Well that says more about you than about the iPhone. One example: User experience regarding camera processing improved tremendously between X and 14. Only with the bigger processing power they could optimize images in a fraction of a second after taking them. The photonic engine as we have today, would not be deliver the same experience on an iPhone X.

It is still the same use case. I mentioned the iPhone X and not the earlier models because the X takes really good photos and videos. Sure the later models are better; but it is a bit like watching 4K instead of 1080p on the TV. I can tell the difference but 1080p is fine.

I’d say you’re right and the differences are marginal for most photography but the real differences come out with things like night photos or portrait mode. Daylight pics are mostly all the same honestly.

Machine learning is that use case, it'll eat up as much processing power as you can throw at it.

LLMs on your phone are a few hardware generations out, but they are coming.

ML/AI is not really a use case but rather a technology. The use cases may come a one point but right now, as far as I can see, they are missing.

The use case is Siri not being complete shit

And autocomplete! The new iOS 17 completion stuff is neat but nothing compared to what state-of-the-art LLMs can do today.

I would say consider yourself lucky that you don’t use questionably-coded apps. I have an iPhone se 2020 (a generation newer) and some apps have a noticeable and annoying lag. A local transport app (9292) is a particularly notorious offender.

For me there’s some benefit in little things like on-device OCR and image classification, which has been helpful for quickly surfacing particular photos in my library but yes the broad strokes have not changed much.

I am wondering about this; I have noticed the OCR (that you can photo something and the copy the text as plain text). How compute sensitive is that? Is that not available on the X?

It is a useful feature. In particular in Google translate (lens function) which I am pretty was also there on the X (perhaps requiring a trip to Google’s server).

I’m not sure if it’s available on the X or not, but it would make a lot of sense if a certain level of hardware acceleration is required to do this OCR in the background with little to no negative impact on battery life. The X’s SoC can probably handle one-offs just fine, but it might not hold up as well to the OS churning through photos OCRing them in the background.

The features you use are not the features everyone else uses.

Photo/video processing

The iPhone X had excellent camera and photo/video processing. So much better than the earlier models; from the X up to today's model it is much more marginal improvements. Really nothing I notice as a casual user.

Even if you didn't change anything about the software, the newer CPUs would still give you better energy efficiency and thereby longer battery life.

I found the battery life to be the same.

But the software devs will always more-than use up any extra efficiency, so it'll still barely last a day, and will die early when it gets heavy use...

This varies a lot from app to app. It’s true that some are built in a way that puts no thought towards efficiency, but there are plenty that are built by devs who care.

I like to keep around test devices that somewhat represent the average user’s device, and when it’s practical a low end device and test against those every so often just to make sure the app performs reasonably well.

This has been in my experience more important for Android apps than for iOS apps, though, because the gulf in power between currently-sold devices in the Android world is vastly more large than in the iOS world. With few exceptions, I find that reasonably efficient apps tested and developed chiefly on newer iPhones work fine on older iPhones, but developing and testing an Android app only on flagships will make for a miserable experience for users of low end or older Android devices.

The CPUs (and the software) are so efficient now that only the screen and the radios really consume energy. If you find yourself blaming high CPU usage for low battery life, it's likely you are either incorrect, or the problem is just some bug in the application, nothing intended.

Okay - App devs find yet more reasons to ping their server every 5 mins and keep those radios active...

Feature, not bug. There is a steady stream of features that build on the newer hardware, for example local dictation support starts with A12 devices. The big question is not whether a five year old phone supports the most current software (I would hope so), it's whether today's brand new phone will likewise support the updated software in five years, and what features can app developers rely on being present in five years.

Deep Fusion is noticeable on photos if you view on a bigger screen or crop in. Cinematic mode is very well liked for making videos with background blur.