Also: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. You can get to those by clicking More at the bottom of the page—or do it like this:
It seems...kinda dumb. Instead of plugging in a lightning cable, I can now stick a hockey puck to the back of my phone?
The “safe” in MagSafe came from its “yankability” without sending your device flying. But if my phone is laying on top of a hockey puck...it’s gonna go flying if I trip on the cable.
Why couldn’t we fill in the lightning port and use flush surface contacts, like the MagSafe of yesteryear?
I’m also not sure why my case needs to magnetize to my device, getting rid of the lip around the screen that made it less cringe to lay my phone face down.
Am I missing something? I really don’t understand this feature.
EDIT: did I see an AirPower reboot in there or am I dreaming?
MagSafe can be seen as the replacement for AirPower! It's solving the same problem in a much simpler way.
AirPower's big promise was that it was a multi-device charging mat that didn't require perfect alignment to get high power charging. Apple ultimately cancelled it, likely because this proved too difficult to do safely. (rumored to be thermal issues with the multi-coil design)
MagSafe solves the alignment problem in a simpler way. Instead of carefully aligning your phone, the magnets just "suck" your phone to the optimal charging position.
Xiaomi also solved the alignment issue in a charmingly inelegant way. Detailed in the video below, it uses motors to align the charging pad to the device.
How strong is the magnet? I can already see a benefit. Don't put you're phone "down" to charge it, put it up on the charger pad that's mounted to the wall. Can be placed out of the way where it's not in danger of being tripped over or spilled on, and frees tabletop space.
A lot of phones have almost enough metal to stick to a magnet. I bought this car mount a while ago and while it came with metal plates I found that my Nexus 6 would stick to it without anything. I later upgraded to a nexus 6P which weakly stuck, it would kinda hang off the bottom but never fell off.
I was thinking that it would be nice if we could just standardize something as simple as "stick an iron plate in the back of the phone" but I guess now I see that it would be nice if there was some sort of standard for a Qi charging location relative to whatever metal/magnets are there.
I used hard drive neodymium magnets for awhile, but recently discovered some incredibly strong magnetic strips with an adhesive backing. This gives me way more positioning freedom for my phone. These strips are neodymium and at least ~7 times stronger than every other magnetic strip. (which all use ceramics).
You can find the magnets I'm talking about on McMasterCarr [1] or just search for "NeoFlex magnets". Besides McMasterCarr, I can only find them from European sellers.
IMHO, anyone buying adhesive magnet strips would be happier buying these, but no one advertises any sort of standardized magnetic strength per area unit. This makes the differences very hard to determine for most consumers. The typical flexible ceramic magnets, like this one [3], support 70g/cm2 [4], while the NeoFlex ones I mentioned support 400g/cm2. ( 800lbs/sqft)
Also many people try to stick magnets to magnets, works works for typical magnets, but that doesn't work well at all for the multi-pole magnetic strips like these. It works just enough that people blame the magnets for being weak, when really they might be quite strong if you just used a thin steel plate instead.
Wires only pick up current when they’re moving through a magnetic field. Just sitting in one is fine. Although the internal compass isn’t going to work great.
Also people significantly overestimate the amount of current a normal (something you’re gonna encounter in day-to-day life) magnetic field can induce in a wire. There’s a good reason motors are packed with so many windings, you either need an incredibly large magnetic field, or a crap ton of wire, to get an interesting amount of current.
Current also picks up force as it moves in a magnetic field, but it's not like the electrons are going to fall off.
Magnetic fields can saturate ferrites and affect coils, but the slight deviations in few components should be nothing the closed loop circuitry won't handle. You'd need a stronger/closer magnet for that.
Solid state circuits usually have tiny sensitivity to static magnetic fields as opposed to EM waves, which they need to handle gracefully.
The reason for magnetic field strength falling off as 1/r^3 is interesting: the biot-savart law says that magnetic field falls off as 1/r^2 from a magnetic source, but in reality sources tend to be better approximated by magnetic dipoles than magnetic monopoles. A "north pole" is always accompanied by a "south pole", and at distance there are "interaction effects" such that a part of the field strength is "canceled out".
I've never noticed an issue. And I have used Waze at least three or four times over the years, both with my old Note 3 and now with a Samsung A50, with no issues.
Aira's FreePower technology seems to be what Apple was trying to achieve with Airpower. Haven't tried it yet (because it's expensive) but from the review I read, it's legit.
Unfortunately this base station does not live up to its promises. You still have to perfectly place your phone to get a charge, unless you want to position it horizontally and take up 2 charging coils to get it right. I returned it.
Since I can't edit my comment, I'll correct it here. As others have pointed out, I bought and returned the "Base Station" because it only had 2 coils and needed precise placement. I have not used the "Base Station Pro" (but will give it a shot, since it has some advanced tech). I jumped the gun on my comment, so the above comment is not accurate.
if you want the one thing that will work, though with a much less polished very un-Apple-y design, this is expensive, huge, and it will work basically edge to edge.
I will say having used it, I understand why Apple axed the idea. It is huge and gets hot and I assume it is thicker than Airpower would have been.
This also assumes Apple doesn't plan on scaling the spec. Other phones are already up to 40W charging, and several OEMs have been tipped to be aiming for at 100 by next year.
It's likely solve the gap of "I can't use my phone while it's wirelessly charging". With the magsafe thing you can just clunk the charger to the back of your phone and keep using it. While battery life is still crap on these (side note - I didn't hear a single thing in the presentation about battery life... yikes) people are going to be charging their phones while they use them.
I hate to be a pessimist but with them not including a charger or headphones, they're slowly moving toward no data port whatsoever
I guess my confusion is basically that: if I want to use my phone while it charges, I just plug it in with a lightning cable. I don’t need it to “wirelessly” charge if I’m having to connect something to the device anyway. It seems to be a weird 3rd option for charging.
They’re definitely getting rid of the port, maybe next year.
Consider that iPad has replaced lightning with usb-c and that having ports takes up a lot of space... I think they are just planning to phase out lightning and go port-less on the iPhone.
Sure, it has existed for several years. But I’ve yet to drive a single car that supports it. By my understanding only super expensive high-end luxury cars support it, and even then it’s hit and miss. I’ve never seen it with my own eyes.
https://www.cars.com/articles/wireless-apple-carplay-and-and... lists 2019 model cars with Wireless CarPlay. I've driven one and tried out the wireless CarPlay, and it works more or less like the wired version (no lag, as smooth as wired CarPlay AFAICT). The only major inconvenience is probably that, if you have a passenger and they want to use their phone for music, you will need to pair their phone to the car instead of just finding the wire and plugging in. Takes about 30 seconds to a minute to go through all the setup. While the cars listed are not cheap by any means, there are a few moderately optioned minivans around the same cost of some of the less expensive cars from BMW (base cost around $38K USD).
They even tried to blame Apple for this, only to have their lie publicly called out by Apple. This created such outrage that the decision had to be reversed, but for me that's enough - they showed their true colors and are very likely to come up with further crap in the future.
I agree that it was ridiculous and to be on guard for these shenanigans. 100%.
Today though, BMW is not charging a “subscription” fee and much more importantly, all of their iDrive data is provided for free with free software updates. And yes, competitive pressure probably forced them to, but it is much better than just 5 or 6 years ago where you were charged for yearly map updates by buying a DVD. They are also the first car manufacturer to support the CarKey feature so they have changed (for now anyways).
Two advantages: (1) the Lightning port can wear out if used often, but the magnets won't; (2) you can attach and remove the phone from a magnetic charger with one hand and without looking / in the dark.
I have not had an iphone come in with a worn lighting port. 10/10 times it has been extremely packed pocket lint preventing the cable from seating correctly.
I've had that problem, but I've also had the cable clips in the sides of the socket lose some of their grip over time. They're spring steel, but even spring steel is still somewhat subject to plastic deformation with enough cycles.
It's never gotten bad enough to be a problem with mine, but I'm still happier to be using magnetic charging cables most of the time. That's primarily for the convenience of it, which is significant, but I don't mind that they also preserve the connector.
(They're especially convenient in the car. I have an SE, but even with a phone that supported inductive charging, I suspect I'd stick with the magnetic-mount-and-cable arrangement - it's exactly as convenient as inductive charging, with no risk of compromise on the strength of the mount in order to get one with half a transformer in it.)
The lightning port can essentially loosen over time, meaning the “snap” of the cable grips less and the plug can become susceptible to falling out. This has happened to me, even as someone who takes good care of his phone.
Even on very old very carelessly used phones I have not seen this. Every single time the lightning cable does not snap into place, it's some packed lint that is the problem. It can be removed with some care and it works fine after that.
If the wireless charging mechanism is solid state, it’s immune from mechanical wear.
Mechanical wear matters for example if you have a Roku, and the buttons in the remote control physically wear out. You can just instead use your phone app to control it over WiFi, and the WiFi antenna will “never” wear out because it’s solid state. Source: I have an old Roku
It's a good rule of thumb, but that doesn't check out in practice.
The wireless charging mechanism, while solid state, generates a lot of heat, which has the potential to degrade the battery especially in certain climates.
Solid state devices can still fail from mechanical stress. Heat cycling and strong magnetic fields could be a problem for wireless charging even if they don’t need to be. The core issue is generally trying to use the cheapest solution, not just mechanical stress.
Ethernet connectors are probably the best example of this, for servers that might be moved every few years their cheap and maintain a solid connection. It’s really desktops and especially laptops where they become such a major issue.
I’m struggling to understand your point. Phones are closer to laptops in that in typical use a wired power connection is frequently plugged and unplugged, so mechanical wear is an important consideration. Why are you bringing up Ethernet on servers in this context, when as you say the pattern of use is utterly different?
I know almost nothing about wireless charging. But have fair experience with working with WiFi devices. In my lifetime, I have observed 0 cases of failure on the WiFi client mechanism, and exactly 1 case of a WiFi router failing due to hardware. Meanwhile, power plugs are the most common part I have experienced wearing out on consumer electronics. Have you experienced lots of failures of solid state electronics due to eg. hear cycling and magnetic fields?
My point was you need to design stuff for the use case and a healthy margin. Incandescent lightbulbs are perhaps the poster child for solid state devices which with a limited lifespan. You can design lightbulbs for a 100 year lifespan at the cost of efficiency and bulb brightness. Even then an incandescent bulbs lifespan is dramatically shorter if your power cycling it every 2 minutes. But eventually stuff like electromigration for example will be an issue for solid state devices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration
When designing wireless charging the same efficiency vs lifespan tradeoffs exist. Sure, they might be fine, but don’t expect them to last 20 years or anything. Further, the mats are significantly more expensive than a cable.
PS: Connector specifications are generally a dumpster fire because nobody wants to be forced to build expensive cables. And even if the spec says X, if Y is cheaper and still mostly works then you can bet people will do Y. Failure tends take a while at which point people buy a new cable vs returning the old one etc.
On my last phone, it's precisely the part that wore out first. A local guy replaced it for about $50 and I got another year of life out of the phone before I dropped it and broke the screen. (Note, this was an iPhone 6 that I replaced about a year ago)
Sure, and for some people the part that wears out first is the third SoC capacitor.
In agreggate though, the lightning port isn't the first thing that will break, and if it breaks you can use wireless charging. Whereas if you only use wireless charging there is less redundancy and the part that actually wears out the fastest, the battery, will degrade faster due to the heat.
I think the sun will outlive the lightning port. Unless the sun explodes, in which case technically it would have ended prior to its contents hitting Earth and destroying the lightning port.
Counterpoint - I have an iPhone 6 that has exactly this problem. The cable doesn't get seated properly, so occasionally it stops charging or disconnects when attached to a computer.
The primary use case is watching a movie or listening to music with headphones. Can’t charge and listen without an extra dongle. Apples solution is BT headphone they sell but it’s a bad pattern.
I agree it is a bad pattern. Remove features from a device to force you to buy an alternative accessory. Nowhere else would anybody accept this - eg. a car that came without a steering wheel so you had to buy one.
Next they'll take the screen from the phone and force you to buy an accessory screen!
a car that came without a steering wheel so you had to buy one.
When I bought a new Ford pick-up truck in the 90's, it didn't come with a rear bumper. That was an add-on. I presume because different people will want different rear bumpers (regular, towing, something else).
When I lived in the desert, I regularly saw brand pick-up trucks without tailgates, or with various specialty ones, so I assume those are also optional.
I've used Apple phones for the last ~10 years but I have held back on AirPods as I've read a few reports from people whos AirPods have lasted ~18 months before the (non-replaceable, because Apple) battery begins to heavily degrade.
I would have much preferred a USB-C plug for all my devices.
It’s nice that it’s wireless on the new iPhone and all, but it’s still an extra cable (or puck) to carry around.
Much like the headphone cable, I think that things like charging could be done in such a simple way, that the alternatives that are presented just don’t make the users lives easier and generate unnecessary waste.
I find myself thinking that at some point they'll be moving to an iPhone with no ports at all, and aren't bothering with USB-C because they'll have a transition to entirely wireless charging instead.
Yes that seems to be the direction. I'm really trying to vote with my wallet here, so I'll hope the cheap iPhones will keep the port and luckily in my city repair vouchers are out as part of the local corona relief program, so I'm giving my iPhone 7 another year or two. In fact USB-C would have been the primary reason to upgrade for me.
I would have moved to an Android device with a headphone jack and USB-C port, but I prefer to stay away from Google products as much as I can.
Going wireless with everything where it isn't necessarily needed is just a bit overrated in my opinion:
- The biggest driver in network speed to me was adding all devices I could to wired connections - there's 20+ different networks in my area and some of the devices use old Wifi standards, so I avoid all of that for devices I don't move around. Homeplug devices with higher speeds than my internet connection were necessary here to make the experience better than wireless (compared to laying new cables wireless is better to me, but I hope devices like TVs keep their LAN port)
- In the car: it's just a constant pain to switch the connected device (when more than one person is present), especially when a call comes in, simply using the headphone plug would be much quicker.
- When working: switching the devices the headphone is connected to when a call comes in between phone and laptop is equally painful, again, switching plugs would be simpler (though here at least I can walk around with the headphones, so there is a bit of a benefit).
Which almost doubles the size of what I need to carry along to simply charge my phone and more than doubles what needs to be on my table. I’d rather have a single cable on my desk, in my car etc. that ideally works across generations (from a slow ebook reader, charging headphones and power packs to connecting video and storage) and manufacturers (pretty sure the MagSafe connector won’t be available for non-licensed devices).
I've been using a anker stand for the past few years for wireless charging my iphone 8 and that works fine. Just plop the phone in place and it stands up and you can read it if it lights up.
The one thing that happened when I got that is that I never bought another lighting cable.
if it was me, I'd skip straight to Qi-only just to avoid the amount of whinging they would have to endure (here would be among the worst) about "omg another cable change!!11" for their...second cable change in two decades.
Which isn’t much better than any other phone in the industry. The difference is that other phones have been using standard cables that inter operate with each other and non phone devices as well.
So we’re now in a ridiculous situation where you have to carry fewer cables with a MacBook + Samsung setup than a MacBook + iPhone one.
all of the issues stemming from charging can be solved by having bigger battery.
Why cant they make device 1 or 2 mm thicker and have device survive a day longer. Then I just plug it in at the nightstand and dont have to worry about yanking phone as I dont have to top up charge. No need for spare cables at your car/work/relatives.
My phone always slides off the center of my wireless charger in my car and it stops charging without me noticing -- I would love to have this feature there.
True, the alignment help would be great. I had a Palm in like 2006 that had a magnetic wireless charging dock. Ended up modding a Galaxy Nexus to use it in the car.
I have a wireless charger in the car, which has clasps to hold the phone. It has never misaligned. This simpler solution seems preferable to the more complex MagSafe solution.
Maybe it's because I have been playing with magnets since I was a kid, things snapping together because of magnets are no longer magical, although ferrofluids are still pretty cool.
Another note: the iPhone 12s still support Qi wireless charging, up to 7.5W. MagSafe allows faster 15W charging (sigh). Apple said during the event that it wants a MagSafe ecosystem, so expect chargers, mounts and so on from third parties.- nilay Patel on Twitter
I think the concept of the wallet that can quickly snap on and off of the phone is pretty neat. I currently use a case that has a wallet functionality (for my driver's license and credit cards) and that doesn't allow me to use wireless charging without completely taking the case off.
I suspect the magnet will make it a sure shot thing with the new iPhone though. With current phones you can often get away with keeping a hotel card in the same pocket as the phone.
For NFC, the NFC antenna on an iPhone is on the top rather than the back, so as long as you only have one NFC credit card in the wallet on the back and then presumably it will work based on if you tap the top or the back of the iPhone to the reader
PopSocket has already confirmed they're working on something. This will be awesome for those of us who don't use wireless charging because of our popsockets.
Besides the convenience, it must be a way for Apple to eventually drop the charging port completely, maybe even with the next version. No police data tampering, but also no jailbreaks, a physically walled device.
This is much simpler, they wanted more sales of accessories to show higher sales revenue. Playing up the "eco-friendly" messaging, they're able to cut costs and avoid including a charger +headphones.
The changes forces most customers to buy either a wireless airpods or a new magSafe charger. This become an easy 'attach' sale for all retailers and virtually any sales person. Customers will be told that their device does not come with a charger and the apple authorized, overpriced charger is the best option to use with their new $700-$1K+ device.
This allows Apple to show stronger revenue numbers, even if demand for the iPhone is weaker.
Except many probably already have a gazzilion of chargers around the house. Or jusst some USB to plug the cable in. For the last 3 or 4 iPhones I had I did not even take the charger and the earbuds out of the box. Adds nicely to the resell value.
There may be a JTAG port in between the glued-together battery and screen, but it's not going to be easy for someone who gets access to your phone for 5 minutes to exploit that.
JTAG's the extreme case though: it's not like most existing hacks have involved that level of access. It's been mundane stuff like just going in through the USB interface. If Apple eliminate the USB interface entirely, they're still going to have to make it available by some other means to service/update the device. Which means they'll be adding that software stack to wifi/bluetooth.
Your 2 attack scenarios are: device is in evidence lock up, and can b cracked at will (so a security company probably comes up with a kit for cracking and hooking them up, sells the service to LE) - or what happened with T2, where the software stack just gets exploited.
Since you'll still need all those management interfaces that currently are only on the physical port to be somewhere - well I'd put money on removing the port actually making the device more vulnerable. Briefcase of GPUs to crack wifi and rootkit a phone if you can get on the same network.
My sense is that existing physical access exploits have relied on legacy assumptions that shouldn't exist for wifi/bluetooth - hopefully no-one is building systems that give wifi devices direct memory access, or boot over bluetooth. They'll need some level of management interface, certainly, but that's likely to be something purpose-built and more tightly constrained.
JTAG is very useful to test that this particular iPhone was manufactured correctly, so Apple doesn’t completely disable it. That said, Apple does have a hardware disable that removes the ability to access registers and memory via JTAG. One only has this ability with special development iPhones that have to be obtained illegally, in the US anyway.
....Further incentivizing the fascists to figure out how to either force Apple to give them a wireless backdoor or figure out a wireless backdoor for themselves...
Magnetic force falls off pretty quickly - a phone case can cause enough of a difference to make that force lackluster. Apparently, it seems, enough to put magnets in the case itself to better maintain that force.
Additionally, it looks like the goal is to let your phone be held vertically, while attached only to the magnet. This makes sense for car mounts, where you may want to mount your GPS via magnet and charge it simultaneously.
At the risk of being pedantic (or misremembering college classes), there's more to it than that. First, at the relevant distance scales, the magnets aren't point particles, they have an extent and very close to that surface it should be 1/r. Secondly, magnets are dipoles and at greater distances the two poles cancel out to first order and you have a 1/r^4.
There appear to be a lot of people who use those ring-shaped grip holders (or a Popsocket, which has a similar functionality) that stick to the back of a mobile phone.
It appears you can have either MagSafe or the phone holder, but not both. Does Apple have a solution for this?
Upon further reflection, the magnets might have been a necessary tweak to the AirPower concept. They couldn’t get it working with a large matrix of coils, on which you could lay the phone/watch anywhere. Instead, the combo charging mat shown in today’s presentation will use magnets to force proper placement on the mat.
Being able to dock a device for charging with one hand (very difficult with a cable) is very nice. Wireless is superior to surface contacts because you can mount orient your phone in different directions without needing to account for the cable.
Depends how the magnets work; sometimes these types of things are pretty opinionated about the orientation. I think a “smart connector” approach like the iPad could also be used one-handed, but point taken.
I like products that have less friction, and are easier to deal with. I often find it fiddly to insert the lightning cable into my phone, especially in low light.
It’s not a matter of whether one way is too difficult or not. It’s a matter of whether an alternative has some improvements or not.
Personally, I'm waiting for it to release before jumping to conclusions. It's possible it's weighted so this isn't an issue, or the magnet is just strong enough to hold it in place but make it easy to pick up. Apple's usually pretty decent about providing a nice UX for these kinds of things. But I do agree the watch charger is a weird thing that pretty much requires a stand to feel complete.
Totally! Apple is amazing at getting the tolerances on magnets, hinges, etc just right, but I don’t see how you could get by without a suction cup or something on the bottom of the hockey puck.
A downside to wireless chargers has always been alignment. I always do a double take to make sure my phone is actually charging. Having the magnets guide the phone onto the coils is an improvement, I guess.
Ya. The inconsistency of placement has dramatically reduced the value of the wireless so far. Presumably they have the data to see that people have struggled.
> Why couldn’t we fill in the lightning port and use flush surface contacts, like the MagSafe of yesteryear?
I don't remember MagSafe on macbooks ever being truly flush. It was less deep of a port than USB, sure, but it was still a port.
As for why not, there could be many reasons, but I have a feeling it might have something to do with their waterproof/dustproof rating. That's just a pure speculation on my end though.
Or, more likely, it is simply because swapping the lightning port with a magsafe one would make the phone pretty much impossible to use while charging. But with a lightning port + magsafe wireless charging, you get to have both use cases covered (using while charging with lightning, drop off for an overnight charge on your magsafe charging surface).
MagSafe wasn’t flush, no; but I don’t think this is an inherent requirement. I think it’d be possible to make something flat on both the cable and device side.
> swapping the lightning port with a MagSafe one would make the phone pretty much impossible to use while charging
How so? I used my MacBook in bed while charging with MagSafe all the time. The magnets were fairly strong. With a cable going away from the bottom of the device, I think it’d be perfectly usable.
As far as waterproofing, getting rid of the lightning port seems inevitable, because it allows for better hermetic sealing. A flush set of pins seems great for this goal, surely it’s trivial to avoid shorting something out in the prescience of liquid? (I am not an electrical engineer)
Eventually you will see the lighting port disappear with no way to back up the device locally. 5k cameras in cellphones with no removable storage and no way to locally backup.
Huge miss to not have touch id in a era of a raging pandemic. I literally have not used the face-id once outside my house since March, because I always use a mask, so I have to type in my password. Which I had to revert to an unsafe 6 digit one from my 12char alphanumeric that I had until March.
Face ID is a major downgrade from Touch ID regardless of the pandemic.
Touch ID (combined with a home button) is a lot faster. You can reach into your pocket or handbag, put the finger on the button and press it while you're taking it out. By the time your phone is out it's unlocked and on the home screen. I don't recall seeing people failing to unlock their phones while paying with Apple Pay before but now it's a reasonably common occurrence if they didn't "prime" it ahead of time.
You can also quickly unlock your phone if it's not directly aligned with your face without having to pick it up (let's say it's on a table or desk) or if you're letting another person handle it.
Face ID is also annoying in bed, when either your face is obstructed by pillows/blankets or if you're holding your phone too close to your face and need to hold it further away for a second, illuminating the whole room in the process.
Touch ID also makes the authentication action explicit. If you're handling someone else's phone, you can look at the lockscreen without attempting to authenticate by simply keeping away from the home button and using the power button to wake it up. With Face ID the simple fact of looking at the phone is an authentication attempt and you'd be consuming the limited amount of attempts the owner has before they have to fall back to a passcode.
I have to disagree. Both systems have advantages over the other, and of course with a mask on TouchID has a pretty big advantage right now. But:
- FaceID is way better when your fingers are not perfect: after washing hands, in the kitchen, when wearing gloves etc.
- FaceID is more secure (lower chance of a false positive)
- FaceID already starts working when you pick up the phone (you do not need to trigger it), so by the time I swipe up to unlock, it has already long since identified my face
- FaceID enabled you to hide the content of notifications and only show them when you look at the phone
> by the time I swipe up to unlock, it has already long since identified my face
With Touch ID and a home button I do not have to swipe up to unlock - in the accessibility settings there is a "rest finger to open" option which brings back the pre-iOS10 (or around that time) behavior where the lockscreen is dismissed as soon as your finger is recognized.
This means that before I even take out the phone out of my pocket it is already unlocked and is on the home screen ready to be used. You can even start opening apps purely through muscle memory while you're taking the phone out.
FaceID gave access to my phone to a malicious house guest of a guest (boyfriend of sister who was unreasonably convinced of my disapproving of him, self fulfilling in this case ) who unlocked my phone using my face while I slept and even managed to authorize expenditure on my wallet.
Odd, as this shouldn't be possible - Face ID checks your eyes are open and are looking at the screen before it unlocks (unless you disable Attention-Aware Unlock in Accessibility settings).
Presumably he would have pressed your finger on the TouchID too, or just cut your thumb off if he's willing to go the next step. Hard to hold the phone manufacturer at fault for a case like this, right?
One major downside of Touch ID that is niche but affects me personally is that if your fingerprints get damaged (e.g. by rock climbing, which I do regularly) then Touch ID will stop working for ~1 day while your fingers recover. For this reason I'm planning on getting a device with Face ID or a similar feature next time I buy a phone. The downsides of Face ID you mention are valid, though.
Add your two thumbs and two index fingers so that you can use any one of them depending on convenience or rare edge cases like rock climbing damage to one of them.
A lot faster? what are we talking about? 1/2 a second? faceID is great, you look at the phone and it unlocks, I much prefer it to touchid, I used to have to use my passcode far more often with touchID because It didn't get it quite right, or my fingers were wet, or using my other hand from an odd angle.
And, with winter, you know, gloves...
If memory serves me right, Western Australia , South Australia and Tasmania haven't had local community transmission in months. Queensland had a couple of small outbreaks but seems to have been contained very quickly.
The Pixel 3XL and others had it right - fingerprint sensor on the back (natural spot for your pointer finger), still allowing for the whole front of the device to be the screen.
I disagree, I prefer Face ID. They just both have pros and cons.
If you're wearing gloves, Touch ID doesnt work. If you're wearing a mask, Face ID doesnt work. If your finger is a bit wet and/or wrinkly, Touch ID doesnt work. If your face is at a very off angle Face ID won't work.
Face ID worked pretty well for me (before mask time) and for me it had less tradeoffs. I prefer it.
> Touch ID (combined with a home button) is a lot faster. You can reach into your pocket or handbag, put the finger on the button and press it while you're taking it out. By the time your phone is out it's unlocked and on the home screen. I don't recall seeing people failing to unlock their phones while paying with Apple Pay before but now it's a reasonably common occurrence if they didn't "prime" it ahead of time.
I was excited when I discovered this, but I now consider this “feature” to be a security issue. I used to “prime” my Touch ID-equipped iPhones until I accidental authorized an in-app purchase because my thumb was pre-placed on the sensor.
Never again.
I had modified the Accessibility settings so that resting a finger on the sensor would unlock the device, and when reverting that setting I still ran into the same issue.
Yes I have used Face ID. I actually tried to force myself to like the new phone by "dual-wielding" both my iPhone 8 and a new iPhone XS for a couple weeks. I ended up sticking to my iPhone 8 and keeping the other one as a test device for iOS development.
By illuminating the room I meant illuminating from the light of the screen, not IR. When using it in bed I can keep a Touch ID device under a blanket as to not illuminate the rest of the room, but Face ID performs poorly in that case and I have to take the phone out completely so the light does leak. Granted, nowadays with dark mode and the new "dim screen during bedtime/do not disturb" it is a bit less of an issue but those weren't a thing when I used it and a light lockscreen wallpaper is still a significant amount of light for a pitch-black bedroom even on minimal brightness.
Problem is that Apple just isn't nimble enough to do anything about it. Everything important about these phones was set in place before there was a pandemic.
There’s a good chance that some of the production pipelines for parts began spooling up months ago. Producing that many phones is a huge undertaking with longer lead times than most people imagine, I imagine that they’d lose billions, and they’d risk releasing a “pandemic-friendly” phone once the pandemic is actually over.
You’re not wrong, but there’s also no way in hell Apple was not going to keep their pipeline moving so long as they were able to. It’s not like Apple hasn’t been affected by the pandemic as much as everyone else has; stalling to bring TouchID into this year’s model probably wouldn’t have seen this series of phones released until almost summer next year. Might as well release what they’ve prepared and hopefully rejigger next year’s lineup if it didn’t call for any kind of inclusion of TouchID.
I have a work and personal phone, the work phone has FaceID and I do prefer it, but I intentionally swapped my personal phone out for an iPhone SE because it has TouchID. Any other year, I would have preferred FaceID, but given current conditions and possible future conditions, I would like it to really be either/or with both the FaceID array on top and TouchID built into the side button at some point in the future.
What’s makes this even more frustrating is that they just came out with Touch ID in the power button foe the iPad Air, so they could have put both on the phone.
I had the same thought initially, but the reality is that the amount of rework required in terms of design, development, QA and production (parts, production lines) will be huge at Apple’s scale. You probably have to plan features like that more than a year out, so they’d have to skip this generation (which they will have invested a huge amount it), which realistically was never going to happen.
I agree that the lack of Touch ID feels like a fairly big deal though. Face ID is useless right now and I don’t see things getting back to “normal” in terms of no mask wearing for some time, so I think I will wait and see if they bring it back next year.
Just wanted to say the Touch ID on power button was planned for quite some time. As rumour ( more like Supply Chain Fact Check ) from Ming pointed it out last year.
The thing he got wrong was that he thought it was for iPhone. Turns out it was for iPad.
FWIW, Face ID started to work for me with a mask on after iOS 14 update. Apparently, it requires a lot of training by failed attempts with a mask before it starts working. It doesn't work if you have your mask all the way up to cover your nose completely, but a little space is enough.
Pretty sure it's the nostrils that matter. The grandparent post was talking about needing your nose to be partially visible—and the top half of your nose is just skin.
I think it differs for everyone, but I can only get a good seal by having the top of the mask (with the bendy metal bit) well down my nose, so the metal bends down into the "crease" bit on the outside of my nostrils. If I have it higher near the bridge, inevitably air comes up my cheeks and out to fog my glasses. My nose is fairly big, I suppose.
Oh, I've been wearing my mask wrong... My glasses fog up as well, and I've been putting my mask at almost the same height as the lower frame of my glasses...
Weird, fully masked Face ID has worked fine for me since the iOS 13.5 update (more than 95% of the time). Before that it never worked with a mask on. And I wear the L size huge standard disposable white mask which covers nearly my entire face from the bottom of my eyelids, fully side to side, all the way over my chin.
Personally I never used either. Biometric authentication just seems like a terrible idea to me and I really don't want my phone collecting data like that.
iPhones don’t collect biometric data other than locally, and even then only in a form that would never be useful to anyone (hashed and stored on Secure Enclave).
Adding a fingerprint scanner doesn't affect every component in the phone. It doesn't affect the display, CPU, dimensions or anything with a long lead time. It affects the power button. Apple had well enough time to add it.
I would give them some benefit of the doubt to one of the biggest companies in the world that they had at least a dozen people research this and came to the conclusion that they couldn’t or didn’t want to (due to cost, design, etc).
The same reason that Apple shipped broken keyboards with MacBooks for years. Because Tim Cook is not a product person. He is an operations person. Adding a fingerprint sensor is good for the product but bad for operations. Who do you think he's going to side with?
At the risk of using a cliche, I think Jobs would have made a different decision.
The answer seems obvious: they are pigheadedly stubborn when it comes to design decisions. They will never throw away a design decision within 5 years because that would be admitting they made a sub-optimal decision at some point. It simply is not on brand.
Of note: the iPhone 12 mini appears to be slightly smaller and lighter than the (current) iPhone SE (2), so is basically the phone those of us who prefer phone-sized phones have been asking for for years. The price differential of $300 seems reasonable (in Apple-adjusted numbers); if I hadn't bought an SE this past month (unfortunate toddler-related water incident!) then I'd be right in there.
Honestly, the only feature that makes me lean towards the SE2 for my next phone is that I want a fingerprint reader since face masks have ruined Face ID
This was the deciding factor for me. I use my phone far less nowadays because many of its functions are served by other hardware at home, so the most important function left exclusively to the phone was the Wallet/Apple Pay. I would have preferred a better camera, but I’m not out taking nearly as many pictures as I used to, so the camera is fine. Post-pandemic I can always swap out my phone for a newer one, or rather I look forward to it.
I'm really hoping someone like Samsung or Sony picks up on the small iPhone with the same specs as the normal one and come up with something similar in their next gen when my Pixel 3 will be due for an upgrade.
(I don't use apple phones because I'm against not being able to run whatever you want on your pocket computer)
I don't use Apple phones because I cannot afford one. I used to be a developer (in India), earned a decent salary, and at the end of 3 years I had something like 20k USD saved. If I spend 1k on an Iphone, that's 5% of my entire life savings (though I'm pretty young) for a phone. So I end up spending 200$ for an Android phone that runs for maybe 3 years and dies. That being said, the 400$ Iphone SE sounds tempting :)
Even if I go beyond my comfort zone and pay $ I cannot really afford for an arguably better/durable Iphone, the psychological anxiety that comes from "I should be really careful with this phone because I cannot afford a new one/repairs" is something I would not be happy with.
S10e came out year and a half ago! Unfortunate despite everyone complaining no one bought it and we didnt get s20e. Seriously that has been the best smart phone I've ever used or heard of and if mine dies I'm buying the exact same one.
I have an S10e. Coming from the 2016 iPhone SE I was looking for something a bit larger, but still reasonably small. It was a bit bigger than I would have liked, but I thought it would be fine. It's not. It's too big for me and I'm an adult male with relatively large hands. I'd be all over the 12 mini if it weren't for the price.
So s10e is still the biggest one of "high-end small phones" though it has the best screen ratio by far.
I do think mini might be just the right size! I hope this will prompt more small phones on the market!
I am keen to get a iPhone 12 mini once the iPhone X breaks (it had a touch screen replacement already within warranty, touch issues, problem still exists).
Size is pefect (iPhone range), love the iPhone 4 like frame and overall look. I don't use a phone too much at home (only on the go) so don't need the iPhone 12 Pro premium features. For taking photos and videos, I'll use the Sony A7 iii.
NOTE: in Australia the price is A$1199 for 12 mini 64GB, and A$1449 256GB (more expensive than my iPhone X 256GB).
As a small phone fan I’m hoping the SE2 hasn’t cannibalized much of the small phone market. I’d like the mini to succeed. But, I also bought an SE and won’t be upgrading, as the SE us great and has Touchid.
Why? It's been leaked for ages that the iPhone announcement were coming this month.
I'm only asking because you added Damn as if you were disappointed in your timing. I've been holding off waiting to see if the 12 was going to be something I'd be interested in, or just waiting for the 11 series prices to drop. My 6S+ works fine, but the capacity is too small.
What is it about the iPhone Mini that is selling you most?
I only now learned that the SE had touch ID and am now contemplating buying that instead of the mini. I was ready to drop $1500 if their had been a mini-sized iPhone with all the pro features and touch ID, but now I find every option frustrating.
How so? They release new phones every autumn, with few exceptions. So if you buy an iPhone in the autumn and it’s not the brand new just-announced model, you should expect that you’re going to have a previous-generation phone very quickly.
Apple’s marketing timeline is remarkably consistent with very few exceptions.
They release the SE (2020) in April. So they hit that smaller but latest phone market, and then they are tapping in again only 6 months later with the 12 mini. A lot of people with the SE (2020) will want to upgrade for the speed, camera, even smaller body etc.
The camera was not in fact a direct upgrade, it was the same hardware with improved software post processing. That was the deciding factor for not getting an SE for me, and to wait for this cycle.
The pants look artificial, the hands and feet are really dark, you can't see the detail on the trees. Is this just a really hard angle to shoot, against the summer sky?
Huge contrast, natural light only and focus on a fast moving subject, yeah definitively tricky (as for the artistic interest of the picture that's another story).
The weirdness probably comes from the post treatment. But still impressive for a smartphone. The result (almost) look like something you could expect from RAW post treatment of a reflex camera take.
Don't know if I'll go for the iPhone 12 Pro or a refurbished iPhone 11 Pro but for my amateur usage my mind is set. I wont replace my 10 years old reflex with a new one. Theses are "good enough" in most use cases and fit in my pocket.
sandals and socks. high fashion uses multiple sources. Sometimes its inspired by nature, sometimes scifi, sometimes its inspired by traditional internet cringe!
Interesting pic. I think it tries to show the hdr, dynamic rage of shadows + cleanliness even though the person is in motion.
My iPhone 6S+ is still running super smooth. Maybe because I'm not a huge photography buff or mobile gamer, but each year I wait to see something that will finally make me buy a new one, but each year I just don't see it.
I don't know exactly what I'm waiting for, but this wasn't really it.
(Also enjoying using one of the last TouchID iPhones during Covid 19)
I hope no one feels 'not needing to upgrade' is a 'bad thing'
It's a testament to Apple's build quality and long term support that you don't need to upgrade.
Samsung and Android are big on the half baked gimmicks and lackluster supports. Those phones you have to upgrade after a few years as they become more bloated than a Windows 95 machine bought from CompUSA.
> Samsung and Android are big on the half baked gimmicks and lackluster supports
Since when? I have a Samsung Galaxy S7 from 2016, and I honestly don't see any bloatware. It's still running smoothly, and without degraded performance.
Contrapoint: I had an S8 and it was full of Samsung cruft including bixby and would barely let me use the phone without a "Samsung account" (which it often prompted me for... often)- it wouldn't even let me use my CardDAV/CalDAV servers. (which, Apple does. :S)
it was some time ago, but I remember being very angry at this phone and being unable to flash it with another OS which made me even more angry. After coming from OnePlus before (Cyanogen) the software quality was horrifyingly bad.
I had the same experience but somehow managed to circumvent /avoid any such account requirement for the replacement when lost that phone soon after buying it. I actually blamed the Samsung account requirement for losing my phone. At the time I argued that if I hadn't been restricted from using it normally on account of the registration demands Samsung was being so aggressive about, I wouldn't have been so indifferent to where I was keeping my phone about my person and consequently, so I told anyone within earshot, it was their fault that I never kept my new phone in a regular and always double checked secreted location. I would love to be able to force that argument thru court just to vex that company. I really think that I had a fair point even if the ultimate responsibility has fall to me, putting the vendors marketing interests before my ability to even use the device they just sold me outright, is a case I want to hear heard nevertheless.
No clue. As I have been rather happy so far with my phone, I haven't followed newer phones much, outside of some bullet points of new and improved functionalities.
> Samsung and Android are big on the half baked gimmicks and lackluster supports. Those phones you have to upgrade after a few years as they become more bloated than a Windows 95 machine bought from CompUSA.
Am I missing something? What are the phones getting bloated with?
My Galaxy S3 was bloated to hell from Samsung and AT&T. Samsung had half naked eye tracking gimmicks and AT&T would constantly be scanning for WiFi points to connect to draining my battery.
The only way to get out of it was to flash another rom. Samsung never really updated the device while I had it.
For some time the software updates I received on my Note made it worse and worse. It’s like each major update was loaded with crap to run on the new hardware, making the experience terrible for the legacy phones.
IIRC wasn't Apple throttling the CPU because of battery degradation and to prevent sudden shutoffs even when it showed >25% battery? In my opinion, they should've said what they were doing, and made it clear that replacing the battery would fix the issue, but I'd rather have the battery status be accurate versus an always fast phone that shuts off randomly.
I distinctly remember my Galaxy S4 or something introducing the "innovative" feature of waving your hand in front of the front camera to scroll web pages.
But Windows 95 wasn't too bad once you removed the bloatware! In fact I think it's faster to use in daily usage due to the lack of animations and GUI candy than modern Windows.
Also, I have an Android device and have had them since the TMobile G1. Early models were hampered by RAM scarcity, and each Android release mentioned the smoother UI (it didn't get great until 6.0 or 7.0?). But in general they were OK (apart from a dreadful Samsung tablet I bought) and the only thing that would "bloat" them is running too many apps concurrently (but then they were "freeze dried" until relaunch) or having too many services running, which recent Android has started to kill vehemently like iOS.
I agree with your Apple build quality support though - my MacBook Pro is 8 years old no problems, and I'm happy with the Air 2 I own that is still supported and useful at decent speeds 5+ years after I bought it.
> It's a testament to Apple's build quality and long term support that you don't need to upgrade.
> Those phones you have to upgrade after a few years
Shall I remind you that Apple was sued and lost in Europe precisely because it forced user to either upgrade after after 3 years or be condemned to live with a phone that was throttled at like 50% cpu clock?
This is exactly why I never bought an iphone again, I don't want my phone to expire after exactly 3 years because of a forced update.
Apple probably stopped doing this since they lost that case, but let's not talk about a "testament to long term support" as if that was a long standing tradition.
I switched to android 7 years ago because of that and never had that kind of issue, Android upgrades don't brick my phone, and I have not noticed a worse build quality even though I am buying "cheap" (OnePlus).
The only thing that is making me consider Apple is privacy.
The throttling was battery related. They could either have the phone shut off or just throttle down, they chose the latter. The fault is assign there is not communicating what the problem was and how to remediate it. They will still swap out your battery for a new one for something like $80 out of warranty, giving the phone another 3+ years of life.
Batteries are always maintenance parts. The fact that modern smartphones and notebooks don't make changing them a trivial operation is condemnable.
At least you can install new batteries with different form factors now. Technically it would be trivial to just have a lid to install new ones.
Profit orientation is worse than customer orientation. It is also an ecological problem. Instead of changing batteries after 2-3 years, people buy new phones.
One might say that the original fault was to include a battery that was somewhat too small, so that after a bit of normal wear, the battery was no longer able to provide the voltage required for demanding situations (e.g., launching the Camera app).
Fortunately, they learned from that mistake and started to make iPhone batteries significantly more powerful. As a nice side effect, even a two-year old iPhone XR, for instance, still has excellent battery life today.
I'm sure this was true for certain phones, but it that case the 'testament to build quality' is clearly unwarranted.
As far as I am concerned my phone never shut off randomly, I was perfectly fine with it. And yes indeed they made absolutely no effort to tell the customer that they could get the battery replaced for like a 10th of the price of a new phone, I don't believe for one second it was a communication error, and not a simple trick to get people to buy a new iPhone.
I honestly feel a bit insulted that Apple is releasing a phone without Touch ID during COVID-19. They think I will gladly hand over large amounts of money for a phone that is highly inconvenient to unlock.
When it became clear that people around the world were being legally required to cover their face, in some places at any time they left the house, Apple should have raced to equip the next iPhone with a fingerprint scanner. Apple didn't even apologise for not including one. I would have bought the phone with that feature. Maybe next year.
I imagine that the hardware design was finalised a long time ago and even 9 months would be too short a time to figure out how to include it without reverting to the old design with smaller screens
I don't think it's about having the cash, I think it's about whether or not it's a viable change to make.
Given the lead times on iPhone hardware design, and the lead times on building the tooling and machinery to actually build that hardware, these things need to then get locked in well in advance.
It was April before face masks started to be recommended in the USA, which is reasonably the earliest that Apple might be considering that pivot.
Assuming Apple pivoted on the spot, consider the following:
1/ The full scale of the pandemic was even less known then than it is today
2/ China was still not operating normally, and it wasn't known if the lockdowns they imposed would prove to be a success or not, resulting in continued reduced availability of factories.
The implication from your (very terse) comment is that the solution was just to throw money at the problem. The trade off in that scenario is that Apple is then effectively asking it's suppliers to put their employee's health at risk in order to increase their customer's convenience.
We're dealing with a global pandemic. Some things can't be solved just by throwing money at the problem.
Also the commitment of resources and user interaction research and development consequences of user behaviour, I'm sure weren't decisions made by whoever proverbially "slaps on the last button at the bottom of the screen ".
I would be fascinated to learn about how the effects of such a interface change are studied.
Edit to clarify my inquisitive interest is in the Who Moved My Cheese effect on subsequent purchases after a long loyal customer has been made aware of the possibility of their most important attributes of the product which they're buying and paying a premium for, aren't guaranteed to continue to be available at all. If the most frequently used interface is up for unexpected total disruption, what is the effect that has upon the long term purchase plans of previously loyal customers?
The CDC put out guidance in March (not April), but it was in February that anyone involved with US supply chains knew shit was hitting the fan. If you were involved with global supply chains you knew shit was hitting the fan by January at the very latest.
Personally I find FaceID far superior to TouchID - wet hands, gloves and so on used to get in my way, whereas FaceID rarely fails (apart from one pair of sunglasses). It's only now that masks are commonplace that it's become an issue.
So, for me "failing at design" is "winning at design" as far as that particular feature is concerned.
Given that, even if they had decided to change course in January, making a design change and scaling production to millions of devices was probably beyond this year.
Absolutely. They aren’t mutually exclusive. You can have both. Some phones have fingerprint sensor on back and face sensors on front. You can choose which way you prefer (or both).
Other than Apple wanting to save cost, I don’t see why this wouldn’t have been possible.
This is pretty much my exact situation. The new iPhones have been so underwhelming and so highly priced that I haven't felt the need or want to upgrade.
Now previously this year, I dropped my phone and the glass broke - but it still works. So I am on the verge of upgrading, but iPhone 12 still doesn't really... make me want to upgrade - if I can put it like that.
So I am rolling with a cracked screen iPhone 6S+ until I can find the motivation to upgrade. Maybe my battery life is becoming one and the problem with charging.
It does often seem that the new feature causing people to upgrade more than any other is that the new model hasn't yet been dropped--parking lot, toilet, etc. #2 is battery. "We think you'll find the new iPhone has been dropped less than any iPhone we've ever made and has a newer battery...."
For all the talk about saving carbon by skipping on headphones/charger, it is quite telling that if Apple (and other manufacturers too) wanted, they could have just made these two parts easily replaceable (batteries used to be conveniently replaceable anyway) and saved a lot more wastage. Talk is cheap etc.
I can almost imagine Apple unveiling a replaceable battery in the future and claiming it as ‘innovation’. It’l never happen but I’m sure they’d market it that way.
I would think they can at least do it for MacBooks. I mean I distinctly remember my MacBook from 2006 had a removable battery and just removing the battery exposed the storage and the memory. The price we paid was a slightly thicker MacBook so no MacBook air but I doubt anyone was complaining.
I think it is the other way round; thinness makes gadgets look good and feel light but more importantly, it provides an excuse to make everything non-replaceable on that altar in the underlying aim of planned obsolescence. Plus once you make it thin, you can always say that we can't go back because that is the new normal and making it thicker will be a regression.
Same here. I like the improved camera, and the poor man's LIDAR would put me over the line to buy as I could totally use that for 3D mapping, but otherwise, a new phone just doesn't give me much.
Recently, since us in Massively Lucky Tech World mostly work from home now, I've taken to leaving my phone in the bedroom and just wearing my smartwatch for 2FA stuff... and it's made my life better.
The compulsion to look at my Sadness Rectangle has been fading quite rapidly, I'm more focused on whatever my task-at-hand happens to be, and I'm spending more of my break time doing stuff that I want to do for me: reading one of my books, writing stuff, etc.
By all means. That framing has really helped me come to grips with just how psychologically damaging smartphones can be, without proper information hygiene.
>So I am rolling with a cracked screen iPhone 6S+ until I can find the motivation to upgrade.
I recently fixed a iPhone 6S+ for a friend, primarily with an aim to retrieve the photos and contacts. It wouldn't switch on, and had a broken screen. I ended up replacing the screen, battery and the charger port+headphone jack flex. It cost less than £40 in parts and some elbow grease; a superb compromise for a phone, which supports iOS 14 albeit it might not receive any future OS updates.
Hopefully, the arrival of the mini doesn't spell the end-of-life of the 7 and 8. Also, has anyone noted the cost for display/battery replacement on any recent phone (including Samsung) has skyrocketed, making it uneconomical?
I was about to, but I have some issues with battery life and charger plug, so it would be cheaper to buy a lower end iPhone (like the 12 mini) - so I am in a slight dilemma now.
Most likely if this phones battery gets any worse, I will upgrade to the new iPhone 12 max (or current flag ship) and hope it will last years to come. My iPhone is I think now 5 years old, where the average phone life seems to be 2-3 years, so I am quite happy with the quality and don't mind the upgrade, when it is necessary
I had issues with intermittent charging of 6S so I upgraded to 2nd gen SE. I didn’t want larger screen so 11 wasn’t the option.
I personally don’t like SE. The Touch ID is crap, it is not an actual button that presses so touching or pressing button doesn’t wake phone up. I have to pick up the phone to wake it.
In terms of unreliable charging, maybe you have already done it but: clean the lightning port. They did it at the apple store for an unrelated repair and all my issues went away. A year later i even went back and had them do only that because I couldn‘t find a good tool to do it myself.
Have you checked whether replacing the screen yourself is cheaper?
As an example, I had an iPhone SE with a broken home button. Repairing it would cost 60 euros, which wouldn't be worth it. On the other hand, a single replacement home button was only 8 euros, and it included the tools. It worked.
OLED's have vastly superior picture quality and are easier on the eyes. I would say this is kind of the "4.7 inch iPhone" moment where Apple is finally giving iPhone users an acceptable screen at an "affordable" price. OLED displays have been dominant on Android phones and high end iPhones for a reason - they are so much better in picture quality.
OLED's are very nice, but if the phone is used for example as a car navigation, then burn in might be an issue. I am very sensitive to it, to the point that I am very happy having an LCD screen.
Not really, No. Not even WOLED from LG can say that on their TV.
On mobile phone it is mostly dodged simply because you dont have the same screen for a long time and your screen time tends to be a lot lower than on PC.
But you can, definitely get burn-in on all modern OLED. And likely an unsolvable problem in the foreseeable future.
I suppose our experiences differ. I've tried using Pocket at night on an amoled screen and with dark mode, but because it's real black with bright white text I can't tolerate it for long. Would prefer a dark grey with white text, or even a navy blue with light yellow
I've had this feeling ever since the 3G / 4; all the improvements since the app store and mobile internet have been incremental, and sometimes even regressive (e.g. getting rid of the 3.5mm jack). Maybe I'm a luddite though.
Anyway some years ago I got an iphone XR (via work) and it's just fine, it'll do me for the forseeable future. It was an incremental upgrade to my iphone 7 or 8, whichever it was.
I felt the same when I upgraded my 6 to an XR. But when you actually get your hands on the phone, you quickly notice the improvements. There’s no pressure to upgrade, but when you finally do I think you’ll be happy
Will not give up iPhone 6s it is the last iPhone version with a headphone jack. With iPhone 6s and earlier one can use Hifi headphones without carrying extra headphone jack dongle.
My 6plus became unusably slow and remained that way even after a battery replacement. So I upgraded to a iPhone 11 after 5.5 years with the 6Plus. I expect to keep my iPhone11 for 5-6 years at least.
I encountered this as well, the fix for me was a full reflash (from DFU) without loading the backup from iCloud. Apparently whatever was slowing down the phone was getting loaded back in. I'm guessing there's some internal cache or database or something that is grinding to a halt over time.
Same here, and my wife. That was one of my most infuriating phone experiences. The 6S was working perfectly fine then after some update it was basically useless. This was around the time of the underclocking debacle.
That was actually much more substantial of an upgrade than I previously anticipated. The stronger glass, MagSafe being able to stick your phone magnetically to surfaces, and the Dolby Vision HDR recording are what really got me. Not so much 5G.
It's not widely known but iPhone 11 pro has a softer glass, more flexible, which better withstands falls. Problem is that it scratches easier than previous models. They improved this in the iPhone 12 models, maintaining the flexibility while making them harder to scratch.
I don't know of you've used a screen protector in the last few years, I hadn't until recently. They are very glass like now, if not actually glass. Not like the old days of disgusting plastic protectors. My wife had one on her iPhone and I didn't even notice.
I’m not exactly sure what they’re made out of, but mine cracked recently after a drop and looked just like glass (the screen was perfectly fine however). I made the mistake of grabbing the phone near the crack and ended up stabbing myself with a small shard that had splintered off.
Are we just not using the same screen protectors? I don't ever notice my screen protector and I've been using them for years. The only annoyance I can remember with those is applying the plastic flexible ones, but the rigid glass ones are very easy to apply.
I'm curious as to what you dislike so much about them.
I think there's an extremely wide sensitivity in range of eyes, I honestly cannot imagine how in the world a screen protector couldn't significantly affect color and brightness that comes from the display naturally (your comment is the first time I learned this isn't the common case, I swear)
For me it's feeling the ridge at the edges of the protector, as a do a swipes from the edge of the phone. For things like deleting mails, going back, or especially for usng the alt-tab like feature that my iphone 8 plus has.
Because if it falls to the ground you can just pull of the $10 glass layer and replace it like nothing happened, instead of sending in your phone for repair.
I have a somewhat deep scratch from keys that actually causes that area of the touchscreen to be less sensitive. If it’s in the 30% of the screen that sees 70% of the action it can be a big annoyance.
Try as hard as I can, my phone always finds my keys. I still go case-free but I strongly consider the case with every new phone or every new key mar.
What I'm really hoping is that MagSafe finally fulfills my dream of having a secure magnetically-attached wireless charging point in a car. Accessories to this effect theoretically exist already, but they all suck.
This is nice, but what I really want is for it to 1. be built into the car's dash or roof or something, 2. charge it, and 3. auto connect to CarPlay, all without needing a connector or setting up Bluetooth.
From the old indestructible Nokias, passing through a Sony Ericsson, a Nokia Windows Phone, and then the Moto G4. Until my previous phone.
My previous phone was a Moto G6, with glass in the back. In the second day, it fell from my lap and the back-glass broke completely, but stood in place with glass dust all over. I had to use a case (that is shipped with the phone, probably predicting this). I was pissed, always hated. All of that because of a useless aesthetic product decision.
Then I bought the latest iPhone SE, my first iPhone ever. I use it without a case and it fell, from various heights, probably more than 30 times now. The screen is intact, just a few scratches in the corners. I am pretty happy about it.
Edit: just in case anyone wants to know, I don’t like cases solely because it makes the phone larger. The “how easily and comfortably it fits in my pockets” is my main criteria. I don’t care about aesthetics much, consequently I also don’t care if my phone has scratches on its sides. That’s one reason I changed to the iPhone SE (small phone + great chip + privacy considerations). I would only ever consider buying the iPhone Mini out of these iPhone 12 line.
I didn't use a case for my iPhone 5, but it was very easy to grip. The 6 and later models, including the 11s and the SE 2020, have rounded edges that to me are really slippery and easy to drop.
The 12 seems to be similar to the 5 (and the iPad Pro), so let's see if it's any better to use without a case.
> have rounded edges that to me are really slippery and easy to drop.
And easier to crack the screen when it lands on the edge. I'm pretty sure I didn't drop my 6S more times than I dropped my iPhone 5 or 4S, but I cracked my 6S screen three times, whereas I never cracked my 5 or 4S screens at all.
I never use any protection on my iPhones. I find cases ugly and bulky; I want to enjoy the device's feel, design and engineering.
The iPhone 8 with it's full-glass enclosing has been surprisingly sturdy, surviving even rough drops with only a scratch. Plus if it breaks, I get two replacements with AppleCare, and the process is ridiculously smooth.
I never use cases. But then again, I break every phone eventually. My iPhone 8 has broken glass on both sides and a broken camera glass but it works well apart from that, so I was waiting for this announcement to get a new one.
Presented without comment: I always have my phone in a case and have never broken anything physical on any phone. My launch-day iPhone 8 still looks great.
On my last phone (Galaxy S8+) I was able to break both the back glass and front glass while it was in a Spigen case (two separate incidents). First time I broke the glass on any phone I've owned. I've moved up to an Otterbox now on my S20+ as I'm not going to let that happen again.
It must be my dry skin, but I cannot use my iPhone without a case. It's so damn slippery, it slides right through my fingers if I'm not careful to keep a death grip on it.
Another user without a case reporting in. I udnerstand that people try to protect their expensive devices, but it seems absurd to me to hide a beautiful device like an iPhone (particularly the 4-5 as well as the new 12 generation) in some form of mediocre wrapper.
However when carrying the phone in my pocket or bag I always use a fabric sleeve with microfiber inner lining. To me this approach is the best of both worlds: The pure device when in use, but protection when carrying it around - Plus, instead of having to put the device down on hard surfaces the sleeve serves as a soft bed for the phone. And the microfiber lining keeps the display clean.
All my past iPhones looked pretty much pristine when I sold them on ebay.
I'll add to the anecdotes: my iPhone 6 plus has no case, and looks like it was pulled out of a box a few hours ago. I don't understand the whole case universe/how people can drop their expensive phones so consistently.
I never used a case with my SE. i just try not to drop it. I had to get a case for my XS, reluctantly, because the camera is not level with the body... so I was afraid of scratching it, plus the phone didn’t lay flat on a table. The XS was made for use with a cover, not an option.
I used a case briefly but stopped (after it was damaged when I had precariously balanced it about 2m above the ground to use it as a torch and then knocked it to the tiles below). I don’t really suffer from the prevalence of broken screens. Am I just careful or is if from people with loose pockets running around or moving some other way (eg skateboarding)?
I occasionally drop it from my pocket onto not-too-hard ground without damage and I bent the corner a bit dropping it on tarmac when I was drunk once but otherwise it’s unscathed. Maybe I’m just super lucky.
I didn't use a case for my iPhone 3g. Or 4s. Or 5s. Dropped them all several times, never had more than dings on the metal edges.
Did the same for my 6S, and cracked the screen three times. The third it cracked time I upgraded to an iPhone XS; but my wife insisted I get a case, and it was hard to argue against.
I'm really glad they've moved back to the (apparently) more robust form factor of having squarish metal edges. I look forward to not having to use a case the next time I update.
Anecdotally, I tend to drop my phones from chair-level monthly, with no case, without issue. I dropped my Pixel 2 two stories onto concrete and only damaged the back glass cosmetically and the phone microphone slightly. Used it for another 4 months until the Pixel 4a finally came out. I've always assumed cases were overrated but haven never looked for any statistics.
I have an iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard. The magnetic attachment is fantastic. I can hold the palmrest on the keyboard, turn the whole thing upside down, and shake it without the iPad falling off.
From my first day of using them together all I could think was "I want this connection method on every tablet and phone"
Also, btw, the iPhone 12 MagSafe doesn't prevent you from using a case.
I never used a case. Only once my iPhone catapulted from my pocket once and the screen was broken, but still, that repair wasn't worth enough for me to use an ugly protector that kills the whole design of the iPhone.
I never used a phone in a case because I think cases make phones look uglier.
And also I'm careful with my phones, I dropped my phones several times and only once the glass shattered.
Iphone 12 tech specs says it has a depth of 7.44 mm. It's unclear if that includes the camera bump, but I'm going to to asssume it doesn't, because Apple.
Yeah. That extra 1.86 mm would probably add quite a lot of battery capacity, like 20-35% more.
Buttons on both sides also completely breaks the ability to use the volume rocker buttons as a camera shutter -- 'oh let me quickly grab my phone and take a pictu--- nope, I hit the sleep wake button, sorry'
I hate that iphone 6 and onward design decision ... (design-wise pretty much everything after iphone 6 has been a regression imo, although this one looks the best that any phone has looked in a long time -- aside from the notch)
I cannot understand how they keep the notch so big at this time. There are android phones that do the same without it AFAIK. I imagine that Steve would have not allowed it to last so long, but the current CEO only cares about money.
It's regressing back to a superior design. The hard edges are easier to hold, and also, you can rest the phone on it's edge without stand. I miss being able to rest my phone on it's edge.
Yes, it does, which is why the iPhone 4 was a terrible design. Pull the phone out of your pocket, and there's a 3-in-4 chance that you're "holding it wrong" right off the bat because the front and back feel the same.
No, thanks. Every surface on a phone needs to feel at least subtly different.
The glass front and the metal back always felt different to me... and in any case, the very first thing I did is look for the home button with my thumb.
In a way, yeah, definitely. Perhaps it's a bad sign for Apple, but good for consumers. It's a solid (and imho beautiful) design that works really well mechanically (iirc).
I'm treading into parts I don't know very well here, so treat this as a question: Is this perhaps a part of the de-Ive-ification process?
The magsafe is really cool but for anyone interested in the wallet accessory just be careful with putting NFC chipped cards there. Paying with Apple Pay from your phone could get confusing.
The protocol does support anticollision so technically multiple cards (the NFC-enabled phone, which simply emulates one) can work and the card terminal would let you pick which one to choose, but in practice I don't think that is implemented and the choice of card you'd end up paying with is essentially "undefined behavior".
I guess it depends on what you need to carry with you. For example, I only carry my medical insurance card if I’m going to the doctor. It’s not an every day carry. Likewise, I only carry my HSA card when I am going to buy something that can be covered by the HSA (not that often). I have a work-issued credit card but I only carry it when I’m on a work trip (and even then I generally leave it in my wallet inside my luggage unless I know I will need it that day).
On 99% of days over the past two years, I’ve left my wallet at home and only carried my phone with only with two cards: my personal credit card and my drivers license.
At least in WA state, vehicle insurance card can be electronic. Health insurance card is electronic. That leaves an ID, one CC (in case "they" don't take Apple Pay), and a Health Saving Account card that oddly cannot be added to Apple Pay. Looking in the wallet, I guess I carry my credit union debit card, too.
The point is not to brag, but point out that two of those cards get taken out because there are electronic alternatives. Some states allow electronic driver's licenses, too. Subtract those three, and there's your "3-4" in your wallet. And a fuel card, FFS, for a fleet card that couldn't be an NFC/RFID fob like Exxon has had for a decade? Which in turn might as well be a reader on the pump for your NFC payment of choice.
I suppose you would, and I print a copy for each vehicle and do just that. So I suppose it doesn't save anything, wallet-wise, but I keep electronic cards for each vehicle just because it's probably easier to find when it's needed than digging through that black abyss of a glove box.
Fuel card I don't carry, but I can picture parent comments having a fuel card attached to their name, but they might drive a different vehicle each work day ("fleet card" tells me it's for work, not personal).
In Sydney Australia, I have a Government app for an electronic Driver License. My public and private health insurance details are just numbers, the physical cards aren't necessary. So while I do still carry a wallet, it's only out of habit and I really should stop it.
Any cards which are specific for driving (e.g. fleet fuel, insurance, physical license as backup, etc) could live inside your car in a "driving wallet".
There's no point switching from lightning to USB-C now. The MagSafe (should make it just as nice to charge while using the phone) and dropping earpods in the packaging kind of confirms a suspicion I've had that they really, really want to get rid of the port all-together on iPhones. They've switched to USB-C on iPad.. there it makes sense, they're making it more like a laptop. But phones will go all-wireless. Like, there's no other logical explanation now considering they're going all-in on USB-C on MacBooks and iPads.
They don't want to do the switch now because they don't want to send the wrong signal to accessory makers. They want them to focus on Bluetooth and wireless charging.
If they knew it'd take this long to get here, maybe they'd have switched to USB-C at an earlier stage. I know there were many blunders and delays with things like wireless charging and Bluetooth 5 audio. So the situation has become kind of awkward.
While I see Apple moving towards that direction, I don't know how it will play with things that DO need a connection: for example aux port in the car, or connecting a drone controller (these are two examples from my daily life, I'm pretty much sure there are many others)
The answer is Bluetooth dongles. I’ve got a Bluetooth to aux adapter in my car, and it works a treat. I much prefer it to when I had my (original) SE hooked up with a physical aux cord, since it doesn’t wear out from fiddling with it and it automatically turns on and connects when I start my car.
Exactly charging by cable is basically out of date now. There's so many wireless charging options for nothing on Amazon, using a cable is the back up option.
The only place I could see this not being the case is in older cars which require plug-in for some features like CarPlay.
But eh, it's an expensive device. An extra cord (also for cheap on Amazon) isn't a big deal.
This is a good point. Though the battery management seems to have gotten good enough that these speed charges are less necessary.
Funny thing is the only time I run out of juice now is if I did not place my iPhone on the wireless charger straight enough. Apple spoke specifically to this pain so it must be widespread.
Also occasionally when traveling, so combination of long days + higher than normal usage. I've got a battery case for those days that more or less doubles the built in capacity (at the cost of also basically doubling the weight)
There is wireless Carplay, my previous BMW had it like 2 years ago? I hope it will get more common. No cable required. There is also wireless charging on the middle console. Worked quite well.
The problem is that people don't upgrade their cars every few years like they upgrade their iPhones. There are many people out there who still don't have a wireless connectivity system whether just for Bluetooth music or CarPlay.
Give it a year (or two)! They probably want to go straight to full MagSafe rather than USB-C. However, if they drop Lightning right now, nobody will be able to charge their phones. It'll take a year or two for magsafe/Qi/etc to be ubiquitous enough that they'll feel comfortable dropping lightning.
We'll see! There are so many problems with wireless charging that I don't see it becoming truly mainstream. Not being able to use your phone while charging is the most visible one (maybe 15W via magsafe will make it fast enough it doesn't matter). I also have trust issues with wireless charging in general - I got a free wireless charger from TripleByte once that overheated my phone and only got it to 60%. I'm still hoping for USB-C
I’ve given up, ikea has cheap Qi chargers now, bought three and put them in strategic places of the house. Wasteful laziness but it’s oh so convenient.
Since the new Magsafe charger is a slim puck on a long cord, I'm thinking you could still hold it and use the phone while charging, alleviating the 'can't charge while using it' issue which was one of my concerns too
I actually scratched my iPhone 8 a few weeks ago (using the light on my phone while working under my car...my fault). I've never scratched an iPhone (or used a screen protector) since the 4S.
FWIW, I tried to use my iPhone X without a screen protector but the glass was getting scratched all to hell. I had no worries about it cracking or anything, but it seems to have been a common problem:
What are you using it for, driving nails? I had many smartphones in over a decade and never a single scratch on a screen, without using any screen protector.
The X was just bad for tiny scratches. Mine had a bunch and it was stored in my pocket without anything else in the pocket to scratch it. It was the only phone I had that scratched like this.
yeah, if you put your phone in a pocket together with you key fob then that's not so different from using it to drive nails :) Fortunately, even skinny jeans usually have more than one pocket.
Unfortunately the iPhone 11 Pro has a softer screen, I had mine accumulating permanent scratches within just a few days which surprised me as every other phone I’ve owned had no issues without a screen protector.
So iPhone 11 Pro max become the first phone I had to buy a screen protector for, really disappointing in such an expensive phone.
Do you keep it inside a purse or in a pocket with keys?
I got mine on launch and have zero scratches. I've even zoned out at work and started writing on the screen with a pen a few times, but it's still perfectly smooth. I grabbed a piece of metal and started scratching at my screen halfway through this post just to double check, and it's still fine.
Do scratches really matter anymore? The screens now get so bright I don’t see them unless I’m really looking for them. Cracks are the far bigger problem.
Glass screens are reasonably resistant to scratching, but they're very prone to shattering. A tempered glass screen protector acts like a crumple zone, dissipating energy and spreading shock loads that would otherwise shatter the underlying screen.
earlier version of gorilla glass used to be very hard to scratch but easy to shatter, now, the glass is easy to scratch but hard to shatter. I forget the actual references, but from corning spokeperson, they focus more on shattering for recent version
Nope... it just seems to make the glass stronger (more shatter resistant). Which is unfortunate, given how bad iPhones scratch over the last few generations.
I don't put my iphone in the same pocket as my keys and my phone is scratch free after 3 years. The screens are made of sapphire, you don't need a screen protector.
[edit] Not made of sapphire. My head has been in the sand.
It looks impressive, but why does everybody talk in that weird way;"Wow. What an exciting day." It feels so weird and artificial. It actually makes them sound less enthusiastic and genuine to me.
They also present a lot of features (especially photos), but without comparison I am left wondering, how much better is the new stuff. And why should I buy it...
Sounds great with that new glass too; I wondered if they would show how much better it is -- Maybe do something funny, risky, and slightly stupid like the Cybertruck incident. Nope: Just 4x better than before -- Whatever those 4x means. Get some hammers out -- Do something...
The A14 is also faster than before. No real-life demo comparison. Wouldn't it have been easy to compare the games on the GPUs (stuttering frame rate on one side)? Just something. If you can't show us why it is better, it is not good enough.
Oh, and why no actual live demos with the phone instead of just 100 great photos and videos of the phone and by the phone?
The old keynotes had a slide with the comparison of the mini, normal, pro models and the end. Those actually served as an informative summary at the end. Instead Tim Cook just told us what we had seen, and that "it was the day everybody had waited for", and then I am left struggling to remember why the pro is more expensive and how much more it was...
They may be the best at this, and it does feel (overly) polished, but I feel the old much simpler Jobs keynotes were far ahead in enthusiasm and far more entertaining. Sorry.
> why does everybody talk in that weird way;"Wow. What an exciting day." It feels so weird and artificial
This gets me every time. It's so artificial that I'm pulling my hair. I honestly don't know, why everyone is always so so "excited". Every time I hear someone say "this is exciting", I think BS. We had a colleague and his go-to phrase was "This is super exciting". "SUPER EXCITING!"
Where do you live?
Because I'm from Europe and I used to work for a US company but in a European office and it was kind of a running joke among us that the people from the HQ would always call everything "amazing" and have these all-hands meetings that felt like rallies to us.
I think this fits the cliché that we have about Americans, although I'm sure it's not like that everywhere.
I'm from Czech, but live in Silicon Valley. For last 10 years I have been really struggling with this. Every time someone calls something "amazing", I automatically ask them politely to tell me what they really think. Oh boy, I heard some harsh feedback after the first "it's amazing".
Thanks for the link. Pretty much sums up my experience. And I can say it isn't so much about Easter European... it is more like American vs the Rest of the World.
Oh man, as a Yank who has worked at startups, I feel like that’s just the sales people we have sadly perfected. “Let’s all cheer instead of whistling past the graveyard.” FWIW, devs here struggle with it too.
I believe you can generally just capture a scene with a lot of dynamic range (say a person standing in front of a flat wall with the light falloff ranging from dark to overexposed) and then zoom in on a frame and you'll see more or less banding because of the tough decisions the capture device has to make on what data to throw away/reduce and what to keep
I kinda don't think Tim was in the theatre. It's much more likely he's match moved and laid over pre-recorded renders. they're not the first tech group I've seen go to full pre-recorded footage like this, it takes _all_ the risk out of a failed demo.
With my browser (chrome) it was H.264. Still, I'd take 6 Mbps H.264 over 1.5 Mbps H.265 any day. I'm sure the apple stream was VBR as well - I tried to pick a representative/average segment to do the quick calcs on.
I was wondering how they'd done the house with open sides. Looked really realistic but even apple don't have enough money to burn on stripping the side wall of a house off for a 10 minute segment... or do they?
They built it, it's really not that difficult. The sky, view through window and trees around it look like they were added after. The top floor may have been a seperate piece perhaps.
Maybe I'm being too negative but other parts of the production are throwing me off. The white balance is so cold and the profile photo style vignetting and background blur is so overbearing.
Its a great keynote but I would have preferred more subtlety in the production toys.
They supposedly use Keynote, but I think with these presentations it's more likely custom motion graphics in After Effects or possibly Final Cut Pro if Apple is imposing in-house software.
Apple have an in house team that specialize in just these kind of keynote slides. I imagine it's worked up mostly in keynote, maybe with a bit of extra software like After Effects on the side.
They employ an outside company to do the bigger CG graphics, promo introductions and renders of the devices
One could argue that a company like Stripe's target demographic is _precisely_ the enterprise markets; yet, their product pages are slick af! Smooth scrolling, animations and all that jazz.
Because they're made up of folks who love JavaScript (and animations, of course)
Apple's marketing team is similar. They're probably a bunch of people who _love_ making videos; probably studied film or art or spent a ton of time on Final Cut Pro etc etc.
Stripe has some serious frontend considerations too. I think their original value point was lowering friction in payment systems and reasonable rates. Stripe still does those things really really well, but so did Braintree (now part of PayPal).
Where Stripe absolutely nailed it is the infrastructure around it. Their SDK documentation and continous improvements still outpace Braintree.
For instance, Stripe has custom elements that you can use to interact seamlessly with their SDK, with little setup needed[0]
I could not find a similiar integration from Braintree.
Compartively, I find their informational SDK page a bit more polished than Braintree, respectively, though I realize some of this is personal style and taste, Stripe has clear pathways for me to find the information I want right on the side bar and referenced throughout the landing page for the client SDK[1] where as Braintree[2] is more narrowly focused, which with payments, may mean I miss a better set of features I should be aware of.
Reducing frictions and painpoints is what they won with, in the end. It was easy to setup and maintain. How many 3rd party services have both of those things that handle something as complex as payments? I can't even get AWS integrations with their own SDKs working together without some effort
Could this be because Stripe has to sell, essentially, to developers, not executives, unlike most B2B products? Developers love slick product pages as much as the next guy, but none of that matters if sales are made over golf sessions with executives.
Although I personally feel it may just be innate appreciation or love of the craft. It's interesting to compare Stripe with other providers such as PayPal, AWS/Amazon, Square. AWS is (and has been) focussed on selling to developers, startups to massive companies. Yet, their product pages aren't as slick as Stripe's. They built out their product with the ethos from the Retail side -- frugality, ship fast & often etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's a tired and specious argument that might have held water if Apple were only successful for a year or two. There are a myriad of devices from competitors who also had large marketing budgets but eventually disappeared into the night.
But it's essentially been 13 years (if you only start counting from the introduction of the iPhone). Great engineering/product deserves a big marketing budget. They go hand in hand.
"The iPhone mini fits in the palm of you hand" lol.
It's interesting that a reasonably sized phone is now a selling point in itself.
In general i like keeping my devices for as long as possible - so when i jumped from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 10, i was surprised to learn that the phone was hard to use with one hand now, extremely slippery and way, way heavier than my iphone 6.
The mini seems like a good size for me. The Pro 12 looks absolutely amazing though! I usually don't fanboy but goddamn their product design is stellar.
I think I'm the only person who likes iOS's reachability gesture. The only annoying thing about it is sometimes it will trigger touchUpInside for buttons along the bottom of the screen, navigating me away from the screen I was on.
It is a software-bandaid to cover the physical design problem of a one-handed device that is too big to be used with one hand.
I realize that research shows people use bigger phones more, but I'm the odd one out. I've been on the X, and it is too big. I use my phone far less than I did when they were smaller. It is just awkward and annoying.
I'll have to hold the Mini to see if it is small enough to actually make a difference, I might actually buy a new phone before the old one croaks.
bandaid is a strong word to describe a feature I love
I actually consider individual app designs the problem
iOS navigation is such that you shouldnt need to use the top portion of the screen, to go back you can swipe from the left edge to right, except some apps override that default behavior
> iOS navigation is such that you shouldnt need to use the top portion of the screen, to go back you can swipe from the left edge to right, except some apps override that default behavior
This was true with the first jumbo phones, but is less the case now. Notification Center and the Control Center both require you to swipe down from the top of the screen. The "Back to previous app" function is also a very narrow touch target all the way at the topmost left edge of the screen.
miniswipe on the bottom, miniswipe from the center of the screen
if you weren't using iphones for the last 5 years I can see how it would be perceived as an antipattern. if you've been using computers for a while though, then I've seen worse.
I may be the only person who has never taken the time to figure out how to intentionally call the reachability feature. I just know that sometimes everything shifts down on the screen and it has never been on purpose, and then I have to figure out how to undo it - usually by turning the screen off and back on.
I am on the 11 (I think? I've lost track, but its the one with three cameras), and the screen is slightly too large for easy one-handed use, at least in my case. I might opt for the mini if/when I decided to get a new phone, but throwing $1000 at a new toy just because it's slightly more comfortable in my hand feels like a very "first-world" solution to a not-really-problem. None of the other features this phone comes with feel like they bring any extra value to my life or warrant an upgrade.
But hey, newer, faster chips mean it can probably run Doom now, right?
Wow that was easy once it was explained... Thank you internet stranger. I can now operate the device I carry on my person all the time with a little more grace.
You and me both, friend. I hate reachability with a passion, for the simple fact that when I got my first iPhone I had never heard of the feature, and it's literally taken me 1 year to understand why sometimes my screen would look weird. No amount of Googling or searching the settings helped, until someone mentioned the magic keyword "Reachability". Which then was easy to disable.
So it might be a cool feature, but if you don't know about it you'll go mad trying to understand what is wrong with your phone. And it's not like Apple is good at teaching users about power user gestures. I still feel I'm not using my iPhone at its full capacity yet.
I find the feature to be entirely useless. In my usual hand position I can't trigger the mode and I can't reach the back button which ios places in the top left corner for some reason.
Reachability has come a long way, too. On TouchID phones, it was always fiddly, double-touching (but not pressing) the home button, but the gesture that replaced it on FaceID devices feels natural. I was originally apprehensive about moving to a larger phone yet again after the iPhone 6, but it has more or less made "big phones" a non-issue for me.
There are one or two apps I use that seem to reliably have the touchUpInside issue you describe, so I wonder if it's down to their implementation. The Redfin app in particular is terrible with this.
I fully agree. It's insane that Apple makes screens too big to use with one hand AND puts important controls like the back button at the top of the screen. Like you were saying, it's really frustrating that the reachability gesture triggers things in apps--e.g., Twitter's navigation menu completely overlaps with the reachability gesture area, so you can virtually never hit the "back" button because the reachability gesture will reliably send you to Twitter's "search" page.
It uses the accelerometer that has already been built in to iPhones going way way back (actually ALL iPhones have at least a 3-axis accelerometer), so that's why there is so much support for older devices.
It was added in iOS 14. Not hardware specific. It works on my iPhone 11 Pro Max. It's an accessibility feature that has to be specifically turned on though.
IMO the reachability gesture improves about 20% of situations where one more tap is required, and for all the other situations I find I need more than one tap.
I would say my usage is inverted. 80% of the time it's one-tap; however, of that 80%, 90% is just hitting the back button. Move the back button to the bottom where it's reachable with one hand and ~75% of the use case for reachability is solved (for me, at least).
I just configured this and it seems kind of clunky? The phone seems pretty inconsistent about registering the taps and even when it does it's slow to respond.
Even the iPhone 6 is too big to use one-handed, and I have giant sasquatch hands. I got one from work when they first came out, and ended up sticking with my iPhone 5. I also really dislike the protruding camera lens, and now all phones do that. The phone can't even lie flat on a surface. Bigger is not better. I use a Pixel 2 right now, and it's the perfect size for my hand. It also has a protruding lens, but with a slim cover, it's fine.
I have a 4" iPhone SE. It’s great, but the web is becoming less and less usable as designers/developpers have larger phones and forget smaller screen sizes. It’s common to have cookies/newsletter popins with a button that’s too far below the screen, and sticky menus are the hell.
It's also unfortunate that many iOS apps have totally neglected support for 4" devices and it's all too common to see apps in which the viewport is far too small due to other UI elements covering the screen (e.g. Uber and Google Maps).
Things like that are why I don't auto-update apps carte blanche. Except banking and security-related ones.
I really would like to automate backup of every version of every app I own, so that I could pick and choose which to install. It seems pretty doable with just scripting, but haven't really explored it.
Also an iPhone SE user, a smaller form factor is definitely important for me. I've actually ordered a Nokia 2720 flip phone. Features might be limited but it'll be good to have as a backup and to play around on.
The diagonal screen measurement is meaningless because of improved screen-to-body ratios. The iPhone 12 Mini is smaller than the 4.7" iPhone 6/7/8, despite having a significantly bigger screen.
Iphones always had screens that were close to the sides which is what really matters. The chin and forehead don't matter for reachability because you never had to reach them.
I use Jelly, a tiny smartphone that fits the little keychain pocket of my running shortpants, I don't even feel it while running. They released a newer version of it, Jelly 2, if you're interested in small phones.
I looked and I like everything I see about it except for the mediocre camera. I want exactly what I see there, but with a premium camera and maybe a better SoC. I'm not looking for a cheap budget phone, but for that form factor and I'd pay for it. I'd have a hard time giving up my Pixel 3's camera, it'd be odd to have to start carrying around a separate camera.
Kinda reminds me of my first gen Palm Pre. Loved that phone.
In my eyes, phones actually provide mediocre quality. Even the ones Apple released today, notice how bad are the night shots they display on the website.
I have a dslr with two fixed (portrait and panorama) lenses, and night or day, every single shot is timeless. The quality won’t be outperformed by the next smartphone getting released next year. Of course, I can’t spontaneously shoot photos, need to decide when I want to actually shoot photos so I carry my camera.
Which is not a cons, even an advantage, if you’re truly looking for quality, not quantity.
I'd pay decent money for a 4 inch phone as well. I've been in the Apple ecosystem for years but decided to search for a current Android phone that's around that size, but couldn't find anything decent.
That's actually not a bad suggestion! I'd miss being able to snap the occasional photo, but I could always carry my old iPhone if I anticipate the need for that.
A third of an inch is definitely enough to affect one-handed reach/operation (ask anyone who's played typical electric vs classical guitars), but it is nice that the mini's part of the lineup, and I might even replace my trusty 5SE with the 12 mini in a year or so, depending on how much performance issues are starting to show for the SE and how annoying/easy audio and other interconnectivity is on the port-handicapped phones.
(Yes, I know, airpod/bluetooth connectivity works well for your use case. No, that doesn't mean it's not inconvenient and maybe even product-choice-driving for other people.)
Completely agree with you. I’m typing this on my trusty SE. Work gave me an XR back in February which I tried for a week, horrendous device.
While the lack of 3.5mm is a drawback, the phone looks only a few mm wider that the (2016)SE, which feels like the best I’m going to get befor they EOL the SE.
The wireless charging may be good enough to solve the clunkyness of having to have a lightning+3.5mm adapter.
My wife has the Se based on the iPhone 5 and I have the iPhone Xs Max. When I look at her phone it reminds me of looking in the viewfinder of a digital camera. She likes the size and will stick with smaller.
That followed the original PowerBook ad with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in middle seat, middle section, coach to highlight how small the computer was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr5jdvAhxoM
Phablets also fit in the palms of some people’s hands. There’s a surprisingly wide range of human variation in hand size.
My larger-limbed friends used to complain about how hard it was to operate dinky candy-bar phones with their large fingers. And today, they’re perfectly happy holding and tapping on a Galaxy S20 Ultra, presuming the display has been scaled up.
Even a 2016 iPhone SE is significantly larger than the candy-bars of yore, though. I have large hands (my hand span, thumb to pinky, measures 26 cm). I have an iPhone 7 for work, and while it does fit in my palm, it does so much less comfortably than my SE. Going even larger is a non-starter.
Yes, there are people with hands large enough that phablets fit in them, but only if you loosen the definition of "fit".
Remember when they used a person with extra large hands for advertising the iPhone 1, so it looked smaller? If you consider how phone sizes have developed, it is quite funny IMO.
It's equally as ridiculous to say "small phones are a niche" in 2019 when nobody was selling small phones, as it was to say "phablets are a niche" in 2013 when Apple wasn't selling a big phone.
I would bet that the Mini will be a runaway bestseller.
I guess “runaway” is kind of hard to define, huh? Obviously bestseller means “outsells all other sizes.”
The king of leaks* claims that Apple expects the regular size iPhone to make up 40% of sales, and the Mini, Pro and Pro Max splitting the remainder roughly evenly. IMO, if the Mini share is something like 35% and the regular size is 25%, that’s blasting past Apple’s (or at least the most prolific insider’s) expectations.
As for determining the winner... that’s a little tricky. I was thinking browser stats, but 12 and 11 Pro have same screen resolution... I’m willing to take word of “Omdia” or whatever barely credible research firm wants to speak up when Apple is reporting their winter quarter earnings.
I’m poor, so say $250 to the loser’s charity of choice?
Not the parent but my daughters have refused to upgrade from their original iPhone SEs because all the newer phones are so much bigger and more slippery.
Personally, I went from an 8+ to an 11 because the 11 fits better in my pants pocket. I thought about the 11 Pro just because of the smaller size but couldn't justify the price.
Six months from now (after 5G gets proven one way or the other) the 12 Mini would be really tempting.
Apple simply prioritised pixel density over screen size. Once they’d gone to retina resolution displays, they didn’t want to drop the resolution to make a bigger phone and still have good performance and battery life.
Bear in mind the 6+ was actually a bit under powered for its screen. While overall it was acceptably performant, mine noticeably lagged compared to a 6 in graphically intensive applications, so they did the transition just when they could get away with having both high resolution and acceptable performance.
It's not an "excuse". It's an affirmative choice, and it was the right choice, in the opinion of many.
Yes, some Android devices do manage to beat Apple to market with various specs or features, occasionally. Usually in a way that is compromised, half-baked, or results in other issues. If you prefer that approach, there are plenty of Android phones you can buy and use for, oh, maybe 6-12 months before their version of the OS is permanently outdated and can't ever be updated. Have at.
Facts are facts, you're clearly an Apple fanboy the way you're responding. There were large screen Android phones that were running 60fps in Geekbench before Apple, so clearly the GPU performance and density existed and was shipping.
Apple actively advertised (real print ad campaigns) AGAINST large screen phones, they said they were un-ergonomic and too large of a form factor to hold and use single handed. The company had a real psychological opposition resisting large screen phones and gave non-technical justifications for their opposition.
Simultaneously, Steve Jobs attacked mini-tablets, claiming "7″ tablets should come with sandpaper, so users can file down their fingers"
So let's just be clear here: Apple creates a PR narrative that something sucks unless they do it, even if that thing categorically sucks (non-one-handed-use-phones, mini tablets). Specs don't matter when Apple devices consistently had inferior performance, and now that Apple Silicon leads, of course specs are front and center.
What's happened is, after they ship, they ret-con the reasons why it took so long, in order to provide an excuse that they had misjudged the market, that Steve Jobs had been wrong in his intuition about big phones and small tablets.
Pretty rich being summarily called an "Apple fanboy" by an actual Google employee who then posts the most tendentious possible reply. But I noticed you didn't actually rebut what I said. I also noticed that you found it necessary to bring up 8-year-old issues as a distraction tactic.
This Google employee happens to own every iPhone since exception, a Mac Pro (cheese grater), Mac Pro (trash can), an iMac, multiple AppleTVs, multiple Apple Watches.
It's possible to like Apple HW and still dislike the company's messaging and PR.
I waited years to get the SE2 and it turned out to be the size of iPhone 8. The same iPhone 8 that introduced the double-tap to fix the “thumb reach problem” which Apple usd to proudly tout for the ORIGINAL iPhone 5 and SE.
The original iPhone SE (same size as the iPhone 5) would have about a 5" screen if it was edge-to-edge[1], and this is 5.4", so probably larger than the old SE and smaller than the new SE.
I've liked the iPhone X size but I do have big hands. I also find that I certainly feel more secure holding with a case with rubberized edges. Using it in one hand is sort of important to me. In normal times I often have a phone in one hand and food/beverage in another at events. The Plus sizes have always felt a bit too large to me.
I would have upgraded this year normally. With travel mostly shut down for a while though, I may end waiting another year. I don't need an upgrade for mostly using around the house.
I was looking at the bit when they showed that gaming app and I kept looking at the phone in her hands and thinking it was a max, but they hadn't shown the pro max yet and thought they were swapping different phones in and out for different shots, but I think she just had tiny hands. (Relatively, I probably just have massive hands)
marketing is absurdly relative and cyclic, smartphone sold you custom icons and wallpapers just like microsoft salesmen did in 82. Now they'll try to make small looks cool again. Wait for the iphone nano with only half a screen and new piezohaptic actuator matrix underneath.
I believe the trend is more about people using their phones as their main computing device so a bigger screen is desirable to many. I'm still on the original iPhone SE but the battery is definitely on it's last legs.
It only costs about $50 USD for a battery replacement from an authorized Apple service provider. If you're satisfied with the device otherwise, a new battery will keep it going for far cheaper than a new device.
FWIW, I just got an original SE new in the box for around $130 a few months ago after my last one went for a swim, and it came with 96% of the original battery capacity as reported by iOS.
My goal was for it to just last me until the 12 came out, but I'm still on the fence about whether the better camera (and water resistance...) are worth the additional bulk.
I used an original SE until my current XS. I didn’t want a larger screen, necessarily, but UIs started making buttons smaller and it became harder and harder to use. My Airpods also work better with the XS, and I assume it is because the smaller size has antenna limitations (although I know nothing about the subject).
From the market research I've seen, Americans were actually reasonably happy with the old phone sizes - the move towards larger phones was driven more by international (particularly Asian) consumers.
Part of this is because a smartphone is a "primary computing device" in those countries, whereas Americans tended to have tablets, laptops and TVs as well.
Believe it or not there was a real reason for bigger phones. They realized that most people still couldn't single handle the standard size smartphone, so if the majority of the population was going to have to use two hands the phone makers may as well jack the size up as much as possible to take advantage of the larger battery size and additional features.
There is obviously a market for big phones, though it was always odd to me that Apple went from a normal sized (now small) phone to big and even bigger.
There are obviously various profit motivations. Bigger phones are easier to throw more tech in since you're less constrained by physical size while also making the devices thinner. There was also no risk of losing market share since nobody makes smaller phones anymore. And lastly, most people still bought the product that was available.
I am excited to see this return to a smaller form factor. I hope we can get a Pro model eventually and decouple budget and size.
I feel we need to talk about the charger. It is not included in the box. The reasoning is that we have our chargers from previous iPhones. But those white boxes all take USB-A. The included cable is USB-C. Never mind, I will just use the USB-C charger from other devices. But wait... the cable that comes in the box is USB-C male and those adapters from other devices don't take USB-C (either fixed cable, or USB-A, or non-standard female port).
So there are only two possibilities here: you have a USB-C charger, or you don't.
If you do, like I do, then you don't buy one. If you don't, then you buy one: Apple sells them, everyone else sells them.
There's nothing to talk about: I've thrown my last two included chargers in a box, where they languish next to my Lightning-cable-equipped EarPods. I'm unlikely to get a new phone in this cycle, but if I did, the difference would be two gizmos which I won't use, won't be included.
Then why include the cable? Apple sells them, everyone else sells them. You are missing the point here. A better solution is to put something like this in the box: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B079LYHNSR/
Cables work harden and eventually fail. I've never had a cable last as long as a device, or even up to the next upgrade.
But if they took them out in the next iteration, I'd shrug, I have plenty at home.
This is Apple we're talking about. They'll sell you dongles all day, but include one? Not a chance. Apple said it's USB-C time at least four years ago, end of. I don't expect them to ever release a new product with a USB-A port on it.
That would be another accessory I don't need because I have plenty, and also, because I barely use them anymore.
Yeah, and the USB A to lightning cables they came with still work fine on the new phones. Just because it comes with a USB C cable doesn’t mean you have to use it.
Seems especially frustrating for folks who are upgrading from a non-iPhone with a non-USB-C wall wart. If you're unfortunate to end up in that situation and you don't have a laptop with USB-C... you literally won't be able to charge your new iPhone.
Especially worrying because I don't have a personal laptop with USB-C or any USB-C wall warts. I have a lot of friends who don't have any USB-C gadgets at all. Kids who finally get old enough for a phone will be in for a rude awakening.
To be honest this doesn't seem like that large of an issue. The primary market for this device is people who already own an iphone. They already have lightning charging capabilities in their bedroom, in their car. A new charger is pretty optional for the "main" market.
There is a minority of people, like myself, who are basically entirely on USB-C and can charge my laptop, ipad and android phone all on the same cable. Including lightning to USB-C is... well, honestly, it's not that stupid because most of my charging ecosystem now is USB-C, so this very slightly lessens the blow. Slightly.
Who am I kidding, I really wish it was just USB-C.
"They already have lightning charging capabilities in their bedroom, in their car": The issue is not about the lightning end of things. It is the other end. I'm an iPhone user since 2007. Not having a USB-A_to_lightning solution in the box is super inconvenient. It would have cost Apple $2 to either include a split USB-C/USB-A cable or a small USB-A_to_USB-C adapter.
How is it inconvenient if, as you point out, you already have lightning infrastructure from the last 10 years of ownership? If anything, including usb-C to lightning is better for future proofing as it allows you to connect your phone to a new macbook for instance, which is capability you probably don't already have but may eventually need.
Not just non-iPhone users. I have been on iPhone since it first came out. Last upgrade was 2.3 yrs ago. All the wall warts I have from past iPhones are USB-A.
Then people will but the USB-C adapter but in 2-3 years Apple will be removing the charging port altogether and introduce wireless charging only!
I actually don't like that they removed the accessories from the box, unless they can prove that they reduced the cost of the phone's overall price.
I sell my accessories to other people which reduces the phones overall cost by a non-insignificant amount. People will happily pay $5 less for a 2nd hand (but brand new and unused) Apple accessory like earpods/adapter if it's genuine since there are so many fakes out there.
That is how you dent the "premium" perception you have built over several decades. You don't want your users buying $1500 phones and then having to search the web for solutions and pick up $5 converters off Amazon. You could have easily included one in the box.
I was wondering about those while watching the keynote, but now that I see the price of 10$ I think most people would rather buy a cheap USBC charger at 10$ instead of an adapter?
The most disappointing aspect to me is that the difference between the Pro and the Pro Max is no longer just the size. I'm quite fond of the size of my 11 Pro and I don't really want to be upsold to the Pro Max if I want the best.
I was hoping so badly that the rumors were wrong and even the smallest option came in a full featured pro version. I don't get these enormous phones except for older folks who struggle with small controls. All options are super frustrating to me. Small, touch id and best camera is what I want.
I feel like I'm going insane. On every single model revealed today, there is a differently-colored patch on the right side of the phone, below the power button. What is it?
It's not the SIM card slot - that's on the left side. It's not a new TouchID sensor - the website doesn't even mention it at all. And yet it exists in every single render.
I kept thinking it was the SIM card slot earlier in the presentation, but from what I've read on Reddit it sounds like it's part of the 5G antennae array.
I started watching the keynotes with 2 tech friends when I was like 16 years old and as we grew older (am 27 now) they are the only events across the year where we sit down, talk a bit about tech and make fun of all the stupid bullshit in the keynote.
Watched for a little bit, gave up. I used to find them very interesting back in the Jobs era, but now they're pretty boring. I think partly it's just because the tech is maturing so there's less exciting stuff to show, but it's also definitely down to a much less crisp presentation style.
I have zero interest in Apple, never owned one since the very first iPod mini, but I still find their marketing department to be fantastic. These virtual keynotes also have amazing production quality.
I do agree the talking parts could be maybe 50% shorter though.
The way I avoid stressing about this is by realizing that the iPhone camera is still way worse than a real dedicated camera with a large optical path (lens and sensor). If you care about good photos, the Pro Max won't get you that far in the grand scheme of things.
This isn't as generally true as you seem to think it is. There are absolutely a few situations where a mirrorless / DSLR camera is going to run circles around a smartphone camera, but fewer than you might think.
A mirrorless camera may have a wider dynamic range by default, but modern iPhones have incredible Smart HDR capabilities that actually work really well. With a mirrorless, they can do an auto HDR effect using several photos, but it's a much simpler effect, and you can't get RAW photos when using that. The new iPhone 12 will capture RAW photos even when applying Deep Fusion and other advanced techniques, from what they mentioned on stage today.
I'm fairly sure no common mirrorless camera is going to be able to do HDR video at the level that the iPhone 12 will do it.
If Apple or Google would make a mirrorless camera that combined their intelligent camera software with a larger sensor, that would be epic. Right now, there are always trade-offs, no matter which camera you pick.
I've thought about getting a mirrorless camera to have that massive sensor for night photography, and to have the variety of lenses, but it's a lot of money for something substantial to have to carry around, and the difference just isn't what it used to be.
Even if you're printing these photos, an iPhone 12 is going to be able to take a lot of really crisp, excellent photos. With the help of LiDAR, I think the 12 Pro will be able to create a really compelling portrait mode effect that's less glitchy than the current techniques that don't have an accurate depth map instantly available.
Computational photography is a real thing, and it's impressive how much they have made up for the lack of physical space that would be required for a giant sensor.
If you scroll back on this twitter feed, you can see some nice examples of pictures shot on iPhone by various people: https://twitter.com/halidecamera
They're not "nice for a smartphone" pictures. They're just good pictures.
So true, in pre-covid era I traveled with only a cabin luggage for two and had no space for my DSLR + lenses. So while my DSLR had better image quality, actually I enjoyed more taking photos, filtering, editing and sharing them on the spot with my iPhone.
I would never ever go back to shooting with my DSLR on holidays. I did it and it's just painful to carry around whole day. My iPhone does so much more than my DSLR for a fraction the space & weight of one of my lenses ...
Using a proper dslr or mirrorless does make a measurable difference in terms of the depth of focus, aperture, image size, speed, etc. The lenses in the latest iphone can't really compete with a quality camera lens.
However as I mentioned those cameras are not fun to carry around all day unlike my phone. They are bulky and heavy, so I prefer not to use them except in important events or just around the house. And these days phone cameras are getting rather good for the average user's use case like posting to instagram.
I still use a 6S because of the headphone jack, lots of long conference calls where my Airpods die and being able to quickly switch to a plug-in headset (while the phone is on a charger!) is such a convenience.
If they can have a camera bump for the cameras, why not a little bump for a headset jack???
Assuming you mean the 2016 iPhone SE, in the US you cannot buy it from a retail store - it is not presently available on the market as new stock (that i'm aware of). You can only get them used, refurbed, or maybe NoS if you're lucky.
Not trying to be pedantic but where do you see this? I do not see the SE even listed in Apple's refurbished store anymore and I am struggling to find any documentation or evidence suggesting it is available thru Apple authorized resellers (no inventory I can find at ATT, T-Mobile, Verizon, etc)
FWIW I've been using a 2016 SE since... 2016, and I bought a spare one from Apple's refurbished clearance in 2019 when it became clear the phone would no longer be available outside ebay/grey market. If it's been silently available this whole time at any authorized seller that'd be huge news to me.
I'm very tired of my 5.6" phone (Pixel 3A). 5.4" seems a small upgrade, but maybe worth it. I've been on the Android camp for a decade, but I'm getting fed up with these enormous phones. It's ironic that there's a million Android manufacturers and zero good small Android phones, while there is one iPhone manufacturer and they may actually take the small phone market.
Because of aspect ratios and bezels, the 12 Mini is significantly smaller than the 3A. The 12 Mini is smack dab between the size of the iPhone 5 and the iPhone 6, whereas the 3A is roughly the size of a current iphone 11.
I understand the value of the different phone sizes but still can't understand why companies are selling 64 GB models.
I know we have everything in the cloud these days but with apps with rich assets and smartphones being more capable with cameras, you run out of 64 GB quite easily. 128 GB should be the baseline model in 2020 for any phone that costs above $600.
A substantial amount of iPhones are purchased by corporations for business reasons. They run one or two corporate apps all the time, which probably don't need much room anyway since such apps are usually designed to sync stuff with some kind of server in order to not have anything on the phone to back up or be lost in the event of a failure. Nobody shoots videos photos with those phones, and nobody puts music or movies on them. They basically need the space for the OS plus a few gigabytes extra; any additional space is wasted and ideally not there in the first place.
I seem to run out of it quite fast. Even if we exclude all the new app install space, a typical 64 GB phone will have around 50 GB usable space.
50 GB is 66 mins of 4K 60 fps video or about 5000 RAW photos. I understand that in a city this might be enough but consider if you are traveling.
You will likely store songs for listening offline, you might not have wifi available with you to sync daily so you can't keep deleting your photos and videos once you have synced them.
Furthermore the 512 GB option is, again, only available on the pro models. I'd sell my 11 Pro and get the 12 Mini in a heartbeat if I could get it with 512 GB.
I am willing to bet next year iPhone 13 will start at 128GB for the same price. Giving you the perception it is now $50 cheaper due to the increase in storage.
"Across the iPhone family, we’re removing the power adapter and EarPods that often go unused, but including the fast-charging USB‑C to Lightning cable that most people need."
Ouch. Do most people really not use the power adapter?
Mine sit in the box for years until I accidentally run the old one over with the hoover or something. Apple will ditch Lightning long before I run out of cables.
Of course, the right thing to do here would be to drop the price of the phone by some token amount, like £10. Sure the environment benefit is real, but the real driving force is that Apple makes an extra 1% margin on every phone.
Right, I have gobs of them too... but they’re all USB type A, so the included USB C cable with the iPhone 12 is kinda weird. People don’t have many USB C bricks yet. So I don’t think the logic of “people have them already” checks out
I was thinking the same thing, but on second thought I already have a multitude of USB-A and USB-C to lightning cables and chargers all over the house and ready to go in my backpacks.
Well, anyone who's had an Android in the last few years would, and they're widely available (and cheap) online.
The unbundling is obviously just Apple pushing people toward their new magsafe charger tech though, (spinning it as an environmentally friendly thing) so they can finally make the jump to completely portless phones.
I have at least three but if you don't why not just buy one and be set for the next eight or so years? It does seem like a huge waste that every device in the foreseeable future will ship with a new USB-C charger that is quite redundant.
But you can't plug that into the iPhone. Because the phone has lightning port. And the other end of the included cable is USC-C male. And all previous adaptors (the white box that goes on the wall) are USA-A. So yeah... no cookie.
The Macbook charger has a brick with a female USB-C end, and a male-to-male USB-C cable. Which you can unplug from the brick and plug in the USB-C-to-lightning cable, in theory.
Now if you need to charge both, and you have the one-port Macbook, you're SOL. If not, you can plug the phone into the laptop...
Well, I do hope the proposal to buy a Macbook so you can charge your phone was tongue-in-cheek. Because that's a pretty daft solution compared to buying https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MHJA3AM/A/20w-usb-c-power... for $19 if one doesn't have an existing USB-C brick.
I actually never take any of the cables out of the box but I'm probably more of an edge-case. I take out the phone and use Anker cables/Qi-chargers and my AirPods Pro.
I don't really miss the power adapter as I have so many USB power sources and I will never miss those crappy earbuds though I do miss the headphone jack.
Yeah, having an on-device DAC was really the killer feature for me. I'm fine using a lightning-to-3.5mm adapter but trying to be clever and putting the DAC in the adapter didn't work out super great for me since they seem to break super easily.
Right, I just mean that's it's not connected to the lightning port. Apple's lightning-3.5mm adapter conceals a small DAC inside compared to Google's approach on the older Pixels where USB-C just carried the analog signal which I think was a better, albeit more complicated, design.
Does everyone except me have a power adapter with a USB-C port on it? I’ve definitely never got one off Apple, though my Apple stuff is at least 2 years old so maybe they have been shipping them? But if I got one of these phones that cable would be useless, except I guess for plugging my phone into my work laptop without using a dock.
The included power adapter is really bad (1A, USB-A). Currently nearly all my devices charging via USB-C, except my company provided iPhone. I just bought a USB-C to lightning cable so I can charge it via my Macbook or Pixel charger
To be honest, this move by Apple is good for first world countries where many people may keep their older devices and power adapters, but will raise the costs in other countries where people usually sell their phones (with accessories) and replace those with new ones. Oh wait, people in first world countries do trade-ins too.
I think a minuscule number of people won’t mind this. For the rest, these phones are going to cost more than before with the additional purchase of adapters.
When I traded my last phone in, I brought in the charger and was told to keep it -- that they throw power adapters away. No one wants to buy a refurb phone and have the cord suddenly fray a month later.
Calculated to help them sell the fast chargers. Until now, every iPhone came with USB-A chargers so yes people have a lot of them, but they are allll USB-A.
I don't know if this has been remarked upon, but I kind of appreciate the diversity in the presentation. It's not showy or contrived; Apple doesn't make a huge deal out of it, but it's nice to see a wide variety of genders and races.
I used to think Apple has the best approach to diversity, but this presentation really showed the folly inherent to the entire project. You realize that what you just saw was a cast of exclusively white men and women gushing over a cast of exclusively colored models? All the engineers and executives vs. nice-to-look at minorities. This is not a new social arrangement, and certainly not one Apple would stand for, and yet inadvertently this is is the image that they've created.
The pictures themselves are telling to. They are all weird, lower power poses. Could you imagine Tim Cook or another speaker striking a pose like that? This is how the executives like to be seen: https://www.apple.com/leadership/
Sadly it has come to the point where any criticism of diversity for any reason is sacrilegious, but people would be wise to think twice what the outcome of these policies is. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
iPhone 12 mini has not been authorized as required by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission. iPhone 12 mini is not, and may not be, offered for sale or lease, or sold or leased, until authorization is obtained.
Same thing about the iPhone 12 Pro Max on its page. I guess that's part of the reason why those two devices go on sale later than their respective counterparts.
It's pretty dumb to call it magsafe. With a laptop it really did keep your laptop safe from getting pulled off a desk when you got up to get a coffee and walked through the cord like an idiot.
What exactly is 'safe' about this? It's just... mag.
It’s called marketing and brand recognition. Most people won’t care it’s not a literal description of how it works, but they will have heard of MagSafe before and get the general idea.
In my experience MagSafe never did that, so it’s likely to be the same on the iPhone as on the Macbooks. Most times when I tripped over the cable, it pulled the cable in a straight line. Unfortunately I can lift my Macbook with the MagSafe cable by pulling in a straight line, so it never actually broke apart the way it was intended. Also unfortunately, it breaks apart very easily if you push up or down, which happens frequently when the laptop is sitting on my lap.
So it would unplug itself constantly in normal use, but still pull the Macbook off the table when I tripped on the cable. It’s still better than nothing, but in my experience MagSafe never worked the way it was advertised. Especially as the Macbooks got lighter.
Why do people want magsafe back? The new USB-C cord pulls out of the wall if you trip over it ... and the little slot doesn’t get filled with metalic dust any more.
Can we talk about the hypocrisy of the recycling segment given that Apple is a known adversary of the “right to repair” bill?
All of this “net-zero” talk yet they have a system in place that makes it prohibitively expensive to repair slightly damaged devices (ie, bad battery) out of warranty. So, consumers are left to live with the problem, pay for the cost of the repair which ends up costing about 1/2 to 3/4 of a new phone, or just buy a new phone.
Of course, people could go to a third party repair facility, but Apple doesn’t provide these businesses with the replacement parts and software to fix their phones. In one case, the display hardware identifier is tied to the “True Tone” feature and changing the display will result in this feature not working. In another case, the TouchID is hardcoded to the device and can only be reset by Apple techs, otherwise the Touch ID feature no longer works.
I like Apple products in general, but this is one of the few cases where Apple can do better.
I’m torn in this case. On one hand, Apple is in the right because that company was hired to do a job but ended up doing something completely different. But on the flip side, if the phones were functional at the time of receiving the phones and required none to minimal repair, then shame on Apple.
This whole fiasco reminds me of the O&G industry and the manufacture of plastics. It’s much cheaper to create and sell “virgin plastics” rather than trying to recycle the existing plastic.
But as discussed in that HN thread there are many reasons why it's the wrong thing to do, specially if you want to pretend to take the moral high ground regarding the environment.
Relatively I've understood that iPhones are still more repairable than Samsungs and other Android, based on ratings from companies that rank these (can't find a link on my phone)
Apple started out as fairly repair hostile while Androids were relatively repairable. Now most android phones are sliding more and more towards glued together bricks while iphones are mostly the same to the point where most android devices are actually harder to repair.
I took my Pixel 2 in to a store for a battery replacement and the person told me that there is a chance the screen will shatter when they remove it. If a person with all the tools and training can't reliably replace the battery something is seriously wrong. Apple might be doing a lot of things horrible but they are the only ones who actually have a store in my area and offer repairs on their own devices.
This is the reason I switched to an iphone this year after 10 years on android. Everything I loved about Android devices is dead and they are now while at least Apple respects privacy.
Apple chokes the repair shops by banning other companies from selling them parts. Even if Apple devices are more repairable (companies find other ways to source parts, schematics), Apple is actively working against the right to repair movement.
The League of Legends x Apple announcement is bigger than people might think. I 100 % believe that this is the start of a massive shift from pc/console to mobile which we have seen before in China. In fact, it is clear from this announcement that iPhone IS considered a console now for Riot. Huge stuff.
I think you might have it reversed. I think the LoL announcement is mostly catering to the LoL playerbase (which is mostly located in China) rather than a great ploy to steal PC gaming share.
Separately from that, its pretty interesting how obviously faked the "playing" of LoL in the video was, in an presentation that is otherwise so focused on attention to detail.
It's not the start of a massive shift. You'd be surprised what the gaming spending per platform breakdown looks like - phones are a MASSIVE chunk, and growing by far the fastest.
I don't have the numbers on me to back this up but maybe someone else can fetch them.
The rule of thumb when it comes to sizing gaming audiences is:
- Mobile: Billions
- Console: 100s of millions
- PC: 10s of millions
In other words, a decent mobile game (not Fortnite or LoL, but something like Among Us) can get 100s of millions of users, a good console game can sells 10s of millions of copies and a PC game can sell millions of copies.
According to one source[1], steam alone has 95 million monthly active users. Not every pc gamer has steam running, so actual PC gamers are definitely in excess of 100 million. By comparison, ps plus and xbox live have 103 and 90 million monthly active users respectively. I'd say that PC and console gaming are within the same order of magnitude.
10's of millions of PC gamers? I think you're off by a huge margin. I believe DFC reported that there's over a billion PC gamers in the world in 2020. It's a billion dollar market in itself.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is partly why Epic made such a big move trying to put an Epic store on IOS (to the point of sueing Apple).
They managed to get Fortnite to run at 120FPS on Ipad Pro just this March and probably realized that high performance gaming on IOS is here and will only get better as CPU\GPUs improve on mobile, and sued Apple by August.
What better way to monetize your immersive, high performance, addictive game when it's in everyone's pocket all the time ie no need to sit at your console or PC.
>Seems like it started with the AirPods page and will likely continue.
No it started with TrashCan Mac Pro, and then stopped for a while and it came back to AirPod.
The whole page is Janky, not smooth, and painful trying to consume information out to it. Although it must admit this is better than AirPod Page, and it is also better than Mac Pro. So improvement are being made, but it is too slow.
I've replaced my 2016 SE's battery once through Apple ($29 battery lawsuit program) and once myself ($29 and an hour of my time, via iFixit). So the whole phone cost me something like $460 over 4.5 years.
I'm looking at the 12 Mini.
- It doesn't have a headphone jack, so I'll have to buy an adapter to use my chonky set of headphones with it.
- Apple phased out TouchID, and my state is experiencing it's worst-ever COVID numbers currently. So I'll just have to enter my passcode whenever I'm wearing a mask now, which is something like 40% of the time.
- It comes with a lighting<->USB-C cable, but not a wall plug. I don't have any USB-C wall plugs. Am I supposed to only charge this thing off my work laptop, or should I buy a $20 USB-C wall plug from Apple? My current lightning cable is fraying 4.5 years in so I need a replacement.
- The phone is advertised at $699, but it's actually $730 if I want to use it on non-Verizon/non-AT&T (I use Google Fi). Huh?
- 64GB is the same storage size as my current SE, which is just a little too small for me to store local Spotify songs (lots of trips in the mountains with crappy signal) and podcasts. So I'll have to step up $50 for the 128GB version if I want this to last me any reasonable number of years.
So I can either use my current SE, which is still treating me great... or I can cough up $780 + tax for the phone + $20 for a wall wart + $20 for a headphone adapter. So like $900 total.
- I don’t know when the last time I plugged wired headphones in was, so Bluetooth only is fine for me.
- I’ll still have all the same charging cables that I have now, the lightning to USB-C cable is nice but I’d be fine with out it. This is going to be a backup cable for my USB-C power bank, since I already have a cable with that.
- The $30 price difference is bulllshit, agreed. It’s shitty of them to be marketing these prices with a $30 AT&T/Verizon discount included. I’m on T-mobile, so no discount even if I stuck with them, but will likely be switching to Mint.
- I haven’t filled 64 gigs on my SE yet, but I’m certainly glad I spent the $100 to get it over the 16 GB base model. Looking at getting a similar life out of a new phone, I should plan on the $50 for 128 GB.
The things that I want are:
- Modern camera technology, especially night mode and the ultrawide. Many years ago I paid $700 for a cannon 10-22mm ultrawide lens, I don’t know if this is superior in every way to my (oldish) DSLR, but as they say the best camera is the one you have with you. And most of the time I don’t have my SLR, let alone it’s extra lenses.
- On that note, compatibility with Moment cases and M-mount lenses. A small phone is more important to me than the 3rd telephoto camera in the Pro phones, but it’d be nice to have the option to mount a decent quality telephoto or macro lens.
- More RAM. The SE does a lot of relaunching apps when switching between more than two things, and it’s not particularly fast at it.
Losing TouchID is a bummer, but a trade off I think I’m willing to make. I could drag this phone out for another year if I had to (barring hardware failures), but I’m looking forward to the upgrades.
> So I'll just have to enter my passcode whenever I'm wearing a mask now
If noone is around you, you can just pull down the mask for a second. At the moment, in my country (N/W Europe), I personally don't see the harm in this.
I'm still rocking a first-gen iPhone SE as well— I actually picked it up a few months ago for next to nothing, second hand with a smashed screen, and swapped the screen from my former 5S to it. Happened to get double the storage along the way, as well as iOS 13 compatibility for my country's Covid exposure app. As a device, I love that it's small, and it having cost me very little means that I'm not nearly as paranoid about losing or breaking it.
And the screen swap/upgrade experience was great too— so much so that I expect my next device (in a year or two) will be the iPhone 8, with the explicit intention of doing a similar upgrade down the line to the 2nd gen SE.
Just got my wife's original SE its third screen. I freaking love that this product has been around long enough that parts and labor for a new touchscreen are $49.
I’ve had one battery replacement and really need another if I were to keep using this. It’s back in the “degraded performance” mode where the processor throttles peak performance down because if it tried to draw as much power as it wants, the battery can’t keep up and it spontaneously turns off.
Going from this to a 12 may be a bit of a shock, but it’s a modern camera that I’m more excited about than anything else. And having enough RAM to switch between more than two apps without them having to relaunch all the time.
It's the annual incremental improvement, and many will like the smaller form factor too I'm guessing.
But the whole 5G hype is lost on me. Specifically, none of the carriers or handset makers are telling me how much the data will cost. Maybe I'm a little price-focused, but that determines for me whether I'm excited about it.
If I'm just burning through my existing data limit faster, what's the point? What's the pricing of this new data capability?
The whole 5G thing is just complete bullshit. After the tech has flopped pretty much worldwide and Verizon's and AT&T's "5G REMOTE SURGERY" and "RACE TO 5G" marketing bs didn't get consumers interested, they finally decided as a last resort to pay Apple and see if that will be enough to push this technology through.
disagree, sort of. The marketing was always shit, but the 2 big differences between LTE and 5G are latency and cell size.
Cell size matters because there is a ceiling for how many devices an LTE cell can support in a certain range. Thats why you get crappy speeds/connectivity’s at concerts/events/crowded areas. As I understand it, 5g can support more devices per cell, and also can have smaller cells for more connection density. With latency, LTE has a baked in 300ms min latency that 5g does not, so 5g can be used for latency sensitive applications.
It will be a slower rollout due to the costs and infrastructure requirements, but 5g (from Verizon at least) will be faster than your home cable connection. That's a big deal.
LTE already allows 150Mbps symmetrical on an iPhone 8 (real-world speed test in London), and probably more on the newer phones.
The problem with mobile data has never been the raw speed - that is already fast enough. The problem was always how it's being sold (whether data caps, the overall - terrible - customer experience and the BS the industry is constantly pulling like AT&T sharing data for marketing purposes), and switching to a different technology won't magically change that.
From a technical perspective, it actually is a bit of a problem.
First, remember that speed is shared with everyone using the same tower (sector) as you. As data usage goes up, that will drop. In a major city where cell density is high it's less of a problem, but it's already an issue in more rural/suburban areas where cells are larger. There are plenty of places in the US that have LTE coverage, but the speed is actually pretty poor.
Second, there are some limit on the number of devices each tower can support. With embedded devices increasingly relying on cellular, we're expecting to hit those limits. So 5G allows for future system growth.
And as for data caps... more available bandwidth does help lower prices. Those prices are, at least in part, set in order to manage system load. More capacity means they can relax the pricing and/or caps.
I am aware of this, but data caps don't solve this problem either.
Data caps do nothing if everyone in a crowded area has plenty of "data" remaining and start using it all at once.
The reverse is also true, you can have towers in a low-usage area at night that are basically just burning energy, and yet if you run out of "data" you can no longer use it; so the RF airtime is essentially wasted as the only customer wishing to use it at that time & location is unable to.
Furthermore what about the "data" that somehow "expires" at the end of the month? That doesn't make sense either and proves this pricing model is just a bullshit extortion strategy and is very bad at actually addressing the problem of limited RF airtime.
The proper solution is to charge for a bandwidth, not data. The more you pay the more bandwidth you get allocated, and users can choose which plan they want based on their usage patterns.
> Data caps do nothing if everyone in a crowded area has plenty of "data" remaining and start using it all at once.
But 5G does make a difference, that's what the parent comment was trying to tell you. It allows high-density crowds to continue having high-speed access, something that is not possible today. You can barely make a phone call on NYE.
> It allows high-density crowds to continue having high-speed access
Is that an actual problem that affects many users and currently can't be resolved with LTE? I don't disagree that 5G will benefit carriers, but the hype around it being some kind of a revolution for the customer is overblown. The customer's problem is very rarely a technical shortcoming of LTE or the earlier technologies and more about how the service is sold and priced, and so far despite 5G indeed allowing much higher capacity there's no evidence that the industry as a whole is moving away from the user-hostile "data cap" model.
> You can barely make a phone call on NYE.
Isn't that a failure of the switching/call control equipment or the inter-carrier peering as opposed to tower capacity?
The key technology design dimension cell towers of almost any generation gives you is the the ability to tradeoff cell sizes and numbers of nodes with density of users. Maybe 5G gives you some incremental improvements on that, but it was always possible to put in more towers for more users.
US telecom companies in particular have always been at loath to share any cost savings with the end consumer - so I don't think consumers have any reason to be exited over marginal 5G gains on efficiency.
It's a lot easier for some mobile companies to roll out 5G than 4G too. Vodafone in the UK were still rolling with point-to-point microwave connections between masts all over the place before 4G and had to ditch that to get the bandwidth needed to support it.
Only mmWave 5G, as of now mostly used in the USA, has this problem. Sub6 5G has similar propagation to LTE. Sub6 has way less capacity than mmWave though.
I guess in the future operators will use both frequency ranges in parallel in a macro/micro cell format. If you happen to be within the range of a mmWave micro base station you will use it. If not the sub6 macro base station will make sure you remain connected with “good enough” speed.
5G isn't bullshit, but it will be years before the standards are completed to do novel things, like Vehicle-To-Pedestrian (V2P) -- imagine cars sensing humans and no longer running into them.
What its marketed as is bullshit. 5G seems essential to fit more devices in packed spaces like sports stadiums. Marketers are trying to convince users that 5g is absolutely essential even if you aren't quite sure what for yet. The news post I read today listed 4g as enabling video streaming and 5g as enabling "Hyperfast gaming and augmented reality". What a load of meaningless bullshit.
I'm not going to be one of those "the eye can't even see 60fps" people but lets not pretend that 5g is going to be anything but an incremental infrastructure upgrade that won't affect people in a non congested area.
That's basically the only problem. The marketing pushed it way too early, as they tend to do, but just way too cheery for what the reality is going to be.
But otherwise it is a serious and legitimate leap forward.
Of course it's nearly impossible to tell the sales people to keep the expectations in line with reality. Which I'm sure Verizon/ATT/etc all had engineers who knew the reality.
It's just business from hyper competitive companies where most customers won't see much of anything for years.
Customers will figure it out down the line, the companies are just kicking the can to try to exploit it for now before the other guy.
>Verizon's and AT&T's "5G REMOTE SURGERY" and "RACE TO 5G" marketing bs didn't get consumers interested
who are the ads supposed to be targeted to? why should I, as a consumer care about 5g remote surgery? it's not like only at&t subscribers have access to remote surgery.
I always found that one the most egregious of their stupid marketing BS. It's a blatantly terrible idea. If you're designing a robot surgeon, please don't rely on (or even allow) a wireless connection, and please design it in a way that handles low latency well enough that the incremental gains offered by 5G are basically moot. There's enough that can go wrong as it is. The thought of 5G actually enabling something here is frightening.
I seriously saw some """"national security experts"""" claim that America was doomed to sink beneath the waves if we didn't deploy 5G first. It was a truly shameless level of nonsense.
Since you do not include a reference to this "shameless nonsense", it would be reasonable for us to wonder if you are exaggerating in service of some preconceived beliefs of your own.
I remember reading those same types of stories a couple years ago, where winning the 5G marketing game was being discussed as if it was critical to the future of the country. Much like GP I didn't bother to bookmark the stories or go looking for them, but I am sure they are still out there if you care to look.
Fair enough...there's a special kind of 5G alarmism which proposes a relationship between 5G and global warming. I might have misinterpreted OP's mocking expression "America was doomed to sink beneath the waves" as a reference to same. Apologies if so.
Less sensationally, OP might not believe that 5G has economic and strategic importance to the US. We would disagree on that, but that argument is not very interesting to rehash.
What’s the point of 5G when I don’t even have LTE in many rural areas? I’d rather have LTE everywhere than a faster download rate when in a city but not at home.
Cell carriers try to optimize for places with the highest population densities, so they focus on faster speeds in cities over slower speeds everywhere. It's a fine balance.
Once we see them we can investigate them and adjust our understanding of RF's health effects and modify the technology to make sure it's safe.
So far nobody has proven that the RF frequencies & transmit powers used in 5G (or any other wireless networking technology, for that matter) are harmful.
Can you share any reputable studies of these effects? The amount of crazy conspiracies around 5G makes finding these “real” problems impossible, even if I’m skeptical about your claim considering the amount of information to the contrary.
Well for one, the US's own National Toxicology Program (NTP) found that "high exposure to radio frequency radiation to be associated with cancer in male rats". These results were released in 2018 and this was the world’s largest study on the topic at $25MM.
The EUROPA EM-EMF Guideline 2016 states that ”there is strong evidence that long-term exposure to certain EMFs is a risk factor for diseases such as certain cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, and male infertility: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27454111
I mean, if you're going to cite something you might want to read it first:
“The exposures used in the studies cannot be compared directly to the exposure that humans experience when using a cell phone,”
...
"In our studies, rats and mice received radio frequency radiation across their whole bodies. By contrast, people are mostly exposed in specific local tissues close to where they hold the phone. In addition, the exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience.”"
Really? I guess the radiation doesn't affect your whole body when you're walking down the street and you get close to a cellular tower (you get pretty damn close to them with 5G cells), or say when you take a crowded subway and someone's making a call right next to you (oh and the phone will likely amp up its radiation power in there to be able to hop from tower to tower and maintain a connection in a moving cage of metal). Just two examples out of a million
Edit: how am I dismissing your point? I literally just addressed it. And get off your high horse, as though it is completely wacky to consider that something that permeates your environment could possibly have harmful effects on your body
It looks like a 5G array puts out about 120 Watts[1], and that's not attempting to calculate drop-off due to distance, while the sun puts out an exposure of 1,000 W/m2[2] on the Earth's surface at much much higher frequencies (5G tops out at 3Ghz, light starts at 430 THz - we know that the greater the frequency the greater the harm). Really, if we are worried about 5G then normal sunlight is in most measures orders of magnitude worse.
> as though it is completely wacky to consider that something that permeates your environment could possibly have harmful effects on your body
In this case, it kind of is! Human tissue is full of water, and water is a terrible transmission medium for RF energy, with penetration depth decreasing as a function of frequency. This is why submarine radio is receive-only and operates at a rate of characters per minute [1], why fully in-ear Bluetooth earbuds tend to drop out more than other designs, and why I'm not actually worried about low-power GHz-range RF signals like 5G. I'll get skin cancer from sunburns long before I'll get any kind of cancer from thermal radiation that can't even penetrate my stratum corneum.
You are dismissing the paper's authors when they say "exposure levels and durations in our studies were greater than what people experience" by assuming they're ignorant of exposure levels and durations that people experience.
lol - so you want to cite the study, but when you don't like what it says you just decide that you can dismiss that part of it? Why did I even bother...
As an aside, I hate that news media have turned into essentially Medium, where anyone can write anything under their name. Good way to throw away your hard-earned prestige, e.g. Forbes sites.
"indecent author" - look at this credentials, if he is not an expert in this area then I don't know who is
"Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology."
> if he is not an expert in this area then I don't know who is
Someone with a degree in a relevant subject (biology or physics) who has performed research on the topic. Dr. Moskowitz has neither; his degrees are in mathematics and social psychology, and the article he published was a meta-analysis (i.e, a summary of other research in the field), not primary research.
So, what, then? Resonance? I mean, if you're not talking about thermal effects, and you're not talking about ionization, then mechanical interactions seem to be pretty much all that's left.
A lot of countries do not have data caps in europe. For example i’m paying ~$25 a month for unlilimited 100mbps 4g connection and unlimited 1gbps 5g is available for around $40/month.
But it's in the intermediate stage when things are scarce that the price matters, or rate-limiting/throttling/etc matters.
You go to South Korea, and they would laugh to think that the US has monthly bandwidth limits, or is talking about net neutrality. Speed and pipe size take care of all issues some distant day in the future.
I called AT&T to look into their service, and the rep said "all of our plans are unlimited data, it's just a question of how much you want to be able to hotspot". I can see why they're reframing things to call all their plans 'unlimited' in a 5G world, since most people will not sign up to pay more for 5G service. They will ask what the real-world difference will be, and then probably decline to pay even $10/mo more for it.
But if everything is 'unlimited' and they're differentiating based on amount of hotspot or throttling after a certain point, they're effectively charging you for high speed without making it seem like a surcharge.
After 20 seconds on the phone I knew it wasn't for me. I rarely leave the house during COVID, so I hardly use any data. I'm saving 50% going with a different company.
I had the misfortune of charging my iPhone via usb connected to my laptop while working. This triggered the 4G tethering, so i spent an afternoon working on my cellular data plan... schlepping multi-gb csv files around. I didn't even notice anything, until my data plan ran out.
I honestly wouldn't mind slower than 4G speeds. With 4G it's already bordering on ridiculous how quickly you can burn up a data plan.
Your laptop chose to override an existing WiFi/LAN connection to use a tethered phone USB connection? That seems highly unusual. I plug my phone into my laptop all of the time, and the tether has never overridden my WiFi. I've never had to use it, but macOS allows you to order the available networks according to your preference. Did you perhaps do this and forgot about it?
> Your laptop chose to override an existing WiFi/LAN connection to use a tethered phone USB connection?
Tethered phones are considered Ethernet interfaces by many operating systems so they would typically take priority over a wireless connection, unless the system has an explicit override for it like macOS does.
yeah my carrier (Verizon) doesn't have good enough coverage for me to enjoy the full speed that 4G can offer so I don't care to pay more for 5G when it has little to no chance to meet the promised performance.
It just seems like the entire industry is desperate for us to give a shit about 5G. I don't, sorry. To me this is similar to the 4K and 8K HDR TV craze. I don't plan on ever owning an 80" TV. At 30-40" 1080p looks great to me. I don't see giving a shit about this either. Most of the time I am near decent wifi. When I am not, I can always wait to download something huge (and really don't have a need to download something huge on my phone).
Now if they could just work on the audio quality and latency over regular wire-line networks, that I would be interested in. LTE to LTE calls already sound great, so I think there are some upgrades to the wired side of things that are required (which the likes of Verizon never want to do because it is more expensive/a lower margin business than wireless so they neglect it and regulators don't hold their feet to the fire).
I guess I am just too cheap to pony up for an unlimited plan. I never stream video over the cellular connection, and rarely stream audio. I don’t see this changing unless unlimited plans get cheaper. I currently have fiber to the home for less than $70/month, and cannot imagine giving that up for any kind of wireless solution.
Is 5G rollout in the US really comprehensive enough at this point to deliver on any of the promises they're making about it at this event?
[Edit: found this benchmark from a month ago: https://www.tomsguide.com/features/5g-vs-4g] basically looks like Verizon delivers on the promised speeds, but it still isn't clear to me what the spatial distribution of the higher speeds looks like.
Are the speeds really that important or are they already good enough? Any time I try to do something substantial over cellular I wish for either better coverage or lower latencies (oh, the latencies... even with great signal strength)
It depends on whether the higher speeds let you use mobile in conditions where WiFi/broadband is flaky or unavailable. But, I agree in general that is a bigger problem in more rural areas and that's where mobile range is more important as well.
I have an iPhone11. My phone says it connects to 5G already, so I’m actually confused by this launch. Why would iOS tell me I’m connected to 5G? I’ll be honest that I’m unfamiliar with this space
Apple deserves to be shamed for this one, as they implemented a feature that essentially allows carriers to lie and display whatever network technology icon they want, instead of displaying the true status as reported by the network interface.
Source? It's the first time I hear that carriers are able to override the network technology/protocol logo. As far as I know the whole "carrier profile" thing (which is what allows carriers to do this, among other things like arbitrarily restrict tethering, etc) is Apple-specific.
No the same capacities exist,though perhaps not under the same name, on Android; my S10+ dutifully switched from reporting 4G LTE to 5Ge when AT&T decided on that lie.
Android manufacturers are even worse when it comes to this as they let carriers customize the firmware completely (which then interferes with updates) and should also be shamed. This doesn't however say that this is some kind of standard; it's just OS manufacturers being in bed with carriers and doing them favors.
I got stuck trying to explain (without being the annoying "well, actually" guy) why my SO's phone wasn't screwed up when switching from ATT to a different carrier.
Because on the old SIM it said 5G dammit! Now it only says 4G so how is that not slower??
Which is silly because even most 4G networks (LTE) don’t technically fall within the original standard of 4G. ITU actually lowered the standard of 4G to meet the limitations of LTE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_(telecommunication)).
I live in a midwest city with a population around 25,000. We won't see 5G for a long, long time. We need signal that goes farther, not faster. 4G is still being rolled out to more rural areas. 5G is a feature I'd rather not pay for.
5G can potentially help with that when deployed on existing spectrum, because increased transmission rates reduces airtime utilization, and some cells adjust their range based on utilization. It might not help much, depending on current utilization and terrain and what not, but it'll probably help some, and I imagine carriers will do gradual deployments of that to lower density areas when there's enough handsets that support it and base station equipment is cost reduced enough. I don't think it's going to be fast, but I don't think it'll be on the long, long time scale.
Of course, 5G on the new high frequency spectrum is unlikely to be useful in low density areas, and is unlikely to be deployed. Also, I think AT&T has plans to declare their LTE coverage to be 5G :P
There's really 3 types of 5G: ultra-wideband, mid-band, and low-band. Ultra-wideband is the 5G you hear about most, with gigabit speeds but you have to be within direct line of sight to the cell site. There's also mid-band and low-band, which have similar ranges to LTE and can deliver a few hundred megabits instead of gigabits, and can handle problems like congestion better.
There's a lot going on there like "5G service in city X!" where they really mean "we have an antenna mounted at the ballpark to cover a high density use case."
It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation, isn’t it? By getting the chipsets out in the phone they’re at least solving the chicken part. Plus, iPhones are usually supported for a good 5 years, so this is a bit of future proofing for people who buy today.
Mobile providers still upgraded their existing antennas. With my Note20 Ultra 5G on Sunrise, half of the time I am outdoors I get 5G (in Aargau) with speeds between 400mbps-600mbps.
I am curious, what are your complaints about the new SE? I have a 2016 SE and am going to upgrade to either the 2020 SE, 12 mini, or 12. The 2016 SE feels a bit small in my hand (I have large hands), but I worry the iPhone 12 regular size will be too large.
Even though "Android had it X years ago" is mostly a meme by now, I can't resist: The Nexus 5 had magnets that automatically aligned it on a Qi charging dock 7 years ago.
I was sure that the Nexus 5 was probably not the first one, and someone was going to come along to provider older examples :P
I was surprised that the iPhone didn't already have it in the last generation, given that accurate alignment is a well known problem with wireless charging and magnets are a well known solution. Maybe they kept it back on purpose just to have a new feature for this release and/or sell another round of charging accessories.
Here's an even easier one, Apple had them as early as 2006! But then pulled them, even though everyone loved them... and now are reintroducing it as new
Did you also notice that everyone wears white shoes when on that auditorium stage? I wonder how many other dress code-related tips or requirements every presenter is given?
For context: watchmakers have often used 10:10 for marketing materials because it's symmetrical and it doesn't obscure the brand logo, which usually goes below the 12 position. Apple uses 10:09 probably because they want to be "ahead" of everybody else.
Similarly, iPhones are all set to 9:41 in marketing materials because that's the approximate time Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone back in 2007.
You realize the event wasn't live, right? And Tim's watch clearly shows 10:09 the second he shows up in the video which was 10:01 at the latest "real time".
I know it isn't live, and it shows because they've been sloppy throughout. Check out his watch at the 20 minute mark, it's way off.
In general, Apple's presenter's watches (and demo devices) show the local time for live events, and they tried to do that here but obviously didn't do a very good job.
But they didn't do that, as I just mentioned and gave a fairly exact timestamp (to within a few seconds) for for you to check that they did not in fact do this.
You have a point, now wondering if there was some some memo akin to - pretend you are landing a plane as many appear to be doing just that with their arm flail.
Honestly I’m a little torn between the Mini and the Pro models, simply because of LiDAR. I kind of want to experiment with that and potentially make an app utilizing that. But I honesty can’t think of something that Apple hasn’t already includeD.
Same position here. Pro is compelling because I own an old iPad mini that's due an upgrade and I wonder if Pro would provide that for me. But for size I like my current SE gen 1.
The one feature which would have had me (figuratively) running to the store was touch ID on a button like the iPad.
We are 9 months into a pandemic and likely to be wearing masks for another 9, we use Apple pay all the time.
Too bad. Nothing really compelling compared to my XS max, I'll give this year a pass.
Making a product change like that in 9 months would have been very difficult. It is on the edge of what could be accomplished, however with Apples very predictable release cycle I wouldn't have been surprised if the designs were being finalized as the pandemic was getting started.
Yes Im being hyperbolic, battery life at full load is going to suffer tremendously, especially when you consider the degradation of battery performance over the years.
Yeah folks are definitely forgetting that battery life != phone screen size. It's much more complicated than that.
I had a 6S and I couldn't stand the battery life (or size). "Down"graded to a 2016 SE and the battery life was leaps and bounds better -- plus, it didn't shut itself off outside on cold days.
Based on Apple's spec page, it does look like the Mini has worse battery life than the 12. The real question is:
- how is standby battery life?
and
- what kind of impact does 5G have?
The number's on Apple's site are a great deal better than the 2020 SE's battery life, so I think we might have a good balance here. Hopefully.
As Apple makes their chips faster and more efficient and as phone batteries get bigger and bigger, app developers rise to meet the challenge by producing increasingly sloppy software that can afford to be incredibly wasteful because raw speed of the hardware is masking its cracks.
Try to run Instagram today on an iPhone 6, you won't be able to even scroll a feed of static images smoothly without hitching. Imagine what it is doing to the battery.
The released phones are priced between $1100 to $2000 (eqv in India). What do these really have to offer that trumps putting that money into a mutual fund if you actually are willing to spend that kind of money? I'm quite sure this price range is high even in the US?
To me (and I can afford this) it looks insane to sink that kind of money into a bloody phone.
Totally agree. The new emphasis on monthly payments Is also notable. It’s like they want people to view monthly phone payments like Americans view monthly car payments and buy a phone beyond their needs.
Those finding the monthly payments attractive should consider bumping that into an SIP (a systematic investment plan). I'm actually pained to watch folks in India to whom that kind of money would be several months salary burn it away like that for whatever fake notion of "prestige" they get from it.
My crib here isn't about those who can afford it. It is about folks (specifically in India) who actually can't afford it and are pushing through for the "prestige". It's their life, but that they would prioritize it over .. well ... living ... Makes me turn laser eyes on Apple marketing.
A guy I know bought the base iPhone 11 Pro model for $1400 in my country because he needed it for the 'ecosystem' and because the cheaper iPhone 11 wasn't 'good enough' for him while not even having an iPhone-specific use case
We don't go "hey i've saved up $100000, let me buy a Merc". But that's what I see quite a few people doing . They "save up for an iPhone". If you have to save up for it, you better think of other uses for the money than a luxury item for wasting your time.
There's a different between "fine" and "luxury". You don't want to cross it, that's your prerogative. You can judge others, that's also your prerogative. But that doesn't make you objectively correct. The iPhone will obviously work better than your PoS chinese phone. You pay a premium for that. Don't hate on it if you can't afford it or don't want to afford it.
- Why take any vacations or time off? After all you can just put that into a mutual fund.
- Why enjoy any specific meals or foods? A simple, repeatable dish means you can save more money to put into your mutual fund.
- Why enjoy that movie or album? After all, that's another dollar you could be putting into your mutual fund!
All work and no play is not a way to live life either. Some folks like having the latest-and-greatest, others don't mind having the same phone for years on end. If you just boil the entire world down to money in, money out, and mutual funds you are going to have a very unsatisfying and unfulfilling life.
Faux analogies and all they indicate is that apple marketing has won in projecting so much "luxury value" on these things.
The comparison I'm drawing is what do you get out of this that you don't get out of, say, a $200 phone, that is worth paying 5-10x the price. The enjoyment ratio between a vacay and no vacay is way more and hence isn't a suitable comparison. Heck, spending $2000 on a vacation seems more worth it than the phone (to me).
It's a bloody phone. You'll browse stuff with it, do email, maybe tweet and Instagram or Facebook. None of that demands that budget today. Heck it wouldn't even feel different in those apps in the way an Audi or bmw would.
I use a phone that's plenty performant for all of that (and I don't insta or FB), with plenty memory (6gb) and storage (128gb) that I paid $150 for.
I noticed that the new iphone 12 has a f/2.0 aperture telephoto lens whereas my existing iphone XS has a f/2.4 aperture telephoto lens. What are the implications of this?
I always understood that for a telephoto lens you wanted the f-stop number to be higher, so that the image is clearer since the subject is at a greater distance. My gut instinct is that the iphone XS/XR lens might capture a sharper initial image, but maybe the final product won't be as good as the newer lens do to all the processing being done by the phone? Perhaps a bigger diameter on the telephoto lens is better for night mode shooting, so more light is being captured? Hoping someone more knowledgeable than I can weigh in. :)
A lower f-stop number means that the aperture is bigger (relative to the focal length), such that it let's in more light. This has several subjective benefits: more light can be used for shorter exposure time or lower ISO (sensor gain) each leading to a sharper image. Also, it creates a shallower depth of field or "more blur" which separates the subject for a more pleasing picture. (This may be irrelevant on sensors as small as on a phone, which counteract shallow depth of field effects.)
It may reduce the image quality if the lens of of lower quality, as it is more expensive to build large-aperture lenses.
The aperture doesn't necessarily have a theoretical effect on image quality, though it will certainly impact the depth of field, and will be shallower at higher focal lengths for the same f-stop. Also, in practice, due to impurities and imperfections in glass and other inefficiencies, there will be effects, though they can definitely be managed and are always trade-offs. Usually with aperture it's well worth it to increase the aperture.
What you'll find with professional glass lenses, with variable apertures, is that sometimes you do need to decrease the aperture (higher f-stop) to get the sharpest possible image from the lens. At wider apertures you're collecting more light, from closer to the edges of the glass, at higher refractory angles, travelling through more glass, and thus sharpness goes down. The other side of the aperture though, aside from DOF, is that it lets more light through, so you will also get more flexibility in general on trading off proper exposure time vs motion blur, which is great for low light handheld photography.
I would expect for mobile lenses, though, since they know it's a fixed aperture, they've done their best to mitigate those effects, aside from the fact that your DOF is definitely fixed since there's no variable aperture on your phone camera lens. Honestly the only way to know for sure is wait for somebody like DPReview to run the camera through their test suite and get some objective numbers/photos to see what, if any, impact there is from the wider aperture.
A DOF calculator can be a helpful resource to get a gut feel for the relationship between the various inputs that affect DOF. e.g. https://www.photopills.com/calculators/dof
> I always understood that for a telephoto lens you wanted the f-stop number to be higher, so that the image is clearer since the subject is at a greater distance.
You want the lowest f-stop number possible for telephoto, so you have more available light hitting the sensor. This allows you to get a higher shutter speed. The higher shutter speeds compensate for the exaggerated shake you get from the longer lens.
If this is the case, then can we infer that the iphone 12 pro has a slightly better telephoto lens than the iphone 12 pro max? (The max's f-stop is listed as f/2.2)
as others have said, the lower the f stop the more light the lens lets in. lower is almost always better, (But makes lenses bigger and heavier). The amount of light halves as the f stop goes up, but its in steps. 1.4/2/2.8/4/5.6 . so the difference is about 1/2 stop, not huge.
As you close the lens iris (the f stop # goes up) you get more of the image "in focus", so focus doesn't need to be as precise.
But you'll need a minimum shutter speed so moving objects in the frame don't blur.
Lower f-number means that lens captures more light and has less depth-of-field (more blurred background and foreground). For small sensors like in iPhone DoF is huge anyway and planes separation has to be faked in post-processing. In general less f-number is better.
> I always understood that for a telephoto lens you wanted the f-stop number to be higher,
I suspect you are confusing f-stop (ratio of aperture diameter to focal length) and focal length ("zoom").
Also the f-stop marketing is annoying to me - the f/2.4 aperture on an iPhone lens is probably equivalent to like f/22 on an FF lens for most purposes.
They just announced that the iPhone 12 will ship only with a lightning to USB-C cable.
I don't understand why they don't switch from lightning to USB-C despite already using it on the iPads.
At Apple’s scale, a decision like that has really big implications that from a single-user perspective aren’t that obvious.
Not only do you bifurcate your entire product line and supply chain, your customers are not just individuals, but families. Think about a family who has one new phone that now won’t work with any of the chargers the rest of the family uses.
On top of that, the new connector type won’t be compatible with any of the pre-existing “infrastructure”. While that might not be a big deal for some single users, it could be a major issue for others.
My best guess is that they make a lot of money on lightning royalties.
The other guess is that they are hoping to cost until a no-port future. However the fact that the iPad switched makes that seem odd. I expected the next phone generation after the iPad would switch but I was clearly wrong.
eSIM gives way more control to the carriers which is not a good thing. I can take out a physical SIM, move it to a different phone, bring it abroad, lend it to someone, etc and the carrier has no say in that.
With an eSIM, once it's provisioned onto a phone it can't be "extracted" and getting a new one involves the carrier, which can say no or make the process difficult/annoying, even if unintentionally.
Does the Chinese dual-sim iPhone have any restrictions or downsides compared to a US or EU model? I might consider it as my next step if I can let go of the iPhone 8 and its fingerprint sensor.
Which region are you in and which region is your system set to? I always thought things like this were determined by which region you select when you set up the phone (or something similar like detected via GPS/network instead of being bound to the hardware itself).
I switched from android whatsapp to ios years ago and still have all the messages. I don’t recall how I did it, but it is definitely possible unless whatsapp locked things down.
You’ll never get Apple fans to understand that. They will happily toss a $1000 Apple’s way yearly for a new unrepairable device to be created with rare earth metals in China, shipped across the ocean on a freighter and then turn around and tell you that paying more for a charging cable is helping save the environment. Diehards do not care about the cost, they are already paying.
> There is no formal definition but we for some reason love to hear it.
This seems like half of Apple's marketing. They like making up new terms for features. Often these are to try to differentiate where there isn't already an existing term but often they seem like attempts to create an artificial differentiation.
- Ceramic Shield
- Super Retina Display
- XDR dynamic range
It's included in the new HomePod thing, and there was a very brief demo of someone bringing a phone close to the device and the phone showing the current song that it was playing, apparently using that technology.
It basically boils down to a few relatively minor camera features perhaps except for the addition of a 2x camera (The other differences are Lidar sensor, 60fps HDR recording at vs 30fps, and saving in RAW).
It looks like they think that just creating the impression that the pro model is better is enough to get more money from people who are less price sensitive.
Given they both have the A14 chip and seemingly no other differences in their innards, the fact the pro can do 60fps Dolby digital vs the regular phones 30fps feels like a lame software lock?
Yes but previous iPhone "Pro" isn't just only for prosumers; It had OLED and different housing. Now Apple possibly switched Pro-line strategy as same as iPad and Mac.
Intercom is not a solution. Our house growing up had an intercom in every room. We used it for all of 2 days before we figured out that simply calling someone loudly was simpler.
Apple is great at providing solutions to problems that they tell you that you have.
Not to mention that other device like Alexa already have this.
How can you complain at Apple for making up problems and at the same time criticise Apple for not having a thing everyone else has? If Amazon had it first, Apple didn't make it up. If not having it impresses you then it shouldn't be a point that Alexa had it first, that would be bad. If having what Alexa has impresses you, then Apple should be adding it, and adding it is not bad. You can't have both.
> Not to mention that other device like Alexa already have this.
Then don't mention it. What on earth do Android or Lisp or Linux users think will happen when they say "X had it first"? The only sane conclusion is that X is not the reason people avoided Android/Lisp/Linux. That was already clear because people were not tempted over by the presense of X. So if the only point is show gloat or be dismissive and/or scornful, who would want to move to a system which has the same feature but has a public facing community that's more about gloating and scoffing than being welcoming or helping?
MagSafe is sweet, and I think it's a smart move for Apple to launch it this year in preparation for the anticipated "portless" iPhone. By the time they do that, the MagSafe ecosystem will be ready for it, and people won't complain as much about getting the phone right on the charging pad.
It would have been sweeter if it was regular USB-C, so we're not contributing to the massive piles of e-waste generated by their continually changing proprietary adapters.
They have literally had 2 adapters for the entire history of the iPhone. "Continually changing" is flat out wrong and changing it to USB-C on the other end would support the opposite point you're making.
>Across the iPhone family, we’re removing the power adapter and EarPods that often go unused, but including the fast-charging USB‑C to Lightning cable that most people need. That shrinks packaging, and more boxes per shipment means fewer shipments overall. We’re also transitioning our manufacturing partners to renewable energy. Altogether, this eliminates over 2 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually.
Looks like Apple will start a trend by manufacturers of not including power bricks with their devices.
If it wasn't about the money and just about the environment Apple would let you walk in to one of their stores with your serial number in hand and pick one up for free if you needed one (one per person)...
Judging from the lack of announcement, it seems Apple has yet crossed the 1 Billion iPhone users threshold. ( May be they did but held back due to pandemic ) i.e The user growth is slowing, or reached ceiling.
4.5B people have a smartphone. Most of them are on at least 3rd or 4th Smartphone with plenty of chargers lying around. So it would only effect a tiny percentage ( I am willing to bet less than 5% ). So it is not a bad move from environment perspective.
Of coz I wish Apple had at least bundled a high power charger for a few generation before they moved on. But I am ok with the new pricing reduction of their charger. ( $19 )
I sure hope not. Unlike most people, I upgrade my phone in 3-4 years, so by that time even my adaptor is worn out. I would not wish to spend more for one if I don't get any reduction in phone price.
I have never had or heard of a USB wall plug adapter "wearing" out in over a decade. How vigorously and/or frequently must one plug and unplug to cause this?
Odd note,the amount of wealth on display in their demonstration home was astounding. Then again just the amount displayed across portions of the Apple campus and the cost to create such an event.
The Western world talk about distribution of wealth among the wealthiest and poorest people always tend to overlook how the people of the Western world of are of the first category and those in the later see no difference in a billionaire or other member of the same.
That home looked to be about 2x the size of my own, in SCV. My home is ~$1.5M, so let's say it's a $3M home. You'd expect some level of sophisticated furnishing in a $3M home...
Iphone uses orignial kinect style lidar which throws IR beam and captures back results (apple bought primesense which was the manufacturer of original kinect) , These lidar don't work that good under direct sunlight, So cannot be used in cars.
The price of a car is 35x the price of a phone. Does the cost of the LIDAR scale up 35x when going from phone distances to car distances? That is an honest question that I don't know the answer to.
No, it's more than a factor of 300 price difference for the big lidars currently used on cars versus what that thing'd cost. The big spinning mirrors in the car lidar really bring the price up.
Yeah, while I'm pretty excited at the possibilities of LiDAR in the phones, they do have pretty limited range and would in no way be suitable for a car.
I've been working with iPad Pro and I think there's a lot of possibilities for it outside of just autofocus...
My left pocket loadout is a small carbon fiber clip, with cards and cash, and my phone. Been that way for five years and I have no intention of ever changing it.
I'm skipping this year, mostly because I want the Max camera and the regular form factor, but also to get some field data on whether this newfangled mag connector scrambles cards.
On the one hand, they're prominently featuring an accessory which clips your cards to the magnet itself. On the other hand, they build that accessory, and they don't build my clip, which offers no magnetic flux protection whatsoever.
My guess is that they will say "no", but in reality, probably yes. My AirPods Pro case will demagnetize hotel keys fairly easily, especially ones that have been rewritten to multiple times.
I had a card case for my iphone and my cards would routinely get corrupted. I couldn't figure out why it was happening, there wasn't a magnet in my iPhone 4s at the time.
I eventually figured out that it was happening because I'd been routinely laying my phone on my iPad, and the magnets in the iPad would, over time, murder my cards.
The new phones will absolutely corrupt your cards, I don't care what Apple marketing says.
A format to store HDR (high dynamic range) content, referring to colorspace. The difference to non-HDR is huge on a good display and this is the one feature I want to see hands-on on these new iPhones..
Is this the first iPhone launch without Phil Schiller (in a while)? Looks like individual experts have taken over each segment of iPhone (from Phil Schiller). Still I miss him!
Its hard to say until direct image comparisons come out. Historically, Apple computational photography has given it a edge over other phone cameras with seemingly better specs. However, that could easily change.
Not as small as I would like, but I’ll take what I can get. I’ve been clinging to my 5SE for years and they stopped allowing me to renew Apple care a couple of months ago. :/
“a phone that easily fits in the palm of your hand” is a phrase I legitimately scoffed at, what are phones if not handheld devices?
I'm surprised that Apple didn't add a fix or workaround to unlock the phone while wearing a face mask. Should be plenty of features to recognize a person or the mask can be added.
It's really annoying to loose the unlock with your face feature and go back to entering the code while outside.
Apple opened up HomePod to third party services this summer, through an official SDK. A lot of people are jumping to conclusions based on the lack of a screenshot.
Spotify has been pretty slow to pick up new features (iOS widgets, watchOS app, etc).
Well, Magsafe was not wireless but you do raise an existing point. That the iPhone could have magnets and pogo pins and have fast charging without needing it to be wireless, thus saving the weight of the charging coil and saving the energy lost as heat.
I wonder if everyone being locked up at home will dampen the demand for new data features too. If I'm just sitting with my wifi at home, what's the need for 5G?
There's a difference between 5G and Ultrawide 5G. Some carriers in the US, for example, just rebranded their 4G LTE networks as 5G because the top of their speed range is above the minimum required speed for actual 5G.
Their marketing works...Apple markets their fancy screens and people think they're better. But Samsung makes their screens and Samsung keeps the best screens for their own phones.
Prior to LG, Samsung was their only supplier of OLED screens. Even with LG onboard, LG is supplying only 20% for the upcoming iPhone 12. My point is, Apple always slaps a fancy marketing name to their screens (Retina...) but in reality the the quality is worse than Samsung phones. But Apple buyers ask if Samsung Phones have a Retina display...and when the answer is no, they feel they're getting an inferior phone.
I laughed out loud at that. Explaining the deletion of the charger, which is effectively a price raise, through the environmental angle is genius-level marketing and margin improvement.
To be clear: I support the move and think Apple's environmental efforts are both sincere and meaningfully helpful. It's just the best, "aren't you happy we're raising prices!" I've ever seen :)
To be fair, the chargers are inferior compared to brands like Anker. GAN chargers are so much smaller. Apple took the easy way out instead of coming up with a decent charger.
5G is for the cell carriers not the customers. Towers can simultaneously transmit to a certain number of clients at a time, so if you can get latency down and bandwidth up, you can service effectively more clients in the same period of time. With that said clients benefit too since they can shut down their power-sucking radios sooner. Think of it like turbo boost for CPUs: it's all about racing to get the link to sleep.
Has the network ever been a problem or bottleneck for the deployment of IoT, or is it just yet another bullshit buzzword pushed by the telecoms industry, similar to remote surgery/telemedicine? Most current IoT is using 2G cellular modems and seems to be fine with it given that the majority of devices don't need high bandwidth and the carriers themselves are not rationing the amount of SIMs that can be active, suggesting that there's plenty of capacity left too.
It's not about network speed, it's about the power requirements, range and iSIM.
With LTE-M (not sure if it's considered 5G, but it's a new LTE standard being rolled out at the same time anyway) or NB-IoT you can have devices using way less power to stay connected to the internet, and the range can be very impressive too. Of course, the bandwidth is also very low. But that's OK for things like tracking devices (they're making reindeer trackers in Finland) and basic smart watches.
With eSIM or iSIM you can also make the device smaller
> is using 2G cellular modems
I think carriers really want to discontinue 2G eventually. It's really inefficient. They've already dropped support for 3G around here.
I'm guessing it's also way more power hungry than LTE-M/NB-IoT
I’m a layman on this topic but watching the Apple video it sounded like 5G has higher power requirements than LTE. He even explained how it switches between them to conserve battery. LTE when you don’t need speed and 5G when you do.
Do not be confused. These technologies are very different to the 5G technology (called “New Radio”) the new iPhone and 5G phones in general are using. They are designed around using as little energy as possible and maintaining connectivity in very difficult conditions to the expense of speed and latency.
The reason IoT hasn’t completely taken off yet is simply because it’s still developing as an industry. There are lots of open questions about maintenance and architecture and how cloud IoT services should work. As it becomes more commodified it will become widespread.
[edit - noticed sibling post... “smart toasters” etc total BS nonsense, but IoT for business will be transformative]
Both LTE-M and NB-IoT are considered technologies of the 5G family. Technically they are way simpler versions of LTE, but they can coexist with "normal" 4G and 5G. A 4G / 5G base station can allocate part of its radio resources to these mobile technologies. In the future, with slicing this allocation can even be dynamic.
Most of the times, when people discuss how 5G will serve "massive machine type communications" they refer to LTE-M / NB-IoT.
It will become cheap enough (both hardware and subscription wise) that companies can include them in basically everything. That way you can't prevent your TV from uploading data to the mothership by not connecting it to wifi.
I am hoping that SOME TV manufacturer SOMEWHERE follows Apple's lead and markets a privacy-conscious TV as a feature. I have never bought a smart TV (I last bought a plasma 12 years ago), so I have managed to somehow skip the whole smartTV thing. And I'd like to continue avoiding it.
I don't think I've commented here for years, but had to dig out the login credentials for this one.
I recently spent 20 minutes looking at TVs on Amazon because the NBA finals were happening and I figured it might make sense to finally get a TV. Every damn TV I saw either had Alexa built right the eff in or it was Alexa-or-some-such enabled.
It's frustrating. I'd like to have a "smart" TV because having Youtube, Hulu, Netflix or Spotify on it is fairly useful, but the divide between smart and dumb TVs is now too large, with nothing sensible in the middle.
I'd definitely pay extra for a privacy-oriented TV, but I fear that a handful of privacy nerds willing to pay 20% or even 50% premium is not enough to offset the economies of scale and make this a reasonable proposition for any PM at any existing TV manufacturer to bring up.
Every single smart TV I have owned was complete and utter garbage and I am a tech person who carefully reviews what they buy.
I went with a Sony for the display tech but dear God is AndroidTV hot garbage. Interfaces, UX, everything terrible. Worst of all are the $20 main processors used in these things. They feel as if they're run on a 2007 BlackBerry.
The lackluster solution is to get a TV box (AppleTV, Xiami stuff...idk) but why is that even necessary.
Buy a computer screen + the $100 AppleTV module. At least Apple is privacy-serious, and you get Netflix-Hulu-Youtube. It doesn’t give you a classic tuner though.
I have a feeling that the concept of TV will be phased out.
There will be iPhone, iPad, iOS-based computer, iDesk, iWall, and finally, an iHouse.
You wake up to a big ceiling made out of ceramic-enhanced scratch-resistent glass screen, which artificially has emulated sunrise, so your experience of waking up is natural and absolutely amazing. Siri greets you, plays you a song, and while you brush your teeth, calmly tells you about your day, which is of course planned by an intelligent algorithm powered by the latest A42 neural chip.
Bacon is crispy, and eggs are tender. What a breakfast prepared by iChef! Not to mention the special sauce that is part of your weekly gourmet discovery program. Just savory.
The wall is playing you your morning news.
"What day is it today?" asked Siri, cheerfully. "It's Apple Event's day!"
Phew, for a second there, you thought Siri has asked you a real question. Turns out it's just rhetoric.
The new A43 chip is going to blow A42 out of the water. The trade-in program is amazing.
You look around the house, and the iWall looked bleak. The screen contrast-ratio on iChef is lacking. Your iToothbrush doesn't have a speaker as booming as the one in the advertisement.
"Hey, Siri. I'd like pre-order the new iHouse package!"
"Of course. Do you want to enroll in the trade-in program to exchange your current iHouse with a discount."
"Yes, please."
"Done."
A month later, the trade-in team has taken away the iHouse, yet the new iHouse isn't there. There has been a delay; the iHouse was supposed to be transported by the Pixel automatic railway, but Google just cut the project last week, so everything is stuck in warehouse for now.
"Damn it!"
You cursed, reflected, and walked into a Samsung shop.
GoogleMind notices your entry to the Samsung shop and expands the pervasive storage field, incrementally improving its probability of extracting money from you in future. "AndroidHouse had toothbrush features years ago, moron" says the shop assistant in lieu of a greeting. Looking around hoping to see some example appliances and integrations you are puzzled that most of the store is given over to themes. In the distance two people are cheering because the washing machine has dark mode. Presumably the lights in their house don't work.
A customer wearing a V for Vendetta mask locks eyes with you, they start to say something about a YouTube video they're following to upload a custom firmware to their cooker which lets the gas burners override the legal safety limits and double as a room warmer, but at the mention of YouTube a solid sheet slams down from the roof in between you blocking the conversation. "Get the best YouTube experience" it ... instructs? Demands? The place where it should take a response from you is missing. You turn away.
The shop assistant invites you over to the VR counter where you can tour the AndroidHouses on offer, several tens of thousands of makes and models all alike, and hands you a pair of carefully cleaned and sanitized VR goggles, which you put on. "Please select all images of brutal murder scenes or books on leopards" the familiar captcha test prompts. You go through the motions, accepting that it's perfectly reasonable that you might be a spam customer. Nobody has been able to speak to a human about the captcha contents for at least a decade now.
The VR goggles go blank, then show you a scene from a Virtual Reality headset of the 1980s. "I thought Android VR was quite good?" you mutter. "Mandatory Samsung overlay" says the assistant, "runs all the same apps". Data gathered by the headset arrives at the nearest orbiting FaceBook point of presence, sneaking past the privacy filters. Which privacy legislation applies to the satellites is still being fought. You tour some houses, you watch some ads. It's terrible that Apple doesn't let you block ads properly. You watch some more ads. Disgusting Apple blocking third-party plugins. You ask if AndroidHouse allows third-party plugins, but it doesn't.
Leaving the shop, undecided, you glance in the door of the GNU/OpenLibreHouse Organization. "Our houses would have electricity now if it wasn't for Microsoft!" you overhear. A large and intimidating man walks up to you and grabs your arm. "If you want to see your daughter again, come with me and move into your new OracleHouse". He moves and you go with him like his grip was iron. It might well be. Your wallet is missing. He nods at a crowd of people standing nearby and your heart sinks. Consultants. "We can have your toothbrush setup within six months - a Gartner leading average time" one of them says. You never asked for this.
we've got one and have never used it for anything other than plugging in the laptop via hdmi. it just happened to be a decent deal and nice picture - the "smart" aspect was completely ignored.
I hope that would happen but nothing on the technology roadmap suggest that is possible. Even if 5G patents were free, i.e you paid Zero for all Wireless patents cost, Antenna, RF Front End and 5G Modem is expensive.
Even if you somehow Apply Moore's Law, it will take at least 3 Gen reduction in cost. ( That is 6 years ).
The original iPhone was 2.5G and could load webpages just fine. But when a modern iPhone only has a 2.5G connection, it’s useless. All we need to make 5G critical is for webpages to start being 500+ MB for basic text plus all the associated ads, trackers, and other important features.
You're off by an order of magnitude, because it's a max speed of 4Gbps. Not 4GB/sec. Bits and not bytes.
Your overall point is still valid, though. Most users will get essentially zero benefit from this and data caps or throttling will kick in hilariously quickly.
The theory here is nice, but who here on HN does actually get good unthrottled speeds on 4G now? Will carriers just magically stop throttling 5G after they sell it?
A few days ago I downloaded a 4.8GB MacOS update over a 4G connection. That took 25 minutes, which is an average of 3.2 MB/s. My provider claims 30 Mbit/s, so that is pretty reasonable.
That's great and all, but that would leave me with 0.2 GB of data for the rest of the month (Germany). Great now I just have to disable downloading of pictures and videos in Whatsapp.
There was a lot of talk about how the number of sensors on autonomous vehicles meant many gigabytes of data per minute would be produced and transmitted by 5G back to servers to help train the systems. I'm not sure if I actually believe that, but that's certainly what people were claiming.
The claims are even more dumb, that it enables automimous cars by connecting them - would you let a car drive you around if it required a mobile connection to work properly? Nope. Note that Elon Musk / Tesla nor any other self driving car uses anything of the sort. It all needs to be running on the car. And they're managing to do self driving already without any 5G. For uploads you can just wait til the car is home and use the wifi, or slowly (though not that slowly really) upload with 4G.
I think this is a futurist persons painting a sexy picture. In reality, it would be cool if - as we slowly approached a self driving world- the vehicles could relay real time road conditions to the cloud. This of course would enable the vehicle to be aware of upcoming road conditions. It’s not so much that the internet connection is doing the driving but it could aid it. Something simple like potholes. They show up after a rain and get fixed a few weeks later (if you’re lucky). If the car knew there was a pothole ahead and knew to drift to the left portion of the lane to avoid it that would be nice. The vehicle wouldn’t have to do real time jerky swerve reaction because it knew it was coming. Maybe next month a vehicle notices the pothole is gone, the cloud forgets about it. Something like this is the practical use of IoT on the roads.
Certainly not this one simple example in a single device (vehicle). I don’t know where our 3/4 G limits are but I think if you multiply the data transmission by many millions of devices and many millions of reasons to communicate, it’s possible it would put a strain on our present network capacity.
5G in the case of self driving cars is meant to have an auxiliary role. For example, it may warn surrounding cars for pot holes or even notify instantly of a sudden breaking.
> what technology advancements will there be in the next 10-20 years that actually make 5G technology useful?
Real-time 3D/VR video streams. I think this will start happening immediately after release since the Pro models have LiDAR. Expect weird, interesting things to happen in games and streaming.
The demo stated that iOS will only use LTE by default and only kick in to using 5G when it needs it. It will be interesting to see how it makes that decision.
They’ll likely have to change that if for no other reason than someone will use their plan to run some servers using many TB/mo of data or something crazy. Like how MS needed to cap “unlimited” OneDrive because a few people were storing 100TB of system images.
Tinfoil hats, cancer treatment, self driving cars or perhaps platoons for highways, smart homes that are easily hacked, wireless low powered implants that cause benign tumors that sue a tech company into bankrupty, but the shell company opens another 5g implant company.
That's probably a good idea. I do expect the battery gains as well as speeds be massive though. I suspect at least 50% longer lasting battery, and less burning of my laps
Take a look at any of the "new" releases of Macbooks over the past couple of years, and all the problems that people have with them. From butterfly keyboards, to having to charge through right side to avoid CPU slow down, to all the problems with software in Catalina especially how it breaks features on older Macbooks, e.t.c
IMO anyone who actually gives about tech should have stopped buying Macbooks since they started soldering SSDs into the board.
It makes a lot of technical sense to solder SSDs to the board given the insane speed of modern SSDs. Solder joints are much better than a connector for a high bandwidth link. Even tiny parasitic capacitances become a major headache.
Are they accomplishing anything that couldn't and isn't already done well be an NVMe M.2 connector? All that comes to my mind is a miniscule space savings.
I suspect they are getting better speed and power consumption, and deeper integration with T2 (which functions as the controller chip). Apple is generally ahead of the curve when it comes to SSD performance in laptops, so it's unlikely that a generic SSD connector would function as well.
I guess it’s good to add 5G to the baseline feature checklist so that I can use 5G when it rolls out in my city in 3-5 years time, but I don’t see it as a headline feature unless carriers use it to provide much cheaper data plans (haha).
I'm finally going to upgrade from my original SE. It's not as small as I'd like, but I think it will keep its value well if they do come out with the nano in the spring along with a new watch mini/nano.
It's looking like it was a battery issue all along, but once these magnetic chargers become common, that won't matter. It's perfect for mounting an iPhone in the car too.
I hope this will finally stop iPhones from shattering so easily.
I remember a few years ago my iPhone 7 screen shattered while in my pocket, and just 2 days after the 1 year warranty had ended. I've never been so mad as when the "Genius" assistant told me the metal frame just sometimes bent and caused the screen to break. Seems this couldn't happen with ceramic.
It depends how it is implemented. Most of the time the screen isn't updating. It would only need to rev up when scrolling or similar. When you are watching a video it is probably 30 or 60fps. So it would use more battery, but with a good variable refresh rate implementation it shouldn't be too bad.
There are Android devices that show that it does have a battery cost, but it isn't extraordinary.
Putting your phone next to your Macbook and letting it being charged wirelessly would be an innovation. MagSafe on a phone does not make much sense as it would fly away anyways if you hit it hard. USB-C consistency would also be nice.
Does anybody know how the 2 lens setups perform vs the 3 lens setups? I like the size of the Mini but I also want to get a good camera. I have a mirrorless camera with big lenses for tougher things like wildlife or night.
I'm a little concerned about the feature bifurcation with lidar only being available on the pro. Hopefully they won't just kill it off like 3D touch from a lack of developer support.
I'm due for an upgrade and the mini seems to be a really nice option. As an aside, does anyone know what the current limitations are in making a completely sealed weather-proof phone?
I was a bit surprised on how much time they spent on the camera tech. I didn't time it, but it felt like they spent more time on the camera than things like 5G?
A worse battery, no reverse charging, huge notch compared to alternatives...
I was planning to upgrade my phone but I guess I'll have to wait for iPhone 13
If you know anything about cameras and low light photography, the sensor shift OIS is a HUGE deal, especially combined with an f/1.6 lens. Instant purchase!
I’m wondering, would the MagSafe feature destroy cards? I usually put my phone in my pocket without cards, but occasionally I do put it in the wallet side.
No, of course, I'd just previously assumed it was the sort of thing only a couple thousand dollars worth of. You might also want to link to the section on In-Body Stabilization instead, since that's what I was specifically calling out here. iPhones have had lens OIS for a while now, unless I'm mistaken.
Nice to see the old angular frame[0], but disheartening to not see no LCD model. I have avoided OLED so far since I can spend a lot of time looking at my phone’s screen in low light and I’d rather not deal with PWM.
I had hopes for Touch ID comeback (IIRC Apple has a patent for fingerprint reader integrated in phone body or screen), but oh well.
[0] Although it was much better when power button was on the top—in all modern iPhones on/off can be easily mistaken for volume up/down by touch.
A lot less than buying a new phone in the first place. That's where you take the environmental hit. If you're going to fix the environment, implement the fixes that give the biggest bang for the buck. If you don't buy a new phone, you don't need to worry about buying new adapters.
"And here's the best part. We are able to decentralize and distribute both the cost and impact evenly across the entire consumer base, making Apple itself much more environmentally friendly."
I always get a laugh reading the comments on a new Apple offering. This time - OMG! Mini! Until you go back and review the specs and style of the original iPhone SE which these new phones get their styling from. The original iPhone SE was also smaller and lighter.
just the way they present stuff like the ceramics or chips is very nice, it makes it feel futuristic even when the actual in development tech has already advanced years past this point
The arrogance of this fucking company, so now you dont even get the wall plug. And how much is their apple brand wall plug ? I bet minimum 40$. How are ppl still blindly just buying these dumbass iphones still I dont get it.
(Am I the only one who hates FaceID and feels like it was mostly a neat engineering problem to work on that doesn't actually suit the task as well as simple fingerprinting?)
So now, a $1k iPhone comes standard with LiDAR sensors - but Musk still claims they're too expensive and cumbersome to use in self driving vehicles that cost over $40k.
It's more of, you can now put usable LiDAR sensors in a package as small as a phone, and so cheaply that it doesn't impact the final sale price of said phone...
That, and every other AV company is using LiDAR sensors...
But, Musk has doubled down, tripled down and more on this. So much so, I doubt he could come to his senses one day without a big PR nightmare - after all, they've been telling folks their car has all the hardware for fully autonomous driving for the past 5+ years.
I had a friend who had every single iPhone release. She'd immediately buy the new generation when it came out.
You know what I really want to see, more than any of this gitter and glam and a few features here and there? A real, actual campaign to reduce e-Waste. I way out of this bullshit, constant consumerism mess. How many more wars have to be fought, and people repressed, to continue the machine that gives us more machines?
Apple has so much money at this point. What are they even going to do with more? How about you do something that's actually innovative Apple: Officially open all the hardware specs, bootloader keys and what you can legally release of device drivers for iPhone 1-7. Maybe even contribute some code to get a DarwinBSD booting by itself on those devices; letting developers add on new layers.
How about something that will actually end the cycle of factory sludge, toxic waste and human toil that goes into each new generation of shiny new product.
I'm sick of these releases. Give me something fucking upgradable, fixable and usable. Give me something that's thicker and bulkier, but that I can take apart myself and fix.
I'm in the minority though. The rest of the planet is okay with this. Their advertising has made people even more okay with this, so they'll just keep selling us this crap, until we've extracted every last resource the Earth can give.
I agree, it's absurdly overhyped. I mean, it's just a phone at the end of the day, no need for all this cult capitalist nonsense that goes along with some functionally minor improvements.
And with their huge wealth, Apple has such an opportunity to do some actual good in the world but, really, does fuck all.
What an annoying presentation. They try to make 5G look like it's invented by Apple by labeling it "innovation". No, Tim Apple, it's Qualcomm who made that chip. You just had your hardware team build it inside the phone.
The screen, same deal. A fancy name for technology that's been around for a while. Nobody will really see the difference between the screen on an iPhone X and iPhone 12, but hey, it's a sales-talk.
Speaking of 5G, they're trying to sell us onto the idea that we need it. We are still dealing with relatively low bandwidth caps from our providers, and nobody in their right mind is going to use 4GB/s to do... anything. Do they expect us to willy-nilly download games of 4GB on the go or something?
5G is technology for the providers and their benefactors, not for us the comsumers.
On to the CPU. It's faster. Great. It was already industry-leading fast. I respect processing power as something amazing and I'll respect this improvement for what it is. Great job. Not too impressed because I wouldn't use it myself, but it's nice.
Then Touch ID, wow I'm so happy they reintroduced it last-minute during this pandemic where we all wear masks when out and about. What's that? They didn't include Touch ID? You mean their superior technology that is pretty damn amazing and convenient to serve NEXT TO Face ID isn't there even though they could have?
Yikes.
Well, at least the announced 120Hz for the Pro Max and 90Hz for the smaller Pro model was nice. Hm? They didn't do that either? Oh. They're still stuck on 60Hz while the competition is delivering phones for half the money doing all of the above since about a year ago?
Yikes.
MagSafe, though. Now that is quite nice! Not even kidding. They invented magnets at Apple, like, whoa I'm going to assume that the magnetic connection will allow you to charge the phone and ALSO transfer data! Wild assumption, huh?
The case with a spare pocket for the Apple Pencil was a nice touch, though, especially now the iPhone 12 supports it. That's also a lie. I'm lying. They did not do that.
At the very least they're good for nature and such. No more charger and earphones! As a result the price has gone down a whopping $300 across the field, with a respectful nod to the people who are struggling in these dire times.
No USB-C, no fast charging, no high-refresh rate display, same large notch, mediocre battery life, expensive 5G chip that is useless in India, higher prices this year compared to last year, no charger included. There isn't one good reason to buy the iPhone 12 in India this year!
As a frugal Android spectator, a high-refresh rate screen is one of the only upgrades that I find compelling in new phones. Already have USB-C, AMOLED 400ppi screen, mediocre battery life but fast charging, no notch, and this is a OnePlus 3 from 4 years ago
None of the carriers or handset makers are telling me how much the data will cost. Maybe I'm a little price-focused, but that determines for me whether I'm excited about it.
If I'm just burning through my existing data limit faster, what's the point? What's the pricing of this new data capability?
Lowest plan:
"In times of congestion, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic."
Upper plans:
"Get access to 50GB of 4G LTE premium data per month. ... . In times of congestion, your data may be temporarily slower than other traffic after exceeding 50GB/mo/line."
Of course, that's 4G, not 5G, but before they tell you whether or at what point they throttle 5G, I can't say what "having unlimited 5G" means.
For context, it looks like this means what a commenter on a Verizon forum says (quoting verbatim, looks like the GB numbers changed):
"Verizon has 3 levels of unlimited data plans. The cheapest one has the possibility of being "throttled" AT ANY TIME there is congestion on the local towers. The mid-tier has no throttling until you have used at least 22 GB in a month on a line. The highest tier has no throttling until you have used at least 75 GB in a month on a line."
>4. iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini are splash, water, and dust resistant and were tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP68 under IEC standard 60529 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes). Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.
Shame. I was hoping they would develop a completely washable phone due to corona.
The overall sense of control I have over the system. With iOS it feels like I am using someone else's phone, it's not as customizable/optimizable. I can't install other apps on it (outside the store that is) and the entire dev process feels so..gated. I want my phone to be an extension of my tech environment, something I can automate and freely fiddle with.
It might sound petty but having to jump through hoops to use a custom ringtone was the nail in the coffin.
> iphone enables people to do more and more every day
Not entirely true , e.g. they can't play fortnite or other unreal-based games
Among Covid, uncertainty, and people moving, i m not sure it's the best time to present their most expensive phone, esp. now that comparable phones are half the price. 5G is exciting? hm most people use their phones in crappy wifi for years, plus it's not like apple built the 5G infrastrucutre. (plus there's noone to show off to at this time)
I live in the future. Here we hate mobile phones. They are boring slabs with annoying demand of mental attention. The cool kids are using simple open hardware to tap into p2p networks. The old people are recycling 4g tech with 3d printed mods for fun and to save money. Economy is sinking daily and the only option to buy new hardware is to finance it for life, so we avoid to do this.
Seriously now, my last phone is SE.
I am old apple user.
I plan to buy cheap Android phone for Important apps. Actually Apple of now is what I don’t trust or like. I feel that this boring, politically correct, cunning corporation is exactly the opposite of the original Apple idea and ethos. This started years ago with whole Semi-Pro trend, but now is in a full swing, not listening of pro users, milking 30 percent everything, basically is a company for “fashion people” with polished marketing. My money are safe:)
Using public political positions for boosting sales and marketing. People today are buying perceptions and lifestyle not technical products. When corporations are filling political realm with positive public perceptions and lobbing for profit margins and tax evasions the future is bleak.
No matter how much they tout the video and picture quality, it's still behind DSLR and pro's can't use it until it beats DSLR at it's own game. LIDAR was interesting but I only see very limited use case for it.
>No matter how much they tout the video and picture quality, it's still behind DSLR and pro's can't use it until it beats DSLR at it's own game.
Pros increasingly don't use DSLR nowadays, the use mirrorless cameras.
That nit, aside, it's not about replacing DSLR/Mirroless FF cameras for Pros (which it will never do).
It's about having great video/picture quality for the average user and the ocassional pro use (which it does).
I have used it in pro contexts, as have many others (including several prime time TV shows and even movies). For photography it's even more of a non-brainer...
Obviously it will be hard for a phone with 1/10th the z index to fit the same optics that a DSLR came.
But I work in video production and I can tell you that for 99% of people, there is absolutely no reason to buy a separate camera.
What Apple and other smartphone makers have managed to achieve in such small and (relatively, compared to a full frame DSLR) inexpensive items is pretty amazing.
They have such good quality that when I need to grab a quick pickup shot, I can easily use my phone's camera and drop the footage in with a pro cine-style camera. There are tons of apps that will let you shoot with full manual control or even flat color profiles.
People have shot entire, commercially released movies on their smartphones. Once you get to a certain image quality, it's not about the image quality but the artistic content/merit of said image.
Zero photos where you can actually see how thick the bezels are on the 12 Pro's product page. Guess it's safe to assume it'll be pretty disappointing considering how much they talked about thinner bezels.
Looking at specs, the 12 (and 12 Pro) has the same 6.1" screen size as the XR/11 did, but body length and width are both about 4mm smaller. So that's ~2mm less bezel all around presumably.
Where are you seeing this? On the Apple site they list the 12 pro as being 146.7mm x 71.5mm whereas the 11 Pro was 144mm x 71.4 mm. That's a larger surface area than the 11 Pro, not smaller.
I was comparing the 12 and 12 Pro to the base 11 and XR, not the 11 Pro. Base 11 and XR had the same 6.1" screen size as the 12 lineup, the 11 Pro has a smaller screen (5.85", identical to the X/XS and not present in the 12 lineup anymore).
I HATE thin bezels. I actually returned my Galaxy S10 because palm-misclicks dove me crazy. After 19 days of practice and different grips, random clicks didn't get any better.
Apple might be better at detecting if it's your palm or an intentional tap. MacBook trackpads are great at detecting palm vs finger, so I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone does well with that too.
It's kind of fascinating how subtle the math and engineering on this sort of thing is.
I can't stand how, after this many decades of iteration, the Lenovo ThinkPad still mis-comprehends accidentally brushing against the trackpad while you're typing (and the form factor of the whole keyboard / trackpad combo does one no favors unless one touches the keyboard like a hook-handed monster).
In Linux this is a solved problem by a very simple measure. The gestures (click by tapping, scrolling) are turned off while you type for a short period of time (around 300ms) after each key-press. It works surprisingly well and I've never noticed the trackpad not working when I need it too.
I have -- attempting to play Minecraft on a touchpad, or just multitasking real quick. While not a huge problem, macOS does it better and the simple measure is just that - a simple measure.
That far from solves the problem. Your workflow might never require using the keyboard and trackpad simultaneously, but for the majority of users, this “simple measure” is a never ending source of pain.
One thing I dream of and will never get is a Thinkpad without a trackpad. Just remove it, give me bigger keyboard, keep the track point and its buttons. I disable the trackpad anyway but it's still annoying just being there and crippling the keyboard functionality.
Yeah, I especially like it when I'm in the middle of a long email and some sort of click with my palm happens and it deletes most of what I've been typing. Just happened to me today. Be nice if there was a way to totally deactivate the trackpad if you were using a mouse or something.
So, just to give you data on the other side of the curve: the very large trackpads are basically the only reason left (keyboard now sucks, magsafe is gone) for me to use a MacBook Pro.
Should I in the future revert to Linux as a day-to-day driver, it would probably be conditioned on similar-level support for the (even larger :-D) Magic Trackpad peripheral.
So I guess this is one of these things where YMMV
Edit: FWIW I'm a touch typist with relatively small hands. Maybe this has to do with it. I cannot remember accidentally triggering the trackpad ever since... I can't remember the last time, it's been at least half a decade.
It matters to me, in the sense that I prefer to have some bezel left so I can actually hold onto the phone without accidentally pressing things on the screen.
Have you tried with an iPhone? Legit curious as I'm about to switch from a Pixel 2XL. I didn't think I'd like the giant trackpad on my MBP, but Apple does a good job with rejection about 99.9% of the time.
Is the fact that wanting thinner bezels when they are 5mm wide != wanting thinner bezels when they are 1mm wide, really something that needs pointing out? Apparently so.
https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/
https://www.apple.com/iphone-12-pro/
Also: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. You can get to those by clicking More at the bottom of the page—or do it like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24767378&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24767378&p=3
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