9 ms·

This thread needs to lighten up. The 11 is an incremental improvement - is that so wrong? Who still upgrades their phone every year anyway? I bought my iPhone

by jl6 7y ago

This thread needs to lighten up. The 11 is an incremental improvement - is that so wrong? Who still upgrades their phone every year anyway? I bought my iPhone 8 two years ago thinking of it as a 5 year investment.

noncoml 7y ago
> I bought my iPhone 8 two years ago thinking of it as a 5 year investment. That's exactly what's wrong, that users don't feel compelled to upgrade. It's bad for business.
- acd10j 7y ago
  But good for users. We will not generate too much electronic waste. Will save money and when finally when their is actually a time to upgrade due to actual hardware degradation, You can get nice bump in hardware spec.
  - mike_d 7y ago
    Very little e-waste is generated by iPhone upgrades. Apple is using 100% recycled materials now, has a trade-in recycling program, and their is a robust resell market for older devices. I'd say the biggest e-waste offender right now is the server market. Enterprises are replacing entire data centers full of servers every 3-4 years because of depreciation and OPEX efficiency upgrades.
    - q3k 7y ago
      > Apple is using 100% recycled materials now. For consumer devices? Very unlikely. Do you have a citation? > has a trade-in recycling program Just because you send something off to be recycled doesn't mean it actually ends up being recycled. It's much better off to not have to recycle in the first place at all (eg. by making your hardware easy to repair, which Apple is notoriously bad at).
      - mike_d 7y ago
        Apparently I misunderstood the keynote, it is 100% recyclable materials.
    - stordoff 7y ago
      > Apple is using 100% recycled materials now "So far, we’ve identified recycled alternatives for 24 different grades of plastic, allowing us to use an average of 38 percent recycled plastic across 82 components for products released this year." https://www.apple.com/euro/environment/pdf/a/generic/Apple_Environmental_Responsibility_Report_2019.pdf https://www.apple.com/euro/environment/pdf/a/generic/Apple_E...
      - w0utert 7y ago
        Not disputing that apple doesn’t “use 100% recycled materials” now (that would be virtually impossible), but the plastic recycling figure is also not saying much about e-waste from iPhones either. How much plastic is even used making an iPhone? I would be surprised if it’s more than 10%. Recycling figures for aluminum, stainless steel, glass, battery chemicals, and the expensive metals such as gold and silver used in phones are probably close to 100%. If the ‘24 different grades of plastic’ include the materials used for the (tiny) PCB in an iPhone, not much is left that is not recycled. On a side note, I would like to see some figures how much energy and materials are actually spent when replacing something like a phone, compared to things like driving to work each day, running the AC for 12+ hours a day, flying around the globe once or twice a year or eating meat and dairy products every day of the week. I would be surprised if it’s even remotely significant compared to these things (yes this is a cynical and not very constructive argument to make, but perfectly rational)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zepto 7y ago
  Apple has stated that it is part of their plan to have the longest possible useful life of their devices. This is good for their business.
- igrekel 7y ago
  Bad for business but good for customers? I'd just assume that most of us are customers.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- lrem 7y ago
  Good for the environment though, I'll take it.
krzyk 7y ago
Xs was incremental improvement, this year people expected more.
- gallerdude 7y ago
  Apple is on a 3 year cycle now, probably to help accelerate development on their AR project. Redesign -> CPU leap -> Camera leap iPhone 6 -> 6S -> 7 iPhone X -> XS -> 11
  - leoc 7y ago
    > Apple is on a 3 year cycle now, probably to help accelerate development on their AR project. If Apple has made that decision then there's a context which isn't generally appreciated. It's not just that you've stopped buying new phones so Apple needs something else to sell you: it's that AR/VR is more or less inevitably the future mainstream interface of mobile computing. The box-with-a-screen-on-the-side physical UI has hit its limits (this is Amdahl's Law of Mobile UI ;) ), which is also why there's so much interest in trying to make folding screens work.
- snuxoll 7y ago
  If the iPhone 6-8 and now the X/XS/11 are anything to go by then I think the days of the tick-tock refreshes are over. Apple has made it pretty clear they don’t see upgrading their phones every 1-2 years anymore. Personally if my iPhone 7+ hadn’t gone and bricked itself I wouldn’t have bothered trading it in (after replacement under warranty) for the XS. My wife is still rocking an iPhone 7 and I see no reason to upgrade it either. Never in my life until the year before last have I been satisfied to just hold onto a phone, especially after my contract or payment plan has ended. This is the new “normal”, and everyone except the most enthusiastic of enthusiasts are going to bother buying a new phone more than every 3+ years.
  - dangus 7y ago
    It's exactly like the laptop and desktop refreshes. Nobody who bought a 2016 MacBook Pro has any business buying the 2019 model. The performance gain and overall differences are far too slight for that to matter. But that doesn't mean you just stop updating your products every year.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
baq 7y ago
inherited 6s reporting in, have exactly 0 reasons to upgrade.
- mattnewton 7y ago
  Still got that 3.5mm jack too!
- danw1979 7y ago
  Roger that. Battery needs replacing but I'll gladly give Apple £80 to do that instead of £1.3k for a new one. Really glad I got the 128GB 6s now... lots of storage makes the difference in longevity.
  - danw1979 7y ago
    I came back to this comment to admit that I just got a new phone on launch day.
- subpixel 7y ago
  I also have a 6s and am going to start watching for X-series iPhones on Swappa, mainly as a camera upgrade. My wife has an XS and her kid photos are a good bit better.
psychometry 7y ago
You shouldn't fill an auditorium full of journos and tech bloggers to announce minor iterations of existing products.
- rmorey 7y ago
  It is quite aggressive of apple to physically force all those people to fill that auditorium against their will, isn't it
  - closetohome 7y ago
    They made me watch the whole keynote too. If I even tried to look away an iGuard would jab me with his camera bump.
  - psychometry 7y ago
    You're being dense. The attendees don't know ahead of time if they're going to have a major announcement or not.
    - urbanjunkie 7y ago
      And you're being a dick. So, stfu.
seppin 7y ago
> This thread needs to lighten up. Tagline for HN in general.
- elsonrodriguez 7y ago
  Could you elaborate on this? It's not that I doubt what you're saying, but some studies would be nice.
  - pduan 7y ago
    > Could you elaborate on this? It's not that I doubt what you're saying, but some studies would be nice. Lol the irony.
likeabbas 7y ago
... I'm on the upgrade plan and plan to upgrade every year...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
clairity 7y ago
but this really was the least exciting iphone keynote ever, which was totally expected, but still disappointing. none of the more interesting rumors came about, like ultra-wideband positioning* and apple tags. apple product cycles have lengthened, so this was inevitably going to be a lower-the-base-price and harvest-the-late-adopters year for the notch model era. i think apple may even keep the same style next year to introduce 5g (to reduce additional manufacturing challenges) and settle into a 4-year cycle so they can really milk the capex (which is what happened to macbook pros as the product line matured). i’m still happily using my 6s. * edit: apparently i missed the part where they talked about the U1 chip in the new iphones, which does the UWB positioning.
- conception 7y ago
  2020 iPhone I've read a lot of buzz about being a pretty big release - e.g. https://sea.mashable.com/tech/6142/the-2020-iphone-already-sounds-way-more-exciting-than-the-iphone-11 https://sea.mashable.com/tech/6142/the-2020-iphone-already-s...
- bredren 7y ago
  Those tags are going to be a really big deal. I think they may have even upstaged the iPhone if announced today.
_bxg1 7y ago
In fairness they did incremental upgrades 2 years in a row, which they didn't used to do. But yeah, cycles are naturally slowing. Supposedly they have big things coming in 2020; USB-C, a whole new redesign, etc. I'll still probably stick with my XS, though.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  Any source? I'd kill for a flagship iPhone with plain rectangular screen (no notch or rounded corners!) and with an USB-C port. If it is also vactually rugged then I'll wet myself.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/9/6/20853343/apple-2020-iphones-all-new-design-ming-chi-kuo-rumor-5g-camera-updates https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/9/6/20853343/ap... USB-C is just my personal guess. It's been such a glaring, weird omission for years, and between the 11's lightning-to-C cable and the prospect of a redesign, 2020 seems like the perfect opportunity to finally do it.
Havoc 7y ago
>a 5 year investment. I hope not...but sure looks that way. Still sporting a 7+
arvinsim 7y ago
It didn't help that the event tag was "By Innovation only"

by jl6 7y ago

noncoml 7y ago

> I bought my iPhone 8 two years ago thinking of it as a 5 year investment. That's exactly what's wrong, that users don't feel compelled to upgrade. It's bad for business.

acd10j 7y ago
But good for users. We will not generate too much electronic waste. Will save money and when finally when their is actually a time to upgrade due to actual hardware degradation, You can get nice bump in hardware spec.
- mike_d 7y ago
  Very little e-waste is generated by iPhone upgrades. Apple is using 100% recycled materials now, has a trade-in recycling program, and their is a robust resell market for older devices. I'd say the biggest e-waste offender right now is the server market. Enterprises are replacing entire data centers full of servers every 3-4 years because of depreciation and OPEX efficiency upgrades.
  - q3k 7y ago
    > Apple is using 100% recycled materials now. For consumer devices? Very unlikely. Do you have a citation? > has a trade-in recycling program Just because you send something off to be recycled doesn't mean it actually ends up being recycled. It's much better off to not have to recycle in the first place at all (eg. by making your hardware easy to repair, which Apple is notoriously bad at).
    - mike_d 7y ago
      Apparently I misunderstood the keynote, it is 100% recyclable materials.
  - stordoff 7y ago
    > Apple is using 100% recycled materials now "So far, we’ve identified recycled alternatives for 24 different grades of plastic, allowing us to use an average of 38 percent recycled plastic across 82 components for products released this year." https://www.apple.com/euro/environment/pdf/a/generic/Apple_Environmental_Responsibility_Report_2019.pdf https://www.apple.com/euro/environment/pdf/a/generic/Apple_E...
    - w0utert 7y ago
      Not disputing that apple doesn’t “use 100% recycled materials” now (that would be virtually impossible), but the plastic recycling figure is also not saying much about e-waste from iPhones either. How much plastic is even used making an iPhone? I would be surprised if it’s more than 10%. Recycling figures for aluminum, stainless steel, glass, battery chemicals, and the expensive metals such as gold and silver used in phones are probably close to 100%. If the ‘24 different grades of plastic’ include the materials used for the (tiny) PCB in an iPhone, not much is left that is not recycled. On a side note, I would like to see some figures how much energy and materials are actually spent when replacing something like a phone, compared to things like driving to work each day, running the AC for 12+ hours a day, flying around the globe once or twice a year or eating meat and dairy products every day of the week. I would be surprised if it’s even remotely significant compared to these things (yes this is a cynical and not very constructive argument to make, but perfectly rational)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zepto 7y ago
Apple has stated that it is part of their plan to have the longest possible useful life of their devices. This is good for their business.
igrekel 7y ago
Bad for business but good for customers? I'd just assume that most of us are customers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lrem 7y ago
Good for the environment though, I'll take it.

krzyk 7y ago

Xs was incremental improvement, this year people expected more.

gallerdude 7y ago
Apple is on a 3 year cycle now, probably to help accelerate development on their AR project. Redesign -> CPU leap -> Camera leap iPhone 6 -> 6S -> 7 iPhone X -> XS -> 11
- leoc 7y ago
  > Apple is on a 3 year cycle now, probably to help accelerate development on their AR project. If Apple has made that decision then there's a context which isn't generally appreciated. It's not just that you've stopped buying new phones so Apple needs something else to sell you: it's that AR/VR is more or less inevitably the future mainstream interface of mobile computing. The box-with-a-screen-on-the-side physical UI has hit its limits (this is Amdahl's Law of Mobile UI ;) ), which is also why there's so much interest in trying to make folding screens work.
snuxoll 7y ago
If the iPhone 6-8 and now the X/XS/11 are anything to go by then I think the days of the tick-tock refreshes are over. Apple has made it pretty clear they don’t see upgrading their phones every 1-2 years anymore. Personally if my iPhone 7+ hadn’t gone and bricked itself I wouldn’t have bothered trading it in (after replacement under warranty) for the XS. My wife is still rocking an iPhone 7 and I see no reason to upgrade it either. Never in my life until the year before last have I been satisfied to just hold onto a phone, especially after my contract or payment plan has ended. This is the new “normal”, and everyone except the most enthusiastic of enthusiasts are going to bother buying a new phone more than every 3+ years.
- dangus 7y ago
  It's exactly like the laptop and desktop refreshes. Nobody who bought a 2016 MacBook Pro has any business buying the 2019 model. The performance gain and overall differences are far too slight for that to matter. But that doesn't mean you just stop updating your products every year.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

baq 7y ago

inherited 6s reporting in, have exactly 0 reasons to upgrade.

mattnewton 7y ago
Still got that 3.5mm jack too!
danw1979 7y ago
Roger that. Battery needs replacing but I'll gladly give Apple £80 to do that instead of £1.3k for a new one. Really glad I got the 128GB 6s now... lots of storage makes the difference in longevity.
- danw1979 7y ago
  I came back to this comment to admit that I just got a new phone on launch day.
subpixel 7y ago
I also have a 6s and am going to start watching for X-series iPhones on Swappa, mainly as a camera upgrade. My wife has an XS and her kid photos are a good bit better.

psychometry 7y ago

You shouldn't fill an auditorium full of journos and tech bloggers to announce minor iterations of existing products.

rmorey 7y ago
It is quite aggressive of apple to physically force all those people to fill that auditorium against their will, isn't it
- closetohome 7y ago
  They made me watch the whole keynote too. If I even tried to look away an iGuard would jab me with his camera bump.
- psychometry 7y ago
  You're being dense. The attendees don't know ahead of time if they're going to have a major announcement or not.
  - urbanjunkie 7y ago
    And you're being a dick. So, stfu.

seppin 7y ago

> This thread needs to lighten up. Tagline for HN in general.

elsonrodriguez 7y ago
Could you elaborate on this? It's not that I doubt what you're saying, but some studies would be nice.
- pduan 7y ago
  > Could you elaborate on this? It's not that I doubt what you're saying, but some studies would be nice. Lol the irony.

likeabbas 7y ago

... I'm on the upgrade plan and plan to upgrade every year...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

clairity 7y ago

but this really was the least exciting iphone keynote ever, which was totally expected, but still disappointing. none of the more interesting rumors came about, like ultra-wideband positioning* and apple tags. apple product cycles have lengthened, so this was inevitably going to be a lower-the-base-price and harvest-the-late-adopters year for the notch model era. i think apple may even keep the same style next year to introduce 5g (to reduce additional manufacturing challenges) and settle into a 4-year cycle so they can really milk the capex (which is what happened to macbook pros as the product line matured). i’m still happily using my 6s. * edit: apparently i missed the part where they talked about the U1 chip in the new iphones, which does the UWB positioning.

conception 7y ago
2020 iPhone I've read a lot of buzz about being a pretty big release - e.g. https://sea.mashable.com/tech/6142/the-2020-iphone-already-sounds-way-more-exciting-than-the-iphone-11 https://sea.mashable.com/tech/6142/the-2020-iphone-already-s...
bredren 7y ago
Those tags are going to be a really big deal. I think they may have even upstaged the iPhone if announced today.

_bxg1 7y ago

In fairness they did incremental upgrades 2 years in a row, which they didn't used to do. But yeah, cycles are naturally slowing. Supposedly they have big things coming in 2020; USB-C, a whole new redesign, etc. I'll still probably stick with my XS, though.

pdimitar 7y ago
Any source? I'd kill for a flagship iPhone with plain rectangular screen (no notch or rounded corners!) and with an USB-C port. If it is also vactually rugged then I'll wet myself.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/9/6/20853343/apple-2020-iphones-all-new-design-ming-chi-kuo-rumor-5g-camera-updates https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/9/6/20853343/ap... USB-C is just my personal guess. It's been such a glaring, weird omission for years, and between the 11's lightning-to-C cable and the prospect of a redesign, 2020 seems like the perfect opportunity to finally do it.

Havoc 7y ago

>a 5 year investment. I hope not...but sure looks that way. Still sporting a 7+

arvinsim 7y ago

It didn't help that the event tag was "By Innovation only"