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.
iPhone Air
871–880 of 1001 posts
Re: iPhone Air
#872Can 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…
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
#873I'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.
Re: iPhone Air
#874It 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.
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
#875It 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…
Re: iPhone Air
#876Can 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 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
#877It'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.
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
#878I'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
Re: iPhone Air
#879Every 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.
Re: iPhone Air
#880I'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…