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…
I don't know that I completely agree. To some degree, sure — most folks probably don't notice the year-to-year updates in e.g. computing power. But my 70yo mother, who is pretty far from being technologically savvy, uses continuity every day to copy one-time-use codes from her phone to her computer, even though she'd have no idea what the term "continuity" means in this context. She notices that it's easier to snap b…
iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
601–610 of 1001 posts
Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
#602Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
#603I used to obsess over megapixel count, portrait mode, FPS, lighting, and so forth, because I used to think that these amazing images would be priceless in the future. Well, the future came and went, and to me they actually ended up being worthless.
At one time I cared about other people on the Internet seeing pictures of me and my friends and family doing things and being places. Now I don't want anyone on the Internet seeing pictures like that. I especially don't want bots to scrape the photos to build a dossier on my activities that data brokers can add to my profile that they then turn around and sell to whoever's buying.
So these days I don't ever bother even taking photos of anything any more. Instead what I do is try to be 100% "in the moment." I try to notice the small details, feel the emotions, immerse myself in the experience. I look for the things that make an impression. I find that a camera will always -- I mean, always -- detract from that.
I suppose that's my way of saying that there hasn't been a camera feature for a phone that I've cared about for many years now. For me the 2017 Pixel 2 was the point where phone camera technology got "good enough" for anything I ever wanted to use it for. Which, these days, is almost nothing.
Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
#604I'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…
I don't know that I completely agree. To some degree, sure — most folks probably don't notice the year-to-year updates in e.g. computing power. But my 70yo mother, who is pretty far from being technologically savvy, uses continuity every day to copy one-time-use codes from her phone to her computer, even though she'd have no idea what the term "continuity" means in this context. She notices that it's easier to snap b…
Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
#605Give me a new mini. I’m begging you.
Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
#606Smaller 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?
Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
#607I love how ridiculous the scene to showcase Apple's Intelligence ability to tell you what bread the dog was. Instead of simply asking a women what breed her dog was - he had to open a camera app on his iPhone, ask a women a permission to take a photo of the dog, wait until the AI gives him an answer...
Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
#608I'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…
It doesn't take the best pictures but it is not a blurry mess either, more than enough to complement my terrible skills as a photographer, and by that I mean the skill of pointing the camera in the right direction, not that of fiddling with the settings.
It doesn't run "heavy" apps, like 3D games, but I don't play these on my phone, the controls and small screen are not great. So I don't need that massive computing power. In fact, I only need these gigabytes of RAM because of how terribly bloated mobile apps have become. And the worst part is that I can't even use my phone as a general purpose computer. Despite being the more open of the two platforms, Android is so locked down that I can't have fun with the hardware and still use it as a daily driver.
A smartphone is like a game console, like the Nintendo Switch. The Switch is an underpowered device by today's standards, but who cares about the hardware, its only value is the games it plays, and Nintendo makes damn good games in that power budget, making it a damn good console. Same idea for smartphones, they are defined by the apps they run, and the apps I want to run run on low end smartphones, so why buy an expensive phone For real work, I use a PC, with a large screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and an OS with a usable filesystem, that PC, while decent, is actually cheaper than a flagship phone.
And yes, the camera, pretty much the only thing worth getting expensive phones for for most people, but still, there are limits to what these tiny sensors can do. And as I said before, we have already passed to point where for most people the real improvement can only come from the one taking the picture.
Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
#609Smaller 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 only upgrade every 4 or 5 years, and only because I need more storage after a few years of usage. This time I'll probably "upgrade" to last year's version.
Re: iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max
#610Earlier 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…
Bring it in where? I have to drive an hour one way for an Apple store. It’s easier to order a new device than be without my phone.