"Comment about how shitty this corporation is"

"Why don't you talk about the product like a good consumer?"

"I'm done with Google, Adobe, ..."

It's just a rant for the sake of rants

Hence why they are considering building their own phone

I think I remember them saying the current target is 2026-2027 which is promising.

(Note I didn't say consumer as that's reductionistic)

If the M5 generation gets this GPU upgrade, which I don't see why not, then the era of viable local LLM inferencing is upon us.

That's the most exciting thing from this Apple's event in my opinion.

PS. I also like the idea of the ultra thin iPhone Air, the 2x better noise cancellation and live translation of Airpods 3, high blood pressure detection of the new Watch, and the bold sexy orange color of the iPhone 17 Pro. Overall, this is as good as it gets for incremental updates in Apple's ecosystem in a while.

- mobile mp3 player sales are low unless disk and battery life are greatly improved

- large display touch screen phone market is small unless someone solves the "app problem"

- smart watch market is tiny if exists at all unless someone makes one that is useful and has improved battery life

The breakthru that made touchscreen phones works wasn’t an app ecosystem. That came after people were already crazy about iPhones. It was capacitive touch screens. Basically everything before was resistive touch, which is why they usually had styluses. Getting touch, and really multi-touch, working well was the game changer that redefined cell phones.

Every smartwatch that hasn't met that bar, which is almost all of them ever made, is a joke to me. I'd have ordered a RePebble had I not moved back to analogue dumbwatches instead just before they were announced (and were iOS not actively hostile to competing watch implementations).

A side effect is that this makes your watch look less new, and therefore less of a theft target.

But if you want to leave your smartphone at home, but you still want cellular and notifications, I agree the apple watch is the only game in town even if the battery life sucks.

I agree that Apple Watches don't last long enough between charges, but comparing them to a completely different class of device that's technically the same broad category is pointless.

the camp that sees the smartwatch as an accessory to their smartphone that does fitness tracking and maybe a few other useful things to avoid pulling their phone out constantly - those people want MUCH longer battery life.

the camp that sees the smartwatch as a REPLACEMENT to their smartphone, they are perfectly fine with the current battery life.

2. Just for general convenience, having to take another special cable for every late night or overnight trip is maddening. I always have a phone anyway for any actual interactions.

I find it hard to believe many people are writing texts on their watches, it's just a nice to have gimmick feature that everyone I know has stopped using.

That has not been my experience though - having used both an Apple Watch and a Pixel Watch for years on end every single day. Absolutely outside my area of expertise, but I would imagine that you can design batteries to have a much longer lifetime (no of recharge cycles) when their capacity is smaller.

You are brushing your teeth for like half that alone.

OLED is just the wrong screen tech for these devices, never made any sense to me given how little I care about graphics and how little time I spend reading the display.

Especially considering how useful sleep data is, then I was surprised to see they're only getting sleep scores now.

My dirt cheap Huawei watches have had this for years. It's accurate enough (my own perception based on use). And I get a weeks battery life too (although I don't have the distracting fancy notifications perhaps). It does check blood oxygen levels, heart rate, stress etc.

I truly thought this was a solved problem (looking at headphones battery life, although I might need to check my assumptions here also apply to Airpods).

> I truly thought this was a solved problem.

I charge when showering in the morning. 15 minutes is enough for the day + night, half an hour to charge it fully.

In other words, if they made the battery last twice as long it'd still be equally as annoying (since your daily routine would be nearly the same, except now you also need to remember if it's a charge day or non-charge day).

To be fair maybe 3/4 days buys you some convenience. But anyways charging once a day is a reasonable place to get to, to get something better would require at minimum a 3x improvement which probably means a ground-up rework instead of continuous refinement.

A battery band might get you there but I suspect it'd be too clunky. At best Apple may redesign their watch to support a battery band and allow 3rd parties to make them for folks that need weeks of battery life.

The other issue is that I don't want to have to bring Yet Another Dongle™ every time I go away for a weekend or short business trip. Most of my trips are ≤ 4 days, so if AWs could reliably go that long (including battery degradation over time) then I'd consider getting one.

Right now, only the AWU even approaches this, and only in low-power mode. If it weren't a thousand dollars, I'd consider it. But between the low-power requirement and the pricing, it's just no contest in my book. I'm getting a new Pebble, which offers a month of battery life at 1/3 of the cost.

I think reverse charging from your smartphone is a quite decent solution to the problem, which is supported by certain Android devices.

The tech isn't there yet.

From Google's official Pixel 9 Pro Fold handling instructions: (https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15090466?hl=en#...)

> Flexible screens are softer than traditional phone screens, so avoid contact with sand, crumbs, *fingernails* and sharp objects.

I'm sure that if Apple invented the exact same thing in the exact same way, it would have been the "greatest thing since sliced bread".

For those that are not chronically online, a mobile phone from a decade ago has everything they need. If you only have to phone the family, WhatsApp your neighbours, get the map out, use a search engine and do your online banking, then a flagship phone is a bit over the top. If anything, the old phone is preferable since its loss would not be the end of the world.

I have seen a few elderly neighbours rocking Samsung Galaxy S7s with no need to upgrade. Although the S7 isn't quite a decade old, the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come since there is this demographic of active users.

Now, what if we could get these people to upgrade every three years with a feature that the 'elderly neighbour' would want? Eyesight isn't what it used to be in old age, so how about a nice big screen?

You can't deliberately hobble the phone with poor battery life or programme it to go slow in an update because we know that isn't going to win the customer over, but a screen that gets tatty after three years? Sounds good to me.

I have several apps that no longer work on my otherwise good phone bought in 2018 because I can no longer update the OS that they require.

Edit: This is a honest question.

Whatsapp also no longer works on it, thus the phone is useless.

Which is sad, as it has a great camera, battery life and is very light.

https://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_redmi_note_8-9814.php

It's small, has dual sim card sockets, and a headphone jack.

I'm not sure how I'd replace it to be honest.

Because there are very cheap, lightweight adaptors to headphone jack from USB-C.

Wireless chargers are pretty good but it’s still a pain to wear out your port.

I can dual-SIM my iphone by using one e-Sim and one physical. The only thing it is not, is small...

The S7 you mention lasted 4 years, and received the last patch in 2020.

Not convinced that doing online banking on a phone that hasn't had software updates for 5 years is a good idea.

A lot of us the techies can be strong-armed via FOMO and other tropes but good luck convincing the elderly neighbors.

Probably trying to find better screen materials, and addressing reliability issues.

I used Palm devices with resistive touch screens. It was good, but when you go glass, there's no turning back.

I would never buy a phone with folding screens protected by plastic. I want a dependable slab. Not a gimmicky gadget which can die any moment. I got my fix for dying flex cables with Casiopeia PDAs. Never again.

Am I representative? Dunno.

There will never be a folding iPhone, simple as.

Also flip phones aren't dorky and have a 2000s vibe - but they don't fit Apple "you can have any color as long as it's black" approach to design.

In some ways I can't even fault them - fragmenting your device shapes/experiences to chase a niche look is not good business. But this is exactly what's pushing me out of Apple ecosystem - it's so locked down that if you don't want to fit into their narrow product lines you have no other options. There are no third party watch makers using apple watch hardware and software. No other phone makers with access to iPhone internals and iOS. Nobody can hack a PC OS onto an iPad or build a 2in1 MacOS device.

I feel like this is the last gen of Apple tech I'm in on - I just find there are so many devices that are compelling to me personally but don't fit into the walled garden. Plus Google seems light-year ahead on delivering a smart assistant.

It's OK but it feels bad because you are kind of trapped with their stuff if you invested in their ecosystem.

Apparently in 2022, 80% of iPhone owners also had the AW.

It’s hard to find a source of how many iPhone owners specifically also own a smartwatch, but in the US it seems like 35% might be a decent estimate of smartwatch ownership, so it’d be more in the realm of ~28% of iPhone owners also having an Apple Watch.

Meanwhile my Casio calculator watch: "bonjour"

https://teddybaldassarre.com/blogs/watches/rectangle-watches...

There's nothing wrong with rectangular watches - a fat bezel less screen rectangle around your wrist is not the same thing. The pro comes closest to a proper watch look but even that's "inspector gadget" teritory, not fashion accessory.

I left the ecosystem after Catalina, and my experience with macOS at work has horrified me enough to stay well away. Nowadays I'm happily using NixOS on the desktop, laptop and homeserver. My biggest gripe is that I didn't switch sooner, probably could have saved a decent amount of cash eschewing the Apple tax, SaaS fees and macOS migration hamster-wheel.

Oh and I remember everyone mocking the airpods pro when they came out. Now everyone is wearing them.

For phones what really matters for most people is... the screen size. And a folding phone is basically the best thing you can get right now for that.

The only problem is pricing at the moment.

Apple cancelled their mini line which was 3% of sales.

It’s not a big enough slice for them to want to chase.

The screen isn't really big enough or the right shape to feel like a real upgrade for movies, and a lot of apps just aren't built with foldables in mind. Most of the time it just feels like a weirdly shaped, less powerful, less durable tablet.

On top of that you're dealing with a visible crease across the screen, higher prices for something that's actually more fragile, and bulkier hardware with smaller or split batteries. The tech is cool in theory, but in practice it's a lot of compromises without a clear killer use case.

It's not really free. It's just built in to the cost of your plan. Your plan would be half the price if you weren't paying for the phone.

Fair enough, then it makes sense to get the phone.

That would be the half sized phone I would buy.

Typical strat for them is not to be first with an innovation, but to wait and work out the kinks enough that they can convince people that the tradeoffs are well worth making. Apple wouldn't be chasing that existing slice, they'd be trying to entice a larger share of their customers to upgrade faster.

Maybe I'm the idiot, but you won't catch me dead paying laptop money for a neuter-computer.

Form factor. Touch screen. GPS. Cellular. Circular polarization. These are all literal hardware differences between the iPad and MacBook, and every single one of them makes the iPad suitable for my use case (ForeFlight running on an iPad mounted to the yoke) where a MacBook would not be.

iPads are better for watching shows on a stationary bike, since they fit on the bike

iPads are better for reading manga, since you can hold them vertically

and iPads are clearly better for drawing--you can't draw on a laptop.

There are some hybrid laptops that do these things, but they're bad at them. Especially drawing, I've used enough HP convertibles with "stylus support" over the years to know that.

Or you can pull up VLC and peruse your collection of locally-stored content

[1]: Mediocre folded experience doesn't bother them

[2]: Think calendars and whatever else middle managers look at

My use-case is for travel, where I want to read books, and the very occasional time when I want to do some design work outside the office -- draw a diagram that sort of thing. A third rare use case is where a web site is buggy or limited in functionality for mobile browsers. In all these cases the unfolded screen allows me to do the thing I need to do without carrying a second device (tablet, eReader). Another marginal use-case is to show another person a photograph. The fold out screen is much easier to see and I think has better color rendition too.

For these use-cases I find the folding phone very worthwhile.

But...the benefit that trumps all that is that the phone itself is smaller (narrower) than the typical flagship phones these days. It fits in my pocket and my hand reaches across it. I'd never go back to a non-folding phone for this reason alone, even if I never unfolded it. In fact I almost never do unfold it, except when traveling.

fwiw it wasn't until the Fold6 that the "cover screen" typing experience was ok. I understand that the Fold7 is a bit wider and so probably better, but I can't justify the expense to upgrade so will sit out until the Fold8.

I guess if you're the sort that is not clumsy and you're in a mild climate you might get your money's worth

for reference these were Samsung Z Flip devices

The one I have used felt like using a real phone through a layer of vinyl, definitely not a pleasant experience.

They're buying another year of very-high margin phones I guess...

I don't blame you. It's confusing.

2. It moves some stuff from the external Neural Engine to the GPU, which substantially increases speeds for those workloads. That itself is a feature.

Will any of this really matter much to the average consumer at this point? Probably not. Not until Apple Intelligence gets off the ground.

This change is strictly adding matmul acceleration into each GPU core where it is being used for LLMs.

Which is a very powerful feature for anyone who likes security or finding bugs in their code. Or other people's code. Even if you didn't really want to find them.

Meanwhile, the GPU is powerful enough for LLMs but has been lacking matrix multiplication acceleration. This changes that.

And there's an official port of Stable Diffusion to it: https://github.com/apple/ml-stable-diffusion

So the new engine is accelerator for matmul accelerator ?

Based on that, it doesn't sound like it's that much worse. Of course, if you're trying to maximize battery longevity by not exceeding 80% charge, that might make it not very useful for many people.

https://store.apple.com/uk/xc/product/MGPG4ZM/A

This new battery however is only compatible with the Air as other phones have a bigger camera bump.

https://freshnrebel.com/magnetic-wireless-powerbank-5000-mah...

It does the MagSafe thing, but will also offer a charge through the USB-C port.

And batteries don't last forever. When you upgrade to a new phone after a few years you'd likely need a new one anyways.

Worst case scenario just sell the old one on eBay if it's still holding a good charge!

Selling a thin phone with half a battery where you have to buy the other half and keep it attached to get a proper battery runtime (turning it into a normal-sized phone) can't be the solution Apple intended. At least I hope so. And that battery doesn't fit other iPhones as the camera bump of those other phones is in the way.

I don't really understand all the complaining since it's merely a variant of the iPhone for people who prioritize thinness over battery.

For over a decade, HNers have complained that they don't want thinness to be forced on them and that there should be a separate SKU for it. Yet when it finally happens, HNers complain about the trade-off.

3rd party versions of course, the official one was much more expensive than that.

https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/1/as-images.apple.co...

The camera bump on other models protrudes more towards the centre of the body. And thus the battery wouldn't fit (flush) and the Qi charging wouldn't engage properly.

I'm sorry if I'm not completely familiar with this product: you are to have this battery attached at all times while you're charging, and it just stays in place? (gawd I sound like I'm from a different planet, I apologize -- wireless charging just never has been interesting to me)

Other people: how dare you

Seems like Apple is way ahead of you.

You did have to pay extra for the battery, mind.

A big loss for a small coolness factor.

How much cheaper can they possibly get?

With the addition of NPUs to the GPU, this story gets even more confusing...

But there isn’t a trivial way to specifically target the neural engine.

If you use Metal / GPU compute shaders it's going to run exclusively on GPU. Some inference libraries like TensorFlow/LiteRT with backend = .gpu use this.

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

Should be interesting to experiment with this on A19 Pro.

I don't think local LLMs will ever be a thing except for very specific use cases.

Servers will always have way more compute power than edge nodes. As server power increases, people will expect more and more of the LLMs and edge node compute will stay irrelevant since their relative power will stay the same.

Is it 'Local'?, 'Large?'...'Language?'

From Apple's point of view a local model would be the cheapest possible to run, as the end-user pays for hardware plus consumption...

the problem is people expectation, they want the model to be smart

people aren't having problem for if its local or not, but they want the model to be useful

But cloud models will have diminishing returns, local hardware will get drastically faster, and techniques to efficiently inference them will be worked out further. At some point, local LLMs will have its day.

this is the same happening with software and game industry

because free market forces people to raise the bar every year, the requirement of apps and games never met. its only goes up

human would never be satisfied, boundary would be push further

that's why we have 12gb or 16gb ram for smartphone right now only for system + apps

and now we must accommodate for local LLM too??? it would only goes up, people would demand smarter and smarter model

frontier model today would deem unusable(dumb) in 5 years

example: people literally screaming in agony when Antrophic quantized their model

Even with token consumption increasing as AI abilities increase, there will be a point where AI output is good enough for most people.

Granted, people are very willing to hand over their data and often money to rent a software licence from the big players, but if they're all charging subscription fees where a local LLM costs nothing, that might cause a few sleepless nights for a few execs.

I use Read Aloud across a few browser platforms cause sometimes I don't care to read an article I have some passing interest in.

The landscape is a mess:

it's not really bandwidth efficient to transmit on one count, local frameworks like Piper perform well in alot of cases, there's paid APIs from the big players, at least one player has incorporated api-powered neural tts and packaged it into their browser presumably ad-supported or something, yet another has incorporated into their OS, already (though it defaults to speak and spell for god knows why). I'm not willing to pay $0.20 per page though, after experimenting, especially when the free/private solution is good enough.

Mobile applications are also relevant. An LLM in your car could be used for local intelligence. I'm pretty sure self driving cars use some about of local AI already (although obviously not LLM, and I don't really know how much of their processing is local vs done on a server somewhere).

If models stop advancing at a fast clip, hardware will eventually become fast and cheap enough that running models locally isn't something we think about as being a non-sensical luxury, in the same way that we don't think that rendering graphics locally is a luxury even though remote rendering is possible.

Even over LTE you're looking at under 120ms coast to coast.

Never could figure out what the heck the value proposition was supposed to be though. Pay full price for a game that you can't even pretend you own? I don't think so. And the game conservation implications were also dire, so I'm not sad it went away in the end.

But on technical merits? It worked great.

This doesn't seem right to me.

You take all the memory and CPU cycles of all the clients connected to a typical online service, compared to the memory and CPU in the datacenter serving it? The vast majority of compute involved in delivering that experience is on the client. And there's probably vast amounts of untapped compute available on that client - most websites only peg the client CPU by accident because they triggered an infinite loop in an ad bidding war; imagine what they could do if they actually used that compute power on purpose.

But even doing fairly trivial stuff, a typical browser tab is using hundreds of megs of memory and an appreciable percentage of the CPU of the machine it's loaded on, for the duration of the time it's being interacted with. Meanwhile, serving that content out to the browser took milliseconds, and was done at the same time as the server was handling thousands of other requests.

Edge compute scales with the amount of users who are using your service: each of them brings along their own hardware. Server compute has to scale at your expense.

Now, LLMs bring their special needs - large models that need to be loaded into vast fast memory... there are reasons to bring the compute to the model. But it's definitely not trivially the case that there's more compute in servers than clients.

A single datacenter machine with state of the art GPUs serving LLM inference can be drawing in the tens of kilowatts, and you borrow a sizable portion for a moment when you run a prompt on the heavier models.

A phone that has to count individual watts, or a laptop that peaks on dual digit sustained draw, isn't remotely comparable, and the gap isn't one or two hardware features.

I'm running Qwen 30B code on my framework laptop to ask questions about ruby vs. python syntax because I can, and because the internet was flaky.

At some point, more doesn't mean I need it. LLMs will certainly get "good enough" and they'll be lower latency, no subscription, and no internet required.

> Deepseek-r1 was loaded and ran locally on the Mac Studio

> M3 Ultra chip [...] 32-core CPU, an 80-core GPU, and the 32-core Neural Engine. [...] 512GB of unified memory, [...] memory bandwidth of 819GB/s.

> Deepseek-r1 was loaded [...] 671-billion-parameter model requiring [...] a bit less than 450 gigabytes of [unified] RAM to function.

> the Mac Studio was able to churn through queries at approximately 17 to 18 tokens per second

> it was observed as requiring 160 to 180 Watts during use

Considering getting this model. Looking into the future, a Mac Studio M5 Ultra should be something special.

[0] https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/03/18/heavily-upgraded-...

Society is already giving pushback to AI being pushed on them everywhere; see the rise of the word "clanker". We're seeing mental health issues pop up. We're all tired of AI slop content and engagement bait. Even the developers like us discussing it at the bleeding edge go round in circles with the same talking points reflexively. I don't see it as a given that there's public demand for even more AI, "if only it were more powerful on a server".

Speaking to your PC gaming analogy, there are render farms for graphics - they're just used for CGI and non-realtime use cases. What there isn't a huge demand for is consumer-grade hardware at datacenter prices. Apple found this out the hard way shipping Xserve prematurely.

Correct, though to me it seems that this comes at the price of narrowing the target audience (i.e. devs and very high-demanding analysis + production work).

For almost everything else people just open a bookmarked ChatGPT / Gemini link and let it flow, no matter how erroneous it might be.

The AI area is burning a lot of bridges and has done so for the last 1.5 - 2.0 years; they solidify the public's idea that they only peddle subscription income as hard as they can without providing more value.

Somebody finally had the right idea some months ago: sub-agents. Took them a while, and it was obvious right from the start that just dumping 50 pages on your favorite LLM is never going to produce impressive results. I mean, sometimes it does but people do a really bad job at quickly detecting when it does not, and are slow to correct course and just burn through tokens and their own patience.

Investors are gonna keep investor-ing, they will of course want the paywall and for there to be no open models at all. But happily the market and even general public perception are pushing back.

I am really curious what will come out of all this. One prediction is local LLMs that secretly transmit to the mothership, so the work of the AI startup is partially offloaded to its users. But I am known to be very cynical, so take this with a spoonful of salt.

Right, and that's despite the datacenter hardware being far more powerful and for most people cheaper to use per hour than the TCO of owning your own gaming rig. People still want to own their computer and want to eliminate network connectivity and latency being a factor even when it's generally a worse value prop. You don't see any potential parallels here with local vs hosted AI?

Local models on consumer grade hardware far inferior to buildings full of GPUs can already competently do tool calling. They can already generate tok/sec far beyond reading speed. The hardware isn't serving 100s of requests in parallel. Again, it just doesn't seem far fetched to think that the public will sway away from paying for more subscription services for something that can basically run on what they already own. Hosted frontier models won't go away, they _are_ better at most things, but can all of these companies sustain themselves as businesses if they can't keep encroaching into new areas to seek rent? For the average ChatGPT user, local Apple Intelligence and Gemma 3n basically already have the skills and smarts required, they just need more VRAM, and access to RAG'd world knowledge and access to the network to keep up.

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

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

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

Large issues: tokenizers exist, reasoning models are still next-token-prediction instead of having "internal thoughts", RL post-training destroys model calibration

Small issues: they're all trained to write Python instead of a good language, most of the benchmarks are bad, pretraining doesn't use document metadata (ie they have to learn from each document without being told the URL or that they're written by different people)

Android crowd has been able to run LLMs on-device since LlamaCPP first came out. But the magic is in the integration with OS. As usual there will be hype around Apple, idk, inventing the very concept of LLMs or something. But the truth is neither Apple nor Android did this; only the wee team that wrote the attention is all you need paper + the many open source/hobbyist contributors inventing creative solutions like LoRA and creating natural ecosystems for them.

That's why I find this memo so cool (and will once again repost the link): https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-a...

I disagree.

There's a lot of interest in local LLMs in the LLM community. My internet was down for a few days and did I wish I had a local LLM on my laptop!

There's a big push for privacy; people are using LLMs for personal medical issues for example and don't want that going into the cloud.

Is it necessary to talk to a server just to check out a letter I wrote?

Obviously with Apple's release of iOS 26 and macOS 26 and the rest of their operating systems, tens of millions of devices are getting a local LLM with 3rd party apps that can take advantage of them.

https://www.apple.com/watch/compare/?modelList=watch-series-...

In the past few weeks the oxymeter feature was enabled by a firmware update on series 10. Measurements are done on the watch, results are only reported on a phone.

Incidentally, the feature was enabled a few days after my dad died of respiratory failure. I had got him an Apple Watch for his birthday, so I have to wonder if he could have detected a problem sooner with the oximeter feature unlocked.

As of September 9, 2025, hypertension notifications are currently under FDA review and expected to be cleared this month, with availability on Apple Watch Series 9 and later and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later. The feature is not intended for use by people under 22 years old, those who have been previously diagnosed with hypertension, or pregnant persons.

Sounds a bit ironic but I guess it's for legal reasons.

my guess is this is more like the heart irregularities feature: it’s for the first diagnosis. (a relative of mine actually got diagnosed that way)

The point of the detection features are to notify people who are not diagnosed with the condition to go to the doctor about it possibly get diagnosed with it.

It's not useful for people already diagnosed because they already know they have it, so the notification is just telling them something they already know.

The color line up reminds me of the au MEDIA SKIN phones (Japanese carrier) circa 2007. Maybe it's because I had one back in the day, but I can't help but think they took some influence.

Wow, thanks for sharing the name, these are really good! I don't know why I was surprised to realize that great designers have made fantastic products even in the past...

Some sites with images, for anyone curious: 1. https://www.dezeen.com/2007/01/17/tokujin-yoshioka-launches-... 2. https://spoon-tamago.com/best-of-2007-part-iv/

"iPhone4 vs HTC Evo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg

Though I do wonder, given the logarithmic nature of sound perception, are these numbers deceptive in terms of what the user will perceive?

1: https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/

Luckily they added the blood pressure check for when you get too excited about the color orange.

My current (Android) phone is from 2020 and I have bought three cases for it because the previous ones got wear and tear. The phone inside still looks brand new.

But yeah, the trend of ultra-thin phones is silly.

edit: It was only the Pros and up which had titanium bodies. The 17s are all aluminum.

The Sage Air has my eye. Would match my AirPods Max. But that orange pro is also calling.

I'm not a chemist, but I looked into this years back when I was wondering why everything titanium is offered in the same couple of colors. Personally, I like the plain gray.

[0] https://wisensemachining.com/titanium-anodizing-guide/

[1] https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/cups/products/ti-single...

> I looked into this years back when I was wondering why everything titanium is offered in the same couple of colors

I wondered the same thing, but never hit that threshold of urgency to actually look into it!

The materials used is a factor: the last few iPhones were built with aluminum (iPhone 16), titanium (iPhone 16 Pro) and stainless steel (iPhone 13 Pro).

Not all colors work with all materials; my understanding is titanium is particularly bad for bright colors. The colors for the iPhone Pro models have been pretty drab--not this year.

But it's not general purpose. Broken by design.

I'll pass. Not going to support this. We need less of this crap not more.

Intrigued to explore with a19/m5 and test energy efficiency.

Or do you have to copy paste into LM studio?

https://opencode.ai and https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code both allow you to configure any API as the LLM provider.

That said, running agentic workloads on local LLMs will be a short and losing battle against context size if you don't have hardware specifically bought for this purpose. You can get it running and it will work for several autonomous actions but not nearly as long as a hosted frontier model will work.

It seems to work better for me when I tested it and Cline's supposedly adding it to the Ollama integration. I suspect that type of alternate local configuration will proliferate into the adjacent projects like Roo, Kilo, Continue, etc.

Apple adding hardware to speed it up will be even better, the next time I buy a new computer.

So is the high blood pressure detection. It's not from the new watch, it works also in the series 10 and series 9 watches.

1. Biggest is that Apple can finally tell if people really want a thinner phone (I don’t). Maybe once they find out the answer, they can finally start using the space more productively.

2. They mentioned local LLM in passing, but this is the biggest possible selling point of the executives actually back real work on making them consumer-level easy. Have a LLM marketplace. Let users sub-train with their own ideas and local data. Enable users to privately and safely port their personal LLMs to their next Apple. Apple has the best most efficient hardware available and they have it in millions of pockets. It’s about time they use that to become the dominant phone and personal device maker. Instead of focusing on anorexic phones.

The iPhone 14 Pro was noticeably heavy, but the switch to titanium the following year made the 15 Pro feel way lighter. The only difference was 206 grams -> 187 grams, but you'd swear it was 25% lighter.

My personal favorite would be that style with modern chips and a full glass display. Basically an updated mini without a camera bump.

They'll never make this though because the minis proved the market is tiny.

The apple watch ultra is thicker and overall bigger than the regular one in the name of better battery life, and people that don't need that buy the regular one. Win win!

Now I'm curious to do the math.

The iPhone 16 Pro's volume (not counting camera bump, you don't hold that in your hand anyway) is 149.6 x 71.5 * 8.25 = 88,245.3mm^3

Bumping the thickness to 12.55mm you end up with 149.6 x 71.5 * 12.55 = 134,239.82mm^3

A 52% increase in volume.

In the Pro Max you'd go from 104,352.6mm^3 to 158,742.44mm^3

The iPhone Minis sold millions of units and Apple still determined it wasn't enough to justify existing. I'd bet a big brick iPhone would be far more niche. I'd certainly like to see one and hold it in my hands but I think you can see why Apple wouldn't go for that.

But yeah, I know you are right and the market has spoken. I accept this however begrudgingly.

I also don't care about weight, up to a point. No phone I've owned in the last 25 years has felt too heavy.

It will be much more grippier and easier to hold. The weight part is very subjective of course.

I'm not comfortable with lighter models for example and always have to buy a case simple to feel the phone in my hand.

I've seen one guy attach an ECG lead to the back so that he could lay the phone down without the camera part touching the surface. As a bonus you could spin the device on it.

> if they made a phone where the camera bump is made flush by adding thickness elsewhere to match, filled with extra battery

Phones should not have fans.

I will most likely upgrade to an 11S around this time next year. The other factors that drew me to it were the huge (6500mAh) battery, a real analog headphone jack (used daily with my Etymotic ER4XR), and no dumbass notch cut out of the screen.

Cant a case do this for you?

I'd be at least INTERESTED in seeing what my iPhone 15 Pro Max would look like without a case and with a built-in battery that made it not have a camera hump.

It's going to be so painful if the answer is yes.

They would need to sell two otherwise equivalent new models att the same time where one is thicker for that.

https://www.gq.com/story/best-fanny-packs

https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/covid-times-h...

https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-gear/run/fanny-packs-s...

I wouldn't be surprised if discomfort from having a bulky phone in your pocket drives this.

I am also guilty of buying a bag (not this kind) for my phone because it's so much more comfortable (and makes my trousers last longer) to not have my phone in my pocket.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/09/all-of-the-iphone-17-model...

I'd believe this is an area where even a few millimeters of thickness makes a real difference in how much the phone in pocket stands out despite the overall footprint being larger? Will be curious to read once people get their hands on the things.

I be been struggling with the 14 pro's weight. So that would mainly be my interest here.

Also almost certainly less likely to get obsoleted by some AI feature given the higher end GPU cores.

They switched the frame from stainless steel to titanium the next year which made the Pro phones noticeably lighter. And now this year the Pros are aluminum like the non-Pros have been for years, which is also pretty light.

The 3 big camera sensors certainly don't help with the weight either, but the good news is they did seem to recognize they were getting to heavy with the 14 Pro.

Recent breakthroughs have produced multilayer metalenses only ~0.5 mm thick that can focus unpolarized broadband light across several discrete wavelengths.

Dual-Pixel Coded Aperture (CADS): End-to-end learned amplitude masks on dual-pixel sensors have shown >1.5 dB PSNR gains in all-in-focus images and 5–6% depth accuracy improvements in DSLR, endoscope, and dermoscope prototypes.

Color-Coded Aperture Imaging: Single-lens, single-frame depth sensing via color-coded apertures has been demonstrated on DSLR and preliminary smartphone modules with depth map extraction sufficient for basic AR and portrait modes.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_and_Bubble

Do you have any evidence behind it? I personally would love it, price is the biggest blocker tbh.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

I have this recurring vision of what could have been if we never lost Steve before the industry went whole hog in on the camera bump fad. It goes something like this:

SCENE: Steve Jobs' office on the eve of the iPhone 7 release

"Hey Steve here's the new prototype for iPhone 7, we think you're going to love it!"

Steve picks up the phone, fumbles it around for a moment, flips it over, and runs his index finger over the camera bump

"You're fired. Now, you" points to another engineer "Get rid of the bump."

And just like that, we were saved from this nightmare. Alas, the world is shit now and no one cares about anything anymore. But I can say without question he would have never allowed it.

I’m sure some people would buy a 16mm thick, 400g phone but I doubt it’s the majority.

I'll concede the point on the weight, although I bet it'd be more like 350g.

The argument is that you shouldn't need to pick one or the other. They got us used to the bump because it is cheaper and simpler for them to build. The same with literally everything now. No more striving for excellence, it's just "what can we normalize and force people to put up with so we don't have to fix the problem".

It isn’t a problem. That’s why it isn’t “fixed.”

The cameras are getting bigger because a decent segment of the customers want better performing cameras on their phone.

Either the whole phone would have to get thicker and heavier to accommodate, or you end up with a camera bump. And yes, some people would want that brick phone, but Apple seems to think it isn't a large market segment and the money they print from iPhone sales seems to point to them being decent at gauging that market.

The main issue is weight distribution, although current designs are slightly top heavy anyway.

A less obvious issue is that people would tend to hold the screen vertically while taking photos, which would distort the visual plane of the lenses at the back.

I'm sure both of those could be solved, and a wedge would create something original, instead of the nth iteration of the same ugly wart aesthetic.

You meant to say "14 years old Android phones", right? chuckles

https://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_razr_xt910-pictures-4273.p...

Jobs's "design horse-sense" was also strongly against the screen size you take for granted as well.

Maybe its time to put away these weird hagiographies.

The idea that you're hiring talented people and just firing them like this is not only obscenely anti-worker, its anti-social and a wonderful example of how we worship the worst people. This is someone with a pedigree, able to land an apple job, pass the interviews, work with a team, has mortgage/family/whatever, etc but he upset a sultan sitting on his silk pillow and now must be thrown out on the streets?

Oh and Apple's entire existance hinges on "HP and IBM were too full of fire-happy, stodgy, powerful men who wouldnt let youngin's with ideas flourish" then now Jobs becomes the HP/IBM he and Woz have decried all their careers? What a great way to send your talent off to competitors, scare your existing staff to never take chances, depressing hiring, build a toxic workplace, and send all these people to a startup where they might eat your lunch.

Rather, it would be about their values and vision not aligning with those of the company. The job shouldn't have happened to begin with.

Not that I like this kind of company mind you, but I do understand and see the appeal. The comparisons with a cult that are often drawn have a logic to them. But this whole scenario is also an exaggeration. Somewhat.

> Pedigree...streets

If that pedigree is such a high horse.. I'm sure they'd have no problem joining the company next door.

One of many problems with that is the power imbalance. Another is the wealth imbalance. Another is that the “company next door” might not be in a hiring cycle. Another is that your mortgage doesn’t stop and wait for you to get rehired. Another is that people aren’t emotionally indifferent interchangeable cogs and having your life upturned on a whim sucks. Another is that people have lives outside work and have to be able to plan for the future, things like arranged holidays, childcare, that depend on some medium term stability. Another is that people invest time and effort in learning one company’s internal systems and that’s one-sided.

If you can’t come up with half a dozen things wrong with that off the top of your head, you aren’t trying.

Ben Thompson (Stratechery) has been documenting for almost a decade that the biggest driver of new phone sales in China is a new form factor.

I’m sure that might be the same in other markets where an iPhone is a status symbol. It’s definitely not one in the US where 60% of phone buyers have iPhones.

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/09/iphone-air-esim-china-u...

Eg. ALDI (yes, the German supermarket chain run a MVNO in Australia), have been saying esim support in the future since 2021.

The MVNOs here mostly market older, cheaper iPhones.

It can still be a status symbol to have the newest phone. That’s imo the only reason for changing camera alignments between generations. So people (who know & care) can see that you have the newest model.

But how is it a status symbol in the US is $25 a month between the SE and the iPhone 17 Pro Max?

Most users probably use/need 10% of what a max pro iPhone offers, but they want 100% of the max pro status.

Now they can keep the status without needing to carry a chonker.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...

$999 is a lot of money.

US net worth at the 25th percentile is >$20k, it’s not the case that 32% of people literally don’t have the wealth to afford a $400 expense.

  Suppose that you have an emergency expense that costs $400. Based on your current financial situation, how would you pay for this expense?
  If you would use more than one method to cover this expense, please select all that apply.
  a. Put it on my credit card and pay it off in full at the next statement
  b. Put it on my credit card and pay it off over time
  c. With the money currently in my checking/savings account or with cash
  d. Using money from a bank loan or line of credit
  e. By borrowing from a friend or family member
  f. Using a payday loan, deposit advance, or overdraft
  g. By selling something
  h. I wouldn’t be able to pay for the expense right now

Which almost no one pays up front or at all in the US with the carrier deals and trade ins.

I definitely agree about them being just about the most banal stupid toy you could spend the money on, but it's still a lot of money to a lot of people despite the cost of basic necessities making it not the huge amount that it used to be. I cringe at paying over $450, considering that every new model of phone since like 2015 hasn't really done anything worth significantly more money.

I say that because I feel similarly, but my out of college coworkers rib me for not having an iPhone. One even commented he'd probably never text me in real life, to which I of course replied that I'd never want him to text me in real life.

Genuine question - maybe I'm too in my own bubble but it seems like iPhone just completely dominates the market and is viewed as the "default" phone, which to me implies status quo, not luxury.

Is it a green bubble or a blue bubble? :)

In wealthy circles, no. Anywhere else, yes, it’s a thousand-dollar device.

Of course a lot of people can not afford it.

$7.25/hour = $1,160/month for 8 hours of daily work, monday to friday.

iPhone Air costs $1000 according to https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare

I was quite surprised that other than the much better battery, USB-C, and much better camera, and sometimes faster speed, the old one was holding up quite well.

You can get an old iPhone XR for 100 EURish, in decent condition. I really have no idea what model year iPhone's others have.

I grew up with Nokia phones all I want out of my phone is something cheap and rugged with a decent battery life.

It's very particular to your group I think as I am in the same country, similar age, and yet it's the complete opposite for me.

But none of us care because it's not the US and nobody is using some phone exclusive messaging service enough to care about what phone anyone else is using.

I'm debating if I just replace the battery and let this run another year... since the iPhone X I haven't seen any major upgrades still that feel like they'll matter in my day-to-day life.

A flip would be different...

I keep looking at new flagship launches and I keep not seeing any new capability, feature or performance that would make a noticeable difference to me. I replaced the battery myself last year and generally keep the OS clean, not letting app cruft accrue. I'm not a luddite nor am I price sensitive. I remain ready and willing to buy a high-end flagship phone the moment it does anything new I actually care about. It still gets regular security updates even though a couple years ago Samsung stopped updating it to their latest customized version of Android. And despite looking, I still haven't seen any new Android OS or Samsung One UI feature that would matter to me. Bottom line: I don't think it's you or me, I think it's that phones are mature tech and unless you have a specific use case or it breaks, there's just not much reason to upgrade.

I don't know if it's one of those things where you get "unlimited" data but you get X amount of data until they throttle it. I'm usually near trusted wi-fi and I've never run into it.

> chonker

Can't see the specs for the iPhone Air but it looks much larger than my SE 2022. I wish they would bring that form factor back. Obviously not as powerful as bigger iPhones so not useful for posing purposes.

On the other hand, the cameras on plateaus are real issues because they don't lay normally and the cameras are very easy to scratch.

(Edit: Should have refreshed I see. Feel free to ignore.)

(But if you use it rarely it's better to just rent one, and then you can get a really nice one.)

The reason for the Max Pro is the larger screen and better battery life

Even the very poor all seem to have new-ish iPhones.

Also not sure what you're on about with "huge bulky phone".

They want thin phones for the same reason they like fast cars. The same reason that ice cream tastes good.

Why do (some) people like jazz music?

Although, I'm not a big phone user though, mainly use it when I'm outside of the house. In the house, I'll just use my laptop.

For reference, the 13 mini has a 5.4" screen, and the new-gen iPhones are 6.3", 6.5", and 6.8". Pixel 10 is 6.3" as well.

iPhone 5 was the most perfect size ever and was about 0.3" shorter than the 13 mini, though it had a much smaller screen due to the bezel: https://www.gsmarena.com/size-compare-3d.php3?idPhone1=5685&...

Apple offering is underwhelming to say the least and way too expensive for my use case.

I want to go Android anyway, I'm too disillusioned with Apple currently, I'm tired of dealing with their predatory behavior. But there aren't a lot of decent options there as well but at least you can get it much cheaper, so that's something, I guess.

Previously Apple was the provider of hardware which made the right compromise to allow specific/focused use case, they called it "taste" in a sea of nonsense with bullshit "features". But now it feels like Apple has joined in on the nonsense and is actually leading the pack; which is why the price feels bad. If you are going to make the same crap as everyone else with the same set of bad compromises, I'm not going to overpay for it.

I think this is why Apple "AI" got so much backlash. If they didn't make it or at least market it as heavily as they, did it would have been fine, but it was just the same crap as everyone else, just worse and more expensive. They could have released the exact same phone, just shaving a 100 dollar and have been acclaimed and made more money that way I believe.

Source: https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-13-mi...

1. Flip one switch in settings to enable sideloading

2. Download and open an APK

3. Flip one more switch (which you get automatically redirected to and it's highlighted at least on Samsung phones) the first time installing from whichever app source (Chrome/FDroid/etc).

4. Click install

Other than step 1, the user is led through the process via prompts, and step 3 only has to be done once per source. i.e. the first time you install from FDroid, after that you just click install without any nags or scare screens.

As far as I remember the "enable sideloading" switch in settings has always been a thing, and the per source setting was added at least 5+ years ago.

Marketing will create hype and desire and the feeling of exclusiveness. Those will lead to sales.

Not every big change is an actual innovation. A lot if just engineering sales via these methods, which aren't very different than fashion, jewelry, or luxury cars.

I might get one because I'm always a bit forced to follow the curve and can't afford to look 'backwards' or 'old fashioned' to stakeholders in the workplace, people in my life, etc who's good side I need to stay on who believe in the above dynamic.

Umm, smaller? We don't need thinner, we need smaller.

Proportionally though that was only 3% of their sales.

I do hope that the metal they are using is on the grippier side (like the black 16 Pros, as opposed to the 16s)

Personally, I think thin is just "omg look at my engineering". blah blah.

I found the (expensive!) bullstrap case to be helpful - thin and slippery enough to slide out of a pocket easily, well engineered to protect the camera.

But really, I think the iphone 13 mini was the most useful/practical application of apple's engineering.

I think a mini-sized 3-camera bulge phone would be great.

I stuck on a MagSafe metal sticker thing on the back and that little bit of greebling makes me feel a bit better holding it.

"Wild" seems like a stretch. I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to believe that some people drop their phones occasionally, and it's a reasonable concern when it's likely to be with you everywhere you go.

> Hearing someone drops their phone on average 50 times more often than i do i find wild

;) wait till you hear someone's completely incomprehensible ADHD story

Edit: sibling comment is correct, sketchy pockets of athletic shorts are a major offender. Actually it bothers me way more when my car keys fall out of those.

I never used a case until I got a Galaxy S9; that phone was like a greased eel. Went from dropping my phone zero times in 8 years to 5 times in one week.

The thickness should be from the front to the back of the camera lens, not to the thinnest point they can find.

People need to get a grip. ;)

Cases are dirt cheap, if you're paying over $30 for one you're probably overpaying. The expected value of a screen repair, not only the cost but your time makes it a no-brainer.

I would gladly ditch the case if Apple had a strong mounting system integrated into the phone (MagSafe has nowhere near the resistance to shear forces sufficient to hold a phone over bumps on a bike.)

I suppose I am looking for the phone equivalent of a camera thumbscrew mount. If Apple iterated on MagSafe to include an actual mechanical fixture as part of the attachment, I would buy that phone right away so I can avoid using these crappy pieces of rubber/plastic that degrade so much more quickly in appearance than the phone frame rails.

My phone case has saved my phone many times.

Heck, my bike helmet has saved my head at least 3 times.

Survivorship bias /s How do you know it wouldn't have survived without case? I drop my phone on nearly daily basis and since 2007 only cracked one iPhone screen.

I did do cosmetic damage to the non-screen parts of some phones while not using a case, though.

> I did do cosmetic damage to the non-screen parts of some phones while not using a case, though.

I don't care about those for various reasons.

The idea of letting my phone drop unprotected (or getting it wet like I see some people do) is horrible.

You did forget one big use case for cases: money laundering. There's no way all the physical stores and kiosks that only sell cases are actually making money...

It's really more "I got extended warranty, and I'm not afraid to use". I live in LA, so I'm never too far from the nearest store I can replace mine. All data important backed up. Dropping a phone for me will result at most in a minor-to-medium annoyance.

I only fear of getting the phone too wet because battery disconnect is practically impossible today.

People would still put a case on a bulky phone to protect resale or trade in value.

A super thin phone doesn't require a super bulky case, it requires just as much case as a person would normally use, resulting in a smaller overall profile.

I'd probably still go pro because I care more about the camera than the size.

Another alternative is hard plastic, but it doesn't "feel premium"

Just subjectively, I remember having a super scratched iPod and it just felt kind of ratty every time you looked at it. Meanwhile, a phone in a leather case gets kind of a patina that improves with age. It is kind of sad though, I got a really pretty blue iPhone and you wouldn't even know it because it's completely covered by a case.

But a thinner phone still means the end result is thinner in a case.

I didn't understand the appeal of thin phones until I used them in cases.

Average thickness phone + case = bulky phone.

Thin phone + case = normal thickness phone.

That's what makes them great. It's normal thickness with all the protection.

If you really want protection, the screen is still more fragile than the camera.

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

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

It’s light and the thinness is just fun. I’m not putting a case on it. And I really don’t understand why a phone needs to sit flat on a table—if anything, the angle is a plus.

It’s just less. Less means it hits the ground softer when I drop it. Less means I’m less pissed off when I lose my AirPods and have to hold my phone up to my ear. Less means little moments of delight over how this engineered slab of minerals can do these things.

Do you remember the ad for the first MacBook Air? Even if you didn’t connect with it, can you recognise how someone else might?

So can you not appreciate how such cloying fandom (or apparent fandom) can kind of be, in a way, almost nauseating for someone and just move on? And there’s a reason I didn’t directly respond to you for this comment. But anyway that’s moot now.

If anything is off it’s your belligerent anti-fandom. You are coming off as on tilt. Over someone else’s preferences in phones of all things.

No, I really can't.

I'm not into most sports. That doesn't make those games' fans nauseous. They've found something they love. I don't get their particular attachment. But that doesn't make it dumb, must less disgusting--I can empathise with their joy because I, too, have found things which delight me.

I can articulate, respectfully, why I think their games are dumb. But I can also recognise that's a subjective opinion about aesthetics.

Yes, yes! Yes, dear JumpCrisscross I do believe in that. People singing really badly but happily is one of those things, people wearing clothes that looks absolutely horrible in them (as per me) but they are happy and love it and that makes me strangely actually happy. These are just few examples. But someone being Apple is not one of that and I am also respectful about it - I try tone down criticism, I try sarcasm, hell in most cases I try not to directly respond to such people.

> I can articulate, respectfully, why I think their games are dumb.

No, imho, you can't. When you call/consider something "dumb", it is just being called dumb - no matter how syrupy and respectful articulation that has. But that's just me. I won't call a sports dumb, but if you feel like it, you sure can with whatever articulation you prefer. You keep your sense of aesthetics and let me have mine.

What I don't understand is: I did not even respond to you, and I was just criticising the company. I was not being abusive, and I was definitely not being disrespectful to you, but you still jumped into it and just started this argument. Why? Is that just pure ego? And now you can't let go?

You went ahead and confronted me, and I replied back using that "nauseous" phrase because you took umbrage at something which was directed at a damn corporation and not at you in any way—unless criticism of Apple directly hurts you.

Heck, I did not even mention you, and there is a reason for that—because I was not responding to you. I literally directed my disappointment towards the company—literally. Why, then?

Do you still not recognise that you ought to just move on? And if that doesn't do it for you, then downvote, flag (that comment is already flagged), report, and then move on. Why do you have to pick an issue with me about it? Is it even worth it? Or do you want to have the last word? Is that it? Do you have something in mind that you want to hear?

I'm probably not getting one, but I don't see the point of comparing it to physically smaller phones.

Sony Xperia Z2 - 2014 - 172mm x 266mm x 6.4 mm - 439g

Sony made nearly equally thin but lighter devices 11 years ago.

Again, not nearly the same screen size, so weight is irrelevant. But also, 439g? Wow! If that number wasn’t completely wrong, that would be impressive.

6.4mm is nowhere near as thin as 5.6mm, but I’m actually seeing 8.2mm for thickness on reliable websites, not 6.4mm: https://m.gsmarena.com/sony_xperia_z2-6144.php

Did an LLM hallucinate those specs that you quoted? I honestly don’t know how the thickness and weight you quoted could be that far off if you did the research yourself.

But, even if you were right, which you don’t seem to be, it’s all moot. No one is cross-shopping a 2014 phone to a 2025 phone. But even if they were, the real numbers speak for themselves.

That said, it looks like the clear case for the air has a plastic ridge to protect the lens and keep the phone from wobbling

Right. I am sure flatness would have Revolutionary™ had Apple decided to make it rather flat (of course with the "First Time Again In An iPhone™" tag).

I'd even go with a millimeter or two thicker to have the backplate attached by screws and the battery easily user replacable after a few years.

It stands to reason the iFold/iPaper/iSheet/whatever Apple will call it is drawing closer now that Samsung and several Chinese brands have pretty much solved the design for Apple.

signed, apple CFO

the argument that the bump defeats the purpose of a thin phone is only true if you're trying to squeeze it through a narrow gap in a rigid object.

I don't have much call for most of the camera system, and my battery life on my Pro is just fine. I have plenty of chargers typically, and for emergencies or times I know I'm going to be out I could potentially get the battery pack.

I basically never use cases on my iPhone, and at most will maybe use an ultra-thin one or some sort of structure adhered to the plateau just to make it flat across so as to not rock on a table.

Now this, good people, is a real use case. If it seems like an edge case to you, I guarantee Apple’s design and product people know of — and optimize for — use cases much more rare.

But its not about optimisation it's about freedom. I don't enjoy having to baby around a lumbering 6 inch phone. I want my phone to optimise around me being able to not worrying about a brick sagging in my shorts.

Funny way of spelling "millions of people"

It wasn't enough for Apple's standards and manufacturing optimization. But yes people bought them.

I wonder if anyone has successfully gone down this path.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/text-in-bed-drop-phone-on-fac...

I never had this issue with my phone but it was a big reason for moving from an iPad to a Kindle for reading in bed... Dropping an iPad on my face (or even chest) == ouch.

There's not much left to "fix" on mobile phones, and no real important features to add. Lacking that, they need something to sell the phones with, so they're going for these strange "improvements". It needs to be something that has some wow factor so they can lead with. This seems to somehow work on normal people so they'll keep doing these "improvements".

I expect in the future they'll pull this trick again, moving bits of the phone upwards towards camera, and create a second notch from half way down, where the phone will get even thinner, and they'll sell that.

- novel approach to camera optics that can completely flatten them into the phone - front camera hidden behind the screen removing the island or inset - dramatically better battery tech density leading to like week long usage - way more ram (100gb+) and processing power for powerful local llm and other ai - significant reduction in thickness and weight. like this air with no bump but also under 100 grams - maybe some stuff with projectors

Interestingly Chinese manufacturers seem to be the main adopters of this tech. For example, the article below has Samsung, Xiaomi, ZTE, Oppo, Vivo (actually, this may just be due to there being many more large Chinese phone manufacturers in general.) https://www.smartprix.com/bytes/under-display-camera-phones/

The motivations of Apple to keep things as they are for so long, despite strong criticism from all over is one of business mysteries. A little middle finger to its user one may say, not big enough to stir things too much, just a bit.

The only relevant criticism is their sales figures and revenue numbers. Everything else is just noise.

With the introduction of the iPhone Air, it would have been a great opportunity to do this on the normal model.

Those who care about phone thickness could buy the Air, and the rest of us could have our large battery flat phones.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m6GpIOhbqRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gStI9ysPrhs

Pictures of my dog are the main reason I upgraded from a 13 mini to a 16 Pro.

The difference was noticeable and I wouldn't go back.

For example: https://www.gadgetmatch.com/time-covers-shot-iphones/

- Such an important moment is something you often wanna blow up in a large/hi-res print.

- An ultrawide lens is suboptimal for portraits and usually makes the face look puffy from the perspective.

- Unless you know the exact color & aesthetic for the cover you want to preserve the raw capture for changes in post to match the vibe.

While I can certainly appreciate the casual and intimate vibe she’s going for, as a pro she could have brought any decent camera with a portrait lens and keeping the shoots equally short without compromising quality and adding risk for the poor layout person who has to work with it later.

Everyone else takes photos with their phone and yes, everyone wants to take better photos

Though the camera isn't even the most important equipment, that's lenses/lighting (plus stabilizers, studio backdrops, etc.)

- Novel radios that enable true Starlink connection in your pocket for gigabit internet globally

- multi-spectrum imaging for spectroscopy and FLIR-like cameras to get temperature info in images

- Light field camera system for true 3D imaging and synthetic refocusing

- Air quality sensor that can also act as breath analyzer

I was going to come in with a set of reasons why these wouldn't sell, but... I think they could! Air quality fits neatly into Apple's health push, though I could see them making that a Watch feature rather than a phone feature (since your phone lives in your pocket, and quality sensors need time for the readings to stabilize). 3D imaging and synthetic refocusing both have a wow factor that would be easy to get people excited about. The only one I'm unsure of is multi-spectrum imaging; while I suspect pretty much anyone on this forum would jump at that, I don't have a good idea of whether the general population would get excited about temperature data. At the very least, it'd be handy for some kitchen tasks where you need a surface temperature.

We also have a Seek phone attachment camera. It's cool but again, don't use it in daily life that much.

Satellite comms gets very close to face melting tech quite quickly, so I would prefer not to have that in a mobile device....

I would like a light field camera. I've seen some research about using and array of 1mm2 cameras (basically the smallest omnivision module) and one decent module to make a synthetic high res camera. Takes a huge amount of GPU power to get not very interesting results though.

Restricted by ITAR. You can buy lowres attachments for it on Aliexpress though.

The thing you are looking for is meta lenses, not the company. They could cover the entire back-face of the phone and provide some pretty incredible capabilities. We are not there yet, but I'd expect to see them in the next 20 years.

I love the idea behind the pro phone and going all out on cameras, but practically I want the air more. I wish it had an ultrawide, but it is what it is - I have and frequently carry around an actual camera with me most places I go where I'd want to take photos.

I'd go back to feature phones if not for BankID and the NFC payment thing.

My phone has replaced my wallet, except I have to keep it charged and it's bulkier.. maybe I just go back to a wallet.