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iPhone Air

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Re: iPhone Air

#881

Post by hu3 »

askl wrote: post #804
creer wrote: post #167

"Impossibly thin" is right in line with Patrick McGee's "Apple in China" who argues that the main reason for Apple's designs is to keep imitators at bay by introducing manufacturing challenges that only they can meet. Indeed impossible at the time of release. One generation after the other. He estimates this gains them about 6 months of headway. Tough world. (Yes, to be fair, there is more to this new phone than just…

But on the other hand, apple seems to be the only company unable to get rid of that ugly huge notch. Everyone else improved on that years ago.

it's a feature! /s

Re: iPhone Air

#882

Post by hu3 »

bapak wrote: post #826
rob74 wrote: post #775

5.6 mm? Pah! The Moto Z beat them by .4 mm almost 10 years ago: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/05/the-moto-z-was-so-a... And, more importantly, the Moto Z had a reason for being so thin: the ability to add "mods" that attached to the back of the phone magnetically. What I don't like about iPhones in terms of practicality is that the corner camera makes it impossible to lay them on a table without wobbling. Goo…

> The Moto Z beat them The unfortunate part is that you can make anything better in a single parameter, but Apple has effectively no competitors. People who buy Apple will continue to buy Apple. For people to switch, the competition has to come out with something that is visibly and unbeatably better than what Apple has. I know many people in developing countries who'd rather have a 5 year old iPhone than a new andro…

Bs. I've seen people migrate between iphones/pixels/galaxies. Some write about it in HN even.

Re: iPhone Air

#883

Post by cj »

commandersaki wrote: post #506
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…

Hoping this budget macbook rumour based on A19/A19 Pro is real.

Isn’t the MacBook Air already pretty cheap at $999?

Re: iPhone Air

#884

Post by BozeWolf »

alkonaut wrote: post #837

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 have an XS and wanted to upgrade. But I still don't see a super appealing reason. Battery still decent at 72%. Photos still good enough. browsing fast, apps fast...

It is the best iPhone I owned (3, 6s).

But yeah, spotlight is slow and the phone constantly runs out of storage, so apps need to be deleted before installing updates and least used apps are constantly removed. Additionally the screens are way better now and you do see the difference with photos made on an iPhone 16. I guess I'll upgrade late this year when I am sure the 17 (pro?) is a reliable piece of hardware, like my iPhone XS is.

Re: iPhone Air

#885

Post by rekoil »

Topfi wrote: post #862
alkonaut wrote: post #837

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…

This is total speculation on my uninformed part, but to me, the Air seems like the result of their research into foldables. The way hardware is laid out in that upper area is very reminiscent of the Flip category from other manufacturers with their a-symmetric halfs and considering Apple is a very efficiency focused company these days, letting that effort linger till display tech catches up to whatever Apple is waiti…

> letting that effort linger till display tech catches up to whatever Apple is waiting for, would feel like a waste perhaps.

To add to this, it's often said that research can only take you so far, at some point you have to ship something to get the opinions and hands on from a wider audience of users to make further discoveries and improvements.

Re: iPhone Air

#886

Post by hu3 »

ge96 wrote: post #411

They really know how to get your consumer juices flowing Aside from Macs for development I've never been an iPhone person but I'm seeing this like ooh. But no I'm good with my $160 motorolla android phone, no shade against this phone, good enough for my needs. I do wish Android phones had lidar

Air lost lidar btw

Re: iPhone Air

#887

Post by hu3 »

mrcwinn wrote: post #483

I'm concerned about HN database storage capacity, so here's a simple way to think about this. If you're interested, consider buying it. If it's not for you, no need to argue a whole lot. Plenty of other topics worthy of discussion. XD

all the text in this thread is smaller than one of the large iphone announcement photos. Don't worry

Re: iPhone Air

#888

Post by hu3 »

martin1975 wrote: post #568

Am I the only one who has never owned an Apple iPhone? I just got my Pixel 7 upgraded to Pixel 10 Pro XL, couldn't be happier.

You and more than half the world.

Re: iPhone Air

#889

Post by PaulRobinson »

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…

Apple literally mentioned local LLMs in the event video where they announced this phone and others.

Apple's privacy stance is to do as much as possible on the user's device and as little as possible in cloud. They have iCloud for storage to make inter-device synch easy, but even that is painful for them. They hate cloud. This is the direction they've had for some years now. It always makes me smile that so many commentators just can't understand it and insist that they're "so far behind" on AI.

All the recent academic literature suggests that LLM capability is beginning to plateau, and we don't have ideas on what to do next (and no, we can't ask the LLMs).

As you get more capable SLMs or LLMs, and the hardware gets better and better (who _really_ wants to be long on nVIDIA or Intel right now? Hmm?), people are going to find that they're "good enough" for a range of tasks, and Apple's customer demographic are going to be happy that's all happening on the device in their hand and not on a server [waves hands] "somewhere", in the cloud.

Re: iPhone Air

#890

Post by aurareturn »

Uehreka wrote: post #547
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…

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.

Already available via Metal: https://x.com/liuliu/status/1932158994698932505
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