621–630 of 1001 posts
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'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…
This effect has been compounding too. I used to upgrade almost every cycle but have been on 11 Pro now and haven't been motivated to upgrade until this 16. It takes the combined changes of about 4 cycles to match the level of interest in upgrading single cycles did in the first 10 years. If I do get a 16 Pro the only thing I can even think of from an upgrade perspective that would make it last less than 5 years would…
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…
I agree that even when they aren't explicitly highlighted, they do make a substantial difference, especially when comparing models over a span of a few years.
The Pro variant is unusually poorly differentiated from the base model this cycle: https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/ The 13 Pro had ProMotion, 14 Pro had Dynamic Island and Always On display, the 15 Pro had USB-C and the Action Button, the 16 Pro...has maybe slightly faster AI? 4k120fps video? USB-C w/ USB 3? Not things most people would care about. ProMotion/Always On is still limited to the Pro models which is…
For me 60Hz on the base model is now a deal breaker. Even our daughter's 300 Euro A54 has a 120Hz screen (though not LTPO). Once you are used to 120Hz on a touch device, it's hard to go back (different on a relatively static computer screen, where I prefer having the high DPI of 5k 27"). So, it's iPhone Pro models until the base model gets >60Hz too.
The non-techy group of friends only commented on the colors, size of the phone, and how there's nothing interesting to convince them to upgrade from the 13/14/15 models.
The nerdy group really got hyped on the Apple Intelligence part, only qualm being that it's not going to be released on day one. They also had screenshots to share of previous chips like the A16 and A17 to compare. The video specs were all followed by positive emojis because almost everyone has kids, pets, or things they like recording. And at the end, some even lamented the fact that the default storage is only 128GB on the smaller Pro model.
As someone who's very interested in smartphones, I found it kinda interesting how Apple seems to be sharing more data points on performance and specs instead of "useful features" that most people would notice.
This is pretty insane to me. For a $1,000 device to limit itself like that seems crazy. iPads have up to 16 GB, so it's obviously useful. From games to the browser - and especially on-device AI and ML - they all could use way more RAM.
Apple's tech decisions are always an enigma.
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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.
Spotify already supports liking a song via Siri.
https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri-and-spotify/
Unfortunately adding to a playlist would require Spotify to add that capability. Siri doesn't learn how to navigate third party UI and infer potential actions, the context of what is currently going on and the actions which can be performed need to be codified by the developer.
Siri is a hybrid dictation and command-and-control system (at least today), which is why it sometimes decides the closest action to what you said is something obviously different from what you asked for. Unfortunately this is done via a dynamic vocabulary, so it leads to situations where something you were able to ask for before (like the local weather) suddenly changes behavior because you installed an app with "weather" in its metadata.
This also poses a unique problem for streaming and downloading media services, because the valid targets for the command aren't locally known - it's all the media on Spotify in this case. So "play enter sandman" won't know to infer whether you are asking to play an album in the cloud vs a game which hasn't been installed vs the "Sandman" series on Netflix - it may instead decide the best guess was you meant you wanted to "read" the books you have locally installed.
You know what really caught my attention with the 16 Pro Max? The 6.9-inch display, with a resolution of 1320x2868 pixels [1]! However, I’m a bit skeptical about this choice. A 6.9-inch screen size is quite rare in the smartphone world [2]. Samsung tried something similar back in 2020 with its S20 Ultra (and Note 20 Ultra), only to revert to 6.8 inches with the S21 Ultra the following year—and they haven’t looked bac…
I used to care about my photos a lot. After accumulating a few decades worth of photos I've gotten to the point where I don't care about my photos at all. I 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 ca…
Whether this is actually worth the many, many thousands we have spent on our smartphones to preserve rare moments that matter amongst many that really don't is another question. If smartphones never had cameras at all we'd almost certainly preference our own "lower resolution" memories over carrying a small, cheap, lightweight digital camera everywhere in case of something special.
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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 essen…