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Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

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Re: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

#571
post #4

Very cool to see a new entry into the modem market. Obviously not available for anyone other than Apple, but I’m interested to see how it shapes up over time much like their SoC has done. This has been a long time coming since Apple bought Intels modem division several years ago. I’m also interested to see if it enables cellular in laptops. Afaik the limiting factor has been that Qualcomm charge a percentage of devic…

I think the long term plan is for the modem to be part of the SOC. That would probably lead to even better efficiency and cost/space savings. If that happens I fully expect the modem to end up in the M series as well.

Re: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

#572
post #513
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market for a cheaper iphone like this has always been just buying a 4 year old phone for like $0-small few hundred from your carrier. Makes no sense for apple to push a new product in this segment when their own supply eats it. And all they really offer in the se is a new old iphone anyhow making use of old components they have spare inventory available or on order from their vendors remaining supply lines.

You are missing the point. These types of "budget" phones that Apple does are for people who can't/won't buy the flagship (because too expensive) but wouldn't buy something second-hand either. There are a LOT of people like that. It is not rational at all; they would rather buy something shittier for their money than get more value. My grandparents are like that. To buy in the second-hand market you need to have some…

I'm not talking about second hand. I'm talking about new from the carrier old model phones. Here is the verizon page for iphone 14s they have, you can get them for 0 down 0 a month through some deal from the cell phone plan. Apple can't compete with free.

https://www.verizon.com/smartphones/apple-iphone-14/

Re: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

#573
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except making a decent modem is indeed harder than start of art CPU. People loves to shit on Qualcomm but dont appreciate that amount of work involved.

The hard part is not the modem design per se. The hard part is designing a good modem while also unambiguously working around all the Qualcomm patents in all the jurisdictions that have iPhone, which is all of them. Because if you don’t do that, you’re still paying Qualcomm which defeats an important purpose of making your own modem.

All those patents are standards-essential, which means Qualcomm (and anyone else involved in the standardization process for cellular networks) has to license them under "FRAND[0]" terms, which at least for this scenario means "for the same price we'd license them to Samsung or Intel[1]". It also means that design-arounds are not possible; if you design a different technology from the one Qualcomm owns, you're not speaking 5G anymore. That's why we have these legal rules on standards-essential patents.

[0] Fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory. Each one of those words has a funny legal definition separate from whatever English you're thinking of.

[1] Who, incidentally, sold Apple the modem division that made the C1, because Intel is nothing but a bottomless pit of bad management decisions

Re: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

#574

> iPhone 16e will be available in white and black in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB storage capacities, starting at $599 (U.S.) or $24.95 (U.S.) per month for 24 months. Wait a sec. 24 * 24.95 = $598.80 They'll pay you twenty cents to take the financing?

read the fine print

> The last month’s payment for each product will be the product’s purchase price, less all other payments at the monthly payment amount

Re: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

#575
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it will be a very hard sell to add extra work for the production lines for a smaller size The Toyota Corolla sells 1 million units a year worldwide - it's totally practical and realistic to set up a production line to make 1 million devices a year. Apple sells 200 million iphones a year. That's why they're happy to make the iPhone 16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, 16 Pro Max and 16e and offer them in 4-5 colours per mod…

Is there also an added effort around making iOS work on the smaller screen size/resolution as well though? If they can standardise those, they might end up with an easier OS to maintain once the Mini (sadly) is no longer supported

AFAIK it's 360px wide, the same as on larger phones. You can of course enable an accessibility option to take it down to 320px width, which was the iOS standard for almost a decade and only stopped being a standard iOS resolution when they killed off the iPod touch.

Re: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

#576
post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their private cloud for AI reads on the surface like the answer. If they can establish privacy then they can push the work to the edges. Again, I'm not saying the are. They're the only ones that could, though.

If you just read my comment and arrived at the conclusion that private compute is the solution, you misunderstand the issue at hand. Networking compute isn't an issue. Compute architecture is.

Sure so then ask yourself what advantages could an NPU have over a general purpose GPU. Your assumption is that Apple has erred. However if security was top priority, then that could make NPU make sense in the long run. And then ask why security is so important… it becomes vastly more important when your device is operating on other people’s workloads.

Re: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

#577
post #18

Let's see... it's replacing the SE, which is no longer on Apple's website. It's more expensive than the SE, at $599 vs $429. It's a pretty substantial hardware upgrade over the SE, including something like 75% more battery life by Apple's numbers, but it's also noticeably bigger. Apple's own comparison tool is useful: https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-16e,i...

The price hike is the major turn off point. Even as a non Apple person I was on the verge of getting the new "SE" if it's in the price range of the old SE line up. But not for 600 USD, that's a bit too much.

As someone who uses Android as the main device, I have an iPhone SE as a backup phone when travelling. It is a nice phone by itself, and allows me to access Apple services in case I need to.

When the time comes, I'll probably look for a used iPhone 14/15 instead of a new iPhone 16e. To much money for my purpose.

Re: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

#578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do signs point toward Apple adopting a unique, new cell chemistry for what will be their high-volume budget product for the next few years? It would have probably been a marketing line if so, similar to the C1 modem. A bigger battery doesn't imply new tech. (Yes, the phone expensive now, but these SE-tier phones typically get discounts pretty quickly after release through carriers/non-apple retail; and then a bigger…

The overlap of the “cares about battery chemistry” and “purchases the lowest tier device” is probably close to 0 The C1 modem gets a line because Wall Street has seen that expense for a decade now, so this is a “win” for them. Battery chemistry is completely 3rd party, so they’ll claim the battery life improvement

The C1 modem is also not a feature that users care about, other than the increased battery life (that Apple does advertise). In fact, there will be concerns that the modem isn't as good as the existing ones in some edge case.

Putting the new modem into the new "budget" phone reduces expectations so that the impact of any issues will be blunted. Only when all the problems have been ironed out, that will be when the mainstream iPhones will get the new modem.

Re: Apple Debuts iPhone 16e

#580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I’ve not used the cable for anything but charging for at least five years

Backup/restore is one common usecase. It's painfully slow with current speed. AFAIK only Pro model support USB3 speeds. Someone more knowledgable can maybe explain if there is any technical/cost reason behind it (I honestly don't see one ).

You used to be able to do syncing with iTunes via WiFi. Can you do that for backups? WiFi is bound to be faster than USB 2.
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