iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
apple.com
apple.com
It's absolutely stunning what smartphones can do these days and Apple makes an excellent product. It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models "boring".
The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I'll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.
She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.
You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter. Her only awareness of features is when she accidentally enables one and doesn't know how to get back.
You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn't notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn't know they even exist.
All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.
You might assume my girlfriend is perhaps lowly educated or just not tech savvy. Wrong, she's highly educated, even works in IT, although not in an engineering role. It's not that she's unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn't care.
It's becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies. Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.
I think this is also why Apple put many Pro features into the regular model. Most people don't buy the pro and they're desperate for selling points in the regular model.
If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.
Why is the back of my phone glass. Why does the front of my phone have 0 protection from the glass hitting whatever it is dropped on?
This has to be on purpose. Or maybe in an opposite direction, their stock would likely drop a considerable amount if they made a phone you could drop on concrete with only minor blemishes.
Diamond and ceramic are however more prone to shattering. Sapphire like they use for the camera lenses and watch face might be ideal.
People buy cases because they feel their $1,000 slab of metal must be protected.
Same camera hardware as the flagship 6s, but more comfortable to use one-handed and the camera lens was flush with the back.
I didn't get a case when I bought my 15 pro.
For two weeks I was without a case, dropped the phone two or three times.
Screen got scratched in 3 places and the paint chipped from around the bazel.
Went into a store and got a case.
For me, it's just not worth it. Had iPhones break while on trips and it's just an absolute hassle dealing with replacements, especially when there aren't Apple stores for hours, while I can just put on a protector and done.
(Plus I think a clear case looks really nice and brings a retro Casio vibe.)
Gonna disagree with this one. Tell me, does using an iPhone today feel significantly faster than the top model 2-3 years ago or even 10 years ago? Does the battery last a lot longer than it did back then? Apple certainly claims this is the case in their marketing every year. The answer however is no, because with every increase in computing power and battery size, the OS and all the apps on it get that much more resource hungry. The entire ecosystem is designed to get users to need to upgrade every ~2-3 years, otherwise they will start to feel the lag.
Yes. Absolutely. We just forget that opening an app--or restarting the device, or recovering from airplane mode--was an action that incurred a noticeable delay once and does not tend to anymore.
Where?
Out of curiosity, where? I went from the 12 something to the 15 Pro and the speed in connecting to networks and rendering pages was memorable. Now I don't notice it anymore; the old phone is just slow.
Still, I can't say I've ever thought, jeez, this thing is slow to render a page.
> the speed in connecting to networks
I'm not even sure what you mean. Connecting to 4G? a) mine's practically instant and b) how often are you doing this?!
(Not being snarky there. Genuinely don't understand how this is a thing someone would notice. But you may have a different use-case to me.)
I see a lot of "this 200€ phone is as good as the 1000€ one"
Sister, i would kill someone to not have to use Google maps on a phone 10% slower.
In 2020 i returned my samsung A7 (decent phone for the era) because i just couldn't support how laggy it was. Thst phone was better than most phones around me but i felt the slowness. (ended up with a Huawei mate 20 pro)
I'm on the other side of the fence, and just replaced a Pixel 7 with a 9. And quite frankly I bought it because I was Supposed To. I'm sure there are benchmarks to say otherwise, but routine use is basically instant on both and absent a professional desire I quite frankly would have just waited until I broke it.
This obviously revolves around what one perceives. Data speeds on mobile are objectively faster on their newer devices [1]. But we normalise those speeds without needing additional cruft; waiting for a page to load just ceases to be a thing one notices except when it doesn't work.
[1] https://www.opensignal.com/2023/09/07/users-should-upgrade-t...
I’ve done performance tuning long enough to develop some rules of thumb:
Just about everyone will detect a 3x performance difference if told about it. (5x even if they’re not told.)
Only gamers and some IT pros will notice a 50% difference.
Nobody will notice 20% or less.
Anything under 10% is hard to even measure.
One career trick is that if you have three changes that provide a 20% boost each, release them at the same time instead of trickling them out one at a time. Sure, this is more risky for the company but is great at review time because otherwise your contributions would go unnoticed. Unethical? Maybe, but this is the incentive structure. Hate the game, not the player.
There is also an adaptation factor: Good performance is only noticeable in contrast to poor performance. You get used to it very fast and stop noticing, unless you go back to the old system which suddenly feels "broken", even though you may have considered it perfectly acceptable before.
For example, if the first visible paragraphs takes the same time to show up, but the rest of the page is slower (but still not slow enough to be visible even if the user starts to scroll right away), then there is objectively 0 improvement on user interaction
A lot of apps don't handle state changes to background well, especially social media apps where there's no reason to cache what content you were viewing.
The camera app is usually the culprit for things getting sent to the background for me.
You are on a platform where 99% of comments at one point were suggesting VSCode is fast enough or feels as fast as Sublime when it first launched, i.e before a lot of optimisation.
There are a lot of people just dont feel the difference or simply dont care about that tiny difference. And for someone like me who is latency sensitive, it bothers me a lot.
Scrolling at 120hz is butter smooth and improves the UX quite a lot. While battery life is peace of mind that you don't have to worry about.
What ticks me off is OpenAI integration in my private life. I really like chatGPT as a daily google box but I hate the idea of it meddling in my private information. That's a big no no.
ChatGPT is optional.
Try using CarPlay without enabling Siri.
I do agree that it would be nice to know whether voice control is safer, but unfortunately I can't find any studies that compare voice vs tactile control (all I can find is studies on touch vs tactile)
If the voice control is bad and you are never sure if it heard it correctly then it wouldn't be safer.
I was with you up to there. Do you really think that people are so lazy or stupid that they wouldn't go to any of the zillion battery replacement places (including Apple Stores) rather than buying a new $1K-$1.5K device?
I would happily spend a several hundreds dollars to save these and continue to use them, or give one to my parents or kid, but I can't find someone who will do a battery replacement. I live in Austin TX and have called 3-5 different apple repair shops. If I can't find someone to do it in a city with the second largest Apple office in the world, I don't think anyone else will be able to.
Source: https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-replacement and https://support.apple.com/mac/repair
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772
> Obsolete: ... MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015), MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)...
Fill in the form and send your iphone 11 in for battery replacement.
I've done this a few times w/different iphone models, works great, no fuss. The several days w/o the phone is nice forced social media detox.
It has held a charge for the last few years well. The other issue I had with a laptop this old was cooling. Ended up swapping out the fans and heatsink/heatpipe and am expecting to get another couple years out of it.
1. https://www.ifixit.com/products/macbook-pro-15-retina-late-2...
Especially if you are paranoid and refuse to hand a third party your phone full of private data. If I need to wipe and restore that is a huge time sink I’d rather future proof against.
It’s the pain and uncertainty factor.
It works until it doesn't.
It's also rarely spending "$1,000" - it's usually a $200-400 price difference after trade-in depending on how often you upgrade. Apple typically gives extremely aggressive pricing on trade-ins, or at least has over the past few years. I sent my wife in for a battery swap and it ended up being $150 more to simply swap phones and upgrade 3 generations to reset the obsolescence clock. No-brainer at that point.
Besides effort, there's also trust issues. I once had a battery replacement done but the "new" one was just as bad as the old one.
Battery replacement costs at Apple are $69-99 and offered all the way back to the iPhone SE 1st Generation. That's the all-in cost where you bring it in, they open it up, swap it out, and give your phone back to you.
An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.
Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years hardly seems like it's going to nuke their business from orbit.
Watching their live feed, one of Apple's selling points on such an expensive phone is that it will last a long time and have a higher re-sale value than other phones. It's not a case of planned obsolescence.
When you’re trying to develop a vertically integrated feature across a synchronized release requiring potentially new silicon, a new device, new OS frameworks, new app code… you have to express your requirements precisely. Either the M1 is being designed to support three displays or it’s being designed to support two. Not “as much display support as we can squeeze in where performance is still OK end-to-end”. By the time you know if end-to-end looks good for all the features you built up depending on lower layers in the stack, it’s too late.
You’re also likely not to trust “hey, seems like our tolerances were excessive and it works great on older hardware”. And building up that trust is time-consuming and difficult, so they rarely go back to do it without a strong market justification. Stage Manager being the most recent—somewhat odd—example.
Which is weird because who really cared about stage manager? I guess they decided the media kerfuffle was making owners of unsupported recent hardware feel put down.
So whilst Siri could technically run on older devices the experience was unacceptably poor.
Almost anything can kinda work on older devices. But lots of little details make the difference between a good experience and a poor one. Which simd instructions did it support. What’s the battery impact on that BT chipset. Did the ANE support NN layer style X?
Apple has a great track record of brining new features to old hardware. I don’t see example here or elsewhere that I think were purely greed and not quality driven.
E.g. the apple watches really “inherited” a good chunk of all the new features to the point that there are several versions that are basically identical. Like, I have the 6, and besides the on-screen keyboard (for which I guess the screen was too small based on their testings) and temperature-sensor reliant features, it does almost everything the new 10 will be able to do.
Having replaced the screen, battery and home button on my 1st gen iPhone SE myself I can confidently say that Apple do not make these easy to repair yourself, and arguably make it more difficult to drive business for their own repair service. Lots of tiny screws requiring particular tools of different lengths that can't be mixed up, lest you permanently damage the phone. Glue that needs to be carefully removed or you risk dangerously damaging the battery. Just look at their repairability scores on iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit... .
User replaceable cell phone batteries used to be the norm, not the exception.
Batteries used to last a lot longer
> physical size, weight
Phones used to be a lot smaller as well
Few enough people want them that no one makes them anymore
(That’s what people mean when they say no one wanted them)
I know whenever I upgrade it will always be to a current state of Apple”s art because of these incremental consistent upgrades.
I”m very tempted to buy a new one. The last time I waited till it broke to upgrade.
You can google it, go to the website, go to any of their stores or authorized dealers, or click the link the phone gives you in the battery health view.
Short of apple beating down your door, what more do you expect
Most of the time I go into an Apple Store I don’t buy anything, and I’ve never gone in and bought something that I didn’t plan on buying before I arrived.
Don't kid yourself, it's not because you can visit for free that the whole thing isn't design to extract the most money possible...
iOS 15 got a security update less than 2 months ago. iOS 15 supports devices released in 2015.
How much further back should Apple support devices?
A computer from 1986 would be useless in 1996. A computer from 1996 would be useless in 2006.
Computers were getting so much faster so fast back then, that obsolescence was really a big deal.
There is physically no hardware support for 32 bit software on modern iPhones. Do you suggest that Apple still supports 32 bit iPhones and 64 bit iPhones?
Would third party developers want to support phones back to the iPhone 6 that is 6x slower and has 1/8 the RAM of a modern iPhone?
Should Apple support phones like the 3GS that doesn’t support LTE and has 256KB of RAM?
You used to have to pay for the OS on your hardware at each update. If I wanted to go from OSx Tiger to OSX leopard on my first Macbook, it cost me $99 at the time. That computer still works fine with Leopard. It does everything Apple said it would do when they sold it to me. Why would I be entitled for it to do the things that the latest macbook does?
If you still have a 2G or 3G only phone - in this case the iPhone 4s and earlier from 2011, they will stop working.
Also many websites will be inaccessible on older devices because of SSL certs.
You can't blame Apple that network and site providers don't continue to provide service, anymore than model T drivers can be upset that their local tire store doesn't stock tires for their car.
How is any company supposed to provide updates in perpetuity for technology advances that wasn't even planned at the time of purchase.
The fact that Apple has teams of developers providing free seamless updates to my iphone 11 from 6 years ago is a modern miracle. What other item in the market can you expect the maker to provide free maintenance and functional improvements for years after purchase?
Apple isn’t supporting older phones out of the goodness of their hearts. The larger the installed based, the more they can sell you. There biggest revenue increases are coming from Services
I agree with you, the fact that they are providing security updates for a phone that came out in 2015 as a recently as two months ago is remarkable
[1]: https://archive.nytimes.com/gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/201...
I never heard of someone who bought a new phone _solely_ for a new battery
I did.
I had a Samsung Galaxy s10e, and I have an s23 now, which I got on its launch. The only reason I got a new phone is because they don't have legit batteries to replace my shitty s10e battery in my country of residence (very shitty European country). No Samsung support, no iFixIt (they don't ship here), nothing. Just shady shops selling shady batteries.
I preferred the smaller size of the s10e, and software-wise it did everything I needed it to do. Plus I didn't have to rely on Bluetooth earbuds when I need(ed) to wear some earbuds.
Oh, and the battery has gotten noticeably worse in the past year and a half, and the _only_ reason why I will buy a new phone in a year, year and a half is that I know for a fact the battery life will become (even more) unbearable, and there aren't any official/legit channels through which I could replace the battery.
I know I'm talking about Samsung, but the same would apply to Apple here, and any other brand.
If this wasn't an issue for me, I could see myself using the same phone for 5-6 years, probably even longer if set up lineageOS on it -- but after +5 years I imagine I would like to use some new phone with its "new" features... which I will likely never really use in the first place
Every device I've ever wanted to keep after its battery started degrading (mostly laptops, but has happened with a phone too) I've either ordered one from ebay and replaced myself or went to a cheap local shop.
OE batteries aren't magical.
As with buying a battery from ebay, it's still not gonna be an OEM battery (or am I wrong?). OEM stuff is more important for phones than for laptops, I have found
It's a lot more nowadays. Magisk, lsposed, play integrity fork, shamiko, trickystore, custom keybox.xml, zygisk next... and with news of google now forcing certain apps (eg. chatgpt) to be installed from the Play Store + the device being of at least DEVICE integrity it's slowly all falling apart.
To me it seems like throwing money out of the window just for the sake of it.
I think you need to check how much iPhone cost nowadays.
Pro is 1000 USD. That's $16 per month. Easily affordable for most of developing world.
This argument sounds a lot like a used car salesman.
I think focusing on the monthly payment is deceptive. Especially with a device like a phone which could easily meet its doom before the 5.2 years used in your calculation are up.
It's reasonable to compare the total cost of ownership or the up front price. Your choice is a $1000 phone or (say) a $600 phone (new iPhone 14, no tax). There's $400 difference there. That's your money making the choice.
The question of whether it's worth it is something else.
It is for everyone that has is bank account in the red for half of their month. Which is a lot of people regardless if they live in a developing country or not. And those that can save money do not necessarily save money for a smartphone. They do it for their own financial safety. Even the streaming accounts are usually shared accross friends and families and said services don't crack down on them because they know they would simply lose their customers completely anyway. They would rather keep money in case their home need a reparation or their car they are using to go to work break down.
So when the time comes that their phone has issue, many of them are faced with a non scheduled financial issue. They will definitely repair their phone if it is more affordable than buying a new one. No wonder their are lots of repairing phones shops in every city. Where I live you can literally see a queue on the sidewalk during the opening hours. The alternative would be buying a second hand cell phone with the risk of ending up with one whose battery is already in average conditions.
Phones frequently die after 4-5 years.
They almost didn’t work on my daughter’s phone because of a tiny nick on front corner for fear of it spiderwebbing when they opened it. And some phones broken back glass is game over since it’s all glued to that surface.
By year two, the screen just gets grubbier and grubbier. By year three its just plan nasty.
It seems every year they are scratching even more. Not that it matters much tho.
The reason screens scratch more now than in the past is the tradeoff between shatter resistance and scratch resistance. Generally speaking, it’s very hard to make glass that is both resistant to scratching and shattering at the same time - you can trade off one for the other, but you can’t have both. (Of course as material science progresses the baseline improves - I’m talking about a given point in time at a given price point). In general, it’s much easier to live with light scratches in a screen than with a shattered screen, so the majority of mid-to-high-end phones make the trade off to favour shatter resistance over scratch resistance.
Next time you’re on public transit, or in line at a restaurant, or somewhere else people frequently use phones, take note of how many have cracked screens. Compare that to a decade+ ago where it was fairly common (for me at least) to see broken phone screens. Obviously anecdotal, and could be due to a number of compounding factors, but I very rarely see broken phone screens these days.
Cool anecdotal evidence, it does actually seem to be correct based on my experiences as well.
Though imo a screen protector is very little price (in terms of losing out on stuff, not monetary wise) to pay to have that scratched instead of the screen.
In any case, sounds like you have a lifestyle that doesn’t require one.
I depend on them. Really can’t tell a difference anymore with regards to feel, hue/light etc.
Not sure what the justification for the change would be, if anything it does make changing the back glass much faster as there is no need to scrape or laser blast the entire surface to remove all the adhesive. It would be interesting to see if this is also the case for the 16th gen.
Given how much Apple is pushing apple care (and how much they charge for back glass) - it's almost like incentives have turned around.
My iPhone barely fits in my jeans pocket as is. Piling 3-4 credit cards and some cash on top of that is way too much.
Had the X (10) for years and it was great and compact but the face-id broke, upgraded to the 13 (because i didn't need anything in the 14/15) and now i have a phone that's too bulky, and not as comfortable to hold.
The X was simply thinner, more rounded and a way better experience, also i feel almost no difference doing day to day stuff.
There are android phones that have this ability, I have one. New batteries are ~20 bucks, and they take about 5 minutes to swap, most of which is shutdown/boot time. I can take my phone out innawoods and use offline GPS all day, and as a flashlight at night, by just bringing a pocketfull of batteries.
When a battery goes bad, I toss it in the recycle bucket, and buy a new one. I currently have 10 of them and they're on rotation.
What that means is, I get a new phone when apps stop working, and I use very few apps, so, that's been 5+ years since I adopted this model. It'd certainly be better for the environment and better for the consumer if manufacturers were on-board with this idea, but, it'd be far worse for their margins, so, these devices only exist on the periphery.
That said, I do think that Apple could make this work for the masses. Simply pair the batteries with the phone, keep everyone in the walled garden, don't allow 3rd parties in willy nilly, and then charge more for new batteries. That that system and spin the hell out of it, make android/google/et al look like evil megacorps filling the earth with chemicals leached from 1-time use android phones, and call it a day.
"The masses" do not want to carry a bag of spare batteries. The masses don't want to have to think about it.
The latest generation devices are mostly "don't have to think about it" on batteries.
> New batteries are ~20 bucks
Gotta love those after-market or counterfeit high density inflammable energy packs crammed against your body or the bagful of 9 spares left in your car...
https://www.motleyrice.com/news/lithium-ion-batteries-explos...
Getting worse, not better:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/09/tech/lithium-ion-battery-fire...
I want real ones from a real company spending real money on R&D, that I "know where they live" if it's a problem.
Speaking of quality, I can use current iPhone off grid with offline GPS all day, and use it again the next day — without taking any battery packs.
The new "max" devices clock effectively two day battery life if you are conscious of what you're using it for (say, camping out off grid instead of doomscrolling Insta, for instance). I find even 3 or 4 sometimes if you're not picking it up and are in low energy and low data mode. Definitely 3 - 4 if you shut it off while asleep. It's nuts.
You see sir, when manufacturers compete on price we call that free market, and when you try to stop that we call that overregulation or protectionism.
But when talking about apple we suddenly call it ‘counterfeit’
Regardless of safety/counterfeit, you do realise that the OP has like 2 weeks supply of batteries for camping or apocalypse, and if ‘off grid living’ is your use case, it’s a slam-dunk?
And for apocalyptic scenarios your LiPos will naturally degrade collectively together in a few years even if they sit unused. An external battery with a more stable long term chemistry would be better.
Also if you're talking about the world being dark for 3 years, not sure batteries are the thing to stock up on friend. We'd be well into mad-max mode after a few months I'd think, and after a year or so of that, well, nothing's going to come back for a good long time.
I'm much more concerned with making it, say, a week without being able to charge, which, I can easily do without thinking too much.
Friends don't let friends go camping with a bag full of replaceable phone batteries.*
A couple alternatives I like...
This costs considerably less per milliwatt-hour than even ~$20 replaceable phone batteries, and is rather more useful camping:
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerCore-Portable-Retractable-...
If one needs more oomph, this is 6 lbs, so I wouldn't take it for a walk. Depends on the type of camping:
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Portable-Generator-Traveling-Em...
For the little bank, something like Anker Solix PS30 Solar Panel charges like a wall wart with just a couple hours' midday sun in northern U.S. or southern E.U.:
https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Foldable-Resistance-Ultra-Fast-...
North of 40th, combo can get us through strings of rainy days off grid while not thinking about it.
To cost less, on Alibaba you can match case style, plug placements, and feature/functions to find the same OEM models as well-known portable power and solar brands for a fraction of price if one doesn't mind ship time.
* That said, this is all one's power eggs in one power basket. To your point, a bag full of batteries means one can fry half a dozen and still have a few juicy eggs to suck dry, but don't lose tools or phone bits and bobs on field replacements and one will still want a panel or two to top them off!
In terms of power banks, I'm currently hoarding my friend's disposable vapes which all have fairly high output LiPO batteries in them. All I need once I'm done harvesting is a few 3D printed parts, a aliexpress BMS, and some wiring, and I'll have way more capacity than I know what to do with for very, very cheap. BMS is the most expensive part really, the rest is a few bucks, and, if I kill a cell, well, there's an abundance of disposable vape batteries available.
I can't see how juggling internal batteries is anything but the worst possible option. I can upgrade or replace any one component without obsoleting the rest. How many future phones will accept your stockpile of batteries?
And they offer a little charging dock with pogo pins, so, no wearing out the USBC port.
I will admit, the main bottleneck is that I only have 3 battery dock chargers. So unless I'm planning on needing it, half of those batteries are charging or dead at any given time.
I'd bet I could be camping for a month or so with the batteries I have if I really put my mind to it.
False, most people I know are already doing this, they're just doing it with a big lithium pouch cell coupled with a BMS/charge controller called a "battery bank"
>Gotta love those after-market or counterfeit high density inflammable energy packs crammed against your body or the bagful of 9 spares left in your car...
Never had one pop, never left anything lithium powered in a car. A black car on a very hot day in a very hot region can reach ~160f, which is hotter than the recommended storage temp of lithium batteries. Most places with a non-black car won't get hot enough to be a problem. Lithium batteries are fine to store up to ~140F. Do understand that the air in your car being 160f doesn't mean your batteries are, just that they will be eventually. How long is eventually? Ultra-situational. Put your batteries in a cooler, you're probably good forever. Put them loose on the dashboard, probably not good for very long. Same thing goes for your phone, or anything else with a lithium battery. They're not the boogyman, they're not magic, they're subject to the laws of thermodynamics just like everything else.
The reason for caution really is that you don't know the condition of your batteries. They could have been damaged but still function just fine until you put them into some marginal condition and then they're very not fine very quickly.
That's not specific to the batteries I carry in my backpack, that's the battery in your iphone too, and a quick google for "iphone battery fire" is proof of that enough.
That said, if your iphone sets your pants on fire, what're you realistically going to do? Sue apple? You know, the multibillion dollar a year company with so many lawyers that they have them setup in a huge building all their own? Good luck, you have exactly the same amount of recourse I do, ie, none. You also probably have auto insurance, and renters/homeowners insurance, so, it burning down your car/house/etc is well covered at least.
>effectively two day battery life if you are conscious
What people actually don't like doing is being forced to be 'conscious' of their devices. They don't really even like having to charge their devices. Throw a small standby battery in an iphone, have it pop the back off, swap in an iBattery that lives in your iBattery dock (which is also insulated and keeps your iBatteries charged up), and you're off to the races. Apple could make this a really good system.
They won't, because they exist to be as anti-consumer as possible while not pissing them off so much that they look elsewhere because that's what is profitable.
Precisely. That means you can "not think about it" 4x as much as without it. One of those with USB-C in and a solar charger has gotten us by off grid for years, as well as perfect for long haul travel. No five minutes replaceable mucking about needed.
It's one thing, not a bag of 10, it packs slim, won't slow you down on an all-day all-night "Midnight Madness" scavenger hunt in NYC, and won't get you pulled out of line at the aeroport.
Also never had trouble flying with batteries. They're always in a ziplock and tossed into a bin, then back into my carryon. You can't check anything with a lithium battery, or, you're not supposed to at least.
not to pick on you but it’s baffling the way some people clothe themselves in right to repair and then bust out some shit like this. this is absolutely insane from an e-waste and frankly just regular-waste perspective.
I’m sure it’s very convenient and granted everyone needs batteries, but still, “they fail and I throw them away and buy new ones, I currently have 10” is objectively insane and I have to think that buying shitty non-oem batteries is a major part of why you churn batteries so much.
“I said it sounds like he’s just feeding e-waste to landfills and hackernews started crying”
maybe think about buying some 18650 batteries and a power bank or something, idk. You can get cold-weather 18650 cells which improve outdoors performance a lot, and good quality 18650s last a half decade or more.
Really disappointing how right to repair just turned out to be a fashion accessory for most people, and the actual boots-on-the-ground aspects like oem parts availability and not using disposable junk batteries didn’t sink in, people are literally happy to have a backpack full of 10 Amazon batteries they change out every 6 months if it means they get to bash apple and feel smug about it. The discussion around usb-c vs lightning went much the same way - people were exuberant at the prospect of filling the landfills full of discarded cables (on a port that's been around for a decade), as long as they were the right cables. People bashed the self-service/OEM parts availability for being some kind of plot or conspiracy. People bashed it because the OEM factory repair tools apple will rent or sell you are too big and clunky.
There really, really ought to be a real attempt to account and attribute some of these total lifecycles, independently of some of the fandom and some of the actors involved with R2R with their own personal foibles and financial interests. Specifically thinking of component-level repair as not being in the interest of certain major backers of R2R, for example. There should be an accounting of what the actual cost is for that decision, vs the aspects of R2R increasing the churn on these essentially-disposable amazon batteries and other junk and so on. Those things need to be attributed in the total lifecycle cost too, if bunches of people keep doing the same thing you are that's a real social problem. Ten batteries, and I just swap them out when they fail and buy new ones to throw away. One of the most polluting and dangerous and toxic parts of the phone. Good lord.
I hope you are at least sending them for proper disposal, but even that is not currently even close to full recycling efficiency iirc.
It's a lithium recycle bucket at my local library. I'll admit, I don't really know what the service is that they use, but I do assume that those batteries are getting turned into new batteries somewhere. They could end up landfilled though, your guess is as good as mine. I'm not really sure why you thought "recycle bucket" meant "where the aluminum cans go"...
>buying shitty non-oem batteries is a major part of why you churn batteries so much.
Funny enough, the OEM batteries are LION, and the replacements are LIPO, so, the replacements actually have a fair bit more capacity than the originals, at like half the cost. I've only replaced 3 of them in 5 years, and I bought 10 when I bought the phone. I do have a couple I have sharpie'd red because they are down on capacity but still usable, but they still get me a full day without any drama. That's my benchmark for replacement, if it doesn't make it a day, into the bucket it goes, and back to amazon for a new one.
Something you're missing though is, I can get aftermarket batteries for my phone, and, I have at least 3 different designs in my possession, so, there's good competition in that space. It's china-based competition, but, it seems to have yielded good results here.
Do understand that, I'm likely keeping this phone 2-3x as long as most people keep their phones, basically until an app I use stops working because the android version I have is too old. So maybe I go through a few batteries, but, I'd end up doing that regardless. What I don't go through is any of the other components, so far less waste there. Not why I do it, but, a nice side effect nonetheless.
>There really, really ought to be a real attempt to account and attribute some of these total lifecycles
I couldn't agree more honestly. I think the 2-3 year phone churn is absolutely abhorrent for many reasons. I also think $1000+ phones are equally abhorrent given their lifecycle, and how features continue to be stripped out of phones and sold as features. Sure, consumers are of middling intelligence (objectively), that doesn't mean companies aren't also a little evil. I also don't think that the current incentive structure is going to allow for any of that to change, no matter how well presented any argument to the contrary is. You effectively have zero competition in the phone space, because they've made it intentionally difficult to switch between flavors of phone. That alone should be a multi-billion dollar antitrust lawsuit against anyone who does it. Then you can go after things like glued-in screens and soldered/glued in batteries and charging ports that are PCB mounted to the mainboard. Get rid of those things and you probably wind up with something that'll last a very, very long time. You also probably get rid of incremental tech improvements altogether because they won't be worth the R&D dollars. Hard to tell what the unintended consequences of that would be.
Apple's business model partially depends on selling people a new phone every few years. If people switch to battery replacements in place of new phones in large quantities, that is going to significantly hurt their business model.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment...
That’s not an accident, they spent a lot of effort building up their portfolio when this trend was obviously unavoidable. They’d love it if you buy a new phone every year but they’re almost as happy if you keep the same phone for 5 years, buy apps, and subscribe to Apple One. One of the really big questions is what impact the EU DMA will have on this strategy: a lot of what’s kept them ahead of Android on things like CPUs is the geyser of App Store cash stabilizing revenue for long-term commitments.
To note, that's a regional thing. It seems to stop at gen2 for Asian countries for ex.
> Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years
iPhone batteries become subpar way faster than that, especially the older models who get more strained as they bear the heavier OS. Once every year and a half looks more realistic to me.
Also, 3 year battery life is much more realistic to me than 1.5 years, but that's just personal experience.
On third party repairs...it's sure getting better, hopefully in other regions as well.
Ah, could be. I use iPhones intensively, but almost never for gaming.
So while batteries certainly can go subpar faster, they can and do last much longer sometimes.
I also babied it and rarely charged above 80 or fell below 25, which may have played a part but who knows.
Anecdote from one person who buys lots of phones for extended family: I see no such phenomenon
500 cycles can be a lot if you mostly keep it as a standby device to stay reachable, but not that much if you actually use the phone everyday.
That's less than 2 years if you completely drain the phone at least once a day. Our kid easily goes through two full charges in a day, especially on weekends. It really depends on what you use your phone for.
Also I think some people live with a < 70% battery without really minding it much. That's IMO only viable if you don't have a winter, where the battery efficiency becomes so worse. That's the combination of weak battery + poor weather that triggered the phone shutdown for me when BatteryGate was the rage.
It's a shame, because I like the phone a lot otherwise.
And I’ve never met anyone who replaces their battery after a year and a half. At least not an iPhone.
I’ve replaced a battery once.
Maybe I’m just lucky. But I also don’t view having to charge during the day as a problem that I need to fix. Other than just charging it.
I just got mine replaced on my pixel 6, total cost was $200.
Still gonna hang onto it because there's no reason to replace but yeah labor costs for android are a bit ridiculous.
I've done four or five battery replacements on various Pixel phones, each time battery was 15$ max. I've done the replacement myself, but I know that in an (unauthorized, obviously) repair shop the work costs maybe 10-15$ and takes twenty minutes. The math is the same for iPhones, maybe 10$ more.
69-99$ is an "Authorized Apple Service" tax.
- Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones
- More battery life.
- Better camera (arguably already achieved)
- lesser issue but fix the stupid bugs with storage/duplication with pictures and messages. I am already paying for a TB level plan with iCloud. How can my phone possibly run out of storage?
That’s it. All the AI stuff is marginal at best and useless at worst. The new UI stuff they introduced sometime ago? Doesn’t really get used by anyone I know. Control center was probably the last useful feature added. If they did a release where they removed features to simplify iOS I would upgrade.
I don't actually know how this will be implemented into iMessage but it's supposed to bring feature parity between android and apple.
EDIT: looks like still green bubbles https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apples-rcs-texting-starts-i...
Like, sure, yeah it's possible but all the stacks in between are too heavily ossified.
> but for American android users refusing to use other apps.
As if it's just those pesky Android users that won't just use another app. Lots of my contacts only want iMessage. Show me the APK signed by Apple, the Google store page managed by them, and I'll install it.
You realize it's not me, the Android user, being unwilling to use something other than iMessage/SMS? It is the iPhone users I wish to communicate with that don't want to use Whatsapp/Signal/LINE/Facebook Messenger/Element/Telegram/WeChat/Threema/Viber/GroupMe/Discourd/Teams/Allo/Discord.
Give me an app that actually directly supports iMessage on Android and I'll use it. Not something which is trying to proxy through some other device. Something either made or directly blessed by Apple.
Messages is the app. It currently supports SMS/MMS and iMessage protocols. It will soon also support RCS. So soon all those people who will only use Messages on their phones will be able to send and receive high quality videos and images with me. I'm quite excited for the change.
Suggesting RCS doesn't bring any new features other than advertising and spam is being extremely disingenuous. Larger attachments and other extensions, while not quite feature parity with iMessage, are leagues ahead of what was available by SMS and MMS. Effectively available, not just what was theoretically allowable by a spec but not actually possible due to limitations with service providers.
The automated backups (which are not e2ee) serve as endpoint key escrow (to the middle service), backdooring the e2ee of iMessage.
As for green text, this is purely a US thing. Most of the rest of the world uses Whatsapp.
I don't have WhatsApp and literally nobody ever asked me to use it, even if I know they have it. they just flat out don't care as long as a message gets across.
Sure people use a variety of messenger apps, Whatsapp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat. Since you don't have a guarantee that any one person is using this or that the default messaging app (Messages on iOS, whatever it is on Android) SMS is the safest bet that always works. That's typically what people use when they get someone 's contact: hand over phone, ask to type number in focused input field, send $firstname SMS; bam, handshake done.
> WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there
Lots of people here have WhatsApp. Doesn't mean it's their go-to, they still don't ditch SMS[0] nor dunk on "green bubbles". And then if both parties have an iPhone it just so happens that they obliviously converse over iMessage as a side effect.
[0] Except for group chats. But then they just create groups in whatever's at hand, which may or may not be WhatsApp. And that's mostly because SMS group messaging is thoroughly broken (as in it works more like email than IRC and people want the latter). But for 1:1? SMS is brutally consistent.
So there's often motivation to install your country's dominant messaging app beyond just the cost of SMS.
If they were expensive, users jumped ship right away. If they were nearly free, people just kept using them on brand new devices as there were no compelling enough arguments to switch.
To answer your question more directly, Sweden comes to mind.
Why does that need to be stated?
Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones
Better camera (arguably already achieved)
I don't think iMessage is big anywhere outside the US (which appears to account for about 9% of iPhone users). I don't think a majority of global users even knows there are different colors.
Also free/unlimited SMS was prevalent in many countries before WhatsApp or iMessage. And there were plenty of IMs before that too.
I still doubt it, especially since it’s the same green for FaceTime, Phone, and the icon that still represents iMessage.
Like when I'm listening to a Spotify playlist and I want to like the song or save it to a playlist while driving, it would be amazing if I could just tell Siri to do it for me. As-is, sometimes it tells me it doesn't how to play songs on Spotify.
Or they were showing how you would be able to look for photo by describing it.
The capability set is indistinguishable.
Spotify already supports liking a song via Siri.
https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri-and-spotify/
Unfortunately adding to a playlist would require Spotify to add that capability. Siri doesn't learn how to navigate third party UI and infer potential actions, the context of what is currently going on and the actions which can be performed need to be codified by the developer.
Siri is a hybrid dictation and command-and-control system (at least today), which is why it sometimes decides the closest action to what you said is something obviously different from what you asked for. Unfortunately this is done via a dynamic vocabulary, so it leads to situations where something you were able to ask for before (like the local weather) suddenly changes behavior because you installed an app with "weather" in its metadata.
This also poses a unique problem for streaming and downloading media services, because the valid targets for the command aren't locally known - it's all the media on Spotify in this case. So "play enter sandman" won't know to infer whether you are asking to play an album in the cloud vs a game which hasn't been installed vs the "Sandman" series on Netflix - it may instead decide the best guess was you meant you wanted to "read" the books you have locally installed.
I feel the later generation of phones went back a bit as they have more aggressive processing. It can work great, but the hit or miss ratio is worse, in particular noise processing can be way off.
That's crazy the budget Pixel a lone gets overall better photos than a top of the line iPhone.
I preferred it when they saved the original and processed photos. Now there is no way to turn it off.
Worst part for me is when I get to see a perfect picture that gets processed a blink later and can never be recovered.
This has happened to me way too many times. I take a picture, it looks great, then shortly after it gets processed so badly it's all blurred up with no return because of some forced long exposure low light compensation feature that cannot be disabled.
It's not ideal; I'd like to see more attention given to multitasking in general, the re-arranging deck of cards system has always been counterintuitive and clumbsy in my opinion.
For the Pro Model. Yes. Not for the normal iPhone though. 2x Optical Zoom is barely enough. Especially when I default to taking photos with 1.8x which fits my view point a lot better. So when I get 5x optical zoom it is more like 2.5x only.
And if there is one thing I would add to the list is weight. The Pro model is too heavy.
For measurement I found Apple's app disappointing, even on the Pro models it isn't accurate to the scales I typically work with (centimeters.)
For the image search, i use this https://github.com/mazzzystar/Queryable
You don’t use the camera for QR codes? Fine you don’t want to scan things for information. You don’t use the image recognition in the camera app to select people and copy them out of the background? That’s fine you don’t participate selfies and party photos. To do OCR on text in photos? It’s fine that you never want it. To select e.g. plants and search for what they are on Google? It’s fine that you know what everything is/don’t care/don’t photograph plants. To search your photo library by text for things and people recognised in the pictures? Fine that you know where all your pictures are. To describe photos by voice? Fine that you have good eyesight.
You don’t use the builtin daily steps tracker, or any third party running or cycling or exercise mapping / route trackers, or any Garmin style route planners? Fine that you don’t have other devices for that kind of thing or don’t go out.
You don’t use the weather app, or a third party one? Fine that you don’t want to.
You don’t use any remote terminal, Remote Desktop, programming, Jupyter, anything? Fine that you have a laptop which does everything you need.
Kindle, any ebook reader, any podcast app? Fine that you have paper and don’t listen to posts.
Any music player? Fine that you don’t listen to music.
Any Netflix style video or TV show app, BBC iPlayer? Fine that you don’t even own a TV.
Any third party camera app such as night eyes or webcam stacking, or use the phone as a wireless webcam on another computer? Fine that you aren’t interested in photo novelties.
No Evernote or OneNote cloud synced notebooks or todo lists? Calendar? Email? Fine that you only ever write plain text in a plain text file and you don’t have meetings or appointments.
No local train, tram, bus, library, cinema, schedule app? Fine that you drive everywhere or go nowhere.
No educational apps? Fine that you learn things in other ways. No Chatgpt? Fine that you don’t ask LLMs things. No Google or phind or kagi search? Also fine.
Look, 25 years in tech, am I really writing out a list of “things people do on phones” as if I genuinely believe that you’ve never heard of any of this stuff while also adding how it’s fine because I’m totally expecting you to do the “too cool for school” dismissal of everything?
Has your 25 years in tech been Bronze Age tech? You must be 40 ish, and lived through the era of dumb phones being new and everyone talking about nothing but what contract texts and minutes they had, the time when everyone had Blackberries, the time when features were things like a compass, clock, snake game, custom ringtones, FM radio, and people were doing endless comparisons of their new phone to their old one, the first camera phones, when data went from WAP to GPRS to 2G and web browsers, when “location based services” were called out on TV adverts, and all through the smartphone years nobody ever showed you the cool app they just found, when translating foreign signs was coded in assembly on a 3GS to being just a built in thing in Google camera, when Evernote was a tech darling as people realised the cloud sync convenience, when “no Wi-Fi less space than a nomad” gave way to “all previous gadgets are now one” and the rise of smart tv and smart homes and appliances with their own apps and streaming, every app launched on “show HN” or linked,
you missed everything for fifteen years and “don’t really know what people do with phones anyway?”
That’s got to be a troll comment where you know very well what people do and are pretending not to because you look cooler if you’re disaffected and uninvolved… Right?
Why else would you have no interest in phones but be in an iPhone 16 launch thread? and think your comment on how you don’t even use a phone anyway is a good comment worth posting?
Or you have main character syndrome and think the only things which exist should be for you to use need nothing else matters?
Assume good faith… are you … hoping someone can share a list of “things phones can do?” then here is another partial one.
Of course I use a few other things, just very rarely. I do my programming on a laptop, I watch my tv on a tv, I read my books on my kindle, and use my car's nav for maps.
I hope you realize the irony of your "main character syndrome" accusation whilst writing a massive diatribe denouncing a random post on the internet. You could have just disagreed and moved on.
>You don’t use maps for looking around? For navigation while driving? You’re allowed to have in-car satnav or not drive.
I do indeed use Waze, with the occasional PoC/location check in Google Maps in the browser.
>You don’t use the camera for QR codes? Fine you don’t want to scan things for information. You don’t use the image recognition in the camera app to select people and copy them out of the background? That’s fine you don’t participate selfies and party photos. To do OCR on text in photos? It’s fine that you never want it. To select e.g. plants and search for what they are on Google? It’s fine that you know what everything is/don’t care/don’t photograph plants. To search your photo library by text for things and people recognised in the pictures? Fine that you know where all your pictures are. To describe photos by voice? Fine that you have good eyesight.
Google Lens and Assistant serve these tasks for me. Especially useful when I need to find something on the Chinese web.
>You don’t use the builtin daily steps tracker, or any third party running or cycling or exercise mapping / route trackers, or any Garmin style route planners? Fine that you don’t have other devices for that kind of thing or don’t go out.
My watch does that and I sync it every other month with its app (which is complete useless bloat, but oh well).
>You don’t use the weather app, or a third party one? Fine that you don’t want to.
I do that in the browser.
>You don’t use any remote terminal, Remote Desktop, programming, Jupyter, anything? Fine that you have a laptop which does everything you need.
I occasionally do use RDP to check on my server, although it's so rare that I usually don't even have the RDP app installed. Wish there was some client for RDP that could run in the browser instead, similarly to qBitTorrent's GUI (not neccessarily hosted locally, it might as well be a web app that connects to the local network - IF that's possible, that is).
>Kindle, any ebook reader, any podcast app? Fine that you have paper and don’t listen to posts.
Nope, not in the target demographic for any of these...
>Any music player? Fine that you don’t listen to music.
Spotify, YouTube and Tidal. Occasionally, I also use Telegram and Poweramp for FLAC playback, although I don't have Poweramp installed at this moment and Telegram is not something I often think about when it comes to audio playback.
>Any Netflix style video or TV show app, BBC iPlayer? Fine that you don’t even own a TV.
YouTube exclusively. If I want to watch some show I do it via shady, but legal (in Poland) websites in the browser. Android can handle HTML5 players just fine, although I slightly prefer iOS' unified player, especially when it comes to hiDPI.
>Any third party camera app such as night eyes or webcam stacking, or use the phone as a wireless webcam on another computer? Fine that you aren’t interested in photo novelties.
A Google Camera modification is my single camera app. Does almost everything - good night shots, way better day shots than the default Xiaomi camera etc. - remote webcam is the only thing I don't have, but I have an old phone that sometimes serves this purpose.
>No Evernote or OneNote cloud synced notebooks or todo lists? Calendar? Email? Fine that you only ever write plain text in a plain text file and you don’t have meetings or appointments.
Nope - I only have an e-mail client out of those. Calendar - well, I do have the built-in one, but I exclusively use it to check which day of the week is day X going to be. I don't really have appointments, and when I do I fixate on them so much it's hard to forget them.
>No local train, tram, bus, library, cinema, schedule app? Fine that you drive everywhere or go nowhere.
IF I rarely need to check the schedule (public transport/cinema) for anything I do it via the browser. No need for Yet Another App (TM) that doubles the web app they release regardless.
>No educational apps? Fine that you learn things in other ways. No Chatgpt? Fine that you don’t ask LLMs things. No Google or phind or kagi search? Also fine.
I ask the LLM questions... in the browser! The ChatGPT mobile site is absolutely sufficient for all of my needs. Google - I do have the app but I do searches exclusively in browser as well.
At this point, I'm not going to be interested (dead battery isn't "interested") in the upgrade cycle until there's a new kind of sensor, e.g. thermal imaging or (technically possible in software) repurposing the WiFi as a wall penetrating radar.
Even on the dev side, WWDC for the last few years feels more like "here's an even more complicated way to create a simple app" instead of "this will make your life easier because x" or "y is increasing important, use tool z to support it".
Similar reasoning even before I stopped being excited.
I've got an SE 3, which makes me aware how many UI teams don't design and/or test for narrower displays.
(But also, the move away from touch ID to face ID feels worse to me; when I do finally replace this phone, I'll likely return to using my actual cards for contactless payments rather than Apple Wallet with face ID).
Have you used FaceID? I was skeptical of it, but within the first day or two I was sold. It’s so seamless, and there are some safe guards. If you’re not looking at the camera with your eyes open, it won’t work. You can also repeatedly mash the lock button to disable it. I haven’t needed to do this, but if I ever see a potential situation coming, I’d likely reach into my pocket and quietly kill FaceID, but I’d want to do the same with TouchID as well.
I’m curious, why would you use your cards over an iPhone with FaceID? The card seems more vulnerable, as anyone could use it (unless you’re in a country where a pin is the norm for credit).
The technical stuff is all fine, and it works as you say (I noticed the "look at screen" requirement myself a while back); my dislike is purely the practical issues, not the technical, as the arrangement of the contactless mechanisms in stores means the camera can either face me or the device can be close enough to the reader to work, but not both. Also, I'm still wearing masks quite often (not 100% of the time as when I bought the SE, but quite often) and for that, Touch works better than Face.
I suppose theoretically I could set up the Wallet on the Apple Watch, but I find the watch to be disappointingly difficult to get on with, again for UX reasons. (On screen buttons are too small and often reject touches entirely, everything is so slow to respond it might as well be going via a random website).
Regarding security, there's inherent (and fairly low) limits to the maximum payment, and cards can be disabled in banking apps if they go missing.
(I'd count your anecdote as "UI team": developer-designer collaboration rather than siloing each speciality).
https://www.flir.com/products/flir-one-edge-pro/?vertical=co...
The general customers definitely want more. They are getting excited by AI in camera apps (existed before the AI hype) and other stuffs.
I find this example interesting, because on the android side I would rank these two in the top 10 _most_ notable improvements made to phones in the last 5-10 years.
I have had multiple "normies" use my phone in the last few years and ask why it felt so smooth - and every time the difference between my phone and theirs has been a higher refresh rate display (what apple calls "ProMotion").
iOS, most apps, most websites, even most video isn't mastered as such and not consumed in those conditions.
Your GP and optometrist would certainly prefer you don't do it. I can't speak to the frequency of how much other people do it, but my wife and I try to avoid it, not always successfully.
I have an incredible TV. OLED with increased brightness, the latter being new tech. The combination of OLED and HDR is jaw dropping to witness. To me and to everybody that I show it to.
What do I show them? A Youtube list with TV demo videos that specifically demonstrate the effect. Deep blacks with locally bright highlights. Not to mention very deep vibrant colors.
I watch the demo videos every 2 months or so to remind myself that I have an awesome TV. Because I most certainly do not experience anything remotely like that on ordinary TV channels, streaming services, the like.
Streaming services absolutely have HDR programming. My GF has been incredibly impressed as a normie.
Probably more impressed than me because I consider OLED to be relatively meh for HDR. Not really bright enough for me, I only care about OLED largely for black depth / lack of glow and motion quality for games, I rarely watch TV/movies in comparison.
Hence my remark on OLED with increased brightness. In the TV world, they're called OLED.EXT panels. The new iPad Pro uses a different technique (layered panels) to achieve the same thing.
Infinitely deep blacks combined with high local brightness is god-like to experience.
The money I would give to have this in a form useful to me is beyond what most people would considerable reasonable. But god I want it.
Contrarian opinion on the AirPods. Apple says that they think the new noise cancellation "auto adjust" is better on the "human" side of things, and the social - they showed an interaction where the barista started talking to the wearer, and the AirPods adjusted so the barista could be heard.
To me, that's not social, I think it's actually anti-social. It moves the onus onto anyone who wants to or needs to interact with you to assume that you can hear them, that you're focused on the conversation, etc.
It really wouldn't kill you to remove an airpod (or any headphone) if you are in public initiating interactions with someone, for just a few moments.
"Great for when you don't have your airpods with you"
Yes, and surely it will be normalized in the culture to just blast your watch in public.
I was doing retail work around COVID and there were many many people who didn't have the decency to hold phone calls while checking out let alone taking off headphones.
you can just do this. but sometimes your hands are full, or you dont have use of them, or you dont want to drop your airpod.
Actually, I've found this creates more social friction, not less. I spent a while listening to some books while working, and originally had noise canceling turned on. Every time someone came over to talk about something, whether I paused and turned noise canceling off or removed the ear pieces, there was always an awkward moment for the person talking to me while they had to stop what they were starting to say, wait for me and then usually apologize for interrupting. It felt extremely anti-social, and I think a part of that is that headphones were for a very long time considered anti-social and the act of removing them was often a signal that someone was interrupting you (and that you didn't really want to be interrupted). But when you're using headphones in a shared space, it's usually less about not wanting to be interrupted and more being considerate that not everyone wants to listen to the same things you're listening to.
Eventually I left them in transparency mode and kept the volume low enough that I could carry on a conversation over it, and could subtly reduce the volume while still holding a conversation. No more awkward pausing and restarting, no more apologies and the "hardest" thing I have to do is maybe rewind a bit after I'm done with the conversation. So much less anti-social feeling all around.
And dont even get me started on the robots that are talking into the void when out in public. I have no idea if they are trying to talk to me or on a phone call because their airpods are hidden.
If you feel Apple isn't actively facing a xx% risk to their business by 2030, you're beside yourself. Its not that people are switching away, or that Apple overtly missed some major tech trend; people just aren't upgrading anymore. They need to come up with something a lot more drastic to keep people motivated toward spending $1000+/year with them; its not ungrateful, its not cynical, its the market. AI is not it.
If they're able to figure out a mass market VR headset that will give them another push for new phone sales. I hear the "spatial photos/videos" are very cool.
I think the broader problem is that no one knows what "it" is; what comes next. We had web3, crypto, AR, VR, now AI, but none of these things feel like they have the horsepower to launch another $30B in quarterly or even annual revenue for Apple.
Just because phones are maturing doesn't necessarily mean a new computing paradigm is right around the corner.
If there's an Apple exec reading this, you can pay me for this idea before committing billions to develop and subsequently cancel it when everybody realizes it's dumb.
- 20% chance they continue to iterate on the Vision Pro or its successors for the next 5+ years
- 40% chance they release one more non-pro model that’s maybe half the cost and nobody buys it
- 40% chance it’s already dead and the Vision Pro is all we see of that whole product line.
If I were CEO I would definitely kill it now and lay off everyone involved. It was an experiment and it didn’t work out. Nobody wants or needs VR. Hardly anyone even remembers that it exists.
They’ve now discovered that $3500 device for a solitary person to watch 3D Disney movies isn’t it.
But personally I would bet they give it a runway to try and figure out how to make VR happen.
I have no idea if AR/VR will ever really be a thing, but this is hardly the first time Apple has launched a product that struggled with fit initially. It's also the first time they've launched so expensive of a consumer "gadget" as the initial foray into a market as a core product - the original iPhone was "only" $900ish in today-dollars, so the vision pro is nearly 4x in price, and apple slashed the price to $600ish in today-dollars shortly after launch. (Obviously they've had expensive computers, but the pricing wasn't out of the norm for the industry)
The original iPhone also totally flopped outside of the US. Total worldwide sales a year in were about 4 million, almost entirely all in the US. That's quite a bit better than the AVP, but, phones are also quite a bit more ubiquitous than the AVP. Smartphones were also already much more mainstream of a concept at the time the iPhone launched - you already had half a decade of Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm, etc. devices out there. VR stuff has existed too, but it's remained much more niche.
The Watch and HomePod's initial versions had slow starts. The watch is obviously a big deal to them now, and the homepod has done OK with the mini.
Sometimes it takes 2-3 generations to figure out a product fit. If Apple cut products every time the first generation product didn't meet expectations, we'd certainly have fewer Apple products.
It needs to be in a sunglasses form-factor for anybody to care. The tech isn’t here yet, might never be.
I figure Apple hasn't depended on latest model upgrades every year for a while now. Hell I'm going 12 to 16 Pro because I'm sick of not being able to photograph birds well.
But still, it masks the problem of an underlying demand that will stagnate if not decline. They're aware of this danger, hence to pivot to earn more from services.
Apple sold 232M iPhones in 2023, and had 1.83B active iPhone users.
Doing a little math, they'd need their existing users to upgrade every six years to keep selling them at the current rate. Your friend would still be ahead of the curve for Apple if he goes forward with that upgrade.
be very curious to know what percentage of users bought second hand
Apple only needs a device to last 6 years(on average) to keep current sales levels, that includes all the irreparably damaged, or irrecoverably lost and bricked ones after theft etc.
Even if a device did last 10 years on average, Apple will still sell 183M units a year, iPhone is only 50% of the total revenues, so roughly 5% of their total revenue would be impacted, that is also ignoring additional revenue generated due to service and parts and batteries needed for older phones between 6-10 years.
A net impact of say 3-4% of revenue while significant wouldn't really change their fundamental numbers or long term market value. The market has already accounted for no further iPhone sales growth in the models anyway for last few years.
They need to only convince people over the next few years on the value of Apple Intelligence not with 16 right way to upgrade, coupled with lightening to USB switch since 15, it will be enough of motivator for 11 to 14 users to switch during the 17/18 cycle and beyond.
What’s changed is that Apple increments the model number every year instead of every two years, and you can probably blame Samsung for that a bit. Your friends probably still upgrade every 4 years like we almost always used to. I remember getting the 3G for the network improvement, the 3G S for the speed bump and video recording, the 4 for Siri, the 4S for a speed bump, … back then it was often the case that the non-S model was a new design with last year’s chip, and the S model was a speed bump with last year’s design.
If anything’s changed, it’s that they often spec bump the processor every year in minor ways, instead of every 2 years, and the increases are steadily more incremental than they used to be. If you ask me, it’s because Apple doesn’t have competition in the mobile phone CPU space yet. (Or ever, while Qualcomm holds so many patents…)
Also it’s more clear than ever before that the iPhone X, Max, Pro series are all ways to ask for more money for the exact same chip/product. Some years the Pro is significantly faster because it gets the new CPU first, but by the next year both Pro and non-Pro end up getting the same CPU for cost reasons. It’s telling that most years Apple doesn’t claim a speed increase between the Pro and non-Pro models. For example, if I recall correctly the only difference for the iPhone 13 was actually software. Likewise in this generation (16) it feels like the only difference between Pro and non-Pro is the SoC binning and the binning of the quality of the OLED in minor ways.
What an accurate profile! I work in an engineering role in IT, and I'm like your girlfriend when it comes to the phone. Like, I don't even know whether my iphone is max or max pro, as it does not make a difference to me. The top apps that I use are Kindle, Books, Chrome (for tracking my progress on dreamingspanish.com), Podcast, Spotify, Maps, and as everyone else: some social/messaging apps. Everyone of such apps seems work just fine on a much older phone.
It would actually make the phone more comfortable in the hands too because they could improve the weight balance.
But my 70yo mother, who is pretty far from being technologically savvy, uses continuity every day to copy one-time-use codes from her phone to her computer, even though she'd have no idea what the term "continuity" means in this context. She notices that it's easier to snap better pictures in more conditions than it was a few years back (and that pictures she receives are better looking on average, too). She uses 1Password with FaceID, which I set up for her, because it's so easy to just look at your phone to unlock that there's very little in the way of enabling and using that, and she doesn't need to write down passwords anymore.
I think some of the magic of the Apple ecosystem is that you don't have to know about these things in order to use them. Someone shows you how to do something (Apple could certainly improve on the organic discoverability of many of these features! Some are impossible to find without looking), and then it often just works. And these things do keep getting closer to that ideal over time, with each generation. When I first started using continuity — long before my mother did — it definitely did not work all the time, and I persisted because I'm a techie early adopter. Eventually, though, it reached a state where once folks learn about it, they can just use it.
I'm also not sure about the 3-4 year number, at least from personal experience, fwiw. We pass down phones in my family, and it easily takes 5-6 generations for them to reach the end of that chain and be in use for a year or two before they're switched out for the next model. Battery has never been the reason someone in that chain switched phones.
Phone definitely last longer so 6 years sounds about right, as after that they tend to get obsolete.
Works great. Original battery.
Again, it might not be the right decision for you, but I thought you might like to be aware of the option.
We do get them a nice new phone when they graduate high school.
I preferred touchid over faceid. Sure, there was always the SE option, but if I was buying a newer phone then it was going to be new one, damn it.
What pushed the needle in the upgrade vs repair decision for me was wear concerns on the nand flash. I've encountered plenty of stories of flash failures after the 4th, 3rd or even 2nd battery replacement. I never found a way to get a meaningful health check for iphone flash lifetime but I really didn't want to find out the hard way.
That was in addition to 5G vs LTE. LTE in our area is a quagmire.
But yeah overall it’s bonkers how similar the two devices are for purportedly between four generations apart.
neither does face ID
What I found out though is that it's because in such lighting conditions I don't blink, compounded by the fact that if it doesn't unlock I unconsciously keep on not blinking to... see it hopefully unlock! So when this happens I consciously blink and it unlocks immediately, which is kind of cognitively dissonant.
Unknown if that would apply to your situation, YMMV but I thought I'd throw this one out.
There's also a kind of annoying recurring situation where I want to look at stuff on the lock screen but don't want to actually unlock...
I do wish they'd have reintroduced Touch ID in the camera control button sensor (or just in the power button, as for the iPad Air) but I guess cases would cause a problem.
Touch ID was reliable for me.
Apple is working hard to add all kinds of "missing" features and complexity all over the place, all while raising the price of the device as much as possible. But in the end, what kind of client will be satisfied with this approach but noy with an Android? Not a whole lot I believe.
I feel the same way. If there’s one feature I miss, it’s toichid.
On the other hand, my parents, who are older, find Face ID to be a lifesaver since their fingerprints have mostly worn out.
I used to think I wanted FaceID over TouchID, because TouchID would regularly fail to recognise my thumb if I'd recently washed my hands, or was a little dehydrated. Anything that affected my skin tension.
In practice, FaceID fails way more often, and also "resets" (the phone decides it wants a passcode before it'll trust my face again) multiple times a day. TouchID almost never did that.
If you have an Apple Watch, you can also configure it to unlock your phone automatically when an obstruction prevents Face ID from recognizing your face.
I'd never go back to Touch ID. Face ID works in the dark, at pretty much any angle, and requires zero interaction.
I have had it in this mode for years. It's still very fragile and/or skittish regarding making me use my passcode. Intuitively, it feels like about 10-15% of logins require the code rather than my face.
> If you have an Apple Watch, you can also configure it to unlock your phone automatically when an obstruction prevents Face ID from recognizing your face.
That's a very expensive solution.
> Face ID works in the dark, at pretty much any angle, and requires zero interaction.
All of which apply to TouchID too.
Especially since it makes many operations a 2-step process when it was much smoother before; like for example Apple Pay where you find yourself looking at your phone like an idiot instead of doing it all in a single movement.
Battery is at 78%, as Apple says: Degraded considerably...
I hope to get it a new bat when I goes to my son in a few years. Really hope the new SE models are the mini form factor...
It's pretty common knowledge that most (not all) batteries shouldn't be charged past 80%. Which isn't really true either, but it has to do with voltage going up when the battery gets hot, meaning overvolting your battery and causing bad things to happen.
I'm disappointed in my Fairphone 4 not having an option to limit charge to 80%, though the battery is very replaceable.
Again, it’s the perfect phone.
I’m also weighing out my repair options.
- Sent from my iPhone 13 Mini
Even when you are potentially interested by features update there is always a weighting to be made about slowdowns or things that change that you wish didn't.
In the end I don't think updates should be much of a thing, apart from security updates. You should buy a device with a set of capabilities and it should stay mostly the same all its life.
And then we should make laws about the minimum amount of time a device has to be supported with its original software. The problem with computer technology is that we always go with updates, just because we could even though we need to ask if we should. In some ways it's a problem the internet created, the expectation of always being connected to bring in new stuff.
go to youtube history in youtube app on iphone.
click the top video (the last thing you were watching)
youtube should automagically continue where you left off.
you must be logged into youtube on both machines.
Thank you for posting all these tips.
They have the decryption keys
https://telegram.org/faq#:~:text=To%20protect%20the%20data%2....
But the comment that kicked off the thread was the one about privacy.
I agree that even when they aren't explicitly highlighted, they do make a substantial difference, especially when comparing models over a span of a few years.
She used an A14 Bionic equipped ipad.
She is in her 80's.
When she visits friends and tells stories, they always lament that they refused to learn “these computers”. She’s around 6 years into her tablet which I brought her spontaneously. She collected questions (we write everything down as a rule) and I had to find the way to manage the learning complexity at each visit.
Don’t look at age, just go and buy it for them. With a little help they’ll figure it out just fine.
Edit: don’t buy android ofc
By design, 1Password always makes you re-authenticate every time you lose focus on the app. But Face ID (or Touch ID) makes reauthenticating a lot less painful.
Recently 1Password has change on IOS (and I assume Android) to ask every two weeks for the password even if you use FaceId/TouchId - it says so on the app. This is probably what the poster was complaining about - I agree it is a nuisance.
For macOs and Windows it asks for the password every time the screen saver or sleep happens.
Although my understanding is that the new cameras are incredible, so while you could get a "decent" photo on an old phone, unlike the other features it would be noticeably worse than the new phone.
The HUGE L by Apple is their shitty Photo App. It’s great if you have under 1Gb of photos, but over 100Gb - forget it - it is fucking. God. Aweful. PAINFUL!
And then they have the nerve of once in a while having a non-compatible Photo database format and so your WHOLE photo collection has to be converted… over 4 days wtf!
I specifically learned Rust so I could make a better Photo app. Sadly, time has shelved that project like many others, but man I would like be for someone to solve the iPhone -> Laptop photo management problem.
… and no, cloud backups? Not for > 400Gb thanks. All it takes is for Apple to kill your account and then ALL your family photos are gone. F that.
I rarely relate to issues people paint about Apple products. The Photos app is great, and moving stuff around between my MacBook and iPhone is seamless.
Could it be user error?
How many hundreds of gigs is your Apple Photo library? And have you used it long enough that you’ve had to bare the pain of an Apple Photo database upgrade?
And no, it’s not user error.
Sorry, but this is the one feature I hate (not being able to turn off) on today's phones. All the wannabe HDR, noise reduction, upscaling, color corrections that make the pictures look plasticky and overly colorful and just plain kitsch when compared to the same scene taken with a 10-15yo pocket camera.
New hardware would not be needed for most of it, but then Apple would have to make every iOS user a fixed yearly fee for a generic package of "some services at our disclosure". And that's quite impossible to achieve and stay competitive...
People love the seamless integration of hardware, software, and services that Apple provides, but introducing a mandatory yearly fee would erode that goodwill pretty much instantly.
It would be more or less impossible to pull off.
Imagine the effect of a TV spot touting a new OS feature on the new iPhone. Do I need the new phone to get that feature? As soon as you've asked the question, you're at the doorstep of "I wasn't thinking about it, but I will need to replace the battery soon ($$) and it's been getting slower …"
You may learn the feature is available in an OS update, but it's inconsequential: you've already rolled the idea of a new phone around and remember how nice it is to start fresh. This one may not get you, but next year's definitely will.
Some confusion around hardware -vs- software is key to draw people in.
I’d say this works exactly once - Apple will get a one time hit out of customers upgrading to an AI enabled phone, which will have a SOC capable of running AI (customers don’t need to know what a SOC is).
For anything beyond that, the media will likely pick up that it’s not strictly necessary and you’ll already have pocketed a lot of the benefit from having your first AI integrated phone.
Sure, and a couple of iOS updates into a good phone, and the phone is suddenly slow, crawling, and no longer meeting normie needs.
And of course creatives that do it as a hobby or a job.
Regular folks won’t be using this stuff
Historically, that was true, but more recently, most people do buy the Pro. I don't know why (actually I do: FOMO and monthly payment plans).
https://www.techradar.com/phones/iphone/iphone-15-sales-figu...
iPhone 15 Pro Max: 23%
iPhone 15 Pro: 22%
iPhone 15: 14%
iPhone 15 Plus: 9%
If they just made the base model have half decent specs, a lot less people would upgrade to the higher end models.
For me it's slightly more complicated than that. I would probably still be using my 2016 iPhone SE with its headphone jack and size if (a) it was still receiving OS updates and (b) iOS bloat didn't make it slow.
Would love it if the battery swap were easy for the end user to do, but TBH paying $100 to have it done every few years is doable for me.
Better camera capability is the only other thing that even registered for me. The jump to the iphone 12 mini that I made last year did have some nice benefits on that front and got me some performance I'd lost back. Other than that, the main reason I upgraded is that I was forced to by the iOS obsolescence treadmill.
That's not the case anymore, but it's a hard feeling to shake, especially when companies are still trying to convince us that it's true because it benefits their top line. The truth is that smart phones are just small computers at this point. Most people don't feel conflicted about not buying a new computer every year and you shouldn't feel that way about smart phones.
At this point the only people who need (I use that term very loosely) a new smart phone every single year are people who see having the most recent version as a status symbol.
Phones (particularly iPhones0 have stubbornly resisted getting cheaper. That's by design. Features get added simply to make it more expensive.
We saw this with the Macbooks about a decade ago. The Macbook Air was fantastic because it was cheap. For Apple it was too cheap. So we got Touch bar. Did it solve any user problems? No. I know a few will say they like it but it was a dismal failure.
The only reason the Touch Bar existed was to make Macbooks more expensive.
I have been frustrated with subsequent iOS updates because it gets less and less intuitive. Even Safari has a lot of touch points on the screen that do stuff I don't care about. On the iPad there's now split screen. I bet you've triggered this acccidentally or had to solve this for a friend or relative who had. We replaced private browsing mode with "tab groups". Does anyone actually need this? If you don't (and I would posit that's most people) then it's now an extra tap to switch modes.
Cut and paste just seems to get worse and worse. It tries to be cleve by selecting a word. It can be difficult and involve several taps to get around this. The original implementation of this was (IMHO) far superior and more intuitive.
You have a keyboard and mouse as inputs to a Mac. why not a mini touch screen as well? but instead of rendering the app content there you render the controls. this way you don't need to remember shortcuts because common actions for an app are displayed there.
IMO the idea makes sense but needs further refinement in execution. maybe even better haptic feedback
This is a big issue with modern cars (particularly Teslas). People generally hate touch screens because you have to look at them to use them. For driving in particular, that's a real problem. Compare this to a more normal car where you can feel the AC button or the volume or whatever.
Companies like touch screens because it lets them punt on UI/UX design and selecting controls, which means they basically never get done. It's purely a cost issue.
Now with Macbooks, I did like that I could slide my finger for the volume. That's it. And that wasn't worth losing the Escape key for. Or function keys for that matter.
But that's so specific that I'd rather just have a volume control. A slider would be ideal but that takes up a lot of space. The best compromise is a "roller" (like on the Corsair K70 keyboard) as you can get precision and speed. You absolutely don't want to repeatedly hit a volume up or down button.
I'm imagining a touch screen right next to the trackpad that displays the short cuts to common functions of the current app that's open.
For example, I don't mind having common controls of, say Google sheets or Photoshop near the keyboard. Maybe the trackpad could be that touchscreen. idk but I feel there's something to explore in this space.
Or alternatively, individual keys on a keyboard can be LCD screens and show you app specific controls. this way you get the haptic feedback too.
Although this reminds me, my old Logitech G15 from 2008 already had an LCD screen and a bunch of app-customisable buttons.
> The Macbook Air was fantastic because it was cheap. For Apple it was too cheap. So we got Touch bar. Did it solve any user problems?
Do you remember the same Macbook Air I do? The first one was $1,799 retail, and probably the biggest complaint in reviews was that it was too expensive for what it was. The MBA didn't drop below $1000 until 4 revisions later with the introduction of the 11 inch model. In 2014 that dropped to $899 for the 11 inch model. The cheapest the 13 inch model ever got was $999 for the last intel and the first M1 model. Today it's $1099, hardly a change from the "too cheap" $999 of its heyday. Also to the best of my knowledge, no MBAs shipped with a touch bar.
> iPhones are getting heaper all the time. Yesterday a base model iPhone 15 was $799, today it's $699.
Last year's model. It's going to have a year less life in terms of software support too. It should be $100 less. Probably more. You are (probably intentionally) missing the point.
> Do you remember the same Macbook Air I do?
The very first one in 2008 was a POS. The good one was released in 2010-2011, which simply needed a newer screen in later models but Apple pushed the POS 12" Macbook instead, because the 2010-2014 (2015?) MBA was simply too cheap (for Apple) to be interested in.
> Also to the best of my knowledge, no MBAs shipped with a touch bar.
MBPs shipped with a Touch Bar. Stop being overly pedantic. That's actually the point. They killed the old MBA form factor and replaced it with one they could charge more for. The 12" Macbook wasn't a replacement (too many compromises like only one port). They eventually had to bring the MBA back because it was such a good compromise between price, power, size and weight.
Doesn't matter, your argument was that the new features of the current year model are "added simply to make it more expensive." If that's true, the fact that its "last year's model" shouldn't make a difference to you. You wanted the phone to get cheaper, it did.
> You are (probably intentionally) missing the point.
Realistically if I'm missing it, it's because your point is obtuse. You seem to be complaining simultaneously that iPhones never get cheaper, but also you want them to get cheaper without any of the attendant things that make technology cheaper (like older technology or potentially less support lifetimes). The iPhone 15 bought today has exactly the same support lifetime as an iPhone 15 bought yesterday. But for some reason the fact that a new iPhone model was released today means for you that the 15 did not in fact get cheaper over the last 24 hours.
> The good one was released in 2010-2011, which simply needed a newer screen in later models but Apple pushed the POS 12" Macbook instead, because the 2010-2014 (2015?) MBA was simply too cheap (for Apple) to be interested in.
>They killed the old MBA form factor and replaced it with one they could charge more for.
I really have no idea what you're talking about. The Macbook Air received annual refreshes every year except once in 2016. The 12 inch Macbook was released in April 2015, one month AFTER the 2015 MBA refresh. That 2015 Macbook which did come with a "retina" display retailed for $1299, the 2015 13 inch MBA retailed for $999. The MBA was never "killed", its form factor was never retired.
I think what you're trying to say is that the missed 2016 update and the fact that it took to 2018 for the MBA to see a retina screen is some attempt by Apple to not have low price point laptops. The problem with that interpretation from my point of view is:
1) Apple continued to sell the MBA the entire time, compare to the Macbook moniker which was discontinued from 2011 until the 2015 model because they did supplant it with the MBP 13 inch instead
2) Apple released the 2015 MBA literally a month before the 2015 Macbook, if the goal was to replace the MBA, it would have been simpler to not release the same model year MBA for folks to compare against
3) The 2015 Macbook used the Intel M series processors, compared to the Core series in the MBA at the time. The M series allowed producing a computer in the MBA form factor that didn't have fans (something they couldn't make work in the MBA with the Core series chips until the last revision before the M1 MBA.
To me that time period reads as Apple trying to make a MBA form factor machine that could run fanless and cooler, potentially by using a different chip set from Intel, but they were unsure if customers would accept the tradeoffs required to make that work. Certainly if the goal was just "more expensive" computers, Apple could have just raised the price of the MBA, which they did in 2018 with the retina model ($1199), before subsequently dropping the price each year after, until we'd hit the lowest base MBA price of $799 in 2020.
None of that really suggest to me a company that is "engaging in feature-bloat to protect [a] price point" or thought the MBA "was too cheap". If cost was the driver, if "The only reason the Touch Bar existed was to make Macbooks more expensive", then why did Apple lower the prices on the MBA after raising them with the switch to Retina? Why release the 2015 MBA at all? Why do a refresh in 2017? Sure you might say "because their customers weren't buying the 2015 Macbook" but why bother with that at all? They could have just raised the prices along with a processor bump. They could have discontinued the MBA all together and the customer's would have been forced to choose between the 2015 MB and the MBPs, which were even more expensive. Why go back to a price point you claim they had no interest in serving and why continue to this day to come in at a mere $100 over that price point when the Apple M series chips would have been the perfect excuse to simply jack all the prices up and never look back?
It's cheaper if you consider inflation. $999 in 2020 dollars is about $1,210 today.
The original iPhone was $499 in 2007; around $750 today. The iPhone 16 starts at $799, so it's a bit more expensive in adjusted dollars. It's also enormously better, of course.
Don't underestimate the power of marketing.
I'd say this goes one step further. We hand down older devices to our parents. They are completely happy with a device several generations back. The current product philosophy has completely cut them out as purchasers. They are product users, but will never purchase again.
In fact, without planned obsolescence/battery degradation I suspect they would be happy never replacing their phones until they physically broke. It's a shame that they continually slow down to such a degree - the decreased speed is actually the only Apple 'feature' they notice.
I think battery power drain is even not fast enough for phone companies to sustain the selling Model. My guess is sooner or later they realize the real control point is software updates and they forcefully shorten OS and specially OS security updates under a bullshit reason they still can get away with to get us all back in line of buying regular phone upgrades in fear of hacked internet banking.
That's why I'm in the market for an iphone (and a new service provider), my pixel 5a5g got its final "guaranteed" security update in August. Nothing wrong with the device. Time to de-google I guess..
Also when you are forced by apps you need that want the newest hardware by some reason. I mean when most of them, because some could be missed for a while, but when most you use are just refuse to work, then it is time to get a new one.
Not like you need the new app, it is the same like with the iPhone 'features' you mention, but when your bank app cannot connect the bank when it is the newest version minus 2, then it becomes a nuisance.
Not like I am afraid of tech, I have cool interconnected home appliances built from raspberrys and make my living on developing desktop tools, but the rampage of the mobile industry is just too much to handle. It does not worth the money and time they demand, getting in the way of my life as much as helping it. By now. It was better but getting worse as we speak.
I'm still using a phone that's only a few years old and maxes out at 4G. Lately it's started sporadically losing connection entirely in locations where it previously worked perfectly... meanwhile everyone around me has a five bar 5G signal on their newer models. They've started to do to 4G what they did to E, H and 3G, complete bandwidth reduction to fuckin zero so the latest protocol can hog all frequencies. Planned obsolescence or what? Upgrade or we will slowly reduce your device to a useless brick.
No, it's not an artificial barrier.
Cell phone spectrum is very limited. Making everyone switch every 8-9 years is reasonable.
In particular, 5G was available on many phones before 2020 and 6G might start deploying in 2030.
Not for the users, no!
Who the f cares what G is that if it does what is needed? Replacing is only reasonable for those who want to push through new things (to sell, keep themselves in their position, be paid). Technical barriers have overcome creatively in countless situations in history and we do not need ever increasing bandwith after a satisfactory level reached. Using old spectrums scarcely used should be possible in alternative manner but not f up the life of customers who pay for the whole thing if can be avoided!!
4G and 5G can share to a good extent but it's not worth making every tower do both.
Who says 4G was satisfactory for even the majority of customers? It wasn't satisfactory to me. Sure, useable, but there were (and still are) a number of things that aren't reliable enough that I'd like to do with the wireless networks available today.
But someone somewhere has a 5 year old phone with a busted screen and a dead battery and it'll be nice for them to get this phone or another similar new, highly capable device. And they'd probably like to know that this 5-year-newer phone has a whole bunch of new capabilities when they spend a big chunk of money replacing a big purchase.
Sure, I don't want to buy a new car. They're expensive and they depreciate. I would like to just keep driving mine, it's fine. But when the time comes that I do buy a new car I do want to know that it has a whole bunch of new, better things than the one I am replacing.
Don't forget that Apple makes the perfect phone for your girlfriend: the iPhone SE. The flashy marketing videos are for high-value high-vanity customers who throw money at them. She could buy that type of low-mid-range phone at $400 and run it into the ground until she is forced to upgrade by hardware failure.
My main phone is a 2019 Xiaomi midrange phone, and I just can't tell how's the Iphone 14 I use to test our apps should be better, and I played with it some.
I read the economist, hackernews watch some YouTube, play chess and occasionally use messaging apps or check banking stuff.
I couldn't care less about editing photos on a phone nor mobile gaming.
I know I live in a bubble, but I don't see users around me do much more than I do with the phone.
It's not like these products are bad, and I think that people that live on their phone will benefit from all of this. But I'm just not one of them.
Recently, I've been valueing repairability more in tech that I buy and it feels like such a breath of fresh air and a bit of an antidote. Particularly, products like fairphone (a smart phone where almost every part can be replaced with a screwdriver) make me really excited, and feel like amazing innovation solving actual problems.
The church of American consumerism is so galling to me. This is a trillion dollar corporation that famously involves itself in tax schemes to avoid paying the face value rate that any other smaller corporation would have to pay.
You feel "ungrateful" or "cynical" because they aren't innovating?
Good lord man. Get out of that church.
I’d also put a bottle of Trader Joe’s 2 buck chuck ($4 cab) up against 75% of the $30 bottles and I bet in a blind taste test it would win.
That isn’t to say that people’s taste buds don’t work. I’ve spent a bit of time tasting wine essentially blind (to price) at vineyards, brought that same wine home and been underwhelmed again… I learned that even 30min in a hot car trunk (140F) can change wine. The wine I tasted from the storage cave that was great, sucks when I got it home. I actually tested after I got it home and saw this.
I think a lot of the “wine flavors being mysterious and psychosomatic” is actually poor storage. I know Reddit disagrees with me, but now that I climate control my wine when I bring it home, I haven’t had the same issues.
This is a fact for beer (hoppy beer specifically) that is well known and pasted all over the Russian River Pliny the elder label. I believe it’s a fact for wine as well. Because I’ve had a couple $100 bottles that were stored well, and the memory of that taste is still with me. I want to find a way to repeat it. (Without spending $100 for a bottle)
The biggest upgrade for me in the last 19 years is the fold-able phone with a much larger screen area. But honestly, the old HTC Wizard that I started with does 80% of what I need a mobile device to do.
I don't need or want AI following me around, especially not in my mobile device.
I am exactly like this. But I am also use it as an opportunity to upgrade the hardware.
For some time it was memory, although now I am pretty done for 256gb. I don’t need more. Recently it was the new processor+camera. I am not big into photography, but I like to take pictures. And I like them to look great, focused, even with bad light, without doing any setting myself (cause I am ignorant how to do it). Just regular picture of trips, or night with friends. I like the 2x and 0.5x zoom a lot also.
It is also nice for the new updated apps I use to run fast. My 4 yo iPhone SE not only had a bad battery, but it was very slow already.
And, occasionally, some gimmick is actually useful to me, like the notch. I turn off notifications of almost every app, including Uber and food delivery. For those the in-screen info in the notch is very useful.
I’ll probably only buy the iPhone 18 next, but it will be nice have the 5x zoom (maybe more by then) at the least.
Tech people, on the over hand, are some of the most borderline luddite people I know (me included!)
there was a huge jump in the quality of my photos when I upgraded to an iPhone 13 (my current) from an iPhone 8. I've seen iPhone 15 photos and they're even better. And I'm not a pro photographer.
Apple aren't going to all this effort so you have an amazingly functional product that will solve all your real world needs. They're doing it so you think you need it to solve problem you don't have. Classic FOMO.
It's not just "normies". I'm a senior engineer and I drive an 3rd gen SE. I was perfectly happy with my 2nd gen SE and only replaced it because I wanted more memory. In fact, I preferred the 2nd gen because of the square sides. The 3rd gen keeps squirting out of my hands.
It would have a faster CPU, more RAM, and more storage, but it's rare I run into any of those limits. It would have a better camera than my current phone, but it would still be worse than my Olympus. It would have a bigger screen, but I wouldn't have a bigger hand and that would make it harder to use. It would have a bigger battery, but it would need a bigger battery. It wouldn't have a headphone jack, and I use mine. It might have an AI thing, but I don't want an AI thing.
For about a decade after the current era of smartphones launched, they weren't good enough to do all the things people wanted them to, so most people were eager to upgrade when possible. Now they are, and an upgrade usually brings more hassle than excitement.
I quite honestly cannot think of a single time I've run into any of those limits in at least the last 5 years, personally!
This is actually one of the reasons why I changed my phone last year. I don't know about your Olympus, but mine doesn't fit in my jeans pocket, even though it's one of the smaller models.
I don't always what to carry a dedicated camera with me, even though I bought a m4/3 specifically because of how portable it was. But I do like to be able to take good enough pictures, and the iPhone enables me to do that.
I'll admit to occasionally contemplating a Ricoh GR III, which is quite pocketable.
It's just a natural maturity-curve that every new piece of tech inevitably goes through.
Tech on the maturity curve:
ICE cars: settled
EV cars: rising
PC's: settled
Phones: settled
Smart TV's: slowly rising still
Wearables: rising
There were times when a CPU four times as fast changed what I could do with a PC. For a long time, with Moore's Law in full swing, we reliably got that sort of improvement every three years, and PCs older than that were widely seen as obsolete. Today that would only speed up batch jobs for me and have no impact on any of my workflows.
Some sort of on-device AI thing is probably the next threshold for PCs. I don't think there's anything production-ready and compelling right now, but I can imagine useful automation features when it gets good enough.
Somewhere in the late 2000s, the CPUs got powerful and cheap enough (in the sense of "cents per MHz") that it shifted from having to be creative to get your programs to perform at acceptable speed, to not having to and instead focusing on delivering marketable software faster.
The only thing nowadays I can imagine requiring a substantial amount of raw processing power would be on-device AI processing, but that doesn't seem to be the case here, as large parts of the processing is still done in the cloud.
I upgraded from the X to the 15 Pro Max and it was a nice improvement. Much better camera. Much speedier. Better wireless charging. USB-C. I wouldn't upgrade to the 16, though; looking at the comparison chart, pretty much nothing changes. It can charge faster and record better 4K video. I have no complaints about charging speed and don't know what Dolby Pro Motion even is.
When the iPhone 20 comes out, I'm sure I'll be tempted to upgrade. Every 5 years is a totally reasonable upgrade cycle, and enough stuff changes that it feels worthwhile. So for that reason, I don't view the yearly announcements as being anything relevant unless you need a new phone today for some reason. (Though I was in the Apple Store last weekend and saw people happily buying full-price 15s, not knowing Apple's release schedule. That's a shame for them.)
The annoying thing is that somehow they manage to make it so the same apps doing the same thing either get too slow or stop working over time, so you have to upgrade to get the same functionality. I usually keep a device until it cannot do something I need that it could do just fine the day before….
There’s also the security update thing but I think that is overblown. Ironically, if you have a very old device it ages out of being targeted for attacks. I have never had a very old device get compromised.
Not a chance. I think she would immediately notice because the web of today is always going to be far more bloated than the web of eight generations ago.
Trying any dated browser+hardware combo on the modern web is noticeable to all users I feel.
I predict that in retrospect this will be considered a watershed moment in computing.
Honestly that feels deep to me. I wonder to what extend all of the recent LLM advancements are lost on most people.
I also wonder if over a long enough time horizon, the "normies" as you call them catch up, or it goes the other way and the "techies" also start to not care (?)
Oh yes. Switched from the iPhone X to a 13 Pro only because the battery life became unbearable.
Overall, the size/format/handling of the X was *way better*. Even the camera was *better on the X* except in low-light pictures which I don't really care about. The difference is noticeable on 4K screens and print, pictures were truthful without complex image enhancement algorithms that you can't disable (even not in RAW). Etc.
It doesn't take the best pictures but it is not a blurry mess either, more than enough to complement my terrible skills as a photographer, and by that I mean the skill of pointing the camera in the right direction, not that of fiddling with the settings.
It doesn't run "heavy" apps, like 3D games, but I don't play these on my phone, the controls and small screen are not great. So I don't need that massive computing power. In fact, I only need these gigabytes of RAM because of how terribly bloated mobile apps have become. And the worst part is that I can't even use my phone as a general purpose computer. Despite being the more open of the two platforms, Android is so locked down that I can't have fun with the hardware and still use it as a daily driver.
A smartphone is like a game console, like the Nintendo Switch. The Switch is an underpowered device by today's standards, but who cares about the hardware, its only value is the games it plays, and Nintendo makes damn good games in that power budget, making it a damn good console. Same idea for smartphones, they are defined by the apps they run, and the apps I want to run run on low end smartphones, so why buy an expensive phone For real work, I use a PC, with a large screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and an OS with a usable filesystem, that PC, while decent, is actually cheaper than a flagship phone.
And yes, the camera, pretty much the only thing worth getting expensive phones for for most people, but still, there are limits to what these tiny sensors can do. And as I said before, we have already passed to point where for most people the real improvement can only come from the one taking the picture.
If I do get a 16 Pro the only thing I can even think of from an upgrade perspective that would make it last less than 5 years would be if on device inference becomes a major thing and there are huge and relevant improvements, everything else is basically mature and I can't see being motivationally better in a few years.
People bring up battery as a big thing for upgrading but with the smarter charging that has changed a lot, my 11 Pro is still at 80% max after 4+ years which isn't materially different on a day to day basis for me.
The pictures they take when you press the button have gotten better and better. That’s not even considering the live photos, which are a new thing entirely.
Maybe this is the upgrade cycle it’ll flatten out, but I sort of doubt it.
Can my new phone do anything my old one couldn't? Sure. The telephoto lens is really helpful for my blog, and I can shoot in raw format which is also really helpful. Circle-to-search is an astonishing accomplishment.
Do I actually do anything with my S24 that I couldn't do with my V35? Not really. All the improvements are nice to have. I could still take adequate photos for my blog with my V35, even if the S24's photos are better. I think I used circle-to-search to find a Chinese candy online once.
The simple reality is that I'd still have my V35, and I'd still be perfectly happy with it, if AT&T had ever updated their shitware-riddled fork to Android 9. I was stuck on Android 8. Slack stopped supporting it, which was an inconvenience that I could work around. But, then one of my banks stopped supporting Android 8, and at that point the only reasonable solution was a new phone.
The funny thing is, the V35 is noticeably better in several ways. It's lighter and thinner. It has a 1440p display in the same footprint as the S24's 1080p display. It has a headphone jack, and a really good one at that - LG was pushing their hi-fi DAC when Samsung and Apple were dropping the feature entirely.
I like the iPhone because it is easier to use than Android. My iPhone 4 was perfect. I'd still be using it if they haven't deprecated the OS and the battery died.
I have exactly 6 non-apple Apps on my current phone.
I want FEWER features. Integrated it or hide it. Don't make me have to learn about a new button, or switch, or setting or some magical tweak to use the basic features. If enthusiasts want to sniff and twiddle every last setting, go for it: give them dozens of settings until they burst. Just bury those settings away from me, or better yet: have a pro-mode setting that fills the GUI with all these features.
I want something easy to use with as few knobs as possible, and the ability to factory reset every app in case I screw up and accidentally flip some esoteric setting.
All of my college buddies and age-equivalent work peers (mid/late 50s) feel exactly the same way.
Mixing them together is probably healthy to each other, but definitely annoying both.
Quick story - me and my partner were confused why none of the pics you take appear in the gallery. Turns out she filtered to show Shared Photos only...
I just bought my first iPad, going on a work trip next week, gonna give it a whirl, and try that out.
Eventually the level of arete usually passes some threshold that enables new normie-appealing use cases as well.
But I use my phone just like you described your GF. They’re just not that interesting to me.
There is so much more tech out there that is more interesting.
That is not lost on even casual users. It’s not that they need or want a faster phone; it’s that their existing daily runtime can be in a lighter and thinner device, or a same size device can run longer.
The "upgrade every year" concept never made sense to me, and while I agree that a battery might be the trigger, I think a reasonable number (not all) would still upgrade every ~4-5 years.
While there's generally no single groundbreaking feature year to year, over 4-5 releases there are likely enough smaller incremental features/improvements that someone would still upgrade.
It’s coming, the EU brought the USB-C port to the iPhone and in 2027 it brings user replaceable batteries too. [1]
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/07/13/new-eu-regulation...
You’re technically correct phones have reached feature parity, but how refined are those features is another story.
I can technically do whatever iPhones can do on an iPhone knockoff, but do YOU actually want to use an iPhone knockoff? Please.
Children and teens drive this, not existing adults. If existing adults is how we evaluated usefulness, we’d all still be using the command line on dot matrix screens.
Even for me the new features aren’t compelling. They don’t really help me do anything I actually want to do. They don’t solve a problem or scratch an itch. And features change so often and so drastically I don’t really care to learn. I used to have an optical zoom but now I have super wide angle. My Fidelity widget used to show my balance but now it doesn’t so I just never bother swiping to that page. I assume the current iteration of widgets will go away or be replaced soon so I don’t bother trying to fix it. Whatever, doesn’t matter.
Smartphones are essentially solved at this point. It’s an appliance. And just like my washing machine and dishwasher the buttons are arbitrary and clunky but work well enough. I tolerate it. Like I tolerate that burner on the cooktop that doesn’t always work.
The only thing that would get me excited is text editing and spellcheck that work correctly.
The dishwasher comparison is also way off, the level of dishwasher interaction is primitive and the frequency thereof is very very low, so it's much easier to tolerate bad design
I just want to be able to hold backspace in my URL bar until my link is 'polite' enough to share with someone else. I want it to stop clearing the entire field when I'm only halfway through removing the trailing crap.
How about running a normal desktop OS on smartphone, so that you could completely replace your laptop/desktop?
See also: https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-year-of-librem-5-convergence/
I’m a programmer, apple devices have had the cpu grunt to run ssh or vi for ages. Therefore, I don’t really notice much generation to generation. I wonder if it will ever catch up to the Raspberry Pi in usability.
I expect a photographer, or maybe someone who opened big spreadsheets, or a social media person, or one of those coffee-shop authors, might be more likely to notice the difference.
This is not my experience. All my life I used slow phones and browsing the web on them is excruciating.
"Pro Max currently accounts for nearly 40% of new model shipments" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41386700
You misunderstand the business case: she is not the target demographic/user, filmmakers are (as seen on the presentation). Apple's product marketing is 2nd to none.
To break it down: iPhone 16 is for photographers, Pro for filmmakers; Watch for sport and health enthusiasts, Ultra for athletes; iPad for media consumers, Pro for artists; MacBook Air for everyday consumers, Pro for working professionals; SEs for newbies to grab competitor market share with price penetration, etc.
Research: http://www.marcoshung.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com...
The MacBook Pro is only for working professionals if they happen to be professionals in some kind of graphics (editing videos, digital artist, etc). Work gives me a MacBook Pro, and it’s pretty pointless. I write code; I’m not touching the GPU. On CPU tasks, the Air as the MacBook Pro are going to perform the exact same, assuming there is no thermal throttling going on… and there isn’t. I’ve never heard the fan on Apple Silicon; it used to be on all day every day with Intel. I’d actually prefer if work gave me a MacBook Air.
The implication is 'if it's good enough for a photographer/videographer, it will be excellent for me if I want to take photos and videos of my hobby/kids/travels'.
But professional photographers aren't giving up their DSLR's for an iPhone anytime soon.
I think the thing I like most about my phone is the OLED screen, which has been basically the only feature I've cared about.
You can still take your old iPhone to a local electronic store or that phone stall at your nearby mall and get that dying battery replaced or check this one https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+15+Battery+Replacement/1...
Yeah - a battery replacement wouldn’t collapse a mere $3T juggernaut
But if the battery was working as well as it did when it was new, it is unlikely that the person would have started shopping in the first place. It is the catalyst that sees them move beyond "what I've got is good enough" to "this isn't serving my needs anymore".
But let's assume what the OP says is true. It is still not clear why anyone would do what you suggest? The investment required to be that player would be intense and knowing that you only have one product lifecycle to recoup it... Highly unlikely anyone is that daring. Competition sees players seek to be the winner, not the first loser.
You think you can build something at least as compelling as the iPhone from the ground up for less than $80 billion? Apple is spending $30 billion on R&D a year just to improve what they already have! Good luck...
And you only get one year to capitalize on that investment, more or less. By year two, without even more investment, the competition will have you smoked with their latest offerings. You might not even get a whole year if they see you as a credible threat. Nothing says the iPhone must be released on a yearly schedule.
It’s simply that 3 small, incremental upgrade does make up for a more significant one in the end, though in the future it might end up 4 or 5 years instead, as the changes from generation to generation are smaller and smaller.
I’ve been on vacation and used my Apple Watch as a remote for the camera for a group photo. People looked at me as I came down from mars.
And it’s not like Apple tries to sell these features. I think their videos and ads are on of the best. I mean they managed to teach pinch and zoom in an ad :)
Podcasts have grown in audience size dramatically, everyone has Spotify or whatever, and the iPod has long since been discontinued.
In the end I found my 2008 walkman and it works perfectly to this day. It's built like a tank. It has a replacable 64GiB SD card just for the music. And my latest macbook can now again work with this card perfectly for syncing. No upgrades needed for 16 years.
I also don't like the concept of renting the music for listening, instead I prefer to buy it, as directly from the author as possible – so I never used Spotify or whatever.
A lot of people are like this actually, I personally know a dozen who won't even listen to digital formats, only physical copies on vinyl, cd, tape, etc. – so it's a bit of an exaggeration to say "everyone is using X"
The ONLY reason I stick with iPhone is Apple's approach to policing privacy and security. Other than that, it was done for me a few generations ago (maybe iPhone 4-ish). I have a 15 now, only because my iPhone 4 started to get weird. I can't see upgrading until iPhone 20 ore beyond.
If Microsoft got their heads out of their behinds and came out with a next-generation MS Phone (please don't call is Windows Phone) with true deep integration with desktop Windows as well as the security and privacy features, I would jump over in a microsecond. Sadly, they it seems they never understood this value proposition.
There a few simple things. iPhone has broken listening to music and they simply refuse to fix it. Own a large CD library that I have fully digitized into Windows Media Player. I can listen to an album as an album, from start to finish, in order, without doing anything special. Pink Floyd? Bach? Mozart? Just select the record play it as it was written. I can't do that on an iPhone. Or, at least, I have not been able to do it for multiple generations of iOS. To the point where I gave up and have not checked if anything has changed in a while. They model is selling you songs. Which is fine of one hit wonders. I get it. However, Mozart's Requiem isn't something that you should listen to or experience in "shuffle" mode or as songs.
I could go on.
I see sunglasses with polarizing lenses are the new rage. Have her wear a pair and try to look at the phone.
I wanted to buy such a pair a few years ago, but I still had an iPhone with an LCD screen, so I went the regular lens way.
Having a frequent, iterative release cycle has a number of benefits: - Everyone in the ecosystem knows the rough cadence of when releases will occur - The people and companies involved in those releases have a steady stream of work - If something isn’t ready, it can more likely be dropped without the consequences becoming overwhelming, which would force the company to push back a release and screw up the schedule of many other things - If something isn’t working, it can be quickly removed in a subsequent release rather than having to push out an out-of-band release - There will always be people looking to casually buy a phone, and this ensures they’ll probably always get something reasonably current rather than it depending greatly on when they buy. - People are much more likely to delay a phone purchase for most of a year rather than switch ecosystems for a killer feature. If it’s two years, they’re probably more likely to switch ecosystems (and if it misses that next release, they would have to wait four) - Holidays come annually, this ensures gifts are “this year’s watch” and not “last years’s watch”
Really, I think Apple should be commended for tweaking and refining things, rather than making big BS lateral changes to justify a product release.
Also, not all the changes were “incremental”. The camera changes and SoC improvements are pretty significant for people who make use of them. I saw 30% and 2x bandied about for some things.
As for “she opens it and presses the shutter”. That’s pretty much the optimal UI for a casual user, no? There’s a ton of work going into making it that easy to use for everything that goes into the picture that comes out.
The whole point is that people aren’t aware of it. They don’t know how fast the lens is or the resolution of the camera, they just know if they get a newer device the pictures will be a little better than the previous device. And that’s probably all they care to know.
No one is making you or your girlfriend upgrade every year. It looks like phones as far back as the 6s or the 8 are still supported, so by all means, keep using a phone until it’s 8 generations old.
As others have pointed out, you can replace the battery for a reasonable cost, too. Of course Apple doesn't want to - their whole business position is that it’s a premium product for people who are purchasing an “experience”.
They’d rather have the freedom to customize the internals to optimize performance than be limited by affordances sufficient to allow non-tech-savvy users to replace the battery. The latter of which is probably at odds with it being simple, waterproof, durable, and thin (eg a tiny screw or some kind of latching mechanism ).
I have huge hands. This phone is too big for them.
My second biggest complaint is that the 5g modem eats an insane amount of battery when it has weak single (20% in 10 minutes. I set an automation to force airplane mode.)
My third complaint is that the se3 is missing the UWB radio (and I actually use it!), so when this phone dies, I’ll need to get a refurbished phone.
My typical budget for a phone refresh is $1000, but apparently my money isn’t good enough these days.
You live close to another country and switch languages all the time? (Very normal in many places in the world) well, then you’re happy translating photos or copying text on them work without cell coverage.
You have some disabilities and can’t see much anymore? Local AI can describe what your phone sees, ans help you navigate places more easily.
You like photography, but your neck hurts because you carry that DSLR everywhere? Better cameras on your phone mean more people stop carrying those.
When you sell to everyone, a niche feature for some is a crucial feature for others. It’s no longer about averages.
there's no manual to read. apple does not inform you in any way. finding out new features is by word of mouth.
so annoying.
i should not have to discover features on my very expensive phone by random chance via watching a tiktok video!
New iOS features are typically announced at the WWDC event. Which is a developer event that surely no normie watches. But even if they did, it's still a summary featuring like 5% of new features.
Normies may not know or suddenly discover features introduced a decade ago.
It's not entirely true: apart from hardware measures, they also use software to enforce phone upgrades.
But what you said is true I think a lot of people would be happy with the upcoming iPhone SE, which is basically a iPhone 14 with single camera, Apple modem and A18. On the assumption that the Modem isn't too bad. ( Not too sure if it will be 8GB or 6GB memory, which could mean getting Apple intelligence support or not )
Even the most lax laymen of photographer would notice the tremendous difference in photo quality between an 8 year old iPhone and today. I’d argue even from 13-15 it was a big bump, but certainly going back 8 generations.
There are no LCDs in current lineup, I think.
> nor would she notice Pro-motion
This is kind of like "no one notices reduced air pollution". Yeah, but some people actually notice and even for those who don't it is a quality of life improver.
> All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest
Then she didn't need the Pro version or even iPhone 16 at all. I have a friend who does photo/video as hobby and photos he takes are mega cool. He will benefit from pro camera. Another friend does commercial video and only shoots on iPhone. He will benefit from pro video capabilities. Most people will not benefit from a pro. By definition. That's why it's pro.
> It's becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies
Is that a problem? I use iPhone 11. It works. I don't feel like I need the 16 or the pro. What's wrong with not having to buy latest devices if they are built to last?
Basically apple was able to fund enthusiast level R&D by asking people who don't care about to pay for it. Every enthusiast should be grateful.
There are some relatively minor iOS features that appear here and there that make me want to upgrade the OS. And one day I find myself with hardware that works for me, but I can no longer upgrade to the latest version of iOS.
And your assertion that their business would collapse is false. You can already replace batteries through Apple and their business model hasn't collapsed. It's just not "true" enough for you so that you can end your post with a dramatic flair.
There will also be a time where my iCloud Photos storage will surpass the available physical storage Apple gives you for your phone, so I don't understand this weak design.
Worse is the Messages app, which insists on downloading every gif, photo and video I share to my iPad as well, as if I need them available for offline use all the time, no Apple, if I needed to see any of it, I would download them manually.
iOS and iPad OS need to be smarter about their Photos and Messaging apps, they're really dumb. What's the point of iCloud if it forces everything downstream when I'm not asking for it.
I sincerely admire your girlfriend’s penchant for simplicity, I just don’t think that represents most people IMHO.
New features aren't for users. They're for the media so the company gets publicity and we have conversations like this and don't forget about them.
Imagine if Apple said "we're done, users have all they need", but Samsung kept putting out new features nobody wants or needs, and press releases and launch events... It's obvious what would happen to Apple, right?
Your average user has no idea what the buzzwords mean either, and that's for a reason. God knows why I need titanium, but I know it's strong and probably expensive so helps justify the price. 120fps? Who knows, but it's more than 24 or 60 so it must be good, etc. The features page goes on and on, gushing with how easy things are, high pro quality, time saving, etc.
Features are there to bamboozle buyers and overwhelm them with "benefits" to justify the high price. Frequent releases are for regular publicity. Heaven forbid any of this is actually because users want any of this stuff.
Its compelling in the sense that these organizations feel compelled to continually release things. No other real reason exists. You could probably classify much of product development for smartphones as bullshit jobs at this point. They are as useful to society as someone adding features to an ERP system.
https://repair.eu/news/new-eu-rules-smartphones-and-tablets-...
There is certainly a segment where "it takes photos" is a boolean, not a scale (my mum being in that group), and they will be perfectly happy with cheap Androids.
The switch didn't feel like a downgrade at all. I didn't miss any of the new fancy features. The only real downside that I ever noticed is the camera, which doesn't have night mode.
The thing about infinite growth, is that at some point things are "good enough" for users, and they have no reason to upgrade. So companies have to create problems to force them to upgrade, like device locking down the device and not offering new software support, or preventing users from swapping batteries.
>She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.
I recently had a similar realization. Last year I finally bit the bullet and decided to build out a decent 'home office' setup. I have a tendency to research something to death before I make a purchase. I read all about monitor resolution, viewing distance, field of view and viewing angle. I had multiple different calculators. I measured my typical sitting / viewing distance down to a fraction of an inch.
After doing all this, I initially thought surely, I needed a 32" 4k 144hz screen. Nothing else would do. Then at the last second after reading up on fractional scaling issues with linux, I decided on a 27" 1440p screen. It's fine.
It turns out I am not the discerning conesour of pixels I thought I was. Yes, I can see them if I look hard enough, but I don't really care. I should have known. The most productive I have ever been as a dev was as a teen coding away on a 800x600 crt!
Maybe I'll eventually get a 4k screen if I upgrade to a 5090 or whatever, but I have found that buying n-1 off the bleeding edge is the absolute sweet spot when it comes to capability.
AI is also normie feature. A big one. Say what you will about its limitations and inadequacies but to a normie, GPT is a search engine with superpowers and an intuitive UI. Improved autocorrect and call screening, smart reply in Mail, transcripts and summaries for audio recordings in notes or from phone calls… these are all things normies will love. The technical crowd will dismiss them, afraid of inaccuracy or the model hallucinating. To a normie, it’s just the computer being helpful with everyday tasks. The only real hurdle will be how simple the UI is. Some of these features will be easy to access, while others might not be obvious.
Most people do notice a difference there, maybe not instantly with a few second glance, but using one over another is definitely visible. I do think it is not a reason to upgrade for most people.
I consider myself quite technical, and I also upgrade fairly rarely - with 14 Pro I will either wait for next year or the year after that.
I think there is a main point people usually forget - new phones are not for people who have bought an iPhone in the last few years, rather than people who have 5-6 year old phones, Android users, new people coming into smartphone market. That market is huge and the differences for those people is definitely perceivable. With non-pro version having a lot of the features from a pro version from the years before, it is a great time to buy the latest phone.
If it weren’t for those defects I’d keep it at least for another year.
Which seems totally fine to me since those features probably don't solve any real problems that she has. It's weird to me that the tech industry has this implicit idea that every product has to get better every year and users are missing out if they don't follow along. Not all products work that way indefinitely and that approach is driven more by corporate financial reasons than by anything else.
Apple starts from a position of "How can we continually increase our sales of this product", not "How can we make the best possible product for users". There can be a lot of overlap there, but not always. The number one rule with corporate product and sales is: Number Go Up. Consumers shouldn't have any obligation to follow along though.
But I’ll buy every other new “Pro” phone if it takes noticeably better photos, regardless of everything else.
I used to obsess over megapixel count, portrait mode, FPS, lighting, and so forth, because I used to think that these amazing images would be priceless in the future. Well, the future came and went, and to me they actually ended up being worthless.
At one time I cared about other people on the Internet seeing pictures of me and my friends and family doing things and being places. Now I don't want anyone on the Internet seeing pictures like that. I especially don't want bots to scrape the photos to build a dossier on my activities that data brokers can add to my profile that they then turn around and sell to whoever's buying.
So these days I don't ever bother even taking photos of anything any more. Instead what I do is try to be 100% "in the moment." I try to notice the small details, feel the emotions, immerse myself in the experience. I look for the things that make an impression. I find that a camera will always -- I mean, always -- detract from that.
I suppose that's my way of saying that there hasn't been a camera feature for a phone that I've cared about for many years now. For me the 2017 Pixel 2 was the point where phone camera technology got "good enough" for anything I ever wanted to use it for. Which, these days, is almost nothing.
Whether this is actually worth the many, many thousands we have spent on our smartphones to preserve rare moments that matter amongst many that really don't is another question. If smartphones never had cameras at all we'd almost certainly preference our own "lower resolution" memories over carrying a small, cheap, lightweight digital camera everywhere in case of something special.
Film camera sales proceeded on a steady incline from their invention until the introduction of the digital camera.
Digital camera sales increased year on year for every year of their existence prior to the introduction of the smartphone.
Approximately everybody wants to have photos of their precious memories, and the idea that people wouldn't have kept buying digital cameras if smartphones didn't incorporate them is, to be frank, a little bit silly.
The primary difference between digital cameras and smartphones was that every family I knew had a digital camera, where every person I know has a smartphone. And every single person I know uses the camera on their smartphone very regularly.
I guess the idea is all your memories are precious. What the parent poster said certainly resonated with me: most of them are not.
Writing is also a big part of history, which also gave us the ability to preserve our most special events since over 6,000+ years ago. This is the first century that isn't permeated with unknowns because few made any deliberate attempt to record things - and we had the option to paint on a cave wall for 10,000s of years before that too.
If the king of the universe suddenly decreed cameras on phones verboten, people would go back to buying standalone cameras, not back to floral written descriptions, commissioning a portrait on canvas, or cave paintings.
The real difference is the rise of social media. Digital camera photos were taken for you, for your family and close friends.
In the post-facebook world we live in now, smartphone photos are taken for other people - a curated snapshot of your life to show off to acquaintences and strangers. Something of the intimacy of photography has been lost.
What kind of pants do you wear? Or are you in one of those locales where you have a coat on year-round?
Asking because my iphone barely fits in my jeans pockets. I'm a dude, so I still have somewhat usable pockets.
I used to not take photos because I never went back to see them. And even if I did, one the best moments to review THAT photo is when I am talking to someone else about a related memory.
Now with Google photos, if we are talking about that one time when I was a kid driving a tractor, I search for tractor in photos app and presto, like magic the conversation about that memory has a nostalgic photo to boost the moment.
Family loves it!
It sounds like you needed a healthy correction from too much sharing and organizing, but just a few shots will be treasured.
That's why it's important to document your house and your town (all of it, not just the glamorous bits), rather than travelling to exotic locations to take photos like some lame "influencer".
Having thousands upon thousands of images to look at does not make it better.
It's nice to have a couple from each year maybe, but the huge amount of pics we have today is just ruining the experience and value of the pics somehow.
As they are stored somewhere digital on a device or cloud makes them also somehow less accessible even though technically they are more accessible. If they lay around in an album on a coffee table or a book shelf makes them more visible. It makes it also a nice way of talking about the pictures with friends or relatives when someone pics up the album.
I do this. And I look over these pictures to get a sense of what their life was like. And where they lived. I found a small book of photos of my great grandfather and his family and they really made me happy to see.
We might not want to look at photos right now. But photos aren’t everyday items, they are long tail items. They are used infrequently, but when they are used, their impact is great.
Just because I don’t want something right now doesn’t mean I’ll never want it. Or that someone important to me won’t want it.
Hell, I wish I had home movies of myself with my parents as a toddler/child that included audio. All our home movies were on soundless 8mm film.
Might be cultural or even a me thing though, I grew up with a grand-aunt that loved talking about how they survived the winter every year.
Sounds super cool for them, of course, we have been born to early for this, so from our perspective we still shouldn't give a dam. As probably we won't be ghost behind checking how they enjoy that portal to the past.
Then I would look at the metadata to see what geolocations and dates reveal hai vacation patterns.
Finally, I’d just randomly browse through to see what he was up to.
I wouldn’t do it all the time, but I’d definitely spend a few hours over the course of my life looking through them.
I’d love to see what random life was like from 1910-1950.
Thats the key. You would be tired in a while if there was tens of thousands of photos of your grandparents.
You never know - I had some contact with people gathering old photos and post cards or people trying to piece together what a particular part of the town or their home village looked like say 100 years ago and surprisingly little information is sometimes available.
Couldn't we alternatively just use AI to identify the most interesting ones or ones with specific people we want to see?
I’d go through them an hour at a time.
if i look at my brothers kids, their phones will be full to the brim with 1000's of photos of them. we have whatsapp groups filled with their photos.
i wonder how interested they'll be when they're 40 to see these photos. perhaps a few, but all of them?
We do, I really would like to have waaaay more photos of my parents, grandparents and of myself when I was younger.
That's why I take pictures of my children frequently so they will have that what I do not.
Now that you have 40000 selfies with silly faces and 25000 pictures of burgers it's going to be way less interesting
Then on a weekly basis I delete all the duplicates/failed shots/boring photos.
And then on a yearly basis I select the ones 10-50 photos that evoke the best memories and emotions.
Those 10-50 are the ones that I print and put in a separate album in the photos app to look at regularly. The rest I store “just in case”.
We may need to revise the 100 picture limit because as the family grows it's getting a bit long for one sitting :^)
Picking 1 photo per week could be a good base to aim for. A slice of daily/weekly life.
Then perhaps a few more photos for each special event where lots of folks get together: birthdays, holidays, births/deaths, weddings, graduations, etc.
Probably end up with <100 photos, and if you print US 4x6/EU A6, probably fit in one album.
Photos are incredibly devalued now.
This is not happening in the real world, though. Everyone is on tiktok today and they need these powerful cameras more than ever.
I also think cameras can be a positive part of "the moment" wherever that is. Photography and dealing with a camera can be a meditative way to see reality.
I shoot maybe one roll of film a month on average, so about 400 pics a year, 1/10th are keepers, that's 40 good pics per year and I remember where I took every single one of them since I started this in 2018.
I did first part of the curve like you - full frame nikon, amazing photos, milky way in the night camping etc. Now I just carry around phone (Samsung in my case, use that 10x physical zoom quite a bit).
The stuff I can snap or record, most of it would be uncatchable with camera - I would have to run around with it constantly like an idiot and shove it in everybody's face, missing much more from those unique moments. Its not so much for me but for everybody else not being there, ie grandparents, so the question is - do you care more about you being in the moment, or sharing the moment with your closest ones. Its amazing how better connected they are with whats happening to their grandchildren living not so close to them, compared to a generation ago.
Also, how much of these memories our kids will have once adults - 'you know, daddy wanted to be in the moment so sorry not many photos or videos from important moments of your childhood' is pretty lame to me, but thats me. I still see purpose of photography as service to others rather than me, me and me all the way down.
Since kids are so active, there are some cool things like very slow mo videos that give completely new perspective - process it in 30s if needed at all and share. Completely unavailable even in current 5000$+ cameras. And yes on big screen you see various errors and less quality, but nobody I know watches it on big screens anymore.
It's not just the look of film which I find more appealing than digital photos, the physicality of the whole thing. Operating a film camera (especially older ones like Leica rangefinders or large format view cameras) is a very hands-on and deliberate process. You don't take a photo with an old camera, you make a photo.
This means you need to spend a lot more time composing the shot, focusing on the subject, metering the light (or using the zone system [1] if you want to go really old-school), setting the lens aperture and shutter speed, and finally taking the picture. In the case of a large format camera, you find yourself ducking under a dark cloth and focusing the (upside-down) image on a piece of ground glass, even using a magnifying glass for critical focusing!
The deliberate process doesn't stop with exposing the image. It continues into the dark room with creative control over the development and printing processes. From a single negative you can spend hours making test prints and playing with the exposure of the final print, using techniques such as dodging, burning, and masking. You can also do some crazy things with an enlarger; even producing wall-sized prints at home!
With the right lens(es) it still destroys every iPhone.
I don’t see myself getting rid of it for a phone camera any time soon. If anything, I feel the opposite and want my camera with me (rather than just my phone) more of the time.
That said, I also still take loads of photos on my phone and look forward to that camera becoming more capable. And I completely hear and am on board with the argument about enjoying things in the moment and not getting stuck behind a camera, or worse, obsessing over posting to social media.
Everything in moderation, I suppose.
notes:
- photos/album search now includes video understanding, which imo seems very good from the first 2 examples they showed. includes scroll to exact time of the moment you describe.
- Mail and Notifications will show summaries instead of str[:x]
- Siri now knows iPhone, becomes the ultimate manual on how to use the increasingly complicated iOS 18. and can read your texts (!) to suggest actions with Personal Context Understanding (also it will try to advertise apple tv shows to you... i'm SURE it will be totally objective and aligned to your preferences amirite)
- new iphone 16 camera control button is PRIME real estate - notice how OpenAI/ChatGPT is now next to Google search, and both are secondary clicks to Apple's visual search, which comes first
- camera adds events to calendar!
- "all done on device" and on cloud (though craig doesnt say that haha)
overall i think insanely good ideas on ai + phone integrations.
Another example is my air filter. It’s nice to get a reminder when it’s time to change the filter since it’s so infrequent, but I can’t get that notification without also getting spammed with “news” about new machines I should buy. Apple actively enables this behavior while claiming that spam is against their terms of service.
They are clearly working for the spammers, not the user, because they profit off of their cut.
> Make sure people can manage their notification settings within your app. In addition to requesting permission to send informational or marketing notifications, you must also provide an in-app settings screen that lets people change their choice. For guidance, see Settings.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
I’ll even leave you with a third example: I can’t get shipping notifications about an online order I made without also opting into spam about sales and discounts. Apple could take a pro-user stance here and help us push back against scummy behavior, but they choose not to be helpful. They also happen to profit off of it, I’m sure that’s unrelated.
1) They could implement a “promotional” notification category the same way that they do “time sensitive” and let the user customize that the same way, or at least offer an opt-out.
2) Add a “report” button next to the disable notifications button.
3) Stop delivering notifications on behalf of apps that don’t correctly categorize promotional notifications.
4) Skip all this complexity and just ban developers that send spam. This is what their monopoly on app distribution is supposedly justified by: protecting users from malicious app developers.
Take a picture of a restaurant? Hey, did you know it's a place you can make a reservation at?
Your friend mentions a song offhand? Psst … wanna play it now?
Don't forget about how your cousin talked about that AppleTV+ series!
("Get an Android?" Yeah, I hear you, I switch ecosystems in anger with every phone, which is why I am so keenly aware of how badly Apple's anti-spam sucks -- but also why I am not over the moon at the prospect of my next switch: I know where the Android skeletons are buried, although hope springs eternal.)
The real indicator for me is: how many of these features are not available in the EU due to privacy concerns. Do we know that?
How do you know that? (How much of your net worth are you willing to bet on it?)
Between GDPR, the DMA and now the AI Act, there is a lot of unique regulatory cross section that Apple has in the EU. It would be surprising if there weren't additional legal checks it had to do, internally and on its suppliers, before launching a product or feature in the EU.
Apple just got dinged under the DMA [1][2]. The text of the law may not have changed, but the reality of its meaning has.
> they're really doing something horribly wrong if they can't be in compliance with GDPR
The point is verifying you are in compliance with a law has costs. Plenty of start-ups, for instance, are better off geoblocking jurisdictions they don't have the resources to comply with but don't want to accidentally do something illegal in. Not because they think they're violating anything. But because it isn't worth losing (a) nimbleness over or (b) future access to. (Common ones being the EU, China and India.) Apple isn't a start-up. But they probably don't want their design team to be half staffed with lawyers either.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-announces-chang...
[2] https://www.beuc.eu/sites/default/files/publications/BEUC-X-...
So while you are correct that there is no technical barrier, you are incorrect that they are the same under EU regulation. Involving EU regulators in product design for designated gatekeepers was the entire point of the law, so this is the desired effect. Regulators want the flexibility to e.g. work with the gatekeeper to design feature modifications, like the default browser selection screen[2], for other aspects of designated gatekeeper platforms.
One can choose to see this as good or bad, but this is clearly the intent of the law.
1 - https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
2 - https://developer.apple.com/support/browser-choice-screen/#:....
Lawyers and lobbyists are still getting their heads around the EU's AI Act [1].
[1] https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/high-level-summary/
With the months of nonstop and over-the-top hype of "Apple Intelligence" these all seem underwhelming.
Even in the idealized world of demoware there's no killer feature, not to mention that none of it is even available to real customers yet.
I was expecting something only Apple could do with their vast ecosystem of IP and partnerships, the must-have cool new thing that would stimulate a leap in demand for iPhone.
It's hard to see how any of this is enough to trigger a new upgrade cycle instead of just waiting until battery life goes to shit or the screen cracks so you have to upgrade.
2) i actually do think dedicated visual intelligence button IS a killer feature. suddenly phone is ai's view into the world. yes probably v1 today will disappoint. but 5 years from now the kids will laugh when we say we had to take photos and upload them to an app back in our day. or manually enter in any information from the real world into our calendars and emails and texts.
Normies struggle with the nuance of devices. They understand what they want, they don't understand steps, like start here then do this, then go here and copy this, then go there. This SKIPS all the steps. This is huge for them, but (probably) just mildly convenient for others.
Google Googles did this 13 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Goggles
It remains interesting to me how much we have been able to do, already, with technology. But discoverability, walled gardens, and <hand waving>marketing/positioning/hype</hand waving> have obscured awareness/adoption.
This is the perfect use of AI, at least for me.
Apple has lost its way, just look at how the "normies" and the "neckbeards" responded to the Vision Pro. Apple doesn't know how to innovate anymore, just how to market, and mass produce things, which is honestly good enough to keep making money for now.
Vision pro was an over-hyped dev kit that offers a taste of the future. That’s it.
Such people are likely confused. The AVP makes sense as a high end POC and dev kit. It takes a minute for a new modality of computing to make sense to people, even for Apple's own devs to figure out how people can use it, to iterate the OS and default app suite for a few years.
They aren’t that dumb to think calling it now Apple intelligence powered will make Siri work
Not everything is available like on a rooted Android of course, but I can at least create a Shortcut script and give it to any iOS user regardless of their technical expertise and they can utilize it, which is leagues ahead of the situation amongst non-rooted Android and non-technical Android users.
I view users moving through interfaces in a mass abstracted form like electrical or hydrological currents. My job is to widen the pipes.
My impression of my non-tech friends is that they aren't too dumb to follow instructions, they just don't enjoy operating a computer like I do, so they are more okay with their choices being restricted if they don't have to waste time doing something they find boring.
None of that was coming from Apple, though. I don't think they can be held responsible for hype that gets put on them.
IMO these are all solid moves into AI integration without getting carried away by hype and doing things that will have very middling results.
My understanding is people knew Apple Intelligence existed before this event.
Is it accurate to say Apple wasn't involved at all in touting it? All external parties? Sounds wrong to my ear
- https://buttondown.com/ainews/archive/ainews-talaria-apples-...
- https://buttondown.com/ainews/archive/ainews-apple-intellige...
That means Apple has a much simpler problem: they don’t need to convince you that AI as a concept is worth hundreds of dollars, they just need to convince you that the hundreds of dollars you were already going to spend on a smartphone should go to them instead of Samsung or Xiaomi.
Anecdotally I tried to get my dad to a iPhone 14 and shift from Android, he basically kept using his Android and never switched,so my mom is using that device now(along with an Android) not too happily just cause no else one is using it and will switch back to Android fully next upgrade. There are plenty of people who simply prefer the Android interface or by now so used to it that don't want to change and vice-versa. I myself use and need both and cannot imagine exclusively committing to one ecosystem.
Even reminders is pretty bad:
"Hey Siri, add celery to the shopping list" "Okay John, I've added celery to the shopping list list (sic)."
Shopping list: - Celery
"Hey Siri, remove celery from the shopping list" "Okay John, I've added celery to the shopping list list."
Shopping list: - Celery - Celery
This is not meeting expectations.
Although somewhere I'm sure we can find an '80s pop-culture vehicle that predicts those shortcomings as well.
Where's the innovation in word processors?
At this point, we're often talking about regression. Apple removed the audio output from its best-selling music player. It removed TouchID. It removed the SIM slot.
You know what would be "innovative?" Making a goddamned phone that can withstand being used for its primary purpose. The failure of the iPhone's design has been confirmed by millions upon millions of people, who have concluded that they must bury their "thin, elegant" phones in bulky, tacky cases. You have to shake your head at Apple's breathless announcement of NEW COLORS!!!! when the vast majority of them will never be seen.
Then there's the fact that Apple ignores an entire market: men who don't wear cargo pants all day every day. Maybe some of us don't want to look like a schlub with a TV tray jammed into his pocket (again, made even worse with a dumb case).
Edit: and currently, that looks to be you and the entire iPhone engineering team
Possible with current tech? Hell no. But within the realms of reality for handhelds to do this in the next 15 years? I think so. Probably less valuable over health and other potential device functions, I don’t think about these things and so I wouldn’t know.
Thus, we are not at a point where portable computers should be considered ‘mature’ from an innovation standpoint, even if current innovation is slow.
You know when you go to a restaurant and the menu is like 3 different cuisines, it's 12 pages, and each page has 20+ items?
The Intelligence section of the presentation felt a bit like that.
Generally, I was surprised how lightly Intelligence featured into the keynote: it wasn't a standalone talking point, nothing on the Apple site talks to it directly. It's conspicuous, given that they've dedicated hardware real estate to it ... and the hype cycle.
I go to a restaurant and look at the menu/see a commercial on TV, I can usually order the item now (other than films).
Apple Intelligence - certain feature(s) (can't recall now) are US-only in November, rolling out to other English-speaking countries in December. No idea when non English-speaking countries will get that feature.
Who knows what Apple Intelligence features are in the device on day 1?
Where were you when they were coming up with "when a friend texts a song name to you, remind them they can play it in Apple Music"??!
"You're holding it wrong" - Steve Jobs
This is a killer feature. Everyone can understand the usefulness of just describing the video moment you want to find. Digging through years worth of photos and videos looking for that one specific moment can be a huge chore when you want to show it to someone.
It's a button that'll be in the hands and pockets of >1 billion people soon.
Each press allows these billion people to connect with a supplier of Intelligence. Whether it's ChatGPT, Google's search, Apple AI or whatever supplier. Apple controls the hardware.
Just think of Apple's contract with Google that nets them $20 billion a year in profit. For comparison, Walmart, Amazon, NVIDIA, Volkswagen, VISA, all had about 20 billion in net income in 2023.
Or think of the appstore as an analogy. Apple controls the gateway between consumer and supplier, and gains from it. This action button will be no different.
On device, my own model. Great.
I'm on iOS 18.0 on my iPhone 15 Pro, rather that the 18.1 with the "AI". Recently had an eye doctor appt for one of my children and they scheduled a follow-up, giving me a little card with the details. I was in a hurry so took a picture of it intending to enter the calendar event later, and it immediately pulled up a fully-filled in, completely accurate new calendar event. Little affordance that is just so nice.
Indeed, in general the camera is getting...crazy. We have a pair of Maine Coon kittens and every picture is tagged with Maine Coon, despite the cats barely even coming into the breed's features yet. Constantly amazed at the stuff the built in camera is identifying.
I feel like loads of these features just quietly appear to be randomly discovered by users.
So it's AI, but not the big hype stuff that gets most of the attention.
My devices have finally figured out that a volleyball and photo of a hand of cards aren't people. I do miss getting a solid chuckle checking that tab.
but few times, there are instances where it doesn't recognize the date and time. I guess this is now a supported feature, instead of accidental feature.
* I think I got that name right...
The iPhone 16's camera button will gain the ability to soft-press to lock focus "later this year". Their software teams are so incredibly far behind, the new phone has literally one new feature, a feature medically prescribed to induce drowsiness, yet they can't even get the software for it finished for release.
It's been nearly 12 years and the supported language list is still the same.
In theory at least it should be straightforward to make LLM-based assistants like Siri truly multilingual.
Mmmmm, feels disappointing to me if that is all we get from a multi trillion tech company + multi trillion technology
In their demos, they use the action button to capture an ambient song for Shazam, the power button to capture a voice command for Siri, and the camera button for an image for Visual Intelligence. All 3 captures should be performed using the same button.
And screenshots still require pressing 2 buttons simultaneously. Unless you want to share your screen with Siri in which case it's the power button...
People are going to use this button as a voice recorder, and Apple will announce native support next year.
While it's true that the first x characters of an email don't always have the most important bits, they're never _wrong_. It's always exactly what's in the email.
I'm worried about cases like this [0], where a summary is inaccurate or misleading. It may not happen often, but it's possible, so I have to be a little skeptical of every summary. Though I can see where AI summaries are a plus, the move from 100% accurate to <100% feels like a big downgrade.
[0]: https://mastodon.macstories.net/@johnvoorhees/11288700482217...
It feels like an endpoint that will get gamed by apps over time.
Anti-feature. I don't even want my phone listening to me and prompting some awkward speech search engine I didn't ask for.
The state of the camera app pisses me off. It could do so much but it does so little. Why can’t I snap a picture of a written WiFi password to connect to WiFi? QRs are so 2008. Why can’t it fully parse a menu and show me what each dish might look like? It’s mind-boggling to me that with thousands of engineers on staff they produce so relatively little. Thousands!
You can actually do that, as of last year's iOS release. It's sort of a pain, but it's doable.
You need to be at the point where it's asking you for the WiFi password, tap the text field, choose "AutoFill", choose "scan text", and use the camera interface to pick the text.
This is extremely undiscoverable, no argument, but it is at least a system-wide standard for how to scan in arbitrary text when you have a text input. (They've picked "AutoFill" as the brand-name for all their get-text-from-somewhere-else features, so it also contains standard password-filling from apps.)
Bafflingly underwhelming additions from the previous innovation leader who had a last mover advantage in the space.
Think we need to be holding Apple to a higher standard, what they did in spaces before with the OG iPhone, iPad, iPod was completely upend the industry and change the game through focusing a product on a few pain points of the existing market. Yet Apple Intelligence feels like a brief struggling to find a reason to be there.
Is anyone here actually excited about the features they just announced? Or are people simply upgrading because they get the latest iPhone every year or two by default?
That’s the only thing from your list that people actually care about and they did improve battery life, there was a whole segment about it.
The rest? No one cares. Do you even use an iPhone? You sound like me before I got an iPhone:
- I thought the notch would be annoying, I don’t even notice it anymore, it’s never been an issue in actual use
- I was convinced TouchID was better than FaceID but I completely changed my mind. FaceID is just more reliable and convenient, especially if you have sweaty palms
- Faster charging? I mean, why not, it’s always nice if it can be faster, but I’ve found fast charging already surprisingly fast whenever I’ve needed to quickly get some % before going out
- Larger default storage? Same, it’s a nice plus, but if you want or need more storage, pay for more? You have the option
- I wish my phone was easier to unlock when outside in the bright sun and wearing glasses. I often have to take them off or try again, or put in a passcode.
- I'd like the screen to not dim after a few minutes outside in the sun.
- I wish my phone charged faster, especially for moments where I'm like "Oh crap, my uber will be here in 5m and I forgot to charge my phone"
- I wish my safari tabs didn't attempt to reload at the most inopportune times (or ever like my Macbook). This is a very real scenario I run into often when in the subway with no cell/wifi, and is extremely annoying. Better than my 11, but not fixed by any means.
- I wish my OLED screen didn't have visible PWM at low brightness, and strained my eyes. Not everyone is sensitive to this, but some are, and I didn't have this issue with my 11.
These are all regular user stories.
Have you tried playing with Reduce White Point in accessibility options? This plus the Dark Reader plugin for Safari it's a good option for late night reading.
This is my absolute #1 wish for my phone.
I want to load up 30 news tabs before I hop on the subway and just have them all stay loaded, instead of the most recent 4 staying loaded, while any others refresh (and fail) if I switch back to them.
I absolutely want all of my tabs to have the page state cached in storage whenever I leave them and they're done loading. With the scroll position too, as I'll often be interrupted halfway through reading a long story. I don't want them to be stored ephemerally in memory.
Surely it can't be so impossible to "pickle" the state of the page and then unpickle? I can totally accept it not surviving every app upgrade too. Just let me load up stories on the subway platform and read them all on my underground commute.
They just purge the oldest-used app(s) when they need more memory.
Unlike on a Mac, applications don't stay open in the background. With some exceptions for specific authorized background processes.
Surely there's An App For That / another browser that doesn't do this? (I don't own an iPhone myself so can't give any recommendations)
I gave up and went back to my 6S.
I have several apps the notch covers. Arguably that's the app's fault for not upgrading ? Or is it Apple's? Maybe Apple should let apps opt into the notch. For apps that don't opt in they'd get a blank bar at the top. That would at least not have broken so many apps.
> - I was convinced TouchID was better than FaceID but I completely changed my mind. FaceID is just more reliable and convenient, especially if you have sweaty palms
Sucks with face masks.
Actually for me it's the opposite, and I see much more failures to unlock with FaceID compared to TouchID. There are many times where I had to hold the phone out in front of me like I'm taking a selfie and look directly at it for the system to work, whereas TouchID works in all kinds of weird positions as long as I'm able to place my finger on the sensor.
I don’t shoot much video but I do take photos
It’s also supposed to do the half-press to lock focus and exposure, which has been a common feature on cameras for ages. But I think I read this is a “coming later” feature.
There was something else about double tapping to switch modes though I don’t know how that works exactly.
It's just a portable computer, and people don't buy new computers every year or two.
It's not just the phone though, you would think by now they would release a smaller watch with round face.
In the iPod era we got a new form factor almost every year. You didn't have to buy it, but you had the choice. Now if I want a round watch I have to buy from google, which doesn't work with my iPhone?
Not saying I need those new features. Only that Apple's incentives are to try to get you to buy the new phone so they are incentivised to gate several software only features to try to get you to upgrade.
Like any evolution, the year over year changes shouldn’t be that drastic
It does feel like there's a small degree of "they can't win" here though. They caught a bit of flack last release cycle for comparing the M3 and M4 chips to the M1s and M2s. Either they can compare to the old ones and people gripe about them hiding the fact that the new releases are incremental, or they compare to the current models and people complain that the releases are incremental.
>Would the new models feel bigger upgrades if Apple only released one every 2-3 year? Sure. Would that be better for the average consumer looking to upgrade from whatever iPhone they have? Not sure. Incremental updates are nice IMO, stop caring about them if your iPhone is less than 3 year old…
I do find it funny that the industry that gave us "rolling release linux" and "dependabot" is full of so many people that hate incremental hardware release cycles.
I'm on a 12 Pro and I only want to upgrade to get more memory and faster processors. My current phone easily pages apps out of memory too often these days and it gets a bit tiring. Also, I already replaced the battery once after 1.5 years and the current battery is already back to about the same health/capacity as the first one was in the same amount of time.
We complained about lockin and the uselessness once the older devices falls off the Apple support list, as repairs became a huge PITA (full swing anti-repair design at the time), and rooting the phones didn't help much as the jailbreaking scene was kneecapped compared to android's alternative stores.
Apple drip feeds features, they have realized that their business relies of making small incremental improvements to the iPhone every year so they hold back features that are bog standard in the more competitive Android world and then make a big fuss when they add it to the iPhone.
How so?
As long as other family members are happy with a steady stream of hand me downs, no harm done I guess.
This is just a new excuse to get a new phone with extra steps.
If you want a new iPhone, get a new iPhone, just be honest with yourself.
And business expenses, like a new phone, are usually above the line, meaning you essentially get a discount of your marginal tax rate, you don't just get it for free.
Your total expenses are less than half and the average phone age is the same while being adapted to everyone's needs. Each device is about 90% as good as the thousand-buck ones (assuming no one has special requirements, like if you're really into photography then either a camera or a top-of-the-line phone does make sense! Exceptions exist for sure)
Or you tell yourself you can get a discount (omg!) by buying it for business and get yourself a shiny new toy every year :). I know some people that do this indeed
That’s liable to land you in hot water in an audit.
I stand corrected.
I really don't care. The 15 pro is so much phone, I can't imagine it lasting less than my SE. And frankly I only upgraded due to the limited time opportunity and knowing my son could use my SE due to his 7 being a crumpled lump of broken glass and gnarled aluminum. It's like he skate boards to school on it. RIP little SE, I guess.
I'd like the slightly nicer camera, but the ones on the 15 pro are so good it seems absurd to complain. I actually used this thing for product photos on my store's website, and they turned out remarkably well. It's not PRO level (I'll reproduce all of them with my camera later) but my god, cameras in phones have come a long, long way. We're at a point where I'd be very surprised if iPhone 17 introduces anything interesting.
I might get an Airpod 4 for the USB-C though the Airpod 3 sucked and I'm suspecting the Airpod 4 is just as bad. Falls out (compared to Airpod 2). Pinch to play/pause/que sucks compared to Tap to play/pause/cue. Several friends had similar experiences including several friends that work at Apple. All of them returned their Airpod 3s.
the CPU and integrated circuit is the core of the phone and if it is intact, the phone can be refreshed to be like new with the new shell for like $30 with parts from ebay
I'm frankly happy Cupertino didn't add bullshit features to make it exciting. This is an incremental update. They opened up minor new capabilities, some of which will matter to some people to varying degrees of compellingness.
I once had a phone break just shy of 2 years and got it repaired, lasted three more years after and I only had to replace it because apps started to require a newer OS, the hardware was fine
On the other hand, the iOS device I had for a few years at work broke part of the touchscreen just after 2 years (nice one, Apple, just out of warranty) and had a battery life that was bad from day one, but then I only use it twice a day for 2FA and the occasional call so it wasn't quite worth sending back
YMMV... saying that any phone running a particular OS must have hardware lasting no longer than the minimum warranty period is beyond me. Well, except when there is only one manufacturer's monoculture of course
I missed the memo - I thought Touch ID was abandoned in favor of Face ID? Did they bring it back on the latest models? Can you use it again instead of Face ID, and is it as instant as it was on the older Apple phones?
Would love to have both! FaceID never works for me when I'm laying on my side in bed.
The only two devices I have that don't have touch ID are my watch and my phone - the two devices I use Apple Pay on the most. WTF Apple.
They likely won't end up reducing the size of the notch any further until they figure out how to either make Face ID work with just a single selfie camera (which would inevitably be less secure), or put the sensors under some sort of semi-transparent display.
Many people thought they missed an opportunity by not simply putting the fingerprint sensor under the Apple logo on the back of the iPhone, but they probably didn't like the UX of that solution.
[1]: https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s24-ultra/comp...
Or they could have both Touch- and FaceID. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I buy a new phone every year because I'm rich, I love technology, and this is a device I use for a significant portion of every single day.
I'm not entirely sure why it happened… Maybe Apple thought that they could keep their own proprietary plug forever and that the EU was bluffing about forcing everyone to use USB-C? Or maybe they are happy like everyone to switch to a fragile connector type that will shorten the lifespan of iPhones.
I wonder what the EU will do when they eventually drop connectors entirely in favor of wireless charging.
It makes sense that they would keep prices constant this year considering the pattern over the last decade.
Apple raised the retail price on the 15 Pro Max and added 5x zoom (2023). Apple raised the price on the iPhone 14 by using last-generation SoC (2022). Apple raised the price on the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro by dropping the AC adaptor and adding carrier charges of $30 (at least in the US) (2020). Apple raised the retail price of the iPhone 8 ($50 more than the 7) and in the same year, put more expensive inputs in the the X line which became the Pro line (2017). Apple put more expensive inputs in the 6 Plus and priced it $100 more than the 6 (2014).
It got smashed, so now I have to deal with all the regressions. No TouchID, no headphone jack, no SIM slot. Will I enjoy having a much better camera? Yep. But that won't do me any good while I can't listen to shit on the plane or in my cars... unless I carry an octopus of dongles everywhere, and none of it breaks and none of its non-removable batteries die.
The sad fact is that manufacturers work harder to screw the customer now than they do to impress him. Apologists enable this behavior, and entire product categories regress.
For the last few years I've been waiting for the final, long-overdue ditching of all Lightning ports.
I've been writing an application and jumping through hoops to make it work on iOS 15 simply because I wanted it to work on my own phone. And those hoops were a PITA because SwiftUI was full of absurd holes and defects until iOS 17 (yes, 17). So I guess I can go through and shitcan all the workarounds I had to implement, at least!
As a street / candid / pj photographer, the iPhone cameras + photo capture flow is unbeatable.
That said, it seems pretty unrealistic that we can't figure out any incremental improvement until advancing our understanding of the universe. Both have been happening in parallel for centuries if not millennia
Battery life is more than enough for me almost every day.
Why on Earth should I downgrade to Touch ID when using Face ID?
I cared about the camera and improved ultra wide angle, 5x telephoto (my current one, 14 Pro Max has 3x) and 4K 120FPS HDR are enough for me to upgrade.
I agree that the general improvements could be better though: nowadays it's mostly software/AI stuff, and I'd definitely would like to have better camera/better display upgrades instead of just software stuff.
And the thing with the dynamic island is it's mostly drawn on in software. It's actually 2 small cutouts, a pill and a circle for FaceID and the selfie camera. They fill it in with the island at the top to make it look like it's all software, so I don't see them shrinking it since it's being used as a feature, where apps can minimize into it with live data (music playing, sports scores, etc)
The new models do have better battery life and faster charging.
They probably have done a load of research that shows that people on the whole buy new phones more because they think they will take better photos/video of their travels/friends/kids, rather than because of the notch size.
I'm somewhat tempted by the camera improvements. Mostly the increased resolution on the ultra-wide camera, though the dedicated camera button might be nice. There've also been times when the higher zoom lens would have been useful for me, and it being available as standard means I'd actually have it without needing to buy a too-large phone.
The ultra-wide matters even when you're not using it for the zoomed-out fisheye shots, because it also is used for the macro mode. When you're within about a foot-or-so of a subject, the Camera app will switch to macro mode and quietly transition to using an extremely cropped view from the center of the ultra-wide lens. This lets it focus really well on up-close things... but the image quality is noticeable worse. So hopefully a vastly higher-res ultra-wide would result in me not feeling I should fiddle with camera settings around that transition point.
(Yes, this is very much a problem of Apple's own making. It started being annoying around the 14, when the main camera's focal length changed a bit and made them push the distance they had to trigger macro mode from out so it was no longer only happening when you were around 6 inches from a subject.)
Mind you, I try not to get excited for other releases when I made the decision to not yet upgrade my phone.
The more things change...
I’ll continue using my SE 1st Gen with 4 inch screen for as long as I can.
It's the little iPhone that could and it's such a shame that its most recent replacement - the iPhone 13 Mini is both such a brick in comparison and did not have a successor.
What's worse there's hardly any choice nowadays in the sub 70mm width, sub 150g weight category. I guess people collectively resigned themselves to holding their devices with both hands.
I held on for so long, but even with a healthy battery, modern apps just crush it. I'd open Uber and go from 100% to 60% by the time my ride arrived. Caved and bought the new SE and mostly hate it in all its giant rounded slipperiness.
Instead of simply asking a women what breed her dog was - he had to open a camera app on his iPhone, ask a women a permission to take a photo of the dog, wait until the AI gives him an answer...
- "Is that rain?" pulls up a weather widget, but Siri doesn't say anything about it (the correct answer for me right now would be the response "No")
- "Let's get soup delivered" does a google search for literally "let's get soup delivered" with no vocal response.
- The other two work fine.
It honestly felt like Apple didn’t do that scene because normally everything is well thought out.
The one from Google the AI a man was using to raise his child convinced him to use Gemini to write an admiration letter to an athlete wouldn't look out of place in the series.
The 13 Pro had ProMotion, 14 Pro had Dynamic Island and Always On display, the 15 Pro had USB-C and the Action Button, the 16 Pro...has maybe slightly faster AI? 4k120fps video? USB-C w/ USB 3? Not things most people would care about.
ProMotion/Always On is still limited to the Pro models which is enough to justfy the upcharge, but it's a surprise they aren't locking a new feature this time.
It's a no-brainer to get the Pro for this reason, if you care about photos.
In other words, I wouldn't expect a improvement in capturing actual 48MP pictures in phone cameras, apart perhaps from pixel binning to a smaller size and similar techniques.
Disclaimer: I haven't followed camera tech very closely recently, and I'm not an expert. Take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Is this correct?
As far as I know, Sony is the only company making phones with “actual” optical zoom, and not just a bunch of primes.
Is it actually a different die though? The A18 and A18 Pro are so close in specs, with the same 6 CPU cores, same 16 NPU cores and only 5 vs. 6 GPU cores that I would guess that they are the very same die just with one GPU cluster and USB3 switched off in the non-Pro version.
The rumor was that they are different dies. It seems strange because both are made with the same 2nd generation 3nm architecture.
Each model now has a different display size.
You can choose between 6.1", 6.3", 6.7" and 6.9"
https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Apple-iPhone-13-Pro,A...
I understand it's not ideal, but I find it a valuable feature when I must operate one handed and sometimes struggle with the same issue.
I did also set up an accessibility feature where you can map a handful of actions to a double or triple tap on the back of the glass, and I mapped double-tap to trigger Reachability. But it's not super fast and overall a bit of a downgrade from the double capacitive TouchID tap on older models.
If it helps, the Pro is only increasing by a few mm in height and depth, not width.
[1]: iPhone 13 Pro specs: https://www.apple.com/by/iphone-13-pro/specs/
[2]: iPhone 16 Pro specs: https://www.apple.com/ca/iphone-16-pro/specs/
The mini was a great form factor, fits in more pockets comfortably and the whole screen is within reach of my thumb when using the phone one-handed.
That said I wonder if they'll slip in a new mini model every once in a great while to give that group of users an option.
My mom doesn't need more than 8GB RAM. Overengineering is still bad engineering.
Maybe 8GB ram is enough for your mom but know lots of non-techies suffering with underpowered machines.
As always, it depends on how the machine is being used. The encompasses both intent and habits.
Someone who will install ad-spam toolbars will chew through all the memory in the world. That doesn't change the fact that they're largely using their device to e-mail, read news and occasionally open a spreadsheet.
It doesn't matter than they're only using their device to e-mail, read news, and occasionally open a spreadsheet. In fact, reading news is arguably a memory and perf hog. 100s of large images, plus video, etc... taxes any low-powered/low-memory machine. It's bad enough on a fast machine that doesn't slow down but is still covered in ads on the news page. But it's horryfing on an under-powered/under-memory machine.
believe it or not, an 8GB macos device is generally quite usable even if it's swapping, as long as it's apple silicon family. yes, it's not going to save if you if your working set is more than 8GB and you need everything in the set, but chrome/firefox do not actually need the 32gb you are probably giving them.
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Students-Business-Quad-Core-Storag...
Grandma, on a fixed income, buys the $249 machine.
The end result is super slow loading as stuff is swapped, apps crashing (at least on Windows), tabs reloading when you don't want them to.
She does most of that on an iPad. The computer is used for e-mail, filling out government forms and looking at spreadsheets. She needs a sturdy machine that works, simply, and doesn't need a lot of babying. A cheap, well-configured Mac running Safari with an ad blocker is just about perfect for that.
Just pulled it up on my (16GB) Mac. 300 MB.
Note that she's manipulating, like, a spreadsheet for the rotary.
It is a joke, right?
Sent from my iPhone 15 Pro
Fundamentally Apple wants to leverage their supply chain to maximize shared parts between the Pro and base iPhones. Lack of hardware innovations makes it hard to create product differentiation.
Heck, even the A18 Pro chip seems a marginal upgrade over the base A18 chip: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/apples-a18-chip-desi...
In the announcement they said “big boost”, and looking at the comparison page I will go from 17h video playback to 27h. That’s not even including the battery degradation I built up in the last 4 years. I’m practically going to double my battery life.
https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16-pr...
Better ultrawide, but from the comparison page on Apple’s website it would appear the main sensors on both are the same?
Always On is on the base model this year too
Always On depends on ProMotion for 1Hz refresh.
This is just Apple maximising profit as usual, pushing people up the endless tiers of their product families.
I suspect everyone who upgrades from a $150 120Hz phone to a new iPhone will be thrilled.
You have it backwards. Nobody is pro gaming on an iPhone. That high refresh rate doesn't have a real, practical purpose. It just looks really really good and immediately grabs your eye - it's candy.
> Literally anyone picked off the street will notice jumping from 60hz to 120hz after maybe, I don't know, 2 seconds of swiping around.
But frame rates? I was curious to see what the hype was about and walked over to the phones section in a nearby tech store when I was there to buy something unrelated. Side by side, I just cannot tell the difference. I'm swiping fast and slow but I cannot tell whether one is smoother or if that's my brain doing this placebo thing. I'd be very curious if I can tell in a blind test. Perhaps I could, but it's so close that I really don't see the point of making a big deal out of selecting for screen refresh rate, for myself at least
1) OMG! What an upgrade! I will never own another phone without this! 2) Eh, I see what the difference is. I don’t care/it isn’t worth the price. 3) What are you talking about? I don’t see any difference.
2 and 3 combined are probably the majority of people. The first post is literally about his girlfriend not noticing screen differences. There are plenty of people like that.
No, no there aren't because fast refresh rate is painfully obvious. I'm talking within a second, maybe fractions of a second, you will notice. Because every single animation is affected.
It's one thing to say it's a small change, or not a big deal, or not worth it (I'd even agree). It's another to say you can't notice it. No... you can definitely notice it.
I actually like the idea, but I worry a lot that it will lead to non tech-savvy (and tech-savvy-but-hurried) people to getting rekt. It’s still obscene to me that they don’t show the sender’s email before clicking in. It not only removes valuable information to screen emails with, but if there are tracking pixels, they fire since you must open the email for further screening. (Sender email can ofc be spooked, but this catches most spam I get)
Even after clicking, you have to tap twice on the sender's to open his details and see his address.
And if he's in your contacts and has more than 1 address, there's no way to know which one sent the email.
What makes you think that? Email message content is plain HTML, tracking pixels are usually implemented as `<img>`s with unique link.
I'd expect Apple engineers are aware of that and they can render HTML without external resources, and only then pass it to their LLM. Also Mail.app is already capable of doing that -- you can disable loading external resources by default in settings on iOS and macOS both.
Every iPhone generation makes YouTube video quality slightly better as it’s what a lot of people use. That plus social media.
Camera quality is quite amazing these days
I have read the official press release but it seems like there is no mentions of this.
Might need to wait for the ifixit tear down in ~10 days.
Edit 1: there has been some discussions that eventually the Sony IMX903 would be used, but not sure when that will actually eventuate.
> You can capture 4K 120 fps ProRes and log recordings to an external storage device — a big plus for pro editing workflows that demand a high frame rate and colour grading control.
Might make a dent in mirrorless sales, just w/o the lenses
True flagships these days are really made by Chinese firms. I am only holding back because of long term software support. I guess I will grab the next gen flagship honor/mi phone.
Despite boasting to have an intuitive UX, iOS can be very obscure regarding discoverability and exploration of features. Many features give no hints whatsoever of existing.
I have a Sofirn SP35 (USB-C charging, standard 21700 battery) and for about $40 it can be brighter than a car's low beams. r/flashlight's recommended lights is a solid place to start.
Until Apple releases an iOS platform equivocal to AOSP, there's really not any competition at all. Apple claims to care about privacy, Google proves they do.
Google’s entire business model is dependent on personal data. AOSP may have privacy features that are verifiable but Google Play Services is not open source and undoubtedly collect lots of data for Google. Most AOSP-based phones all largely include GPS. Sure, you can limit what access GPS has but then you’re sacrificing features. The majority of people probably opt-in.
In contrast, Apple doesn’t need your data for most of the products / services they sell. Privacy is a selling point, so they’re incentivized to build robust privacy features. I’d love to see more commitment to open-sourcing underlying technologies but imo Apple is way more privacy conscious than Google.
I will however give Google credit for their privacy initiatives in recent years. They seem to be taking it more seriously.
Google Play services is not everything though, and Android being what it is, you can actually replace and spoof most of these features to your heart's content. Having used Android without Play Services for a few years now, I honest to god do not notice the difference. microG coming preinstalled on most Android derivatives helps a lot there.
> Privacy is a selling point, so they’re incentivized to build robust privacy features.
Problem is, that's a tautology. Apple says that, and certainly stand to gain quite a bit from claiming it. But nobody is holding them accountable besides themselves; if Apple was asked to compromise their privacy by a third party, their users may never know. Nobody can earnestly say that iOS is a comparatively private operating system, because we literally cannot see how it behaves!
Apple's approach to "privacy" is publishing whitepapers and then absolving themselves of real accountability. That's how they approached iPhone security, that's how they approached Mac security, and lord only knows how they approach iCloud security. When you say that Apple is "privacy conscious", you mean to say they market privacy better. You don't know how conscious Apple is of privacy, you only know what they claim to be true.
As I said; it's not a competition. Marketing-based security is not a threat model; transparency is.
This is not even funny:
1. "macOS sends hashes of every opened executable to some server of theirs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
2. https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
3. Apple fined $8.5M for illegally collecting iPhone owners' data for ads (gizmodo.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
4. Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS (therecord.media) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
5. Keeping your data from Apple is harder than expected (aalto.fi) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657
AOSP so different than even Google own pixel phones it's code is basically irrelevant.
I'm not saying that the AOSP absolves all of Google's server-side behavior (or even that it proves they're benevolent; neither company is). My point is that Google presents a realistic threat model to their users, that takes them seriously and even provides escape hatches for any potentially concerning features. iOS presents a comparatively cartoonish outlook that relies more on the strength of their marketing than the self-evidence of their security. Apple's position is indefensible but claims to be altruistic; Google's position is honest, so much that it treats themselves as a threat.
What is the difference?
Again - Linux for desktops and servers can be great for privacy. For pretty much every single smartphone-based threat vector, it is a free lunch for attackers. We're talking off-the-shelf CVE exploits versus blowing a multi-million dollar zero-day here.
That would be Sony's phones for you. They're great for raw photography, especially if you process it yourself from raw.
Downsides behind...it's a Sony. And they also don't have any interest in AI and advanced software features.
The sad thing is image processing is also basically machine learning when it comes to noise management, and computational photography is still what pushes the envelope when it comes to sensors these sizes. Sony handles the whole stack, from the sensor to the color management, and still can't have great photography on their phones almost solely because of that.
I'm curious how Xiaomi does with their phones with actual larger sensors, but given the price I won't be touching one anytime soon.
Figured I'd drop a comment to let you know about the others though!
Does it? I can't find any info about this online and all I can find seems to indicate that you can run Shazam and it scans for some amount of time afterwards but iOS kills it to save battery. It doesn't seem like you can get Google Pixel-like "Now Playing" which I sorely miss on my iPhone 15 Pro.
The non-techy group of friends only commented on the colors, size of the phone, and how there's nothing interesting to convince them to upgrade from the 13/14/15 models.
The nerdy group really got hyped on the Apple Intelligence part, only qualm being that it's not going to be released on day one. They also had screenshots to share of previous chips like the A16 and A17 to compare. The video specs were all followed by positive emojis because almost everyone has kids, pets, or things they like recording. And at the end, some even lamented the fact that the default storage is only 128GB on the smaller Pro model.
As someone who's very interested in smartphones, I found it kinda interesting how Apple seems to be sharing more data points on performance and specs instead of "useful features" that most people would notice.
It feels like a “off” or “s” year. Some minor improvements and technically a new phone but nothing to write home about.
It's been many generations since I've had an Apple device, and each year they release a new one I try figure out how long the battery lasts, to no avail. Nobody I know has bought a Max Pro either.
With Apple, you never know, it could still be 10 hours battery life. I mean they just released "ground-breaking" features like moveable icons, something I think Android had since Android 1. My point is one never knows.
"The new mechanical architecture improves heat dissipation and efficiency for up to 20 percent better sustained performance. Along with the new internal design and advanced power management of iOS 18, larger batteries are optimized to offer a huge leap in battery life."
>larger batteries
>optimized
> a huge leap in battery life
This is still all just marketing puff and air though.
Also 20% better than what?
This is designed so that when you try to nail them down, they can change what it is 20% better than.
Perhaps you’re more annoyed about right to repair in general? That’s a different story…
Edit: To head off any doubt, no my phone was not damaged, and the repair went smoothly. They were having an inventory tracking system outage with absolutely zero fallback/continuity plan and absolutely refused to give me my phone back, repaired or not.
There are some actual benefits though, even if you choose to ignore them. The water resistance rating is much higher compared to phones with a battery cover, a modern iphone will have zero problems being accidentally dropped in the deep end of a pool, or in a lake.
Everything is a trade off, don’t forget that. You don’t like this trade off, which i completely understand. Not everyone cares about water resistance…
If a replaceable battery is a must for you, i’d buy an android with a battery cover. Gotta choose what’s right for you.
So which benefit can you make up to explain why older iphone models with low water resistance also didn't have replaceable batteries?
Also it's not really true for the modern phones either since there are rare models with high ip68 water resistance and user replaceable batteries
So it's not that I ignore the benefit, I deny its explanatory power and doubt its size
what’s this?
Given the numbers the SE is selling, it might totally be a factor, on top of the price.
Comparison page lists the "Blood Oxygen app" for the S6 through S8, but S9 and S10 both just have "-" for that comparison section like the S5 has.
https://www.apple.com/watch/compare/?modelList=watch-series-...
EDIT: Another difference between them is the Vitals App description removing the blood oxygen reference.
S10: "Vitals app featuring heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, and sleep duration"
S08: "Vitals app featuring heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen, and sleep duration"
https://www.apple.com/sg/watch/compare/?modelList=watch-seri...
https://www.patentlyapple.com/2024/07/while-apple-has-update...
Edit: if you go to the comparison page, it lists the blood oxygene app for the 10 and the Ultra 2, so great :)
Here's one thing I saw about it:
https://www.patentlyapple.com/2024/07/while-apple-has-update...
No real pattern to the large outliers, they’d happen at all times of the day, even with my girlfriend’s watch that I asked for a lend of.
Is FlightAware blocking use of the app now? I assume it's because they've dropped support for iOS 15 (which can be a hassle depending on new APIs they want to use), not the 7 device specifically.
1: I don't see what the big deal is to just put if statements around any iOS16-requiring new features, yet keep targeting iOS15. We did this all the time back when I used to write iOS apps.
It gets increasingly more expensive to support older and older iOS versions. These “new features” you’re talking about wrapping in if statements aren’t here and there. Many upgrades are pervasive, and would eventually make every file a branching mess.
Now, you could argue that that should still be the chosen route. I can empathize with that. I like software that just keeps working forever.
(I often use it on low brightness in dim ambient light)
also: burn in
Can't believe I haven't done it already actually. I've noticed that nearly everything in life flickers from microwaves (each digit is lit up sequentially! I can't believe we can't see this) to my LCD laptop screen (flickers in different colors! Red comes first, then green and blue, it's extremely obvious on the slow motion but, with my own eyes, I'll only occasionally catch a glimpse of red when I look away from something white that just turned on, and even then I'm not sure if I'm just seeing things), but the phones I looked at so far must have been LCD then
I heard that it can be opposite in TV world, some backlit LCD panels flicker as hell while some OLEDs manage to flicker less but I never owned a TV to make observations
All phone OLED exhibits this, though iphone is one of the more egregious ones.
I saw a couple mentions of this today that I’d never heard of before. Do you know if there have been any studies (preferably double-blind) into this?
FWIW I don't think I have any sort of special sensitivity, I just don't like it and it annoys me whenever I notice it
If I was not using my phone in the dark at low brightness as much I would probably be fine with OLED...
Also maybe they made it better since first OLED iphones, but they never say anything about PWM in press releases and it is kind of expensive to just buy it to try and throw out if it still sucks.
I'm curious, why? I hate the whole screen glow of LCD in low light, much preferring the pure black of OLED.
Swings and roundabouts… for some people the grey tinge and messed up gamma curve of low brightness OLED is unacceptable. For others text readability in darkness is key
There’s also the PWM argument which has been beaten to death
And if I have full screen glow anyway then LCD looks better due to less flicker.
usb-c is a big feature increment for me, and I need to finish the leap away from google voice, since I absolutely know they are not going to bother implementing RCS and will just shutter the service instead. LiDAR also seems extremely useful/cool. On the other hand, I was kinda hoping for thunderbolt support on the pro models eventually. Not sure if I will buy a refurb 15 Pro or a new 16 Pro Max or wait for the next cycle.
that's how you avoid e-waste for real and not as a fashion statement. simply consume less - and that includes not consuming a $300 android phone every 18 months, not just apple - and have it repaired when it needs it. with OEM parts that will last the long-haul and not something off amazon that will need to be changed again in 6 months.
But in comparison it would be also more than half the price you could sell an iPhone 11 nowadays
Have we witnessed peak Apple?
Apple Watch: minimal updates. AirPods Max: new color. AirPods: some minor tweaks.
Wow they really didn't upgrade to the H2 chip! I preordered this without looking too closely as I've been waiting forever for an upgrade to buy this. Very strange.
How about running a normal OS without artificial restrictions, so that you could completely replace your laptop/desktop?
But in general I agree that the innovation output of Apple is really low compared to their size. But that seems to be the case for most of these mega trillion dollar companies. The bigger, the more conservative they get. But they are very good at making profits so it's all good as far as the CEO's bonus goes.
And yet I would consider the M-chip Apple laptops to be a massive improvement.
Every year can’t have a huge paradigm shift, most users update every 2 to 4 years and so a bunch of small improvements can feel much much larger. Personally, I think releasing a phone every year is the right move even if the improvements are small.
Until some other form factor takes off, this is where we are.
The yearly thing is to scam superfans.
Beyond that there's huge issues with it such as third party batteries tainting the overall quality of the phone, having an entirely removable back plate would kill their water/dust resistance rating, it looking bad (Yes this is important to Apple) etc, god-knows-what other issues arise changing the internal structure of their components that drastically.
Don't assume they can't figure out an engineering problem because you're upset that phones aren't the same as they were 20 years ago.
The battery disposal is not really the point of the conversation, you could make the same argument about the whole phone. The point is that all of the components of the phone last a lot longer than two years, but the sealed in battery will barely make it that long. They obviously benefit financially from the current arrangement because they’ve shifted consumer decision from “should I pay $40 to increase my battery life by 25% on my 2 year old phone” to “should I invest $100 in this older phone or just throw it away and spend $200 (subsidized) on a new one?” The second one makes a lot more money for Apple and has a much larger negative impact on the planet.
As far as waterproof ratings, such phones exist, even in the thin form factor. This argument is a non-starter that doesn’t agree with observed reality. It’s an active choice they’re making because the incentives are misaligned.
As to the argument that users will use bad components, how is this any different than the myriad of bad Bluetooth headphones available that degrade user experience? Should Apple disallow those as well to protect their stupid users? What about cheap chargers? Cases that induce thermal throttling? Screen protectors that greatly degrade visual fidelity?
I’m not upset about phones being different than 20 years ago, I’m upset that the planet is being destroyed to slightly increase profits, all while Apple lies to our face and parades Mother Earth around the keynote stage.
From [1] "Additional Apple Intelligence features will roll out later this year and in the months following", i.e. later in 2024 and then in 2025, and the not-available-at-launch features appear to be the stronger ones, e.g. ChatGPT integration?
Any word on improving the dictate-to-text keyboard feature? I could only find "In the Notes and Phone apps, users can also record, transcribe, and summarize audio", but that's different.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/09/apple-debuts-iphone-1...
I freakin' love them. Wireless and device handoff just works. Great for running, never fallen out in thousands of miles. Great for taking calls even in noisy places like an airport. And I even sometimes use Siri with them despite generally hating voice control anything.
Totally sold on them, all skepticism erased. I'll buy a new pair the same day these eventually die/break/get lost. And my spouse has their own pair now, too.
Never thought I'd be so impressed by something as boring as earbuds.
So, will Apple be the one to make this a new industry standard for flagship devices, like they did with the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack or excluding the charger from the box? Perhaps, but for now, I remain cautiously skeptical.
_____________________________
1. Apple hasn’t officially listed the display resolution on the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s product page, but thankfully, GSMArena has all the technical details available: https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_16_pro_max-13123.php.
2. AFAIK, aside from Samsung, only two other major brands have experimented with this display size: Motorola, with its Razr 50 Ultra (2024), and Huawei, with the Pocket (2022).
2868-by-1320-pixel resolution at 460 ppi
As I am on an iPhone 13 Pro Max, still in total absolutely a worthy upgrade for me. I certainly look forward to it. The advantages vs the 15 I can see so far:
- updated SOC, somewhat faster, but up to 30% more power-efficient which turns into
- larger battery life. Thats something everyone will welcome, I guess.
- better camera: 48mp wide angle, 120mm tele lens, 4k 120 Hz.
- a bit larger screen, too bad they at least didn't name any other screen enhancements
- the shutter button. A ton of functionality built into one single button. Pressure/touch sensitivity, haptical feedback. That should greatly improve its usage as a camera.
- all the AI stuff. We need to wait how it delivers, when it arrives (especially, if you are outside the US), but that could get interesting when it delivers.
While there wasn't any big surprise or outstanding change, for a year over year update a lot of things and definitely very nice for everyone with an older phone than the 15.
We order online from the comfort of our homes and still get the phone on launch day?
I bet he is rolling in his grave when he sees this new icon color theming thing or what they did with the control center where there is now 5 different page of settings.
The iPhone 16 Pro has four buttons: power, up, down, camera.
Plus a switch for mute. Both models.
What are your kids doing that consumes so much local storage?
We aren't photographers, we just goof around, and our almost-teenaged son doesn't factor into those numbers.
The sheer volume of data created is just .. it's nuts. And there's another 300gb of data generated from all the metadata, sidecar, smart search, face detection! Imagine all that plus much more that Apple Intelligence generates.
Long gone are the days of just putting JPGs into a folder!
If I was betting, most people likely pay for a cloud storage solution and don’t use the majority of their device storage.
I'm at 285GB right now.
The breakdown is 81GB for music, 56GB for pictures, ~40GB of download content on TV/Youtube/Audible and ~23GB of games.
I could _easily_ cut down on that. There's games I haven't played in a while, movies I've already watched, or even music I don't really listen to frequently enough to have it downloaded.
Safe to say I'll go for 256GB next time
iPod touch (32GB), if you ignore this
iPhone 4 (16GB), 2010
iPhone 6 (64GB), 2014
iPhone SE 2nd gen (256GB), 2020
iPhone 16 (1 TB)?, 2024
Every time, I think "that's probably way more than I'll need", but I guess in 6 years or so I'll upgrade to the 4 TB model. Or wait for next year's model, maybe another SE will come out...
Both my parents barely use the 64GB on their phone. The one that does photography, probably can't store all their photos on any iPhone, because it measures in the multi-TB.
I usually overbuy storage but after three years, I'm removing things like music and podcasts because it's completely full.
Those who go heavy on the video vs those who don't.
They, unlike us, also know what 256GB of storage actually costs but somehow that's not reflected in the price difference either
128GB is plenty for me.
This pricing strategy is intentional in the way it is limiting to encourage people to buy more expensive models.
They don't offer 128gb as the base tier because they think it will meet everyone's needs. They offer that as the base tier because they think it won't meet everyone's needs. An ideal pricing strategy captures as many sales as possible while also upcharging as many people as possible who would be willing to pay more.
But also I just checked and I have 128GB and its fine for me.
also use it as a portable usb stick. when you are transfering stuff over 10gb, usb 3 is very very usefull.
Not saying they should: using existing hardware to solve one's problem is perfectly legitimate; just saying there's other hardware out there than Apple devices
ProMotion, Always-on display, a bunch more resistant to fall damage, and a camera that is better, but doesn't look like a lot.
I'm a bit worried about the Apple Intelligence features, as they've been very prominent on WWDC, but were fairly toned-down today. Not much of it was shown, and they're delaying their arrival (notification summaries look great though, as a "little thing that matters").
Can't find the toot anymore but a recently popular one said that developers should be legally bound to 5-year-old hardware so that the resulting software works smoothly on all current systems and one is not forced to constantly upgrade just to keep a working system
Not a serious proposal but it did give me pause
On occasion they'll squash down something that is better read tersely, but I've overwhelmingly found them to make the content worse than simply reading the original text.
I was really hopeful about them going in, but it seems like it might need an iteration or two more.
The fun of my family group chat is reading the messages from everyone.
I haven't had an Android phone in something like 10 years and I really think that Apple is about to start losing its monopoly due to the folding phones. They're the main (only?) reason to move to Android and leave the Apple ecosystem now.
The folding phone has now basically replaced my tablet, my phone, and my e-reader. It's just such a huge technological leap to just be able to open it up in the subway or in bed and get access to the massive screen on demand. It's actually much more comfortable to hold and type on this way that I'm writing this comment sitting on my couch with the phone unfolded in my hands.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/06/03/foldable-iphone-unlikel...
We're half a decade into folding phones and I've only seen a handful of them out in public. They're still too expensive, and they haven't solved the issue of the foldable screens being incredibly scratch prone, and having random failures where they spontaneously break along the fold crease. Not to mention none of the OEMs offer great solutions for pain-free screen replacements that I've seen.
I won't say Apple will never release a folding device, but I can't see foldables going beyond a niche enthusiast product in the long-term. Even though the folding screen technology has improved, it seems like there hasn't been much progress in resolving the issue that if you just press a nail into one you have a permanent mark in it. That already makes it a non-starter for women with long nails, who are constantly clicking their fingernails against their phone screen when they type.
Modern foldables have gotten pretty good at being a foldable. But the iPhone is damn close to perfection at being the candy-bar phone people are used to. Using it doesn't blow your mind, but I think if you gave most people a top-of-the-line foldable and then an iPhone to use for an extended period of time, they'll end up being happier with the iPhone.
Interesting to see all the rumors of a iPhone Slim / Air be nothing and I almost thought that they would do it on the Pro lineup.
People want this? My current 6.7 14promax is already in hindsight too big for single hand operation.
Realistically I'm probably skipping 16 anyway. Top end 14 is still adequate for everything I need
"Apple Intelligence" does not come to Europe and the rest of the world because of the DMA/DSA or other regulations. It doesn’t come, because language support isn’t there.
They are only announcing US English support, with some other English dialects in December: https://eu-img-cdn.livecenter.com/lc-images-2021/lcimg-72ed0...
And the list of proposed languages coming sometimes in 2025 is rather anaemic: https://eu-img-cdn.livecenter.com/lc-images-2021/lcimg-8aec0...
Granted, Silicon Valley companies are mostly rather bad when it comes to other languages (and even more other cultures), but Apple in the last decade tried at least and language support for Siri, dictation and such had in the past much fuller lists of language support. When was the last time they had to pad an extra slide with different variants of English [1]? When did they had to put Spanish, the quasi second language of the US, into next year? And missing from the next year slide are major languages like Arabic, Japanese, German, Italian, Hindi and a lot of more languages Siri already could do, although badly.
Maybe the new LLM/ML training for "Apple Intelligence" needs far more data, bigger data sets and that's why?
[1] Normally I would have thought of a slide with english dialects as a good thing. Computer language systems should recognize that the English language is different in different countries, that different English-speaking cultures are different and I'd argue even "UK English" is far to wide for that country of dozens of vastly different dialects. And of course the biggest English dialect is missing: "English as a second/nth language" or better "English with an accent".
> is Danish classically difficult even for computers, or is the whole language family out?
Google does it, so I guess it should be possible.
I’m using my action button, I like being able to assign it to ProCamera, but it’s not as useful as it could be. I miss Touch ID.
I’m not sure why but Face ID fails for me quite often. Maybe 25% of the time. I have to make a real effort to ensure it works. Straighten out my glasses, hold the phone up and look straight into the camera, ensure good lighting, etc.
Though sometimes it will randomly work in nearly pitch black conditions. How the hell? I miss Touch ID.
I plan to get a regular 16, for the reasons you mention. What regular features would you want to see?
Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases.
Plus, you’re on HN: your complaint about iPhones is supposed to be that they’re just “mindless consumption devices” for sheeple who want to drool at YouTube shorts, wildly worse for any conceivable creative or practical, serious endeavor than Linux phones or a Thinkpad, because you can’t get a root shell. You’ve gone entirely the wrong direction for this site, with your post :-)
We must live on different planets. Are you really going to send your friends and family AI-generated emojis, or rewrite your texts to them with Apple Intelligence? I sure know they won't.
I've returned to the stone ages of digital tuners and metronomes for practice(1), and any recordings I make use a laptop. Not that there are good options for quick and dirty recordings, just that they're better than using a phone.
If I were making podcasts or something like that the phone would be a lot more useful, but for music, not so much.
(1) there was awhile back that my phone was integral to practicing music but now I can't use it at all, because every decent metronome/tuner app is trash.
Not trying to judge what counts as making music - just saying that the times are changing a bit and the GP probably wasn't referring to traditional DAW usage and stuff like that.
Audio player, cell phone and camera were already implemented by “dumbphone” Nokias. I think adding mobile internet was a mistake. I use it all the time but it doesn’t add much to my life. It doesn’t make me more productive but it adds another consumption device.
Then one day I was at the airport waiting in a long check-in line. I got out my Motorola Droid, dug though my email, checked in to the flight, and got out of the line.
After that I was convinced of the value of it, and I’m reminded every time I’m standing on the street, waiting for an Uber rather than looking around for a cab.
Mobile internet was not a mistake, we just started to use it wrongly. It's your choice to not use it to browse internet aimlessly. It's your choice to make yourself available all the time. You can definitely use it how I did for more than a decade before everybody realized what being always online means. It definitely improved my productivity before that, but it's true that the added benefit is about flat in the past decade.
I 100% agree that if I was doing those things, they would be wrong for me so I avoid doing them.
I don't like people who say "I don't like when I do this thing, so, this thing should not be available for people to do!"
I equally don't like people who say "I don't like when other people do this thing, so, this thing should not be available for people to do!"
I know that social media is designed to be addictive. This is why I'm mostly absent from it for most of my life.
If you use and enjoy social media and it brings joy to your life, great, have fun. It wasn't doing that for me (or more directly, I realized very early on it was going down a bad path) so I cut it out.
If you're lamenting social media and bothered by how much time you spend on it, or how it negatively impacts your life, or whatever: I am definitely going to advocate to you that you do simply have the option to turn it off. Life will move on!
You can also have a smart phone and not feel the need to immediately respond to every text message, nor, click every notification. You can even choose to not pick up phone calls if you want.
In the past decade while the reality of mobile connectivity hasn't changed much, the quality and ubiquity of it has improved dramatically.
10 years ago I would have agreed that in most places it was possible to get some form of internet connectivity, today, it's deeply unusual to travel anywhere in the USA and not get >100Mbit on LTE with "good enough" latency.
Of course, most people goes to places with coverage, but for example if you travel between population centers (cities, towns, etc), then it's quite frequent that you don't have internet, or just terrible one. Especially if you're on a train which insulates somewhat, and of course speed is also a degrading factor.
There's a huge difference between an audio player and having spotify (or apple music, or whatever you prefer) where you can play effectively any song you want at effectively any time.
There's a huge difference between having a camera and something which can record 4k video or take photos which surpass any digital camera we had in the early 2000s and even today surpasses virtually any camera in the price range of the whole phone. You would need something like a Leica fixed lens camera or a mirrorless DSLR with multiple lenses at several times the cost of a smartphone to equal the photo and video capabilities. This also ignores the fact that I can snap these amazing pics or videos and send them to a friend instantly.
We still don't have:
- an iPhone SE1-sized device
- USB-C on a "medium" (iPhone Mini)-sized device
- Touch ID or non-OLED screen on a non-budget device
- 3.5mm headphone jack (even after they backtracked on removing most ports from Macbooks)
Yeah basically can I just have a 2016 with an updated SoC please.
It's probably not all women, maybe not most, but I can't believe there's not an important market, it seems like a common enough situation.
I'm not a woman, but I know many who 1. refuse to carry a purse; 2. are deeply unsatisfied with trends in clothing such as small pockets (and no they can't just wear men's clothes because women's bodies are shaped differently); 3. whose hands are too small to comfortably use a large (branded as "normal") or even medium (branded as "mini") phone.
There's a billion other ways women are being discriminated against every day. But yeah, it doesn't sell.
I almost garroted myself attempting to supervise a toddler on soft play with a handbag, so I'm not a fan
https://www.slashgear.com/1234403/apples-decision-to-cancel-...
And the mini ran for multiple generations and none of them sold well.
Much like the 3.5mm jack, people just cannot admit that it's not a very popular idea. Extremely popular among a very small niche, incredibly unpopular if not actively dispreferred outside of it.
idk why you guys are continuing to rage at the messenger here, I'm not the one who canceled it and the reason it was canceled is widely acknowledged. Your refusal to accept reality does not constitute a problem on my part.
And I think the 3.5mm ship has sailed, right behind the "persistent notification LED" ship. Fsck me if I can understand how not a single manufacturer has figured out that a bright, persistent, multi-color LED/OLED notification is a desirable zero-hardware-cost feature.
Personally I value the notification led more, and don't mind some borders.
Accessibility. https://rubenerd.com/the-iphone-14/
> figured out that a bright, persistent,
> multi-color LED/OLED notification is
> a desirable zero-hardware-cost feature.
a LED has nonzero cost. The case having a hole for it also has a cost, as does engineering the hole not to be a weak point. It may not be hard or expensive, but nonzero nonetheless.
Some phones like OnePlus do temporary lighting. Persistent lighting without burn in is doable and I wish someone would take it up. Aodnotify is glitchy.
I totally buy into the "best camera you have is the one in your pocket" concept -- especially if that camera takes amazing photos without me needing to know how.
I do agree on the other features (or lack thereof), in general I only upgrade my iPhone for two reasons:
1. Newer/better camara
2. Old iPhone is getting long in the tooth (i.e. battery degradation)
I'll take a look at this one and if the camera is compelling enough, maybe upgrade (the 5x optical zoom might just do that for me).
Innovations are either going to be aimed at improving niche uses, gradual enhancements on stats like power/cpu/display/photo-quality, or accommodating fashion trends like overall size or whether it's foldable.
The most original opportunity lately is generative AI integration and that's exactly what they put into focus for 2024.
What apple offers me is peace of mind and stability. That's all I want from a phone.
They’ll literally make your beloved iPhone 11 obsolete in a year or so, deliberately.
Those are not real competition to the iPhone in any meaningful way.
A "niche audience" is inflating the point.
The same thing occurred with GNU/Linux desktop.
I do think some of the Apple Intelligence features are going to be pretty useful for regular folks. I also think it’s going to be the case that after a few years people will forget how limited Siri used to be while taking for granted the improved performance.
I currently use ChatGPT for it’s accurate speech recognition then copy/paste into iMessage.
You can run smaller Whisper models on your phone through various third party apps, and those options work well too. (Trying to run Whisper Large even on the iPhone 15 Pro Max is asking too much… it works, but only barely.)
Expecting ground-breaking new features every year is a bit crazy, unless there is a new breakthrough like solid state batteries. Like what's going to be there next year? Flush side buttons to make the phone thinner? Why not apply all those additions in a single iteration and wait 3-4 years to come up with a next major upgrade? Consumers are not dumb anymore and can see through their marketing gimmicks
They need to put two Spatial Video cameras on the top right and top left of the phone in landscape, to record 3d video at or a bit wider than pupillary distance.
Given a way to watch them, Spatial Video memories "sell" the AVP and/or (if zoomed in) 3D TVs, and the perspective also gives fantastic clues to photo processing algos, 3D model generation, more.
I do love the colors on the regular models though!
The camera button/gesture thing on this new model seems decent but none of the features really seem that compelling to upgrade, the "visual intelligence" which is supposedly reserved for the 16 models just seems like Google Lens with maybe tighter integration with the OS features.
Additonally the 16 doesn't have more RAM which I thought they might have done given the local LLM models, so not really a compelling upgrade.
To me the old iphones with 4" screens were a good start, and I was hoping they'd get smaller and lighter as the tech got better... an iPhone 5 was 3.95oz, now iphones weigh 6-7 ounces.
My language was not even mentioned yesterday (italian)
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/09/apple-discontinues-ipho...
I just upgraded to an iPhone 15 pro from an iPhone 13 pro a few months ago.
Honestly, I felt like the iPhone 13 pro had better battery life.
My friend confirmed the same thing between a regular iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro.
Not sure if it is software or hardware or both.
I also really don't understand what the hangup is with the batteries.
You bought a $1000 phone, $99 to get a new battery is reasonable.
I get it, the cost should be $20 and it shoulde be an easy DIY job, but it seems like you're actively refusing the solution. You undoubtedly spent more to upgrade to the 15 Pro than to replace the battery in your 13 Pro.
Up to 33 hours video playback on iPhone 16 Pro Max8
Up to 27 hours video playback on iPhone 16 Pro8
> When you purchase an iPhone at Apple, you’ll receive an unlocked model that you can use with any carrier. There are two exceptions: If you buy an iPhone through an AT&T Installment Plan, you will receive a locked model. If you buy an iPhone through Boost Mobile Financing, it will be locked for the first 60 days after activation.
I'm still of the opinion that Apple needs to make a cheaper phone. Starting a $1100 makes this something only very few will purchase on their own. It's an absolutely insane price.
The iPhone SE starts at $600 (4000DKK) that is still way to expensive. I really wish they'd make a "base" phone for around $150 (1000DKK). I don't need the fancy big screen, I don't care about FaceID, the camera was good enough on the iPhone 7, I don't care about the sensors, I don't care about AI, I don't care about games. I just need a phone that can run a few very simple app and has BlueTooth and tethering.
Apple caters to the premium market, diluting their brand with a cheap phone would be a dumb business decision on their part.
I don't even think that's their problem to be honest. People want an iPhone, and if they could get one at say $250, they'd get that model the majority of the time. Seeing that they have no problems selling $600 phones, then why not just take the higher amount.
It just sucks that you basically have no choice, either get an expensive iPhone or be stuck with Google on Android.
I don't think that's necessarily the case, people have consistently bought the premium iPhone models over the much cheaper SE. You really can't generalize the buying habits of consumers as if they all have the same buying power. Intentionally not catering to buyers of lower buying power is exactly why green bubbles have a stigma in the US.
not if you account for inflation.
$1100 is $905 in 2020 money.
basically iphones have become cheaper every year due to inflation.
This is pretty insane to me. For a $1,000 device to limit itself like that seems crazy. iPads have up to 16 GB, so it's obviously useful. From games to the browser - and especially on-device AI and ML - they all could use way more RAM.
Apple's tech decisions are always an enigma.
What’s even crazier is I am tempted by the pixel fold — that looks amazing for content consumption which is what I use my phone for the most.
there's just not much new going on. small improvements here and there..
i have a ton of options for my phone, special settings, options to download other apps, to further add new features
and i will probably never bother. i wanna use my phone as little as possible
Yes, there is an audience that want more and more camera, and the pro caters to that. For a lot of people they just want a pretty good camera that they can quickly capture their memories with, they don't really care for the phone to be wrapped in a camera with a dedicated button etc. I also think in terms of all the AI image processing vs. just giving a natural image the quality peaked at the iPhone 13.
I think the camera button is neat, and of course no one is going to avoid an iPhone because of it, but I don't know if it's really going to drive sales more any other small iteration would. Again, the innovation continues to comes from software features.
17 might, as it would indicate Apple is taking a breath.
Or, of course, we'll never get a supercycle again till someone iphones the iPhone.
That would be a flex.
Sure, I understand people have different needs from mine and appreciate they have a choice, but it saddens me that I don't anymore, and all I want is a modern (read: not discontinued), compact device that can do what a 10-year-old smartphone could do and gets out the way.
They even invited “Mother Earth” herself to their last presentation to talk about how much they care about the planet! Were they just lying to our faces then?
But I know what Steve Jobs would have said to this. Just go up and ask the girl what breed her dog is, and get to know her.
Was hoping for: "We peaked last year, this iPhone is slightly worse in all dimensions compared to last year."
Disappointed.
----
Hm, Death Stranding in the official article? :DDDDDDD
Guess it's a testament to how far hardware, modern game engines and competent developers can all go.
They want you to put even more of your life on your phone but the security is just smoke and mirrors.
The 16 Pro is larger and heavier than the 15 pro which is already heavy.
I have small hands, I want a smaller and lighter phone.
Not going to buy the 16 because of lack of ProMotion.
Optical zoom level is now the same on both the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max
LOL. Glad I grabbed a Mini before they was discontinued.
One is addiction (deaddiction mindset is becoming a thing) and the next is the fanboism (understandable and unstandable) which actually creates more aversion than anything!
While there is nothing wrong, the price to value justification is a like vampirism and surrounding ecosystem and hardware and specs are fine, but the real value of everything that is present is not realised by everyone.
Honestly people, how many of the actual iphone users even look at the photos taken in the phone after a day or two? probably 0.0001% (who may be pros who wants to make a statement and probably help fuel the hype for the company!) or some professionals who are stuck (sucked into) the ecosystem (for whatever non-debatable and (some good) reasons!). For the rest, it's a pride to own something costly! That's it. There you go... I said it.
It's like I'm owning a device which most people can't afford and I think I'm super and standout,but in reality, it's such a self obsessed and narcissistic feeling and nothing else!
It's their marketing and product placement and business tactics.
I just need a compact phone for making calls and don't want a device which I will proudly show in front of my face wherever and whenever possible... That's really annoying.
Good that I moved away from Apple ecosystem completely and I'm still alive.
Just too much hyped year after year...
That's the case with most manufacturers and just not these guys!
... gosh.
For all the discussion, this was so mid it hurts.
I feel like people are poking the product release with a stick. C’mon. Do something.
Thanks Greg, that's very helpful information.
Well, they also regularly release lower specced models for people who don’t want, don’t need or can’t afford the Pro or Pro Max iPhones.
And on the other hand you have people who need the best or want the best.
And it’s helpful to both kind of people to know that ok the Pro and Pro Max are the most powerful ones.
And while it might seem “obvious” to you and me that Pro and Pro Max are the most powerful iPhones, there’s a lot of people that don’t regularly stay on top of what models exist of iPhones.
They should be covered in a durable and easily replaceable cover.
All that for the low price of being constantly annoyed by the bulkiness and unwieldiness of a case that will cost up to 5% of the price of the device itself if you want to keep it in decent condition.
It's like the concept of insurance, it's a scam. A good scam, but still.
I don’t like cases (they make the phone too bulky for my liking) but also frequently drop my phone on stone/ceramic tiles (not the perfect combo, I know) and after 3 years of having a 13 Pro it’s still in great shape.
Just a few scratches on the corners of the phone (which usually get the most of the hit).
In other words, I very much appreciate them improving durability.
https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
We don't deserve so much advance.
Come out once a year and say "we made this thing bigger and better"?
Must be nice to get paid $25mil/year for that.
There’s a quote from the CEO of Coca-Cola I remember but can’t find a source for, about why they still spend so much on advertising. When a pilot gets to cruising altitude, he doesn’t shut down the engines.
Since then, they have been surfing that wave and that's pretty much it. The reason is pretty simple: people are sheep, they like to appear cool and "IN", iPhone was the thing that did that so they keep buying that.
But in my opinion the tides are turning, Apple gear doesn't have the coolness factor they once had (everyone has them anyway) and the technological side is on a slippery slope for some time now. They still have some strong factors (like the chips) but those are being slowly but surely reduced to nothing by the competition and it doesn't look like Apple has much left in the tank (the idiot in charge fired everyone who could have done anything worthwhile anyway).
As for their marketing, it is basically the same. It once was memorable and cool but nowadays it's all very forgettable and meh when it's not completely controversial in a bad way. As far as I'm concerned, their marketing doesn't bring them that many sales; nowadays the vast majority of people who buy Apple stuff buy it for reasons unrelated to the product marketing/specifications.
And this is exactly why Apple is becoming something else, something that their loyal customers who ensured their long-term success do not really like...
is there a word for this...marketing inflation in lieu of innovation.
apple used to be a tech company supported by marketing. now its a marketing company supported by tech.
Note: I don't disagree with what you're saying. But Apple also creates multiple models for different users desires, and it sounds like you're most closely aligned to the iPhone SE target market (not the iPhone base or Pro).
And what is worse about this se line is that I know it is temporary. They won't be building them out of new old stock iphone 8 parts forever. That will run dry like the old iphone 5 supply lines the se1 used did, which forced its obsolescence. Eventually I will be shunted into these newer, heavier, wobbly bottomed iphones, due to forced obsolescence in either the apps I use or the actual carrier network protocols.
- 90W fast wired charging, 80W wireless charging - many android phone have it
- reverse charging - so that in emergency when you forgot to charge airpods and you already outside you could charge a little bit enough for a run - again some androids have it
- stylus support - still would be nice to get apple pencil for some signatures etc
- fingerprint reader either under display or on side button like on ipad air - sometimes when phone is sitting on the table it's easier to unlock with finger than pick it up and point at your face then put it back (especially annoying for iOS devs)
- irda led for controlling air con in hotel - they have already IR blaster on front and maybe even on lidar that they could potentially hack it similar like they hacked screen for flash.
- temperature sensor and humidity sensor
- IR temperature sensor for checking your body temperature or stuff you baking in the oven
- tiny thermal camera sensor for inspecting leaks in house for the winter
- microsd support (yes can dream can I?)
- any improvements for lidar quality or truedepth
- another programmable button on the left side for lefties
- 250GB storage by default
- 12GB RAM
- bluetooth 5.4
- thread protocol support like HomePod
When you first connect, the power capabilities are negotiated and usually the more powerful device takes on the "source" role while the other gets to be the "sink".
This can be dynamically controlled and switched back and forth so some devices have UI to select what to do.
> tiny thermal camera sensor for inspecting leaks in house for the winter
So just a thermometer gun? It costs like $20-30 on amazon and I've never needed one other than in my home / kitchen. Why in the world do you want a phone for this haha.
I do think I've found the perfect car for you: https://tenor.com/view/homer-simpsons-car-gif-8120474
It would be nice to have constant monitoring against a baseline as well, to alert people when a fever might be breaking out.
I think it'd be an easier pitch in the watch though as that's where they are already shoving most of the health sensors (and have wrist temperature monitoring already).
My point here is I'm not saying it can't ever be something anyone would want because of that rather something selling in another device on Amazon has no weight one way or the other on whether it'd be a good thing to add to a phone.
Looks like they are super-uber risk-averse and there is 0% new ideas with these products.
Yes, this is the first thing I look for in a smartphone. Maybe next year, Apple?
-Why are iPads and iPhones treated so differently? I want to use a pen on the phone and make a phone call on the tablet.
-Double screen, not foldable, but two screens like an open book. I could see a lot of useful applications like showing lists on one screen, details on the other, or a good ereader. In landscape, have a writing app on top and a touch keyboard on the bottom screen.
-Slide the phone into a laptop-like shell and run desktop apps with MacOS. It's the same processor the macs have, no?
-Likewise, attach to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and run desktop apps.
Edit: Linebreaks.
imagine at work projecting from iphone work slides or whiteboards at work or videos/games indoor at home on a white wall etc (apple loves accessories, and the potential for accessories on this would be huge as well)
Another idea: support hover gestures as seen in this article: https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11595564/microsoft-3d-touc...
In software, get rid of flat UI. No need to bring back skeuomorphism, but find a middle ground.
see https://www.pcmag.com/news/iphone-16-and-16-pro-get-wi-fi-7-...
No idea why they didn't announce it.
Maybe they had a rule, "discuss camera and ai features only"?