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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

I'm not surprised sales are weak: the regular iPhone 7 seems to offer few improvements over the 6s or 6, with only the 7+'s camera being a really notable differentiator.

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Better camera, better screen, faster, waterproof, more ram, Taptic Engine, nicer finish options, more durable home button, and on and on. It's a better phone in almost every measurable way.

And still, for many daily users the differences are not going to be spectacular. At least not 'drop 700 Euro on it' spectacular. So I guess many people went from a 2 year to a 3-4 year upgrade cycle.

The camera upgrade is spectacular. But yes, it's not a reason normal people would pay 700 € to upgrade, unless they're semi-professional bloggers/Instagram users/whatever.

I should start measuring the time I spend fishing around my cluttered desk looking for that stupid dongle because I'm now done with a Hangouts call on my laptop and would like to switch back to my phone to play a podcast. iPhone 7 will crush that metric! Oh wait, lower is better? Eph!

There's also that time that it was 2pm and I still hadn't had lunch. I ended a Hangouts call, yanked my headphones out of my mbp, cruised over to the elevator, and excitedly made my way to Eataly for a prime rib sandwich. Sat down with my sandy, pulled 1/8" jack toward base of phone… Eph again!

The experiences that end in me loathing Apple are building slowly and steadily.

See, your problem is you need a 1/8" (male) to lightning (female) dongle that you leave on your laptop. Then switch to lightning headphones and you're all set. Because dongles magically fix everything.

It does suck. I've remedied it by using bluetooth earphones & also bringing an adapter (which is pretty small) in my wallet, along with a microusb-to-lightning adapter. And now I'm pretty happy with my phone.

All of this is extra effort to fix broken usability. Not much but frequent and unavoidable.

All this subsidizes apple's decision to not offer an effortless solution for very common use cases.

Bringing a dongle is an effort. Replacing existing headphones is an effort. Paying extra ateention to which Apple-made earbuds I bring is an effort. Buying bt headphones and charging them is an effort.

What am I buying with the extra efforts I need to invest in activities which required no such efforts before?

The sound is not better. I am not going to swim with my phone.

My only conclusion is that I do this for Apple, not for me.

Not $850 better than this iPhone 6+ purchased at launch.

It's trivial for folks to turn a light on if their pictures are too dark

Unless you're making a living off iPhone photos, most people will do fine with performance and features of the SE even

None of those is as big as a upgrade than a bigger screen from 5s to 6.

Seriously, look at Apple's announcements of late, it didn't feel like an event trying to wow its customers, it felts like an internal business review where executives boasting about how impressive their achievements/progress are since last one.

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