects to this reality, because they can push off the cost of the inference silicon to customers for many many queries (especially given 3-4 years, as models become more efficient and Apple Silicon becomes more powerful).
EU ruled that Apple cannot link components. This suggests that Apple would need to provide API’s to allow competitors to be listed alongside the “Apple AI”, or any device to enable screen remote control (ala remote iPhone control).
If you’re a dev, you might appreciate why that is an absolute PIA from a software perspective. Since they want to bring these features to market ASAP, launching now and foregoing the EU is a sensible step.
Huxley sends his regards, really.
I think they say French (the language), but that might be for people outside the EU. German is notably missing from their list, though it’s a bigger market for Apple than French.
Privacy concerns? They're just trying to bully the EU. There's no legal or technical reason iOS 18's remote access features wouldn't work in EU, but alas, they do not.
> no legal or technical reason iOS 18's remote access features wouldn't work in EU
How do you know that? (How much of your net worth are you willing to bet on it?)
Between GDPR, the DMA and now the AI Act, there is a lot of unique regulatory cross section that Apple has in the EU. It would be surprising if there weren't additional legal checks it had to do, internally and on its suppliers, before launching a product or feature in the EU.
Because the same exact tech, remote desktop access on macOS, has been working fine for years. That's how I know this has nothing to do with DMA, GDPR and the AI act. Yes, there might be AI features that are gatekept due to DMA and GDPR, cool, that is kind of understandable. But they also threw a hissy fit and excluded the EU from having lots of unrelated functionality. Or, maybe, they're really doing something horribly wrong if they can't be in compliance with GDPR when sharing a screen of your phone on your macbook.
DMA allows EU regulators to designate certain platforms as gatekeepers. Platforms that are designated gatekeepers are subject to different requirements under EU law than those that are not designated gatekeepers. The EU designated iOS as a gatekeeper[1], but did not do the same for MacOS.
So while you are correct that there is no technical barrier, you are incorrect that they are the same under EU regulation. Involving EU regulators in product design for designated gatekeepers was the entire point of the law, so this is the desired effect. Regulators want the flexibility to e.g. work with the gatekeeper to design feature modifications, like the default browser selection screen[2], for other aspects of designated gatekeeper platforms.
One can choose to see this as good or bad, but this is clearly the intent of the law.
> the same exact tech, remote desktop access on macOS, has been working fine for years. That's how I know this has nothing to do with DMA
Apple just got dinged under the DMA [1][2]. The text of the law may not have changed, but the reality of its meaning has.
> they're really doing something horribly wrong if they can't be in compliance with GDPR
The point is verifying you are in compliance with a law has costs. Plenty of start-ups, for instance, are better off geoblocking jurisdictions they don't have the resources to comply with but don't want to accidentally do something illegal in. Not because they think they're violating anything. But because it isn't worth losing (a) nimbleness over or (b) future access to. (Common ones being the EU, China and India.) Apple isn't a start-up. But they probably don't want their design team to be half staffed with lawyers either.
The document you are referencing has no mention of remote access to a phone. The fact that apple chooses to gatekeep unrelated features and seemingly cites EU regulation to explain this behavior is just absurd. And the amount of people coming to their defense is equally absurd. Have you even understood my main gripe? If Apple feels it is unable to comply with EU regulations with apple intelligence, I can understand that given the amount of raw data that is required to deliver the current generation of AI products. But to then turn around and cite the same regulation when it comes to features that are completely unrelated to data gobbling is mindblowingly stupid, and to me, definitely feels like a tactic to gaslight the consumers in the EU, to try and turn them against this legislation.
I don't even think it's a question anymore, they opted out of new features on non-European handsets. Gemini is probably already on Nokia phones for all we know.
The part I am most interested in is how much of it is on device and how much of your data is trained only on your own model vs hovered up into a larger model.
> Mail and Notifications will show summaries instead of str[:x]
While it's true that the first x characters of an email don't always have the most important bits, they're never _wrong_. It's always exactly what's in the email.
I'm worried about cases like this [0], where a summary is inaccurate or misleading. It may not happen often, but it's possible, so I have to be a little skeptical of every summary. Though I can see where AI summaries are a plus, the move from 100% accurate to <100% feels like a big downgrade.
I predicted those features weeks ago [1], but I still feel they could do so much more. If anything, their implementation feels like a rushed afterthought.
In their demos, they use the action button to capture an ambient song for Shazam, the power button to capture a voice command for Siri, and the camera button for an image for Visual Intelligence. All 3 captures should be performed using the same button.
And screenshots still require pressing 2 buttons simultaneously. Unless you want to share your screen with Siri in which case it's the power button...
People are going to use this button as a voice recorder, and Apple will announce native support next year.
I quite like AppleTV's content choices, but I am not looking forward to getting shilled on it. Again. In between the other spam that they don't block. Ahhhhhg!
("Get an Android?" Yeah, I hear you, I switch ecosystems in anger with every phone, which is why I am so keenly aware of how badly Apple's anti-spam sucks -- but also why I am not over the moon at the prospect of my next switch: I know where the Android skeletons are buried, although hope springs eternal.)
i undersatnd i might come across as an apple shill/fanboi here but just pointing out that its fairly easy to punish any abusive app by killing their notifs and apple does sometimes make it easy to do that by letting u go straight to settings to kill the notif (i'm not conscious of when it does that but i think it does?)
No I can’t. Here’s an example: my security system app sends me push notifications when there is motion detected at times and places where there shouldn’t be motion. I need these critical (“time sensitive” in Apple-ese) notifications. It also helpfully sends me random “SUBSCRIBE TO SOME ADD-ON SERVICE, 50% OFF SALE THIS WEEK” at all hours of the day and night. Sure I could rip out my entire security system and replace it but that’s a lot of physical labor and wasted hardware.
Another example is my air filter. It’s nice to get a reminder when it’s time to change the filter since it’s so infrequent, but I can’t get that notification without also getting spammed with “news” about new machines I should buy. Apple actively enables this behavior while claiming that spam is against their terms of service.
They are clearly working for the spammers, not the user, because they profit off of their cut.
This can always be turned off using in-app settings. It's an App Store requirement. Note: in-app settings, not general settings for the app. Check. It's there.
> Make sure people can manage their notification settings within your app. In addition to requesting permission to send informational or marketing notifications, you must also provide an in-app settings screen that lets people change their choice. For guidance, see Settings.
The options are “On” or “Off”. Please read the examples I provided for why that isn’t good enough.
I’ll even leave you with a third example: I can’t get shipping notifications about an online order I made without also opting into spam about sales and discounts. Apple could take a pro-user stance here and help us push back against scummy behavior, but they choose not to be helpful. They also happen to profit off of it, I’m sure that’s unrelated.
By “choose not to be helpful”, do you mean that they don’t use AI to detect spam notifications and distinguish them from useful notifications? That seems like quite a difficult engineering problem, though I’m sure their new AI could help.
There are many tools at their disposal, of which AI may be only a small one.
1) They could implement a “promotional” notification category the same way that they do “time sensitive” and let the user customize that the same way, or at least offer an opt-out.
2) Add a “report” button next to the disable notifications button.
3) Stop delivering notifications on behalf of apps that don’t correctly categorize promotional notifications.
4) Skip all this complexity and just ban developers that send spam. This is what their monopoly on app distribution is supposedly justified by: protecting users from malicious app developers.
As someone whose mother tongue isn't English, and whose residence isn't the US, apple intelligence is basically useless to me. Like every other ai assistant gimmick out there.
Honest question: why though? If someone uses a language other than English on their phone, the feature is quite literally useless to them, isn't it? I don't get why they're "self centered" for saying so.
I think it's quite telling that one of the main new features of the new iPhones won't even be available until next year for most of the world.
because obviously its coming and its not a huge technical lift at all. transformers were born to do translation. its just impatient and a waste of space complaining about how we know the world works for already very good if unfair reasons.
The state of the camera app pisses me off. It could do so much but it does so little. Why can’t I snap a picture of a written WiFi password to connect to WiFi? QRs are so 2008. Why can’t it fully parse a menu and show me what each dish might look like? It’s mind-boggling to me that with thousands of engineers on staff they produce so relatively little. Thousands!
> Why can’t I snap a picture of a written WiFi password to connect to WiFi?
You can actually do that, as of last year's iOS release. It's sort of a pain, but it's doable.
You need to be at the point where it's asking you for the WiFi password, tap the text field, choose "AutoFill", choose "scan text", and use the camera interface to pick the text.
This is extremely undiscoverable, no argument, but it is at least a system-wide standard for how to scan in arbitrary text when you have a text input. (They've picked "AutoFill" as the brand-name for all their get-text-from-somewhere-else features, so it also contains standard password-filling from apps.)
Bafflingly underwhelming additions from the previous innovation leader who had a last mover advantage in the space.
Think we need to be holding Apple to a higher standard, what they did in spaces before with the OG iPhone, iPad, iPod was completely upend the industry and change the game through focusing a product on a few pain points of the existing market. Yet Apple Intelligence feels like a brief struggling to find a reason to be there.
Smaller notch? Touch ID? Better battery life? Faster charging? Larger default storage? Nope, let's skip all that and spend most of the event talking about video recording.
Is anyone here actually excited about the features they just announced? Or are people simply upgrading because they get the latest iPhone every year or two by default?
Do people have to "upgrade" constantly? Shouldn't the iPhone get at least a little bit better every year, even if no one "upgrades"? I often use my devices for years until they break in some way, and then I get a new one... is it really so wrong that the 2024 model is only better in ways you don't care about from the 2023 model?
Exactly. Them releasing a new model every year with small, incremental updates is not for people to upgrade from the latest model (although it is obvious Apple tries to frame the newer models as large upgrades, they haven’t been that for the past 5 or so years), but rather for people who have been wanting to upgrade for a while from their 3-4-5 year old iPhones, and whenever they do they get the latest and greatest. Would the new models feel bigger upgrades if Apple only released one every 2-3 year? Sure. Would that be better for the average consumer looking to upgrade from whatever iPhone they have? Not sure. Incremental updates are nice IMO, stop caring about them if your iPhone is less than 3 year old…
>although it is obvious Apple tries to frame the newer models as large upgrades, they haven’t been that for the past 5 or so years
It does feel like there's a small degree of "they can't win" here though. They caught a bit of flack last release cycle for comparing the M3 and M4 chips to the M1s and M2s. Either they can compare to the old ones and people gripe about them hiding the fact that the new releases are incremental, or they compare to the current models and people complain that the releases are incremental.
>Would the new models feel bigger upgrades if Apple only released one every 2-3 year? Sure. Would that be better for the average consumer looking to upgrade from whatever iPhone they have? Not sure. Incremental updates are nice IMO, stop caring about them if your iPhone is less than 3 year old…
I do find it funny that the industry that gave us "rolling release linux" and "dependabot" is full of so many people that hate incremental hardware release cycles.
My personal upgrade cycle has been every 4 or so years for the last few iPhones. You really don't need to upgrade more often.
I'm on a 12 Pro and I only want to upgrade to get more memory and faster processors. My current phone easily pages apps out of memory too often these days and it gets a bit tiring. Also, I already replaced the battery once after 1.5 years and the current battery is already back to about the same health/capacity as the first one was in the same amount of time.
I’m on the same model and find it completely fine. The only thing I want is USBC. I keep saying “next year’s model will have some killer feature that’ll make it worth ditching my lightning cable finally”, and Apple keep giving me no reason to upgrade.
The only reason I feel pressure to upgrade my 11 is due to Pokémon Go ruining the battery (again). Will try to snag a used 13 Pro Max on the secondhand sites in a few weeks.
It comes to something when a $160 Xiaomi has the features that OP wants though.
Apple drip feeds features, they have realized that their business relies of making small incremental improvements to the iPhone every year so they hold back features that are bog standard in the more competitive Android world and then make a big fuss when they add it to the iPhone.
We complained about lockin and the uselessness once the older devices falls off the Apple support list, as repairs became a huge PITA (full swing anti-repair design at the time), and rooting the phones didn't help much as the jailbreaking scene was kneecapped compared to android's alternative stores.
They mentioned giving up to $800-$1000 for trade in for an iPhone 12 or newer. That's pretty aggressive on a device that's $999-$1199 list. It sounds like they are really wanting people to upgrade to this device.
It's "Up to $800" for an "iPhone 12 or newer". You won't get more than $200 for trading in an iPhone 12. The max value is reserved for the newest and highest end phones, i.e. 15 Pro Max.
Dunno exactly what my dance is but more than once I’ve found myself getting on the upgrade program, but not upgrading on the 12 month opportunity and instead paying it off over the next 12. If it has a crack I’ll do a last minute applecare swap while I got it. Cool, new old phone for another cycle
Because they actually refurbish those devices. It only makes sense for devices that are out there in very large numbers - most of their other products are owned by vastly smaller target groups.
Apple often gates features on model number. They'll make up some BS about needing the power of the newer model to do X but they'll be plenty of demos of doing X on various platforms with less power.
Not saying I need those new features. Only that Apple's incentives are to try to get you to buy the new phone so they are incentivised to gate several software only features to try to get you to upgrade.
I don't think anything after the 6S or 7 was that impressive. The X's form factor was cool, that's about it. I was annoyed that they took out the force sensor/3D touch.
It's not just the phone though, you would think by now they would release a smaller watch with round face.
In the iPod era we got a new form factor almost every year. You didn't have to buy it, but you had the choice. Now if I want a round watch I have to buy from google, which doesn't work with my iPhone?
You can swipe on it to adjust zoom level instead of having to pinch on the screen. Having owned SLRs I think I’ll appreciate the more camera-like affordances.
It’s also supposed to do the half-press to lock focus and exposure, which has been a common feature on cameras for ages. But I think I read this is a “coming later” feature.
There was something else about double tapping to switch modes though I don’t know how that works exactly.
Many families hand devices down. It would be odd for a bachelor to buy every new device every year, but if older devices end up with kids or grandpa it makes perfect sense for the family to buy a new device every year.
Yes, my family practices trickle-down iPhoneconomics. I get the new one every year, because it's a tax thing. I give my old one to my wife, and whichever kid has the oldest phone gets hers.
It's still cheaper to not buy a phone. Yes, buying with pre-tax dollars is cheaper than at a store. But not buying one at all is even cheaper.
And business expenses, like a new phone, are usually above the line, meaning you essentially get a discount of your marginal tax rate, you don't just get it for free.
I don't think they meant it like "I have to get the new one for tax reasons", but more like "I get the new one instead of my wife getting the new one, for tax reasons"
Yet if you'd buy normal phones, you'd not be spending a thousand bucks a year but rather something like 4× 300 bucks every 4 years or maybe 4× 500 every 5 years depending on what tier you get (assuming a standard family with 2 parents and 2 kids). Then nobody has hand-me-downs and everyone gets a fun new toy at the same time. You can even pick the model that fits each person's usage best! Some can have a bigger battery, others can have more storage...
Your total expenses are less than half and the average phone age is the same while being adapted to everyone's needs. Each device is about 90% as good as the thousand-buck ones (assuming no one has special requirements, like if you're really into photography then either a camera or a top-of-the-line phone does make sense! Exceptions exist for sure)
Or you tell yourself you can get a discount (omg!) by buying it for business and get yourself a shiny new toy every year :). I know some people that do this indeed
In a family group, at least one person in the hand-me-down chain is going to have a problem with their phone every year, so it makes sense for all the phones to scoot a step down regularly. And yeah, if the person first in line can claim them as a business expense then that’s a good excuse.
Yes of course it still costs money and not worth it if you derive zero benefit. But you pay less money, so you expect over many users there will be several for whom its worth upgrading at the lower price but not the higher price.
Probably as a business expense it can be deducted from income for the business + no increase in personal income for him. It's not free but is something like a 50% savings vs. paying himself and buying it personally.
My last iPhone purchase was the original SE... which turned out to be the most highly-regarded iPhone of them all.
It got smashed, so now I have to deal with all the regressions. No TouchID, no headphone jack, no SIM slot. Will I enjoy having a much better camera? Yep. But that won't do me any good while I can't listen to shit on the plane or in my cars... unless I carry an octopus of dongles everywhere, and none of it breaks and none of its non-removable batteries die.
The sad fact is that manufacturers work harder to screw the customer now than they do to impress him. Apologists enable this behavior, and entire product categories regress.
Same here! Haven't smashed mine yet thankfully and it's still great in 2024. Except that everyone is making their software slower because that's how it goes.
I did replace the screen on it. I've replaced screens on several phones several times, including once before on this one. But for some reason it suffered a total collapse of functionality this time. Not only did the Home button stop working (and no, there was no damage to it, its ribbon cable, or connectors... I examined every millimeter with a microscope), but the speakers stopped working and maybe the mic.
I've been writing an application and jumping through hoops to make it work on iOS 15 simply because I wanted it to work on my own phone. And those hoops were a PITA because SwiftUI was full of absurd holes and defects until iOS 17 (yes, 17). So I guess I can go through and shitcan all the workarounds I had to implement, at least!
That's a positive way to look at it! Shame that SwiftUI is tied to the OS version though, I guess that's why apps are slowly dropping support for iOS 15.
Even the 3rd-gen is pretty old at this point, and it retains the dumb rounded edges of much older models. The original SE had the nice flat edges, which Apple has wisely returned to.
Video and photography are by far the biggest feature that people buy phones for.
Pretty much every phone manufacturer focuses on cameras for that reason.
Incorrect. Video and photography is all the phone manufacturers can practically upgrade given the form factor constraints (size, thermals, etc.) so that's what consumers have been trained to differentiate between generations and makes and makers. The truth is the feature most people buy new phones for is more battery, and that's about it.
I'm excited that the cost of iPhone 15's will continue to fall so I can soon eliminate lightning cables from my life. Please everyone, go out and upgrade from 15 to 16! :)
I bought a bunch of the ones that have 2x lightning, USBC, usb-mini. Put them in my car and house etc. now my spouse has a new iPhone and we need 2x of the USBC, so I'll have to redo the whole setup!
I wish Apple never (got forced to) drop the lightning port. USB-C is vastly inferior in terms of durability due to its dumb design with a tiny PCB that sticks out right in the middle and an hermaphrodite plug that goes around it while still being inside the port.
From my experience USB-C is more durable. It has all the wearable springy parts in the cable, so replacing the cable every couple of years keeps it working like new. With Lightning the phone connector has spring-loaded contacts and retention clips that are guaranteed to wear out, and when they do you have to take apart the device and in some cases do micro-soldering to replace the connector.
USB-C has a tiny fragile 0.7 mm thick PCB levitating mid-air right in the middle of the port, just attached to one end (enabling it to irreparably bend in any direction if anything pushes it). This is in my experience way more fragile than the internal tried-and-true spring fingers.
Lightning does seem like the smarter mechanical design. Less to break on the phone side. Smaller overall. It's a shame it didn't become the general usb standard but I guess that's apple keeping it proprietary?
Also less likely to break on the plug side because it's a solid block rather than an extruded shape. Apple is infamous for its flimsy cables, but they always broke at the start of the cable (right after the end of the solid plastic thing), they never broke at the connector level. USB-C breaks on the connector, the plug, and the start of the cable.
I'm not entirely sure why it happened… Maybe Apple thought that they could keep their own proprietary plug forever and that the EU was bluffing about forcing everyone to use USB-C? Or maybe they are happy like everyone to switch to a fragile connector type that will shorten the lifespan of iPhones.
I doubt they're happy about it. With its smaller receptacle dimensions they could make a thinner phone or use the saved volume for a bigger battery than competitors.
I wonder what the EU will do when they eventually drop connectors entirely in favor of wireless charging.
In the theory that sounds plausible to me but (1) I've never actually experienced such a break (so "vastly inferior" can't be right) and (2) USB-C has clearly won, so it's water under the bridge.
I personally don't care about smaller notch (wouldn't say no of course, but not dealbreaker)
Battery life is more than enough for me almost every day.
Why on Earth should I downgrade to Touch ID when using Face ID?
I cared about the camera and improved ultra wide angle, 5x telephoto (my current one, 14 Pro Max has 3x) and 4K 120FPS HDR are enough for me to upgrade.
I agree that the general improvements could be better though: nowadays it's mostly software/AI stuff, and I'd definitely would like to have better camera/better display upgrades instead of just software stuff.
The new iPhones don't even have a notch anymore. The 14 Pro switched to the dynamic island 2 years ago, and last year the whole 15 lineup got it.
And the thing with the dynamic island is it's mostly drawn on in software. It's actually 2 small cutouts, a pill and a circle for FaceID and the selfie camera. They fill it in with the island at the top to make it look like it's all software, so I don't see them shrinking it since it's being used as a feature, where apps can minimize into it with live data (music playing, sports scores, etc)
> Is anyone here actually excited about the features they just announced?
I'm somewhat tempted by the camera improvements. Mostly the increased resolution on the ultra-wide camera, though the dedicated camera button might be nice. There've also been times when the higher zoom lens would have been useful for me, and it being available as standard means I'd actually have it without needing to buy a too-large phone.
The ultra-wide matters even when you're not using it for the zoomed-out fisheye shots, because it also is used for the macro mode. When you're within about a foot-or-so of a subject, the Camera app will switch to macro mode and quietly transition to using an extremely cropped view from the center of the ultra-wide lens. This lets it focus really well on up-close things... but the image quality is noticeable worse. So hopefully a vastly higher-res ultra-wide would result in me not feeling I should fiddle with camera settings around that transition point.
(Yes, this is very much a problem of Apple's own making. It started being annoying around the 14, when the main camera's focal length changed a bit and made them push the distance they had to trigger macro mode from out so it was no longer only happening when you were around 6 inches from a subject.)
I only upgrade every 4 or 5 years, and only because I need more storage after a few years of usage. This time I'll probably "upgrade" to last year's version.
Could also buy a device that takes upgradable storage, if that's truly your bottleneck / the reason you're replacing the whole device. Current state of the art is 1TB sdcards iirc, probably in 5 years they'll be denser again
Then you go back for warranty? Depends on the manufacturer and country of course but in the EU 2 years is the minimum and some member states extended that
I once had a phone break just shy of 2 years and got it repaired, lasted three more years after and I only had to replace it because apps started to require a newer OS, the hardware was fine
On the other hand, the iOS device I had for a few years at work broke part of the touchscreen just after 2 years (nice one, Apple, just out of warranty) and had a battery life that was bad from day one, but then I only use it twice a day for 2FA and the occasional call so it wasn't quite worth sending back
YMMV... saying that any phone running a particular OS must have hardware lasting no longer than the minimum warranty period is beyond me. Well, except when there is only one manufacturer's monoculture of course
Not sure why you're getting downvoted when almost no Android devices get security updates after 2 years, sometimes even less. Without the custom ROMs (that Google is putting an end to through hardware-backed Device Integrity) you get left behind without updates incredibly quickly.
I got the 15 pro because of an offer through my wife's work (it made it ridiculously cheap and seemed like the right opportunity to replace my 3 year old SE), and worried I'd have a bit of FOMO with the 16 a month away from release.
I really don't care. The 15 pro is so much phone, I can't imagine it lasting less than my SE. And frankly I only upgraded due to the limited time opportunity and knowing my son could use my SE due to his 7 being a crumpled lump of broken glass and gnarled aluminum. It's like he skate boards to school on it. RIP little SE, I guess.
I'd like the slightly nicer camera, but the ones on the 15 pro are so good it seems absurd to complain. I actually used this thing for product photos on my store's website, and they turned out remarkably well. It's not PRO level (I'll reproduce all of them with my camera later) but my god, cameras in phones have come a long, long way. We're at a point where I'd be very surprised if iPhone 17 introduces anything interesting.
I got the 15 mostly for USB-C. I still have cable hell because my AirPods are lightning so sometimes I need USB-C -> lightning and sometimes I need USB-A -> lightning
I might get an Airpod 4 for the USB-C though the Airpod 3 sucked and I'm suspecting the Airpod 4 is just as bad. Falls out (compared to Airpod 2). Pinch to play/pause/que sucks compared to Tap to play/pause/cue. Several friends had similar experiences including several friends that work at Apple. All of them returned their Airpod 3s.
How does that help? now I need to carry a magsafe charger everywhere I go so that I always have a way to charge? That's not better than needing 2 different kinds of cables. it's worse.
both glass and back frame is easily replaceable and very easy to DIY.
the CPU and integrated circuit is the core of the phone and if it is intact, the phone can be refreshed to be like new with the new shell for like $30 with parts from ebay
Please tell me you at least give the old phone to someone who can still use it for multiple years, rather than putting it with recycling where they may reuse some metals or, at best, some of the parts
> Smaller notch? Touch ID? Better battery life? Faster charging? Larger default storage? Nope, let's skip all that and spend most of the event talking about video recording.
They probably have done a load of research that shows that people on the whole buy new phones more because they think they will take better photos/video of their travels/friends/kids, rather than because of the notch size.
I don't think paying inflated prices for more expensive inputs while keeping the same retail price is good business, I wish it were because everything has gone up. Other than the camera button, Apple focused on features enabled by the System-on-a-chip because the per-unit marginal of those features are low. The 16 has improved computational photography which could be a substitute for optical zoom for some families who previously bought the Pro for optical zoom.
It makes sense that they would keep prices constant this year considering the pattern over the last decade.
Apple raised the retail price on the 15 Pro Max and added 5x zoom (2023). Apple raised the price on the iPhone 14 by using last-generation SoC (2022). Apple raised the price on the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro by dropping the AC adaptor and adding carrier charges of $30 (at least in the US) (2020). Apple raised the retail price of the iPhone 8 ($50 more than the 7) and in the same year, put more expensive inputs in the the X line which became the Pro line (2017). Apple put more expensive inputs in the 6 Plus and priced it $100 more than the 6 (2014).
I’d be in favor of the massively improved battery life that would come from making the main body of the phone thicker. The camera bump is absurdly thick, and making the rest of the phone 1-2mm thicker would make the camera stick out less and add a lot of internal volume that could be used for a larger battery.
for me the issue would be not thickness but heaviness - iphone are quite heavy already comparing to androids even though the latter have batteries with more capacity. I switched from iPhone XS (177g) to iPhone 13 mini (141g) and really enjoy that it's much lighter. iPhones 16 pro is 199g.
For better or worse the current big thing is AI. I wouldn’t expect any big leap in hardware anytime soon, other than perhaps running local AI models locally.
> Is anyone here actually excited about the features they just announced?
I'm frankly happy Cupertino didn't add bullshit features to make it exciting. This is an incremental update. They opened up minor new capabilities, some of which will matter to some people to varying degrees of compellingness.
I have a 14 Pro, and the main reasons I want to upgrade are for Apple Intelligence (mostly Siri-based) and for the better camera and video (as my family's default photog). If I didn't have kids I could wait a few more years on the camera, but I've been wanting a better Siri for years.
I missed the memo - I thought Touch ID was abandoned in favor of Face ID? Did they bring it back on the latest models? Can you use it again instead of Face ID, and is it as instant as it was on the older Apple phones?
It isn't abandoned. The side button on the iPad Air for example is a touch ID sensor. They just don't want to bring it to iPhone for some reason. Plus all other high-end phones from competing manufacturers have touch sensors under the screen now.
The rest of the industry seems to be moving towards under-screen ultrasonic fingerprint readers, which if Apple adopted, would allow them to shrink the notch by getting rid of the Face ID sensors. I think they've dug in their heels on Face ID though, so it likely won't happen (although they did reverse course on Force Touch, so anything is possible).
They likely won't end up reducing the size of the notch any further until they figure out how to either make Face ID work with just a single selfie camera (which would inevitably be less secure), or put the sensors under some sort of semi-transparent display.
Many people thought they missed an opportunity by not simply putting the fingerprint sensor under the Apple logo on the back of the iPhone, but they probably didn't like the UX of that solution.
You can get used to anything after putting up with it for long enough, but use a Galaxy S24 or Pixel 9 for a few weeks and when you come back to an iPhone you will realize just how intrusive the notch really is. Apple marketing has really convinced us that watching an entire movie on our $1200 device with a large chunk of the screen blacked out is totally normal.
The S24 still has a dot right in the middle of the upper part of the screen where the iPhone "notch" is[1]. When they play full screen video, don't they black out that part of the screen too? Or do they just leave a dot floating over part of the image? If the latter, I think I'd rather lose half a pinky width of screen real estate, I had a screen with 2 dead pixels one time and they were surprisingly annoying, I'd imagine a random camera dot in the image all the time would be just as bad.
It covers 16:9, but nothing beyond that. Most new releases are now 2x1 or 2.39x1, and they all get blocked by the notch. Try playing a widescreen YouTube video or any Netflix original and you will see this.
its about day to day usage, S23 user myself, whenever I use my friends phone I just can't stop staring at the thicc notch, anothwr reason it pop so much is because my friend uses light mode.
> The rest of the industry seems to be moving towards under-screen ultrasonic fingerprint readers, which if Apple adopted, would allow them to shrink the notch by getting rid of the Face ID sensors. I think they've dug in their heels on Face ID though, so it likely won't happen (although they did reverse course on Force Touch, so anything is possible).
Or they could have both Touch- and FaceID. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They definitely could, but it would likely cost Apple more to have two sets of sensors, not to mention take up more space in the device itself. Isn't that how they justified removing the headphone jack? And of course this is Apple we're talking about — they would probably deem having two authentication methods to be too confusing for users. They only recently decided to allow things like arbitrary home screen icon re-arrangements in iOS 18.
It said A18 uses 20% less power than A17. However, that might have been for the CPU cores. I don't remember if they made claims specific to the GPU cores or the ML cores.
Yeah but unfortunately I really needed more space than what I bought, and I figure at some point my cell carrier will drop support like they did with my 5. Also the 6S has that infamous battery design flaw. So the battery repair cost is something to think about vs replacing the phone.
Our tech is already great, we just need to distribute the awesomeness better. If innovation stops today, honestly I'm rather happy, we'd just keep building the tech we have until everyone gets their copy
That said, it seems pretty unrealistic that we can't figure out any incremental improvement until advancing our understanding of the universe. Both have been happening in parallel for centuries if not millennia
That’s the only thing from your list that people actually care about and they did improve battery life, there was a whole segment about it.
The rest? No one cares. Do you even use an iPhone? You sound like me before I got an iPhone:
- I thought the notch would be annoying, I don’t even notice it anymore, it’s never been an issue in actual use
- I was convinced TouchID was better than FaceID but I completely changed my mind. FaceID is just more reliable and convenient, especially if you have sweaty palms
- Faster charging? I mean, why not, it’s always nice if it can be faster, but I’ve found fast charging already surprisingly fast whenever I’ve needed to quickly get some % before going out
- Larger default storage? Same, it’s a nice plus, but if you want or need more storage, pay for more? You have the option
I disagree, there's lots to improve on that "regular users" would notice. I went from an 11 (non pro) to a 15PM, and there's still a few major gripes I'd like to see fixed that haven't been addressed in the 16, but would benefit regular users if improved:
- I wish my phone was easier to unlock when outside in the bright sun and wearing glasses. I often have to take them off or try again, or put in a passcode.
- I'd like the screen to not dim after a few minutes outside in the sun.
- I wish my phone charged faster, especially for moments where I'm like "Oh crap, my uber will be here in 5m and I forgot to charge my phone"
- I wish my safari tabs didn't attempt to reload at the most inopportune times (or ever like my Macbook). This is a very real scenario I run into often when in the subway with no cell/wifi, and is extremely annoying. Better than my 11, but not fixed by any means.
- I wish my OLED screen didn't have visible PWM at low brightness, and strained my eyes. Not everyone is sensitive to this, but some are, and I didn't have this issue with my 11.
> I wish my safari tabs didn't attempt to reload at the most inopportune times
This is my absolute #1 wish for my phone.
I want to load up 30 news tabs before I hop on the subway and just have them all stay loaded, instead of the most recent 4 staying loaded, while any others refresh (and fail) if I switch back to them.
I absolutely want all of my tabs to have the page state cached in storage whenever I leave them and they're done loading. With the scroll position too, as I'll often be interrupted halfway through reading a long story. I don't want them to be stored ephemerally in memory.
Surely it can't be so impossible to "pickle" the state of the page and then unpickle? I can totally accept it not surviving every app upgrade too. Just let me load up stories on the subway platform and read them all on my underground commute.
Should be theoretically possible via swap. Like, my MacBook can have a thousand browser tabs open without reloading any of them, and I'm sure it doesn't all sit in physical RAM. Is your phone low on storage, or are iPhones just less swappy?
Right, I know at least 3P apps get the "memory warning" and have specific rules about background execution, but wasn't sure about Safari since it's special.
> I wish my OLED screen didn't have visible PWM at low brightness, and strained my eyes. Not everyone is sensitive to this, but some are, and I didn't have this issue with my 11.
Have you tried playing with Reduce White Point in accessibility options? This plus the Dark Reader plugin for Safari it's a good option for late night reading.
> - I wish my safari tabs didn't attempt to reload at the most inopportune times (or ever like my Macbook). This is a very real scenario I run into often when in the subway with no cell/wifi, and is extremely annoying.
Surely there's An App For That / another browser that doesn't do this? (I don't own an iPhone myself so can't give any recommendations)
> - I thought the notch would be annoying, I don’t even notice it anymore, it’s never been an issue in actual use
I have several apps the notch covers. Arguably that's the app's fault for not upgrading ? Or is it Apple's? Maybe Apple should let apps opt into the notch. For apps that don't opt in they'd get a blank bar at the top. That would at least not have broken so many apps.
> - I was convinced TouchID was better than FaceID but I completely changed my mind. FaceID is just more reliable and convenient, especially if you have sweaty palms
Not everyone has the same set of use cases that you do. Device storage for example is a big deal for anyone who spends significant time outside of wifi. Buying more cloud storage doesn't help someone without an internet connection. Many people prefer TouchID for various reasons and I'm not sure why we wouldn't believe them just because you happen to like FaceID.
> I was convinced TouchID was better than FaceID but I completely changed my mind. FaceID is just more reliable and convenient, especially if you have sweaty palms
Actually for me it's the opposite, and I see much more failures to unlock with FaceID compared to TouchID. There are many times where I had to hold the phone out in front of me like I'm taking a selfie and look directly at it for the system to work, whereas TouchID works in all kinds of weird positions as long as I'm able to place my finger on the sensor.
Yeah, on an iPhone 12. Once you enable FaceID, the option to require passcode only after X minutes is removed, leaving only "immediately," which makes it a lot more important for FaceID to work reliably. It fails more often than TouchID does, and I can't unlock it without looking at it. Also the new swipe gestures are harder than using the home button; it's like they copied Android.
FaceID is not really compatible with Always On Displays. When you glance at a screen it's because you want to take a look at the clock or see if there are any notifications. I don't want my glance to unlock it! At least that's my experience with Galaxy phones and how I use AOD.
Looking at an iPhone unlocks it. You can then read the notifications. You will see that there are notifications but the content is hidden while the phone is locked. It does not go to the Home Screen until you swipe up from the bottom.
I mean, the big feature last year was that it was made out of titanium making it slightly lighter than the previous stainless steel models but still heavier than the aluminum regular models for no reason. Video recording is cooler than that, at least.
They added enough weight back to the 16 Pro that it’s now only 7 grams lighter than the 14 Pro, whereas the 15 Pro was 19 grams lighter than the 14 Pro. (I just want a new Mini, tbh)
Reminder for folks with older models: an Apple authorized battery replacement is about $80 in the US and will refresh your device enough to stretch its life a few more years.
People have been saying this every Apple announcement since the first iPod. It's replaced the classic "beleaguered Apple" line that was so popular in the press before they were as massive as they are now. I'm not sure an incremental iPhone update is any real proof of stagnation given that every iPhone update since probably the X which introduced face ID has been incremental, with the predictable accompanying "nothing exciting or new since Steve Jobs" commentary. And certainly one could maybe argue that the fact that every update since the X has been largely incremental is that proof that Apple has stagnated, I would offer the counter argument that no one today would pick an iPhone X over an iPhone 16 even if the X still ran the latest iOS, and when the X was released Apple was still shipping computers with intel chips and has since then successfully introduced an entirely new class of computer processors capable of competing with x86, completed its 3rd complete and relatively seamless architecture change, along with ripple effects in the non-apple world in the way of boosting interest in Windows ARM and increased focus and market access for things like the Qualcom Snapdragon Elite chips. So while they may have slowed down some, I think going from the first A4 series chip in 2010 to an entire industry changing desktop class processor series in 2020 is the sort of "stagnation" I can live with.
For fun, revisit the iPhone 6 announcement thread on HN[1], coincidentally posted 10 years ago today. I love going back to these to see how people responded.
The 16GB complaints brought back some traumas as an iOS dev. So many support issues arising from that. It was actually criminal Apple was still selling that as the base at the time, and iOS wasn't able to deal with restricted disk space very well either.
My SO was using one until it started behaving erratically.
It's the little iPhone that could and it's such a shame that its most recent replacement - the iPhone 13 Mini is both such a brick in comparison and did not have a successor.
What's worse there's hardly any choice nowadays in the sub 70mm width, sub 150g weight category. I guess people collectively resigned themselves to holding their devices with both hands.
I love my iphone 13 mini and am planning to run it into the ground. The form factor alone (despite numerous ribbings from friends), is enough to keep me from picking anything else up
The new Android foldables with edge-to-edge outer front screen are bearable, but then again you're paying flagship prices just so your phone fits into your pocket.
> I’ll continue using my SE 1st Gen with 4 inch screen for as long as I can.
I held on for so long, but even with a healthy battery, modern apps just crush it. I'd open Uber and go from 100% to 60% by the time my ride arrived. Caved and bought the new SE and mostly hate it in all its giant rounded slipperiness.
I love how ridiculous the scene to showcase Apple's Intelligence ability to tell you what bread the dog was.
Instead of simply asking a women what breed her dog was - he had to open a camera app on his iPhone, ask a women a permission to take a photo of the dog, wait until the AI gives him an answer...
These MBA-approved use cases for AI feel like the Futurama parody of The Twilight Zone.
The one from Google the AI a man was using to raise his child convinced him to use Gemini to write an admiration letter to an athlete wouldn't look out of place in the series.
It's weird how they pick unrealistic use cases when there are real ones. Last week I saw a nice plant and wanted to buy the same one, so I used Google's image recognition feature.
Agreed. Normally Apple finds genuine uses of their features they’re intending to market. The guy ended up talking to the person with the dog after, which made the use of the AI a bit of a miss.
It honestly felt like Apple didn’t do that scene because normally everything is well thought out.
Its so sad how much Siri has degraded even since this commercial; and then Apple Intelligence comes along re-selling a ton of the stuff Siri used to be able to just do.
- "Is that rain?" pulls up a weather widget, but Siri doesn't say anything about it (the correct answer for me right now would be the response "No")
- "Let's get soup delivered" does a google search for literally "let's get soup delivered" with no vocal response.
The 13 Pro had ProMotion, 14 Pro had Dynamic Island and Always On display, the 15 Pro had USB-C and the Action Button, the 16 Pro...has maybe slightly faster AI? 4k120fps video? USB-C w/ USB 3? Not things most people would care about.
ProMotion/Always On is still limited to the Pro models which is enough to justfy the upcharge, but it's a surprise they aren't locking a new feature this time.
For me 60Hz on the base model is now a deal breaker. Even our daughter's 300 Euro A54 has a 120Hz screen (though not LTPO). Once you are used to 120Hz on a touch device, it's hard to go back (different on a relatively static computer screen, where I prefer having the high DPI of 5k 27"). So, it's iPhone Pro models until the base model gets >60Hz too.
I’ve actually come to the conclusion that a laggier worse phone display is a feature, not a bug. Quicker response times = more addictive with little to no upside in productivity.
That’s not wrong, look at America, very tasty food and very unhealthy people. In Switzerland the food is no where near as tasty and the people are healthier and in better shape.
I don’t know what Switzerland you are talking about, only 12% of the population is considered obese so I don’t see how over half the men here are obese.
America doesn't have a monopoly on particularly good food.. We have a lot of junk and fast food and cities that are only usable by car which I think are the real issues.
I understand 60 Hz being “a deal breaker” for gaming and VR applications, but on a battery-constrained mobile phone that I carry everywhere? No thanks. I’d rather have more battery life or less weight in my pocket. 60 Hz is more than adequate.
Isn't the difference minimal, particularly with LTPO that can go down to 1hz? Of course this is assuming you aren't gaming at 120hz but rather doing more casual tasks.
Surely that's a joke, what special need could possibly call for requiring more than 60fps (calling it a dealbreaker)? It's nice to have but... it's like having a slightly faster CPU or cellular modem that lets pages load 2ms faster, sure it's nice but... a dealbreaker? Why?
I'm pretty sure what OP meant is "once you try high refresh rate, you can't go back". I had the same feeling many years ago as an android user. And more recently after switching to an OLED monitor.
I read that sentiment often. But I am able to switch between my 60 Hz iPhone 13 and 120 Hz iPad Pro without issue. iPad Pro switches from 120 Hz to 60 Hz when low power mode is activated. I notice the switch but I easily adjust and not think about it.
Well. I used to think the same but I found myself got used to the 60hz display within a week again. It's true it's annoying for the first few days but you know, mankind is an adapting animal.
I generally find the opposite. Experts know how to deal with limited memory. They benefit from more but they understand the tradeoffs. Non-experts get all kinds of bad experiences not realizing the issue is their machine is underpowered.
Maybe 8GB ram is enough for your mom but know lots of non-techies suffering with underpowered machines.
> Non-experts get all kinds of bad experiences not realizing the issue is their machine is underpowered
As always, it depends on how the machine is being used. The encompasses both intent and habits.
Someone who will install ad-spam toolbars will chew through all the memory in the world. That doesn't change the fact that they're largely using their device to e-mail, read news and occasionally open a spreadsheet.
The people I've seen with underpowered machines, wait 5 minutes for them to boot since they are both slow (celeron) and low-mem (so swapping 10-15 times while booting). They they take minutes to launch apps (like open a spreadsheet).
It doesn't matter than they're only using their device to e-mail, read news, and occasionally open a spreadsheet. In fact, reading news is arguably a memory and perf hog. 100s of large images, plus video, etc... taxes any low-powered/low-memory machine. It's bad enough on a fast machine that doesn't slow down but is still covered in ads on the news page. But it's horryfing on an under-powered/under-memory machine.
swapping on an m4 with a midrange pcie 4.0 SSD is quite different from swapping on a celeron with a low-end SATA SSD or spinning rust, plus linux/unix/macos is generally much better with swapping sensibly than windows.
believe it or not, an 8GB macos device is generally quite usable even if it's swapping, as long as it's apple silicon family. yes, it's not going to save if you if your working set is more than 8GB and you need everything in the set, but chrome/firefox do not actually need the 32gb you are probably giving them.
Might have been true 5 years ago, but I don't think this is true now. Base systems with nothing open are using 3+ gigs of memory. Web pages use a ton, but even fairly standard apps will use a gig or more (thanks, electron).
The end result is super slow loading as stuff is swapped, apps crashing (at least on Windows), tabs reloading when you don't want them to.
> Web pages use a ton, but even fairly standard apps will use a gig or more (thanks, electron)
She does most of that on an iPad. The computer is used for e-mail, filling out government forms and looking at spreadsheets. She needs a sturdy machine that works, simply, and doesn't need a lot of babying. A cheap, well-configured Mac running Safari with an ad blocker is just about perfect for that.
The optical zoom on the Pro is so good! I often zoom in 3-5x and still get great results. I've gotten comments from people saying they thought photos of far off building features, etc, were taken with a DSLR.
It's a no-brainer to get the Pro for this reason, if you care about photos.
Really thought they'd upgrade from 12MP to 48MP on the telephoto. iPhone 16 Pro matched the Pixel's 5x optical zoom, but weirdly it remains stuck at 12MP.
When it comes to exchangeable lens cameras (DSLRs/DSLMs), as you increase the number of pixels you very quickly reach a point where you're limited by the optical performance of the lens instead of the sensor. Lots of systems offer a choice between a 24MP and a high pixel count camera (e.g. Nikon Z6/Z7), and you'll find that the high pixel count sibling requires very good lenses to actually achieve a meaningful improvement over 24MP. For these cameras, common wisdom says to stay with 24MP apart from certain niche use cases.
In other words, I wouldn't expect a improvement in capturing actual 48MP pictures in phone cameras, apart perhaps from pixel binning to a smaller size and similar techniques.
Disclaimer: I haven't followed camera tech very closely recently, and I'm not an expert. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.
It might be a 48MP sensor that produces 12MP readout after pixel binning. That's how the sensors on the Sony Xperia 1 work. Does Apple use Sony sensors? I vaguely remember that being a thing.
If image sensor / lens system quality are orthogonal to the final megapixel output, why bother with 48MP output JPEGs? They take up more space, so the practical benefit to smaller files is there.
Is this a real zoom or just a fixed lens with longer focal length? I have read that the 13 Pro does digital zoom between 1x and 2.9x and only at 3x the 3x lens kicks in. So if you have a 5x lens you get digital zoom over an even longer range. So you may end up with worse image quality over a wider range.
That is correct. I treat my 15 Pro like having a set of prime lenses at varying lengths, and so only use 0.5x (13mm), 1x (24mm), 2x (48mm, which is 12MP out of the main camera’s 48MP), or 3x (77mm). In theory, anything between 1x and 2x should be non-digital zoom, but a crop of the 1x 48MP sensor. Anything between 0.5x and 1x, over 2x and less than 3x, or over 3x is digital zoom (crop + upscale). (For the 15 Pro Max, and I assume upcoming 16 Pro models, replace 3x with 5x)
As far as I know, Sony is the only company making phones with “actual” optical zoom, and not just a bunch of primes.
I'd hope it's just a "set of primes" with interpolation/digital zoom between them. At least I wouldn't want to have something that I drop on the floor on regular intervals to have a movable lens assembly that needs micrometer alignment because it's 48mp spread out over just a couple of mm.
The previous model 15 pro already has 3x, so it’s a jump from 3x to 5x. Not enough for me to upgrade already, but a good feature if you like photography or videography.
I agree but I already planned to upgrade to a 16 Pro up from my 12. Biggest thing I’m looking forward to? Battery life.
In the announcement they said “big boost”, and looking at the comparison page I will go from 17h video playback to 27h. That’s not even including the battery degradation I built up in the last 4 years. I’m practically going to double my battery life.
I would be fine with the Pro models getting larger screens if they would shrink the standard phone. I'm still trying to survive with my 12 mini for as long as possible until the battery dies. I tried a standard iPhone 15 for two weeks last year and I wasn't happy with the larger size and returned it.
The mini was a great form factor, fits in more pockets comfortably and the whole screen is within reach of my thumb when using the phone one-handed.
More people want "all of the above" to be larger than want the smaller phone. It does leave those that prefer the truly small phones in a tough spot though, but they are a tiny percentage of buyers and only a fraction of that percentage actually dislike the other options vs would just use the mini when it's available https://www.macrumors.com/2022/04/21/iphone-13-mini-unpopula...
That said I wonder if they'll slip in a new mini model every once in a great while to give that group of users an option.
It's not the phone size, its the reach for my fingers. I can't reach the top left corner with my thumb on these larger screens and UI/UX people keep putting the hamburger for the navigation in that spot.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but bringing it up in case you aren't. On newer Face ID models, you can swipe down on the bottom of the screen (the little grey bar) and it'll toggle the reachability feature so the top of the screen comes into the middle of the display. Basically shoving everything down.
I understand it's not ideal, but I find it a valuable feature when I must operate one handed and sometimes struggle with the same issue.
I've found that feature really difficult to trigger reliably without hitting buttons on the bottom of the screen if they're there. Maybe it's just because I'm on a 13 mini, and before that a 12 mini. But if an app has a bottom navigation bar, I've found it absolutely impossible to trigger reachability without also hitting the bottom navigation.
I did also set up an accessibility feature where you can map a handful of actions to a double or triple tap on the back of the glass, and I mapped double-tap to trigger Reachability. But it's not super fast and overall a bit of a downgrade from the double capacitive TouchID tap on older models.
15 and 15 Pro both had USB-C. The 15 pro just has USB3 capable USB-C (15 regular was USB2 only). Seems like they're keeping that differentiation, which I suppose makes sense given the USB3 PHY is a considerable die cost.
Is it actually a different die though? The A18 and A18 Pro are so close in specs, with the same 6 CPU cores, same 16 NPU cores and only 5 vs. 6 GPU cores that I would guess that they are the very same die just with one GPU cluster and USB3 switched off in the non-Pro version.
On the 15 series it was since they used different chip generations. No idea on the new 16 series, we’ll have to wait for die shots from teardown groups.
A18 Pro is also faster. Typically the speed and 5 vs 6 core difference would use the same die and selecting Pro chips during testing. Chips that tolerate heat better become pro-model chips.
The rumor was that they are different dies. It seems strange because both are made with the same 2nd generation 3nm architecture.
If you’re using the phone to shoot ProRes video, it uses something absurd like 1GB/min of video… so, offloading that video via USB2 would be agonizing.
Some of the video modes are only available if you record directly to external media. 4k HDR ProRes 120fps isn’t going to transfer real time over usb 2.
Are there new hardware features announced for the 16 Pro? Apple definitely would love to add an exclusive feature but it seems like negligible pickings. The "Fusion" or "tetraprism" camera is the only other one that comes to mind.
Fundamentally Apple wants to leverage their supply chain to maximize shared parts between the Pro and base iPhones. Lack of hardware innovations makes it hard to create product differentiation.
This isn't related to the user update cycle discussions, just pointing out it's odd that Apple has always locked a new feature/hardware to a higher SKU to help price discriminate but here it's weaker.
The non-Pro models are still only 60hz? C'mon man, high refresh rate is hardly a luxury feature anymore. At least give them 90hz and reserve 120hz for the Pro models.
I used a 14 pro for 3 months before going back to 13 mini. The screen was definitely nicer on the former but I have no actual issues with the little one. Maybe because I don't wildly flick through social media feeds very much?
Since I scroll quite a lot, I prefer to have a better experience with this very basic and common activity. Apple claims to provide the best experience, while it clearly does not.
Literally anyone picked off the street will notice jumping from 60hz to 120hz after maybe, I don't know, 2 seconds of swiping around.
You have it backwards. Nobody is pro gaming on an iPhone. That high refresh rate doesn't have a real, practical purpose. It just looks really really good and immediately grabs your eye - it's candy.
The current top comment talks about how an average person "can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED" and I was shaking my head. While I got used to LCD again after having OLED for a few years, it took multiple months for me to stop noticing the faux-gray dark patches. It makes a real difference and you instantly see it when you hold phones side by side with a screen or picture that includes any dark section. If you know what to look for, you can also tell at a glance without a side-by-side comparison
> Literally anyone picked off the street will notice jumping from 60hz to 120hz after maybe, I don't know, 2 seconds of swiping around.
But frame rates? I was curious to see what the hype was about and walked over to the phones section in a nearby tech store when I was there to buy something unrelated. Side by side, I just cannot tell the difference. I'm swiping fast and slow but I cannot tell whether one is smoother or if that's my brain doing this placebo thing. I'd be very curious if I can tell in a blind test. Perhaps I could, but it's so close that I really don't see the point of making a big deal out of selecting for screen refresh rate, for myself at least
There are three types of people when it comes to OLED/fast refresh rates.
1) OMG! What an upgrade! I will never own another phone without this!
2) Eh, I see what the difference is. I don’t care/it isn’t worth the price.
3) What are you talking about? I don’t see any difference.
2 and 3 combined are probably the majority of people. The first post is literally about his girlfriend not noticing screen differences. There are plenty of people like that.
No, no there aren't because fast refresh rate is painfully obvious. I'm talking within a second, maybe fractions of a second, you will notice. Because every single animation is affected.
It's one thing to say it's a small change, or not a big deal, or not worth it (I'd even agree). It's another to say you can't notice it. No... you can definitely notice it.
I am happy with 60hz but I did stumble upon a 120hz phone the other week and it was instantly noticeably nicer, so much so that my next phone likely will be whatever iPhone has 120hz.
Phishing email operators rejoice: Apple still are not showing emails in the Mail app, and will even scan your phishing email and rephrase it while recognising and pushing it as a priority notification.
I actually like the idea, but I worry a lot that it will lead to non tech-savvy (and tech-savvy-but-hurried) people to getting rekt. It’s still obscene to me that they don’t show the sender’s email before clicking in. It not only removes valuable information to screen emails with, but if there are tracking pixels, they fire since you must open the email for further screening. (Sender email can ofc be spooked, but this catches most spam I get)
> if there are tracking pixels, they fire since you must open the email for further screening
What makes you think that? Email message content is plain HTML, tracking pixels are usually implemented as `<img>`s with unique link.
I'd expect Apple engineers are aware of that and they can render HTML without external resources, and only then pass it to their LLM. Also Mail.app is already capable of doing that -- you can disable loading external resources by default in settings on iOS and macOS both.
> Featuring a new 48MP Fusion camera with a faster quad-pixel sensor that enables 4K120 fps video recording in Dolby Vision, these new Pro models achieve the highest resolution and frame-rate combination ever available on iPhone
Every iPhone generation makes YouTube video quality slightly better as it’s what a lot of people use. That plus social media.
Given that they had to upgrade to a new camera sensor to get faster readout speed, I’m wondering if they actually changed to a better sensor with improved pixel size and light sensitivity.
I have read the official press release but it seems like there is no mentions of this.
Might need to wait for the ifixit tear down in ~10 days.
Edit 1: there has been some discussions that eventually the Sony IMX903 would be used, but not sure when that will actually eventuate.
I'm actually so furious about this. No, they did not put the IMX903 (ik this because microns they showed are still 1.22, not 1.4 of the imx903) - even though it was supposed to be in the 15PM. It's the exact same sensor, all they changed is the processing algorithms & new sensor shift OIS (v2). Nothing that 15PM couldn't have been if they bothered 1% (even now they could push an 'OTA' to turn 15PM into 99.97% 16PM (if they were a real company that is)). IMX903 would remove a need to upgrade the sensor for the next 3-4 years (coming from me, who is already using a phone with a way better 1'' sensor (lyt-900)) but no - they choose to do the same crap scamsung and goolag are doing, albeit iPhone sensors are currently way better as the Scamsung/Goolag are still on the old dogshit HP1 and HP2s from 2020/1 tech (yes, GNK is new but it's the same crap, basically a mix of HP1 and 2) so it's still in the era where Sony was unparalleled (now both Samsung and Omni are killing Sony with their latest sensors). And it's crazy how only Chinese phones are pushing new techs, literally if they had better QC and ideas they'd be 5 years ahead of crapple, scamsung and goolag - like this they're barely better. If Apple had my LYT-900 it'd be a murder scene.
It's not a chip but a sensor. The difference between 1/1.28'' and 1/1.14'' may not sound much but the whole tech of the IMX903 (double stacked CMOS for better light gathering, better video performance, cinematic mode) would make it way better. So it'd perform better at night (video especially), it'd have huger pixels & would allow Apple's 24mp mode to truly shine as it'd capture an amazing level of texture any time of the day, like this it just doesn't matter as much
Are there any phones currently using IMX903 sensor? Also, is IMX903 better than lyt-900? Also, which phones are using lyt-900?
True flagships these days are really made by Chinese firms. I am only holding back because of long term software support. I guess I will grab the next gen flagship honor/mi phone.
thanks, was looking for confirmation of this. shame. going to skip this years model and hope they upgrade the camera sensor in the iPhone 17 pro. it's the only reason to switch to a new phone these days
A big part of it for content creators is stuff like this
> You can capture 4K 120 fps ProRes and log recordings to an external storage device — a big plus for pro editing workflows that demand a high frame rate and colour grading control.
Might make a dent in mirrorless sales, just w/o the lenses
I’ve been blown away by the 15 Pro’s camera quality. I still use my camera for more serious photo taking, but the phone is kind of my default for throwing content together because it’s so flexible and the quality is basically good enough to go live with. I didn’t expect this at all. It has been a really pleasant surprise.
I’m probably in the minority, but a thing I’d love to see is a much stronger flashlight. It’s silly, but the flashlight is something I use almost daily and having a more powerful one would be quite useful.
What a random feature request. In case you're not aware, you can open control center, long-press on the flashlight icon and you get to adjust the brightness of the flashlight. If you're not already at the max level, you might get a slightly (but definitely not much) stronger flashlight on your current phone.
My wife is a long time Apple user, and I had to tell her to charge her phone sideways, swipe a few times horizontally and a few more vertically to get the night clock face with big numbers she wanted.
Despite boasting to have an intuitive UX, iOS can be very obscure regarding discoverability and exploration of features. Many features give no hints whatsoever of existing.
Not sure how it's random. I use the flashlight every day as well. A better one(yes I have it maxed out already) would be more valuable to me than any of the features they announced today.
Just a data point, I have a $800 watch (Garmin Fenix 7 Pro Sapphire) that has a built in LED flashlight, including a red hue. I bought it to have backup GPS in off grid situations and for health and activity tracking, but tbh the feature I would never want to give up is the flashlight. I use it all the time and it’s, frankly, invaluable. I’m not sure if other smart watches have good flashlights, but they should. I almost never use my phone flashlight as a result.
Me too! I thought it would be somewhat gimmicky but I use my Garmin flashlight all the time. For instance I was just trekking in South America and at camp while everyone else was using headlamps to get around at night, constantly shining lights in each others' eyes I could use the more subtle watch light to get up and find the toilet, etc.
Apple Watches also have a "flashlight" feature, including a red light mode for SOS and running modes, but they just turn on the screen to full white or red output with some brightness controls. It's not a dedicated LED emitter like yours appears to be but it's sufficient for finding things in the dark or not tripping on something.
Leaving the flashlight on annoys me but nothing beats an AirPod in the case that’s not charging. That one drives me nuts. If I’m not listening to anything and one of the two AirPods is charging then they really should be able to detect that and alert me. Especially with all of the find my features.
Not really what you're looking for, but a dedicated "proper" flashlight today easily has 1500-2000 lumens. It's a far cry from those old AA maglights, and frankly it's absolutely worth it if you need a torch for even 10 minutes a week.
I have a Sofirn SP35 (USB-C charging, standard 21700 battery) and for about $40 it can be brighter than a car's low beams. r/flashlight's recommended lights is a solid place to start.
I've been an Android user since day 1, but am very impressed by some of these features. I'd love to have the half-click to focus feature and other dedicated camera button features, macro, a few other things that put this generation in a next category. I'd like to see them catch up and surpass all of Google's onboard AI features, and it looks like they're working on it. Being able to find a section of a video by a vague description, all on-device, is incredible. And they're finally improving their photo app. If Apple offered call screening, ambient song identification/logging, and allowed browsers to support extensions, I'd be tempted to switch, especially since they have a clearer privacy story. I'm glad strong competition is continuing, especially around privacy.
Likewise. The only thing I strongly dislike about the 15 pro is the brutal post processing smell on the photos. It’s almost like how you can tell when an image was AI generated. You can tell a photo came from my phone (or any other iPhone 15). The processing is HEAVY and there is a whack load of ML going on.
The sad thing is image processing is also basically machine learning when it comes to noise management, and computational photography is still what pushes the envelope when it comes to sensors these sizes. Sony handles the whole stack, from the sensor to the color management, and still can't have great photography on their phones almost solely because of that.
I'm curious how Xiaomi does with their phones with actual larger sensors, but given the price I won't be touching one anytime soon.
iOS does support a form a call screening, called live voicemail, which transcribes the message being recorded by the caller and lets you pick up the call if you want. iOS also supports ambient song identification, with history, which I use frequently. Safari supports extensions, and I believe other browsers can as well, but can't speak to that as I really only use Safari in my phone, even though it's not my primary browser on desktop.
Figured I'd drop a comment to let you know about the others though!
> iOS also supports ambient song identification, with history, which I use frequently.
Does it? I can't find any info about this online and all I can find seems to indicate that you can run Shazam and it scans for some amount of time afterwards but iOS kills it to save battery. It doesn't seem like you can get Google Pixel-like "Now Playing" which I sorely miss on my iPhone 15 Pro.
Right, the person saying "they use it" as opposed to "refer to it" is an indicator. It's a great feature, using on-device "AI" (privacy preserving), and available since Pixel 2 (2018).
That's great news, I didn't know they had rolled out those features. I don't really want to rewrite my extensions for another browser, but I'll see how applicable the others might be.
> I'm glad strong competition is continuing, especially around privacy.
Until Apple releases an iOS platform equivocal to AOSP, there's really not any competition at all. Apple claims to care about privacy, Google proves they do.
Google’s entire business model is dependent on personal data. AOSP may have privacy features that are verifiable but Google Play Services is not open source and undoubtedly collect lots of data for Google. Most AOSP-based phones all largely include GPS. Sure, you can limit what access GPS has but then you’re sacrificing features. The majority of people probably opt-in.
In contrast, Apple doesn’t need your data for most of the products / services they sell. Privacy is a selling point, so they’re incentivized to build robust privacy features. I’d love to see more commitment to open-sourcing underlying technologies but imo Apple is way more privacy conscious than Google.
I will however give Google credit for their privacy initiatives in recent years. They seem to be taking it more seriously.
> Google Play Services is not open source and undoubtedly collect lots of data for Google
Google Play services is not everything though, and Android being what it is, you can actually replace and spoof most of these features to your heart's content. Having used Android without Play Services for a few years now, I honest to god do not notice the difference. microG coming preinstalled on most Android derivatives helps a lot there.
> Privacy is a selling point, so they’re incentivized to build robust privacy features.
Problem is, that's a tautology. Apple says that, and certainly stand to gain quite a bit from claiming it. But nobody is holding them accountable besides themselves; if Apple was asked to compromise their privacy by a third party, their users may never know. Nobody can earnestly say that iOS is a comparatively private operating system, because we literally cannot see how it behaves!
Apple's approach to "privacy" is publishing whitepapers and then absolving themselves of real accountability. That's how they approached iPhone security, that's how they approached Mac security, and lord only knows how they approach iCloud security. When you say that Apple is "privacy conscious", you mean to say they market privacy better. You don't know how conscious Apple is of privacy, you only know what they claim to be true.
As I said; it's not a competition. Marketing-based security is not a threat model; transparency is.
> In contrast, Apple doesn’t need your data for most of the products / services they sell. Privacy is a selling point, so they’re incentivized to build robust privacy features.
It's an option. AOSP isn't identical to OEM-distributed ROMs, but it's certainly a great basis for private OSes like CalyxOS and GrapheneOS. For individuals that are serious about privacy, there aren't any options to compile your own iOS with Apple services disabled.
I'm not saying that the AOSP absolves all of Google's server-side behavior (or even that it proves they're benevolent; neither company is). My point is that Google presents a realistic threat model to their users, that takes them seriously and even provides escape hatches for any potentially concerning features. iOS presents a comparatively cartoonish outlook that relies more on the strength of their marketing than the self-evidence of their security. Apple's position is indefensible but claims to be altruistic; Google's position is honest, so much that it treats themselves as a threat.
GNU/Linux cellular devices are not more private than an appropriately secured Android handset. Given the modem vulnerabilities and poor support for Linux ARM SOCs, I would much rather trust an OS designed from the ground-up to incorporate cellular security. There's a reason Linux was forked to create Android, and not built as an upstream effort. Linux is perfectly secure for a physically secured server rack. It is a nightmare scenario for GSM privacy.
Endpoint security, IP-based GSM networking vs RIL telephony, isolation measures, ISP trust and fingerprinting mitigation, modem transparency, privledged baseband access and SIM vulnerability, to name a few big ones.
Again - Linux for desktops and servers can be great for privacy. For pretty much every single smartphone-based threat vector, it is a free lunch for attackers. We're talking off-the-shelf CVE exploits versus blowing a multi-million dollar zero-day here.
This is all very theoretical and unclear. For example, on Pinephone, the modem runs FLOSS software (except for a small blob managing the tower connections). Also, it's connected via USB, so there is no privileged access for it. I have no idea what ISP trust has to do with that. You can install Tor on the phone. And so on.
Usually when the Apple event is going on, my iMessages is pretty active with different sets of friends talking about it.
The non-techy group of friends only commented on the colors, size of the phone, and how there's nothing interesting to convince them to upgrade from the 13/14/15 models.
The nerdy group really got hyped on the Apple Intelligence part, only qualm being that it's not going to be released on day one. They also had screenshots to share of previous chips like the A16 and A17 to compare. The video specs were all followed by positive emojis because almost everyone has kids, pets, or things they like recording. And at the end, some even lamented the fact that the default storage is only 128GB on the smaller Pro model.
As someone who's very interested in smartphones, I found it kinda interesting how Apple seems to be sharing more data points on performance and specs instead of "useful features" that most people would notice.
They mention battery life in this release 11 times without saying how long the battery will last. Please Apple, even just a typical usage number would be great.
It's been many generations since I've had an Apple device, and each year they release a new one I try figure out how long the battery lasts, to no avail. Nobody I know has bought a Max Pro either.
With Apple, you never know, it could still be 10 hours battery life. I mean they just released "ground-breaking" features like moveable icons, something I think Android had since Android 1. My point is one never knows.
The only number I could find was 22/27 hours of video playback for 16/16 Pro, you can compare that to older models on https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/ that might give some indication?
I was reading and thought this was about as concrete as they got:
"The new mechanical architecture improves heat dissipation and efficiency for up to 20 percent better sustained performance. Along with the new internal design and advanced power management of iOS 18, larger batteries are optimized to offer a huge leap in battery life."
The vast majority of energy use when watching videos is the screen, so my guess is that most of the improvement is from lower screen energy use when at its lowest brightness.
You can never please everyone. Not sure if you realize, it’s trivial to get a new battery replaced once every 3 or 4 years. Apple store can do it, as well 3rd party repair shops in most cities. Takes 15-45 minutes, depends how busy the shop is.
Perhaps you’re more annoyed about right to repair in general? That’s a different story…
There are some actual benefits though, even if you choose to ignore them. The water resistance rating is much higher compared to phones with a battery cover, a modern iphone will have zero problems being accidentally dropped in the deep end of a pool, or in a lake.
Everything is a trade off, don’t forget that. You don’t like this trade off, which i completely understand. Not everyone cares about water resistance…
If a replaceable battery is a must for you, i’d buy an android with a battery cover. Gotta choose what’s right for you.
I just went through that process at an Apple Store less than 50 miles from Apple HQ. It took 4 and a half hours from my appointment time to having my repaired phone back. (And of course I couldn’t get work done because I didn’t have my phone, and I couldn’t warn the people who were expecting me of my delay, because I didn’t have my phone.) That’s completely unacceptable when it should only take 5-10 seconds.
Edit: To head off any doubt, no my phone was not damaged, and the repair went smoothly. They were having an inventory tracking system outage with absolutely zero fallback/continuity plan and absolutely refused to give me my phone back, repaired or not.
Even in the best case scenario is objectively worse in every way than a 10s at-home battery swap. Especially for the vast majority of human beings that don’t live within a reasonable distance of an Apple Store. Keep in mind that most older phones end up on secondary markets in less wealthy countries. They could live for years there except for the failed batteries.
The latest iPhones require the battery to be cryptographically paired to the phone and can only be done by Apple or a few approved vendors. You can’t just take them to a normal repair shop.
Does the new camera button thingy happen to be a fingerprint scanner as well? I live in a constant state of rage with Face ID, longing for my iPhone 8 Plus with its Home button and the ability to pay for things in one fluid motion.
The fact that they have touch id on some of the ipad side power buttons, but not on the iphone, is so annoying. Face id is both great and terrible, and complementing it with touch id to cover the >5% of cases where face id fails would be such an improvement.
I really want the touch id from iPad. It's so much faster and reliable that face id. I think together would be a winning combo, but given the option, I'd take the ipad touch id over face id.
How is using face id for payments not a fluid motion? Double click on the side button and it’s ON to make payments, no need to do anything else. While on Touch ID you have to first initiate the payment and then unlock with a finger (2 steps)?
With Face ID you have to take your phone out, double click, then hold it up to your face and wait for it to work, then hold it out to do a contactless payment. With Touch ID you just take your phone out of your pocket with your thumb on the home button and pay instantly (you don’t have to initiate anything).
I must have bad fingers cos Touch ID is more miss than hit. More often than not, I'll just type in my password on the Mac. The Touch ID rarely works faster.
As for iPhone, the Face ID works (for me) soooo much faster and reliable than my finger ever did. I don't miss Touch ID for a second.
That's what I thought too, but you actually don't have to do the face ID when it's next to NFC reader. You double click the side button, while looking at the phone - it lets you choose which card you want to use for the payment, ONLY THEN you tap the phone to the NFC range, you don't need to look at the phone anymore after you unlocked it with a double click.
Yeah you don't need to do them at once, but with Touch ID you could authenticate in one smooth motion to the NFC machine rather than having to go up to your face first.
So did they just give up on Blood-Oxygen sensing on the Watch? Thought it might be a good time to update my Watch 6 (black titanium) to a 10, since they brought back the black titanium, but they just have no answer for the blood-oxygen lawsuit?
It’s been really crappy the entire time it existed, so it’s not a big loss. I have my watch on quite snugly (but not too tight), and fairly high on my wrist, and the stupid thing only takes maybe 3-5 measurements per DAY. Also, it cannot take measurements while exercising, or even moving.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch series still supports it, as well as blood pressure and sleep apnea (though you may have to hack it slightly to unlock those features in the US).
Anecdotally I found it worthless anyway. I tried a variety of straps, tightness, positions, but I think the freckles on my white skin just confused it. Finger monitors consistently have it at 98%+. Apple Watch: “Your Blood Oxygen content is 85-100%”. Thank you Apple, very cool.
No real pattern to the large outliers, they’d happen at all times of the day, even with my girlfriend’s watch that I asked for a lend of.
Probably gonna upgrade from my iPhone 11 to a 16 Pro, seems like a good time to make the jump (also I'd need a battery replacement anyway and I rather spend that money on the new phone)
Same here, satellite messaging alone is enough to get me on this upgrade cycle. Beyond that though I am quite content with my 11 Pro, though I am looking forward to some of the AI stuff.
I'm in the same boat, got a battery replacement last year and am struggling to justify the expense but the satellite piece + AI integration may clinch it
There is no pure black if you watch videos or read HN or use any site or app not specifically optimized for this. Got me thinking if manufacturers started this dark theme trend actually because for phone in bed types like me dim OLEDs suck to look at unless they are 98% pure black...
And if I have full screen glow anyway then LCD looks better due to less flicker.
LCDs are more accurate in low light, but OLED can reproduce readable text at lower brightness from its higher contrast
Swings and roundabouts… for some people the grey tinge and messed up gamma curve of low brightness OLED is unacceptable. For others text readability in darkness is key
There’s also the PWM argument which has been beaten to death
FWIW I don't think I have any sort of special sensitivity, I just don't like it and it annoys me whenever I notice it
If I was not using my phone in the dark at low brightness as much I would probably be fine with OLED...
Also maybe they made it better since first OLED iphones, but they never say anything about PWM in press releases and it is kind of expensive to just buy it to try and throw out if it still sucks.
TIL. I owned an OLED phones since 2012 iirc but never noticed, or heard of anyone else noticing (on their or my device), any flickering. Will be taking my 980 fps slow motion camera to an OLED device near me soon!
Can't believe I haven't done it already actually. I've noticed that nearly everything in life flickers from microwaves (each digit is lit up sequentially! I can't believe we can't see this) to my LCD laptop screen (flickers in different colors! Red comes first, then green and blue, it's extremely obvious on the slow motion but, with my own eyes, I'll only occasionally catch a glimpse of red when I look away from something white that just turned on, and even then I'm not sure if I'm just seeing things), but the phones I looked at so far must have been LCD then
Regular LCDs like on macbooks (and I guess most laptops) flicker less. It is the drive for insane contrast ratios and pure black in phone screens that is driving OLED adoption.
I heard that it can be opposite in TV world, some backlit LCD panels flicker as hell while some OLEDs manage to flicker less but I never owned a TV to make observations
I upgraded from an iPhone Xs to an iPhone 15 Pro. The CPU speed was a major improvement to not have to wait for my phone any more, as well as better low-light photos.
iphone 8 plus, bought refurb in early 2019. replaced the battery once (and got a replacement since the battery wouldn't pair). it's getting to be time.
usb-c is a big feature increment for me, and I need to finish the leap away from google voice, since I absolutely know they are not going to bother implementing RCS and will just shutter the service instead. LiDAR also seems extremely useful/cool. On the other hand, I was kinda hoping for thunderbolt support on the pro models eventually. Not sure if I will buy a refurb 15 Pro or a new 16 Pro Max or wait for the next cycle.
that's how you avoid e-waste for real and not as a fashion statement. simply consume less - and that includes not consuming a $300 android phone every 18 months, not just apple - and have it repaired when it needs it. with OEM parts that will last the long-haul and not something off amazon that will need to be changed again in 6 months.
Alrighties, thank you. It is expensive to me, I wish I could just do it myself. There are no Apple stores in my country. I may be able to take it to a store though and they may replace it for less than $99 but I am not entirely sure.
Keeping my 12 Mini; I just ended up getting a 2nd-hand MagSafe battery. It’s small enough to have in a bag or pocket without a second thought, no cables to carry around and turns into a wireless charger when I’m not using it.
App support is forcing me. My iPhone 7 still does everything I need, but 3rd party developers have stopped supporting it. I don't mind if I stop getting updates, but some of these developers are blocking my use of existing apps with a full-screen modal, telling me I need to buy a new phone in order to continue using the app (FlightAware, for example). Perfectly good phone, probably going into the landfill, for no reason other than to appease app developers too lazy to retain already-working code for older devices.
The 7 is coming up on it's 8th birthday, on the bright side that's a pretty good run.
Is FlightAware blocking use of the app now? I assume it's because they've dropped support for iOS 15 (which can be a hassle depending on new APIs they want to use), not the 7 device specifically.
Yea, they likely want to move on from iOS15, which is fine[1]. But at least let existing users with the existing iOS15-working app keep using that app version. But no, instead, they issued a final "update" which does nothing but block iOS15 users with a full screen modal that you cannot skip (as far as I can tell). Totally overboard. I hope this doesn't start a trend.
1: I don't see what the big deal is to just put if statements around any iOS16-requiring new features, yet keep targeting iOS15. We did this all the time back when I used to write iOS apps.
Not a new trend. Many places I’ve worked at (whose business models center around iOS apps) routinely plan to drop old iOS versions, yearly, as the new ones come out.
It gets increasingly more expensive to support older and older iOS versions. These “new features” you’re talking about wrapping in if statements aren’t here and there. Many upgrades are pervasive, and would eventually make every file a branching mess.
Now, you could argue that that should still be the chosen route. I can empathize with that. I like software that just keeps working forever.
At the very least, when they stop releasing updates supporting older OS versions, they should at least leave the old apps already installed on the old devices alone to continue to work. I wouldn’t mind if I never get an app update again, but don’t send a final “update” that disabled the app and tells me to buy a new phone.
Agreed. There should be a warning to those that will be left behind soon, instructing them not to upgrade if they don’t plan on updating, or can’t update iOS.
The thing I liked the most about this event was the beautiful places where the presenters were. Outlook on Golden Gate, Coit Tower, Palace of Fine Arts, De Young... loved that!
Homeless are not common at any of these places. They’re mostly downtown or close to public transit and tourist spots (Downtown, Castro, Mission). They aren’t known for climbing big hills (Coit Tower) or frequenting museums. I suspect there are some in GGP but it’s such a big place I don’t remember encountering many there (and also probably not the most attractive place for them to sleep at night).
Agreed. I frequently go running by (all?) the filming locations they used. With the exception of the Hippie Hill location in GGP, I rarely, if ever, see homeless at any of the others.
As an aside, a few weeks ago I ran by a film crew with a lot of privacy fences set up at the location by the Warming Hut with bay and GGB in the background. Now I know what they were filming!
Interesting to see how they're marketing increasingly minor improvements as major breakthroughs.
16 Pro: Better camera, more zoom, dedicated camera button… isn’t that it?
WiFi 7, faster ray tracing, USB-C/USB 3? Hard to imagine many people really need that.
Have we witnessed peak Apple?
Apple Watch: minimal updates.
AirPods Max: new color.
AirPods: some minor tweaks.
Wow they really didn't upgrade to the H2 chip! I preordered this without looking too closely as I've been waiting forever for an upgrade to buy this. Very strange.
It's like Call of Duty, you're not supposed to buy one each year and be amazed. Just wait two or three years and THEN you get a marginal improvement that means you can justify the purchase to yourself.
Why would a user-replaceable battery be better for the environment? Do you think that consumers are able to recycle hard-to-recycle lithium components like that _correctly_? Apple already offers battery replacements (comparatively) cheaply.
Beyond that there's huge issues with it such as third party batteries tainting the overall quality of the phone, having an entirely removable back plate would kill their water/dust resistance rating, it looking bad (Yes this is important to Apple) etc, god-knows-what other issues arise changing the internal structure of their components that drastically.
Don't assume they can't figure out an engineering problem because you're upset that phones aren't the same as they were 20 years ago.
The battery replacement service is not comparatively cheap. I just paid $90 for my iPhone 11. There is no world in which a cell phone battery of even the highest quality costs anywhere near that much. For example iFixIt offers a comparable battery for less than half that price, and generic sellers less than a quarter the price. You could argue that the labor required justifies the price but that makes the design all the more predatory.
The battery disposal is not really the point of the conversation, you could make the same argument about the whole phone. The point is that all of the components of the phone last a lot longer than two years, but the sealed in battery will barely make it that long. They obviously benefit financially from the current arrangement because they’ve shifted consumer decision from “should I pay $40 to increase my battery life by 25% on my 2 year old phone” to “should I invest $100 in this older phone or just throw it away and spend $200 (subsidized) on a new one?” The second one makes a lot more money for Apple and has a much larger negative impact on the planet.
As far as waterproof ratings, such phones exist, even in the thin form factor. This argument is a non-starter that doesn’t agree with observed reality. It’s an active choice they’re making because the incentives are misaligned.
As to the argument that users will use bad components, how is this any different than the myriad of bad Bluetooth headphones available that degrade user experience? Should Apple disallow those as well to protect their stupid users? What about cheap chargers? Cases that induce thermal throttling? Screen protectors that greatly degrade visual fidelity?
I’m not upset about phones being different than 20 years ago, I’m upset that the planet is being destroyed to slightly increase profits, all while Apple lies to our face and parades Mother Earth around the keynote stage.
I think there is still some room. For me screen technology would be an innovation. Envision a screen that is hybrid between eink and current OLED. Or Siri that is useful (I think thats what they are working on). Or envision other inputs other than your thumbs :-) Maybe ironed out version of what they developed for Apple Vision Pro in terms of eye tracking or some other inputs. So many ideas!!!
The same happened with laptops a long time ago. They basically do everything that's needed.
But in general I agree that the innovation output of Apple is really low compared to their size. But that seems to be the case for most of these mega trillion dollar companies. The bigger, the more conservative they get. But they are very good at making profits so it's all good as far as the CEO's bonus goes.
> The same happened with laptops a long time ago. They basically do everything that's needed.
And yet I would consider the M-chip Apple laptops to be a massive improvement.
Every year can’t have a huge paradigm shift, most users update every 2 to 4 years and so a bunch of small improvements can feel much much larger. Personally, I think releasing a phone every year is the right move even if the improvements are small.
For the phone we've settled on a current form factor of a slab of aluminum and glass. All changes are at the margins. A little thinner, a little lighter, a little better X.
Until some other form factor takes off, this is where we are.
ehhhh, maybe. they used to do small updates (other than CPU) and call it the "S" update; now they seem to keep increasing the number but doing similar small updates?
So a lot of Apple Intelligence is still vaporware then?
From [1] "Additional Apple Intelligence features will roll out later this year and in the months following", i.e. later in 2024 and then in 2025, and the not-available-at-launch features appear to be the stronger ones, e.g. ChatGPT integration?
Any word on improving the dictate-to-text keyboard feature? I could only find "In the Notes and Phone apps, users can also record, transcribe, and summarize audio", but that's different.
AirPods are still Apple’s best product. Depending on your ear shape, you might find that regular AirPods fall out and AirPods Pro with their silicon tips work better, or that silicon-tipped earbuds like the AirPods Pro don’t fit well and only the regular AirPods stay in place. It’s great that Apple is finally adding ANC to regular AirPods so people have options.
I have the basic gen2 AirPods that I got for "free" in some Apple deal a few years ago. Was a little skeptical I'd ever really use them at first but hey the price was right and if not me maybe the spouse would use them.
I freakin' love them. Wireless and device handoff just works. Great for running, never fallen out in thousands of miles. Great for taking calls even in noisy places like an airport. And I even sometimes use Siri with them despite generally hating voice control anything.
Totally sold on them, all skepticism erased. I'll buy a new pair the same day these eventually die/break/get lost. And my spouse has their own pair now, too.
Never thought I'd be so impressed by something as boring as earbuds.
I get so much utility from my iPhone that it’s worth many times what it costs to me. So I’ve been on the upgrade program since it came out and get the new model every year. I always look forward to getting the new phone, even though at this point the improvements are incremental. But it’s very much worth it to me just to get better looking videos and photos of my small children. And stuff like better battery life has obvious utility. I’m just on my phone so much of the day and use it for so many different things that having it be a few percent better in a bunch of categories is a no brainer. And it’s often more than just a few percent!
You know what really caught my attention with the 16 Pro Max? The 6.9-inch display, with a resolution of 1320x2868 pixels [1]! However, I’m a bit skeptical about this choice. A 6.9-inch screen size is quite rare in the smartphone world [2]. Samsung tried something similar back in 2020 with its S20 Ultra (and Note 20 Ultra), only to revert to 6.8 inches with the S21 Ultra the following year—and they haven’t looked back since. Why? I’m not entirely sure, but I’ve heard some say the size was just too big.
So, will Apple be the one to make this a new industry standard for flagship devices, like they did with the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack or excluding the charger from the box? Perhaps, but for now, I remain cautiously skeptical.
2. AFAIK, aside from Samsung, only two other major brands have experimented with this display size: Motorola, with its Razr 50 Ultra (2024), and Huawei, with the Pocket (2022).
Famously iPhones and especially iPads have weird dimensions and they are primarily for up/downscaling[1] from the other iPhone sizes so that apps still look the”same”. While 16 pro max is 6.9 inch and 13 pro max for instance is 6.7 inch, both have a resolution ratio of 19.5:9.
May be not an earth-shattering update vs. the 15, but overall a lot of improvements. Probably more so for the plain iPhone 16, as it gets the A18 SOC, the Pro seems to have mainly one CPU core more.
As I am on an iPhone 13 Pro Max, still in total absolutely a worthy upgrade for me. I certainly look forward to it. The advantages vs the 15 I can see so far:
- updated SOC, somewhat faster, but up to 30% more power-efficient which turns into
- larger battery life. Thats something everyone will welcome, I guess.
- a bit larger screen, too bad they at least didn't name any other screen enhancements
- the shutter button. A ton of functionality built into one single button. Pressure/touch sensitivity, haptical feedback. That should greatly improve its usage as a camera.
- all the AI stuff. We need to wait how it delivers, when it arrives (especially, if you are outside the US), but that could get interesting when it delivers.
While there wasn't any big surprise or outstanding change, for a year over year update a lot of things and definitely very nice for everyone with an older phone than the 15.
I remember people lining up outside apple stores on the pre-order day. What has happened now? Have we seen the peak of smartphones until something new comes along and spur a new super-cycle?
If you can get it earlier then when it will be shipped, I can see why people, anxious to get their latest phone, would line up. Regardless, the only thing I’m lining up for is ramen.
I get excited when Toyota does a major model does a refresh. The Corolla is likely the #1 selling car model globally, so it has a major impact whenever they change something.
Sure, but nobody who bought a 2023 Corolla is anxiously waiting the 2024 model announcement. Every ~10 years there's a major refresh, and every ~5 years a minor refresh, and that's plenty. That's why I made the comparison.
i mean have you tried shipping familiar daily use hardware for 20 years? why the cynicism. this thing needs to be dependable, reliable. not introduce new fashion trend every year.
More buttons? Since I lost my power button on Pixel 5, I'm using it only with gestures: touch the fingerprint sensor to unlock, swipe down on home screen to lock it. I think a slider on the notification area can be used for volume up and down for a true buttonless experience something Steve Jobs would have loved.
Ironic, isn’t it? when the iPhone first came the most different thing about it was that it had a very few buttons. they were telling stories about how Steve Jobs wanted to remove all the buttons. Now we have more and more buttons.
the iphone apple makes today and the iphone steve jobs made are very different.
No one can say what jobs would do nowadays ofc, but i believe he adhered to strict guideline like make it hold in one hand and simplify everything -> less buttons, less settings.
I bet he is rolling in his grave when he sees this new icon color theming thing or what they did with the control center where there is now 5 different page of settings.
I guess they have more information about usage patterns than we do. Anecdotally, I have a 256GB iPhone, and I use it consistently for a whole variety of things, and my usage is just under 94GB. I'd bet that my 'normal' family members use a good bit less than that.
I got the 512GB model and have been using it without any regard for storage for a couple of years. All my music is downloaded locally in lossless formats. I keep full-res versions of all my vacation pictures/videos and I also download a ton of crap, from videogames to movies.
I'm at 285GB right now.
The breakdown is 81GB for music, 56GB for pictures, ~40GB of download content on TV/Youtube/Audible and ~23GB of games.
I could _easily_ cut down on that. There's games I haven't played in a while, movies I've already watched, or even music I don't really listen to frequently enough to have it downloaded.
I'm at 166 GB out of 256 GB. Every time I upgrade my iPhone (average every 5 years), I get the most storage available (after learning my lesson on the iPhone 4) and it ends up being 4x bigger than before.
iPod touch (32GB), if you ignore this
iPhone 4 (16GB), 2010
iPhone 6 (64GB), 2014
iPhone SE 2nd gen (256GB), 2020
iPhone 16 (1 TB)?, 2024
Every time, I think "that's probably way more than I'll need", but I guess in 6 years or so I'll upgrade to the 4 TB model. Or wait for next year's model, maybe another SE will come out...
I wonder if storage needs have a very bimodal distribution.
Both my parents barely use the 64GB on their phone. The one that does photography, probably can't store all their photos on any iPhone, because it measures in the multi-TB.
I usually overbuy storage but after three years, I'm removing things like music and podcasts because it's completely full.
Every time I upgrade, I go and look at my storage and see that I’m close to my 256 limit, then I take a closer look and realize it’s my audiobook in podcast app taking up 40 to 50 gigs each. That plus a bunch of apps that I don’t actually use and could easily delete off my phone.
I'm going to downvote you because I don't know what you're talking about. My kids have 128GB phones and don't have any issues at all. They're also on our family plan with Google One for shared storage and we're still -- as a family of five where I personally have contributed about 100,000 photos (and some videos) over the past 15 years -- only at 1.2TB of consumed storage.
What are your kids doing that consumes so much local storage?
I see it was clear enough. We, my wife and I take many pictures and videos (4K 30fps) of our kids. My kids don’t use phones at their age. So our phone storage is always scary high.
Yep. I'm in my early 40's, recently self-hosted Immich, imported the archive of photos and videos my wife and I have created since 2000, and we're sitting at 216,000 photos, 5000 videos, 650gb+ of data. 2000-2011ish was point-and-shoot digital + DSLR, then 2012-2024 has been the output of TWO CELL PHONES.
We aren't photographers, we just goof around, and our almost-teenaged son doesn't factor into those numbers.
The sheer volume of data created is just .. it's nuts. And there's another 300gb of data generated from all the metadata, sidecar, smart search, face detection! Imagine all that plus much more that Apple Intelligence generates.
Long gone are the days of just putting JPGs into a folder!
Why is that shocking? Delivering a base model with minimal specs and upcharging for the specs that power-users need is Apple's standard way of doing business. If you want to store more, you pay more, either by buying more expensive models, or by subscribing to iCloud.
This pricing strategy is intentional in the way it is limiting to encourage people to buy more expensive models.
They don't offer 128gb as the base tier because they think it will meet everyone's needs. They offer that as the base tier because they think it won't meet everyone's needs. An ideal pricing strategy captures as many sales as possible while also upcharging as many people as possible who would be willing to pay more.
With iCloud and music streaming 128GB is enough for a lot of people. I know I still have quite a bit of room left on my 128GB iPhone 12, even with taking tons of photos and videos.
Why would a storage capacity exceeding 128 GB be necessary? If more than 128 GB of storage is required, why not utilize an SD card or other storage solutions (e.g. HDD / SSD used for your desktop) for storing large files? Is there a practical use case where data needs to be stored and actively accessed on a device with such large storage? For instance, I have a collection of videos totaling approximately 30 GB in size. I should consider transferring these files to my HDD or SSD rather than seeking a device with higher internal storage capacity.
I still prefer the smaller form factor. Easier one-handed use, and less bulk in my pocket. I wasn’t going to upgrade this cycle anyway, but the larger size of both pro models has removed any inkling of the “well maaaaaybe” feeling that I usually get.
Notably, only the pro models support USB 3. The base 16/16 plus are still on USB 2. This hasn't changed from the 15 lineup when they switched to USB-C.
No it's the internet connection, 1gb takes two hour to download in perfect condition. Not complaining tho. There are many part of the world where you rely on your phone for internet and to download stuff and then use the computer for excel or to watch movies you downloaded.
Not saying they should: using existing hardware to solve one's problem is perfectly legitimate; just saying there's other hardware out there than Apple devices
They said that the iPhone can record video directly to external storage, so you would need the faster USB speed for that. Quite a nice feature for productions which use the iPhone for professional video.
I was planning to upgrade this year, and probably still will, but honestly, the differences between the base model and pro model this year are fairly limited.
ProMotion, Always-on display, a bunch more resistant to fall damage, and a camera that is better, but doesn't look like a lot.
I'm a bit worried about the Apple Intelligence features, as they've been very prominent on WWDC, but were fairly toned-down today. Not much of it was shown, and they're delaying their arrival (notification summaries look great though, as a "little thing that matters").
I've had notification summaries turned on for at least a few weeks as part of the iOS 18 Beta and I can sadly report that they seem to be very very low quality.
On occasion they'll squash down something that is better read tersely, but I've overwhelmingly found them to make the content worse than simply reading the original text.
I was really hopeful about them going in, but it seems like it might need an iteration or two more.
I think that there are just very few notifications where a summary is the thing I want. Most of them I either don't care about at all or I want to see the actual text. Either it's important and the details matter or it's, like, a text from my wife and I want to read it in her voice and not a summary.
The fun of my family group chat is reading the messages from everyone.
I think it is a good thing to delay arrival so they can get it right. I almost think playing it up at WWDC was intentional so that developers would care more about it.
I‘m on a 13 Pro right now, and an iOS developer, so should have a reason to upgrade now. But the iffy situation with Apple intelligence in the EU makes me hesitate.
> an iOS developer, so should have a reason to upgrade
Can't find the toot anymore but a recently popular one said that developers should be legally bound to 5-year-old hardware so that the resulting software works smoothly on all current systems and one is not forced to constantly upgrade just to keep a working system
I like this! As an iOS developer rocking an iPhone 11, I do find some comfort in knowing that a performant experience on my device suggests it will be a performant experience on others’
I’m going to miss the blue on my 13 pro. I’m probably going for the ‘desert titanium’ as that at least has some color. Such a shame that they reserve the bolder colors for the non-pro line.
Presumably the AI features getting widely derided at WWDC influenced the script. I’m totally fine with generative AI, but I cringed when I saw the images they generated for the demo at WWDC. Just awful stuff.
I just made the switch to Android last week following the release of the pixel fold 9 pro. I couldn't wait for Apple to release a fold, they took too much time, and every new iPhone just looks like the one from 5 years ago.
I haven't had an Android phone in something like 10 years and I really think that Apple is about to start losing its monopoly due to the folding phones. They're the main (only?) reason to move to Android and leave the Apple ecosystem now.
The folding phone has now basically replaced my tablet, my phone, and my e-reader. It's just such a huge technological leap to just be able to open it up in the subway or in bed and get access to the massive screen on demand. It's actually much more comfortable to hold and type on this way that I'm writing this comment sitting on my couch with the phone unfolded in my hands.
> I really think that Apple is about to start losing its monopoly due to the folding phones
We're half a decade into folding phones and I've only seen a handful of them out in public. They're still too expensive, and they haven't solved the issue of the foldable screens being incredibly scratch prone, and having random failures where they spontaneously break along the fold crease. Not to mention none of the OEMs offer great solutions for pain-free screen replacements that I've seen.
I won't say Apple will never release a folding device, but I can't see foldables going beyond a niche enthusiast product in the long-term. Even though the folding screen technology has improved, it seems like there hasn't been much progress in resolving the issue that if you just press a nail into one you have a permanent mark in it. That already makes it a non-starter for women with long nails, who are constantly clicking their fingernails against their phone screen when they type.
Modern foldables have gotten pretty good at being a foldable. But the iPhone is damn close to perfection at being the candy-bar phone people are used to. Using it doesn't blow your mind, but I think if you gave most people a top-of-the-line foldable and then an iPhone to use for an extended period of time, they'll end up being happier with the iPhone.
I don’t think they do, do you have any source? A slim phone is expected next year, while foldable iPhones seem definitely to be in development, but rumors do not point to next year.
I don't see much to upgrade to but, if I didn't get a iPhone 15 Pro I would have probably gotten this. The new camera button is interesting and the gestures are nice.
Interesting to see all the rumors of a iPhone Slim / Air be nothing and I almost thought that they would do it on the Pro lineup.
I had a small conspiratorial thought while watching this event:
"Apple Intelligence" does not come to Europe and the rest of the world because of the DMA/DSA or other regulations. It doesn’t come, because language support isn’t there.
Granted, Silicon Valley companies are mostly rather bad when it comes to other languages (and even more other cultures), but Apple in the last decade tried at least and language support for Siri, dictation and such had in the past much fuller lists of language support. When was the last time they had to pad an extra slide with different variants of English [1]? When did they had to put Spanish, the quasi second language of the US, into next year? And missing from the next year slide are major languages like Arabic, Japanese, German, Italian, Hindi and a lot of more languages Siri already could do, although badly.
Maybe the new LLM/ML training for "Apple Intelligence" needs far more data, bigger data sets and that's why?
[1] Normally I would have thought of a slide with english dialects as a good thing. Computer language systems should recognize that the English language is different in different countries, that different English-speaking cultures are different and I'd argue even "UK English" is far to wide for that country of dozens of vastly different dialects. And of course the biggest English dialect is missing: "English as a second/nth language" or better "English with an accent".
I really hope next year they bring back Touch ID and throw it on the action or camera button.
I’m using my action button, I like being able to assign it to ProCamera, but it’s not as useful as it could be. I miss Touch ID.
I’m not sure why but Face ID fails for me quite often. Maybe 25% of the time. I have to make a real effort to ensure it works. Straighten out my glasses, hold the phone up and look straight into the camera, ensure good lighting, etc.
Though sometimes it will randomly work in nearly pitch black conditions. How the hell? I miss Touch ID.
I don’t know how it is now but when I was holding the locked iPhone 12 or so of a friend infront of my face I got a tingle feeling inside my forehead. Did anyone experience that?
Have you tried installing a different keyboard (that's what does the spell checking on Android), or is that also locked down? Genuinely not sure since I don't use iOS, but I figured if custom keyboards are allowed by the overlords then this might be a useful tip
It will be interesting to see how users will use the new dedicated camera touch control. Other phonemakers have tried it in the past (Sony Xperia comes to mind) but capacitative is probably the first. Also how developers will adopt for their apps. It is a small change but definitely differentiating for Apple at least for now.
The more I watch, the sadder I get. It seems they've gone in the wrong direction. They have nothing to offer regular phone users, so they're targeting "creative professionals" with fancy features.
No, no we didn't. Before the iPhone we wanted a device that would be something like a Palm pilot, an iPod, a cell phone, a camera, and give us mobile internet, but it wasn't clear how to do that in a good way. Blackberry was getting there, Pocket PC was interesting, and there were various other mobile devices that had some of the pieces. It wasn't until the iPhone we saw how to put that all together properly.
I think that’s more of a hindsight than a concrete wish people had.
Audio player, cell phone and camera were already implemented by “dumbphone” Nokias. I think adding mobile internet was a mistake. I use it all the time but it doesn’t add much to my life. It doesn’t make me more productive but it adds another consumption device.
It's absolutely a wish I had, and I spent a lot of time and money trying to make it real!
There's a huge difference between an audio player and having spotify (or apple music, or whatever you prefer) where you can play effectively any song you want at effectively any time.
There's a huge difference between having a camera and something which can record 4k video or take photos which surpass any digital camera we had in the early 2000s and even today surpasses virtually any camera in the price range of the whole phone. You would need something like a Leica fixed lens camera or a mirrorless DSLR with multiple lenses at several times the cost of a smartphone to equal the photo and video capabilities. This also ignores the fact that I can snap these amazing pics or videos and send them to a friend instantly.
I know I wanted mobile internet and was very frustrated with things like WAP at the time. I know that having mobile internet made me more productive. Sure some phones could play music but it was nothing like a dedicated music device, the software and storage were just awful, so you had to have two devices when it was obvious that it should be just one. Something like the iPhone was pretty obviously being desired at the time, we just didn't see how to do it and thought it would be something more like what blackberry and Microsoft were doing.
I have mobile internet since 2001. Those dumbphones had access to the full internet, not just WAP.
Mobile internet was not a mistake, we just started to use it wrongly. It's your choice to not use it to browse internet aimlessly. It's your choice to make yourself available all the time. You can definitely use it how I did for more than a decade before everybody realized what being always online means. It definitely improved my productivity before that, but it's true that the added benefit is about flat in the past decade.
I don't think it's that we use it wrong exactly. I'm not trying to judge anyone who spends hours of time on Instagram sending photos or scrolling X.
I 100% agree that if I was doing those things, they would be wrong for me so I avoid doing them.
I don't like people who say "I don't like when I do this thing, so, this thing should not be available for people to do!"
I equally don't like people who say "I don't like when other people do this thing, so, this thing should not be available for people to do!"
I know that social media is designed to be addictive. This is why I'm mostly absent from it for most of my life.
If you use and enjoy social media and it brings joy to your life, great, have fun. It wasn't doing that for me (or more directly, I realized very early on it was going down a bad path) so I cut it out.
If you're lamenting social media and bothered by how much time you spend on it, or how it negatively impacts your life, or whatever: I am definitely going to advocate to you that you do simply have the option to turn it off. Life will move on!
You can also have a smart phone and not feel the need to immediately respond to every text message, nor, click every notification. You can even choose to not pick up phone calls if you want.
In the past decade while the reality of mobile connectivity hasn't changed much, the quality and ubiquity of it has improved dramatically.
10 years ago I would have agreed that in most places it was possible to get some form of internet connectivity, today, it's deeply unusual to travel anywhere in the USA and not get >100Mbit on LTE with "good enough" latency.
Of course, most people goes to places with coverage, but for example if you travel between population centers (cities, towns, etc), then it's quite frequent that you don't have internet, or just terrible one. Especially if you're on a train which insulates somewhat, and of course speed is also a degrading factor.
Years ago I thought mobile Internet didn’t add anything to my life. I bought a smartphone but was skeptical.
Then one day I was at the airport waiting in a long check-in line. I got out my Motorola Droid, dug though my email, checked in to the flight, and got out of the line.
After that I was convinced of the value of it, and I’m reminded every time I’m standing on the street, waiting for an Uber rather than looking around for a cab.
I was a long-time holdout on getting a smartphone at all, then on really embracing it. Now I gotta admit, it’s the only computing device I use that really delivers ROI for my everyday life (aside from my work computer, for… work, but that’s not mine). All the rest could vanish and it’d mostly just give me fewer ways to frustratingly waste my time. Phone dies, and I gotta replace it ASAP. Everything important happens on there. A compact sensor package glued to good touchscreen, with an Internet connection, is just too useful.
I have everything I need with a 5s. The only thing making me ponder updates is shit like “hi the new T-mobile app requires a newer version of iOS than is available for your phone”. Web still works though.
What is the benefit of a non-OLED screen, and how niche is that ask? I'm assuming the benefit is "no burn-in" but is the risk of burn-in going to affect people in a 5 year timespan?
And I think the 3.5mm ship has sailed, right behind the "persistent notification LED" ship. Fsck me if I can understand how not a single manufacturer has figured out that a bright, persistent, multi-color LED/OLED notification is a desirable zero-hardware-cost feature.
a LED has nonzero cost. The case having a hole for it also has a cost, as does engineering the hole not to be a weak point. It may not be hard or expensive, but nonzero nonetheless.
The software to control a reliable AOD LED light is trivial.
Some phones like OnePlus do temporary lighting. Persistent lighting without burn in is doable and I wish someone would take it up. Aodnotify is glitchy.
Accessibility also doesn't "sell". Apple used to care about making their products actually accessible. They already have all the money. What's the real excuse? Do they just not care?
Flagship iPhones are premium products. Many "regular users" don't see value in getting a $/€1k phone every couple of years - this is the entire point of this thread.
I don't disagree, but the market placement of the iphone has nothing to do with the continued poor sales of the mini series every time it's been tried.
And the mini ran for multiple generations and none of them sold well.
Much like the 3.5mm jack, people just cannot admit that it's not a very popular idea. Extremely popular among a very small niche, incredibly unpopular if not actively dispreferred outside of it.
OK? Well, the iphone mini series did not sell fine, objectively so. It was a bad seller even with the bump from the novelty of apple releasing a mini, and it declined even further the next generation. Probably at minimum it's not worth doing more than one every couple generations.
idk why you guys are continuing to rage at the messenger here, I'm not the one who canceled it and the reason it was canceled is widely acknowledged. Your refusal to accept reality does not constitute a problem on my part.
You and two other people want that. Every time they've released small phones they've not sold well. It's a small but extremely vocal community of people that constantly ask for this stuff.
Many women I know would be interested in a small phone (in part because for some reason clothes makers collectively decided that women should not have big pockets, or any at all, and in part because of smaller hands on average).
It's probably not all women, maybe not most, but I can't believe there's not an important market, it seems like a common enough situation.
I'm not a woman, but I know many who 1. refuse to carry a purse; 2. are deeply unsatisfied with trends in clothing such as small pockets (and no they can't just wear men's clothes because women's bodies are shaped differently); 3. whose hands are too small to comfortably use a large (branded as "normal") or even medium (branded as "mini") phone.
There's a billion other ways women are being discriminated against every day. But yeah, it doesn't sell.
It's still millions of people who buy an iphone mini, but that's basically a rounding error when they're selling hundreds of millions per year, 3-5% from a quick google.
As one of those users I'm still rocking my iPhone 11 and am perfectly content sticking with it The phone works. Telegram and Whatsapp works. Slack works. Safari still runs great on the web on the very few websites I use or browse. The longer I can use this without feeling "forced" to upgrade, the happier I'll be.
What apple offers me is peace of mind and stability. That's all I want from a phone.
I'm under no impression that my phone will continue to work until "the end of time", but if I can get 5-7 years out of a device then I think I got more than my money's worth. The last phone I had before this lasted 2 years before it became practically unusable.
The archetype of a smartphone is essentially mature at this point and has been for a while.
Innovations are either going to be aimed at improving niche uses, gradual enhancements on stats like power/cpu/display/photo-quality, or accommodating fashion trends like overall size or whether it's foldable.
The most original opportunity lately is generative AI integration and that's exactly what they put into focus for 2024.
Do people cringe watching laptop updates too? Only niche, power hungry users feel constrained by hardware limitations these days.
I do think some of the Apple Intelligence features are going to be pretty useful for regular folks. I also think it’s going to be the case that after a few years people will forget how limited Siri used to be while taking for granted the improved performance.
Lots of people have creative hobbies that involve their phone in some capacity—music and photography are common—and basically everyone takes family photos and videos with them, so new photo capabilities are always welcome even for non-hobbyist users. Personally, I think it’s awesome that my kids could borrow my phone and make their backyard movies a hell of a lot more “cinematic” than mine on the family camcorder ever could have been, even if I’d had some idea of what I was doing.
Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases.
Plus, you’re on HN: your complaint about iPhones is supposed to be that they’re just “mindless consumption devices” for sheeple who want to drool at YouTube shorts, wildly worse for any conceivable creative or practical, serious endeavor than Linux phones or a Thinkpad, because you can’t get a root shell. You’ve gone entirely the wrong direction for this site, with your post :-)
I do a bit of creative audio work and consider my iPhone next to useless. iPads are useful in some contexts.
I've returned to the stone ages of digital tuners and metronomes for practice(1), and any recordings I make use a laptop. Not that there are good options for quick and dirty recordings, just that they're better than using a phone.
If I were making podcasts or something like that the phone would be a lot more useful, but for music, not so much.
(1) there was awhile back that my phone was integral to practicing music but now I can't use it at all, because every decent metronome/tuner app is trash.
For an increasing amount of people, "making music" is recording a tiktok of themselves singing or playing a guitar or recording themselves rapping directly into the phone mic for soundcloud.
Not trying to judge what counts as making music - just saying that the times are changing a bit and the GP probably wasn't referring to traditional DAW usage and stuff like that.
> Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases.
We must live on different planets. Are you really going to send your friends and family AI-generated emojis, or rewrite your texts to them with Apple Intelligence? I sure know they won't.
No, I don’t even use the “stickers” and shit they have now, but the enhanced photo and moment-in-video natural language search are gonna make any OS without that built in feel broken when I get used to that and try to use it anywhere that doesn’t have it, I bet. Same as their existing transparent image OCR has left me going “wtf?” when I forgot I wasn’t on an Apple OS and tried to use it. The AI-assistant stuff via camera for quick searches and item identification look great, too. If it’s good enough it’ll Sherlock multiple existing apps, all in one.
Once you start making silly stickers from photos, they are surprisingly fun. I have a bunch of my dogs in poses that can fit on and around the message bubbles.
Isn't that sort of the point though? I'm a regular phone user, but boy when I was on vacation this year, my iPhone took some fabulous pictures with stunning colors. I'm sure way better than I would with a DSLR (given I have no experience with a DSLR and/or whatever post-processing/editing suites I'd need to go with it).
I totally buy into the "best camera you have is the one in your pocket" concept -- especially if that camera takes amazing photos without me needing to know how.
I do agree on the other features (or lack thereof), in general I only upgrade my iPhone for two reasons:
1. Newer/better camara
2. Old iPhone is getting long in the tooth (i.e. battery degradation)
I think the longest I went was maybe 3 years before the battery wouldn't really make it through the day.
I'll take a look at this one and if the camera is compelling enough, maybe upgrade (the 5x optical zoom might just do that for me).
All I want is for Apple to fix speech recognition in iMessage. Not sure if that’s in this release. They demo’d AI text review and rewrite but not LLM speech recognition.
I currently use ChatGPT for it’s accurate speech recognition then copy/paste into iMessage.
In my experience, iOS 18 makes it better, but no, it is still not as good as Whisper Large, which is what OpenAI uses behind the scenes.
You can run smaller Whisper models on your phone through various third party apps, and those options work well too. (Trying to run Whisper Large even on the iPhone 15 Pro Max is asking too much… it works, but only barely.)
To be honest, I think that after years of incremental updates apple has maxed out the number of "value" features. I don't see a strong reason why Apple has to come out with new features every year.
Expecting ground-breaking new features every year is a bit crazy, unless there is a new breakthrough like solid state batteries. Like what's going to be there next year? Flush side buttons to make the phone thinner? Why not apply all those additions in a single iteration and wait 3-4 years to come up with a next major upgrade? Consumers are not dumb anymore and can see through their marketing gimmicks
They need to put two Spatial Video cameras on the top right and top left of the phone in landscape, to record 3d video at or a bit wider than pupillary distance.
Given a way to watch them, Spatial Video memories "sell" the AVP and/or (if zoomed in) 3D TVs, and the perspective also gives fantastic clues to photo processing algos, 3D model generation, more.
I think the issue with the critical comments on Apple's new releases is that Apple is like Coke, no matter what they do, except for obvious glitches [1], it doesn't significantly impact their success. Apple is incredibly smart in capitalizing on opportunities, like designing and producing their own chips (TSMC's Apple Silicon), privacy advantages, and more. Additionally, there's a 'Hollywood-esque' aspect to the company that adds to its appeal.
No additional RAM? So 16 Pro is still using only 8gb? I was hoping to be able to run my own LLMs on device, but unless you're using micro sized models, it'll be practically impossible (or too slow for casual use).
There’s definitely a feeling that the Pro models are the actual model and the non-Pro is a bit closer to the old C/SE models. It didn’t feel that way a few releases ago.
I do love the colors on the regular models though!
I have a 15 Pro Max and I like it, I actually switched from Android last year so I've only been in the iPhone world for a short while.
The camera button/gesture thing on this new model seems decent but none of the features really seem that compelling to upgrade, the "visual intelligence" which is supposedly reserved for the 16 models just seems like Google Lens with maybe tighter integration with the OS features.
Additonally the 16 doesn't have more RAM which I thought they might have done given the local LLM models, so not really a compelling upgrade.
Disappointed again there is no small version... I can't figure out why anyone wants to carry these massive phones everywhere. To me the major advantage of mobile tech should be it getting smaller and lighter each generation. Especially since nowadays it can wirelessly use whatever big screen happens to already be wherever you are anyways.
To me the old iphones with 4" screens were a good start, and I was hoping they'd get smaller and lighter as the tech got better... an iPhone 5 was 3.95oz, now iphones weigh 6-7 ounces.
You can. I took my 13mini to Apple paid the Apple tax and now I’m happy to not be forced
into a uncomfortably larger physical device for at least mother year or two
Why would you see the benefit to upgrading when you just upgraded to the previous model? That's an unreasonable expectation. That would be like complaining that the 2025 Toyota Camry isn't good enough to upgrade to from your 2024 model. Of course it's not!
I also really don't understand what the hangup is with the batteries.
You bought a $1000 phone, $99 to get a new battery is reasonable.
I get it, the cost should be $20 and it shoulde be an easy DIY job, but it seems like you're actively refusing the solution. You undoubtedly spent more to upgrade to the 15 Pro than to replace the battery in your 13 Pro.
The fact that phones needs to be financed or subsidised by the carriers should tell you that they are WAAAY to expensive.
I'm still of the opinion that Apple needs to make a cheaper phone. Starting a $1100 makes this something only very few will purchase on their own. It's an absolutely insane price.
The iPhone SE starts at $600 (4000DKK) that is still way to expensive. I really wish they'd make a "base" phone for around $150 (1000DKK). I don't need the fancy big screen, I don't care about FaceID, the camera was good enough on the iPhone 7, I don't care about the sensors, I don't care about AI, I don't care about games. I just need a phone that can run a few very simple app and has BlueTooth and tethering.
> diluting their brand with a cheap phone would be a dumb business decision
I don't even think that's their problem to be honest. People want an iPhone, and if they could get one at say $250, they'd get that model the majority of the time. Seeing that they have no problems selling $600 phones, then why not just take the higher amount.
It just sucks that you basically have no choice, either get an expensive iPhone or be stuck with Google on Android.
> if they could get one at say $250, they'd get that model the majority of the time.
I don't think that's necessarily the case, people have consistently bought the premium iPhone models over the much cheaper SE. You really can't generalize the buying habits of consumers as if they all have the same buying power. Intentionally not catering to buyers of lower buying power is exactly why green bubbles have a stigma in the US.
I saw that and was disappointed - but then I read the fine print and it sounds like they ARE unlocked and you can switch providers freely (even while still financing)?
Ah, looks like that is the case, with a couple exceptions:
> When you purchase an iPhone at Apple, you’ll receive an unlocked model that you can use with any carrier. There are two exceptions: If you buy an iPhone through an AT&T Installment Plan, you will receive a locked model. If you buy an iPhone through Boost Mobile Financing, it will be locked for the first 60 days after activation.
This is pretty insane to me. For a $1,000 device to limit itself like that seems crazy. iPads have up to 16 GB, so it's obviously useful. From games to the browser - and especially on-device AI and ML - they all could use way more RAM.
I think if I were in the market for a new iPhone the non-pro ones are more than enough for me. I’ve a 14 pro max and I don’t use all of it or its pro features.
What’s even crazier is I am tempted by the pixel fold — that looks amazing for content consumption which is what I use my phone for the most.
You get the phone for speed for their killer apps, previously it was stuff like instagram, camera, chat, games, now it’s AI and how it will enhance all apps. The slow roll out isn’t great, but Apple is gonna real bake it in. “Show me all my unread messages from the group chat”
My hot take – we've gone past peak camera for most people.
Yes, there is an audience that want more and more camera, and the pro caters to that. For a lot of people they just want a pretty good camera that they can quickly capture their memories with, they don't really care for the phone to be wrapped in a camera with a dedicated button etc. I also think in terms of all the AI image processing vs. just giving a natural image the quality peaked at the iPhone 13.
I think the camera button is neat, and of course no one is going to avoid an iPhone because of it, but I don't know if it's really going to drive sales more any other small iteration would. Again, the innovation continues to comes from software features.
ATT is offering $1,000 trade in for Iphone 12 - 15, an amazing deal for those with slightly older iphones. Obviously it pays off over 36 months, but I don't see myself switching anytime soon so it works out. I think the others have similar deals too.
imho these high trade in offers are basically carrier-subsidized phones in new clothes: in exchange of a discount, you agree to stick with the carrier and phone for the next 3 years. And the discount may not be that great! You can get plenty of money if you sell the phone yourself.
Curious to see if the apple LLM can interact with any messaging apps other than iMessage. Even amongst my American friends i only have a lone contact that I keep in touch with using iMessage.
And I would pay a thousand dollars for this as opposed to finding a used earlier generation model for fifty bucks why? It's hard to tell if this is supposed to be satire or not.
I wonder when the iphone 21+ comes out what are we going to call these things? And will they still use software services like AI to differentiate? I mean let's be real they could totally offload AI stuff to the cloud and keep it somewhat 'private' I fear apple is using AI as a way to sell hardware when really it's the same thing with a little more RAM.
The iPhone SE 2016 remains to be the best smartphone Apple has ever released. This year, my wife made me replace it with a 13 mini, and it feels nothing but a downgrade: too large, too heavy, camera bumps, no headphone jack, no touch ID, atrocious PWM, etc.
Sure, I understand people have different needs from mine and appreciate they have a choice, but it saddens me that I don't anymore, and all I want is a modern (read: not discontinued), compact device that can do what a 10-year-old smartphone could do and gets out the way.
No user-replaceable battery even though that’s a consumable/wear item?
They even invited “Mother Earth” herself to their last presentation to talk about how much they care about the planet! Were they just lying to our faces then?
Though mine has been pretty indestructible. No case only mine, have dropped it a bunch and has a few dents, but the screen is perfect and I still get great battery life.
"Powered by the faster, more efficient A18 Pro chip and built for Apple Intelligence, iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max are the most advanced iPhone models we’ve ever made," said Greg Joswiak
Was hoping for: "We peaked last year, this iPhone is slightly worse in all dimensions compared to last year."
I don't quite know how the developers would fit a game like that in a mobile device. I still recall my PC GPU struggling without upscaling. It's not even available on something like Nintendo Switch either, yet here it is for Apple devices: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/death-stranding-directors-cut/...
Guess it's a testament to how far hardware, modern game engines and competent developers can all go.
It is very much a Hideo Kojima game, so answering that question well would be pretty difficult for most folks. Regardless, it’s quite the experience, that’s for sure.
I have a 12 Pro and was thinking I'd upgrade. Usually I'd opt for the Pro tier but this cycle I think I'll actually go for the regular 16. There just doesn't seem to be enough there for someone like me. Which is maybe the point? I liked having the better camera system but these days they show all this extra stuff I don't use my phone camera for anyway. I have a Sony a7iii for the fancy stuff.
I'm not in the iPhone ecosystem anyway, so it's probably moot, but one thing Google did really right this year was to issue Pixel 9 Pro and Pro XL that are identical in everything but the screen size. I'm very happily upgrading from a very large 8 Pro to a nicely pocketable 9 Pro that contains all the same guts as the 9 Pro XL. Apple should have done the same.
The Pro and Pro Max are like you say with the sole exception of optical zoom level. OP is referring to the non-pro models at the end when talking about ProMotion (there are 4 main variants each release, not 2).
i bought my grandma an iphone 6, damn these thing were perfect size and the force haptic was awesome. Iphone are becoming more and more like android, in size, in complexity and jankyness.
I'm a little disappointed they all only have 8GB of RAM, I would have thought that with the world of AI we're all living in now we'd get at least 12GB for our $1850-$2850.
Really boring. Phones,,, apart from the actual functionality, Apple devices have started to become really really boring...
One is addiction (deaddiction mindset is becoming a thing) and the next is the fanboism (understandable and unstandable) which actually creates more aversion than anything!
While there is nothing wrong, the price to value justification is a like vampirism and surrounding ecosystem and hardware and specs are fine, but the real value of everything that is present is not realised by everyone.
Honestly people, how many of the actual iphone users even look at the photos taken in the phone after a day or two? probably 0.0001% (who may be pros who wants to make a statement and probably help fuel the hype for the company!) or some professionals who are stuck (sucked into) the ecosystem (for whatever non-debatable and (some good) reasons!). For the rest, it's a pride to own something costly! That's it. There you go... I said it.
It's like I'm owning a device which most people can't afford and I think I'm super and standout,but in reality, it's such a self obsessed and narcissistic feeling and nothing else!
It's their marketing and product placement and business tactics.
I just need a compact phone for making calls and don't want a device which I will proudly show in front of my face wherever and whenever possible... That's really annoying.
Good that I moved away from Apple ecosystem completely and I'm still alive.
Just too much hyped year after year...
That's the case with most manufacturers and just not these guys!
> “Powered by the faster, more efficient A18 Pro chip and built for Apple Intelligence, iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max are the most advanced iPhone models we’ve ever made,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.
We've manufactured this from a blend of grade 11 graphite collected from an asteroid and dried oyster tears which you will hide using a $5 cover from Alie Express.
Fwiw, the newer iPhone Pros are in fact extremely durable.
I don’t like cases (they make the phone too bulky for my liking) but also frequently drop my phone on stone/ceramic tiles (not the perfect combo, I know) and after 3 years of having a 13 Pro it’s still in great shape.
Just a few scratches on the corners of the phone (which usually get the most of the hit).
In other words, I very much appreciate them improving durability.
Yeah, I mean, that’s ideal right? Expensive and durable materials covered with cheap, somewhat-durable, and trivially replaceable cases to absorb wear and greatly extend the lifespan of the expensive part.
Yeah, this way you get to have a 5 years old smartphone in pristine condition that is worth less than 30% of its initial value.
All that for the low price of being constantly annoyed by the bulkiness and unwieldiness of a case that will cost up to 5% of the price of the device itself if you want to keep it in decent condition.
It's like the concept of insurance, it's a scam. A good scam, but still.
I've always wondered about the "most advanced ____ we've ever made" phrase, it seems like almost like a silly tongue in cheek inside joke at this point. Does it date back to Jobs? They've used that exact turn of phrase for every product iteration as long as I can remember but I can't find any info on its origin. Maybe I'm hallucinating this?
As much as I can’t stand marketing phrases like “the most advanced we’ve ever made” or “the most powerful yet” — because it should go without saying that the newest thing you’re releasing is also the most of anything — the fact that companies keep using it suggests it actually works to market the thing.
> the newest thing you’re releasing is also the most of anything
Well, they also regularly release lower specced models for people who don’t want, don’t need or can’t afford the Pro or Pro Max iPhones.
And on the other hand you have people who need the best or want the best.
And it’s helpful to both kind of people to know that ok the Pro and Pro Max are the most powerful ones.
And while it might seem “obvious” to you and me that Pro and Pro Max are the most powerful iPhones, there’s a lot of people that don’t regularly stay on top of what models exist of iPhones.
I've always wondered what a VP of marketing does at a company that already has a de-facto monopoly on their biggest market as well as in the luxury segment worldwide.
Come out once a year and say "we made this thing bigger and better"?
It’s not like that monopoly was handed to them. They have some of the best marketing in the world.
There’s a quote from the CEO of Coca-Cola I remember but can’t find a source for, about why they still spend so much on advertising. When a pilot gets to cruising altitude, he doesn’t shut down the engines.
It's not really a monopoly (at least if we have to listen to them) and it wasn't handed to them, it was built on top of Steve Jobs' strong intuition and radical product choices for building an extremely appealing device at a palatable price point.
Since then, they have been surfing that wave and that's pretty much it. The reason is pretty simple: people are sheep, they like to appear cool and "IN", iPhone was the thing that did that so they keep buying that.
But in my opinion the tides are turning, Apple gear doesn't have the coolness factor they once had (everyone has them anyway) and the technological side is on a slippery slope for some time now.
They still have some strong factors (like the chips) but those are being slowly but surely reduced to nothing by the competition and it doesn't look like Apple has much left in the tank (the idiot in charge fired everyone who could have done anything worthwhile anyway).
As for their marketing, it is basically the same. It once was memorable and cool but nowadays it's all very forgettable and meh when it's not completely controversial in a bad way. As far as I'm concerned, their marketing doesn't bring them that many sales; nowadays the vast majority of people who buy Apple stuff buy it for reasons unrelated to the product marketing/specifications.
And this is exactly why Apple is becoming something else, something that their loyal customers who ensured their long-term success do not really like...
I’ve read that Apple marketing has a hand in product direction. But yeah, maybe they are paid more for what they don’t say and keep others from saying. :)
In business school they teach you that product is part of the field of marketing. In that choosing what you bring to market is completely integrated with how you message it and that they should not be separated.
There is lots of things were competition is ahead of them or things they could improve:
- 90W fast wired charging, 80W wireless charging - many android phone have it
- reverse charging - so that in emergency when you forgot to charge airpods and you already outside you could charge a little bit enough for a run - again some androids have it
- stylus support - still would be nice to get apple pencil for some signatures etc
- fingerprint reader either under display or on side button like on ipad air - sometimes when phone is sitting on the table it's easier to unlock with finger than pick it up and point at your face then put it back (especially annoying for iOS devs)
- irda led for controlling air con in hotel - they have already IR blaster on front and maybe even on lidar that they could potentially hack it similar like they hacked screen for flash.
- temperature sensor and humidity sensor
- IR temperature sensor for checking your body temperature or stuff you baking in the oven
- tiny thermal camera sensor for inspecting leaks in house for the winter
- microsd support (yes can dream can I?)
- any improvements for lidar quality or truedepth
- another programmable button on the left side for lefties
They could also take a step towards a more conscious engagement with the environment by allowing to replace batteries or other parts. That would win them a very good deal of press nowadays, even if it is not strictly tech-related.
Looks like they are super-uber risk-averse and there is 0% new ideas with these products.
You might have clicked a notification on either device on accidently and set it the wrong direction.
When you first connect, the power capabilities are negotiated and usually the more powerful device takes on the "source" role while the other gets to be the "sink".
This can be dynamically controlled and switched back and forth so some devices have UI to select what to do.
> IR temperature sensor for checking your body temperature or stuff you baking in the oven
> tiny thermal camera sensor for inspecting leaks in house for the winter
So just a thermometer gun? It costs like $20-30 on amazon and I've never needed one other than in my home / kitchen. Why in the world do you want a phone for this haha.
If they are producing and selling it on amazon means someone buying it even if you don't need it. Body temperature check definitely would be handy. Those sensors definitely don't cost $20-30. I had CC1350 SensorTag and it already had that for retail price also around ~$35 (but altogether with 10 different sensors inside and that bought 10 years ago).
They also sell smart outlets, back massagers, and garden sprinklers on Amazon. That doesn't imply people would find them handy in their phone.
I think it'd be an easier pitch in the watch though as that's where they are already shoving most of the health sensors (and have wrist temperature monitoring already).
You can also read it in 2015 Tim Cook's 3D touch announcement voice or Zu announcing the ZTE device with a 3D screen in 2017 or whoever at LG announced the wide angle lens, got meh to bad reviews about it, and then it took off afterward anyways.
My point here is I'm not saying it can't ever be something anyone would want because of that rather something selling in another device on Amazon has no weight one way or the other on whether it'd be a good thing to add to a phone.
At this point its just sad that its spec bumps on what imo is a pretty poor iteration of their own product. They had better ideas in the past that I wish they would rehash just for the sake of offering more skus to choose from vs "small and large." I liked 3d touch. I liked touchid. I liked having a headphone jack. I liked a small and lightweight phone. I liked a phone that actually sat flat on a table. It's just a shame that this is clearly never going to be made by them today, and being reminded of this through yet another paltry spec bump with stingy storage offerings that's been all too typical from this company with this product lately.
It sounds like you'd rather sacrifice Function over Form ... in which case - the iPhone SE checks most of your boxes.
Note: I don't disagree with what you're saying. But Apple also creates multiple models for different users desires, and it sounds like you're most closely aligned to the iPhone SE target market (not the iPhone base or Pro).
I currently do actually use an iphone se 2. But honestly its a worse device than the old se 1 in my drawer that I used when the se2 was in the shop not too long ago. The only issue was modern apps were not compatible with whatever ios version it was on. Otherwise, it was surprisingly faster. spotlight search was appreciably faster, without any delay vs the se2 that just hangs for about 2 seconds before returning any results. mobile web felt great although the smaller screen would often be reduced to a postage stamp of readable space after banner and footer and other ads gobble up the rest of it. It felt much better in the hand and in the pocket. Headphone jack of course.
And what is worse about this se line is that I know it is temporary. They won't be building them out of new old stock iphone 8 parts forever. That will run dry like the old iphone 5 supply lines the se1 used did, which forced its obsolescence. Eventually I will be shunted into these newer, heavier, wobbly bottomed iphones, due to forced obsolescence in either the apps I use or the actual carrier network protocols.
Some ideas:
-change screen ratio, increase width against height, like an iPad.
-Why are iPads and iPhones treated so differently? I want to use a pen on the phone and make a phone call on the tablet.
-Double screen, not foldable, but two screens like an open book. I could see a lot of useful applications like showing lists on one screen, details on the other, or a good ereader. In landscape, have a writing app on top and a touch keyboard on the bottom screen.
-Slide the phone into a laptop-like shell and run desktop apps with MacOS. It's the same processor the macs have, no?
-Likewise, attach to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and run desktop apps.
imagine at work projecting from iphone work slides or whiteboards at work or videos/games indoor at home on a white wall etc (apple loves accessories, and the potential for accessories on this would be huge as well)
I've never owned an Android but I'm extremely curious about the Pixel Pro 9 Fold. That would really change how I use a phone in my day to day life. Presumably, Apple will get around to doing it too at some point.
I got it last week and it's great. My main concerns were the older (pixel 7 generation) camera and the battery life. Both have exceeded my expectations, the massive screen is great for browsing and someone even got debian on there (https://old.reddit.com/r/PixelFold/comments/1fcn4du/fullblow...), and it's fairly thin and light even with a case on.
I just got one and moved to Android after being an iPhone user for like 10 years. This is the biggest leap in smartphones IMO, the big screen on demand is such a huge feature
smartphone plataeu happened like 8 years ago. at this point, even in our wildest dreams, what else could you possibly want a phone to do? all that is left for this form factor is incremental QoL improvements until some crazy new technology which we can't yet fathom drops, and god help us when it does lol.
I love my Flip, well the hardware. Samsung software is annoying, especially Bixby. But it fits in my pocket, which is all I wanted since the iPhone SE.
It's really bad even for Apple. I really expected something more than a button and riding the wave of AI introduced months ago. We can see that technologically (mostly in hardware part) Apple is slowing down and can't innovate at the speed it was before. They still had a chance to add new stuff but for some reason skipped it - Wifi 7, support for JPEG XL, more base memory/RAM... Profit margins are going down and they really struggle to make it high as before. The fact that AI will not be available in most of the markets Apple is getting money from is really concerning and will probably hurt in the long term. The best part of this event is that AI actually pushed Apple to make really significant upgrade on base models.
Not really. This is the first time Apple is betting on something that will not be available in huge portion of the market they are selling iPhone. This never happened before and Apple never directly connected almost all features of the hardware launch with geographically limited area. AI is the only reason why someone should upgrade from iPhone 14 and lower and yet it's only going to work in limited part of the world (China and EU are not going to have AI).
It's absolutely stunning what smartphones can do these days and Apple makes an excellent product. It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models "boring".
The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I'll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.
She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.
You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter. Her only awareness of features is when she accidentally enables one and doesn't know how to get back.
You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn't notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn't know they even exist.
All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.
You might assume my girlfriend is perhaps lowly educated or just not tech savvy. Wrong, she's highly educated, even works in IT, although not in an engineering role. It's not that she's unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn't care.
It's becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies. Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.
I think this is also why Apple put many Pro features into the regular model. Most people don't buy the pro and they're desperate for selling points in the regular model.
If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.