IMO it's underwhelming considering folding phones have been out for many years now and we still don't have a folding iPhone. What are the PMs doing at Apple.
For those that are not chronically online, a mobile phone from a decade ago has everything they need. If you only have to phone the family, WhatsApp your neighbours, get the map out, use a search engine and do your online banking, then a flagship phone is a bit over the top. If anything, the old phone is preferable since its loss would not be the end of the world.
I have seen a few elderly neighbours rocking Samsung Galaxy S7s with no need to upgrade. Although the S7 isn't quite a decade old, the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come since there is this demographic of active users.
Now, what if we could get these people to upgrade every three years with a feature that the 'elderly neighbour' would want? Eyesight isn't what it used to be in old age, so how about a nice big screen?
You can't deliberately hobble the phone with poor battery life or programme it to go slow in an update because we know that isn't going to win the customer over, but a screen that gets tatty after three years? Sounds good to me.
I have several apps that no longer work on my otherwise good phone bought in 2018 because I can no longer update the OS that they require.
Edit: This is a honest question.
Whatsapp also no longer works on it, thus the phone is useless.
Which is sad, as it has a great camera, battery life and is very light.
It's small, has dual sim card sockets, and a headphone jack.
I'm not sure how I'd replace it to be honest.
Because there are very cheap, lightweight adaptors to headphone jack from USB-C.
Wireless chargers are pretty good but it’s still a pain to wear out your port.
I can dual-SIM my iphone by using one e-Sim and one physical. The only thing it is not, is small...
The S7 you mention lasted 4 years, and received the last patch in 2020.
Not convinced that doing online banking on a phone that hasn't had software updates for 5 years is a good idea.
A lot of us the techies can be strong-armed via FOMO and other tropes but good luck convincing the elderly neighbors.
- mobile mp3 player sales are low unless disk and battery life are greatly improved
- large display touch screen phone market is small unless someone solves the "app problem"
- smart watch market is tiny if exists at all unless someone makes one that is useful and has improved battery life
Every smartwatch that hasn't met that bar, which is almost all of them ever made, is a joke to me. I'd have ordered a RePebble had I not moved back to analogue dumbwatches instead just before they were announced (and were iOS not actively hostile to competing watch implementations).
But if you want to leave your smartphone at home, but you still want cellular and notifications, I agree the apple watch is the only game in town even if the battery life sucks.
I agree that Apple Watches don't last long enough between charges, but comparing them to a completely different class of device that's technically the same broad category is pointless.
A side effect is that this makes your watch look less new, and therefore less of a theft target.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as an accessory to their smartphone that does fitness tracking and maybe a few other useful things to avoid pulling their phone out constantly - those people want MUCH longer battery life.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as a REPLACEMENT to their smartphone, they are perfectly fine with the current battery life.
2. Just for general convenience, having to take another special cable for every late night or overnight trip is maddening. I always have a phone anyway for any actual interactions.
I find it hard to believe many people are writing texts on their watches, it's just a nice to have gimmick feature that everyone I know has stopped using.
That has not been my experience though - having used both an Apple Watch and a Pixel Watch for years on end every single day. Absolutely outside my area of expertise, but I would imagine that you can design batteries to have a much longer lifetime (no of recharge cycles) when their capacity is smaller.
You are brushing your teeth for like half that alone.
OLED is just the wrong screen tech for these devices, never made any sense to me given how little I care about graphics and how little time I spend reading the display.
Especially considering how useful sleep data is, then I was surprised to see they're only getting sleep scores now.
My dirt cheap Huawei watches have had this for years. It's accurate enough (my own perception based on use). And I get a weeks battery life too (although I don't have the distracting fancy notifications perhaps). It does check blood oxygen levels, heart rate, stress etc.
I truly thought this was a solved problem (looking at headphones battery life, although I might need to check my assumptions here also apply to Airpods).
> I truly thought this was a solved problem.
I charge when showering in the morning. 15 minutes is enough for the day + night, half an hour to charge it fully.
In other words, if they made the battery last twice as long it'd still be equally as annoying (since your daily routine would be nearly the same, except now you also need to remember if it's a charge day or non-charge day).
To be fair maybe 3/4 days buys you some convenience. But anyways charging once a day is a reasonable place to get to, to get something better would require at minimum a 3x improvement which probably means a ground-up rework instead of continuous refinement.
A battery band might get you there but I suspect it'd be too clunky. At best Apple may redesign their watch to support a battery band and allow 3rd parties to make them for folks that need weeks of battery life.
The other issue is that I don't want to have to bring Yet Another Dongle™ every time I go away for a weekend or short business trip. Most of my trips are ≤ 4 days, so if AWs could reliably go that long (including battery degradation over time) then I'd consider getting one.
Right now, only the AWU even approaches this, and only in low-power mode. If it weren't a thousand dollars, I'd consider it. But between the low-power requirement and the pricing, it's just no contest in my book. I'm getting a new Pebble, which offers a month of battery life at 1/3 of the cost.
I think reverse charging from your smartphone is a quite decent solution to the problem, which is supported by certain Android devices.
The breakthru that made touchscreen phones works wasn’t an app ecosystem. That came after people were already crazy about iPhones. It was capacitive touch screens. Basically everything before was resistive touch, which is why they usually had styluses. Getting touch, and really multi-touch, working well was the game changer that redefined cell phones.
From Google's official Pixel 9 Pro Fold handling instructions: (https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15090466?hl=en#...)
> Flexible screens are softer than traditional phone screens, so avoid contact with sand, crumbs, *fingernails* and sharp objects.
I'm sure that if Apple invented the exact same thing in the exact same way, it would have been the "greatest thing since sliced bread".
The tech isn't there yet.
Probably trying to find better screen materials, and addressing reliability issues.
I used Palm devices with resistive touch screens. It was good, but when you go glass, there's no turning back.
I would never buy a phone with folding screens protected by plastic. I want a dependable slab. Not a gimmicky gadget which can die any moment. I got my fix for dying flex cables with Casiopeia PDAs. Never again.
Am I representative? Dunno.
Apple cancelled their mini line which was 3% of sales.
It’s not a big enough slice for them to want to chase.
That would be the half sized phone I would buy.
It's not really free. It's just built in to the cost of your plan. Your plan would be half the price if you weren't paying for the phone.
Fair enough, then it makes sense to get the phone.
The screen isn't really big enough or the right shape to feel like a real upgrade for movies, and a lot of apps just aren't built with foldables in mind. Most of the time it just feels like a weirdly shaped, less powerful, less durable tablet.
On top of that you're dealing with a visible crease across the screen, higher prices for something that's actually more fragile, and bulkier hardware with smaller or split batteries. The tech is cool in theory, but in practice it's a lot of compromises without a clear killer use case.
Typical strat for them is not to be first with an innovation, but to wait and work out the kinks enough that they can convince people that the tradeoffs are well worth making. Apple wouldn't be chasing that existing slice, they'd be trying to entice a larger share of their customers to upgrade faster.
There will never be a folding iPhone, simple as.
Also flip phones aren't dorky and have a 2000s vibe - but they don't fit Apple "you can have any color as long as it's black" approach to design.
In some ways I can't even fault them - fragmenting your device shapes/experiences to chase a niche look is not good business. But this is exactly what's pushing me out of Apple ecosystem - it's so locked down that if you don't want to fit into their narrow product lines you have no other options. There are no third party watch makers using apple watch hardware and software. No other phone makers with access to iPhone internals and iOS. Nobody can hack a PC OS onto an iPad or build a 2in1 MacOS device.
I feel like this is the last gen of Apple tech I'm in on - I just find there are so many devices that are compelling to me personally but don't fit into the walled garden. Plus Google seems light-year ahead on delivering a smart assistant.
I left the ecosystem after Catalina, and my experience with macOS at work has horrified me enough to stay well away. Nowadays I'm happily using NixOS on the desktop, laptop and homeserver. My biggest gripe is that I didn't switch sooner, probably could have saved a decent amount of cash eschewing the Apple tax, SaaS fees and macOS migration hamster-wheel.
It's OK but it feels bad because you are kind of trapped with their stuff if you invested in their ecosystem.
Meanwhile my Casio calculator watch: "bonjour"
https://teddybaldassarre.com/blogs/watches/rectangle-watches...
There's nothing wrong with rectangular watches - a fat bezel less screen rectangle around your wrist is not the same thing. The pro comes closest to a proper watch look but even that's "inspector gadget" teritory, not fashion accessory.
Apparently in 2022, 80% of iPhone owners also had the AW.
It’s hard to find a source of how many iPhone owners specifically also own a smartwatch, but in the US it seems like 35% might be a decent estimate of smartwatch ownership, so it’d be more in the realm of ~28% of iPhone owners also having an Apple Watch.
Oh and I remember everyone mocking the airpods pro when they came out. Now everyone is wearing them.
For phones what really matters for most people is... the screen size. And a folding phone is basically the best thing you can get right now for that.
The only problem is pricing at the moment.
Maybe I'm the idiot, but you won't catch me dead paying laptop money for a neuter-computer.
Form factor. Touch screen. GPS. Cellular. Circular polarization. These are all literal hardware differences between the iPad and MacBook, and every single one of them makes the iPad suitable for my use case (ForeFlight running on an iPad mounted to the yoke) where a MacBook would not be.
iPads are better for watching shows on a stationary bike, since they fit on the bike
iPads are better for reading manga, since you can hold them vertically
and iPads are clearly better for drawing--you can't draw on a laptop.
There are some hybrid laptops that do these things, but they're bad at them. Especially drawing, I've used enough HP convertibles with "stylus support" over the years to know that.
My use-case is for travel, where I want to read books, and the very occasional time when I want to do some design work outside the office -- draw a diagram that sort of thing. A third rare use case is where a web site is buggy or limited in functionality for mobile browsers. In all these cases the unfolded screen allows me to do the thing I need to do without carrying a second device (tablet, eReader). Another marginal use-case is to show another person a photograph. The fold out screen is much easier to see and I think has better color rendition too.
For these use-cases I find the folding phone very worthwhile.
But...the benefit that trumps all that is that the phone itself is smaller (narrower) than the typical flagship phones these days. It fits in my pocket and my hand reaches across it. I'd never go back to a non-folding phone for this reason alone, even if I never unfolded it. In fact I almost never do unfold it, except when traveling.
fwiw it wasn't until the Fold6 that the "cover screen" typing experience was ok. I understand that the Fold7 is a bit wider and so probably better, but I can't justify the expense to upgrade so will sit out until the Fold8.
I guess if you're the sort that is not clumsy and you're in a mild climate you might get your money's worth
for reference these were Samsung Z Flip devices
The one I have used felt like using a real phone through a layer of vinyl, definitely not a pleasant experience.
They're buying another year of very-high margin phones I guess...
Or you can pull up VLC and peruse your collection of locally-stored content
[1]: Mediocre folded experience doesn't bother them
[2]: Think calendars and whatever else middle managers look at