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iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

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521–530 of 1001 posts

Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

#521
post #457
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

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

Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

#523
post #48

I remember people lining up outside apple stores on the pre-order day. What has happened now? Have we seen the peak of smartphones until something new comes along and spur a new super-cycle?

Upgrades in mature markets are less exciting than in new markets. See: how exciting the 2024 Corolla is compared to the 2023.

I get excited when Toyota does a major model does a refresh. The Corolla is likely the #1 selling car model globally, so it has a major impact whenever they change something.

Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

#524
post #424

For fun, revisit the iPhone 6 announcement thread on HN[1], coincidentally posted 10 years ago today. I love going back to these to see how people responded. The more things change... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8292029

What an archive. I wonder if who is still posting from 10 years ago

Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

#525
post #492

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…

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)

Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 goin…

> 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.

Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

#527

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…

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 usel…

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.

Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

#528

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…

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 usel…

> 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.

Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

#529

Interesting to see how they're marketing increasingly minor improvements as major breakthroughs. 16 Pro: Better camera, more zoom, dedicated camera button… isn’t that it? WiFi 7, faster ray tracing, USB-C/USB 3? Hard to imagine many people really need that. Have we witnessed peak Apple? Apple Watch: minimal updates. AirPods Max: new color. AirPods: some minor tweaks.

And they still can’t figure out how to make the battery replaceable even though they claim to care so much for the environment.

Why would a user-replaceable battery be better for the environment? Do you think that consumers are able to recycle hard-to-recycle lithium components like that _correctly_? Apple already offers battery replacements (comparatively) cheaply.

Beyond that there's huge issues with it such as third party batteries tainting the overall quality of the phone, having an entirely removable back plate would kill their water/dust resistance rating, it looking bad (Yes this is important to Apple) etc, god-knows-what other issues arise changing the internal structure of their components that drastically.

Don't assume they can't figure out an engineering problem because you're upset that phones aren't the same as they were 20 years ago.

Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

#530
post #82

Smaller notch? Touch ID? Better battery life? Faster charging? Larger default storage? Nope, let's skip all that and spend most of the event talking about video recording. Is anyone here actually excited about the features they just announced? Or are people simply upgrading because they get the latest iPhone every year or two by default?

I'm on a 6 year old XS. When I upgrade, I get 5G and USB-C, and a chip that's now ahead of the OS.
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