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iOS 15

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261–270 of 431 posts

Re: iOS 15

#261

Still supported on the 1st Gen iPhone SE, nice.

I’m switching to a Linux phone but recently upgraded from a Gen 1 SE to the newer models and I’ll be purchasing another SE as a backup phone instead once I make the leap because I personally think the no headphone port and larger screen (even on the Mini) is a very powerful phone but also worse to use in many ways. Long live Gen 1 SE.

Re: iOS 15

#262
I really like the bottom tab bar in Safari; however the screenshot is very unfortunate, it shows a website with the mobile hamburger menu icon at the very top. Looks like the need to reach the top part of the screen is still there. I wonder if this will be the reality, at least for a while.

Re: iOS 15

#263
post #210

I stayed away from the beta but hopped on as soon as this was released. Loving the bottom tab bars in safari, I don’t know what all the fuss was about. Interesting that this “add comment” button on hacker news has some weird default style with a bright blue background.

Initial Safari design was quite different from what shipped today (beta process worked!). The main differences were: all the buttons where crammed into the address field, dropping the toolbar (shipping design returned the toolbar), and the address bar was floating over content, detached from the bottom. This caused many sites to break.

Re: iOS 15

#264

Apple continues to support OS updates on the iPhone 6s, a device released almost 6 years ago. Nor is it reserved for their flagship models - the 2016 iPhone SE also gets the latest and greatest. Meanwhile, my flagship android phone from 2018, the Samsung Galaxy S9, is stuck on the last version of Android. At least it still gets security updates, some manufacturers don't even go that far.

At the same time, I do have to admit that things got very, very slow on the original SE. Maybe it’s the battery life throttling thing, but just felt at the end of its life, even though the software kept updating.

It’s very much worth replacing a battery on year 3 if you’re planning on keeping an iPhone to end of life. Harder to justify on year 5+, but still a real quality of life improvement.

Re: iOS 15

#265
post #37

Is apple’s photo search any less terrible now? Dunno if anyone else suffers this? Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Finding a years-old photo to upload is TERRIBLE. It's trivial to do in Google Photos, but then getting a handle on the photo when using the "photo selector" widget to upload it to Twitter or an existing email is horrible. I do this workflow dozens of times per week and the best I can come up with is: 1. text se…

Can you give an example of the type of search where Apple photos fails but Google photos succeeds? I only use Apple photos, but it supports my use case of date/location/"object detection" search, but wondering if I'm missing out on something much better.

"Driveway"

"Winter backyard"

"forest with cats"

"'s first birthday"

" and at cottage"

It's ridiculous how powerful and indispensable this intelligent search is. I have tens of thousands of photos, growing every day. Being able to text search their contents is the killer feature that makes it useful. Apple's photo library is not useful without this.

Re: iOS 15

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I started buying iPhones. The resale value of a device after 2 years of usage is over 50% of the original cost if it's in good condition OEM quality is all over the place for Android, crapware is standard. It's been 4 years of iPhone for me and the only complaint I have is how bad Apple Maps can be

Apple Maps has been great for me, though I've heard the data quality varies widely based on where you live For me it's just a cleaner, simpler, less ad-infested version of Google Maps

I was a big fan when I lived in London, but I recently moved away to a new town that I don't know very well and on Friday it sent me on a 1hr walk that should have taken 25 minutes. When I looked at the route it took me afterwards, it made absolutely no sense at all.

Re: iOS 15

#267
post #156

Apple continues to support OS updates on the iPhone 6s, a device released almost 6 years ago. Nor is it reserved for their flagship models - the 2016 iPhone SE also gets the latest and greatest. Meanwhile, my flagship android phone from 2018, the Samsung Galaxy S9, is stuck on the last version of Android. At least it still gets security updates, some manufacturers don't even go that far.

Meanwhile, after having every single major iPhone version since the original jesusphone, I'm switching from iOS to Android because I'd rather run out-of-date hardware and slightly more out-of-date software just to not have my phone spy on my local media contents for a remote master. Apple's days as a head-and-shoulders above clear winner are over.

Google already does the exact same scanning of images that Apple has now delayed, so, uh, not exactly gaining much there are you?

Re: iOS 15

#268
Has anyone noticed the “add comment” button on HN is now a blue-pill color/style with iOS 15?

EDIT: this appears to only happen on mobile iOS web and not desktop macOS

Re: iOS 15

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe worth noting that, internally, the first-gen iPhone SE is an iPhone 6s; same CPU, GPU, and RAM. It's missing some hardware features, like 2nd gen TouchID, 3D Touch, hardware image stabilization, and some other minor things, but from a performance/capability perspective it's the same phone.

The screen is identical, though, which is awesome— I was rocking an iPhone 5S and was able to buy for dirt cheap someone's cracked-screen SE and swap the screen over. I fully intend for my next device to be an iPhone 8 so that I can eventually pull the same thing with an upgrade to the SE 2.

For reference, there’s a video which tests compatibility of 8 and SE 2’s parts.

https://youtu.be/FTAQqih1DZs

Re: iOS 15

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why when these apps suffer a security vulnerability they've resulted in privilege escalation (inc. root) previously. I actually think it is a bad look for Apple not to dogfood their own public APIs. Microsoft used to do the same thing with Windows and Office, and it was a bad look then too. Credit to Google on this, since many of their apps are just normal apps. No special privileges or bypasses. Even their…

How Apple distributes their core apps (Safari, Mail, etc) is orthogonal to how they are implemented, secured, ring levels, sandboxing, etc. These are separate considerations. Apple's core philosophy is that upgrading the system is the fundamental way to get new things. With iOS 15 we've seen the first real fracture in this model (where they are promoting a "stay on iOS 14 for now" option), and maybe eventually they'l…

> How Apple distributes their core apps (Safari, Mail, etc) is orthogonal to how they are implemented, secured, ring levels, sandboxing, etc. These are separate considerations.

Strongly disagree. If Apple distributed their apps as normal apps, they'd have normal privileges and when exploits are found the scope would be limited to that app domain.

Instead, what we have seen is that Apple's apps act like system services, and when escapes occur it can cause a wide-ranging impact (inc. root).

iMessage just in the last two weeks had to be emergency patched (14.8) because of a root breakout used by an Israeli's company (NSO Group) surveillance software that they were selling to unsavory governments. If iMessage was a normal app distributed by the app store the scope would have been iMessage, instead of root.

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