Describing current phones as slabs? No. Modern phone are in no way too thick
I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
41–50 of 74 posts
Re: I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
#42I will never stop yearning for iPhone Mini phone/screen sizes. But I've stopped asking for it because that would be pointless at this point.
I was a fan of the original 5/SE form factor.
I had a Mini 13, and traded it for a 17Pro. I thought I’d be missing the form factor -and I do, but not much. The 17 definitely feels “clunkier,” especially with its Casekoo, but I now find that comforting. I’ve dropped it, several times, and it hasn’t a scratch.
Re: I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
#43> typing is a joy on the increased size Huh. I hate typing on my phone (iPhone 16e). It actually never occurred to me that maybe I'd have a better time with a larger screen. Although I don't remember ever feeling the disdain I have for typing back when I had an iPhone 3GS which had a much smaller screen than the one I have now.
Did you get older over the last few years? That might make a difference.
I'd be especially interested if they didn't.
Re: I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
#44> And it’s weird, because with the old wedge-style MacBook Airs this feeling never went away for me, I loved those machines and every time I picked it up I kinda marveled
I would love one of those again
Re: I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
#45I will never stop yearning for iPhone Mini phone/screen sizes. But I've stopped asking for it because that would be pointless at this point.
The smaller screen sizes doesn't seem to be something that anyone really tests for anymore. If I have to lookup something on my phone it's pretty often that I just give up in anger. Websites will have a header, and maybe a footer or some sticky element and even on the iPhone SE2/3 the result is having maybe 25% of the screen for actual text/content. In the review the author write: > The iPhone Air is the perfect solu…
> The smaller screen sizes doesn't seem to be something that anyone really tests for anymore.
I do. I write iOS apps.
I just recently stopped using an original SE as my low-end test (because of the OS support). I now use a Mini 12 as my low-end test.
Re: I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
#46I moved from max to pro with the 14 -> 17. They’re about the same size ironically so can’t imagine how unwieldy the 17 max is
Re: I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
#47I will never stop yearning for iPhone Mini phone/screen sizes. But I've stopped asking for it because that would be pointless at this point.
The smaller screen sizes doesn't seem to be something that anyone really tests for anymore. If I have to lookup something on my phone it's pretty often that I just give up in anger. Websites will have a header, and maybe a footer or some sticky element and even on the iPhone SE2/3 the result is having maybe 25% of the screen for actual text/content. In the review the author write: > The iPhone Air is the perfect solu…
Maybe it's driven by battery size?
All phones need to do phone-stuff that uses power, and (for any given generation of tech) battery capacity scales with volume.
If all else is the same, then: A thinner phone has less internal volume for things like the battery than a thicker phone does. Perhaps if it had the XY dimensions of an SE at this thickness, it would have bad battery life. (We all remember phones with bad battery life, yeah? It was an awful time.)
But if it's also made wider/taller ("bigger"), then: There's more volume for a battery.
And, of course: This increases the frontal area.
But because people make fun of bezels, this means that the screen should also increase in size accordingly.
And so we have it: The iPhone Air. It's both big and skinny, it does all the usual phone stuff without giant garish bezels, and the battery life is pretty OK (instead of terrible).
Re: I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
#48> The ultrawide lens is not one I used a ton on previous iPhones, so outside of macro mode I don’t really miss it. I’m surprised though that I really miss the telephoto lens. There’s so many options where I want to see something that’s further away, like something when watching sports, or even a cool bird, and cropping in on the main sensor is such a far cry from a 5x telephoto lens. I think this is a situation where…
How "unfiltered" raw-ish data can you get on the iPhone in an app?
It's Bayer RAW: not yet demosaicked sensor information from a single exposure, without any of the extra steps you get shooting a format like HEIC/JPEG (or even ProRAW [0]), where lots of additional processing is done, including combining multiple frames to get extra dynamic range, detail, reduced noise, etc.
There's still some amount of denoising/sharpening/etc happening in the ISP, but essentially shooting Bayer RAW gets you the output of just the small first part of the pipeline, rather than the whole pipeline.
[0] Despite the confusingly similar names, Bayer RAW and Apple ProRAW are quite different - I wrote about it on this page because I frequently get emails from confused customers.
Re: I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mini didn't even sell that badly, it just sold incredibly poorly for an iPhone. For almost any other brand it would have been a massive success.
Exactly this. And the profit would be huge compared to any Mac. I suspect Apple dropped it just because they're making even more from selling oversized and over-specced phones.
Yeah, they probably lost almost zero customers by cutting the mini from the lineup. The people buying iPhones, in my experience, tend to just pick another iPhone. So they could simplify manufacturing, testing and so on and still sell the same number of phone, just more profitable ones.
Re: I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The smaller screen sizes doesn't seem to be something that anyone really tests for anymore. If I have to lookup something on my phone it's pretty often that I just give up in anger. Websites will have a header, and maybe a footer or some sticky element and even on the iPhone SE2/3 the result is having maybe 25% of the screen for actual text/content. In the review the author write: > The iPhone Air is the perfect solu…
> The smaller screen sizes doesn't seem to be something that anyone really tests for anymore. I do. I write iOS apps. I just recently stopped using an original SE as my low-end test (because of the OS support). I now use a Mini 12 as my low-end test.
Thank you! Even Apple seems to forget the SE, I frequently see UI elements in Apples own software overlap, so I think it's even rarere to see 3rd parties care.