Live data from Hacker News

iPhone Air

apple.com

871–880 of 1001 posts

Re: iPhone Air

#871

It's not about the thickness — this is surely Apple just flexing some of the engineering work that has gone into building a future foldable phone (which inevitably requires thinner hardware to fit two screens in the thickness of one). So don't take this at face value, it's just a prelude to a foldable phone next year.

Probably right because it’s called iPhone Air and not iPhone 17 Air. Seems like this is a one off phone.

Re: iPhone Air

#872
post #470
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 agree with you, you're still going to put it in a fat case to protect the camera. Personally, I think thin is just "omg look at my engineering". blah blah. I found the (expensive!) bullstrap case to be helpful - thin and slippery enough to slide out of a pocket easily, well engineered to protect the camera. But really, I think the iphone 13 mini was the most useful/practical application of apple's engineering. I th…

> I agree with you, you're still going to put it in a fat case to protect the camera.

The Apple cases aren't flat on the back. They have a rim around the camera bump (and they create a rim around the front of the phone, too). The rear rim is slightly taller than the lens bezels (not sure if I used the right word there), so they don't touch the surface the phone rests on. I place my phone+case on the desk face-down because the camera bump and the wobble it creates when resting the phone back down triggers some minor irritation for me. The slight rim around the front of the phone keeps the screen from touching the surface. All of this would be nicer if the phone were flat across the back.

The metal case and toughened glass mean I don't really need the case most the time. I once dropped an older model onto a concrete floor such that it landed on a corner, shattering the screen, so I'm more risk averse with them now.

Re: iPhone Air

#873

I'm going to add +1 to the crowd that thinks that almost no one ever said "Nice, but I wish it was thinner". Who would that be really? Surely apple made their market research before spending the R&D money creating this product. So presumably there is a market segment for it. But who is it? The standard 17 and Pro seems very much the great product they always are. Incremental refinement. Don't like it? Get one 1-2 gen…

The issue with size I have with phones is that they are too high, so I cannot have it in my jeans front pocket and then sit down. Thinness has not been an issue in the last 10-15 years. A thin phone is also very hard to hold, it kind of flips in your hand.

Nobody cares about how hard it is to hold, otherwise we'd have 4-5" screens rather than the phablets that are the norm and basically the only option.

Re: iPhone Air

#874

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…

I will believe this when I see it. It’s totally possible that those capabilities are locked behind some private API or that there’s some weedsy hardware complication not mentioned that makes them non-viable for what we want to do with them.

They might recommend using CoreML to leverage them, though I imagine it will be available to Metal.

The whole point of CoreML is that your solution uses whatever hardware is available to you, including enlisting a heterogeneous set of units to conquer a large problem. Software written years ago would use the GPU matmul if deployed to a capable machine.

Re: iPhone Air

#875

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…

IMO the benefit of a local LLM on a smartphone isn't necessarily compute power/speed - it's reliability without a reliance on connectivity, it can offer privacy guarantees, and assuming the silicon cost is marginal, could mean you can offer permanent LLM capabilities without needing to offer some sort of cloud subscription.

Re: iPhone Air

#876
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.

The good thing about the bump is that it should make it easier to pick up the phone from a desk.

The size and weight of the phone does look tempting, but its battery life is a deal breaker for me. I'm pretty sure there's no way its built-in speakers could possibly match those in the Pro models, which is also very important to me.

Re: iPhone Air

#877

It's not about the thickness — this is surely Apple just flexing some of the engineering work that has gone into building a future foldable phone (which inevitably requires thinner hardware to fit two screens in the thickness of one). So don't take this at face value, it's just a prelude to a foldable phone next year.

Probably right because it’s called iPhone Air and not iPhone 17 Air. Seems like this is a one off phone.

They often discard with the version number for the first release of a product bifurcating, and from then on it follows its own version path.

The first Apple Watch Ultra wasn't the Apple Watch Series 8 Ultra. Subsequent Ultras follow their own versioning. The same with the SE, Air Pod Pros, iPad Air, and so on.

Re: iPhone Air

#878

I'm going to add +1 to the crowd that thinks that almost no one ever said "Nice, but I wish it was thinner". Who would that be really? Surely apple made their market research before spending the R&D money creating this product. So presumably there is a market segment for it. But who is it? The standard 17 and Pro seems very much the great product they always are. Incremental refinement. Don't like it? Get one 1-2 gen…

People who have no concept of material resistance who will come crying when their phone folds very easily with accidental day to day mishaps

I see people every day who have their iphone in their back pocket while sitting. I can’t imagine this model would handle that unless it’s made from pure unobtanium.

Re: iPhone Air

#879

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.

Yeah, I noticed this too when watching the keynote. It's interesting and must be deliberate, I wonder why they do this.

"Drop the _the_, it's cleaner."

https://youtu.be/k5fJmkv02is&t=177

Re: iPhone Air

#880

I'm going to add +1 to the crowd that thinks that almost no one ever said "Nice, but I wish it was thinner". Who would that be really? Surely apple made their market research before spending the R&D money creating this product. So presumably there is a market segment for it. But who is it? The standard 17 and Pro seems very much the great product they always are. Incremental refinement. Don't like it? Get one 1-2 gen…

I've ever owned an iPhone and probably never will, but I very much like smaller, lighter, thinner. For a device that stays with you all day, the less cumbersome the better, no?
Post reply on HN