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Comment by nxc18 | Hacker News Reader

Just updated on my iPhone 6s that I dumped due to slowness. It’s just as fast now as the android I replaced it with and LastPass works with all my Apps now. Only thing missing now is good keyboard support (disclaimer: haven’t tried since update)

I’m really impressed and happy with this direction Apple’s taking. Hopefully they’ve learned their lesson with the battery slowdowns.

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Been using 12 on my 6s since the early betas, and it was like getting a brand phone. If it wasn't for wanting the new cameras and OLED screen, there isn't much reason for me to upgrade!

Same boat with a 6s+ but the camera is really feeling its age, especially in low light.

Agreed, my occupation has been shifting to a professional food photographer/influencer/promoter/marketer/whatever you want to call it. For off the cuff shots, when the DSLR isn't around, or live video, I need better high ISO performance. Really didn't want to spend the $1000, but the camera is MUUUUCH better than the 6s.

Maybe you'd be interested in a smaller camera like the Sony RX 100ii? Seems like it might be perfect for high-quality off-the-cuff photos, and with a big sensor and an f1.8 lens it ought to do very well in low light.

I have the Mark IV, it's a great little camera that I use for mountain hikes. But it's not discreet or small enough to just pocket daily. Also doesn't do Instagram live videos, or allow me to upload stories at that moment. iPhone pretty much required.

Also! It's confirmed the new sensor in the XS is 32% larger than the X, which is SIGNIFICANT.

The XR is getting the same new sensor, so if you want to save a couple hundred bucks and can wait a month, it might be a thought. (That's my plan, less for absolute cost-saving reasons than I think I really want one of the colors that are only going to be available on that line.)

Decided this time I'm just taking the iPhone Upgrade Plan path, and treating the phone as a service. $55 a month interest free, and a new phone ever year + roughly $500 yearly trade in. Also comes unlocked, and without carrier contract.

Thank goodness. The lack of 3rd party password manager integration was infuriating. Glad LastPass is usable natively.

I avoided ios 11x entirely due to performance concerns and it looks like I may update to 12 because it's reversed most of the slowdowns.

My 6s has amazingly poor battery life even after I got the battery replaced and this was before battery gate. I got frustrated and bought an 8 Plus because I knew it had a very large battery and the battery life while using it is about at iPad levels - I can use it all day without it breaking a sweat.

I updated my 6s and reset it to see if that improves the battery life situation.

iOS 11 reduced my battery life significantly over iOS 10. Don't have hard numbers but it felt like ~30%.

The 6s's battery was fine until iOS 11. I've been running iOS 12 for a day now, and I notice an improvement in battery over 11.

That’s what I was waiting to hear. My iphone 6s went from “this is the most amazing phone” to “I need to change phone” because of the last upgrades. I was waiting for this.

Replacing the battery on my 6s resolved most instances of my phone feeling slow. So far this new update resolves the remaining lag and pauses.

I went to the apple store a couple days ago and they replaced the battery for my 6S for free!

Probably due to this issue: https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/

Battery replacements aren't normally free unless you have AppleCare.

Bought an iPad last summer and it keeps crashing. Is there a similar issue for these?

My GF did the same here in Australia and, even though her health was above the threshold, they did the same.

I was actually thinking of buying one of these battery case. Don’t care much about doubling the size of my phone, but I do care about the extra day of battery. Anyone has a recommendation here?

What do you feel is missing from the system keyboard on iOS?

Swipe and comma button in a reasonable place.

Yeah first thing I do on a new iOS install is install SwiftKey.

I recommend using Gboard on iOS. SwiftKey never felt quite as good.

Thanks, I will give that a try. I've always been pretty happy with SwiftKey but I'm game to try something else that is reputed to be better.

It would be so cool if Apple would provide swyping in an own keyboard. Maybe a "Siri-Keyboard".

Number row.

Dvorak. Even after more than a decade, it's the only current OS I can think of that doesn't have a Dvorak option -- and the only Apple OS since the 1980's that didn't.

There are third-party keyboards, but none of them are good. That's not the third-party developers' fault: the iOS keyboard API is so wimpy, developers literally cannot make a keyboard that works like the default ones.

I don't want to hunt and peck, so on iOS I mostly use the Japanese "flick" keyboard, which is much more logical, but doesn't offer English autocompletion, so it's just bad in a different way.

I really don't know why iOS doesn't support Dvorak.

>I really don't know why iOS doesn't support Dvorak.

Probably because Dvorak is used by less than 0.001% of the users and it is only optimised to the English language.

It's _really_ niche.

It works really well with any language that alternates vowels and consonants, which is most of them. I can also confirm it works great with Japanese, via Kotoeri (kana input essentially alternates vowels and consonants, even more so than English). I have yet to run across a language where it isn't better than QWERTY, though I'm sure they exist.

And less than 1 in 100,000 sounds awfully low. Where'd you get that number? There's 700,000 people living in my city and I personally know a lot more than 7 Dvorak users here.

iOS does support Dvorak for Bluetooth keyboards, so it's not so niche to cause Apple to ignore it completely. Isn't "Dvorak on BT (only)" even more niche than "Dvorak"?

This, so much. I've been a Dvorak-only user for nearly two decades, and the iPhone is unusable to me, as I'm not going to relearn QWERTY just for a single mobile OS.

Do any third-party keyboards on iOS even support Dvorak? Last time I checked, keyboards (e.g. SwiftKey) that support Dvorak on Android don't have the option on iOS for whatever reason.

I don't even need predictive text or autocorrect – just swapping the stock keyboard keys to Dvorak, and removing both prediction/autocorrect features would make it vastly more usable.

The especially infuriating thing is that iOS does support Dvorak at a software level – I use my iPad with an Apple Magic Keyboard via Bluetooth, and Dvorak works perfectly.

I share your complaints about 3rd party keyboards in iOS, but just a heads up in case you hadn't noticed: Google's Gboard recently added support for Dvorak and Colemak, and is by far the most stable/usable 3rd party keyboard I've used.

You can buy one for 0.99 from the App Store.

Multiple languages supported in the same keyboard. I frequently type in several different languages, and apps (and even contexts inside apps) never retain the correct keyboard for long.

The best alternative I've found so far is SwiftKey which lets you add dictionaries for many languages and just combines all of them together with Markov chains. Works perfectly. On the other hand, I miss out on features such as the new password filling, and I don't really trust SwiftKey privacy wise (they have a cloud service which they try to sell you).

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