The Apple adverts push the fact that the 15 is titanium. That's it. The ad I keep seeing doesn't even hint at why Titanium matters. No matter, the point is, evidently the technical aspects don't seem to matter.
Titanium matters for lightweight that is one of the important spec for some people. They aren't good at advertising this (or don't want to advertise much to make heavier again in the future?)
But they don't even say that. As if everyone knows that? And no technical improvements? But then again, the new USB C with out of date max data throughput is nothing to brag about.
> I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow. Too bad no flagship phones have…
If we're looking at older phones with removable storage, it usually limited what could be put on the SD card. And in the end the OS and system libraries were still on the on-board storage which would wear out over the years. And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliabili…
should just use m.2 2230 nvme. should be user replacable, its okay if it needs to be disassembled and its a 30 minute job, but that would solve a whole lot.
If only 13 Mini battery wasn’t shit. I don’t need the 1000 mega pixel camera or M20 Apple cheap. Just give me a good battery and a non-crazy sized phone and I am good. And yeah take my money.
I have a 13 Mini. The battery is typically at 30-50% in the evening. Generally never have to worry about the charge during the day. Perhaps it's time to replace the battery if it's at 80% of health or below? If I travel and have to use GPS most of the day / take hundreds of photos, I carry a small 5000 mAh battery to charge up on the go. I think it's a reasonable accommodation for a phone that's perfectly fine day-to…
No no. I had 12 Mini and from day 1 it was a pain. And when I was switching I was told by many who had used both the minis that the battery life is essentially the same. Not much difference. And no I don’t want to consider s power bank as an option for my general usage.
Besides I was tired of buying “old” phone. While 14 battery life is good, nothing compared to the Android word though, it’s a brick. Unlike everybody told me I am still not used to it after 4-5 months. Still hate it when I look at it or hold in my hands or is in my pockets. The problem is that in Android there’s literally no phone smaller than 14 now.
So next is not going to be an iPhone for sure unless a smaller and lighter iPhone comes up.
This is a meta comment, but I think it's extraordinary that we're only 15ish years from the first smartphone release and we've already reached the "boring" incremental improvement phase for these tiny pocket supercomputers. Consider how long it took PCs to reach the same stage (with a fraction of the adoption). It was like 20 years from Kenbak-1 to the 90s PC era.
Waiting when button phones will become the trend again
Maybe I’m weird, but I’d sooner get rid of all my “real” computers and replace them with a typewriter (or… nothing) than ditch my smartphone. It does way too much useful stuff.
If we're looking at older phones with removable storage, it usually limited what could be put on the SD card. And in the end the OS and system libraries were still on the on-board storage which would wear out over the years. And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliabili…
With cloud backup... this isn't as defensible as it used to be. Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM. Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined wh…
That's honestly not a good user experience. Having to buy a new sd card routinely, and better hope you system can detect impending as card failures accurately.
Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that.
They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.
An improved camera can't be something applied in software, a faster chip can't be applied in software. So by your own standard every version is warranted.
"significant" is the key word here. I'd be hard pressed to think of a generational release of an existing phone line in the last 5 years that I would describe as a "significant" improvement. The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean not…
And yet compare this years phone to a phone 5 years old. There is a large different. It just so happens that the yearly increase isn't seen as "significant" to you.
In the iPhone 15 release they wrote "huge leap" 6 times. It felt like something to anchor the perception and to trick journalists to include it in a sentence. But when they say it so much, it kinda shines through that it's mostly just desperate words. "any man who must say I'm the king is no true king" vibes. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-debuts-iphone-1...
It's always the greatest iPhone ever! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPkso_6n0vs
The highest number in Apple version history ever! Wait for it …… after last highest 15, we have …
……… 15.0001. Yes!
> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this. Define better. I enjoyed computers more in the 80s. There was less bureaucracy. Cubase on the Atari ST never crashed. The modern C++ one does crash, often.
Better features, better functionality. Much like with old IDEs old DAWs did a lot less. If you truely prefer it why aren't you still running Cubase on an old Atari or emulator? Besides that there is the whole rose tinted glasses thing. My early experiences getting FreeBSD and Slackware running on my computers, and setting up X for example were something I'd never trade and taught me a lot about debugging systems, con…
both can be true. software has become objectively more abominable each passing year. spyware is being normalized, locking down and taking away control from users is being spoonfed to hipster users as "opinionated" and "curated". Have you taken a look at the chromium codebase lately? 1.5GB of compressed (lzma) "code". W T F. Just look 10-15 years ago and look at khtml, look at webkit a few years after the fork, then look at this shit? we still ordered crap from amazon back then. We still had forms to submit to HN or similar. Sure, we didnt have thin webgl wrappers, webusb, webmidi, web-wipe-my-ass updates to our japanese toilets. The amount of direct crap being put into almost everything is beyond measure
With cloud backup... this isn't as defensible as it used to be. Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM. Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined wh…
That's honestly not a good user experience. Having to buy a new sd card routinely, and better hope you system can detect impending as card failures accurately. Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that. They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.
Not to mention what it’ll do the waterproof rating.
It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones. So much of this product page is focused on new software functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware, but that could mostly be released to existing phones. Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very li…
Try out https://shop.fairphone.com/fairphone-5 for a repair/upgrade friendly alternative
It’s still a “fancy” or too niche a phone. It neither has the reach, nor the supply chain backbone. By the time it reaches critical operational/business mass phone landscape would have had changed. Just like it’ll happen with frame.work.