Can't be just me who feels underwhelmed by the announcements yesterday? I can't imagine why they prioritise making thinner iPhones at the expense of longer battery life.
iPhone Air
791–800 of 1001 posts
Re: iPhone Air
#792It'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.
What an absurd take. If we use FLOPS as a crude measure, the Air would be comparable to the leading supercomputers of ~1999/2000. There's many reasons why that's a very poor comparison but ignoring the absolute insanity of the raw compute available in a pocketable, thin, battery-powered handheld that you can buy literally this week, is ridiculous. Modern smartphones are nothing short of sci-fi when compared to even recent living memory. We're simply used to them due to their sheer ubiquity.
Re: iPhone Air
#793Why does no one make flat back in phones today? everyone just accepted ugly design...
Re: iPhone Air
#794It 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…
I wish they would offer the 17 pro in some lighter colors (like the new sage green for the regular 17). Not everyone wants bold, and the color selection for pro is always so limited. They don't even have white with this generation, just silver.
Re: iPhone Air
#795[deleted]
Re: iPhone Air
#796I have an iPhone 13 mini, just replaced the battery. If you want my money, give me an iPhone 17 mini with small width and height, I don't care about it being thinner like the Air. Also, no AI ruining the image quality of the expensive camera. I saw examples of a consumer-grade digital camera vs an iPhone 16 and the latter introduced "hotdog skin" effect and other effects that made the photos look over-processed.
Unfortunately both the 12 Mini and the 13 Mini did terrible numbers sales-wise. People say they want small phones but not enough of them actually buy them when they are available. :(
I think what happened here is that the target audience are people that do not feel pressure to upgrade to the latest mini every year. They do not look to have the lastest-shiniest-ohlookAI-snapdraxxon22pro phone. Just a phone that is a bit cheaper but gets the job done.
Why would you go from 12 mini to 13 mini, or to the concurrently released SEs if your phone still works?
I am also still holding on to my 13 mini. I would not have upgraded to the 14, 15 or 16mini even if they existed. I will upgrade at some point, and that point is when it either dies, or important apps stop working on the last iOS version supported by the hardware.
Re: iPhone Air
#797Around 2000-2005 there was a race for the smallest phone with ludicrously small displays. I believe Nokia was kind of leading and “winning” the race. Then blackberry and iPhone reversed trajectory and suddenly bigger was better, and Nokia died out. I think we are on the same path here, thinner is not what I want. I want a powerhouse that can run AI for at least 48 hours on the worst conditions, a week at least in an…
My memory is from around 1998-1999 when I did some research to buy my first phone. From memory, I think that at that point Ericsson was winning that race in the more affordable end of the market, with models that I remember being smaller than Nokia models from the same time, such as: * https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_pf_768-108.php * https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_t10s-115.php * https://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson…
The one I have more vivid memories of is Nokia 8210, pretty small
https://www.businessinsider.com/drug-dealers-are-buying-noki...
https://photogallery.indiatimes.com/gadgets/phones/most-icon...
Yes I forgot about Ericsson, same era.
Funny how these are now classified dumb phones, while they have some odd niche market yet :-)
Re: iPhone Air
#798Welcome back Droid X
Re: iPhone Air
#799The 16e is 167 grams, where the Air is 165 grams. It feels like the Air is to the 16e what the Pro is to the standard titled iPhone — the expensive version. Which makes the marketing feel a bit incongruent with what we've gotten here. It's not noticeably more lightweight than what is currently offered, it's less featureful than the 17, but more expensive than the 17 (albeit perhaps prettier). It seems like engineerin…
Footprint to weight ratio is an important factor.
S25 Edge weights 163g but it felt noticeably lighter in hand than other phones with similar weight.
Re: iPhone Air
#800If this thinnest iphone air has 27 hours of video playback, why does the regular iphone 17, which looks twice as thick only has 30 hours? At this point, I just want long battery life. Like an "all-week" battery life would be a nice start.