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I'm conflicted.

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.

I don't know that I completely agree. To some degree, sure — most folks probably don't notice the year-to-year updates in e.g. computing power.

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.

Nearly all of the things you describe there aside from the camera are software/services based and don’t require improved hardware year-on-year at all. This is a problem for a company that makes its money selling expensive hardware.

Even the camera quality could be improved with post-processing like upscaling and color correction, which have somewhat recently become much better.

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.

It’s not the cameras that are bad. In fact, I sold my Canon with a 24-70mm f2.8 L because the iPhone photos were great!

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 use PhotoSync to sync all photos to MiniO s3 docker container on my desktop pc. The only issue is the initial upload that I slowly did over a week (only synced when charging etc). Works quite well as a iCloud replacement for photos. I use syncthings for anything else like my keepassxc files.

Yeah, I use PhotoSync to sync back to FileRun. FileRun places all files in a basic share, which I access by smb on-prem and via FileRun's webdav server elsewhere. When I'm at home, transferring over LAN direct to storage was the fastest option for offloading volleyball videos, which I can then promptly share with others without waiting for upload to a service like iCloud or OneDrive.

Why would Apple delete your photos, and why would your solution for storing them be more robust than Apple’s?

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?

You’ve never heard of people getting locked out of their accounts? Or companies shutting down services? Apple is no different.

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.

> Even the camera quality could be improved with post-processing like upscaling and color correction, which have somewhat recently become much better.

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.

Agree. But the company also pays a large chunk of its services R&D and operations by bundling it with the hardware and have people pay upfront for it.

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...

Here’s the rub though: convincing customers to pay for something they used to think they got as part of the hardware package isn’t going to be easy.

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.

I think you hovered over something significant: yes, most of the "new features" of the new phones are software features … but the line between "what is software and what is hardware" may not be crystal clear to a lot of the population.

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.

> 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 …"

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.

Battery can be replaced by going to the apple store and buying a new one which is cheaper than a new phone, so I agree with you on that.

Phone definitely last longer so 6 years sounds about right, as after that they tend to get obsolete.

Oh wow, I had no clue. Perhaps this means I’ll be able to keep my iPhone 12 Mini for quite a while longer. It’s the perfectly sized phone, IMO.

Wholly agree. I was able to use my iPhone SE for an incredible amount of time until damage caught up with it and the iPhone 12 mini came out.

Again, it’s the perfect phone.

I've nursed my wife's SE along until this past week when we bought a used 13 Mini. She has small hands ( not exceptionally small, just small ) and the larger sizes just weren't appealing to her. I've replaced screens, even have a battery for it ready, but the lightning connector finally wearing out and impending End of Support made her upgrade.

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You will get held back by software updates in ios then apps long before the device is useless. I have a few perfectly good iphones in a drawer like this. Can’t use any apps anymore.

Yep, Apple has made a lot of marketing around the concept of updates and all that jazz but the reality is that the primary beneficiary are them.

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.

I had the same plans for my mini, but the TrueDepth sensor failed on me recently and so FaceId no longer works.

I’m also weighing out my repair options.

There are dozens of us, dozens!

- Sent from my iPhone 13 Mini

I’m still happy with my 8

Another iPhone 12 mini needs that tooooooooo.

I had no idea this was possible, but yeah, going to “battery health” in my Settings shows battery health is degraded, and provides a link to schedule a replacement.

Battery replacements are priced <100 CAD for for all supported Apple phones. In my opinion, it's a pretty good option given the support period these devices enjoy now.

I had two apple US$49 battery replacements both of my iPhone 8 phones before my wife and I jumped to a 14 pro max.

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.

I went 8 -> 13 mini recently and I strongly preferred Touch ID also. It doesn’t require light, the right angle, or a button press to confirm the intentionality of actions like a purchase.

But yeah overall it’s bonkers how similar the two devices are for purportedly between four generations apart.

> It doesn’t require light

neither does face ID

Hmm okay. I’ve never been able to make it work while lying in bed; I end up just tapping in my pin rather than fuss with getting it to go through.

Main issue for me in bed is failure to identify face smooshed into pillow. Raise head and unlock fine, even in full dark. Still requires neck muscle actuation that wasn't required with touch id.

I have the same problem. Recently realized it’s because I don’t wear glasses in bed and thus the phone is too close to my face for faceid to work

It works in pitch dark.

but it fails completely when you have a little bit of rain on your glasses :)

Depending on where you sit on the conscience/security sliding scale you might want to considering turning off “Require attention”. That solves 90% of glasses/sunglasses related issues.

I do it all the time, fwiw, but my girlfriend cannot get it to work reliably. So your mileage might vary, but in my experience ambient light does not matter.

For me it is because I don’t wear lenses and learned to move the phone a bit further away during the scan to make it eorl in bed. It works every time

Trueeee, when I bury half of my head in pillow.

No, but for me it often fails when outside in bright sunlight, especially if the sun is low in the sky, as it often is in my latitude. Perhaps it might work better if I try training it on my squinting face.

Sort of the same experience in some specific lighting conditions.

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.

To me the best iPhone was the iPhone 7, with TouchID but no physical button. If I wanted, there was a completely silent mode that didn't have that "clunk" when you press that button.

I preferred the physical button. I hate the feel of "fake" clicks.

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.

You can disable "Require Attention for Face ID" under Settings > Face ID & Passcode. That makes Face ID far more reliable and consistent in my experience (assuming you're okay with the reduced security tradeoff).

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.

> You can disable "Require Attention for Face ID" under Settings > Face ID & Passcode. That makes Face ID far more reliable and consistent in my experience (assuming you're okay with the reduced security tradeoff).

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.

Yeah, my experience is very similar. Unlike the other replier I don't think there was much gained with FaceID in the end, especially with that stupid notch would made their remove useful information. Also considering the added cost and the even worse repairability than TouchID it's not a very good deal for the consumer.

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.

- sorry, replied to wrong comment...

When my girlfriend saw the new camera button, she thought Touch ID had been added to the new iPhone, just like on her iPad mini. She got super excited for a moment, and I felt bad having to tell her that the new button doesn’t have Touch ID.

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.

completely agree, this was peak iPhone. The killer feature was the Aluminium back, a superior material for the back of a phone case.

The problem I have with Face ID is that with my phone in its holder in my car, it's too far away to scan my face. I need to lean forward.

I switched to Samsung partly because of the lack of Touch ID. Face ID was annoying, it didn't work well with masks (even with the special option turned on), it didn't work well in the morning when I'm lying in bed, it didn't work well when I was carrying my son in a carrier because the angle was wrong.

Touch ID was reliable for me.

My memories of Android phones are bad enough that I can’t imagine actually switching back over this feature — there’s just way too much else I appreciate about the Apple ecosystem. But respect to you!

I'd say it's significantly better... I did a brief stint with android a long time ago but didn't like it, but now I've been using it for 3 yearsish and I actually get annoyed when I use my wife's iphone. There's a lot to like from F-Droid, the fact that the quick settings menu is better (just a recent example, you long press on the hotspot button you get sent to the settings showing you the hotspot password),...

Yeah, I think the hardware has improved so much that now the more complexe software can now be much more useful. This is what Apple has missed in my opinion; the iPhone is no longer a no-nonsense, simple as it gets, with a strict selection of features (both hardware and software) to meet a palatable price point, device that it once was. But then in comparaison to modern Android it feels like at the same time it is too complicated but also missing a lot of options/features/freedom.

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.

They're the same generation though. Just adding to a number doesn't change that.

Yep, my 15 year old son is going to inherit my iPhone 13 Pro after I replace the battery. Way better than getting $300 for trade in that I would get.

I’m not saying you’re making the wrong move, but if you’re willing to go with a carrier like ATT, you can get $1000 trade-in value for that iPhone 13 Pro towards a new iPhone 16 Pro. You can even just buy an unlocked iPhone 12 off of eBay (for about $250) and get the same $1000 trade-in credit for you son. There are some caveats. For example, the credits are paid out evenly over 24 months, but if you plan to keep it for 2 years, you basically get a $250 iPhone 16 Pro.

Again, it might not be the right decision for you, but I thought you might like to be aware of the option.

You'll end up paying for it in the backend with their over priced plans

Tmo normally had good trade ins also, and has the lowest plan prices of the big 3

I've tended to buy iPhones that are 2 or 3 generations old from eBay and Swappa for my family and use Mint or Tello for cheap cellular service. Our costs might be $350 for a phone and $100 - $150 per year for service.

We do get them a nice new phone when they graduate high school.

I consider that state of the art and brand new. I just inherited an iPhone XS and the battery is at 91%. I figure I can go at least another 3 years. For reference I was using a Oneplus 3T which is still going strong.

I have that same phone and have been using it now for six years, and according to the battery health in the settings, the battery is still in good shape, there’s no notice of it being degraded.

I used the same OnePlus 3T that I bought used, until it was stolen. Would have probably considered a new OnePlus but all their models were too big and expensive at the time, so went Pixel 7 near the end of the cycle. Even though I've been a mac user for about 12 years, iPhones have never made it into the realm of consideration.

Just recently replaced my XS Max battery. Great phone! :)

It is indeed the most comfortable of the phones in the last decade perhaps. I am still rocking it. Recently my battery died and they replaced it but that battery too wouldn’t charge for hours and then would charge by a trickle. They said they’d just replace my phone so now I have a brand new XS max ready for another 5 years.

I use an Xs Max to test iOS 18.

Works great. Original battery.

It's telling me CA$120 for an iPhone 12 mini.

I do at least one battery replacement on all my iphones. It extends the life by years IMO. I'm currently coming up on 5 years with my current phone and it's still on the first battery. Seems iPhone battery tech has gotten better.

Same same, 12 mini here (with small battery), still going strong, but I have to say, I have chargers everywhere and when traveling I grab one of my Makita batteries with the USB cap which can charge it 6-7 times (5 Ah). So honestly I wouldn't know how long the battery actually lasts, I suspect less than a full day, or just about a day.

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 has, they don't intentionally ruin your battery when you plug it in at night now at least.

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.

I pay very little attention to features on phones, especially things like improved cameras, but I finally upgraded my iPhone X to an iPhone 15 (one of my kids needed a phone). I've noticed that I've been able to take some stunning pictures out of planes when flying, as well as low-light photos.

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.

your grandma is certainly a small minority. I am a software developer and i barely know or care about most features on my ios phone. If my apps are not slow and require me to update and my battery is good, i have no reason to get a new iphone. Apple knows it since they require their apps to be updated every year so that it won't be supported on older devices.

Genuine question - how do you get 1Password to stop re-asking for the typed in password. It is a pain in butt.

Settings->Security->Face ID. Set to "on".

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.

Setting FaceId is the first step, but you can also decide how often you have to reenter your password for reauthentication, or just so you don’t forget it. Directly beneath the face-id option.

Not exactly - you can lose focus without a problem

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.

FYI there's a setting that lets you turn off the two week prompt or update it to 30 days.

Actually on iPhone it allows turn off for all time.

I recently bought my little ma a new big ipad. Her first response to it was "holy cats, this is fast!"

She used an A14 Bionic equipped ipad.

She is in her 80's.

What does she do with it?

My grandma is 80-ish old and she watches youtube, tiktok, reads “google”, does banking, e-shopping (a lot), messengers, puzzles. All that on a serious level.

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

Maybe she comments on hackernews.

My elderly mother uses it for iMessage, facebook, surfing the web, some sports apps, and lots of crossword and puzzle apps.

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Continuity camera is great too. The mouse and keyboard sharing... works great when it works. Looking forward to that maturing a bit.

Speaking of continuity, how do you get a Youtube video currently playing on the laptop to pause and continue on the iPhone?

pause video on laptop.

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.

There are probably multiple ways, but i find the most reliable probably through share -> airdrop to phone.

That's so cool! I had no idea about universal copy/paste and I struggle a lot with one time codes across devices since I don't have universal iMessage set up for privacy reasons. I usually just send them to myself via telegram for simplicity.

Thank you for posting all these tips.

You realize Telegram is less secure than iMessage?

Significantly less secure at that. I imagine GP has iMessage disabled on their computer because other people use their computer, and they don't want iMessages/SMS going anywhere other than their phone.

Given the fact that the most of zero click 0-day exploits were targeting iMessage, I'd disagree with your statement.

Well, Telegram is by definition not as a secure as iMessage. Telegram messages are by default not encrypted on the server. Even when it is encrypted on the server, telegram has the keys and can decrypt it.

They have the decryption keys

https://telegram.org/faq#:~:text=To%20protect%20the%20data%2....

Telegram isn't as private as iMessage, but that doesn't mean it's not as secure. Security-wise, exploiting iMessage is easier than exploiting telegram, since iMessages has some special privileged access. Security doesn't mean privacy.

The issue with parsing images in a process was fixed awhile back. If you are really paranoid, you can put your iPhone in “lockdown mode”.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120

You rebutted something GP didn't write.

This is true (one is talking about zero-click zero days, the other is talking about “privacy,” not sure if they mean privacy against Facebook or privacy against other users of their device).

But the comment that kicked off the thread was the one about privacy.

I think they mostly targeted font/image/url parsing which are used across the OS. iMessage was somewhat privileged at some point in the back but was compartmentalized later and media processing was the only escape, but that’s out of process now too I believe.

Most car crashes also happen near your house.

The stats understander is logged on and strapped in.

That's because telegram has 3000-day exploits.

This kind of proves the point? Presumably your mother didn't buy the latest phone for "continuity" or camera improvements. The features and additional hardware improvements might be noticeable after being used, but are they driving sales to people who aren't tech enthusiasts?

> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.

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.

My thing is the battery timeline matches pretty closely to when I’m just ready for something new. I go bare, no case, so by 3-4 years my screen is scratched and scuffed enough to just do full replacement. I usually notice the speed leap too and how certain apps were severely unoptimized for my older device. So that’s nice too. But it’s not ever felt like a “upgrade” in a very long time because I don’t have any new features unlocked (not any that I use), so I’m my mind it’s a “replacement”.

The one consumable much harder to replace is the oleophobic coating. There are drops you can buy and apply, they seem to work alright, but don't last nearly as long as the factory coating.

By year two, the screen just gets grubbier and grubbier. By year three its just plan nasty.

If you get AppleCare+ the screen replacement is $29. I usually get it replaced right before I can hand it off to my family. It's not as good a deal obviously if you don't plan on getting AppleCare+ anyways.

Do you have to break it?

Theoretically yes; but depends entirely on the mood of the employee you get.

If the drops work, then are you forgetting to reapply them every few months, or is that not viable, or what?

Seems you need to apply them about every month because they wear off so fast. And then you're looking at multiple $18 bottles per year...

It's very easy to just apply a glass screen protector which has a fresh new oleophobic coating on it.

I buy them in packs of 3-5 on ebay for $5-10. (no need to buy the really expensive brands) They are quick to replace, have a nice oleophobic coating on them, and can be replaced as frequently as desired.

Getting protectors that come with an alignment frame and running a hot shower to pull dust from the air was life-changing for me.

I’ve gone back to no case since the Ceramic Shield and it’s been great. Excited for the improvements in the next model. I hate cases and will no go back.

I tried that for a while, but I find my iPhone 13 Pro Max to be easier to operate with one hand when it has a case. The iPhone is a bit too slippery for me without it.

I used to hate the cases until I recently got one that can hold my ID and credit cards. This allowed me to retire my wallet which was very much worth it. Do you still use a wallet?

That sounds good and convenient until you loose or a thief robs you of your phone and wallet at the same time in one go. I need to use a wallet because I live in a cash first country but even of otherwise I'd still carry a wallet because I don't want a single point of failure. Like what else am I gonna do with an now empty pocket if I give up on the wallet?

The other pocket usually has my car keys. For theft, I in fact rarely use my phone to pay but usually my watch. I can do pretty much anything with the watch except CarPlay and taking photos. It has its own cel connection as well.

Aside from what the sibling says regarding theft, I still use a wallet and what I hate most about the combined wallet + phone combo is the thickness of it.

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.

That's why I never get the Max and wish the Mini had seen further improvements.

Anecdote, but iPhone 13 lasted me 2 years case free before tiny crack appeared. iPhone 15 lasted 5 months until back glass completely shattered.

Not surprising because only the edges of the back glass are glued for iPhone 15 so most of the surface is just floating there without support. On prior generations the entire panel is glued.

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.

Classic of "easier to fix vs less likely to break".

Given how much Apple is pushing apple care (and how much they charge for back glass) - it's almost like incentives have turned around.

I’ve had the 15 Pro since launch day, and it is incredibly durable. No case, no screen protector. The screen is slightly scratched around the edges, there are a couple ~1mm^2 dings in the titanium, but aside from that, no problems. I’ve dropped it probably a hundred times, including probably a dozen or two on concrete or tile. The titanium (and whatever they’re doing with screens these days) really makes a difference.

Not sure how you are not getting scratches - here's a photo of mine https://imgur.com/a/pt5HRVl

It seems every year they are scratching even more. Not that it matters much tho.

My phone has a couple (literal 2) scratches slightly under the notch bubble, that I am fairly certain were caused by laying the phone face-first on a desk that had some kind of dirt on it, and removing the phone by sliding it off the desk (rubbing the dirt against the screen, causing the scratches). The rest of the main screen surface is pretty much scratch-free, and only the corners and edges have notable scratches (from inserting and removing the phone from my pocket - the corners pretty much always catch on the metal rivets on my jeans). I don’t keep anything in the same pocket as my phone though.

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.

> 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

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.

I think it depends a lot on how you handle your phone. I used to have screen protectors, which would always end up scratched, coming off, etc. It was a total PITA to replace them. The last one I had was on my iPhone 7. Took it off for the last 4 years of use I've got out of that phone. The screen is still like new. For mew new phone, I didn't bother with a screen protector. It's a year and a half old now, and no scratch to report.

Screen protectors have gotten much better and much cheaper, especially for anything other than the latest model.

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.

Weird. I get no scratches either. I do try and keep my keeps in an opposite pocket, but not always and this year as my place has been under construction, the phone has shared the pocket with all sorts of metal screws, bolts, junk, etc. still nothing.

Just upgraded to iPhone 15 Pro Max, I’m glad this phone is durable based on your experience.

Obviously anecdotal but yeah, this is by far the most durable phone I’ve owned. My 11 was the first I went caseless with, and it got pretty beat up in the first year. My 13 Pro was better, but still worse for wear after a year. The 15 Pro is probably in similar shape compared to the 11 after 3-4 months, and I have not been careful at all with this phone whereas with the 11 I most certainly was.

A few years ago I cracked my iPhone7+ screen in several places (dangerous to use any swipe features) but I wanted to wait the few months until the next iPhone revision so I just put a screen protector on it and honestly, it was quite usable. I even skipped the next refresh because you could hardly tell it was cracked with the screen protector and using the phone through that - it felt almost new.

Interestingly i felt like my last replacement was actually a downgrade.

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.

I too prefer the more rounded exteriors. It feels better in the hand. I think it's just a cyclical fashion choice, was an adjustment period when it was iPhone 3 (rounded) to iPhone 4 (squared) too and it more noticeable when not cased.

It's interesting that you perceive the X to have been thinner. It's actually very slightly thicker (by 0.05mm) than the 13. The 13 is longer (by 3.1mm) and wider (by 0.6mm) though.

Rounded is much better. Now even macs are getting squareish :(

Same and totally agree with the timeline. This is the first time I have gone 3 years though and the screen hasn’t cracked, the back hasn’t cracked, the battery life is decent. These features the last 3 years haven’t sold me. I’m not spending over 1k, at least on launch day… for the first time in a very long time

Agreed. Apple phones are quite repairable (just not DIY-able), no one is dropping 1000 dollars on a new phone because their current one has a cracked back glass.

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.

There are absolutely cases where they have artificially gated features to new devices, even when the hardware is capable (I'm thinking around Handoff/Continuity, etc.). Where the initial reaction is "maybe it's a new BT chip or ..." but it can be shown that the functionality is perfect when some trickery is done to fool the OS its running on more modern hardware.

This is a consequence of Apple’s deeply ingrained (and hugely successful) product design culture.

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.

What do you mean about stage manager?

They originally claimed it was going to be supported only on the most recent SoC’s, then backtracked.

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.

There was also that instance where Siri was gated from the iPhone 4. It was later shown that it was possible to install the Siri interface on the iPhone 4 through a Jailbreak - the only thing that prevented full functionality was a device serial number embedded in the request to the Siri server.

Not even just iPhones - I ran Siri on a 3rd gen iPod Touch. Anything that could run iOS 5 could use Siri with a jailbreak.

iPhone 4 was first generation of iPhone to have a second microphone used for noise cancellation.

So whilst Siri could technically run on older devices the experience was unacceptably poor.

Siri! What a blast from the past. I wonder if there are people still using it nowadays, now that the novelty is long gone.

There are cases, but credit where its due, I think they are generally very generous in bringing new features to older devices, compared to plenty other companies that basically forget about they ever released another device the moment a new one drops.

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.

Eh, sometimes. Other times, a newer piece of internal hardware has no new “feature” but just works better and has fewer failures. This is particularly true with every kind of wireless networking, including Bluetooth. It may work, but not have hit the quality bar.

Exactly.

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.

True, sure. But someone mentioned the canonical example I was thinking of: Stage Manager. That is a 100% software feature that was arbitrarily gated.

Unless I'm mistaken, stage manager requires running 5 apps simultaneously when iPads were previously limited to 1 or 2? That includes 5 render pipelines (way more pixels to push than exist on the physical display). There would be hardware load on pretty much every key piece of hardware (GPU, CPU, memory, caches, disk), and by a non trivial factor.

So why gate it on macOS?

Same reason. Rendering more apps at full screen in real time takes a ton of GPU. Adds ~5x the pixels, and 5x screen scale transforms+effect. All the optimizations for “that’s hidden”/“that’s background” go out the door.

Apple also has to develop technology at their own pace. I used to get an iPhone every year. Eventually it stopped making sense and I just now had to check to see which one I had .(14 Pro)I remember noticing a big difference when I bought this iPhone with the camera.

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.

Absolutely disagree.

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... .

Repairability was bad but has gone up a lot, they did a big internals redesign for iPhone 15 to make it easier to swap batteries and replace screens. Still not something they want user serviceable, I imagine mostly because it creates headaches for everyone involved. Most people struggle fixing big things, let alone sub-mm precision things. But this helps the 3rd party repair shops a lot.

> Still not something they want user serviceable, I imagine mostly because it creates headaches for everyone involved.

User replaceable cell phone batteries used to be the norm, not the exception.

How much battery capacity, physical size, weight, or waterproofing are you willing to sacrifice? Because for me, it’s straight up zero

> How much battery capacity

Batteries used to last a lot longer

> physical size, weight

Phones used to be a lot smaller as well

Phone batteries used to be a lot smaller, phones used to draw a lot less current and have smaller screens and be a lot stupider.

And at the time they were comparable to a flashlight in terms of complexity, not running AAA games with raytracing and a camera pipeline of untold complexity. It’s almost like having anything this complex working requires insane engineering and miniaturization, this is not due to “planned obsolescence”, especially if you take a look at the second hand market. No other brand has even remotely similar resell value.

Gaming laptops have user replaceable batteries.

> User replaceable cell phone batteries used to be the norm, not the exception.

Few enough people want them that no one makes them anymore

(That’s what people mean when they say no one wanted them)

<Jack Sparrow voice> but you have repaired it </>

Assuming those prices are correct and the procedure is that convenient, it doesn't practically exist if most people aren't aware of it. From my casual observations most people suffer with bad batteries until buying a new model.

At what point are people responsible for their own actions or ignorance? Apple hardly makes the battery replacement option a secret, and there are plenty of 3rd party retailers that advertise them too. Anyone who bought a new iPhone because they didn't realize they could get the battery replaced has failed to do even the most cursory research into what options are out there for solving their problem. It would be one thing if we were talking the 1st generation iPhone days, when the "battery replacement" option was the usually "out of warranty" device replacement that was effectively Apple's entire repair process for the phone at the time. Then your "battery replacement" costs were ~50% of the cost of a new phone, and that definitely gets into the "buy a new phone instead of replacing the battery" territory. But the ~$100 battery replacement option has been around since at least 2010[1], now 14 years later there's no excuse for not being aware, or becoming aware when you need it.

[1]: https://archive.nytimes.com/gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/201...

My SE battery will cost $80 to replace, but since I only paid $120 for the phone it's not a good deal. I'll just wait a bit and get another used SE for $120 when the battery life gets too annoying. I doubt that many other customers are ignorant or irresponsible.

What more can they do to let people know?

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

It also complains in your settings app main screen if the battery is too low.

It's a psychological game. People are primed to want new things, and more investment into something old is hard to justify even if it's financially right. Also OS's lose supprt, softwares bloat, and bundled offers from carriers are toward replacement. You'd have to be really disciplined to not succumb to upgrade pressure when you go into an Apple Store of all places where the entire setup is to generate sales.

An Apple Store is one of the least sales oriented retail environments. You can go in and play with stuff for hours, chat with people who work there who can’t even make sales, and drop things off for them to repair. They don’t even have cash registers in most of them.

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.

Yet when you do the training to work in it, they insist for quite a while that they make more money per square foot than diamond merchant.

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...

Of course they gross more money than a jewelry store. That sounds impressive, but really isn't if you think about it. They sell very popular items that almost everyone in any mall in the country owns some version of that people WANT to buy every few years at most(computer, phone, headphones). Jewelry stores sell items that a lot of people will never own, and they sell items that people might buy every 5 years if they are really good customers.

you literally make an appointment on the website and check in and then walk to the back of the store and drop your phone off

You have to walk past 50 iDevices of Applied Silicon with coordinated beam forming transmitting Reality Distortion Fields into your brain

iOS 18 will support phones released back to 2018.

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?

Uh, for as long as they work? That used to be the support model norm before this disposable software/disposable hardware culture from the 2000's.

The phones and software don't stop working when they aren't supported anymore. They just don't get more free updates. You can keep using the device in perpetuity with the same software that you have on it right now. Its a relatively recent phenomenon that the OS and all updates are free.

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?

Well…

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.

Again, the phone won't stop working. It will still do everything that it did the day you bought, and in many cases more. It will connect to any 2g/3g network that you subscribe to, and connect to any server that operates on the same protocols that existed on the last day it was supported.

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?

I am not blaming Apple. But I am saying that older phones will stop functioning as phones eventually.

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

Were you around during the first 17 years of personal computers?

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?

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They do. You're notified when battery health is either unknown or reaching EOL. It points you towards replacement, not upgrade.

"If battery health has degraded significantly, the below message will also appear: Your battery’s health is significantly degraded. An Apple Authorized Service Provider can replace the battery to restore full performance and capacity. More about service options…"

https://support.apple.com/en-us/101575

Apple provides a warning and a link to battery replacement options from the Battery Health screen when it detects that it's been degraded too much. So... they do provide this?

What a reductive position.

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So obvious, Apple implemented it years ago.

They could also include little leaflets about “Land Declarations” with iPhones and other such rubbish, but that does’t mean it would be a wise policy.

The battery gets bad after 4 years. That’s usually the moment I want to buy a new phone already, why invest $99 in a phone that I won’t be using in a year? Better deal with a bad battery for a few months or a year, then already go on and buy a new one.

I never heard of someone who bought a new phone _solely_ for a new battery

>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

One problem with extending life of your phone with lineageOS is trouble using banking apps on a rooted device. If you are lucky you could get it working with Magisk/Shamiko or similar but sometimes there will be some stubborn apps

> If you are lucky you could get it working with Magisk/Shamiko

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.

Yes I know that's a potential problem (along with using things like digital wallets), but I don't use banking apps (nor digital wallets)

I don't understand this. Why not trying the "shady battery" for cheap before buying a whole new phone? Even if you somehow don't trust their batteries, I see s10e batteries on ebay for ~10€. Just buy one of those and have them install it?

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.

I've had friends take their phones in for a battery replacement, and let's say the results were not better than before they took their phones in.

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

Not everyone is willing to spend >500usd every 5 years on a smartphone.

To me it seems like throwing money out of the window just for the sake of it.

> every 5 years on a smartphone.

Phones frequently die after 4-5 years.

> 500usd

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.

$16 doesn't sound huge to you because you are living in a bubble.

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.

> 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.

iOS 18 literally supports phones back to 2018

$16 a month is close to the cost of financing a basic motorbike over its expected lifetime. People in developing world mostly drive 125/150 cc and expected lifetime is ~10 years

If you look up battery health and it shows as degraded (or you follow the notification to get there), it gives you support options to schedule an appointment or send it in for repair.

If you click on battery health in settings it will literally set up a link to request the replacement service, very minimal friction.

I’ve never seen a literal “this product sucks because I refuse to learn about it” given as an explicit argument before, usually it’s just implicit, thank you for this

I neither made an argument nor any comment on the value of a product.

The issue is probably chips or cracks on the back glass or sometimes the front.

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.

Could it be that you have some internal bias at play here? You don’t seem capable of accepting something that other people find pretty trivial.

No

Most people will refuse to go to the doctor when they have serious symptoms themselves. I don’t think stupid/lazy human behavior can be blamed on apple.

Maybe similar. Doctors are general bad at providing care, so people learn helplessness.

> An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.

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.

The Pixel 6 was one of those awful designs where you have to go in from the front and risk damaging the screen in order to get to the battery, it's no wonder getting it replaced was expensive. That price has to factor in a potential screen replacement if they mess it up. Thankfully later Pixels can be opened from the back instead.

screen repair on my iphone 13 mini is $230, it sucks on both sides depending

> An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.

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.

I really don’t like this “unauthorised” language - when you change light, washing machine or the whole kitchen in your house, so we cal it ‘unauthorised?’ Both are your property

Unauthorised by the warranty agreement. Applies to near every consumer electronics product, for frankly quite obvious reasons.

And sometimes they rip the display cable while they’re trying to swap out the battery, and you end up with an entirely new SE2 in the end. Happened to us about 1-2 months ago.

Bring it in where? I have to drive an hour one way for an Apple store. It’s easier to order a new device than be without my phone.

Last couple of times I have done this, I used Apple’s online system to schedule the battery replace at a locally owned Apple dealer or at the nearest Best Buy. Same price and warranty as at the Apple Store. Turn around time was 2 hours.

Helpful tip. Thanks!

Lucky you. I would need to drive to another country for an Apple store... And I don't live in Third World either (theoretically), but in Central Europe.

Apple store doesn't even exist in my country.

I think people are just too lazy, don't know, or don't want to go to the trouble of getting the battery replaced.

> Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years hardly seems like it's going to nuke their business from orbit.

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.

Apple makes a ton of money from services:

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.

Interestingly, it was recently revealed that 22% of their services income is comprised of payments from Google to keep their search engine as the default in iOS / Safari. Soon to disappear given the antitrust case.

If this becomes the dominant source of revenues, it makes sense for them to make the phone more repairable and to have a longer lifetime - but then this dominance have to really show, otherwise it is a future revenue instead of a present one.

> iPhone SE 1st Generation

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.

FWIW I got a launch iPhone X I gave to my dad with original battery now at 73% health, OLED screen burn in, and a broken charging port (wireless charging still works), and he’s still using it as a daily driver lol.

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.

Not trying to be rude here. How did the screen burn-in happen?

My dad loves to keep it on max brightness without screen auto lock and leaves the keyboard up. It shows ghost keys on lighter screen images.

Impressive. I didn’t know that was even possible. I am a living set of edge cases and I empathize.

I typically keep mine for about 3-4 years. I’ve never replaced the battery.

And I’ve never met anyone who replaces their battery after a year and a half. At least not an iPhone.

Most batteries are made in China (or even cheaper places) now, so they simply do not last. I have iPad 2s that still last for MONTHs without charging. Nowdays iPhone batteries start heavy degradation about 2 years in. That 20-25% loss means all day battery to needing to charge at least once before going to bed for many. Source: I replace more batteries now than screens.

I rarely replace batteries. I have three phones in use and 2 iPads. I’ve had this config for 10+ years.

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 don't think those numbers are right. I am at exactly 3 years on my 13 pro, and I have 92% battery life yet.

> iPhone batteries become subpar way faster than that, especially the older models who get more strained as they bear the heavier OS

Anecdote from one person who buys lots of phones for extended family: I see no such phenomenon

To go for the official rating, up to the iPhone 14 it was 80% of the original charge after 500 cycles [0] and got improved (1000 !) later.

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.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/101575

I use an iPhone SE2 that I got refurbished in the past 6 months by Apple. I couldn't replace just the battery, because the rear glass had a crack in it. This thing is a mess, refurbishing it feels like a waste of money. It runs out of battery almost daily, has terrible multi-second camera lag when I open the camera app from the lockscreen. Often the phone will just have like a quarter second of UI lag for no obvious reason. The experience is overall very slow and frustrating, an enormous degradation from when I got it as a gift 4 years ago (part of why I'm still using it).

It's a shame, because I like the phone a lot otherwise.

Southeast Asian countries have no lack of cheap 3rd party shops that can do high-skilled repairs on pretty much any iPhone model.

Also, 3 year battery life is much more realistic to me than 1.5 years, but that's just personal experience.

On the battery thing, that might depend how much games are run on it. We hand down devices, and replace the battery if its life is below the 70% mark so to somewhat refresh the device. The SE 2nd gen we handed down already had two battery replacements at this point and I'll probably ask for a third before it falls off the support list.

On third party repairs...it's sure getting better, hopefully in other regions as well.

> On the battery thing, that might depend how much games are run on it.

Ah, could be. I use iPhones intensively, but almost never for gaming.

iPhone 11 here and no battery complaints

Nonsense

You missed the user bit of what you're replying to.

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 user* bit*

"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.

> 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.

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?

For camping and off grid living, recharging spare LiPo batteries via a ribbon cable or contact pins sounds like a massive pain in the ass. Give me a standard USB C based power bank, the thing that Solar Generators and many panels have supplied connections for, and can be used for any USB C device. Plus the phone never has to be opened and be vulnerable to ingress of moisture or debris.

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.

Back when Samsung phones had user replaceable batteries they also sold separate battery chargers. This was super convenient because I could just grab a fresh battery from the charger on my way out the door. No need to carry a separate USB power bank. And moisture wasn't a problem, they had water resistant models. It's really a shame that phones have gone backwards in that area while advancing in most others.

Samsung still makes the x-cover series of phones. They're usually used in commercial applications, but, you can find them sold unlocked pretty easily.

And they offer a little charging dock with pogo pins, so, no wearing out the USBC port.

I have little battery dock things, really dumb devices, but, USBC goes in, battery docks in, and it slow charges in about 8 hours. I've got 3 of them.

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.

I can also go several weeks off grid with literally any phone, a moderately sized power bank and a 40w solar panel hanging off my pack or over a tent without thinking too much. It's far more versatile for powering other devices and I never have to reboot my phone. If you want to carefully buy stuff you can even get a fully IP65 rated or better setup, which makes it actually survivable to the elements.

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?

> if you're talking about the world being dark for 3 years, not sure batteries are the thing to stock up on friend

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!

Sure sure, and I lose the ability to keep a phone going 6+ years because the battery is glued into the case. So I'm making 3x the e-waste for... really nothing honestly.

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.

>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?

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.

To others' point here, they even make solar topped rucksacks now. One of those, feeding a powerbank, and you top off your trailmap-photo-gps-emergency-sat-beacon gizmo on walkabout, no fiddling.

>"The masses" do not want to carry a bag of spare batteries. The masses don't want to have to think about 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.

> 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"

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.

I wouldn't want to backpack with it to be honest. In my car? Sure, why not have a cooler sized battery with some solar panels, perfect solution really.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

I am an engineer at a big tech company. I’m not a “normie”.

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.

I don’t get the assumption (not just in your comment, all over this post) that engineers and programmers are more likely to appreciate the changes.

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.

My comment is a counter response to the assertion that engineers are any different than “normies”.

How can you call it "solved" when such basics as text editing are broken?

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

> How can you call it "solved" when such basics as text editing are broken?

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.

What would you want next, a modal editor that understands "clean url" as a type of a text object which you could then select&copy in a couple of motions?

So true. With so much advancement in phone tech I’m still not typing as fast as 15 years ago when phones had physical keyboards. Copy paste undo redo is unnecessarily clumsy. The list goes on.

> Smartphones are essentially solved at this point.

How about running a normal desktop OS on smartphone, so that you could completely replace your laptop/desktop?

This makes a lot of sense for tablets - but Apple decided they won't allow it in order not to cannibalize sales. For phones, the value is arguably smaller, at least for people like me who hate doing anything remotely complex on a tiny screen.

There is no reason to do anything complex on a tiny screen. The phone can stay a phone, except when you connect a keyboard and screen to it.

Nobody actually does that, turns out. Several manufacturers have the feature and it goes unused.

They do it wrong: Nobody needs to expand mobile apps to a large screen. There is only one company which does it right: Shrink desktop apps to mobile: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co...

Total pipe dream. I like GNOME’s design but gtk and its desktop apps at large will never be appealing to mobile users, so I wholeheartedly disagree with you.

I already use a desktop Firefox and LibreOffice on my Librem 5. It's relatively slow but works sufficiently well with NoScript and text.

See also: https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-year-of-librem-5-convergence/

well not fully solved. That's why I was watching foldable phones carefully and seeing how they iterate. That was indeed the first thing in a long time that both excited me and easily had me imagining various improvements (horizontal folds for productivity, vertical to minimize space. Both to built-in protect the screen).

The real advancements majority of users would notice:

- 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.

> Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones

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.

Completely not a thing in the UK. The app is a portal for SMS based auth and that's it. Everyone uses WhatsApp or other social network based messengers.

Australia / Asia too, no one cares about iMessage

Same in Germany. Everybody used WhatsApp

I know virtually nobody using iMessage in southern Europe.

I have lived in Brazil, Australia, Spain, and France. iMessage was never a thing in these markets.

I'm a US iphone user and I had no idea what iMessage colors meant until journalists started making a big deal of it. Not that I doubt the stories about green-shaming, it just never occurred to me.

RCS messages are also still going to show up in green bubbles as far as I know.

they are. the intentionally-low-contrast tone of green that Apple passive aggressively punishes Android users with.

RCS is a new green? If you’re referring to the existing SMS green, that was Apple’s original color for messaging. They adopted blue to represent the transition to iMessage. So you can’t say they picked a poor color on purpose; it was representing their own product originally before they even came up with iMessage.

No, the original green was darker and less hard to read messages on. With iOS 7 they made it super bright.

Good point. The new green was decided after the split with iMessage, so technically Apple could have made it a poor color on purpose.

I still doubt it, especially since it’s the same green for FaceTime, Phone, and the icon that still represents iMessage.

Yeah, it wasn't always a bad green. They absolutely chose a bad color on purpose - arguably the world's best design company accidentally uses a painful high-saturation low-contrast background color that violates their own design guidelines for like 8 years by mistake? Give me a break.

End to end encryption is a reasonable justification for a visual indicator.

Originally it was because iMessages were free, while SMS were $0.15-$0.20 each. So glad Apple broke that monopoly, along with many other anti-consumer wireless provider restrictions.

Did Apple really break that monopoly? WhatsApp was released 2009 with the explicit pitch that it was "free SMS". iMessage launched 2011, and with the anti-consumer Apple lock-in, and isn't even much used outside US.

Also free/unlimited SMS was prevalent in many countries before WhatsApp or iMessage. And there were plenty of IMs before that too.

Is having your message be a different colour really a punishment?

I mean prior to iMessage existing, all messages sent in the "Text" app were green bubbles.

They weren't bright green with white text lmao https://cdn.redmondpie.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Messag...

Anecdotal evidence from Germany: Nobody uses iMessage. Everybody uses WhatsApp. Everbody!

America matters more than the rest of the world. Everyone wants to come here, not the other way around.

This is irrelevant to Apple, still 10% of all customers

That 10% of the customers pays a lot more per customer than most do. We are likely responsible for far, FAR more than 10% of the revenue or 10% of the profit of apple.

did you miss the /s from your post?

Agreed on battery life. It's such a pity that advances in battery tech is never given back to the user.

As for green text, this is purely a US thing. Most of the rest of the world uses Whatsapp.

Most of the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's ass about bubble colour and just use SMS, including for sharing pictures.

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.

I don’t know any part of the world still using SMS. What part of the world is that?

Countries where telecom competition lead to unlimited sms early enough and/or iPhone/iMessage adoption meant people weren’t motivated to install third party apps. The US and to a lesser extend the UK are the only countries I’m aware of this happening? But the UK plans added unlimited sms later and so WhatsApp has >50% market penetration there unlike the US.

(responding to both) France. We've had unlimited SMS plans since what, 2005? It's been a guaranteed solid 10-15+ years nobody thinks that SMS used to be a paid-per-unit (whether you got a package or not) thing.

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.

Apps like Whatsapp provide (a) groups, (b) picture messages, (c) end-to-end encryption, (d) very low spam rate and (e) free messaging, even internationally.

So there's often motivation to install your country's dominant messaging app beyond just the cost of SMS.

it’s a very real friction to install a third party app and ensure the people you want to talk to install it too, when all you really want to do is send short texts and images.

A good indicator is how expensive SMS was back when smartphones were brand new.

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.

I’m not sure where you are, but when I first got a phone in maybe 1998 SMS was completely free. No concept of limits at all. It was only when it became popular that network operators started charging for them. Now nobody uses them for anything except receiving 2FA codes

I use SMS in Canada, so does everybody I know. Businesses also use SMS a lot.

I don't care if you personally use Whatsapp or not, it's beyond the point. Whatsapp is by far the most used messenger app in the world. The US is unique in the developed world for using iMessages or SMS.

Netherlands is unique in the developed world for using iDEAL. Therefore, Apple shouldn't support it or care about integrating it into Apple Pay.

You make it sound like someone was arguing for the green text issue specifically not to be solved, rather than just stating that that's only primarily relevant to US consumers.

>rather than just stating that that's only primarily relevant to US consumers.

Why does that need to be stated?

To inform people who might incorrectly extrapolate from their local situation?

Here in Europe even my grandmother and her neighbours use WhatsApp and MMS for pictures seem to be unsupported for the last decade or so.

My 78 year old mother is now comfortable making and receiving calls on WhatsApp. It’s saved me a fortune in international call charges.

The unreliability of sharing video with android users over mms is what drives my use of Signal. That and it's cross platform.

> Better camera (arguably already achieved)

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’ve searched and searched for a way to turn off the extra processing. The only methods are third party camera apps or doing burst mode for every picture.

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.

> 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.

If you want to try out the “fix” goto camera settings and turn on “prioritize faster shooting” then in the camera app on the take picture button: tap, hold, drag left. It should stay white and play a shutter sound. There is a chance to do a similar action that just starts a recording but the button goes red for that.

Thank you! This fixes the after-shot blur. Now I just need to find a way to disable HDR/color enhancements without a 3rd party app and I'm perfectly set.

Halide. If you don't mind subscriptions or the lifetime $75 the app I found that did everything I wanted is Halide. The pain of the problem for me didn't cross the threshold for me to buy the app but the trial of it worked. Funny I have several dozen selfies of me testing it out compared to the Camera app with all the options toggled.

I don't see a need to upgrade my Xs. I can print publishable photos to A2 size, and that's big enough for me.

Also, AirDrop and mobile hotspot are unreliable, if Apple could make them always work, that‘d be noticeable.

For AirDrop, at least, I've found it to be very reliable, with one caveat that always tripped me up before I realized it: *the recipient's phone needs to be unlocked*. This completely changed the game for me, and now me and my wife use it all the time.

Tapping the top of your phones together is the best way I found.

The AI stuff could be useful if it makes Siri more useful.

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.

> 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

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 have a beta of the new Siri, and it's still less impressive than the the OK Google I gave up half a decade ago.

The capability set is indistinguishable.

>Better camera (arguably already achieved)

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.

How about getting rid of that stupid back button in the top left corner when an app opens another app? It drives me crazy seeing it every time I click a link in a message. It's the most useless thing. There's already a good app switcher. What is the point of the back button?

I would hate that change. I usually hold my phone in my left hand, and can reach the back button with my thumb. Using the swipe gesture at the bottom of the screen to switch apps would require switching to a two-handed grip for that one common action.

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.

you wouldn't hate it since a proper implementation would make it optional

There is no way Apple would make a change like that and have it be optional.

So is it mainly for lefties? I hold my phone with my right hand and that button is inaccessible. Based on the downvotes, I feel like I must be missing something.

iOS is kinda a mess when it comes to what's easy for people who hold their phones in their left versus right hands. That back button is definitely for left-handers, but then the control center is clearly better for right-handers. The slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-back gesture is only usable in the left hand, and the slide-from-screen-edge-to-go-forward gesture is only usable with the right hand. My conclusion is that iOS is only really designed to be used with both hands gripping the edges of the phone, which meshes with their ever-increasing screen sizes. The new Pro Max is 6.9"!! That's basically a tablet.

It's worse than useless - I sometimes mistap it and switch the apps

where'd you see no more green text?

iOS 18 (available for all iphones since 2nd gen SE) will support RCS

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...

Unless the RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they should stay green IMHO.

iMessage isn’t meaningfully end to end encrypted either, so it shouldn’t get a different color by that logic.

The automated backups (which are not e2ee) serve as endpoint key escrow (to the middle service), backdooring the e2ee of iMessage.

i am surprised (am i really?) that apple never implemented a toggle to E2EE your icloud backup, just like you can backing up locally through itunes. thankfully you can just completely disable iCloud Backup.

iCloud Backups can be E2EE encrypted if you enable advanced data protection.

RCS brings plenty of new monetization and spam opportunities but doesn't bring feature parity. Or did Google decide to open up their proprietary extensions to non-Google RCS clients?

You know better than I - can I ask what RCS is doing that leads Google to disable it on devices with unlocked bootloaders? Are devices meant to only accept messages that have been signed by a vendor or something? I thought it was just a new messaging standard but I guess there's a lot that goes into the security of it. But why can Signal run e2ee messages on unsavory devices but googles won't let me send a text message unless they've signed the whole stack?

No idea.

There's a massive feature benefit: finally allowing multi-megabyte attachments. Hopefully pictures and videos won't be compressed to fit into 600KB.

This is entirely possible with MMS but for most carriers refusing to adopt 3GPP's current recommendations. This is also entirely possible with other messaging apps available on iOS but for American android users refusing to use other apps.

That's like suggesting it's entirely to run jumbo frames it's just ISPs don't support it.

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 iMessage and RCS are two different things, right?

> but for American android users

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.

They are talking about features they'd like to see.

Or a folding phone? That would be huge

Only half as huge :)

  Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones

  Better camera (arguably already achieved)

I'm a technically sophisticated user, and I don't want a new phone. I would almost certainly like it less than my current four year old phone.

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.

> It would have a better camera than my current phone, but it would still be worse than my Olympus.

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.

My camera isn't pocketable, but if I'm doing photography such that I really care about the result, I bring it. If I'm not, I usually use the phone camera to document things I want to remember or show other people, and doing that slightly better is not very valuable to me.

I'll admit to occasionally contemplating a Ricoh GR III, which is quite pocketable.

> It would have a faster CPU, more RAM, and more storage, but it's rare I run into any of those limits

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!

Exactly.

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

It seems to me that it's based more on the use cases than the speed of improvements to the technology itself.

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.

It's also that software back in the day was much more fine-tuned to use the very limited resources as well as possible, so getting a better CPU would visibly speed up things.

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.

Editing high-resolution video comes to mind as an example of something that will still stress most PCs. Being able to scrub through footage and preview the effect of edits in real time without using low-res proxy files demands a lot of performance. I think higher-spec modern PCs are there for 4K, but I'm not sure about higher.

Heck, I have friends in tech that in the past did iPhone 4, 6, 8, whether you were an "even number" or an "odd number" iPhone buyer became something of a label. One of these guys is on the 11 Pro, has the 16 Plus in his cart, but is actively texting the group chat whether or not to go through with it.

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.

It's the camera for me, especially 5x zoom lens in the big phone instead of the enormous phone. But if I do go through with it I'll be coming from a 4 year old phone, so I'm already not in the $1000/year market.

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.

VR also isn't it. The best case scenario for Vision is that it becomes a <$10B/quarter market similar to the iPad, but it costs substantially more to build and evolve (more complicated hardware and software, lower margins, less software sharing with iPhone). The more likely outcome is that it doesn't even reach $5B by 2030 (that would be ~6% revenue).

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.

Real AR with very lightweight glasses that work outdoors and don't use camera passthrough would be a massive market. The problem is that we are still far away from that point.

Yes, Apple vision seems like a sort of odd thing, like they decided to sell the developer platform/prototype.

It needs to be in a sunglasses form-factor for anybody to care. The tech isn’t here yet, might never be.

I'm not convinced the next "it" is a new hardware product any time soon. You can do a lot with a screen, battery, and cellular connection. All the stuff that AI pins and necklaces can do will end up in phones, watches, and earbuds, and Apple will keep selling all those existing product lines for years. They might even find a way to squeeze an "Apple Intelligence Plus" subscription in there somewhere, with their recent focus on chasing services revenue to make up for slower phone sales.

Just because phones are maturing doesn't necessarily mean a new computing paradigm is right around the corner.

My predictions for Apple’s VR “ambitions”:

- 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.

> 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.

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.

I think it depends on whether they can find a useful mass market niche for it. The original Apple Watch was envisioned as a multipurpose wrist computer phone but after a few years turned out to be more marketable as a fitness tracker with pretty watch faces and available bonus features that aren’t widely used.

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.

interestingly there was no mention of vision pro at todays' event

It came up in passing when they said that the base iPhone 16 would be able to take 3D images. When they showed someone viewing the images, they were using a Vision Pro.

For phones, I think foldable screens are good for a couple more generations of updates. I've had a Flip for a couple of years and won't go back, when they make them lighter I'm in the market for the next one.

Apple AI selfie drone with a monthly contract for your own livestream channel to stream everything you do, with Siri as the AI stream moderator, and an asset/app store to upgrade different parts of your streams. Maybe even 30% cut of the donations from stream fans.

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.

It doesn't look like Apple needs people to be upgrading every other year to do well. Not anywhere close.

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.

> and had 1.83B active iPhone users

be very curious to know what percentage of users bought second hand

It doesn't matter, second hand or not every day devices like phones do not last for say 10 years on average even iPhones.

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.

I agree. I do think Apple is thrilled with the sudden AI hype as this gives them 1-2 generations of new "selling points" as they were truly running out.

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.

“Even” or “odd” number isn’t as applicable as it sounds, though I do remember if you were an “s” year or not. It was iPhone 3G, 3G S, 4, 4S, 5, 5S, 6, 6S, 7, 8/X, XS, 11, and standard annual numbering from the 11 on. In early days you’d ask if you were an “S” year or not. Only since the 11 could you ask whether you were “even” or “odd” without it meaning upgrades every 4 years.

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.

> spending $1000+/year with them

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.

I feel like Apple is in danger of missing the foldable market. It has matured on Android to the point that the quirks have been ironed mostly out, the inventions necessary has been made, etc. Meanwhile Apple has made nothing at all in that area.

I really hope the vast majority will never upgrade every year, regardless of those poor Apple stockholders and their incentives. What a bunch of capitalist driven excess that would be. I say that and I write code for iOS.

Even as an iOS app developer, there's a huge amount of stuff that stock iOS can do that I'm unaware of.

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".

I am an iOS developer too and I use an iPhone 13 before which I used an iPhone 6 until its support was dropped. I prefer developing with older devices as it helps me ensure my apps work well on slower devices. I haven't seen any reason to upgrade for the last 3 years. Switching from iPhone 6 to 13 was the most needed change for me due to the change in safe area insets (notch).

> I prefer developing with older devices as it helps me ensure my apps work well on slower devices.

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).

The iPhone mini is an issue for devs not testing as well. I sent feedback to one to ask if the mini was still being supported. They told me yes, and they were able to reproduce the bug I was seeing related to the screen size. Over a year later and the bug remains. I don’t think it’s getting fixed.

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).

Owing to my carriers not supporting e-SIM, I have two phones — the other is an iPhone XR with Face ID. Unless I'm travelling to the UK, for which I need the other SIM, the XR serves a similar role as an iPad mini would if I were in any sense a "normal person".

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).

I've been using it since I got my iPhone 13 when it first came out and I can confirm it's not as fast nor as reliable as TouchID was. It often fails, asking me to type in the passcode, to asking me to type it in "preventively", to various small things like not being able to hand someone my phone while I'm driving without looking at it first (which, by the way, is when I find FaceID least reliable).

Also an iOS developer, upgraded last week from iPhone 12 to 15 Pro Max. I also preferred running my apps on the 12, to make sure app is very performative.

Outside of the trades, what would be some practical uses for thermal imaging?

inspecting home for thermal leaks in winter, checking temperature if sick, checking temperature of cake in oven, inspecting dark holes in roof for hornets/wasp nest, utility when camping

Thermal imaging seems tough because the sensor need to be cool down or keep it adequately cool all the time but can be achievable.

https://www.flir.com/products/flir-one-edge-pro/?vertical=co...

I've been working in tech for 25 years, and I'm sure I hardly use any of the new features. Camera? Click, maybe crop it or turn it into a loop if it's funny. I play some games on it. I browse some social crap on it. I occasionally tell Siri to set a reminder. That's... about it. I'm really not sure what else I'm supposed to be doing.

I’m on the same boat as you. I do most of my productive work on my computer. But I started teaching kids recently and realised that kids do EVERYTHING on their phone these days. Write essays, edit videos, play games, make musics etc. A lot of them can’t type well on their keyboards and it’s the main source of frustration for kids when learning coding.

I use mine to measure things, replaced my measuring tape. It is also my flashlight. I use it to find my wallet and keys as they have air tags in them. Its my wallet, credit cards, hotel room key, subway/metro pass. I have an app that implements OpenAIs CLIP on my phone and can instantly search my photos thats better any other image search out there and it runs on the device.

What app are you using for measurement and local image search?

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.)

I just use the apple measure tool. Not dealing with that level of precision, just to measure things in the house to see if furniture will fit or not.

For the image search, i use this https://github.com/mazzzystar/Queryable

You don’t use maps for looking around? For navigation while driving? You’re allowed to have in-car satnav or not drive.

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.

Wow, you're really offended. How dare I speak of my smartphone use.

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.

"Wow you're really offended. Of course I was lying"

As a member of GenZ I find it a fun challenge to answer to this - especially since my generation is supposed to have a significantly higher amount of applications (and smartphone usage in general!) as opposed to others [saw a study on this once albeit I cannot recall where, so no link].

>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.

> Most people don't buy the pro and they're desperate for selling points in the regular model.

"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...

That doesn't make sense. 99.9% of iPhone users are not photographers or filmmakers.

They might be aspirationally.

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.

Oh but they are. They just aren't doing it for money. My mother buys new iPhones almost exclusively for the camera.

Lots of people take photos and videos with their iPhone.

I think the iPhone Pro is for anyone who wants extra flexibility with the camera, photo or video. The normal iPhone is for people who couldn’t tell you the difference between macro and telephoto, or don’t care enough to pay extra for it on their phone. I’ve been using an iPhone mini since the 12 came out. I really miss the telephoto and will be getting a 16 Pro (as much as I hate the size) to get the telephoto lens back. I used it fairly often when I had it; I almost never use the wide angle, other than to experiment to see why it exists (I’m sure realtors love it). I would not even call myself a photographer, I just take some picture when I go on vacation, just to remember stuff. However, I like more flexibility than the normal iPhone gives me. I also despise digital zoom.

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.

> She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.

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").

The lack of distinction between LCD and OLED can be explained. The specific condition in which OLED thrives rarely occurs. You'd need deep blacks in low ambient light viewing conditions for it to really stand out.

iOS, most apps, most websites, even most video isn't mastered as such and not consumed in those conditions.

I wonder if watching TV/movies on phones in bed at night is a normal use case. I thought it was a normal thing that many/most people do, but this comment suggests that perhaps my social circle is odd in that way.

TV shows and movies aren't mastered like that either.

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.

> 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.

"I consider OLED to be relatively meh for HDR. Not really bright enough for me"

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.

> 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.

> I wonder if watching TV/movies on phones in bed at night is a normal use case.

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.

Don't you also need OLED for an Always-On display? Coming from Pixels to an old iPhone 11 that's one of the things I really miss.

> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.

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...

My biggest complaint is that the lenses aren’t flush with the back. I hate having cases on my phone, and their design makes wireless charging somewhat useless because it’s not flush with the charging mat.

They would if they could. Optical physics is one factor that prevents the lenses from being flush with the back. If you want to support advanced optical features the lenses need depth.

Makes sense. Instead of having a flat back, it might be kind of neat to have it slope like a “wedge” shape.

It would actually make the phone more comfortable in the hands too because they could improve the weight balance.

Always wondered why they don't do this. Just a subtle sloping of the edge around the lense, so the phone is flush with the table it is lying on.

it's ugly and 99% of people dont care

The original Google Pixel (2016) was exactly this shape. No camera bump with a wedge profile.

Sure -- but they could make the phone thicker so that the bump is flush, and fill the rest with batteries.

Thats the thing, I don’t care about the optical features they rolled out. I have an interchangeable lens camera that is the tool for that job, 10 years old and still works great.

But they could at least make the bump symmetrical so the phone doesn't wobble when used on a table.

I’d be happy if they sold little furniture feet already the correct height

So put a periscope in there. Or synthesise the image from 48 tiny cameras in a grid.

I vote for a fatter phone with extra space used for battery

The really should do that with the “plus”.

> All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.

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.

> does using an iPhone today feel significantly faster than one from 2-3 years ago?

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.

As an iPhone 12 mini daily-driver who also owns a 15 Pro Max (which I use exclusively to shoot video), I have to disagree.

> an iPhone 12 mini daily-driver who also owns a 15 Pro Max (which I use exclusively to shoot video), I have to disagree

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.

In fairness I'm not a heavy iPhone user. Hence still having a 12 mini. It's rare (~never) that I'm 'browsing the web' on it. If I'm in Safari it's for some functional reason and I'm in and out.

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 have come to the same conclusion, users like you just don't percive it.

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)

Ah, memories of RISC OS from school in the 90s. Instant boot, instead of the minute or so for Win95 and System 7.5.5…

Mostly that's because RAM has increased enough to let the OS do things while multiple apps stay resident. Phones from 5 years ago were still handheld supercomputers, just hobbled by limited memory and code bloat.

Is opening an app on an iPhone 13 actually noticeably slow? What you're saying is true if you go back to a distant enough horizon, of course, but... 2-3 years? I don't really see it.

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.

Completely wrong. As an iPhone 12 User there is 0 perceived difference to iPhone 15 in day to day usage performance.

> Completely wrong. As an iPhone 12 User there is 0 perceived difference to iPhone 15 in day to day usage performance

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...

Speed is both an objective metric and a user perception, which is a very subjective thing.

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.

I would love to take a few people who claim to notice the speed differences and have them do the Pepsi Challenge to prove it. Get iPhones from the past 8 years, put them in big cases that only show the display and hide which vintage they are, and ask people to see if they can guess which phone is which, or rank them in order by year. I bet most people, including the self-professed experts, can't.

The 120 Hz displays are very noticeable when side-by-side. For example, my iPhone switches to 60 Hz on low power mode and it suddenly feels like it's a fast slideshow instead of "smooth".

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.

But the relevant part here is user delay /overall latency, not some intermediate measure like download speed, which is missing from the link

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

As an iPhone 12 user, I'm getting sick of the limited memory in this device. It's difficult to leave an app for more than a few seconds without the memory manager purging it.

Sorry but you just contradicted yourself.

> you just contradicted yourself

Where?

I assume their logic is that if we have forgotten what that feels like then it doesn't in practice feel any different.

>Tell me, does using an iPhone today feel significantly faster than the top model 2-3 years ago or even 10 years ago?

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.

I've noticed overall improvements in responsiveness as well as the number of apps that can stay in memory without some getting evicted, though the latter is most noticeable when using smaller indie sorts of apps (think Ivory for Mastodon, Narwhal for Reddit, etc) which are on average built more efficiently and aren't dragging around a metric ton of tracking garbage.

This is what I notice as the only frustration with my 12 mini.

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.

Eh, iPhones are pretty fast. I think a lot of older model just need a battery replacement. I was using an iPhone 6S until last year and it was certainly slower than the latest models, but not dramatically so. The bigger difference was the camera quality which has improved dramatically in 7 years.

I agree that this effect exists but it's not as strong as it was in early generation models.

> 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.

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!

Indeed. A typical major iOS version has hundreds of new features.

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.

Have you tried the Tips app?

The fact that a helpful comment had to inform me of this apps existence really says it all. Just ship the damn documentation on the device.

When you sell phones to most of the population, it’s not only about the need of average users, but about the needs of everyone.

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.

The problem with smartphones is that we are all, with few exceptions "normies". I dropped the ball on smartphones, my last one is a $300 Samsung that is actually quite decent for all I use it for.

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.

I've been in tech for 35+ years. I've built CPU architectures, I can write device drivers, I can layout an 8 layer PCB, I can design an RF power amplifier.

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.

I think there's massive divide between people who just want a basic device vs (particularly kids) for whom iPhone is primary device.

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...

You and I both want the phonepliance, I work in tech on highly complex distributed systems, and I use an iPhone because its an appliance, it works, I dont need or want to hack my phone, I just want a phone that works.

I just bought my first iPad, going on a work trip next week, gonna give it a whirl, and try that out.

Not only when the battery runs bad. That can be renewed (sometimes, my 1st gen SE from the last batch runs the second battery pack, probably the last batch of batteries available).

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.

5G is rapidly becoming this.

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.

> Planned obsolescence or what?

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.

> Making everyone switch every 8-9 years is reasonable.

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!!

Customers have spoken and said the speed isn't satisfactory yet. And very few of them have complaints about this advancement rate. You have been outvoted.

4G and 5G can share to a good extent but it's not worth making every tower do both.

> we do not need ever increasing bandwith after a satisfactory level reached

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.

Doesn’t 5G piggyback on 4G though?

At the beginning, marketers tried to trick customers into thinking that high bandwidth LTE is 5G

: (

You only feel conflicted about this because (I assume) you lived through the phase where smart phones were changing every year and the updates from one phone to the next were regularly pretty ground breaking. People who lived through that era were conditioned to feel that every generation was a massive leap forward and that you were missing out on cool things if you didn't upgrade every year.

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.

Adding features to smartphones for the last few generations is akin to more buttons in the MS Office ribbon/menu. Or any other commoditized product that adds gimmick features.

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.

I am professional android developer for more than 10 years. And even i dont care about the features anymore. Outside my work i just want good battery life and big screen. I have iphone 12 and dont plan to upgrade until it stops working. Probably professional exhaustion. But i honestly care about the newest buzz.

My daily is an iPhone 12 Pro and I work on bleeding edge tech daily. I don't need to upgrade. It works fine. Had to replace it when it had a battery problem. There are no features I need from the newer models.

Man I work in IT as a developer and I have absolutely no clue what most of my devices (can) do, and truth to be told I couldn't care less, because if I need something I find out how to do it.

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.

> Most people don't buy the pro

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%

You are already spending $800 for the 16; the 16 Pro is $200 more and you get better camera, better battery life, and slightly bigger screen. It is a tempting proposition if you want the new tech. If you don't care about latest/greatest get the SE at 1/2 the price.

This is apples strategy across the whole of their product portfolio. Make a cheaper crippled base device, and a model with higher specs just within reach of that price so that most people will upgrade because 'why not?'.

If they just made the base model have half decent specs, a lot less people would upgrade to the higher end models.

I don’t know if you’re old or not or what your eyesight is like but even the pro max is getting hard to read for me :-)

> It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models "boring".

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.

A more optimistic reading of that sentence is that OP respects the accomplishments the engineers were able to make, but they aren’t impressed. I tend to agree with your sentiment, but reading the whole original post in context does not give me the same take away that you got :)

Same here… I understand the advances and even like reading about them, but in the end I don’t care about having them- the phones are mature tech that still do the same thing.

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.

I'm waiting for 10X optical. There are times where I borrow my wifes s21 Ultra to get a shot i just can't on iphone. Everything else isn't really needed. I haven't even upgraded to iOS17 on my 13. I also have a 14 Pro Max as my gamer but hate the island so i'm sticking to my 13 Pro as daily driver at least 1-2 more years.

>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.

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.

I came to a similar realization when I had to go back to a non retina macbook a couple years ago (after using retina). Other than the larger display scaling you really can’t tell or see the pixels at the distance you would comfortably use a laptop. Same thing with my TV. Its 1080p and I can’t see the pixels. I’d have to spend hundreds upgrading my tv and xbox to 4k and for what? It wouldn’t look any better 10 feet away on the couch.

They have overloaded the buttons and swipe actions so much that it is impossible for most people to remember (or discover) a bunch of features. Zero points on usability and user-centered design.

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'm probably as techie as they get, but I'm 100% with your girlfriend. I don't care. The smartphone industry has not delivered anything truly novel in a decade or more, it's been endless fussing about notch vs no notch, which slightly-different form factor is back in fashion, etc. And on a lot of fronts has made things worse - bloated many-GB apps, ads, spyware, attention sucking practices of all kinds, poorly policed and overloaded app stores, etc.

Apple is engaging in feature-bloat to protect the $1000 price point. That's all that's going on here.

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.

Ridiculous, iPhones are getting cheaper all the time. Yesterday a base model iPhone 15 was $799, today it's $699. In 2022 a base model iPhone 14 was also $799, today that same phone is $599. Sure today the iPhone 15 is no longer the top of the line model, but that phone is absolutely cheaper today than it was yesterday, and if it was good enough at that price yesterday, there's no reason it's not good enough at a cheaper price today. Either the new features are compelling additions that make it worth spending more money on or they're added "simply to make it more expensive", in which case the 15 is right there, 12.5% cheaper today than it was 24 hours 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?

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.

> Today it's $1099, hardly a change from the "too cheap" $999 of its heyday.

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.

You would really do yourself a favor if you weren't so combative, aggressive and overly pedantic.

> 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.

> Last year's model.

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?

I haven't had a Mac with touch bar but I can see the point of the idea:

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 ignores the issue that physical keys have tacticle feedback that touch screens do not.

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 agree that the top row on a macbook keyboard shouldn't be replaced because some of the keys are essential there.

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.

So basically a stream deck. Those things are pretty tempting, I must admit. When similar functions are shrunk down and integrated into regular keyboards, my wallet will be in trouble.

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 never had a Touch Bar

I’m typing this on the last mini.

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 might have better luck with battery life if you switch voice and data to "5G auto" instead of "5G on" in cellular options which chooses to only use 5g only when needed for performance to optimize battery life.

I did. 4G only and 5G only are both worse than 5G auto, but they’re all basically unusable without automatically enabling airplane mode.

I don't really see these upgrades as being for iPhone 15 users. If you smash your phone or whatever, you get this years model and it's mostly like last year's model except it's not samashed.

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.)

> She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED

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?

I think people absolutely notice new screens and scrolling, but the thing is with their current setup they have accepted the conditions. It's one of those things when you've tried the new thing, you don't want to go back to the old thing because scrolling will seem laggy, and screen will seem bad. So it's not necessarily that you need it, but once you have it, you can't go back.

I think people don't actively notice most of these things. But they sure as hell notice when you take them away after. A good example of this is ProMotion. People don't notice high refresh rate when they first get a Pro. but they do notice when you use it for a few weeks and then go back to 60hz. Same for a lot of other things.

> She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.

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.

I'm probably a lot like your girlfriend, and I've been in tech for 40+ years. I'm still very active in tech, but I got over being interested in smartphones after my 3rd one, and I was a very early adopter. My needs were satisfied a long time ago. If I have internet access, and can remote into any of my other dozens of machines, the phone has satisfied most of its purpose for me - allowing me to access all of my computing stuff while away from my main computers. Oh, I also take the occasional call on the phone, but that's very, very rare.

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 can understand and relate to this perfectly. In the past, I used an iPhone 11 or 12. At some point, I got fed up of the issues around FaceID with face mask and/or glasses. I switched to an older iPhone SE with a fingerprint button.

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.

Apple is a trillion dollar battery company.

The joke I want to make is they make phones that are as fragile as glass and that's why people replace them so often... but they actually make phones out of glass that are stupidly fragile. It's equally stupid that you have to buy this thing and put a protective case on it that increases it's size x%.

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.

I have been using the iPhone without a case since the iPhone 6. I think the fragility of iPhone displays is incredibly overblown. The idea that Apple is purposefully making the displays "weak" is unfounded.

People buy cases because they feel their $1,000 slab of metal must be protected.

Hit concrete in the right corner on an iPhone and it will break.

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.)

I shared your mentality.

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.

Also because the camera bulge means the phone can't lay flat on a flat surface without a case.

Original iPhone SE was peak smartphone.

Same camera hardware as the flagship 6s, but more comfortable to use one-handed and the camera lens was flush with the back.

They're not making phones. They make vending machines that go in your pocket.

The iPhone is not fragile. It's astonishing how sturdy it is. Even without a case you can drop it on concrete and most of the time you get nothing more than a scuff. With a case a phone can take an absurd amount of abuse. Many people don't even bother with a case anymore. I suspect people would be a lot more careful with their iPhone if they shared your opinion.

I use a slim Spigen case, because I find the naked iPhone is too slippery to handle safely. And I don’t have to worry about laying the phone down on its face.

It's because the alternative is plastic. Hard to sell a phone for 1000 dollars when its made out of plastic.

Ceramic back? Titanium? Diamond? Anything but a glass back please. Why not even the option? A bezel around the rim?

You just reminded me my favorite fit and finish was the Essential PH1, titanium edge, ceramic back, felt twice as luxurious as anything I'd held previously

Diamond and ceramic are however more prone to shattering. Sapphire like they use for the camera lenses and watch face might be ideal.

MagSafe

3.36 Trillion as of today.

> Apple makes an excellent product

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.

> 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.

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.

Fully agree. Same for putting a speaker on the Apple watch.

"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.

the apple watch has had a speaker for 10 years and it hasn't been an issue

I think that ship sailed a while ago.

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.

> 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.

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.

This is a massive pet peeve of mine. When the f** did it become socially acceptable to wear earbuds when interacting with someone? At least with wired buds or headphones its obvious that you're being an anti-social prick when talking to me, but now you have these hidden things that seem to be in everyones ears always.

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.

> You can add a million features to the camera app

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.

Im there with you, my wife as well as myself are in fact like your girlfriend and I work an highly educated software engineering role. I simply don’t care, still on my iPhone 11 Pro Max which I got as a present from my parents at the time.

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.

> sooner or later they realize the real control point is software updates

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..

I’m with you. My wife is a bit like this but she actually cares for the new features just doesn’t bother to actively look for them. When they showed of all the ways the camera button works I thought: “No normal user will use this to change settings / zoom”. The main usage I see will be: open the camera app. And maybe, maybe take a photo.

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 :)

Its like wine. I can tell the difference between a $4 bottle of wine and a $14 bottle of wine, but I couldn't tell the difference between a $14 bottle of wine and a $140 bottle of wine if my life depended on it.

I also like wine, but it’s rare that I’ve had a $140 bottle of wine that wasn’t actually a $30 bottle, but I was at a restaurant. It is real easy to be underwhelmed by a $30 bottle.

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)

And the pour. A cheap $20 aerator gadget will make cheap wine taste better, but you still can't help but know that you're drinking cheap wine.

> even works in IT, although not in an engineering role.

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.

I feel the same way, both in the sense of not feeling most features really add value to users, but also in feeling a little ungrateful and guilty for not caring about this kind of innovation.

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.

At the beginning of the year, I upgraded to a Galaxy S24 from an LG V35, a phone that came out in 2018.

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'm not conflicted at all. All these normies pay top dollar for things they don't need or really want. But the advances are real. And now we have dual stacked oled with insane brightness. We have a supremely high end CPU gpu combo in the m3 Max CPU. Something I do care about.

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.

I have flashbacks from the time first LED screens appeared. They had lower resolution and overall quality (at least for gaming) than the CRT monitors I was using. I knew it will take time before they get on a par with CRT monitors (and overtake them since that market was basically abandoned) but wondered who will pay for all this R&D? Well, everybody did. Everybody were buying crap monitors for decades and at some point these became quite decent - at least models like Apple displays for example.

Agree with what you wrote. That said quality of life things such as pro motion and increase battery life are noticeable.

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.

So don't enable it.

ChatGPT is optional.

Until it isn’t.

Try using CarPlay without enabling Siri.

Siri doesn't use ChatGPT

The parent comment is saying once an optional feature gains enough traction, Apple will make it mandatory.

Apple very reasonably has decided using your phone while driving requires voice support. It's not about "traction."

People have used buttons in their cars for years. I’d be curious to know whether Siri is actually safer.

People have not been responding to text messages or browsing their entire music library in their cars for years. Siri also doesn't have to be safer than buttons, it just has to be safer than touching your phone for it to make sense as a UX requirement.

I don't believe people have used buttons in their cars specifically to control their phones, though.

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 was reliable it would absolutely be safer, it's like telling your passenger to change the AC, except they don't have to move and bother you.

If the voice control is bad and you are never sure if it heard it correctly then it wouldn't be safer.

My car's mic is dogshit, so this has not been a problem at all for me for a decade. What's so critical about car Siri?

It's not just in the car. I don't want Siri enabled at all. Why should I have to enable a constant snooping device just because I wan't to connect the apps on my phone to the display in my car?

I wasn't sure, thanks

If the only reason people buy new iPhones is that the batteries in their old iPhones go bad, why does Apple bother constantly iterating and improving them?

Competition. Once the battery has gone bad and the user has decided that they are going to get a new phone to replace it, they are going to evaluate Apple's offering against all other phones they can buy. If Apple's device doesn't look as compelling as Samsung's (or whatever), the person is apt to buy something else.

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".

If there is meaningful competition in the smartphone market, and what you say about consumer preferences is true, then surely at least one competitor would make a user-replaceable battery and capture what is supposedly the vast majority of the market.

If what I say is true, the people are still apt to buy a new phone instead of a new battery. As before, once you've overcome the friction of having to buy something new, you're going to evaluate all the options.

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.

I’m pretty sure there would be plenty of players willing to make the investment necessary to capture the majority of the iPhone market even for only a couple of years.

Apple sells around 200 million model year units at a profit of around $400 per device. That's $80 billion in potential profit, less R&D costs.

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.

I think this was really well written and insightful, but I disagree about the extent to which your girlfriend is representative (and not based on her education or anything). Most normies do notice dramatic improvements in battery life, camera quality, and screen quality. My tech-illiterate family may not know what OLED is or how it works, but they definitely prefer the OLED TV to the LCD. Similarly, they can tell a stark difference between a 5X telephoto and a 5X “digital zoom” photo or a macro photo versus an attempt to take a close-up photo without the macro lens. Similarly they will notice the improvements in low light conditions over models that are 6+ generations older. Further, the AI features (enabled by new hardware), for better or worse, will probably be a dramatic change in how people engage with their phones. I’m writing this from an iPhone 11 and I’m sure I’ll notice some stark differences if I upgraded to the 16, and I even notice big differences when I use others’ newer phones as well.

I sincerely admire your girlfriend’s penchant for simplicity, I just don’t think that represents most people IMHO.

> ”Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.”

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.

For memory I've found that I'm much happier setting up a backup to my machines. Currently I'm on a pixel but looking to switch to iPhone. I do my backups with termux, so does anyone know a good alternative on iPhone? I see termus but it requires an account? Can I access my photos from these emulators? Just being able to have a few bash scripts really empowers these devices.

> 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.

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.

This effect has been compounding too. I used to upgrade almost every cycle but have been on 11 Pro now and haven't been motivated to upgrade until this 16. It takes the combined changes of about 4 cycles to match the level of interest in upgrading single cycles did in the first 10 years.

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.

You are lucky, or have excellent battery discipline. I just had to trade my 11 for a 15, the battery life was terrible (enough to force me, knowing the 16 was imminent). Also backgrounded apps would reload almost every time I swapped, maybe I am just using memory-hungry apps though.

Your complaint is that the iPhone is too good?

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.

I would agree on say 14->15 but I find it somewhat ironic that this version contains what could be one of the biggest changes in many years; Apple Intelligence is putting local-first LLMs into the OS.

I predict that in retrospect this will be considered a watershed moment in computing.

Yes, this is the right take on future phone/assistants. We will be entering a new world of search and much better Q&A. I’m hooked in Claude on my phone and having some local mini AI help could be a game changer

> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.

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.

Sorry, jumping in here. I don’t think it’s so much iOS gloat as much as app gloat. Take a look at their sizes, it’s absolutely bonkers and unjustified.

App bloat really is out of control, to the point that I wonder if maybe Apple shouldn't somehow incentivize developers to minimize bundle size and resource consumption. Maybe well-crafted, efficient apps get an "eco friendly" badge and their own section of the App Store or something.

People like new and shiny things even if they don’t use any of the shiny features. There is a contingent buying new cars every decade- those people are buying iPhones every other year. Apple may not sell the most phones but they do make the most money selling phones.

AFAIK the 15 Pro Max is their best selling model, so “most people don’t buy the pro” seems wrong.

Sounds like she would love the new camera control.

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.

> All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.

This is not my experience. All my life I used slow phones and browsing the web on them is excruciating.

I seriously wish I could just use my iPhone 3GS still. I mean, maybe with a slightly newer iOS than it supported, but otherwise, for me that was the perfect form factor, and it was such a "focused" product back then.

Absolutely agree.

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.

>> The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago.

Sure, and a couple of iOS updates into a good phone, and the phone is suddenly slow, crawling, and no longer meeting normie needs.

I experience none of that.

I agree largely. I have a p30 pro, and it's a great phone despite being 4 or 5 years old . It's so good, recently it got water damaged and I as faced with replacing it. I couldnt find a phone for under 500 that could beat it, and especially the 2 day battery life. So I didn't, I instead paintakingly dried it out over 3 weeks and it's pretty much fully functional. That's how much I didn't want to change phone, and how the new sparkly features don't really matter as much as battery life, and utility.

I think She will notice one thing, and that is battery life. The new OLED, new SoC, new Modem, along with slightly better battery all means that you should be getting 20-30% more battery life when all things being equal.

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 )

> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.

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.

I’m still on the X after a $90 battery swap by an Apple shop. I got tired of the small payback doing them myself - and even the iFixit batteries don’t last as long as OEM.

> Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.

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.

Statistics indeed show that 3-4 years is the typical time people switch their phones at, but I don’t think your reasoning is sound. You can cheaply replace the battery at any number of repair shops.

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’m a software developer and I barely care about the new features. I’m on a 13 and the only ‘recent’ change I’m interested in upgrading for is usb-c.

"Normie"? Anecdotally and fro personal experience, I'd say the contrary: it's normies that (pushed by advertising budgets bigger than actual product development budgets) are in love with these yearly churn and ditch their Samsung S74 to buy the new and identical Samsung S75.

Tech people, on the over hand, are some of the most borderline luddite people I know (me included!)

> It's not that she's unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn't care.

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 (?)

> 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 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.

> It's becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies.

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.

"that normie"? Are you 5 years old? You are not in some exclusive elite club, you are just as normal as anyone else.

What people notice are the folding phones. People look at mine when I unfold it in the subway and I'm convinced that a folding phone user using their unfolded phone in public is going to be a massive marketing phenomena and convert a lot of people. iPhones are not cool anymore, they're just small legacy phones.

I am going to have to disagree. You do not have to be a techie to appreciate beauty and enjoy an OLED screen even if you can't tell the technical difference.

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.

> You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter.

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.

They have to keep adding new features because what to do otherwise? I have long lost interest of the mobile world. Battery life and some rams to run some apps are all I need.

The general customers definitely want more. They are getting excited by AI in camera apps (existed before the AI hype) and other stuffs.

In the EU we are going to get user replaceable batteries:

https://repair.eu/news/new-eu-rules-smartphones-and-tablets-...

>The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I'll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.

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.

I’ve have photos on this phone (12 pro) dating back to 2012 through a series of iPhones.

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.

True , for the matter if jsut like a privacy feature , we can turn off certain features which are not required and it can significantly maintain the battery. Yes, we do have Iphone battery power save mode but I am just curious how efficiently it can optimise battery power saving

Owning current year's iPhone model is pretty much status symbol, that's basically all that is.

I started programming on a TRS80 handheld then quickly moved to a C64. All I ever wanted to do was be a programmer. And as a programmer I still do!

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.

I have an iPhone 11 Pro. One of the lenses is broken and it makes a weird snaring sound while recording video. Battery life is still okay at about 80% capacity. It does everything I need it to do without fail.

If it weren’t for those defects I’d keep it at least for another year.

There are just 5 major use-cases for this thing, and they don't change since 2008: calling, messaging, navigating, camera, note-taking. The rest of what you can do is mostly time-burning and satisfying addictions, which makes the most of the profit I guess.

Audio is a major use case.

Podcasts have grown in audience size dramatically, everyone has Spotify or whatever, and the iPod has long since been discontinued.

That's true, tbh I totally forgot about it since I completely stopped using my phone for audio when they started removing 3.5mm jacks. Adapters don't stick for long with me, and BT headphones I just don't find too convenient.

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"

Apple uses software updates to drive hardware sales.

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.

Faster performance per watt means fewer watts for the same performance.

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.

> She can't tell the difference between LCD and OLED

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.

I completely agree. I've worked in tech as a coder for 27 years and I find all the features of the iPhone annoying and inhibitive. When the settings app has 8 pages of scroll, something's gone sideways. I'm running an XS Max currently.

It's OK if we've surpassed the needs and observational abilities of normies and we are now purely pursuing arete for those who can appreciate it.

Eventually the level of arete usually passes some threshold that enables new normie-appealing use cases as well.

I surprised an 18 year old, intelligent and fairly tech savvy, when I showed him the share>find on page search function in Safari. Figured everyone knew that, or at least he and his demo would. No idea how wide spread it is, anecdotal etc.

I'm a senior front end React dev and I also don't care about most of the features on my phone. Notes, email, phone, text, maps and my bank. Other than that, I don't care much about other features on my phone.

There aren't major innovations in chairs or mugs that make you throw out your whole collection every few years. Smartphones are just becoming a commodity and there's nothing wrong with that.

The software mute was the last thing that made a difference in my day to day usage (but didn’t upgrade for it). The next thing I would love and upgrade instantly for is a sealed, waterproof design

Agree that at best the majority of the updates these days are nice to have, if that.

But I’ll buy every other new “Pro” phone if it takes noticeably better photos, regardless of everything else.

> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.

It's not entirely true: apart from hardware measures, they also use software to enforce phone upgrades.

I honestly feel that. I love programming like crazy, I use Linux, but I genuinely just don't care one iota what features my phone or TV has... I just want to browse reddit, read webnovels, call my friends and family, watch and listen to music/videos, and take a few pictures. Sometimes I play with Termux. All these other features are just not important.

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.

Perhaps with Apple intelligence your girlfriend will just be able to tell Siri what she wants the phone to do and it will get done using a feature she never knew she had

Yeah, okay, hardware releases are incremental now. We get it.

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.

I'm just thankful for the people that do upgrade to every new model, it keeps the used market alive for those of us that want a 2 year old phone for cheap.

The savvy users that integrate new features into their creativity are the young people. Under 25.

And of course creatives that do it as a hobby or a job.

Regular folks won’t be using this stuff

>If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.

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?

Yes. Because it’s a giant pita to drop your phone off and be without it for an indefinite period of time (if something goes wrong). For a device worth a couple hundred dollars it typically makes more sense to trade it in and simply upgrade.

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.

I don’t know where you live but I get the battery swapped while I’m standing there. It’s insane that you’d rather spend $800 than be without your phone for a few hours.

I live in the US. I've had friends without their phone for days due to a bad swap. I wasn't really talking about myself (I have a spare phone at all times I can simply switch to in an emergency) - but the average person doesn't have spares laying around.

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.

I have a 2015 Macbook pro and an iphone 11 that works great save for that they don't hold a charge.

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.

Apple will replace the battery on your iphone for $89 and your macbook for $249.

Source: https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-replacement and https://support.apple.com/mac/repair

Following the link on the Mac page, it looks like Apple will not repair a 2015 Macbook Pro:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772

> Obsolete: ... MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015), MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)...

>Mac laptops may be eligible for an extended battery-only repair period for up to 10 years from when the product was last distributed for sale, subject to parts availability.

Probably makes sense, if you're organized enough, to get a battery swap while it's still in coverage if you'll use. My 2015 MacBook had a battery that got swollen a few years ago. Got it replaced and continue to use it as basically a browser and it's perfectly usable.

I've replaced the battery on my 2015 MacBook Pro with one from iFixit [1]. They're a huge pain though, since they're glued to the inside of the case and requires using a solvent to get the battery out.

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...

The thinnest teflon turner worked fine for me, no solvent needed. 2 TiB nvme disk worked fine too with OLPC MacOS 14

https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-replacement

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.

If you’re in South Austin, the Apple Store in Barton Creek Mall will help you. For North Austin, it’s in The Domain.

Yeah they started gluing in the batteries to the macbooks around then. RIP.

Do I believe that? Absolutely. Never underestimate how lazy people are. I very commonly hear battery health as the reason for replacement. In fact, I'd say it's the most common reason heard. A 3 year old iPhone is still excellent, why else would you replace it?

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.

Because people want a new phone and a battery that's not 100% is as good an excuse as anything. The couple times I've had a battery replacement done, I've had Apple do it. Probably worth the premium. If the battery is really the only issue--even if it's just to use the device as a backup of some sort--it's stupid not to get it done.