The more I watch, the sadder I get. It seems they've gone in the wrong direction. They have nothing to offer regular phone users, so they're targeting "creative professionals" with fancy features.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Accessibility. https://rubenerd.com/the-iphone-14/
Personally I value the notification led more, and don't mind some borders.
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.
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 almost garroted myself attempting to supervise a toddler on soft play with a handbag, so I'm not a fan
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.
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.
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.
I plan to get a regular 16, for the reasons you mention. What regular features would you want to see?
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.
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 :-)
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.
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 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).