Apple Debuts iPhone 17
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apple.com
1. Freedom. I should be able to build and run apps on it without the platform holder having a barrier on it.
2. Privacy. The phone shouldn't be an object to track me for better ad sales or any other purpose.
Of course, priority 1 has until recently always led to Android while priority 2 has always led to Apple.
But with the upcoming announced changes where google is going to require registration and signing for even third party sideloaded apps, while at the same time the EU is forcing Apple to open up and allow sideloading, it seems pretty clear that in the near future both Apple and Google's policies regarding point 1 are going to converge. On a position less free than Android has hitherto been, and less free than I would like, but unfortunately they are the two options on the market.
So with priority 1 no longer a differentiating factor, it comes down to priority 2.
I've used both Android and iOS over the years, as while my personal phones have always been Android, my employer provided phones have always been iOS. I think I do prefer the Android user experience and have used enough of both that that's not just a factor of which I'm accustomed to, but it's also not the huge difference it once was for a lot of apps.
Right now I'm using a Pixel 7 Pro and I might weigh sitting it out another year, but my USB-C port is failing and I'm also watching the pixel battery issues creep up the model range to newer and newer models...
On old Android phones it's easier to install newer browsers without having to update the OS.
Edit: your comment is also not valid on occasion. I've recently witnessed some banking mobile webapps being broken for long periods of time and one bank that decided to remove the agreement approval function from their webapp, forcing you to download the app in order to approve updated agreements.
And while we have something similar to Venmo, we don't see any good reason why should we use them. Back transferring already happen instantly.
It's also the only permitted method for 2FA which is required to make online payments. Even logging into the website requires you to approve the login on the app.
The second bank app is also my primary way of sending money to/from my friends, for example if we split the bill at a restaurant.
So the answer is several times a day.
Nobody has used paper checks here since the 90s, that's not what the app is for.
I mean the fact that GrapheneOS and PureOS and Plasma Mobile etc. are not even in the running for me is probably a good indicator that where it's placed is first.
- N Banking Apps
- Whatsapp / Telegram
- Uber/Lift/ Whatever your local flavor of theses are, or even regular taxi apps
- Deliveries and Groceries (I don't have/need a car, I get most of my groceries delivered, and just but fruits and vegetables on a farmers market near my house)
- Some payments app
- Access control for my building
- Navigation
- Entertainment
- 2FA/OTP
Many of these are local apps that have 0% chance of getting built for anything outside of Android and iOS, and further, some would break on GrapheneOS / Plasma / A stock rooted device (I'm pretty sure at least one of my banking apps auto closes if it even detects Developer options enabled)
if apple offered actual privacy, you could:
- find out what/when apps are running
- find out who they are talking to
- prevent it, including apple if you want
and apple has all kinds of nonsense like deep links (apps can intercept links), bluetooth beacons (apps can talk to stuff in a store/location), and lots of other stuff behind the scenes. You can't find out if it is in use.
What is the least worse option in terms of privacy, when comparing apple and google? I think there’s a broad consensus it’s apple. But let’s not call it the “best” option please.
You can go with something else than google and apple, they are not an inevitability. Alternate OSes offer significantly more freedom and privacy.
How do you do that on Android? You can inspect the manifest to see some triggers, but an app can set more triggers when it first launches.
Task managers have been killed by Google about 10 years ago and it's impossible to see that's running in real time.
If you enable developer mode you can kind of see a partial list of what's currently running I guess, is that what you're talking about?
I think the data and sensor access logs is a newer feature since I don’t think I’ve seen it before, but network activity has been in there for at least a few years. The network activity is also only domains and ip addresses, nothing about protocol or what data was sent unfortunately.
Like fetching map routes in multiple anonymised parts so that they don't know where you're going.
A year later, the iPhone mostly gets out of my way. However the keyboard and browser options are artificially limited. I can't easily set my own search engine on Safari either. Ad blocking works fine though.
The hardware is the best I've had in years. Battery life is really good. Airdrop and Airplay are very useful, as are many other small features.
I have come to prefer the iOS experience, but don't expect a life changing upgrade, just a longer-lasting phone.
It's really surprising the amount of data that tries to leave the premises, and this just the one that I block with a mid-range security ban list.
Let's be very clear here: all Google has announced so far is that installing apps from anonymous builds is going to be taken away and only if you want your phone to be considered "certified". Let's not get drawn too far into hysteria.
So unless you're willing (and can afford!) to buy and carry multiple phones, the new severely downgraded Android is about as open as iPhone, but with zero expectation of it respecting your privacy.
I'm having the same issue with my pixel 8 (along with the screen randomly turning green out of nowhere, so I have to "ground" the display to get it to work again)
In general the 8 feels a lot more cheaply made than the 6
I agree that the android UX is better than apple (or at least, it makes more sense to me). But I'd consider moving to iphone for build quality alone
Compare the New iPhone Models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186294 - Sept 2025 (95 comments)
iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186044 - Sept 2025 (42 comments)
iPhone Air - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186015 - Sept 2025 (431 comments)
Or a “related” feature, separate from normal comments, that only admins can access. You manually designate the related posts and then the site displays them dynamically.
But yeah, fully automated would be pretty amazing, but challenging.
I think modern smart phones are pretty remarkably un-fragile compared to 20 years ago before the iPhone ($300-700 for a Symbian with a tiny plastic screens that got scratched super fast) or even 10-ish years ago with much more fragile screen glass and cases. Last phone I did major damage to was my HTC Evo in 2012.
(That Nokia N95 was in 2007 dollars, too!)
Watch me! My point was more about how expensive phones are.
I'm not so sure about modern smart phones being less fragile. My first phone was a Nokia 3310-descendent, and my second a Samsung Beat flip phone. Neither were over $100 at the time of purchase, and both were rugged devices I could throw in my pocket or in a bag without thinking it would need a protective case or that their screens were going to break.
Modern phones are extremely sturdy, people are just more precious about them because they’re much fancier and more expensive and more of a requirement for everyday life.
For a phone similar to the feature set of the original iPhone, you can get a Jelly Pro today for $100.
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It will be another three or four years yet though as my SE is only three years old.
I could buy two Steam Deck LCD's, but an iPhone has a much higher resolution display and I also use it every day and take it everywhere I go.
Buying one every year, not worth it in my opinion. Buying one and using it for many years is. I still have my 12 and will likely upgrade to the 17.
The buyer would get a chromium-plated metal case within which a slightly fancier version of a dumb phone was enclosed, and bragging rights as a bonus, and that would be it.
So, today’s USD 1k (or less, for the non-Pro versions) buys the user – depending on one’s point of view – either a commodity appliance or a personal computing contraption whose performance exceeds that of many high-end RISC workstations that once commanded five-digit price tags, and all for a ⅓ less than the launch price of the Nokia 8800.
Economists knew this phenomenon well before, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good.
Wonder if we'll ever see folding phones. I'm not concerned with the thickness but the overall foot print that's pocketable would be amazing.
Another area where we're falling behind in tech
If you scroll halfway down the press release page you can see an image of the internals https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-ai...
There are some great renders in the first post in the thread, and towards the end you can see 3d printed mocks [0] of foldable devices. Very cool.
0: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/rumoured-iphone-fold-si...
There are more people on HN claiming to use a 13 mini than Apple actually sold.
I would assume this means Apple laptops with integrated cellular modems are on the near horizon.
Perhaps people who buy a MacBook are likely to have an iPhone in their pocket that will function as a hotspot and iPads are much more often used by people who are otherwise outside of Apple's ecosystem?
You don't need an iphone, even a $50 phone will hotspot just fine. How many people travel with a laptop but no phone ?
If you are signed into the same Apple account on your iPhone and your MacBook, the iPhone shows up as a WiFi network option you can select without having to do any additional configuration.
It's one of those "It just works" continuity features, like sharing the clipboard between your Mac and iPhone without needing to configure anything.
Because Qualcomm charges a percentage of sale price for use of their modem.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/23/gurman-apple-modems-integrati...
Outside Qualcomm, there has been a limited number of players out there, with MediaTek seeming to pick up the pace and giving Qualcomm a serious run for its money – if not now then pretty soon.
What is left is… not a lot and appears to have constraints of one sort or another:
Samsung – with 5G-integrated Exynos SoC's. It doesn't make sense for Apple to house 2x SoC's in the same appliance;
Huawei – they target the mainland Chinese market with its own flavour of 5G. One doesn't want their modem anyway due to national security concerns;
Sequans Communications – they focus on the IoT market, which is a niche and has its own unique constraint space;
Intel – they quit the 5G modem market in 2019 and sold the IP to Apple, which has given them the C1/C1X.ROFL. Apple wants to sell as much different devices to a single person as possible. What next, you expect cellular iPads to be able to make calls without tethered iPhone?
Thinking through my own use case, I just use my phone for messaging, maps, and the occasional app, so I'm not going to need a big screen for consuming content. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on a phone, since I don't need any fancy features. So perhaps that intersection of use cases doesn't make much sense to target?
People who want cheap iPhones buy older models. You get better specs buying a used or NOS premium model than a new budget model.
The sales back up my statements.
Yes I romanticize about an iPhone 17 mini pro but in the end I like being able to watch some downloaded content on a plane without having to bring an iPad from time to time and I'm not going to do that on a tiny screen.
It’s a bit like selling increasingly carbonated water and then selling slightly less carbonated water and pretending that it was still water that you were selling- and using the data (of nobody buying it) to tell everyone that “nobody likes the still water; so we will continue only selling carbonated and carbonated+.”
I don't get why people make statements like this.
6: 2.64 (W) x 5.44 (H) x .27 (D)
6s: 2.64 (W) x 5.44 (H) x .28 (D)
13 mini: 2.53 (W) x 5.14 (H) x 0.30 (D)
The only dimension in which the mini was larger than the 6 or 6s was in depth, and that was just barely. It was smaller otherwise.
It did have a larger display, but it fit it into a smaller device.
----
All iPhones before the iPhone 6 were smaller than the 12 and 13 minis. The 1st gen SE was smaller. Everything from 6 on, including the 2nd and 3rd gen SEs, have been larger, though barely for the SEs. The downside to the SEs compared to the minis was that they have smaller displays than the minis.
Betrays the point anyway: the ideal size was the 5 and it was nowhere near that, even by your official numbers (which I would guess are excluding the rounded edges maybe? - regardless, not the point)
So you did that and still wrote that the minis were larger? Or you did that after I pointed out that the minis were smaller?
I provided pictures in a sibling comment thread to show what I mean, there's about 20% of a difference between the iPhone 5 and 6, and that size difference is very similar for the mini.
If people wanted to buy a phone that was the size of the 6, they would have purchased the SE from 2020, which was that roughly that size.
Still good, still works.
Being able to turn Liquid Glass off to sth like flat design would be nice but this probably won’t happen.
Now when it comes to the event itself, it felt so cartoonish.
I cannot agree more on the event video. It looks like a pure TV ad for a full hour long. Also, it used to cover more diversity in terms of presenters. Where are they now? I want to hear lovely accents from people all around the world.
In this one, I noticed that the presenters all stood very still; more still than in previous ones.
It looks like they were all green screen, and the video composer was just very good. I was impressed by the woman standing in grass. It looked fairly “natural.”
What is Thread?
> Thread is an IPv6-based, low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of things (IoT) products.
> Often used as a transport for Matter (the combination being known as Matter over Thread), the protocol has seen increased use for connecting low-power and battery-operated smart-home devices.
> Thread uses 6LoWPAN, which, in turn, uses the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol with mesh communication (in the 2.4 GHz spectrum), as do Zigbee and other systems. However, Thread is IP-addressable, with cloud access and AES encryption. A BSD-licensed open-source implementation of Thread called OpenThread is available from and managed by Google.
Funny thing, I know very little of networking, but this bears more sense than just Thread.
Either too wide (1x) or too narrow (4x), as seen in the live stream video, which was recorded with the iPhone 17 Pro.
I am currently on the 13 Pro, I find the 3x mode ideal for portrait photos and videos.
Is it only me with this impression? Could someone help me to jump back into Apple's reality distortion field?
That said, I too like a 70 mm lens, but I long ago got used to just moving closer to or further away from subjects to take photos with dedicated cameras depending on what lens I had on.
Maybe if the Larrin Thomas came up with some catchy new stainless formulation and called it AppleCut or something...
Maybe the recent introduction of foldable phones indicates the opposite. Is it the final blip, or will something similarly disruptive happen every 5-7 years?
Discuss.
Anything else on the hardware side is mostly noise.
If I had to futurism bet, it'd be on eyeglass AR + pocket device being the next major change. With input method for that still tbd.
Apple switched iPhone 17 Pro from Titanium (used in earlier versions) to aerospace-grade Aluminium for Superior Heat Dissipation.
But for the iPhone Air, they are using Titanium because it's lightweight, strong, and durable.
Aluminum is definitely a softer metal, so using aerospace-grade aluminum makes sense. So, is Titanium not a good thermal conductor? If it is not, then why is it used in the iPhone Air?
Sorry! Their choice is not clear to me. Can someone throw light on it?
Phone material choices come down to which compromises you will settle for.
There are similar compromises with types of glass chosen. One type is more scratch resistance, but more prone to shatter from falls, and vice versa.
I think I could probably squeeze more life out of my phone, but the 17 has a nicer camera, me and my wife are noticing our relatives with newer iPhones have photographs that look slightly (I meant to write NOTICEABLY here) better. As we raise our first child, having a quality camera is definitely important to us.
I was really tempted by the iPhone Air, but the Pro has better camera features. I am actually really excited to see what they will do for the iPads. If they release a thin iPac Mini similar to the iPhone Air, I would immediately buy it. I am not usually a fan of thin, but something in me has always wanted a thin iPad Mini, not sure why, but I'm waiting for it still.
Great demo, the most impressive demo had to have been the Airpod Pros translation piece.
Edit: Needed to annotate that I wrote 'slightly better' but its not just slightly, we both visually noticed a different in quality.
One last note, the 12 Pro was my first iPhone ever. I was on Android since 2009, every Android I had lasted about 2 years. My last one probably would have lasted me 5 years but I was tired and wanted a change at my 2 year mark. I have not regretted my decision to date.
If you want reference tier photos for documenting family history, modern mirrorless is better. DSLR from 10-15 years ago is also still great in all but the most challenging light conditions, where you could simply use a flash.
If you are considering an expensive phone upgrade based off of the camera alone, consider buying a dedicated camera first, I say. I know the best camera is the one you have on you, etc...
Something about iOS and macOS just feels right. Any time I boot up my old Android phones they feel like a convoluted mess.
A phone camera isn't really a camera, it's a digitally-airbrushed impression of reality. There just isn't enough light hitting the tiny sensor through the tiny lens.
I have 20 year old 5MP DLSR portrait photos that are still better than what a 120MP phone can produce, because it's the lens that counts.
But, I never have my Canon and it's too bulky to carry around everyday. I do carry my iPhone everywhere I go. And so, the capabilities of my iPhone camera are more important.
I imagine this is the same for the overwhelming majority of people.
I tried a Sony RX100 (1" sensor) when they first came out, optimistic about the possibility of using it for 'general purpose' photography. After all, it's small enough.
The problem was, it's a second device to carry around and keep charged. Then once you capture the image, it's largely stuck on the device until you find a way to offload your images. I briefly experimented with cables that would let me do things like transfer images from the RX100 to my (Android at the time) mobile phone, for archiving and sending to family and friends. That turned the whole thing into the sort of science fair project that I didn't have time for as the parent of a very young child. (Although in fairness, I can't think of a single time in my life when I'd have had the patience, kids or not.)
This is why, for all the arguments you can make against them as cameras, I've come to be very thankful for the amount of effort that Apple and others have made to get appealing images out of devices I always carry around anyway. I can take a set of pictures, edit them, have them automatically archived to cloud storage, and send them to whoever I want.. all with a single device I was carrying around anyway.
This leaves open the fact that the 'real' camera workflow is still an option when there's the need for higher image quality and the time (or money to hire a photographer) to take advantage of what a DSLR or the like can do.
(When I compare what I can do with my iPhone to what my parents had available to them (a 110 format camera and 35mm Nikons), I like the tradeoffs a lot better. the image quality available now is definitely better than the 110. Some of those 35mm exposures are probably better quality than what I can get out of an iPhone, but they're all stuck in albums and slides, and nobody ever looks at them. )
Most modern cameras now have a WiFi-based photo transfer system that works pretty well. It's not instantaneous, but it is quick enough to copy the photo you want to share with a friend or partner while you finish a meal or drink your coffee.
Waiting until I can plug in the 2TB memory card to my Mac and use a huge screen to review all the photos is far more efficient even if it has much higher startup latency.
Honestly this is a good reason to choose the iPhone Pro over the Air or Standard: 10gbps USB port. Plug the Nikon in to the phone for cloud upload. This would be the fastest path of all. Most people are only focused on the USB bandwidth in the iPhones for download from the phone.
I understand the "second device to carry around" but it isn't a real point for baby pics you might take at home. A ridiculous number of times I have no idea where I last put my phone anyway and sometimes have to make it ring from kde connect on my laptop so it is not like a smartphone is necessarily readily available at all time anyway.
I also know a number of people who don't leave home with their smartphone amyway for short errands since they have an apple watch, that leave one pocket available for those that would prefer having a camera.
On an iPhone, I can take the picture and I'm immediately a button press away from a photo editor and then whoever I want to send it to.
(A camera that automatically tethered to a phone and dumped pictures into the phone's camera roll would mostly solve the workflow issues I'm mentioning here. Would not surprise me if this already exists.)
> I understand the "second device to carry around" but it isn't a real point for baby pics you might take at home.
Maybe. The camera still has to be charged and in mind and hand. (Then as soon as the kids leave the house you're back to where you were and having to carry something around that you might not otherwise.)
> I also know a number of people who don't leave home with their smartphone anyway
I see that... different people have different sorts of relationships with personal electronics. For me, it wound up being that I'd carry a cell phone and that was about it. Even in the pre-smartphone days, when I might have carried a PDA, I either wouldn't or couldn't.
People not gonna let their phone at home and carry the camera only. Having separate camera means you have to carry 2 devices at the same time.
However.... it's really hard to overstate the workflow and convenience aspects of shooting with a phone. (Particularly as a parent, and even moreso when I was a new parent of a small child.) The phone has the twin benefits of 1) being present almost always and 2) being immediately able to process and transmit an image to the people you might want to see it. For the 99% case, that's far more useful than even a very significant improvement in image quality. For the 1% where it matters, I can and do either hire a professional (with better equipment than my own) or make the production of dragging out my DSLR and all that it entails. This is like so many other cases where inarguable technical excellence of a sort gives way to convenience and cost issues. IOW, "Better" is not just about Image Quality.
I have a number of great videos with my baby that required me to have both hands in-use. Only have those videos because of the above devices.
Difference is especially startling for HDR and portraits, particularly backlight ones where the stock app does some hideous segmentation-based “enhancements”.
Just be mindful that those extra megapixels will need some extra storage.
Any suggestions for me while I shop around for "tier 2" carriers? I am primarily concerned with price, and then network coverage second (I am OK with sometimes being throttled, but would prefer to avoid large gaps in any coverage).
I probably experience times with deprioritization. 5G service can go from getting several hundred megabits with pretty low latencies to only getting a few megabits with potentially up to 100ms or so latency, depending on crowds. I don't recall any times where I had good signal but couldn't get any data, but definitely been in places where it'll struggle to do video chats or something at a big live event that doesn't have the extra 5G infra deployed. For example, an extra large crowd at the park for some event will probably give poor network experience but I'll otherwise get good connectivity in a modern sports arena.
In the end it's just a value proposition. Is having really fast network everywhere, all the time really that worth it to you? For many the answer is yes. But for me, on my personal device, if I'm getting poor data rates that's probably a clue I should really be putting my phone down and get back into whatever is happening in the park so I don't mind and the savings are quite nice.
There is a list of all the prioritization tiers (aka QCI, or premium data) on all the three main US carriers here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/1mxogtx/data_pr...
1. Their international plan is garbage, and if you don’t use the international plan, you cannot usefully use them as a phone-and-SMS-over-WiFi only solution in conjunction with another carrier. Competitors like USMobile do not have this problem.
2. Their customer support and website are very bad.
Wikipedia has a solid table of U.S. MVNO's, for a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...
Try Halide with "Process Zero" if you want that, but I'm pretty sure the most popular 3p camera apps are Asian beauty apps that do far more and far worse quality processing.
Camera pixels are only one color at a time:
GGRR
BBGG
(quad-Bayer; Fujifilm uses a weirder one called X-Trans. And some of them will be missing because they're damaged or are focus pixels.)
And then you still have to do white balance and tone mapping, because your eyes do that and the camera sensor doesn't.
You need to do this if you want to see the image at all, and it involves a lot of subjective choices. The objective auto white balance algorithm usually described is objectively quite bad; for instance it's always described as a single transformation on the image, which doesn't make sense if there are multiple light sources.
The reason you'd want to render humans differently in the image is that a) if you don't get skin tones just right they'll look like corpses b) in real life you can choose to focus on a subject in a scene and this will cause them to appear brighter (because your eyes will adapt to them) but in an image there isn't that flexibility and so it helps to guess what the foreground of the image is and expose for that.
I forgot to say recent iPhone cameras let you turn off the sharpening effects anyway, just move the photographic style control down to Natural. It is true that the sharpening is kind of bad. This is because someone taught everyone that digital images are bandlimited so they use frequency-based sharpening algorithms, but they aren't, so those just give you ringing artifacts. For some reason nobody knows about warp-sharpen anymore.
I've seen all sorts of non-black (let alone matte black) iPhone rigs used for motion pictures, including white and natural titanium colors. Eg. 28 Years Later used a variety of iPhone configurations and colors.
But yeah, I'm surprised there's no black/space gray option this year. Some consumers won't buy any other color.
Overall this year seemed much better than last year.
Use an ad blocker if you want Safari tabs to stay open longer.
It is either equal to or better than iPhone 16 Pro. A year ago iPhone 16 Pro 256Gb would be $1099, iPhone 17 256GB today is $799, with a better SoC, better WiFi, same display and ProMotion, better screen protective layer. The only thing worst is the lack of Telephoto camera.
Our daughter still has an older iPhone with 60Hz and I cannot look at it. The flickery animations drive me crazy. Yet, I have had iPhones with < 120Hz screens for well over a decade.
And MagSafe charging and stands.
If I don't need to use the lightning port, I don't need to use what would be the USB C port.
I am looking to upgrade to the 17 potentially, but USB-C to me isn't a key factor.
Makes the Mac Mini look weird now with 256 GB base storage.
Pretty shameful of Google to stick to 128 GB on the Pixel 10.
Yes the Pixel 10 now has telephoto but they nerfed the cameras from the Pixel 9 for that.
In the Pro models for both the pricing is comparable, yeah.
Also realized that Apple charges $200 to jump from 256 GB to 512 GB. That's ridiculous.
That said, I'm sort of frustrated with iOS overall, and sorely tempted to go back to Pixels, so I can't decide.
Beyond that, I get frequent spam SMS's which are stupid. Android blocks all those. I have a Junk mail folder in email and hardly get email spam anymore. It feels like going back 20 years getting these random spam SMS's.
Finally, "glanceability" doesn't seem as good with the iPhone. One silly little thing is that if I'm using my iPhone it's sometimes very hard to see the date! If you have notifications you have to swipe down quite a bit to reveal that.
I got my first Pixel (10 Pro XL); Only because their AI integration felt cool. My iPhone 11 Pro is still doing great overall, besides sluggishness here and there, and random Chrome crashes. I might consider upgrading to 17 now due to speed and camera upgrades. Honestly, it was not an exciting upgrade, just like their last 5.
Edit: 16 Pro 128 GB was $999 at introduction iPhone 17 Pro 256 GB is $1099. Better for the non-Pro though - the 16 128 GB was $799, the 17 256 GB is also $799.
I just want a lightweight device that makes calls, send texts, can snap a quick photo, has maps, mobile payments, and can order a cab. These phones are clearly aimed at consuming content, and I've been pushed out of the market. What to do?
While the new phone might actually be “free” in one of these promotions, it’s not, naturally, because you’ve been thrown into a 36 month installment agreement separate of the cellphone service they’ve sold you on (that they also claim is “price locked” while independently raising surcharges and other fees).
Convenience comes at a cost.