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iPhone Air

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Re: iPhone Air

#781

Post by liamwire »

powersnail wrote: post #722

I sincerely hope that apple will consider making a phone with a worse camera that is flatter. As someone who rarely takes photos, and never photos of importance, the bump is just a dead weight to me. My dream phone has a body like iPhone 12 mini (which I currently use) without the protruding camera. As long as it runs all the common communication apps reliably, I'm happy. I'll pay $100 more than the standard body ver…

If you take Apple's presentation at face value, most of the iPhone Air hardware is within the plateau, with the rest of the body being almost entirely battery. So it's not immediately obvious that even if they did do away with the bump, that there'd be a useable phone left over once considering the necessary reduction in battery size.

Re: iPhone Air

#782

Post by guardian5x »

AndrewSwift wrote: post #780

It's wild to see the HN crowd, bleeding-edge technologists, regularly bring up "lying flat on a table" as a critical feature for a supercomputer inside a camera that fits in your pocket. Somebody (many somebodies?) is rolling over in his grave.

Maybe a supercomputer from a 1980s perspective.

Re: iPhone Air

#783

Post by baybal2 »

astrange wrote: post #149
aurareturn wrote: post #58

It has A19 Pro. A19 Pro has matmul acceleration in its GPU, the equivalent of Nvidia's Tensor cores. This would make future Macs extremely viable for local LLMs. Currently, Macs have high memory bandwidth and high VRAM capacity but low prompt processing speeds. Give it a large context and it'll take forever before the first token is generated. If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, the…

A19 supports MTE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186265 Which is a very powerful feature for anyone who likes security or finding bugs in their code. Or other people's code. Even if you didn't really want to find them.

[dead]

Re: iPhone Air

#784

Post by lvncelot »

Every time I read an apple press release, I immediately bounce off because of the purposeful omission of the definite article when referring to their products; like "iPhone Air features ..." instead of "The iPhone Air features ...".

It's irrational, but it's like an uncanny valley via text for me.

Good looking phone though.

Re: iPhone Air

#785

Post by csomar »

arcane23 wrote: post #593
jdprgm wrote: post #187

Can someone that is actually interested in this explain the appeal? Thin on its own I get but thin with a giant bump 100% defeats the whole point for me. Seems clear at this point there is little hope of them engineering their way into thin cameras.

Doubt most people want it as thin as possible. This is just the phone industry running out of ideas and trying to tell people what they actually need. There's not much left to "fix" on mobile phones, and no real important features to add. Lacking that, they need something to sell the phones with, so they're going for these strange "improvements". It needs to be something that has some wow factor so they can lead with…

There is a lot to fix on mobile phones:

- Batteries that charge fast. Batteries that can support 2-3 days of use. Lighter batteries.

- Thinner camera.

- Better screens outdoor.

- No overheating.

- Better software, or a lower bar: fix the bugs.

- Satellite connectivity.

just few things on the top of my head and things that will interest me and justify a new purchase.

Re: iPhone Air

#786

Post by rickdeckard »

baby wrote: post #225
aurareturn wrote: post #58

It has A19 Pro. A19 Pro has matmul acceleration in its GPU, the equivalent of Nvidia's Tensor cores. This would make future Macs extremely viable for local LLMs. Currently, Macs have high memory bandwidth and high VRAM capacity but low prompt processing speeds. Give it a large context and it'll take forever before the first token is generated. If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, the…

IMO it's underwhelming considering folding phones have been out for many years now and we still don't have a folding iPhone. What are the PMs doing at Apple.

> IMO it's underwhelming considering folding phones have been out for many years now and we still don't have a folding iPhone. What are the PMs doing at Apple.

They're buying another year of very-high margin phones I guess...

Re: iPhone Air

#787

Post by Nevermark »

AdventureMouse wrote: post #582
aurareturn wrote: post #58

It has A19 Pro. A19 Pro has matmul acceleration in its GPU, the equivalent of Nvidia's Tensor cores. This would make future Macs extremely viable for local LLMs. Currently, Macs have high memory bandwidth and high VRAM capacity but low prompt processing speeds. Give it a large context and it'll take forever before the first token is generated. If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, the…

> If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us. I don't think local LLMs will ever be a thing except for very specific use cases. Servers will always have way more compute power than edge nodes. As server power increases, people will expect more and more of the LLMs and edge node compute will stay irrelevant since their relative power w…

Boom! [0]

> Deepseek-r1 was loaded and ran locally on the Mac Studio

> M3 Ultra chip [...] 32-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and the 32-core Neural Engine. [...] 512GB of unified memory, [...] memory bandwidth of 819GB/s.

> Deepseek-r1 was loaded [...] 671-billion-parameter model requiring [...] a bit less than 450 gigabytes of [unified] RAM to function.

> the Mac Studio was able to churn through queries at approximately 17 to 18 tokens per second

> it was observed as requiring 160 to 180 Watts during use

Considering getting this model. Looking into the future, a Mac Studio M5 Ultra should be something special.

[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/03/18/heavily-upgraded-...

Re: iPhone Air

#788

Post by Mistletoe »

powersnail wrote: post #722

I sincerely hope that apple will consider making a phone with a worse camera that is flatter. As someone who rarely takes photos, and never photos of importance, the bump is just a dead weight to me. My dream phone has a body like iPhone 12 mini (which I currently use) without the protruding camera. As long as it runs all the common communication apps reliably, I'm happy. I'll pay $100 more than the standard body ver…

I agree with this so much. I recently upgraded to the 13 Mini and had to go back to the 12 Mini because I hated the big camera thing on the back. I actually like the 12 Mini camera more than the 13 Mini also. It felt like the 13 Mini couldn’t take close up photos worth a damn.

Re: iPhone Air

#789

Post by auggierose »

joshjob42 wrote: post #566
jdprgm wrote: post #187

Can someone that is actually interested in this explain the appeal? Thin on its own I get but thin with a giant bump 100% defeats the whole point for me. Seems clear at this point there is little hope of them engineering their way into thin cameras.

I'm going to preorder one because I want a light phone and a large screen. This will be the lightest iPhone in years while also having a bigger screen than most. I dropped from the Pro Max to the Pro last year because I was tired of how much it hurt when I dropped my phone on my face. I don't have much call for most of the camera system, and my battery life on my Pro is just fine. I have plenty of chargers typically,…

I never dropped a phone on my face. How does that even happen?

Re: iPhone Air

#790

Post by rickdeckard »

Funny how everyone agrees here after the event that it's suddenly GOOD that Apple didn't present a folding phone.

After more than a decade it's still an odd experience to observe how the market is self-adjusting to match Apple's portfolio...

Would be interesting to see if the iPhone Air isn't already a Polymer OLED panel, as a supply-chain ramp-up for a foldable design...

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