iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus
apple.com
apple.com
Apple iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37485271
Apple ditches the Lightning connector in favor of USB-C after 11 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37484897
(Before the announcement) iPhone 15’s shift to USB-C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37480508
Every year it's a new camera, new whatever, but USB-C is going to mean I can get rid of all these lightning cables.
Not increasing the price is nice, I guess. Will have to buy more USB-C cables, though. (Technically the low highest end phone is higher, but higher spec, too).
It comes with one USB-C to USB-C charging cable - not sure if it is a data cable, also.
Pre-order Friday, delivery 22 Sept. Probably going to move on it just to get that USB-C, need to see what carrier deals I can find.
(Worry not though dear mr. Cook, I'll pass it down to one of my kids so the environment won't be hurting while the new toy shows me which gate my CO2-spewing flight departs from. ;))
that's something i never cared about. whether i carry 1 usbc and 1 lightning or 2 usbc, it's still 2 cables.
Though I have to mention, you shouldn't really shop for cables when you're traveling and need a new one. First stop by the front desk, they usually have a huge pile of charging cables people have left behind.
And not all the offices are close to a shop selling those kind of things nor do these persons feel they might be better off going shopping for one directly instead of disrupting a non negligible amount of workers.
I don't even know why people have to charge their phone midday and can't wait. Even when I am going out and extending the night until dawn, I usually have battery left until I go to bed.
For instance, I'm happy that my new laptop can charge on usb-c, so now I don't need you bring a charger for my switch and a different one for my laptop. I just take the smallest one and charge my laptop and switch with it (but not at the same time). I'm happy to know that I will be able to ditch the lightning cable for my next apple smartphone and only keep a single cable for my three devices.
If you have two different connectors you invariably need at least two proper cables.
The integration of two USB ports into the Apple keyboards of this era was an excellent innovation, which I use daily. Mouse on one side, thumbdrive on the other.
In classic Apple style, when they finally capitulated and added secondary buttons to their mice, they hid them. Actually, that was the second stupid move. The first was making the entire mouse body the button... so you couldn't keep the "button" pressed and then scroll, lift, scroll some more (because when you lifted the mouse, the button was released). So Apple's workaround wasn't to fix that stupid design, but rather to add little "wings" on the sides of the mouse that you could pinch with two fingers while somehow keeping the mouse mashed down with other fingers, in order to do multi-swipe scrolling.
The "Magic" mouse was an attempt to one-up legit mice by adding a touchpad to the back of the mouse... which you were somehow supposed to swipe sideways across with some fingers, while using other fingers to hold the mouse in place. It's just so gallingly dumb. There's not much else to say.
Oh... except the one where the charging wire goes into the BOTTOM of the mouse! I mean... you can't make this stuff up. Actually, you could, but "Polish" jokes aren't really PC anymore.
The Magic Keyboard is what it is, which is a perfectly decent keyboard for mainstream users. I like it because it keeps the typing feel consistent between desktop and laptop. I'm sure I'd feel differently if I was writing a novel or into competitive gaming, but I don't, so I like it.
The Magic Mouse is an abomination. Not because the charging port location, sure it looks funny, but it's actually not an issue in real life. The actual problem is it's an ergonomic catastrophe. (Which is par for the course with Apple. In its 40+ year history, Apple has never once made a legitimately good mouse.)
For ergonomics, both are seem to be fine for the way I hold my mouse.
But the "Magic Keyboard" is trash because the "butterfly" keyboard is trash, visited by the hack Jony Ive upon Apple customers for five inexcusable years. Sure, it's consistent with Apple laptops of the era, but if I could wade through shit all day every day for the sake of consistency... I wouldn't.
Even the current Apple keyboards don't approach the quality of the aluminum era; the time when the little Bluetooth one had the curved back edge where the batteries went. I'm typing on a full-sized aluminum desktop Apple keyboard of that era right now. These were the peak of modern Apple (and, I think, chiclet) keyboards in general.
It's sad what people accept for keyboard quality now. I totally understand the resurgence of mechanical keyboards, which are nothing but normal-quality keyboards of yesteryear.
Anyway, we're mostly in agreement here. I just think Apple should give up on the peripherals game, because they're singularly bad at it.
Oh yeah, we didn't even mention the Pencil that you were (are?) supposed to recharge by jamming it endwise into a port and have it sticking out the whole time...
But the continued lack of a real Delete key on Apple's laptops is annoying as shit. It has always been stupid, because everybody else manages to put a Delete key on their keyboards no matter how small. But when the Eject key became obsolete, the failure to put a Delete key on every keyboard just proved that Apple hasn't abandoned the infantile pettiness that has marked a lot of its history.
Regardless of the reason, Apple (per its M.O.) implemented a ridiculously complicated and crippling "solution" instead of simply making Eject a secondary function on some other key... like a Delete key.
So I have always had to use F12 for Delete (via Karabiner).
That stands in contrast to the ones on their computers, which are too big and cause spurious right-clicks and your cursor to jump to other parts of the screen while you're typing. Ridiculous.
What makes it worse is that the Pencil doesn't work on the giant computer trackpads. WHY? I would've bought that on day one. Talk about utter failure on Apple's part, year after year.
The USB-C charging cables can also carry data at USB2 speeds. I'm pretty sure thats the limit of what the iphone 15 usb-c port can handle. (Since they explicitly called out the iphone 15 pro as having hardware support for usb3).
Stop shitting on the long tail!
And fuckin stand up for your rights and privacy as a consumer!
When did tech become so conformist?
I too am saddened by what feels like a deliberate tactic to further cripple the already locked down cable interface. On Android, I could trivially upload and download all of my data without an intermediary.
But it really puzzles me how that feature needs wifi. Regular TCP/IP has everything you need to discover devices on the network and connect to them. What exactly is 802.11x adding here?
There are lots of added protocols (e.g. Bonjour) because TCP/IP alone is not about discovery.
And of course here we're talking about syncing over wi-fi. How would TCP/IP alone, without Wi-Fi enabled, cut it? It would sync wirelessly over ...cable ethernet?
Is it really so inconceivable that a phone is connected to a wi-fi gateway on a regular LAN?
Because that is how my network is set up here at home.
Apple seems to mostly use Bonjour (mDNS) for these whether using a local network (and indeed that is the case for this wifi sync feature), but they also have a few features/frameworks that can also be setup over an Apple specific "peer to peer wifi" connection which is bootstrapped with bluetooth and switches to peer to peer wifi for fast data transfer, similar but not the same protocol as WiFi direct (according to https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/12885). This is what AirPlay2 does for example. That is one way WiFi could matter for such a feature versus Ethernet.
This wifi sync definitely works with Ethernet on the Mac side (personal experience)
You can get a breakout board for few bucks yourself and that's still going to be more than Apple would have to pay.
The actual answer is that they used last year's SOC which had only USB 2 support.
For actual use the actual practical max speed is far more important. It would be useless if you wanted something better than USB 2.0 and it only did 1.1 times the USB 2 limit for example.
My girlfriend's Pixel 4a can transfer about 4x USB2's real world maximum. Just tested it.
USB 3 isn't new, it dates back to 2008. Every Pixel phone except the original Pixel 1 (USB 3.0) and Pixel 3a (USB 2.0) supports USB 3.1.
Those people that do care are probably already getting a Pro anyway.
Any evidence besides you just decided it?
Carplay? Or is a cable optional for that? IIRC it was sending some data over the cable because I get promoted for carplay stuff after plugging it in.
https://slickdeals.net/f/16869551-carlinkit-5-0-cpc200-2air-...
As far as "not very polished UX", after connecting it's been nothing but the standard CarPlay interface. The instructions say there's a web UI accessible via wifi where you can install updates or change configuration but I had no need to use it. Just connect with Bluetooth, wait a second, and accept the "Connect to CarPlay" popup.
It’s been in use for a year with not a single issue. I set it up with my phone and have been able to forget about its existence ever since.
This is the first time I’ve ever used data over USB on this phone though. I wish Apple had better testing for their bluetooth stack.
The only port I want at all is a headphone jack, and that’s easily waterproofed. Since we can’t have that, I was hoping they’d remove the charge port entirely.
This is probably more typical for iOS than Android users, because the former restricts very severely what can be accessed from the connected computer; copying data is much faster via cable.
None of this Face ID nonsense. A camera which takes pictures. What exactly are you missing? My only gripe is it’s too thin - the battery sucks.
I suppose you could argue in the other direction that Macbooks are way overpriced. :-)
I did drop $3.5k on my M1 Max MBP though and have zero regrets. And I plan on keeping it for 8-10 years. My previous laptop was a 2011 MacBook Pro which lasted about that long.
I just haven't ever spent more than ~$450 on a phone so far. The lag and the battery life on my current phone is starting to get pretty annoying. I might end up buying if it is a significantly better experience.
iPad is more or less same, except it lets you extend to a screen (not just mirror with wrong aspect-ratio), but the window management and everything else is still shit.
Neither of those devices adapt to keyboard/mouse yet, and primarily touch only. It does makes sense that they are touch only, but "its powerful" argument becomes less and less useful every release. It may mean different to someone else who plays games, or benefits from Machine Learning things that the phone can perform more each release just because of added power.
But.... with an adapter? They're a few dollars online.
I'm puzzled by your recommendation to use bluetooth on a wired earphones instead of replacing them.
This is why USB-C is a user-hostile spec.
you might get a charge-only cable bundled with some sketchy usb-c accessory. if you do, throw it out. but any standalone cable sold as a cable will do data transfer. the USB-C cables that only carry power and not data is an imaginary problem.
It's moreso things like PD, is it 480Mbits or is it 5Gbit or is it 10 or 20 or 40. What's the voltages, does it support PD 2.0 oh wait is it 3.0 or 3.1?
To be fair, it's been a number of years since I've tried to purchase cables, so perhaps just grabbing the Anker result at the top will net you most of these features. I just remember having to dig and not getting clear answers one way or another which is the spirit of my question.
in practice, in my daily life, all USB C cables work the same. a couple years ago i got one bundled with a device that didn't support some feature, and so i put it in the garbage. problem solved. since then, all my cables work all the time in whatever device i plug them into.
I haven't heard of a phone coming with a charge-only cable. Especially because that cable is usually used for syncing to a computer (iOS)/transferring data from an old phone (Android).
Unless an included cable came with a hard disk, monitor or eGPU, you can be reasonably sure it is USB 2 speeds. If it didn’t ship with a computer either, it is probably 30W max.
Finding a truly power-only USB C cable is difficult but not impossible. It's a special order.
Yes it is.
The spec could have been written such that different capabilities were reflected with different physical characteristics. That is exactly what standards exist to do.
Even if we pretend spec writers wouldn't ever have predicted the proliferation of crappy cables before publishing it, this is not a new problem with USB.
It is absolutely a choice made by the USB Implementers Forum.
And the cheap knockoff brands would have just violated the spec written that way like they violate the current spec.
This is why some things that have a C port won't charge on a C-C cable, but will on a A-C cable, because they don't actually talk to say they need power, but the A port will provide some power regardless, but a C port won't.
Power-only cables should be specified to have a different connector. Vastly different speeds should have a different connector. It should be physically impossible to stick the wrong kind of cable in.
Third parties will make out-of-spec cables no matter what. Some of the ways that Apple has addressed this is the "Made for" program which goes back even to the iPod. And the devices themselves detecting and showing an "Accessory may not be supported" error message, again going back to the iPod.
Edit: Lol, eternally fascinated by what causes some people to downvote on here
Nothing attracts downvotes like criticism of Apple. Their decisions are guided by the hand of the divine, so anyone that won’t follow is clearly an unworthy heathen.
An FYI, Lightning (released 2012) predates USB-C (1.0 specs published 2014) by a couple years. I'm unclear on how Apple was able to choose Lightning instead of USB-C given that timeline.
And wireless powerbanks for when going outside.
And no data option with them.
No kids with android. No wife, husband, whatever with android. No friends with android. Just that trusty ole iphone and airpods.
Plus no iPad, no laptops with USB-C chargers, no battery banks with USB-C inputs/outputs, no other ereaders with usb-c, no USB-C desk fan, no USB-C headphones...
Must be interesting.
> no USB-C desk fan
Are you, uh, powering a desk fan off your phone?
No, but I power it with a USB-C cable.
And with a phone having USB-C I can just use the same to power my phone when I want. Or power my phone from a powerbank without another cable specially made for this brand of phone.
He could just be single...
For example I know of https://shiftscreen.app which is like a fake desktop environment, and the Microsoft RDP client added it last week. I think Github Codespaces or any of those services could probably make a pretty usable experience. Just plugging in the phone in your usb-c monitor and get to coding, could be pretty sweet in some scenarios.
[0]: If you just mirror the screen you'll get black bars and the resolution won't be optimal etc, but apps can render directly to the external display customising the resolution for that monitor. Like how Photos.app behave, not showing the app chrome on the external display. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/windows_and_...
The iPad Pro is like that and their extended desktop is called Apple Studio Display. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102286
Every iPhone with USB C has DisplayPort alternate mode, it was not particularly hard to do because all these Apple Axx SoC have a DisplayPort output just in case it lands in an Apple TV later.
I hope your assumption is correct and they added this, including the mouse and keyboard capability.
Why not a USB-A to USB-C cable? The vast majority of existing chargers and computer/console/car ports are USB-A.
Seems like this is forcing people to buy USB-C chargers.
(Current) MacBooks don't have USB-A.
IDK why Apple supplies these tbh. They are crap, break easily and are far too short.
Invest in good 6ft kevlar braided cables with stainless steel pins. They'll last you years.
Speakers use Bluetooth or a lightning jack in a cradle.
Did you know that the microphone on the wired Apple earbuds don’t work on anything other than Apple devices? Well, one nice thing about the adaptors is that they allow you to use those earbuds on any computer with a USB-C port. I’ve avoided buying new headsets thanks to them.
USB audio adapters are barely even a thing, and the Lightning dongles often suck ass. I mean nearly-unusable sound quality, with weird hiss blasting because of some defective automatic gain function (for example; that was a Belkin).
Getting rid of the headphone jack was indefensible, but people putting up with it was even worse. Worst of all is cheerleading for that anti-customer, anti-quality move.
It doesn't fit a charger, but it should be able to use hubs now.
Qi/MagSafe helps with this
Oh, then you need to run another wire for the audio. Whereas with the ancient 30-pin iPod port, you got an audio line out AND power in. And the cool thing about that one is that it was a true line-out: The volume control didn't affect it, so you didn't have to dick around with the volume on two devices (the player and the car radio).
I bought the Lightning-to-30-pin adapter from Apple, and it duplicates all of that. You get the audio line out and power in. A cheap Y cable with USB for power and 1/8" plug for audio solves everything. As far as I know, it's the only solution that Apple has ever sold for a problem it deliberately created. And I doubt anyone, statistically, is even aware of it.
Neither of the other two vehicles in our household have Bluetooth at all, but they both have aux inputs. Bluetooth is a shitty workaround to intentional, anti-consumer stupidity. Just as almost every car (even cheap-O rental cars) integrated auxiliary audio inputs, Apple removed the audio output from their best-selling music player (the iPhone). And when gutless consumers allowed them to get away with it, everybody else followed suit and now we've regressed decades.
Twenty years ago I built an iPod dock into my car, into which I could plop my iPod (and later iPhone) and get power into the phone and audio directly into the stereo system. The phone charged, and delivered good audio quality. As a bonus, it did so without the need to dick around with two volume controls, since the 30-pin connector had a proper (fixed) line-level audio output that didn't vary with volume adjustments on the phone.
This is a level of convenience and performance that very few people enjoy now, and that is pathetic. Manufacturers have intentionally degraded so many of our consumer-electronics experiences with no payoff for us, and very questionable payoff for them.
Finally Apple's switched to USB-C so that we can cut down on cable waste!
No longer have to think about a separate cable for phone charging, can plug your iPhone in for some juice wherever.
That’s basically all that really matters.
They should have just included a usb-c adapter. Unlike PC peripherals, phone chargers get plugged/unplugged many times every day. It's very easy with android phones for the connector stick thingy on the phone to get loose or damaged.
This feels like a government sponsored enshitification.
Why can't people just get android and let apple be. Why do some people get to force consumer standards other consumers don't like. Android can run on any type id purpose built mobile device.
So long as they are not being anti-competitive, who cares if apple uses PoE to charge phones even lol. Leave my capitialism alone!
I'm sure it happens to some people but it can't be a big issue or I (as the "IT-guy") would have heard about it.
Currently my phone charges mostly with the second notebook charger I got from work or one of those cheapish Anker PD bricks.
I don't think people earnestly and legitimately think usb-c should be used for everything, and the cost of doing so is incredibly high (despite it being rather convenient if all your cables are $25 10gbps/240w 3-meter cables or whatever), it's just a convenient wedge for android fans to argue against iphone.
again, ask those same people what they think of the usb-c philosophy on macbooks and boy you're gonna get an earful. the common factor is always "this guy really hates apple" not "this guy really likes usb-c". they never do, when the chips are down.
I do have a (non-Apple) USB-C only laptop for work currently and... while I'd like a handful of other ports directly on there from time to time, it's kind of a marvel how much of a "dock" situation you get out of a single USB-C port and a cheap hub with PD passthrough. One plug and I have mouse, keyboard, monitor, plus more, and it works fine on Linux, the same exact thing can get plugged into a Mac if I occasionally use one and have all the same features... it's pretty great.
I do have to use USB-C to A adapters now and then, mostly for dealing with embedded systems work, but it's not a big deal - almost all of that happens at my desk anyway.
USB-C has a real pain point when it comes to cable compatibility. It's _not_ a panacea. But those are mostly problems I encounter on bigger computers, such as "oh, my 2TB external SSD seems really slow", and not problems I encounter on my phone. I use a Pixel phone for historical reasons and I love that I can use the same charger and cable to charge my phone and my MBP. My wife has an iPhone, an MBP, and an iPad Pro. Her phone is the only device that needs lightning still. Good riddance!
In Lightning the sturdy bit is the cable and the wobbly bit that grabs it is in the device.
In USB-C the sturdy bit is in the phone and the wobbly bit is in the cable.
It's the wobbly bit that breaks.
USB-c ports are less durable and cables more durable.
It’s about which end has thinner pins
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/12/apple-adds-usb-3-speeds-to...
Even as an Android user, I looooove those Airpods. They're so much more comfortable than the Android ones
Different colors and lossless audio, there’s the home run
The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max are the first smartphones with this protocol built-in.
So I guess if you trust apple, you can sorta trust these devices as their access to the outside world would be through an apple device.
The Apple TV 4k 3rd gen and the new HomePods can be Matter hubs (both have Thread hardware).
(I honestly don't know and was thinking Matter and Thread were somehow related and the were both good and I hope someone can confirm or explain what I am missing.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)
Matter is a network protocol which provides a standard API for how smart devices talk to home hubs. By making devices truly platform agnostic, it will end the dark "Best Viewed With Internet Explorer" direction which smart devices have been going down.
Apple co-invented/contributed to USB-C to address their own needs, and were the first vendor to shove it down on unsuspecting Macbook users, getting rid of each and every single other kind of port.
Meanwhile they kept Lightning relevant and useful for a very long time, which I think is a good thing for a "de facto" standard. Should they have switched to USB-C earlier? Probably yes. But now is better than never (even if it's somewhat forced).
"killer feature"... get off my lawn!
I may get accused of being an Apple fan for this, but this is why I dread USB-C. My lightening cables always charge and have data. Having to care about this is a pain.
Full table and charts are here: https://www.perfectrec.com/posts/iPhone15-price
But the take aways are: - iPhone 15 is cheapest base model since the OG iPhone in 2007 - 15 Plus is cheapest large iPhone ever - 15 Pro is cheapest pro ever (and $250 cheaper than the first Pro model, the iPhone X).
https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/02/apple-results-and-charts-...
Turns out different places have different costs of living.
Different places have different costs of living, and many consumer goods and services adjust to that in different markets. Apple is notorious for setting international price points insanely high relative relative to local price points.
[1]https://www.cars.co.za/newcars/Toyota/RAV4/
[2]https://cacellular.co.za/product/playstation-5-disc-version-...
In fact, someone proved that it is sometimes cheaper to fly to and back from Dubai and buy a pro model from there than buying it directly in India.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-pro...
>iCloud is very inexpensive relatively speaking. And even the smallest plans have a very large amount of storage.
No, 50GB is not "very large". It's far smaller than iPhone storage, which means people filling up their phones (usually with photos) can't use this plan.
>You can get a storage plan for $1/month for 200GB and 2TB for $10.
No, the 200GB plan is $3/per month not $1.
Also, iCloud is lacking a lot of features that other could services have, such as file versioning or any kind of ransomware protection, block-level sync, cross platform sharing features, and many others.
iCloud also happens to be the only cloud service that ever managed to lose some of my data.
The only thing iCloud has going for it is privileged integration with Apple devices.
Also note that photos/videos taken on new phones are much, much larger than on older phones, effectively meaning that you can store way fewer photos/videos than before.
(This is not a defence of Apple btw - it's unforgivable that they lock down the phone so you can only use their backup feature, and it doesn't actually work).
https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/12/new-icloud-big-pricey-storage...
I found myself reading your post, then was like, "Oh hey I know someone who came to this conclusion already... oh shit, they're linking to PerfectRec? Oh shit, I think it's Wally on HN!"
Hope you are well :)
The pricing of the 15 pro is pretty remarkable to me considering apple is paying for titanium and 3nm silicon this time around. It's also interesting how Apple has knocked down the price of the Pro and SE models every generation.
it is hard to buck the S-curve : https://www.open.edu/openlearn/nature-environment/organisati...
only the outer trim is titanium, the frame is still aluminum
They basically eliminated the lower 128GB model.
Meanwhile, I may have had to replace cables for my older iPhone, but those cables are still solidly in place when I insert them.
I find that a plastic flossing pick works really well. (I'd be hesitant to use anything metal like a bobby pin.)
With a plastic toothpick I scraped the inside corners. At first nothing came out, but after a few scrapes multiple dust balls emerged. Honestly a surprising amount
I plugged it in, "that snap feeling again..." charging sound
Why is that surprising? Don’t you keep your phone in your pocket?
Meanwhile, dirt and sand can get into the new USB-C cables on both sides now, and the tube design is less resilient to being stepped on or rolled over.
I will say, it’s nice letting my phone stand also charge it… so I’m also kinda a fan.
This is a surprisingly tough issue for me.
The occasions I can remember USB-C breaking are on cables that are from no-name brands.
That said, at least it's easier to clean the ports on a Lightning cable.
And no, it's not dust/lint in there.
Apple needs to make phones in big quantities for their economies of scale to function, but the market for small phones is small enough that it only makes sense to produce one every few years. (source: one of their yearly reports, IIRC)
This video makes a great point about small phones at scale that changed my mind about demanding small phones from large companies
I have read books on this thing, because, guess what, you can change font size on any reader and actually hold it for hours without your arm falling off.
Have cracked every phone so far even with a case. But if you drop the mini, the low weight works in your favor.
Screen is too small? Why not get a second one? I just airplayed the US Open from my mini to my Samsung TV.
I have no idea why Apple does not continue to make the best iPhone, but I‘ll keep this one for as long as I get updates.
Apple once tried to work around this with the iPad mini by simply not offering that model with the lowest storage, so you HAD to pay their "storage upgrade tax" if you wanted a mini at all.
I could imagine companies issuing iPhones with MDM and corporate credentials preconfigured. As a developer, that would be a pretty cool workflow.
I already ssh into a remote box to get faster development performance (even from my M1) - a powerful mobile device that could be used as a thin client would be crazy cool.
We already have thin client solutions, and virtual machines, and remote development and, and, and...
Slack, Chrome/Firefox, Miro, Zoom - it's all there.
That will never happen. iPadOS though... You never know.
Companies seem to prefer thin client solutions where the employees simply connect to the office workstations. That way, they don't have to provide expensive light and powerful computers, anything that can connect to the internet and stream the image of the desktop does the job and they don't have to deal with the security implications of having to manage a device which is outside of the company network.
Sure, the iPhone can act as the think client but you still need to provide the screen, keyboard and mouse so maybe just slap a cheap computer to those and don't bother with providing company phone which would definitely be more expensive.
So the use case boils down to people that for some reason have access to a screen, keyboard and mouse in many places but don't have computers at these places so they provide their phones as computers. Alternatively, maybe people who would like to save money by having one computer for everything is also a target audience but AFAIK Apple doesn't go after people who want to save money.
Would be very nice to see if this works on the new iPhones. A thin client with decent security in your pocket with keyboard/mouse/display at both home and work seems like a very approachable computing setup.
Photo for reference: https://twitter.com/_______kim/status/1348736952330301440
That's the real trouble with the remote dev environment- invidual tools can work fine but nothing integrates as well as localhost
This is already happening with iPhones & iPads, the Dev tools just aren't anywhere close to being able to match macOS. I'm sort of surprised Apple hasn't at least ported Xcode to be able to run on iPadOS.
> The iPhone 15 lineup offers convenient new ways to charge… Both models use a USB‑C connector, a universally accepted standard for charging and transferring data
Only Apple can do selling like this. It’s clearly that marketing is at its heart or even in its DNA.
Only Apple can sell you a brand-new phone with last year’s chip and still convince you that you made a deal. I admit that the A16 is still at the top of the chips but you get the point.
Only Apple can bring something years old in the Android phones by making the iPhone supports the universal USB-C and keeps telling you about the benefits it brings to the table. Apparently, Apple was forced by the EU to bring USB-C otherwise, we might not live to see this happening. Anyway, I’m glad they did it.
1. You must have not realized that AMD does the same thing. They cover it up better because they rebadge it under a different sku, but it's still "last year's" microarchiecture and lithography process
2. Reusing last year's chip as a lower end model makes a lot of sense. For one, you don't have to design separate chips for mid/high end. As long as it performs well, who cares when it's from? I'd much rather have a 2 year old iphone CPU than next year's midrange snapdragon, for instance.
Marginal improvement presented as huge leap forward. If only words had to mean something
> with a gorgeous new design featuring a durable, color-infused back glass
Didn't the iPhone 2 have a back glass? What's durable about a back glass, aluminium doesn't break.
Its crazy that people have accepted glass as a "premium" material. It's probably about the worst possible choice.
with carpet you could drop it from the ceiling and it would be fine
I like my phones to feel rubbery. It makes them far easier to use with one hand as well.
They also all have the same script writer, and they all *emphasize* *words* in the *same* *powerful* *exciting* *way*.
I'm old enough to remember that Apple presentations, while being clearly marketing exercises, used to be a lot more organic and flowing.
Remember Jobs ordering 4000 Latte to-go from Starbucks?
Like most years, the iphone is iterative. The iphone 15 is better than 14. This is good.
14 was pretty neat with SOS. What was the last "big" update to an iphone, that really shifted the market? Face-ID? removing the front button?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/30/sajid-javid...
Of course, connoisseurs of the historical documentary series “Blackadder” know that this has a tradition going back to Regency times.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-41521671
It was later discovered that her work was fraudulent and her coauthor walked back the claims.
Yearly upgrades of consumer electronics is a pretty non-sustainable idea. Imagine if every year everybody tossed their television, monitor, computer, phone, tablet, headphones, speakers and all their other smart devices into a landfill and bought new ones. Now realize this actually happens with phones in some cases and batteries in almost all cases.
At the end of the day despite what the Lineage OS flashers will insist, lay-people want updated features. Give them updated features for their old phones and they will keep them longer. Keeping them longer is the most you can do when throwaway tech is the norm.
If you need empirical evidence, 5 seconds looking at any market for used phones reflects that.
They also scrap a whole bunch of them too[1]. While undoubtedly many of the shredded devices are beyond repair, many of the devices destroyed in the video have no obvious physical damage.
I don't think they release any numbers on the amount of traded in devices that are refurbished and destroyed.
> I for one don't understand how sustainability and a yearly release schedule can go hand in hand
The sustainability report is more for green washing and a thinly veiled deceptive tactic to hide their lust for greed
> Why isn’t it a 2 or 3+ year release cycle?
again, adjust your perspective. The point is to push hardware sales and pump the quarterly numbers. Making the phones easily repairable means significant decrease in NEW phone sales which generate the $$$. Let’s be honest, Apple C-level execs don’t give a fuck about the environment, human rights, and any of that. It’s all a show.
> Yearly upgrades of consumer electronics is a pretty non-sustainable idea
Apple C-level execs know this. Apple marketing division knows this. Consumers know this. Yet people continue to buy their greenwashing campaign every year and consumers are convinced it’s okay. Oh it’s “carbon neutral” now. Oh Apple installs solar panels at their shitty office, “I am buying into a green company guyzzz!!! save the planet one iPhone at a time”
Support right to repair. Support government regulations. Do not expect these private companies to “do the right thing”
So what's actually happening is that the yearly iPhone rush is only a small fraction of the install base upgrading. Sure, there are a few uber enthusiasts that may upgrade every year, but those are a minority, and it's not like those phones go direct to landfills - they're resold. And since there are more opportunities to upgrade, fewer are attempting to upgrade simultaneously, straining supply chains and making Apple's income fluctuate more heavily.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-smartphon... [1]: https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/18/poll-how-often-do-you-upgrade...
The annual release cycle doesn't force people's hands. You can have a look to see if there's anything compelling this year and if not, just put off your purchase for another year. No big deal.
If the choice was between 3 and 6 years, most people would probably get a new phone almost automatically after 3 years rather than facing the prospect of sticking it out with a very obsolete phone.
A two year cycle would probably have the same effect, only less pronounced.
Also, I think less frequent releases would come with a far bigger marketing push and some actual innovation. This year it's "A16 Bionic for powerful, proven performance".
There's no need to upgrade yearly. They can release whenever they want, but I'm only upgrading every few years at most.
All USB-C cables must support USB 2.0 480 Mbps data transfer, at minimum. There’s no such thing as a USB-C cable that doesn’t support data.
To be clear, “juice jacking” is not a thing anymore, but people are still foolishly worried about it so there’s a market.
https://www.amazon.com/PortaPow-NA-USB-C-Data-Blocker/dp/B08...
Generally speaking any documented cases of juice jacking happening are just red teams doing PoCs.
It's too esoteric & expensive to be viable at any scale, but it's definitely functional.
When I say unsubstantiated rumor, this is what I’m talking about.
I'm aware. As I said above:
> any documented cases of juice jacking happening are [...] PoCs
You mentioned "code execution bugs" - what is that exactly to you? I presume you don't count HID emulation, so I'd be interested in what exactly does count.
They didn’t get anything unexpected to happen on the device. You really should read the paper, it’s a masterclass in making nothing sound like something.
It’s a favorite boogeyman of the “nation state actors are under your bed” crowd. Which is stupid because they all recommend avoiding public charging and would they be doing that if they were siting on high-quality exploits?
There’s a reason NSO doesn’t target USB, and it’s not because they enjoy creating VMs in the image decoder.
The point is it isn't viable at any scale - nation states advise avoiding public charging because employees of companies they subcontract have been individually targetted. They're not going to be doing any indiscriminate mass exploitation of the general public with it though.
You’re thinking of BadUSB or OMGCable.
1) which is a totally different attack 2) not especially applicable to smartphones 3) very much a thing that happens in real life (I have responded to incidents where one was used)
Lastly, there are plenty of CVEs issued for “feature abuse”, that’s a meaningless distinction.
I believe at least the CC connection needs to be intact for a conformant power adapter or device to even output any voltage for charging for a C-to-C cable.
It might be possible to omit the D+ and D- wires, but that disqualifies many legacy charging protocols as well.
* Data (this one is fairly obvious) * Power (since the CC wire in the cable is missing, and a compliant USB-C power source will refuse to output power unless the CC wire is terminated on the other end which signals what type of device it is)
You'd need at _least_ the CC wire as well.
if you can't walk into the store and pick up a usb-c cable (because we've agreed that cable sold at the checkout counter isn't a real usb-c cable) then why does this standard matter?
Same thing with the sideloading, it's not enough that android lets you do it, apple's business model centered around the iphone as a secure endpoint has to be completely outlawed.
kinda seems the android idea just isn't resilient enough to stand on its own in the market without government intervention to literally outlaw competition with it. given how obtuse and anti-consumer the USB-IF body tends to be, this probably won't end well in the long run.
and this isn't even going into the e-waste problems resulting from the android software lifecycle or the lack of OEM support lifecycle for parts availability, etc - all of which are simply swept under the rug in the headlong rush to coronate a market winner by government fiat.
it's easy to see that with the lack of concern over e-waste, and the lack of concern over sideloading in other situations (like consoles) that this was never really about e-waste at all, it was just legislating a solution to the android vs iphone wars. And that's fundamentally disappointing - fanboy wars should not be the basis for governmental policy and regulation.
Standards and interop are good. If the "free market" refuses to align on that value I'm happy for another mechanism to force it to happen. Judging from this thread, I'm not alone in that.
Not everybody is libertarian here, many are pragmatic, and are not dogmatic when a regulation is good.
For example, we also don't lament how there are standards in power plugs, and we don't have to juggle with 20 competing power outlets from different companies in our own country for the benefit of the "free market", nor are naive enough to believe that the better one would just have "won". That's for "ideal over utility" libertarian types.
Or, like, you know...it's just a charging cable.
I remember Apple intentionally selling non-USB conforming cables for the keyboard on the early iMacs. There was a little notch in the USB cable which meant that it couldn't plug into a standard USB port. The urban legend at the time was that it also meant that they didn't have to include the USB logo on the cable, better matching Steve's aesthetic preferences.
I do have an Apple Thunderbolt cable which supports charging (of course), but it was a separate purchase. The Thunderbolt cable looks similar but is a bit thicker, and has the Thunderbolt logo printed on the connectors at each end.
USB A-C cables are entirely separate, there is no CC line, only a fixed always-on Vcc pin at 5V.
Just got a fourth (shorter, different from MacBooks) one with my new iPad, it has data too, which I just used yesterday to restore the encrypted local backup from my previous iPad and perform a new local backup. I bet the cable shipped with these new iPhones is the same as with the USB-C iPad ones.
Do you think USB-C will be around forever? Hint: it won’t. And then all those cables will go to waste.
At this stage it's genuinely hard to envision something replacing it - they're pulling 40gbit over this connector, running full pcie, displayport, etc. Most devices including these new phones are still using USB 2 speeds because it's good enough.
I'd wager that a large majority of iPhone owners already have USB-C cables from some other product. But even if there is a small increase in wasted cables for 2-3 years as people acquire new cables, it will easily be offset over the next 5-10 due to reuse across multiple products.
And if the phones are going in the landfill, the cables are a rounding error.
Is all this this really the best we can create? A shared port standard, a button, a yet-again better camera? Anything else? No new touch surfaces, haptics, sensors; no new hardware capabilities other than yet-again faster chip.
Software enhancements are magical, no argument. But this is the chance for Apple to show why their hardware is unique. Others play with form (fold! twist! spindle!) or maybe design, but Apple chose this time to make the big lead be the port they were forced to use.
I was disappointed. But perhaps my expectations are reality-distorted still.
The reality distortion field Apple projects is always impressive.
Apple is rapidly becoming low status as a critical mass of people catch on to their game.
Lower power 5g, variable refresh, much better camera, moving from 7nm to 3nm, new GPU designed so they finally don’t suck at gaming, AVI hardware decoder, USB C, better battery life, smaller notch, etc.
They’ve hit a lot of my upgrade points with this phone.
Oh and RIP 13 Mini, you'll be my phone until I can't use it anymore I suppose.
The main downside instead of buying a lightning cable that always work we now have to decipher the 10 minor variations of USB-C's various speeds/power now with zero consistency in naming schemes or amazon titles.
Also from other commenters say Apple implemented USB 2.0, so you don't have to care about type of USB-C cable you're buying - these are for advanced features which as it seems are not present in iPhone 15.
I wish I had been warned so I could have grabbed one before it was gone.
Can't buy an unlocked phone from a carrier. Only other authorized resellers either don't sell phones (B&H, Adorama, Staples), have a limited selection which is in-store only (Target, Walmart), which leaves only Best Buy and right now I see everything on backorder. Now that Apple isn't taking new orders there's a good chance those will be cancelled.
And then there's the roulette wheel of buying from Amazon or Newegg where you might get a refurbished phone advertised as "new" if it isn't a literal brick in a box.
Still comes down to my fault for being slow to act. I said I wished for a warning but you know what they say about wishes.
(For context of how slow I am, I'd be upgrading from a SE (2016))
I wonder if they had a lot of 13 Pro purchases after they discounted it last year, which they felt could have been 14 Pro purchases.
Just like with some car manufacturers, if you want e.g. increased safety or radar cruise control, you also need $10k of leather seats and sunroofs; by removing previous Pro models, Apple basically adds a massive price premium to the zoom lens.
As this is honestly the only thing I would need from a new phone, my wife and I stay on our iPhone XR year after year. I just can't pay $1500CAD merely to get more optical zoom than my existing phone :-/
Though to put this in a realistic context, I am curious what percentage of iPhones have ever, over their usage lifespan, made a data connection over USB. I suspect that percentage is low single-digit percentages, and -- again speculating -- I would wager they are almost always by users with the pro models.
Is it lame that it's USB 2.0? Yes. Will it matter at all for the overwhelming majority of users? Not in the slightest.
First year, I tried to transfer data via USB.
After I accepted that Apple hates me personally and does not want me to transfer any of my voice memos, photos, or videos, or documents, or files via USB (I don't have a macbook), you are indeed correct and I'm one of those people who does not make a data connection via USB to my iPhone. But while stat is true, as with all such stats, devil is in the details :).
Actually, you're exactly the person they love. Just enough annoyance to consider a macbook and iCloud.
Airdrop works well for sharing files to other people's iOS devices, but I'd argue SMB is actually better for my use case. Airdrop sends files to a Mac's Downloads folder. SMB transferred files go exactly where I want them on the first try. The difference is just a couple extra taps in the 'Share' modal.
Though I must admit this isn't a solution for everyone. I doubt many iPhone users have a NAS stood up at home and would be happy to spend money on the 'simpler' solution of purchasing turnkey products and services from Apple.
The exception to this -- and there are exceptions -- tend to be "pro" users. If you're actually using the iPhone for video production in any way, USB 2.0 is a brutal limitation, and has long been a noted annoyance when you're transferring massive video files. Lucky for those people they'll be Pro buyers and will enjoy USB 3 (and maybe WiFi 6E? Not sure if this was delivered).
THIS is a trick question.
And the raspberry pi has USB 3.0 for god's sake! It's not a matter of a dedicated processor block on the chip.
<english is a second language to me, this is intended as humourous, not aggressive>
However the lack of USB 3 IO on the existing chip from last year is a very real limitation. The Raspberry Pi 4 supports USB 3 via a separate host controller (the VL805) communicated with over PCI-e, given that the core SoC doesn't have the IO blocks...basically the same deal. That VL805 by itself is almost the size of the A16. Now of course Apple could make a USB 3 host controller dramatically smaller, but then they'd have a new SoC.
Yes it is. It’s just rare for any modern SoC to leave out an XHCI controller, which the Pi and countless others have in their SoC. Apple was an outlier
For that matter, neither does the BCM2711 on the RPi4. It leans on an external chip -- almost as large as it -- for USB 3.0 functionality.
It's actually a security vulnerability to do so, I'm very cautious to never click trust and I wish there was a setting to disable USB (data) entirely.
When that dialog pops up which asks if you want to "trust" the connected device, saying yes creates a token which is exchanged between the phone and the host and stored on the host. That token has special privileged with iOS and can exfiltrate some data from the phone without user interaction (this has become more and more minimal over the years, with the original iPhone as I recall it could literally take a full backup like from iTunes -- and there wasn't even a prompt on the phone to allow that). That token can also be exfiltrated from your computer and inserted into special boxes made by companies like NSO which have in the past utilize proprietary exploits to basically privilege escalate that minimal access and exfiltrate data from locked iPhones.
I sound like a conspiracy theorist and I should probably just delete this.
Edit: this is incorrect, iPhone 15 starts at $799 for all.
But if you check 14/13/SE, then if you do not chose Verizon, the price is $30 higher. I bought a 13 mini yesterday morning, which is when I experienced the extra $30, and I assumed it applies to all the iPhones.
Apparently, current year iPhones are excluded from the $30 surcharge for non Verizon subscribers.
Also, all iPhones sold on apple.com are unlocked, even the $799 ones. Only exception is if you buy with an ATT subsidized contract.
I also found it very interesting that their pics of this feature were with Davinci Resolve on the screen and not Final cut Pro - I guess when it comes to colour, there's no better tool.
Definitely ahead of its time in certain UI concepts, definitely didn't get the attention it deserved to iron out some big defects!
It might be because they code very inefficiently, and they might also be doing a ton of crypto and anti-hacking calculations in background, but these games are surprisingly taxing for the phone they're running on.
AFAIK developing countries are dominating mobile gaming for a simple reason that they cannot afford PS/Xbone/PC. Ergo no iPhone for them to begin with.
If your eyes hurt then switch to literally any other apple device, Apple TV, Mac, iPad, iPhone… they all have access to Apple Arcade. When cloud gaming streams asset objects and not raw video, then it’d be a contender. As of now, it’s too expensive and is losing to mobile games
But, if you are referring specifically to the new GPU with accelerated raytracing, I want to add something more.. Remember that for many years now, every innovation that Apple has produced has been secretly developing towards AR!
For this reason it makes perfect sense.. Raytracing is SUPER important for the kind of rendering needed to make AR/VR look realistic
This was one of the most lackluster Apple launches in recent memory. I long for the day when Apple actually innovated on this product line. Now they're simply treading water and only making good changes when forced to (EU requiring USB-C).
I will give credit where it is due for Apple -- the M2 MacBook Air is phenomenal, even as a software engineering platform. The form factor is fantastic, the weight is awesomely light, and it's a true joy to use. Sadly, innovation on macOS is about as bad as the iPhone, but I suppose I'm more okay with that because being my workhorse machine, I want predictable stability more than I want interesting features.
Edit>> I love how people are asking "what are you doing with data transfer anyway?" Such deflection of the principle of the issue, but keep on trying as if any answer I'd give would satisfy the question. I adore Apple products, I don't adore a clear stab at yet more greed from the company that has had the top market cap for years now. I'm intelligent enough to see this for what it is, and not simply dismiss corporate greed because some people may not use the device the same way as others. Putting USB3.2 in these phones is possible. Putting Thunderbolt in these phones is possible, though that comes with the Intel complication. The tech exists and has for many years now. They chose not to bother on the lower end phones so they could create yet more divergence between the product lines trying to create FOMO for people so they'll buy the higher end phone.
The point is that the technology now is far past USB 2 (and has been for some time despite Apple's persistence on using Lightning with such slower speeds) and the only reason they have for not putting USB 3 in the 15s (non-Pro) is greed. They were forced by the EU to convert to USB-C, so it looks to me as if they did the absolute minimal amount of work and effort to be any more consumer-friendly than they have to be.
They are reusing the SoC of the 14 pro in the 15 (as they always do), which doesn't support USB 3. On the 15 pro they have support for USB 3, and you can bet it will propagate down the iPhone line next year.
I'd rather the up-front greed that may force me to pay for a Pro model rather than the ongoing & increasing greed.
It was especially bad when they added prores without a way to offload footage at a reasonable speed.
And there probably is an element of spite where they don't want the upgrade to USB 3 to come too directly aligned with the USB C switch.
Though recently simple things as copying files have been a challenge.
I don’t do it frequently, but when I do I want it to take as short a time as possible.
If you wait 2-3 years between phones, you get something that's more significantly better. I've seen tons of comments here and elsewhere saying the 15 isn't that compelling compared with the 14. Is it supposed to be? Updating your phone every year isn't that common IRL. This is more compelling for people coming from iPhone 12/13 or older.
Exactly. It seems like a lot of people don't realize this. We will never get that insane rate of innovation in smartphones again. These small incremental updates are what we are getting for the rest of our lives. What innovation we brought in a year, will now take 10 years because smartphones have matured and unless there is a major paradigm shift, this is more or less the final version of smartphones.
The entire computer and internet industry has been maturing too. We are getting to the point where the only significant increases in processing power are coming from spending more on the silicon. Internet companies have secured their markets and it hasn't changed much in the past 5-10 years.
If you want further crazy levels of innovation, it's time to look elsewhere. Computers have had their time. Now it's time for the next big thing. Maybe that's AI, quantum computers, gene editing, or nuclear fusion. Hell I doubt it, but after some years maybe cryptocurrency will have a breakthrough and we'll go rushing back to it. This is a story as old as the wheel.
IMO, taking a look back and appreciating the sum of incremental improvements is something we should do much more of frequently in all areas of society and life.
There was a time when performance would double every couple of years, but now we see around 10% performance gains over the same amount of time. Nothing to scoff at, but not enough to drive as crazy innovation as was previously commonplace.
I wonder where the market will go after we've exhausted lithography.
No, its a smaller rectangle around fewer pixels, which when shown the same size, looks zoomed in.
DX sensors are not "longer reach" than FX sensors with the same glass, they are cropped.
Couldn't tell from the pitch if that's what Apple meant, but it sure seemed like they meant it's cropped, not zoomed.
It isn’t compelling compared to anything after the 11, and they should be aiming higher.
* Twice as bright screen
* Dynamic Island
* Smaller bezel
* Contoured edge
* New better plastic back
* Big camera improvements
- 48MP main camera vs. 24MP
- Faster focus
- Much better telephoto
- Improved portrait mode
* Better color
* Better low-light performance
* No shutter lag
* Turn on portrait mode after the fact
- Smart HDR for better lighting
* Live voicemail transcription
* Longer battery life?
* Satellite emergency / roadside assistanceNo comment on whether the 13->15 jump was big enough to be worthwhile, just that I think that’d be more comparable than the 14->15 jump.
I think it's a legitimate question from people trying to understand the use case -- I haven't done a USB data transfer with my phone in years. I wouldn't want to pay even $5 more to get faster cabled data transfer.
I can't wait to see phones becoming a place for _useful_ AI use cases — with the privacy improvements of on-device computation.
I'm glad they're taking risks with the Vision Pro, but it feels like the phone has become a highly conservative platform.
Maybe this is just the reality of having a product that sells as many units as the iPhone does every single year.
I really wish Apple would try a different design aesthetic, such as a move to something warmer and friendlier than the last 20+ years.
There are other phone vendors, but their innovation within the last 5 years also peaks at "higher screen refresh rate" or "in-screen fingerprint reader" (which didn't solve any use case that a backside fingerprint reader couldn't also manage.)
Where new innovation will occur is with watches and VR headsets.
Large jumps in design language don't happen out of nowhere. Design is an iterative process that more often than not is limited by what technology can offer. Not to mention cultural acceptance.
Phones will remain phones until technological progress makes it economical to explore the more esoteric design spaces you're thinking of.
It takes great photos. I never use the port. Dynamic Island is an Emperor's new clothes marketing scam where they've just moved the bezel even more in the way than it was and managed to convince people it's a good thing.
I’ll probably upgrade next year though not this one. Expecting major improvements and new features every year is odd to me.
These incremental gains add up over the 3-4 years that I feel is a reasonable minimum phone life.
I think that has to do with Apple's own presentation/marketing. They make the announcement into a big thing.
Product launches are always a lot of theatrics regardless of the company.
I don’t think anyone actually takes them any more seriously than a mcdonalds ad implying eating their hamburger will make one more like the cool sports star being paid a million to hold the hamburger.
But just my perspective on it, I will have to replace all my lightning cables with usb-c, and the usb-c ecosystem seems like a nightmare to me from what I have seen.
This would be my first usb-c device.
But it is better to finally make the jump. I've never been unhappy with Lightning, but almost everything else I own has now switched to USB-C.
And he isn't really rough or abusive with these cables either.
Where as I still have MicroUSB cables from 10 or 12yrs ago that still look and work like new.
As many people can vouch for: lighting cables can easily work for many many years without any trouble whatsoever.
What I don’t do is hold them under tension for long periods, or use them stretched taught then bent 90° right next to the connector. My wife and kids ruin cables in a few months, and that’s how they do it. I didn’t get what people were talking about with apple cables being fragile, until I saw that.
I developed my habit because the same behavior is bad on ports, too. I’d developed an unconscious avoidance to doing those things before I ever owned an Apple device, or had one at work. So my Apple cables last forever unless my wife or kids get ahold of them.
Now I just use a usb-c cable with a 90 degree bend built in.
Up until a few years back when I noticed my replacement cord for yet another bad Apple cable felt different. Haven't had any issues with them after that. I assume they changed the manufacturing process.
The most frequent tendency I notice among people who have their cables fray is they use their phones while charging, but if you do certain things on your phone like long gaming sessions, you are almost forced to use your phone while it charges. So blaming the user feels a little bit like "you're holding it wrong" to me.
Where I did notice a difference between USB-C and lightning is that the lightning PORT seemed more durable than USB-C ports. I own multiple phones with flaky USB-C ports, whereas lighting ports seem much more durable.
I've seen this happen for Apple MagSafe, Lightning, and I believe even USB-C.
I noticed (I don't have one) the new Magsafe ones for the current MacBooks have changed to a braided fabric looking coating/sleeve instead.
When I was doing Android phones, I was going through a new Micro USB cable about every month or two. Never long enough to fray the cable itself, it was always the connector flaking out and refusing to make a good enough connection to charge reliably.
Good riddance to Micro USB.
Flimsy cables are flimsy cables and they will break and fray. USB-C, Lightning, whatever.
The first-party Lightning cables from Apple have always been pretty flimsy so if Lightning cables have a bad rep in general, that's probably why. That's Apple's fault but not anything specific to Lightning.
I've had a lot of Anker Lightning cables and they're about as bulletproof as a cable can possibly be.
This is why I don't think Apple's electronic waste argument makes much sense. All devices I've bought in the last 5 years have been USB-C, while iPhone users were stuck on Lightning. If Apple had switched back then all those users would've been buying 5 years worth of cables that work with everything, rather than cables that work for only a few devices from a single manufacturer.
Although I haven't really had a Lightning port fail on me yet, having the component more likely to eventually break in the cable rather than the device makes a lot of sense to me.
Look closely at the lightning cables in your house, calling it now at least one of them has a burnt pin (4th pin from the left most likely)
Compared to lighting it only has advantages, faster charging, more universal.
It's only a nightmare because you can carry almost anything over USB C incl. DisplayPort etc. which is not always clear if it's supported or not
It also supports HDMI but that's used with an adapter anyway, so it's not a consideration if it works for a user.
There's an HDMI "alt mode", but almost no device uses that directly; most USB-C-to-HDMI adapters and cables are accordingly really combined USB-C to DisplayPort and DisplayPort to HDMI converters and translate one protocol to the other at the electrical and logical level.
In the next few years consumers will start getting laptops that need 60W, but most cables can do that now, and it won't be common for a few years now(Phones still had microUSB when I bought my laptop, many people have even older ones).
At my desk I have a laptop, keyboard, and mouse which typically all typically get charged off a single thunderbolt 4 cable. You can have anything from games controllers to bicycle lights to remote controls sharing a single charger. No need to fuss with adapters, or having a rats nest of different cables, or charge-only cables with microusb/usb-c/lightning at the end. C to C cables are also very nice since they allow phones and usb-c only laptops to charge any other USB-C device, and you can't accidentally flip them around the wrong way.
The technology itself is great. It's the flawed implementations, the lack of standards enforcement, the confusing labelling of different types of cables, and the very gradual and slow death of lightning/micro-usb/USB-A that's really holds things back. Once you figure out what you need to buy, and finish buying the appropriate products that you need, it is nice.
People underestimate just how stable lightning cables are. After 11 years they have two types of certified cables in terms of data and charging capabilities, and you can tell them apart by whether the other end is USB-A or USB-C
in practice there are lots of usb-c cables that don't do data, which all lightning cables do. they're just not officially certified ones. which means they're not "real" usb-c cables.
again, the problem is it turns out in practice virtually nobody is using "real" usb-c cables, and if you want to stand on the formal definition, then we can formally say the standard has no real market penetration and can reasonably be disregarded until it catches traction.
if you can walk into a bodega and be assured that the lightning cable sitting on the shelf is going to be a certified and approved cable with data transfer, and the usb-c cable probably won't, then that's kinda all that really matters.
(and thus, we can see why certification programs like lightning exist. the $2 lightning cable on the bodega counter probably has better capabilities than the $5 usb-c cable on the counter because of the certification process.)
However, I believe this prevents negotiation for power delivery. Even if not, you need the CEC pins for the cable to function and that is a data channel as well (there are firmware update specs over CEC)
I have no idea what fraction of the USB-C cables are certified, but they're not broken. They have the wires because people want the wires. For such a basic feature, this is more effective than certification.
This is not true at all.
I've bought lightning cables at the dollar store that are single-sided (one side has "UPSIDE" written on it, you can't flip it over), power only
edit: I buy a lot of cheap USB gadgets (fans, flashlights etc) so I checked my cables. Not one of my USB-C to C cables are missing data. Plenty of USB-A to C cables are, though. So as long as you avoid USB-A you may be fine.
Currently:
- 70% of people have been buying the absolute cheapest lightning conforming cable they could find on amazon. They buy them in 3 packs, use them until they inevitably catch fire or fray within a few months and then throw them out and use the next one.
- 25% of people buy the cheapest lightning cable they can find on amazon that is rated for MFI. They've been burned enough by the bad cable and are just savvy enough to know there is a made-for-iphone program of "approved" lightning cables that actually conform to standards
- 5% of people buy OEM first-party cables from Apple
...
Now you will see:
- 70% of people buying the absolute cheapest usb-c conforming cable they can find on amazon (which is not "really" usb-c but the plug fits so who cares). They will buy them in 3 packs, use them until they fray or catch fire and then throw it out and use the next one
- 20% of people will buy the cheapest certified usb-c cable they can find on amazon because they are just tech savvy enough to know there is a difference and that its worth finding a good one. But this cable will likely only be usb 2 speeds.
- 5% of people will buy a premium usb-c cable with usb 3 speeds for 10Gbs transfer because they actually use and care about it.
...
As you can see, on the low end nothing changes. Most people will still buy the absolute cheapest cable they can find and have no idea what they are buying or care that there is a difference. These people will still benefit from being able to use the same cable for everything because it fits in the hole and thats all they care or understand.
But at least now there are more options and power available to the tiny percent of the population that actually does care and understand the difference.
All in all, its only upsides. Everybody wins. The only real downside is throwing out whatever collection of lightning cables you might already have.
Remember that as cool as transfer speeds sound, almost nobody transfers stuff using a cable off their iPhone. 99% of people will airdrop a few photos off, download music from spotify/apple music, and stream or maybe download from netflix or disney plus for offline viewing. But really VERY VERY VERY few people are transferring using the cable. For the people that do, they are probably transferring huge video files they recorded off their device and they will know to get a good quality usb 3 compatible usb-c cable. But thats like 1 out of 100 people, if that.
If you don't need data transfer, there are reasons like cost and cable thickness/flexibility to get a charging-only cable.
Most people need very few cables over USB 2.0 speeds, and they typically don't need those to be very long.
Unfortunately, there are a bunch of non-conforming USB-C implementations (original Switch models, Raspberry Pis, and tons of other charging-only gadgets) such that it is not possible at any cost to standardize on a stack of USB-C cables with the same properties.
The annoying part is that cables still tend to not be labelled with their properties, it is challenging to determine if a device properly supports power delivery and cables rated > 30W, and there aren't a lot of tools to diagnose issues or cable capabilities.
For people who want to have e.g. 100W+ of power while feeding a signal to 4K60+ external monitors it's kind of a nightmare unless they know that "just use Thunderbolt 4" "trick".
So if you have say a 16" MacBook Pro, you need to get not only Thunderbolt 4 which is a rare spec, you want to ideally get ~85-140w PD not ~60w, AND you need to get an expensive dock that can split up the two HBR3 displayport channels instead of a regular MST Thunderbolt 4 dock.
Thankfully Apple has a solution to consumer confusion caused by all this. Buy a $1600 Apple studio display, connect it directly to your Mac, use the monitor itself as a dock, and everything will be compatible. Stay in the safe walled garden.
USB-C is a mess. Whoever decided to fix the annoying compatibility issues of USB mini/micro/blah blah by just solving the physical port problem should never be consulted on anything again.
I get that it would be cool. For the ipad i think it makes sense to do that, but your phone...? Let's get real. Fast charging over a standardized cable with 10gbs transfer speeds is gonna be just fine.
If you shoot videos longer than a few seconds on your iPhone, you will appreciate a way to get them off of your phone at a non-glacial pace.
For professionals shooting significant amounts of video, this is more than a convenience feature. Once your device's internal storage fills up with video, which does not take long at 4K60, now your "camera" is a paperweight until you can dump that footage.
Obviously, only a very small percentage of people are using their phones this way. But I think Apple really values that market.
But, with these phones, I can at least get rid of the dozens of Lightning cables I’ve accumulated. And only a few of my devices are still USB-A, so I imagine I’ll be all C soon enough (probably just in time for USB-D or something else).
[1]:https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/AppNotes/00001914B.pd...
And there are USB-C chargers (provided with Google phones and Belkin USB-C car chargers) that will charge the devices. So, I guess they're ignoring the lack of negotiation and just providing 5v? No idea.
So, consumers are left guessing what will work or won't. And carrying at least two chargers (one "dumb" and one "smart/PD").
I have a problem with them advertising it as "USB-C" and USB-IF doing nothing to stop this false advertising.
It's common for rechargeable lights to not support c-to-c cables and require a usb a to usb c cable.
This is largely what I'm talking about in the last paragraph of my post.
Worst case scenario, you get a cheap cable and you're stuck at the same charging speed and data speed as what lighting could do. It can only get better for you; lightning is an ancient port.
This is apparently by design, in order to address a security vulnerability: https://imazing.com/blog/ios-backup-passcode-prompt
But surely Apple could fix this more properly, however I guess they don't care to support people who make limited use of iCloud.
Bought a Motorola G6 in 2018 for €199. It takes "fantastic" photos, and came in a "stunning new" (!?) color of black(ish). It's pretty much indestructible, runs Firefox with uBlock Origin, and it's "better for the environment" because every year you don't buy a new phone, the environment is happy.
It also has USB-C, and a 3.5 jack.
It seems the only progress is the camera and the CPU, but for what more CPU speed? The camera?
We don’t have to limit it to people you know
People upgrade their phones about once every 2.5 years
https://www.refurb.me/blog/how-long-does-a-smartphone-last-r...
But, go figure, the sticker price is like 10-15% higher than on the Apple site.
They just hid the interest in the price.
Same, on Apple’s site: $699
IDK, maybe apple price-dropped today and T-Mobile hasn’t caught up, but that’s similar to what I’ve seen in the past when I’ve looked at buying through them.
But even that do they don’t value phone upgrades. When I see their ancient phones I sometimes remark they can get a phone with monthly terms and they just shrug and say the sad device with cracked screens and ancient cameras and crap display resolution and brightness is good enough for them. It baffles me, but most people just use their phone for texting, occasionally a map, and a crappy camera. Only in my tech friend circle do people keep up.
You can easily look up the average time between phone upgrades is between 2-3 years.
64% are living paycheck to paycheck, now whether they opt to get a new smartphone or not is not clear.
What is clear is the statistics you linked and I could find were polls of either people buying a new phone, which would be structurally biased towards people who are buying phones make frequently and are not buying used phones, or they were surveys of people with some relationship with a mobile or tech related site or product. These don’t seem like very unbiased surveys - but they do seem like sources apple or a phone maker would care about. “Of the people we care about in our marketing, they buy every 2-3 years.” I know in my family my wife’s family inherits our old phones and would ever show up in such a poll, nor do people buying off eBay, or even used from Amazon, etc.
Maybe a single mom working three jobs to raise their five children really does feel compelled to have the newest iPhones and puts her kids needs behind a high resolution screen, but I somehow believe she’s just not counted in market surveys of phone buyers.
Regardless the average isn’t 99%.
If given a choice between every single citation I could find on the internet and your anecdotes of what your family does, which one do you think is more reliable?
I’d not the median household income is 70k, which means half of all households make less than that. The median personal income is $40k.
Again, we aren’t getting remotely close to 99% of people are upgrading every 2-4 years.
On the entire internet every source cites 2-3 years but you choose not to believe it because it doesn’t support your worldview?
And in the US, even the MVNOs that are targeted toward lower income buyers subsidize phones where you get them for “free”.
But you’re telling me on the entire internet you can’t find one statistic that supports your claim?
It’s really not that hard to find statistics. It’s 2.5 - 3 years
https://www.refurb.me/blog/how-long-does-a-smartphone-last-r...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-2-year-mobile-phone-upgrade-c...
I know multiple people still using an iPhone X (2018), for whom cost is not an issue.
The main reason for the majority of the general population to upgrade is because the phone literally breaks (screen, stops charging, radio malfunctions, etc)
Plus, currently plenty of androids have 5-6 years of guaranteed security updates. To be honest I wouldnt ever want to use much older phones even if patched up to date, too clunky, making bad photos (I have kids so this is top priority), not up to most network standards and so on
I remember before I switched to iPhone I would wait and wait and wait and wait for the latest android and updates and a whole new version of android would roll out before I would even get the previous version.
For what is worth, I have a Galaxy Tab S6 from 2019 that is still getting security updates, although it wasn't updated to Android 13: https://doc.samsungmobile.com/SM-T865/ROM/doc.html
For reference, the latest version of iOS will run on 5 year old iPhones when it is released.
For operating system updates, Samsung pledged 4 years of updates for the flagships starting with S21.
The difference between Android versions isn't big. I also mentioned in another comment that on Android, to cope with phone makers not pushing for system updates, Google can update many system components via Google Play. And apps remain compatible. Being 2 versions behind the latest Android is OK.
But I agree, it's great how Apple supports devices for 6 years with major updates. It would also be possible for Android phones if SoC & phones manufacturer actually cared.
I also have a Pixel 5. It received Magic Eraser, which used to be a key feature of newer Pixels, as part of a regular Photos app update.
I'm still getting major updates too, but, tbh, they aren't that critical. Chrome, GMail, Maps, YouTube, Calendar, Messaging, the app store itself (including UI) and the core web browser will keep getting updates well beyond the end of life.
There really isn't a direct comparison here, but I wouldn't switch in either direction due to updates.
My S21 Ultra is in its 3rd year and regularly updated. Should get 5 years of updates, and I intend to keep it until then.
Also, the writing is on the wall that the EU will force phone makers to years of updates, changeable batteries and availability of spare parts.
It's also noteworthy that Google has the ability to update many system services via Google Play. The poor track record of updates from phone makers basically demanded it. In other words, an Android device that hasn't received any system updates in a year or two is still fairly usable.
https://doc.samsungmobile.com/sm-a705fn/sek/doc.html
Looking at this list of devices getting updates, it only lists A70s with "biannual" updates, so A70 may no longer be updated:
Ideally Google would mandate a minimum number of years for both feature and security updates that matches theirs of three and five, respectively. Having said that, these really are wasting assets thanks to storage wearing out, but that's true of all phones, regardless of manufacturer.
A complete reset solves it tho.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2020/10/08/sop...
In the article it explains how Google and the ransomers are doing a cat and mouse thing. If your phone is not keeping up, that could definitely be an issue.
I use LineageOS and it is true that I have to use Magisk to have banking app working. And I understand that this is not for everyone.
I just wanted to mention that there is a way to use older phone and have security updates longer than vendor provides it. And even longer than Apple.
I get the argument about binary blob updates. Security is never 100%. And it also shows another reason why binary blobs make things worse.
It may even receive system web browser updates, as those tend to go on for much longer than OS updates with Android.
With a little care, it is likely to be fine.
My iPad 5 got an iOS update last month-ish? And a security patch last week. All of my kids run iPhone 8.
Those two are the apps that survived the longest (Try getting any matrix client to work on it). Others broke sooner, most of them because the app developer has to enable TLS1.2 to be able to use it for HTTP APIs and many web servers disabled responding to older versions a while ago. Firefox (the one which allowed all extensions) still works. Great! But I can't message anyone anymore. On a phone.
TBH I put most of the blame here on app developers (supporting older stuff is not that hard) and some of it on the device manufacturers.
Not every iPhone is over $800.
$500 in 2019 is $597 now.
450 Euro in 2019 is 533 Euro now.
That's enough to buy an iPhone 13 and skip the SE model entirely.
- Most people change phones every 2 to 3 years.
- iPhone SE/mini accounts for less than 25% of the units sold.
If you manage to make do with the cheaper version of iPhones, ok. But your case (and mine) are outliers, and even in that case Apple's products are not better from an ethical/environmental/fair trade point of view.
I don't know where I am losing you...
> How can one justify paying 3x the cost if not just to continue keeping myself tied into Apple?
It's not rocket science. The experience you get using an iPhone vs a cheap Android for 5 years is not even close to comparable, and while you do pay a ridiculous premium for an iPhone, there are obvious reasons why someone would want to.
And this is coming from a long time Pixel user.
I hate to see that I am starting to sound like an activist, but I also hate to see how even the supposedly smarter-than-average people in tech lose all sense of perspective when they see shiny overpriced trinkets.
Why should we care if "the experience is not even close to comparable", if it is brought by a trillion dollar corporation who denies people even the most basic rights and fights as dirty as it can to keep its unfair advantages?
(And please notice that the above paragraph also applies to Google and Samsung, so please don't make it sound that I am arguing for team Android here)
It cost me about €600, and I also enjoy knowing that I've generated that much less e-waste compared to my prior Android life, where I had to discard phones every 2 or 3 years.
Second, I'd love to be proven wrong, but I can bet good money that if we look at a distribution of activated iphones per model, we will see that most users probably stay a lot less than 6-7 years.
Third, it's not about iPhone vs Android. It's the fact that we are discussing things like "getting security updates" when in fact we should be asking ourselves "why aren't we free to install whatever system we want on our own device?" I don't really care so much about the fact your phone cost 600 or 6000€, what bugs me to no end is that we are effectively paying trillion-dollar corporations to let them remove our freedoms.
and you don't have to pay 3x the cost if you don't want, buy last year's model refurbished.
I have the Pixel 5a, it was released in August 2021 and Google only guarantees support for that model up to August 2024, that is for both full OS updates and just security patches. As of the Pixel 6 series and after, you get 3 years of full OS updates, and 5 years of security patches (that's 2 extra years after full OS updates stop).
To compare, the iPhone 13 series was released in September 2021 and will continue to get support up to 7 years after its release (Sept 2028).
So far my Pixel 5a has been the best (reliability-wise) phone I've ever hard and it sucks to know that after August 2024, I'll be vulnerable to future security vulnerabilities.
Samsung offer only slightly better support by increasing the full OS support to 4 years instead of Google's 3 for the Pixel. Same 5 year for security patch. That's not enough for me to go back to Samsung and deal with their OS bloated with apps I can't uninstall (it's been a while, maybe it's better?)
sources:
https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705?hl=en
https://www.androidpolice.com/samsung-four-year-update-list-...
If it feels too slow, try disabling "Secure app spawning". It's a security improvement over Google's Android by GrapheneOS but increases app startup time. Especially on slower devices like the 4a.
In any case, I welcome USB-C to the iPhone world.
I have USB-C for virtually everything and have no interest in dealing with keeping a second set of cables for one device. It's an extra expense, headache, and environmental waste I don't want. The change to USB-C makes an iPhone a viable option for me. I look forward to a refreshed SE line with USB-C as well.
I'm not thrilled about all the cables and dongles/adapters eventually going to landfills, but believe the move will be better in the long-run. I wish Apple made the move earlier.
The point I was trying to make was that an android phone having USB-C isn't the most important factor for the person who posted. This is evidenced by the fact that they purchased the iPhone anyway even though USB-C options existed.
Should Apple have stuck with Lightning for an entire decade? No. But any switch away from Lightning was going to cause pain for customers already invested in the ecosystem, and there was a time when that ecosystem actually made the most sense.
Still work like a charm
This seems wrong. I am still on an iPhone Xs Max from 2018 and it still gets software updates. It looks like the last software update on the G6 was in 2020. The lack of even security patches limits the life of the phone for many people.
The primary reason I'll eventually need to upgrade is because of 5G support. Coverage is getting worse as 3G has been shutdown and all new towers are focusing on 5G. My battery life sucks now too, but that can solved easily.
Works perfectly, and I didn't really care when I smacked a ratchet into it and cracked the screen a month ago.
The problem with tech is nothing is ever "good enough." Sure, you could make a phone that is durable for 10 years... but someone will invent new battery chemistry, CPUs will get considerably more powerful/efficient, and Sony will come along with even better camera sensors.
So it's really not possible for that high-end "old" phone to keep up after a few years. That's true for most consumer tech, even if the pace is slowing down somewhat. An expensive LED TV from 2013 will not compare favorably with a good value mid-range one today.
We can either stop innovating, which is also bad for the environment (technology improvements allow for vast efficiency and energy-use improvements in a huge range of products), or we can make sure things have a lot of re-use value. That can be done through the used market with good repairability and software support, and by making sure phones can be recycled and also use a lot of recycled materials.
Maybe. (I'm not one of them, but ok.) But that doesn't have much to do with the environmental impact? It's still greener to keep phones longer, even if they don't get updates.
A Volkswagen is a better buy than a Porsche for most - pretty much a comparable market positioning
Have you ever had to reflash yours or anything like that?
I'll hang onto my 13 Mini for as long as I can, hopefully they will update the SE to basically be the new Mini.
If there are any Apple execs in this thread: please listen to your customers! We are screaming for a flagship mini!
Also, where exactly are the users gonna go? The smallest is probably one of those Samsung foldable ones. But you’re really underestimating how bad android ecosystem can be (this is coming from someone who’s been hardcore android fan until recently). Maybe I’m getting older, but I really like the part where a lot of things with apple just work.
Exactly. Apple can influence what their customers want to some degree, rather than listening. Only has to be better than Android.
A cleaner example is Bluetooth audio vs jack. iPhones had both forever, but BT wasn't popular. One day Apple coaxed everyone onto BT, probably realizing they can make a killing selling AirPods that way. Samsung thought maybe this would send a few customers their way, so they started advertising that they still have a jack, but nope.
The only issue I see with this argument is that it doesn't matter to Corp if a small minority really wants Thing, it only matters if selling Thing makes more money than not selling Thing.
At the scale Apple operates at, and the egregious margins on their products, I wouldn't be so sure it was a financial decision.
It's worth nothing that there are practical costs for a smaller phone: You can't fit as much battery into a smaller package, but people want to use a smaller phone the same way they'd use a larger phone.
The idea that nobody bought it isn't true. It sold under Apple's expectations, but if they set their expectations correctly and didn't cannibalize a large portion of potential buyers a few months before announcing it, I think it could work.
The real story here is that they don't have to make them because people will buy whatever is available. When my 13 mini is getting old, I'll buy a standard size phone because it's all I can do.
Then the XL or Pro Max or whatever (huge phablet) came out and I used that for a while. The added battery life is lovely.
I finally settled on the non-max Pro, because it is as large as you can go and still be operable with one hand. The Pro Max is a two-hands-always device. If I'm going to do that I might as well carry an iPad Mini.
I'm hoping that folding phones are here to save the day in a "the king is dead long live the king moment" as screens have become so big, they're now overflowing to being small again.
I suspect I'm not alone. I think the population of iPhone users is getting older.
The Zenfone 10 looks fantastic.
14Pro phone looks good at 240 fps. 14 had issues, assuming it will be the same this year
I’d really get a lot of use out of 4 or 6x.
I also wish they’d stop editing the pictures so much. It’s decided I should have gray hair even though I don’t in real life. Really strange.
Oh and it destroys sunset photos. I get completely different colors than I see with my eyes for sunsets.
This is consistent with all the rumors, which were all-in on "the biggest Pro is getting the new camera tech".
I have physical 10x zoom lens on my samsung. Its a massive advantage in almost any situation barring almost total darkness. I take of pictures where subjects are clearly visible and take most of the frame, compared to everybody else with phone who has tiny figures who go to smears when digitally zoomed. If for nothing else, i am not changing the brand, good pics of my kids are simply too valuable to us.
If Samsung can do it, I am sure Apple can do it even better. No clue why they dont.
It's funny because in contrast to the old perception of Android phones being fiddly and iPhones "just working", Google's camera software has been way more point and shoot since the original Pixel. Sure, it's also hyper-processed, but in my experience it provided a more reliably "good" result across a range of situations.
And whereas Pixel software updates just kept delivering better and better photos on the same hardware, I know with this 14 Pro I'm going to be stuck with this out of the box performance until I upgrade in several years.
End rant.
That alone makes the upgrade worth it for me since I'm planning on picking up the Vision Pro!
While I agree that holding up a phone in front of your face presents some degree of being disconnected from the action, I feel wearing a headset where one's entire view of the scene is a computed feed via cameras is totally disconnected.
So I do still agree that it wasn't a reasonable suggestion that people would be filming important life events while wearing their APV headset.
If you think it's reasonable that a person is going to be strapped into a headset at a child's birthday party, then that is indicative of what you believe would be socially normal or acceptable behaviour. I dare say other family members or guests won't see it that way.
In my opinion the idea of any person walking around with a headset on in social settings is not realistic.
There is a not subtle difference between picking up a phone and filming something versus living an event where the only visual stimulus one receives is a second hand video feed. The discussion here seems to be pinned to an idea that this is equivalent, I can say very confidently that it is not.
Side note: I don't live in a bubble, I'm pretty accustomed to watching the stage via other people's phone screens when I don't have a direct view. I also film when I have someone in mind to share it with. However the idea that people are filming to use the footage is largely wrong, they're excited and enjoying the moment and want to capture that somehow, so out comes the phone, they might show some of it to a friend later, or a social post, but largely it's unused and not looked back upon. This behaviour is not comparable to wearing a headset.
> In my opinion the idea of any person walking around with a headset on in social settings is not realistic.
which is precisely why apple is selling the concept of the curved front display, with high-res internal cameras to pass through an image of your face and eyes. if they can pull it off well, it should look like your normal face, so the appropriate social cues will be there.
This feature of the headset is so others can pop-in, or gauge when the user is unavailable (i.e. when the wearer's eyes are entirely occluded.) Which is how those features were largely demonstrated by Apple(sans one setting where everyone in a meeting was wearing one). While this makes accomodations for a person wearing a headset it doesn't "unwear" it and doesn't solve the issues around wearing a headset in public/social situations. There was significant umbrage taken to Google Glass (and still to Spectacles by Snap) and these both are relatively minor adornments in comparison. Even those wearing ordinary motorcycle helmets run into similar. It's not an old-fashioned thing, it's a human connection issue, some people don't even like speaking through protective glass shielding.
At this stage we are quite far down the rabbit hole from the original conjecture. There indeed seems to be a small number of respondents that feel singularly wearing a headset in public won't be irksome for others, or be too disconnected from reality - time will tell how this pans out. I feel there is already sufficient evidence, but a few aren't convinced.
Thus the feature from Apple to allow the recording of spatial video directly from an iPhone, without needing to adorn the AVP seems to be the pragmatic and realistic use case scenario.
There are a few fervent voices that don't see any issue at all, neither for themselves or others around them. They're perfectly entitled to share this view, this isn't a criticism of that - it's more an interesting display of what people see as normal or acceptable.
I sit on the other side of the fence. I pay respect to the fact that in our world there are people that get upset about a simple plastic protective barrier, or someone not taking off their motorcycle helmet, or those wearing any technology that films them such as Google Glass or Snap's Spectacles, and even laws about filming others, displays or media. We have more than enough dot points to know that wearing a headset like the Apple Vision Pro in such a social setting is going to be bothersome for others (and for most, the wearer as well).
Apple needed to demonstrate the feature and did so accordingly, but just because it's Apple doesn't mean it's now socially normal. It seems clear that the primary use case will be filming spatial video on an iPhone and then using/experiencing that later. Especially as this means multiple angles can be captured spatially without special equipment.
> The funny part is that unless something crazy happens very few of those videos ever get watched.
I do agree some percentage of people definitely just shoot long videos and take a million pictures that nobody looks at, but in my household we look at them all the time. But I'll only take like one or two photos and a short 10 second video of my kid going down a slide, not try and record the entire trip to the playground every time.
At good jazz or alt rock concerts people take their phone out to take a few videos and pictures and then enjoy the rest of the show. For the really good concerts they make you put a sticker on the camera of your phone.
And since the Photos app introduced the memories feature, where it creates montage videos of themes like "baby years" or "summer 2022", you don't even need to go back yourself.
We might be the unusual case, but we exist!
It needs to be like VR 360 video where you can look around to be worth it.
So basically you wouldn't need to put it on to watch them but you'd regularly already have it on, instead of, say, watching TV. VR googles for those videos aren't exactly a hard requirement either if you're on the go.
If it stops being a novelty like "see this amazing experience in VR" where you hype yourself up and put work on doing it just for that - sure - it's not very amazing. But when it comes normal and integrated into a computing platform you already use daily it's definitely a plus.
https://www.whathifi.com/news/new-godzilla-series-hints-vr-m...
This could be a big push towards making the metaverse more compelling.
What are the TikTok implications?
The USB-3 controller is in the A17 chip and not a separate component, considering the lead time for chip design and production it seems Apple had the transition in mind for quite a bit longer than the recent legislation changes in EU parliament.
As a timeline: the EU Parliament only proposed making USB-C mandatory in September 2021, and then only formally approved it in October 2022, prior to that it was just the EU's serving suggestion. Enforcement only begins on new product introductions from the latest October 2024, Apple release their Phones in September, meaning both the iPhone 15 and 16 could realistically still use lightning without infringement.
However now that Apple has introduced USB-C EU member states can safely fast track the law without affecting their economies (despite certain HN fantasies, forcing a major phone supplier out of the market for lolz is not good for a country.)
Also as the Pro's USB3 controller is in the A-series chip and not a separate component it stands that Apple had already planned the change over -before- the EU even tabled it as a mandatory requirement.
Sure you could say that they saw the writing on the wall, which is certainly a factor, but they could have just as easily switched the port without deeper integration into the device just to satisfy a legislative requirement. On the other hand one could equally say: Apple have been transitioning their entire lineup to the type C connector over several years and now would be an appropriate time to bring the phone into the fold.
The idea that Apple bent to the will of the EU is largely overblown, it was an obvious change and their hardware indicates that they've been planning this for a while.
I am not surprised that Apple have planned this for a while, because the EU have been pushing this for a while even before making USB-C mandatory. Previously it was only a recommendation for micro-USB, and Apple was practically the only manufacturer that didn't adopt it.
If it was such an obvious change, why did it take them 5+ years longer than other manufacturers?
Source: The European Parliament website.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220930IP...
> Do you have a source for "newly released"? Everything I can find talks about "new" only.
Respectfully the only place you need to be looking for this information is the EU parliament website.
> By the end of 2024, all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the EU will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C charging port.
That's not what's happened though - the USB3.0 controller is part of the A17Pro chip.
It's trivially debunked that this change is in response to EU enforcement merely by observing the timeline of EU legislation and elementary understanding of chip design and lead time/mass production.
This isn't suggesting that they didn't see the writing on the wall, but it's patently evident that the decision was made even before the EU considered making type C the mandatory connection standard.
As I said already, it's just as likely this is part of their phased transition into the type C connector.
Also these MFi arguments for lightning are nonsense, not only are the fees minimal, but they persist with type C.
The EU forcing Apple to switch to the type C connector is largely a HN fantasy. It was happening regardless.
Once the EU signaled they were going to mandate this, there was no reason to do it any sooner. When Apple changed from 30-pin, there was an uproar. “Now my iPod Alarm Clock doesn’t work with my new iPhone!”
Now gets it both ways: more sales, no blame. “The EU made us do it…”
You aren’t wrong about being able to make money and claim the high moral ground while doing so…
Otherwise, AirPods are 100x better than wired.
The DAC in the dongle I got with my iPad pro is noticeably worse than my pixel 5a.
The audio quality of airpods is still subpar compared to $70 wired headphones.
I listen a lot to classical music and airpods 2 still makes becken (two cymbals smashed together. Don't know the English name) sound like someone throwing a rock into a pool.
I lose several pairs of headphones every year. Headphones being smaller is not a feature for me.
I have one pair of BT headphones. They have about 90ms latency, which is borderline intolerable (but better than every airpod). I use them for podcasts.
I plug my phone into speakers all the time (at work. I am a musician). A 3.5mm jack makes that a non-thinking operation.
The latency on bluetooth is killer. I guess most people don't notice, but I notice. There's a irritating delay between every action, and when watching video the sound is noticeably behind.
There is often interference when in frequency-heavy zones. Busy pedestrian intersections, trains, using the microwave.
I switch between devices with regularity. My computer, my phone, my corporate phone. Keeping one set of headphones paired between multiple devices is a nightmare.
I don't like keeping bluetooth on. Why do I need to place yet one more source of power drain on my devices, and why do I need to enable yet another broadcasting signal from them?
Dollar-for-dollar, lower cost wired headphones are higher quality than wireless ones.
I am prone to losing headphones, having them be miniaturized and untethered is not a bonus. Heaven forbid they're not even bound together and are instead individual unconnected earbuds. I can count in the double digits the number of people I've seen before my very eyes lose one half of their earbuds, to say nothing of the number of people I've encountered who are just dealing with losing one of them from some prior event.
Bluetooth headphones are a product with value, but not to me. Not having a headphone jack felt, and continues to feel, like a heavy handed bitch slap straight to my face every single day.
They are $10 each. They can be attached to the end of your headphones and forgotten about.
Even worse: cheap usb c headphones all have shit DACs and will perform worse than cheap 3.5mm headphones.
I get the impression — admittedly having not watched the event — that Apple feel the need to work hard and drum up interest for this release.
I imagine they are or will start trickling "new" features. Be it USB3/4, Thunderbolt, WiFi 7 (or higher bandwidth light or UWB standards). Just because the other races aren't offering much besides better numbers.
Apart from incremental bumps there isn't anything you can add that will move the needle.
The next battle now moves onto AR/VR.
Happy to see USB-C on the iPhone (thanks EU) and no price hikes.
It’s good in many ways, but also hard to ignore just how obvious that effort is once you realise it’s there. That’s true for all presentations, including the dev talks at WWDC.
It is hard for me to push aside the impression that nowadays the speakers - regardless their background - are entirely chosen for optical reasons. My only favourite moment in a recent big presentation was the M1 chip part with Srouji. That guy is not made for the camera but man he lives hardware with every fibre of his soul.
Everything else is "politically correct" according to this segment.
Looks over to me.
It's like coke: "Why advertise Coke? Everyone drinks it."
I've never owned an iPhone, and mainly think of the phone I do have as at best a minor addition to my life, but put a battery-efficient modem in my mac and I'll be all over that, because it lets me keep my phone off almost all the time.
Aside from that though, it's always neat to see incremental innovation anyway, but it would all be superfluous to me even if I was in the iPhone game.
And, yet, ~20% of the population will see this news release, and talk about how clean the lines are, and how perfectly worded every sentence is, as if it was handed to us from God himself on stone tablets.
Cultism is a very interesting thing.
Some middle ground between Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer would bring more excitement into the game, and make it a little more human!
And now, back to Tim.
Apple is ready, but I still don't think people want to wear something on their face. That said, I've put myself in timeout over Apple Watch - still wrist naked, but it's inarguable that it's a successful product line.
I was also disappointed to hear that the satellite stuff is limited to 2 years. Is it going to be yet another subscription after that?
which reminds me, i need to buy extra leather cases.
in any case, this is what happens when you've got nothing to present.
I'm curious how much they're charging for this 'premium' new FineWoven material, which they pitch as a replacement for leather. Will they price it the same? Will people be willing to pay that much?
no, i'll be buying them for my current iphone.
one every 3 to 6 months, depends on how long i'm travelling for (as that's when i usually drop/scratch/etc my case the most).
But this is still condescending and hyperbolic. I'm as surprised as the next guy that anyone would go through multiple iPhone cases per year, but I don't know anything about him, his family/habits/clumsiness, so I would not make such judgmental remarks.
And from a practical perspective, you will win zero converts by telling strangers on the internet that they are "killing our planet".
Currently I find otterbox cases are fantastic grip/slide ratio that I prefer to my old leather case.
Was waiting to see if they had a new mini, and obviously they do not so glad I grabbed it.
Xs, 13, 14, 15, it’s all the same to me except a mini feels so much easier to handle.
Got a 13 mini; I kinda don't like a bunch of aspects of the iphone ecosystem, but the mini form factor is really perfect.
Very much too bad that it's now dead.
Very many companies that built a brand around quality before being quietly sold to a private equity firm are doing just that, to maximize profits for as long as they can while the brand still has a good reputation.
It can be really obvious if you’ve owned a quality product for many years and then go to replace it, only to see that the current rendition is effectively a cheap knockoff.
I imagine a lot of people didn't know or think about wireless headphones until Apple made it a thing.
Apple wouldn’t say the same at a SE release event
I'll mention GM, since they are taking CarPlay and Android Auto out of their new vehicles so they can charge a subscription fee for worse versions of the same features your phone already provides for free.
> The company noted that while leather is popular for things like watch straps, it has a serious impact on the environment, particularly at Apple's scale.
Is that actually true? I remember reading a few years ago that there was actually a big glut of leather: people still eat steak and hamburgers, and without a market for the cow hides then that material is wasted. That is, I thought the leather market was largely a byproduct of the beef market, and that reducing leather usage won't have a measurable impact on reducing the number of slaughtered cows.
In few years full reverse, cleaning up the planet while supporting free range happy lives of cows. Really, who actually buys this in-your-face bullshit? There are proper technical improvements to talk about.
/s
so to do that we really wanted to get inside a cows brain.
we figure dok now that we're here, let's explode it out onto the platter of dead skin of that same animal to capture it's essence.
so without further adieu
I present to you
iBrainSplatStainedWatchStrap"
This totally ignores the land use issue. Cattle absolutely decimate natural areas. e.g. significant areas of the midwest/great plain that were prairie with deep roots to store carbon are now pasture. Pasture grass has comparatively shallow roots and limited ability to store carbon.
Only because humans killed all the megafauna at the end of the last ice age.
The question now is if populating it with millions of cows for us to eat is the right thing to do.
- Grazers improve the capacity of grass to carbon capture
- Some land is ONLY able to grow grass. The alternative is desertification, and so livestock is the only option to produce food. edit: unless you bring in fossil fertilizers.
Sounds like you might be doing a bit of greenwashing yourself. The carbon came from the atmosphere, but the cows make methane, which is much worse. Also they spoil the land and water. And also you're not counting the carbon used to actually raise them, like the gas in the equipment and the transport.
You can’t produce “more” greenhouse gases in a closed system, the system will ebb and flow; until you dig up megatons of carbon that has been stored for a few hundred millennia and insert it into that system.
(same story with polar ice caps and the water cycle)
If you take a bunch of carbon in the grass and convert it to methane gas, sure you have the same amount, but it's a lot worse for the planet.
The issue remains, squarely, on adding to the carbon cycle. The harmful values of methane output is directly correlated with the oil based feed which GP mentions.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7725657/
https://meteor.geol.iastate.edu/gccourse/alumni/chem/carbon/...
Additionally, once the grazers improve grass life, the water-table improves. The worst lakes in our area are surrounded by fertilized annual crops. Their water is polluted with nitrogen fertilizers and are very poor quality, with blue-green algae blooms, and as a result are not swimmable. My friend lost a dog to such a lake.
The land with active grazers in contrast, is very good at preventing this problem. The best lake for 200km around me is surrounded by grass-fed cattle operations, and there is absolutely no problem with algae blooms.
I think a central problem of our time is that educated elites are detached from reality, not seeing things like what I mention above, and so are acting upon their false perceptions, causing great harms as a result. The Apple announcement today about leather acts to confirm my suspicions about this.
Also, cows have feet and digestive systems so it takes more equipment and diesel for harvesting and processing grains.
Cows still have a signifiant impact on especially as a function of how large the industry has become.
And to your point - wasting hides is also not great. Would be great if we were less wasteful in general.
Citing is much preferred to saying.
perhaps not as true when they are phone accessories. ;-)
I'm surprised they're pricing these new fabric bands at $99. If they sold these alongside leather bands, would they sell at that price? Seems like they're trying to position them as a replacement for a premium product, but without any proof that they are worthy of the lofty price.
Why alternatives to leather matter:
Nowhere to hide: how the fashion industry is linked to amazon rainforest destruction [0]
[0] https://www.stand.earth/publication/forest-conservation/amaz...
I read that article, but I disagree that the conclusion is "Leather itself is a driver of deforestation and not just a secondary byproduct."
That is, what I'd like to know is whether all those cows in Brazil would still exist even without a leather marker, but just for their beef. The linked research sort of tries to make that argument, but it doesn't really provide any convincing evidence.
Every 10 dollar knockoff from AliExpress had better quality than this.
Not selling these anymore is not a big loss.
Is this true or false?
If it's true - then how is leather bad for the environment?
I don't eat beef - but it's interesting to me how many people eat hamburgers and then look at someone with a leather bag like they're the devil.
As with a lot of things environmental - this seems purely idealist and not realist.
The main answer I get is that leather is a by-product of meat, but some claim it is a co-product.
Apple could sell a lot more watches if they upped their battery life game. I guess they want a watch that can do a zillion things, one day at a time. I prefer a watch that can do a few things, for a couple weeks at a time.
This would certainly require a display tech change. What do you have in mind?
Daily charging is for normal use, including > 2k nits in sun, with always on display. Low power mode gets around 3 days (all sizes I've tried).
But, you point still stands high, especially since it's also using AMOLED! I naively assume the Amazfit is using a much lower power processor. I've played 3d games, at what looks like 60fps, on my Apple watch. I...don't understand why I should be able to do that.
Exactly — it feels like Apple is going with a high-power device that gives modest battery life, when what I want is a lower-power device with extended battery life.
2) wireless charging via some smart apple watch bands with chargers coils inside macbook on the left side and right side of touchpad - so that every time I type on macbook it charges my apple watch
3) eink technology while Not in use
It’s why you can’t get a paper bag at many grocery stores today. Those bags cost them a lot of money that’s now going into their pockets while you are forced to buy bag after bag (because who always has a bag on them?!) that only becomes a net positive after thousands of uses. Which it never will come close to.
Does being leaked in advance have anything to do with their presentation? "Oh that was leaked, I guess we shouldn't bother mentioning it".
Planting forests, installing solar grids, carbon neutral offices, that all costs the company, it’s not cost savings disguised as green actions. Sure it has marketing value, but that’s hard to measure.
Smaller plastic free packaging and shipping by sea on the other hand could be made to save money without care for the environment. Being able to market it as green is just an added bonus.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/aapl?p=aapl
The broader market rose. Advertising/hype-driven "tech" falls, real economy rises.
Pretending to be ecologically-focused while at the same time trying to get people to "upgrade" is the height of hypocrisy. Back in the day Apple hardware was high quality and, IME, built to last. Today, the company is focused on convincing people to dispose of working computers and generate more electronic waste.
The stock price dropped more after this iPhone annoucement than it has after any iPhone announcement in the past.
Interesting to see Apple finally bumping the upper limit on iCloud storage.
Sell it on the used market if you think your old model is worth more than that.
I'm upgrading from a 3 year old iPhone, so everything here is pretty exciting for me.
This has been the only reason I've not been using an iPhone for some time now.
I love just having one cable that charges everything (phone, laptop, headphones, tablet, you name it - desk fans, white noise machines, thermometers, cameras etc etc etc)
My only problem is that I wish it was easier to tell what cables can do what things. Only some of my cables are able to connect to displays/power my laptop
Even Apple can't resist the numbers geekery - it's just a phone - nothing revolutionary.
I will buy it though. Gotta get rid of my Iphone 7. Time has come
I am a bit surprised there isn't a Thunderbolt controller in the Pro, though. Seems like they already have the IP since it's part of the iPads already.
I had my first taste of this with the macro support only showing up on the Pro model. It's such an old feature I was baffled the other device we bought didn't have that capability. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/453470/is-there-a-...
They are no doubt working on an LLM-based Siri now, but they don't rush things, and they don't preannounce things, so we'll only hear about it once it is ready. And they are probably going to use a different term for marketing it rather than using a generic term like LLM.
They don't roll out half-baked products, and they won't be comfortable placing the big disclaimers that ChatGPT relies on. They'll incorporate LLMs if and when they can guarantee that what Siri says will be consistently accurate and extremely difficult to abuse.
Perhaps even quarter baked. and has been sitting there in the turned-off-oven for YEARS.
But, at the same time. ChatGPT and the likes have a very different failure mode, that feels even less Appley. Like saying actual fake stuff, or saying it understand that you want to turn the AC on when your son leaves school coming home - but then just not doing it, or doing something completely different. With current Siri the failings are at least very obvious…
If you ask it a question it doesn't know the answer to, "I don't know" is better than making up a bullshit answer. That could be potentially hazardous at iPhone levels of scale, giving everyone easy access to what appears to be a very intelligent AI chatbot without them understanding that it shouldn't be relied on for a lot of information people will ask it.
Just like the apple keyboard on iPhones.
You’re not imagining it; it is actually worse.
This is the first ever integration with iPhone after acquisition, it never got better than this https://youtu.be/SpGJNPShzRc?si=a5JgHgnK6Nf2p7BY
You must be really young if you don't remember when they rolled out Apple Maps.
Such a feature would be included with iOS 18 and that's not going to be talked about until next June's WWDC 2024.
Honestly was half expecting more along those lines as part of the new chip announcement for the iPhone 15 Pro, but apparently not.
I really hope that when they release something, the responses will be 5% of the endless stream of words ChatGPT & others produce.
“Sure! I will try to be succinct.
[4 paragraphs]”
Apple isn't the sort of company to rush something out just to be competitive.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-conversational-ai...
The conceptual model behind LLMs utilizes frequency to generate a reasonable response to a query. But that's a bad fit when you're looking for data accuracy that isn't represented by the model. If your model says most dental appointments occur on the 15th and responds so but my appointment is on the 17th, it's not only useless to me it's detrimental.
Who thought adding all the filters and special effects was cool?
It just makes it feel cheap. And my god, the people talking don't sound like people at all.
* Nice camera upgrade on the pro (for people who really care about the focal length/etc)
* Satellite roadside assist in US
* Spatial video looks great. Even if I can't play it back yet, I can begin recording things with it now to render it in the future. I think that's big.
* Custom button vs. vibrate toggle: As long as the haptic feedback distinguishes between vibrate and ringer and silent, then it is suitable. I just need to know what setting it's on while it's in my pocket.
I don't blame folks for buying Apple, the software is great I'm sure (I personally hate it, but I use Windows XP with the classic theme and oldschool WinAmp almost every day so to each their own) and I respect the people who enjoy it, but everybody needs to play by the rules, and when Apple is clearly not with their hardware, f*cking people over and lying about it, maybe we do need laws to keep them in check, because Timmy Apple isn't making me buy an iPhone for my whole family because they won't implement RCS.
The law about third-party app stores will become effective in spring 2024. According to rumors, Apple will limit it to EU customers though.
Does anyone know if this is true? If so, how long is optimal to wait to have the highest probability of all the kinks being worked out? Like when should I buy the iPhone 15?
IIRC, Apple will have made somewhere close to 20k phones before getting anywhere close to mass production and as the ID didn't change that much, the risk is pretty low on there being a long term material issue.
If the ID changes next year (just going off manufacturing rumors), I might wait a little, but this year seems like no risk.
Might be time to just buy a new one with USB-C and use it for 5+ years.
A SoC or CPU can support 512GB of RAM for example, but you won't get 512GB of RAM unless you have 512GB of RAM.
The only think Nvidia has going for them is hardware and CUDA, I don’t even think they are very competent in the software department let alone consumer-facing software.
Phones have peaked just like desktops did long ago.
Onto the next thing already Jesus Christ!
They are the IBM that Jobs used to scoff at, big and stagnant.
Unlike IBM they may be commercially thriving, but it’s clearly the end of ambition for this dinosaur. They’re well set in 2007.
A toothpick is way too thick to fit which seems like an oversight.
Pro tip: cut a pointed pick out of the corner of an old credit card. Works great.
Literally best feature they released is USB-C which they only did because of EU regulations to begin with.
Of course plastic has it's own issues with recycling and heat removal etc.
It's like, right there, so close.
Dedicated cameras have around 20 Megapixels but much larger sensor size - but does it really matter if the most I would do is print them into a photobook?
Did they uh... even listen to this?
There's nothing new here.
Keep your money.
The things I would have cared:
- Dual screen
- AR/3D photo/video features in phone
- Much better battery life
- Full satellite communication
- OS-wide AI features, massively upgraded Siri, AI-first mobile browser, auto-complete, spell+grammer check, rewrites
- Even more AI features: Better reader-mode, PDF mode, maps infused with AI, super-res videos with structure from motion, flower/bird/food/tree/everything ID, so on and on.
What's going on with Apple?
The 2020s were "Internet in your pocket" and 2030s should be "Super smart AI in your pocket". Apple product managers feel so completely out of touch.
Apple doesn't (usually) do something first, but they often do new things well.
LLMs have been mainstream for what, nine months? They aren't going to go all-in on new LLM features that quickly. And if/when they do, it'll just be labelled Siri with new capabilities.
Satellite communications is incredible complex, and, I expect, difficult. Hell, for SOS you need to pause and point your phone in a particular direction. The scale just isn't there.
Spatial video was announced, which is exactly what you are asking for in bullet two.
Like, I don't get what you're saying. By the way, we're in the 2020s now. The 2030s are... ah, six years away.
AR already exists with the lidar-enabled apps, maps is already AR enabled in landscape mode, 3D Video "spatial" recording was announced.
AI features such as sentence auto-complete, upgraded spelling and grammar are already announced for iOS 17, due out in a few weeks.
AI identification of objects is already present and links through to Siri knowledge for explanations/further information (e.g. what breed of flower, landmark, type of cat is this?)
With the greater MP camera, you'd expect a 1 TB storage option.
- no telephoto lens
- USB-C
- smaller battery
- new GPS and Ultra-wideband chips
Shake-to-undo doesn't count in my opinion.
"Action button" feels like a gimmick, and I agree, backwards for usability.
The pandemic is over, bring back the theatre stage with a live audience.
The first one is here from 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKgEsuEBhqI
This was the most boring, unimpressive iPhone event I've ever seen in my life.
I do like iPhone, I actually have a personal one and work provide me with one too, I like their security aspects. But can how can they say with a straigh face this is a new design ?
Claiming a device has a new design when it actually has a few different design elements does not seem like too much of a stretch, for an advertisement.
I don't personally see the new design. This is Apple, king of "design" and the designers/creatives go to company (for good reason) but this is not a new design. This is a, moderate at best, alteration. I'm also not saying it has been a bad design, it's just not new, even for them.
Maybe it's the advertising world that is tilting me more and more in my later years.
If you do not expect marketing departments to call that a new design, you simply will not be happy with what pretty much every other business does and will do.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-just-made-the-iphone-15-...
Which will stay in a protective cover/case for it's life forbid you need to repair a crack.
What new design exactly? lol... UBC-C is nice but new design is a stretch...
No Touch ID.
At least they didn't go back to the rounded edges, which some rumors claimed they would.
It would help reduce both sweatshops and e-waste.
How do I convince myself to buy an iPhone ?
- Does it have fast charging - Can I sideload apps like I do on Android - Does it have 90HZ ?
Fuck no. My 3 year old phone is better than iPhone 15 expect the video recording lol
What value does iPhone 15 give me that I need to think about upgrading instead of just paying 20$ and getting my phone battery replaced
Phones have gotten to a point where the only reason to upgrade is lack of software support in my opinion.
The iPhones 15 pro have 120hz, as did the iPhones 14 pro.
You don't seem to've tried very hard to convince yourself.
1. USB-C. Yay!
2. New colors. Apple repeatedly refers to the colors as "stunning," but they look like regular colors to me.
3. Incremental improvements. Pretty much what you expect every year.
Tech is such an shitty abyss right now, ten years ago people got excited because of truly revolutionary features , like cameras that were better than $1000 digital cameras, 4G that made the internet not just usable but fast biometrics that actually worked, on a phone, in your pocket, like holy fuck that was mind blowing.
We’ve gone so far down the hole that you are like fuck it I’m gonna buy it because of the god damn charging cable, and it’s not even something like the charging cable is crazy awesome and charges your phone instantly, it’s that it’s now just the generic port that everything from moms vibrator to your laptop to every other god damn phone on the planet uses.
And this absurdly mundane and completely valueless “update” has moved you to take a perfectly good $1000 plus phone and junk it to buy a brand new $1000+ phone, just so it can share a charging cord with a used vibrator?!?!
And this, this is the best that one of the most innovative companies in a generation, which generated profits that make the rockefellers and gettys look poor, can do.
No wonder everyone’s so in love with chat GPT, we are awed by our absolutely stunning mediocrity.
Cool new iphone feature: USBC!
Cool new movie: It has Ironman and Spiderman in it!
Also, trillion dollar company lol, arguably the most powerful R&D force on earth and in history. Also... they did pull it off so...
Do you think the and thing when you buy a new dishwasher, a couch, a chair? That it’s mediocre?
Smartphones are not the future anymore, there’s people starting university soon that always had one, and never lived in a world without the iPhone.
Also, besides arguably the first few iPhones, Apple never distinguished itself from the competition with the technology it uses, but by the quality of its offering, which is why bending phones or poorly designed antennas are more important for them than having the newest tech available half a second after being commercially viable - that’s what Android OEMs do to differentiate.
I know that for me, personally, having a new iPhone with USB-C is a must have feature, which is why I have my iPhone 11 still chumming along.
The ability for it to replace a macbook air if you add a keyboard/mouse/screen for one. How about a 3d camera for integration with vision pro? There's still so much they can do.
Even the previous iPhone had lots of great actual new features. Always-on OLED display. Action Camera mode. Auto focus capable front-facing camera. Dynamic island. 2000 nit brightness capable screen. Satellite SoS. Car crash detection.
The iPhone has had a tick tock cadence forever.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/12/23870546/iphone-15-pro-ma...
I don’t believe software can bridge that gap so I suspect it’ll look very strange when viewed in 3D…
Others have said there are algorithms allowing all the objects in a scene to be distorted/rerendered in such a way that this can be corrected for but I am extremely skeptical of this without evidence.
Just becauae you cant get it to work well, does not mean you can blame the consumer.
If I could just plug in my phone to their USB C monitor that is already connected to a mouse and keyboard that'd be amazing for quickly using YOUR device.
Why would anyone need this? Because I could have my ssh keys and some software on it - sure I could have a bootable USB drive and try to boot their desktop (or laptop?!) from it... but that seems more involved than being able to converge your phone.
It's just that nobody nailed the software side of it. Apple could but they just don't care. Linux tried and they will keep trying
For emergency use, it is ok. For a prolonged one, a separate laptop is vastly better experience.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/continuum
This is pretty much exactly what you're looking for. A phone OS on the phone, plug it in, get a desktop OS on a desktop. It worked pretty well, even for the limited hardware at the time.
If a device supports Displayport Alternate Mode on USB-C, there are docks that work like how you're imagining. But I do agree, for a lot of devices the mobile OS just doesn't really have a great desktop experience.
Whats the point? It wont be cheaper if you want usable input and screens. It will Take more space than a laptop wherever you decide to use it.
How do you use even an iPad + keyboard Combo if all you have is a chair?
I fail to see how this is in any way an improvement over just buying a MacBook Air and having the screen, mouse and keyboard built in. Thew laptop is way more portable.
Satellite communications.
A 48 megapixel camera with ever improving computational photography.
I didn’t check recent sensors, but 24MP ones would be 96MP with binning. Sony makes multi-mode sensors which can produce different sized outputs to optimize details and image quality for a given light amount.
Computational photography is like artificial flavoring. It looks fine, but lacks the finesse of a big sensor. Also, “dreaming” things in photography is a no go in some contexts.
Also, I think some iPhone models have emergency satellite communications already, no?
Yes, Emergency SOS. This was the feature that allowed a family to be located and rescued recently during the Hawaii fires.
https://www.macworld.com/article/2027967/iphone-14-emergency...
I see what you did there
Those are things that you replace every 5 to 10 years. People do see innovation with those products because they only look at new ones occasionally.
If people have the same expectations of their iPhone, and they get off the upgrade treadmill of a new phone every 2 years and start buying every 5 years that would mean Apple's iPhone sales would drop by roughly a half among the core group who buy every new model. That would have a very significant impact on their share price.
Coming from Xr to 12 is mindblowing for me for someone who has a poor eyesight.
Got a friend who upgraded from a 6s to a 13.
I dont know who upgrades every year…
Havent seen anything really enticing lately.
Do you remember the time when a new phone model was noticeably faster than last year’s? I do. Vaguely. Barely. Those times are gone.
A battery that lasts longer than a day.
Apple though has enough customers that they can separate and target segments individually.
I realised a few years ago that I'd stopped watching the Apple keynotes or checking their website.
Back when Jobs did them I watched all Apple keynotes but at some point I just stopped. I think this is because the keynotes are refocused on segments that respond to them best.
I still buy Apple products but sporadically. I'm not going to rush out for the latest iphone. I treat iPhones like dishwashers and only only replace them when they break.
However, there are people that will respond to fashion and that's who the keynote marketing is for.
Apple is big enough to treat each segment differently. Hence no pictures of middle aged, white blokes on the website, even though we're a sizeable part of the population in my country. We don't just respond to that type of marketing so it's safe to ignore us. I'll just read 3d party reviews when my phone finally needs replacing.
If there was a fashion market for dishwashers you probably would see the CEO of GE announcing their new products.
YYYYEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
How about an OS that's not walled-garden shite? One that any competent programmer could write an app for -- in any language they chose -- and offer for download to all comers without getting Apple's permission and without paying Apple a dime?
How about a development system built in to the phone so you could add a keyboard and a mouse and write an app, compile it, and install it without ever leaving the phone?
How about a 1/8" jack so I can listen privately on $15 wired buds from one of 1000 different suppliers without paying $300 for buds that are going to become e-waste as soon as their batteries refuse to charge?
How about being able to replace the main battery myself, in my home, without trashing the entire fu*king phone?
How about selling the phone with a decent protective case that still allows the Qi charger to work?
How about using formal methods to ensure some Israeli spyware group cannot constantly find zero-days in my phone and put my life in danger without constant after-the-fact patch-and-pray security upgrades?
I've been building chips, computers, and operating systems for decades. I know the subject like I know my own name. There is no technical reason Apple couldn't do all these things. They choose not to because not doing them makes Apple more money.
Apple is not refusing to do any of these things for cybersecurity or privacy reasons either. I eat, sleep, and breathe cybersecurity and I get paid for it. Apple could do everything on this list with zero security risk. They know this but they choose to lie and say otherwise.
Fuck apple and their horse. They are everything that is wrong with engineering under the control of rapacious capitalist greed.
You can already do this, either getting the parts/tools thru Apple or on your own [0]
> How about using formal methods to ensure some Israeli spyware group cannot constantly find zero-days in my phone and put my life in danger without constant after-the-fact patch-and-pray security upgrades?
> How about a 1/8" jack so I can listen privately on $15 wired buds from one of 1000 different suppliers without paying $300 for buds that are going to become e-waste as soon as their batteries refuse to charge?
Those are fair, altho personally I've been using bluetooth headphones for 5+ years, only going wired when cycling or gaming, and I'm pretty happy with it.
The rest, approximately 0.01% (uneducated guess) of the consumers in the smartphone market will want or care about those things. The regular consumer doesn't want their phone to do everything and be everything, they want it to work for their use-case when they're expected to work, and be relatively easy to use.
Anyway, you seem to be a niche consumer, why aren't you looking for a niche product to match instead of complaining about a mass-market product that never has and probably never will fit your needs?
Genuine question, btw.
The issue that's hard for many to admit is that in many case Apple makes the best devices from a hardware and quality standpoint (I also like iOS better than Android, but that's more subjective). If there were other players in the market making devices at Apple's level that also had some niche features we probably wouldn't see so many complaints.
There are enough cross compile frameworks available. Sideloading is comming in the EU, i think till 2025.
> How about a development system built in to the phone so you could add a keyboard and a mouse and write an app, compile it, and install it without ever leaving the phone?
Will officially be possible with sideloading.
> How about a 1/8" jack so I can listen privately on $15 wired buds from one of 1000 different suppliers without paying $300 for buds that are going to become e-waste as soon as their batteries refuse to charge?
Use 15$ Bluetooth Buds from the 1000 different suppliers? Or use the dongle.
> How about being able to replace the main battery myself, in my home, without trashing the entire fu*king phone?
Is already officially possible.
> How about selling the phone with a decent protective case that still allows the Qi charger to work?
The Leather Case for example is working perfectly fine with Qi Charging.
> How about using formal methods to ensure some Israeli spyware group cannot constantly find zero-days in my phone and put my life in danger without constant after-the-fact patch-and-pray security upgrades?
All software will be exploited. Did you see how suffisticated the last exploit was? They build and own software cpu to execute their payload.
Even without fresh innovations if the competition can't produce a product of equal quality it will still hold its value in the market place.
Apple's profits clearly vindicate this as a business strategy.
Certainly one that other phone manufacturers have had in their phones for the past 8 years? I jest, because I haven't cared that my phones have had USB-C for even longer than that because I've been wireless charging instead. I do believe iPhones do that these days though.
We care about phone charging cables because smartphones are no longer the toys we got wowed by 15 years ago. They're now an indispensable and highly functional tools we use every day to do actual work. And guess what? We charge them every day.
If you want to experience child-like wonder and be wowed by big movements, move into a field that's developing. Smartphones are a developed field, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Also, iPhone & iPhone Pro are offering some really decent upgrades. 48MP camera (that actually works, and not just says "48MP" like many others) prism optical zoom-in 5x and so on. Lightweight titanium is also a good improvement in day to day usability and comfort.
And this "charging cable" for iPhone Pro also offers 10x faster data transfer which matters to many of us.
I’n sure the blame for this belongs more on the app makers than the device manufacturers, but I think it’s still an answer to what your asking.
Apple's target-group for the Watch is every iPhone user, they know that with patience they can sell an Apple Watch to every iPhone user out there.
So there's little incentive for Apple to create a Watch that doesn't require an iPhone, and little reason for app-developers to assume you own a Watch but NO iPhone...
The backlash from the public as well as pushback from accessory manufacturers had Apple quietly remove the warning and drop their plans.
The problem is that USB-C has nothing useful to offer over Lightning. Apple could've updated Lightning to support faster data if they wanted, and even then most people rarely use their cables for data anymore because of iCloud and AirDrop.
So this time around, it really is nothing to get excited over. I will even say it's a downgrade, because I have yet to experience a USB-C port that feels as strong and satisfying to plug in/out as Lightning.
I suspect not much… this generation seems like “fine, EU, we’ll swap the connector.” It’ll take another product design cycle to take advantage of the new possibilities it offers (beyond continuing to sell iPhones in the EU)
I guess they have to spin it. Good on the EU pushing the issue.
Definitely not in phones, because Apple is the laggard in this case. Many Android phones were already USB.
Also, there was that whole thing where the EU wanted to cut own on e-waste and mandate USB-C as a common charging standard, and Apple fought it tooth and nail.
You must live in quite an interesting world then.
The fact that people are running to a megacorp's aid because a bad EU forced them to quit being anti-consumer is staggering.
So staggering in fact, that these commentators might not even comment in good faith and in fact be PR pawns.
I'd really want to believe the latter because someone that gets so intimate with their phone brings out a sadness in me.
What’s valueless to one can be valuable to another.
> And this, this is the best that one of the most innovative companies in a generation, (…) can do.
Looks like yes.
Note that when they launched iphone, they kept upgrading ipod.
Plus, they’ve already announced a new and innovative product; are you saying they should stop upgrading older ones?
They are way more useful (portable, always present) and do lots of cool processing to get usable images in low light etc., but image quality is not competitive with a good lens on even an ancient DSLR. Shallow depth of field in particular - phones generally do it with software, and it's always jarring how fake it looks.
I also remember when the WWDC crowd and the buying public got excited for mundane evolutionary shit, like incremental iPod updates, like the introduction of an rudimentary color screen...
What else do you really want from this technology ?
Having to get a phone to an Apple store, let alone mail it in for a 'battery service' and have no phone for a few days, is a surprisingly big obstacle to just replacing the battery and keeping an older phone running for another few years.
(Not a hardware problem, older OS versions had been OK, and I eventually got it working with LineageOS for a while)
I'd say tech is on a roll just now, but the action is in AI not in smartphones.
I mean phones are good but I was checking out the iphones 12, 13 and 14 the other day and it's a job telling which is which - they are all good.
With that said, the smart phone of today is a solved problem. The industry has converged on a slab of glass form factor, and while it plays at the edges with foldable or flip phone styles they really aren't that popular. Most technology advances are evolutionary, to expect something else is unrealistic.
IMO, the most interesting thing from Apples presentation was the focus on gestures for the watch. When will the Vision Pro get small enough or the watch gain capability to project a screen is the question, because then we will have moved beyond the phone form factor.
Maybe it’s the fact that Apple has these giant events every year, that people think they’re going to get something revolutionary every year. Or maybe we were just spoiled that we lived through the 90s and 00s, but this is crazy talk. If revolutionary tech was released every year, what makes it revolutionary?
> We’ve gone so far down the hole that you are like fuck it I’m gonna buy it because of the god damn charging cable
Your comment is emblematic of everything that is wrong with this generation of Apple, its fanboys, and tech fanboys more generally.
People are not wrong to want what they want. People are not wrong to appreciate features they find useful because these features simplify their lives. The charging cable matters. It's a fucking phone. The convenience surrounding use of the charging cable will matter more to people than some fiddly little improvement to the camera or bandwidth or some thing that's not central to being a phone.
You sound spoiled. How often would you like a technical revolution? I could honestly use a break. We just got off of the crypto train(supposed finance revolution) and are now jumping on to the AI train with LLMs threatening the future of work (correctness be damned). You actually do not need to upgrade the iPhone today. Usually you have about 7 or so years of software support.
there's never been a phone camera better than a DSLR/ILC
today's phone cameras are not better than 10 year old DSLRs
7.5 x 5.7mm sensor vs 24mm x 36mm
Excessive lectures on environmental footprint. Lots of cultural/humanitarian story telling, a pile of non-relatable tech info where they only briefly showed the embarrassing "up to 10% faster", dull/static presenters with their fake excitement.
Even the Pro model, typically the only model where they might add some actual features of any significance just to seduce you to pay more, is now nothing more than an "extra bling" model.
No fresh new demos of 3rd party developers either. All of this shows the maturity and advanced state of the platform.
Here's an idea that would actually impress all of us regarding environmentalism: user-replaceable batteries. As simple as it was 15 years ago. And no, I'm not interested in tech apologies about glue or there not being space. There's space. It's purely a matter of will.
The price increase signs to me that they expect people to upgrade less often.
One thing I'm kind of having a mini midlife-crisis over is that I'm slowly realizing that I am no longer the target market for tech products. I didn't see anything... anything today that resonated with me. Aren't marketing materials supposed to do that?
It's all about things I don't care about, like the camera. Oh boy, more megapixels. Yawn. I don't really even use my phone's camera that much. Dynamic Island notifications? I turn all notifications off to avoid distractions. Display brightness? I'm constantly turning it down because it blinds me at night. Gaming? I have an old Playstation 3 and a nice size TV for that. Carbon neutral? Unpopular opinion but that doesn't even rate as a top-10 driver of my purchasing. As you say, give me a replaceable battery!
The marketing all depicts people 20 years younger than me horsing around taking selfies, people who, I suppose, care about things I don't. I didn't even recognize any of the music. I'm a boring, frugal, old white guy, who uses his phone as a tool, not as a lifestyle, and my wallet is apparently not interesting to Apple. Sad to be left behind.
Some of us do still appreciate these improvements. I greatly appreciate a better camera for example. I actually don’t know if the 15 has as an appreciable improvement but the 14’s camera is still a far cry from the quality of a professional camera in every situation but a un-zoomed shot in moderately bright daylight lighting. There is still major work to be done.
Do you need a high quality camera? No. The movie Tangerine was shot on an iPhone for example… but visually, it does not look fantastic. Some people don’t care about image quality but for the people that notice and care, they appreciate it.
It’s much better on the 14, for example, although you can still tell the parts that would have been overblown previously, especially with HDR mode on, and I don’t love it — but at least you can still see some detail now.
Was 12 to 14 an improvement? Don’t know - didn’t have a 12.
Is the 15 improved from the 14? Until I get my hands on it, I couldn’t say. It’s just a lot of marketing right now.
There aren't any even any more megapixels this year. It's the same 48 as last year.
This is not Apple's problem.
I guess what I'm looking for is a "Wow, that improvement is significant enough that, this time, early-adopting will make a huge difference" announcement. I remember around 2011 when hard drive prices-per-gigabyte took a huge drop to the point where what you got for your money was astoundingly better than what you could get a year earlier. I haven't bought a hard drive since then. Yes, prices have continued to go down, but the slope is not what it used to be. I'm still on a computer from 2014 because that was the last major increase (in my judgment) in what you got for your money. CPUs and GPUs are getting better, but only incrementally so. I typically look for those inflection points/discontinuities to make a tech purchase.
For example, if a phone manufacturer suddenly came out with a huge sci-fi level leap in battery technology, where, maybe paired with a stripped down OS I could get a week of battery life... That would be exciting. Or, if the phone's hardware and OS suddenly became powerful enough to plug in as a true desktop replacement and run desktop applications natively, where I could actually throw away my desktop workstation, that would be pretty awesome.
Ok, it's the same 48. I'm not in the market either, but I would be if I'd be single. I currently have an iPhone 12. To get the newest 48 pixel camera would help me make killer photos for my Tinder profile that I just couldn't do that well with an iPhone 12. I think I'd see a 10 to 20% improvement in Tinder matches.
It doesn't matter whether that's true or not. I know that's how I'd feel if I'd be single.
I'm happy I'm not single, lol. Given that I'm in a relationship, I don't feel the need to shoot the sharpest pictures so I can have an edge on Tinder. However, I can imagine there are many social media savvy people that would feel that way.
Like, please, no more resolution or LIDAR on the front facing camera, it might start picking up wrinkles.
Today a company announced a marginally better product to remain competitive with it's competitors. When you need to buy a new phone, Apple is hoping that they've made the n+1 (or the n, or n-1) version that you will prefer to buy.
You haven't been "left behind" because a company made an ad with young people in it.
Nothing wrong with any of this. Most products in my home are no longer exciting.
Had to replace an iPhone battery exactly once over the last 3-4 years and it was done for free with applecare, in and out in 30 mins.
So about $200 depending on what model you have then? I pay for AppleCare+ for my iPhone 11 (mostly because I like not using a case) and it's not free.
> free with applecare
That's true in your case, but if someone buys a used model then they might prefer to do it at home especially because of budget issues.
This is a myth. Look at the Samsung Galaxy S5 (IP67) & Sony XP10 (IP68). (Yeah, I'm a big Louis Rossmann fan; I learned this from his videos.)
Even if it were true, are you telling me Apple couldn't engineer a solution to the problem and turn it into a key marketing element boasting their innovation?
Don't do it. Ruins batteries.
For me, battery life for days in airplane mode is good enough if it means never worrying about liquid
And before you trot out the Samsung phones, if you didn’t put the battery in securely (and it warned you on the screen) you lost water resistance. It also required a rubber flap to be closed on the headphone jack.
The Galaxy S5 Neo did not have any flaps over the ports.
And what could possibly go wrong after a couple of years with this design?
https://www.androidcentral.com/samsung-galaxy-s5-mini-review
> The plastic battery door still has a rubbery seal on the inside, so you'll want to make sure it's securely snapped on each time you replace it. (And yes, the phone still reminds you to do this each time you start it up.)
I've had an S5 Neo for years and had iPhones as well. It was a completely fool proof design. The worst thing you could have done was break the back cover, which no one did, and that's a 5$ fix. It's a non issue, and no one would have complained if Apple did it.
And the S5 sold only 15% less than the iPhone.
That's unkind. The forward extrapolation is unkind and untrue: Generative Siri and AR are clearly in the pipeline. You can see the infrastructure if you look.
It may be worth forcing replaceable batteries with legislation, but I'm inclined to wait until after AR settles to do it, since executing on AR will involve pushing the limits of what's possible with battery/display/compute tech.
Remember those memes of people looking down at phones and running into telephone poles / glass / wet concrete? Those will come back once there's a good alternative.
You mean the M1 chip on iPad Pros wasn’t enough, but the A17 Pro on the new iPhone 15 pro is the “infrastructure” for better Siri? But wait, they’re not announcing that yet, so maybe we need the A18?
LLM's that are actually good are about a year old now. I'm surprised that wasn't enough time for them to get them into Siri.
Apple has a 2.75 trillion dollar market cap. You don't need to feel sorry for them. At their valuation and multiple they better damn well be delivering the most amazing stuff you've ever seen on a regular basis.
Which might indeed mean some longer running projects weren't ready yet and the next edition is better. I think generative AI is coming.
I guess what I'm looking for is purpose and meaning.
"Titanium is harder" Well, so what? I don't use my phone as a hammer.
"We made up a name for a core and added more of them" Yes? And what does that do? Will this enable new software? Or just run it slightly faster? And whilst that is a good thing, if everything is near-instant already, what does that bring?
I'd put it this way: the device (ie a phone) is now a fully-developed mature product and platform. It browses the Web, runs apps, takes photos/video and plays music/video.
Phones pursued the largest possible screen, first by removing the home button (which, to this day, I still hate and I find gesture replacements to be inferior and inconsistent eg swiping up depends on orientation) and then with the "notch". We lost Touch ID (which I vastly prefer) for Face ID, which is pretty much the sole cause of "iPhone is unavailable for 27 minutes" when the phone sits in your pocket. There are lots of threads all over the Internet about this.
So what Apple (and Samsung) now do is fight commodification, which will lower prices. Forced obsolescence, phones the only really last 2-4 years, incremental component upgrades, sleek materials and a moat of app availability (ie Android vs iOS).
There's really no reason a fully-featured phone should still cost $1000+.
How can there be any innovation with group think and a small minority of decision makers insulated in their bubbles from the rest of the world and simultaneously need the share price to stay stable?
Sounds like they are pretty close to what you are hoping for.
A slightly faster CPU+slightly better battery+slightly better screen(?)+better camera is all I really care about.
Not like any of us are having performance issues with the last few models for 99%+ of use-cases. Software is extremely stable too.
personally, I'd only like to see them get cheaper and maybe longer product life ( i hate replacing everything after just 7 or 8 years).
The desktop PC has been in that boring mode for 15 years or more now. With small, incremental improvements, if you're lucky.
DDR5 instead of DDR4. A 4tb HD instead of a 1tb HD. A faster SSD. A 25% faster processor. etc
2. dedicated hardware button for programatic software execution is fantastic
3. wearable turning your fingers into a button allowing execution from simply moving your fingers is insanely cool
These three things alone are more exciting than anything I've seen in a while. All in all, great ideas that are absolutely pushing the envelope of how we interact with these devices. Love to see it.
The 3d capture and the wearable finger thing could have been a software update.
The dedicated button is just bollocks. You lose the visual indicator of silence, which was a great thing.
You can keep that reminder of whether you muted your phone.
:)
- Remove all excessive animations from the UI. Please stop wasting my battery and my brain cycles on nothing. iPhone 1 to 4 had sufficient level of animation. iOS 16 level of animation is nauseating.
- Make the phone to fit into a human hand. No need for a shovel.
- Non-slippery material. (I'm currently on X and it's like holding a half-used bar of soap in the shower.)
- Remove excessive gestures, corner sliders, pop-ups, etc. The UI is a mess. Simplify everything. Less is better.
- Redo all the UI elements. This mess of excessively saturated flat shapes is dull. Initiate return to skeuomorphism, but at a slightly different angle. Especially get rid of oversaturation everywhere.
- Increase contrast of UI elements.
- More detailed report on processes consuming system resources, something like a Task Monitor.
I am writing this from 5 years old Android phone, and all I really need now is a fresh battery.
Your brain has been rotted by product marketing and tech consumer hype fanaticism.
If your phone is a year old then the only reasons to buy a new one are
- you make a living developing software for that phone
- you make a living writing about that phone
- you are a hobbyist or enthusiast who loves phones and wants to spend disposable income on themFor people that don't work in software, the biggest change here is the camera upgrades. This thing has 8x optical zoom and can record 3D video.
Many people use their phone camera as part of their job, and many more people as part of their hobbies.
For some of these people it's worth the cost to upgrade, especially if their current phone is a couple generations behind.
Yes low light perf is better with a camera, sharpness too. But unless you use HDR bracketing you're DR limited in a lot of every day situations that the general public will be disappointed with. Blown out highlights or indistinguishable shadows. The iPhone or other high end phone will stitch multiple photos with HDR automatically. People prefer that.
Auto-focus is generally not as good as with iPhones either. The amount of computational power in the SoC dwarfs modern cameras, and while you can get very good auto-focus, you've never heard of any iPhone user complain about the camera not focusing on the right subject.
Still, wouldn't trade the XT-4 at all. It's ceiling is vastly higher than any phone camera if you know what you're doing and understand the limitations.
I have the 16-80mm kit lens, and also the 23mm F/2. Both are good lenses.
What I have noticed with this XT4, and I don't know if it's a general problem or specific to XT4/Fujis, is that it's very prone to choosing slow shutter speeds. I normally shoot effectively in aperture priority, but when I first got the XT4 it was constantly picking too slow of a SS to capture people/kids.
The way I fixed that was to go into the settings and find the "auto ISO" section, and set a minimum SS of 1/125s which works well for most everyday situations. Then bump up the ISO ceiling to something very high like 12000. The idea is that if your SS is too slow you basically have an unusable image, whereas at least with high ISO you can denoise and have something useful.
I also now use custom film simulations I got from Fuji X weekly. My favorites are these: https://fujixweekly.com/2021/05/03/fujifilm-x100v-x-trans-iv...
and Portra 400 and some others I can't remember.
I now travel with an Insta360 X2 that is much more convenient and compact, but there are certain types of photos (night time, star trails, light trails, portraits, etc) that phones and action cameras are just laughably bad at.
But... the best camera is the one you've got on you, so I can't blame anyone for the convenience factor, I also take pictures primarily with the iPhone.
Now the phones are more than adequate. The upgrades are often fairly nice. Some years we've had 20% increases in processing speed or a doubling of the RAM be greeted with a yawn.
And this makes sense because we aren't really constrained for most of our uses. But the phones were not generally tripling in capability in years past.
I love how downvotes are used here to punish those you disagree with. Such fun. I guess this is now Reddit.
I fall under this. I'll be upgrading from an 11 Pro this time around mainly because I've let my battery go bad.
We can do most things from the simulator and when we need bluetooth or CoreLocation we can always run the app as a Mac app and use the computers chips.
The job title is a nice excuse to get the latest and greatest but it's not strictly necessary.
this kind of rhetoric has no place on HN, and it's sad that it has been so casually normalized among the android fanbase.
super tired of "brainless apple sheeple only buy because of blue bubble!" and similar stuff, it just is constant and offensive and android fans know it damn well, they just know nobody is going to call it out either. Doesn't belong on HN.
I am a professional iOS developer and I still use an iPhone X. I am convinced this one will carry me another 2-3 years.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37486633.
How can we expect to change things if even meaningful moves to make improvements are automatically cynically dismissed?
And aside from recycling, this whole effort was about "investing in renewable energy projects around the world", so another kind of throwing money at someone who might or might not do something with it. Won't matter to Apple's green message.
Now recycling efforts are nothing to sneeze at and are commandable. Ambitious ? I don't know.
UPDATE: Okay, that was a tongue-in-cheek comment but Apple is doing the most Apple possible thing: they really are going to sell a $29 (?!) adapter that will allow you to use your Lightning charging cables to charge the new USB-C iPhones:
https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/12/apple-usb-c-to-lightning-adap...
The Dynamic Island has to be one of the biggest cons any large company has pulled off in a while, and I’m surprised that a) Apple is continuing to double down on it (it’s the second listed “feature” at the top of the linked article), and b) people still buy that it’s a good feature.
I’ve said this since they announced it for the 14, but it’s a gimmick that Apple is trying to tout as a selling point to cover up their inability to reasonably get rid of the notch.
It doesn’t functionally do anything that they couldn’t do without the notch, yet the notch still gets in the way of many apps/UIs. Yet I still see many Apple apologists coming to its defense.
The notch isn’t the end of the world, and the Dynamic Island is an ok “make the best of the notch” in lieu of getting rid of it, but touting it as a selling point is a bit deceptive (to put it nicely), and unfortunately, people continue to fall for it.
To an extent, but not this extent (i.e. the second listed feature in its second generation). Among the things I care about the iPhone featuring, this is probably somewhere between #20 and #50.
And it’s not even that much better than just showing this information to either side of the notch, or somewhere below it (in other words, what they used to do since the notch was introduced).
I see the DI maybe once or twice a day, if that, for a second or two.
Again, it’s fine as an alternative, but it’s not the selling point they and DI apologists are making it to be.
I think this is the majority of iPhone users, and it really might behoove you to actually try an alternative (and give it an honest go, not a couple days and then returning the device or something). For years I was convinced I was missing out on the bliss of iPhone because I was on my crummy Galaxy phones which were clearly inferior to genius wrought Apple devices. So, a couple months ago I finally caved in and bought my first ever iPhone and… it’s just a phone. In fact, some things really suck.
For instance, when I tried to reply to you I tried to select the text in your comment to quote you and it took me 6 tries to select it (and I didn’t even select it all I gave up because moving the dumb cursor is just impossible so I wrote in the missing words manually). I never had those issues on my Galaxy, text selection just worked.
Add to that the lack of a back button (or any buttons at all), a keyboard that has no period or number row on the main page, no backtick key anywhere(!), crappy auto correct that corrects words I’ve already typed and moved on from, no customizability, no feature discoverability (I’ll often have no clue that a gesture exists or something unless I Google trying to figure something out), terrible volume controls, bad notification display, no option for TouchID, and did I mention I hate this stupid keyboard?
Anyways, I’ll gladly switch back to an Android in a year or two. Maybe I’m just used to Android’s quirks and an Apple user would hate all the Android features I like, idk. What I do know is that the phone brand does not matter. The features differ very very slightly, and the performance differences are negligible from my normal use cases. There is no superior phone brand, it’s all just preference at the end of the day.
Sorry for the long rant by the way, it’s not directed at you but more at the general zeitgeist in the comments I’ve been reading here. It’s crazy. I must be taking crazy pills or something reading how impressed people are with the most mundane features.
I'm looking forward to the day when I need to pack only USB-C cables when we go on family vacation, but it's still going to be a couple of years until we replaced the last device with lightning port (especially iPads seem to last forever).
I wonder if they'll sell cases alone for existing AirPods.
Nevertheless still good that now only one cable is required - especially since the iPad and iMac use USB-C as-well.
Not sure what to do with the AirPods - hopefully the wireless charging directly from iPhone 15 will make it unnecessary to have to carry the cable for the pods.
But I'll be carrying around a USB-A to Lightning cord when I'm traveling anyway, since hotels/airplanes/airports are still on USB-A.
EDIT: Looks like I was confused by this brief description, and they were just saying that you can plug the peripherals into the iPhone. NBD.
EDIT: yep, per Ars Technica, you can now charge your Apple Watch or AirPods off the iPhone 15: https://live.arstechnica.com/apples-september-12-2023-wonder...
This is honestly a pretty great feature, and actually makes me more likely to buy an Apple Watch. I don't want to have to bring another charge cable with me, and now I wouldn't have to. I wonder what the charge speed is though — I wouldn't want to have to charge it overnight.
EDIT: Thanks for clarifying, it took me a while to understand based on what they had said and what Ars reported. I can see that it's just the same as how you can plug any peripheral into an iPad and charge off its battery. Now you can do the same with iPhone...big deal.
Apple's page says this under the USB-C section:
>The new USB-C connector lets you charge your Mac or iPad with the same cable you use to charge iPhone 15. You can even use iPhone 15 to charge Apple Watch or AirPods. Bye-bye, cable clutter.
With a footnote that leads to this:
> The included USB‑C Charge Cable is compatible with AirPods Pro (2nd generation) with MagSafe Charging Case (USB‑C).
iPhone 15 will charge your watch and airpods from the back of the phone, so you don't even need to travel with the watch charging cable anymore.
Samsung did this already (branded as "PowerShare") so it's the year of iPhone catching up on charging features.
I am surprised apple hasn't included this ability yet. My pixel 6 pro also has this ability.
I was also really hoping for wireless "MagSafe-out" charging for the Apple Watch, which would come in very handy when traveling – often there's limited outlets on hotel nightstands, and sometimes I just forget the watch charger.
If I'm traveling with a computer too I use a 2x USB-C wall wart to fit everything in one plug. Not perfect, but beats the rat's nest of cables that it replaced.
Since the Qi charger isn't MagSafe it doesn't really work for topping up the phone from the battery on the go, so I often end up tossing a short Lightning cable in my bag anyway. Will be nice to have USB-C eventually and not worry about that (but I intend to drag this iPhone mini out for a good 5 years).
I will greatly miss the SD slot and headphone jack...
I don't want more cycles on a battery that isn't user serviceable
It seems unlikely that people will routinely charge their AirPods from their phone when they could just as easily use the same charger that they just charged up their phone with.
its like 30 minute job, maybe less for pros
p.s. if you don't like the feature - don't use it!
One can charge a range of devices, including other iPads from a USB-C iPad. One can even change the charge direction between the two devices.
Charging on these devices is independent from data access. The user is prompted to allow data access which requires authorisation.
Government decision makers are often [edit: Not] qualified to make good technical decisions, but sometimes they do. Or they get lucky.
I like lightning. I liked firewire too. It's always kept too long, when its a lock-in.
They had to be made to. Now, lets hope no more new happens in the form factor and cable basics for a while.
The idea was that you would have one cable from your computer, and all devices would be chained. Life would be so simple.
Instead we have several USB cables, plus HDMI and DP, and lightning, and probably some I've forgotten. Thankfully we lost the enormous parallel ports. Although many EU televisions still use something equally bulky.
I'd rather a company make and honor commitments, than never commit to anything or break them whenever they feel like it.
I haven't seen their comments in the spec - but they certainly aren't opposed to USB-C given Macs have been using it for years as has the iPad.
I just don't see a compelling reason to upgrade.
Some people predicted that new iPhone will be completely portless and allow wireless charging only, just to not having to support USB-C out of spite.
I guess we'll need to wait a year or two more.
I found it amusing that they tried to spin Magsafe as eco-friendly too... because, uh, you can't use leather cases anymore(?)
It would be very much Apple move to take something that wastes enormous amount of energy (given the number of people who have iPhones) and claim it is eco-friendly.
(1): I looked on Wikipedia for 30 seconds
Doubling that power use if everyone switched to low quality wireless charging (50%) would require another 5 gigawatts, or a few thousand more wind turbines.
Bigger than I thought in a worst case scenario, but still not too bad.
Especially if wireless charging prevents premature replacement by reducing port failure, as the embodied energy is estimated to to be the majority of the energy involved in the lifecycle of a smartphone.
Interesting. I wasn't aware this was a common problem? It's not something I'm used to hearing about as an Android user.
I'd be more interested in whether Magsafe or USB-C wears the battery out sooner.
Not huge amount of energy, but not negligible either.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agua_Caliente_Solar_Project
edit: I see someone else did the math as well.
That works out to $2 per iPhone to build power plants to charge the iphone every day for it's an entire life. Not bad for a device that costs hundreds of dollars.
Slow charging though... that seems orthogonal?
In my Fusion, I'm stuck using wired Android Auto, so I am unfortunately not able to use the 12V port for charging.
The adapter plugs in to the USB port for android auto and then offers up a wireless connection. Everything is automatic once set up.
The 2023 model had the entertainment system massively upgraded. Wireless CarPlay is seamless and fast. The wireless charging pad isn't amazing but it does the job just fine.
I love wireless CarPlay now. :)
https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/10/carplay-wireless-carplay-adap...
- Plugging the phone in is so easy.
- With Wireless Carplay presumbably I'd have to futz with the phone anyway if both of our phones are associated with the entertainment system
- I still have to take the phone out of my pocket to put it on the wireless charging pad. That is actually the hassle, not plugging the phone in
- If I don't care about charging my phone, I assume my phone is going to heat up in my pocket and drain the battery while I'm doing Wireless Carplay stuff
- A lot of my driving is short 10-15 min trips. Can put a pretty decent charge into my phone during that time with the wired connection. Not with inductive charging.
I suspect they have a few things to work out with regards to CarPlay wireless connection(s) before they could remove ports on the device, in addition to the other comments on this thread.
I'd never say never obviously but dropping ports entirely would have to be a terrible decision anytime soon. (And one wonders what assurances Apple has made to auto manufacturers adopting CarPlay.)
I think you meant brave decision.
One could always dream of head unit updates for wireless carplay support...
But according to some wireless carplay adapters do work quite well so that might be an option: https://9to5mac.com/2023/09/10/carplay-wireless-carplay-adap...
Apple could even release an official one.
Not that CarPlay is a necessity of life but glitchy CarPlay would be a pretty big negative for my experience with a vehicle.
Maybe $199?
And for what benefit? That port is already water-proof.
Resistant.
I care. It's a safety / insurance feature.
I suspect lots of people who would be happy to shoot on a phone have upgraded to blackmagic specifically because you can just swap the card and keep rolling.
It just doesn’t make sense to go wireless only, like even as the presentation showed, there are great usecases for wires, like moving data fast to external storage during video recording. Also, charging is much much slower without a cable, and then we didn’t even talk about debuggibility, servicibility, for no reason whatsoever. Apple is not hurt by usb-c, they have been using it for many years on their own dime. They just waited around so if anyone takes offense (see other commenters) they can freely point their fingers at the EU. They only were waiting around for a scapegoat.
You're right that USB-C can transfer data very fast in comparison to Lightning, but most casual users likely don't do this at all. They primarily use cloud backup solutions. This is somewhat supported by the fact that data transfer speeds on non pro models of the 15 are the same as Lightning.
Additionally, Apple had much more control over who could legally produce cables and accessories with Lightning due to owning the standard, which isn't the case with USB-C.
I really think the only reason it didn't shake out like this is because wireless charging tech just isn't where it needs to be. It's possible that Apple thought it was going to advance faster. They had one very ambitious product they were going to release for wireless charging that got completely canceled a couple years ago: theverge.com/2021/8/5/22611234/apple-airpower-wireless-charger-working-prototype
Do you know how rare it is for Apple to announce a product and then alter it at all from what they said when they announced it -- much less straight up cancel it?
They could have gone the iPad route, but part of the problem is that iPhones are a status symbol/conspicuous consumption product as well. There are plenty of people who buy the latest "Pro" model as a way of signaling status. This move would likely have caused a lot of confusion in general for less tech savvy people. It's no longer "Do you have an iPhone charger?" it's "Do you have an iPhone charger or that new new one?"
>They only were waiting around for a scapegoat.
I really doubt this. Apple has never been one to shy away from making decisions that can be decried as shameless profit grabs. Example: removing headphone jack. Removing wall brick charger from phones.
They could not have predicted that the EU would introduce unprecedented legislation forcing them to this standard and they fought it vehemently.
That wouldn't pass muster in the regulation.
You will:
- save money to buy new phone (cable costs just ~10$)
- it's magnetic so even more convenient to use
- magnetic adapter protects connector from dust getting inside or getting broken
- you use the same cable with adapters for usb-c, lightning and micro-usb to charge different gadgets (even older airpods pro)
- at least baseus cable supports both fast charging (20W) and data transfer (usb 2.0)
If cable brakes (at it did brake for me after ~1 year of use) you just buy new one for 10$ instead of new phone for 1000$. Keeping old phone is the most environmentally friendly option.
non-pro iphone 15 usb-c is still just 2.0 speed and most likely doesn't support usb-otg
[1] https://www.amazon.in/Baseus-Magnetic-Multipurpose-Retractab...
Something about the USB circuitry doesn't like how the magnetic adapters partially connect sometimes. I don't pretend to understand the failure mode but I have a very funky Valve Index controller now.
(Sorry if questions are naive, I've never seen one of those).
Who is buying a whole new device if the cable breaks?? One still just buys a new cable…
You could stick a toothpick inside a lightning port on a phone to remove pocket lint, you can’t do this with USB-C without a higher risk of damaging the phone.
USB-C on the phone side has a protrusion that slots inside the cable end the same as previous usb cables. This is the fragile part, but it’s still a big improvement over micro usb.
What do you mean "while you still can"? Will they discontinue battery replacements for the 11 at some point? At 80€ its a no brainer once the battery does start to deteriorate more
I’m glad it works for you but I personally am glad we’re trending towards usb-c, at least for the next couple of years, across most devices.
However if still someone consider buying this new iphone only for usb-c it's a good alternative to keep old phone and save money (since there was almost no innovation since iPhone X especially in non-pro models).
But if you need usb 3.0 speed then you will need new iphone 15 pro
The problem was, though, that the magnets were too weak - they would constantly disconnect
(of course just a thought but!)
IF people can buy a cheap phone or an expensive but older phone, the older phone still works often better than a new cheap phone. So when he 'upgrades' the old phone gets reused and saves one cheap phone.
Hackernews comment that put it better than me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35436727
I bought into the 'Volta' ecosystem and the adapters started degrading within 6 months. I would only trust a product from a major electronics producer, not these random brands on Amazon. If none of the big players have this as a product, it smells of a reason why it isn't a thing. Otherwise, I really wanted it to be. I hate the damage plugging cables in and out of devices does to the phone's power sockets over time.
Thank European socialists for imposing a worse product on everyone.
>Thank European socialists for imposing a worse product on everyone.
Universal Socialist Bus?
I want simple in my phone with fewer things to break. Id rather just have a thinner phone that’s half the size of a screen.
Maybe Samsung and Google finally cracked the smartphone code after 15 years.
- Android phones (our family collectively has 2 Android phones and 2 iPhones)
- iPad
- wireless headphones
My partner’s phone (an Android) is already on USB-C, so this will also let us share cables, which is a huge plus.
The fact that people talk about how integrated the Apple ecosystem is, yet you needed an adapter to connect its phone to its laptop says it all.
When it came to apple, that kind of stuff has always been pure puffery and marketing anyway. "Their hardware is the best" people would say, while their computers sat at 100% fan, choking under the strain of running basic apps with no real cooling, while the user worked around a stuck "C" key and being careful with their inflating battery.
Everything else I have is micro USB: my phone, my ereader (PocketBook), my reMarkable tablet, my bluetooth headset, my bike GPS, the lights of my bike, my portable batteries.
I fear the day I will have to replace all of those with USB-C because, currently, I can travel with only one small charger (as long as I don’t take my laptop).
I've started buying multi-standard cables - they usually terminate with micro-usb, and have tiny attached adapters for usb-c and lightning.
higher quality example: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071WNQYV6 but there are lots of cheaper variants.
Most everything is moving towards USB-C but it's slow; I want Milwaukee and them to have more USB-C charging devices for the smaller battery charged things.
I wish my Garmin bike stuff had USB C.
Same, my last non-usb C devices are my inreach and edge 500. I guess it's a testament to how long they last.
So, my phone, tablet, steam deck, power bank, bluetooth-to-wired audio adapter, all use USB C. Same with any of the laptops I'm looking at getting. Thus, all I ever need to carry is a power brick, a USB C hub, a C-to-C cable and an A-to-C cable and it'll be sufficient for everything.
Peripherals, usb-a is still what you usually get, just going by what’s common on store shelves. Just got a new kit at work a few weeks ago—all these brand-new devices are made to plug into A, even if the other end is usb-c. They come with A-to-c cables, or else are A-only. In the former case, I can at least fix it by just using c cables I already have.
But, overall, the peripheral world as most people experience it is still A-first. C options are usually more expensive, may be part of why.
At this point I actively avoid buying any devices that are not USBC because there is an alternative to any product I could want. Products shipping with micro USB in 2023 are almost always indicative of a cheap product or an old product that hasn't received any meaningful updates.
The only glaring examples are Apple phones/accessories, which I avoid, and sadly fitness devices. My water bottle and watch both have proprietary connections, I assume because a water proof USBC connection is just not feasible on small devices. Hopefully some kind of standard gets established there as I've had products that look like they have very similar connections that almost fit but they don't actually charge.
This is only somewhat true. Some products are decent quality, but they’re not really “tech” products, they just do power delivery via MicroUSB. Also there are some high end products that have not switched and are huge pain points. Like Logitech makes these very good wireless mouses that are still micro USB.
I’ve wanted a USB C iPhone for years, but will be skipping this because I’m already setup to have to support 4 different types of cable: Lightning, USB C, and Micro USB (and USB A)
For Micro USB and USB A I just have converters that I can slip onto a USB C cord which works because I have to use them less frequently, but I have high quality Lightning cables.
Plus all the other stuff I have that I’d have to buy a new version of to fully get rid of Lightning: 2 Apple TV remotes, AirPods Max, at least a new AirPod Pro charging case and my basic iPad.
It sucks. I’ve wanted this for a while but it’s probably going to be at least 3 more years before I get to demote Lightning to the same category as USB A and Micro USB
I just wish Apple had sucked it up and done this sooner before they got forced to. I really do think the strategy was to eventually have at least the non Pro iPhones go completely portless.
Is it an older model that is popular that they just aren't changing because people are still buying them? If you're willing to try something new you might be surprised by the improvements they have in their latest lines.
Do you use lightning for charging your phone when traveling and mag save for your macbook?
MacBook, iPad, Studio Display, Switch, Sony headphones, Kindle, my wife’s Pixel phone, Steam Deck, Raspberry Pi. The only micro USB devices I have are some old portable chargers. The only Lightning devices I have are my phone, my AirPods and, for some reason that still escapes me, the external trackpad Apple sells.
If the only USB-C gadget you have is the Switch you must not have bought many gadgets in the past five years. Which actually isn’t a bad thing, good on you.
- Phone: USB-C
- Bose wireless headphones charging: Micro-USB
- The hand-held fan (nice one) I bought last week in the heatwave: Micro-USB
- Lenovo tablet: Micro-USB
- Macbook Pro: Magsafe 2
- Monitor 1: Thunderbolt 2 (same connector as Mini DisplayPort)
- Monitor 2: HDMI
- Spare monitors: HDMI x 2, DVI x 1
- TVs: HDMI x 2, DVI x 1 + 3.5mm-audio
- External keyboard and trackpad: WiFi only and batteries, no connector
- Spare external keyboard and mouse:: USB-A
- WiFi modules: RJ-45 (power + data)
- External storage: USB-3.0-Micro-B (the weird split one)
I think I'll wait another year before I upgrade my iPhone 13 but this is great stuff.
Well, this is the company that brought us the butterfly keyboard.
Somehow they always dodge the reverse Osborne effect, haha!
Given the way those antennas work I doubt that. From what I understand they did some neat tricks to send very simple signals for the SOS stuff in the absence of that.
It's literally the same design since the iphone 11.
You need to see them side by side to notice the difference but any other user won't be able to tell at a glace that you own the 15 and not an older model.
Things look the same when you don't look for the differences. Brilliant.
I suppose the lawyers would get paid a bunch to figure out how flexible the definition of "port" in the regulation would be. "Port" in networking is obviously purely a concept vs a physical hole. "Port" in shipping is also more conceptual, no two ports need share the same layout.
This is a really insane thread.
So was removing the CD drive. Or shunning Java on the original iPhone.
Also the Macbooks still have it while the M1 didn't have magsafe, so maybe let's not use Apple's decisions as indication of obsolescence.
Of course marketing sold it as benefit, which for some it was since they are ok with average quality. Considering thick brick that current iphones are for quite some time, space taken by port was never the issue, unlike stated originally as reason for removal.
The source is the DAC and the DAC in that dongle is better than most audiophile DACs are. Remember, audiophile equipment is scams made by small companies and iPhone dongles have bigger R&D budgets than their entire industry.
And if you could, it'd be balanced out in outdoors use cases by the lack of wired audio artifacts, namely cable telephonics sending walking impacts into your ears.
Anyway, AirPods do support lossless audio now. (Well, next year.)
If they remove all jacks, that's so many devices I own, and use-cases I have, poof gone!
(I can't "leave it connected to headphones" as my iPhone is not the only device I own; I have multiple headphones and headsets ; and I move myself and my iPhone quite a bit. The nice thing about 3.5 was universal and ubiquitous. Every headphone or headset worked with every phone tablet and music device. Lightning without 3.5mm is just a constant pain in my keister :)
But, the context of this sub-thread as I understood it, is - if they discontinue all the ports completely / go wireless, one could only use bluetooth headphones. And that's the suck because:
1. I already have a number of very nice headphones I planed to last me a lifetime
2. Bluetooth headphones have built-in obsolescence (battery, new protocols, etc)
3. Lag! I like to play synthesizers / make music on computers and tablets. Or play games with Kishi. Bluetooth is a pain for such use cases.
etc :-/
plugged in the back into the unused cd changer port behind some carpet
took 2 mins to install, wish I had done it years ago
It was this!
https://www.tindie.com/products/aaafnraa/serial-adapter-rebo...