Horses for courses. Better camera (for those special moments while the kids are young) and better battery life are two big ones for me, so I'll likely upgrade. (Kind of digging the orange color too).

It's not the dullest refresh, and they always sell plenty. I'm sure this will be no exception.

99% of the time phones are on a case and used from the front screen so from where I stand I don’t care what it looks like from the back. And there is so few people using it caseless that it won’t really matter.

I was shocked how ugly it looks this time!

Subjective indeed. I don't mind the broad camera bump -- it's a good trade-off for getting the increased zoom, honestly. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the differently-colored ceramic bit on the back, though. But, on the plus side, not like that's the bit of the phone I look at.

Plus, the orange looks great. (In their promo shots. We've occasionally seen these look a lot less vivid once you see them in real life.)

>for getting the increased zoom you're getting 4x optical zoom (going down from 5x on 16 pro) and then 2x software zoom. Not bad, but not more optical zoom...

and that bump has again lens bumps, uneven, and the cases are really fugly and large

It's not software zoom -- it's them doing binned pixels at 4x and then unbinning them and cropping down at 8x. Same thing they were doing on previous models for the 2x zoom, and now unlocked on the telephoto lens because of the resolution increase this year.

It's a quality drop for sure, but it's never extrapolating pixels that weren't optically there as software zoom does.

ok not "software" zoom, but still not optical zoom per se. The marketing guys hard at work

The looks are what they are, but if that wide shelf will mean the phone doesn't wobble when placed on a table, that is a good usability improvement. One of the small things I missed when moving from a Pixel 6 to an iPhone was the ability to not feel compelled to pick it up in order to use it.

> if that wide shelf will mean the phone doesn't wobble when placed on a table, that is a good usability improvement.

That's what I had hoped too, but from the images I've seen it looks like the cameras themselves bump out past the shelf far enough that it will still wobble.

We're talking about an Apple iPhone Pro here. It doesn't wobble, it rocks! /s

It looks like the camera lenses are still raised above the bump. Wobbles look like they remain!

Boo... I was worried that might be the case looking at the renders.