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Comment by codemac | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful photos, but the decision tree can be shortened immensely to:

    Do you like big phones?
    -> Yes: iPhone 12 Pro Max
    -> No: Do you often run out of battery?  
          -> Yes: iPhone 12 Pro
          -> No: iPhone 12 mini

It's kind of ironic that all the questions about photography don't change what phone you end up with in their decision tree.

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I do find the years where the big-phone has a notable camera improvement frustrating. Because I like the fancy camera, but am at best ambivalent about the really big phones. So I'm tempted, but really just wish I could know I was getting "the best possible phone-camera" by buying the middle model.

Even though "it's huge so we could fit better optics and sensors in" is a completely reasonable position for a device manufacturer to take...

Reading the review says to me that, given that I have never been able to sell myself on the plus-sized models, the regular Pro model is almost as good for most purposes. So if I buy one of this year's family, that's probably what it will be. Of course, I have plenty of other cameras so this is a supplement in any case.

I tend to disagree. Apple's newest iPhone 12 Pro Max IS supposed to entice photographers and marketed towards creators. Photogs have always inconvenienced themselves with camera gear just to get the better quality shot. You'll see them take time to setup a photo. A few inches here and there on the phone will probably not matter as much. It's a small price to pay on the daily driver phone to pack a good camera sensor. The iPhone 12 Pro Max is a good deal to pixel peepers.

I’ve been staring at their chart and your simplification for a few minutes, trying to understand what you mean. As far as I can tell there are plenty of combinations of answers that lead to different results.

You missed the "Do you take a lot of pictures with your phone?" If the answer is yes, you won't get to the mini.

IMO, all modern cellphone cameras as fine for I want. I am trying to capture reminder of something so I remember and reinforce the memory that thing when looking at the photo.

Low light is great, but resolution or color accuracy just isn’t that big of a selling point. And the Mini can have 256 GB of memory so that’s plenty of photos.

> Low light is great, but resolution or color accuracy just isn’t that big of a selling point.

Optical zoom is a big deal, though. If modern cellphones will take the same direction as the 12 Max, entry-level cameras will have no reason to exist, as they have tiny sensors anyway. I suppose that they have a small/shrinking market share already, but disappearing entirely is another level.

This may sound strange, but I really don’t use zoom. I have had 10x optical zoom, but that’s simply not the kind of photos I take.

I wonder if the SE is eating into iPhone mini sales. I’ve been waiting for iPhone mini since the 5S, but I got an SE earlier in the year and now I don’t need mini for a few years.

I'm THAT customer. I purchased the iPhone 12 mini with high hopes but for the price, I didn't feel like I was getting enough. I only had 2 out of 3 rear cameras (of the pro) and I would have preferred telephoto instead of wide. The battery life wasn't quite there either. The only improvement was 5G but coverage is still spotty anyway. I exchanged my purchase for the SE and I'm pretty happy. I still get the smaller easy to reach screen size and the fingerprint sensor is a welcome from the past. I think TouchID > FaceID. I was an iPhone X owner for a number of years until the screen randomly died.

I definitely consider Touch ID to be far superior to Face ID, especially is a world full of masks.

I can explicitly have my phone ready and as I am removing it from my pocket with touchid. Even with the newer faster faceid, I have remove it first and look at it. The explicitness of touchid is preferable to me too.

Touch ID requires me to remove my gloves. Everything has drawbacks.

How about adding both? These are high-end, expensive phones.

That would probably be best.

Yeah the mask thing does make me wish I had Touch ID as a backup.

I still prefer face id to Touch ID.

A compromise for me would be letting my watch unlock the phone by proximity as it can do with my Mac. The watch unlock is good enough that I don’t miss Face ID on Mac.

Pressing one home button is way easier than doing swipe gestures especially when the phone is in one hand. Muscle memory takes over and it's a joy. It's kinda like having a Blackberry side scroll wheel all over again.

Main reason im stuck on iphone 8 is the touch id. I dont even want apple to have my face biometric and that says something from guy whos wife was working for apple and could lookup anyone for any reason.

Also nit pick: you don’t “press” the button. In fact there is no physical button; there is surface that acts upon touch and tiny hammer hits the surfec from underneath, making it feel like its a button. I was in shock to discover that once i turned off my iphone 8 first time and though the button was broken because it didn’t “recoil” or made its typical behavior noise.

Just to be clear: Apple does not have your facial biometric data with FaceID. It does not leave your device and is protected by the Secure Enclave there.

There are reasons to prefer TouchID to FaceID, but that isn't actually one of them.

Understood, the Taptic Engine (haptic feedback) is a really great feature that Apple also took to their MacBook trackpad (actually, not sure which came first). They've removed one extra point of mechanical failure and gave their laptops and phones a consistent feel with minimal delay (instead of a vibrating motor). A disassembled Taptic Engine is actually a bunch of small coils of different sizes and oil filled inside. Quite the engineering masterpiece.

I imagine it must be. I needed to replace my iPhone 8 and bought an SE2 instead of the Mini because they still haven't brought back TouchID. I was really expecting TouchID to come back in the 12 line-up, especially after the iPad refresh brought it back, but I think COVID messed up their plans and it got cut. We'll see what next year brings, all I know is no TouchID and I'm not buying it, and I'm not the only person I know who feels this way.

I recently upgraded from an iPhone 8 to a 12 Pro. TouchID is the biggest thing I miss. It is particularly an issue with Apple Pay, since when I'm using it, I invariably have my mask on.

There are hacks to get FaceID to recognize a mask, but I haven't got them to work.

not that there's any reason you should trust my opinion, but I would doubt it. the mini is much nicer than the SE in pretty much every way. the bezels on the SE belong in 2017. the 12 mini has a much larger screen and a smaller chassis. if I were willing to spend $750 on a phone, there's no way I would cross-shop the two.

I had the mini for a week and returned it for an SE2. The screen is slightly smaller on the SE2 but in a good way because your thumbs can reach better. It also lacks the cutout at the top. I have average size hands but my thumb can really roam around everywhere on the SE2/iPhone 8 screen size. I just wish the SE2 had OLED and a bigger battery. That would have made it a tank of a phone. I really have to agree again with Steve Job's old reasoning for small phones. It really changes how you interact with the phone. I'm happy to be able to pull up the control center from the bottom again rather than from the top right corner. Source: I'm an iPhone X convert.

Besides Touch ID being more useful than Face ID during a pandemic, I'm also not a fan of the PWM flicker across iPhone 12 models. Depending on how paranoid you are about your eyes, this could be a deal-breaker.

I also wouldn't buy any 1st version of a product. It's getting beta tested with the public, whereas the SE is tried and proven for many years and does the job (for me at least), for $300 less to boot. Although, I'll definitely be interested in a perfected mini in the future.

The non-Max iPhone 12 Pro is still a big phone...

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