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The more I watch, the sadder I get. It seems they've gone in the wrong direction. They have nothing to offer regular phone users, so they're targeting "creative

The more I watch, the sadder I get. It seems they've gone in the wrong direction. They have nothing to offer regular phone users, so they're targeting "creative professionals" with fancy features.

jamestimmins 2y ago
That's just for the pro version of the phone though. I plan to get a regular 16, for the reasons you mention. What regular features would you want to see?
souvlakee 2y ago
Also, my take on the new cinematic mode is that they should invest in a better camera if they can afford such fireworks.
vundercind 2y ago
Lots of people have creative hobbies that involve their phone in some capacity—music and photography are common—and basically everyone takes family photos and videos with them, so new photo capabilities are always welcome even for non-hobbyist users. Personally, I think it’s awesome that my kids could borrow my phone and make their backyard movies a hell of a lot more “cinematic” than mine on the family camcorder ever could have been, even if I’d had some idea of what I was doing. Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases. Plus, you’re on HN: your complaint about iPhones is supposed to be that they’re just “mindless consumption devices” for sheeple who want to drool at YouTube shorts, wildly worse for any conceivable creative or practical, serious endeavor than Linux phones or a Thinkpad, because you can’t get a root shell. You’ve gone entirely the wrong direction for this site, with your post :-)
- talldayo 2y ago
  > Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases. We must live on different planets. Are you really going to send your friends and family AI-generated emojis, or rewrite your texts to them with Apple Intelligence? I sure know they won't.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    No, I don’t even use the “stickers” and shit they have now, but the enhanced photo and moment-in-video natural language search are gonna make any OS without that built in feel broken when I get used to that and try to use it anywhere that doesn’t have it, I bet. Same as their existing transparent image OCR has left me going “wtf?” when I forgot I wasn’t on an Apple OS and tried to use it. The AI-assistant stuff via camera for quick searches and item identification look great, too. If it’s good enough it’ll Sherlock multiple existing apps, all in one.
    - matwood 2y ago
      Once you start making silly stickers from photos, they are surprisingly fun. I have a bunch of my dogs in poses that can fit on and around the message bubbles.
- duped 2y ago
  I do a bit of creative audio work and consider my iPhone next to useless. iPads are useful in some contexts. I've returned to the stone ages of digital tuners and metronomes for practice(1), and any recordings I make use a laptop. Not that there are good options for quick and dirty recordings, just that they're better than using a phone. If I were making podcasts or something like that the phone would be a lot more useful, but for music, not so much. (1) there was awhile back that my phone was integral to practicing music but now I can't use it at all, because every decent metronome/tuner app is trash.
  - wilsonnb3 2y ago
    For an increasing amount of people, "making music" is recording a tiktok of themselves singing or playing a guitar or recording themselves rapping directly into the phone mic for soundcloud. Not trying to judge what counts as making music - just saying that the times are changing a bit and the GP probably wasn't referring to traditional DAW usage and stuff like that.
sk11001 2y ago
We’re at a point where regular users already have everything they need, from any model in the past few years.
- souvlakee 2y ago
  Before the iPhone, we thought we already had everything we needed.
  - gnatolf 2y ago
    Nah, but phones are commodities by now.
  - rTX5CMRXIfFG 2y ago
    Yes but marginal utility curves are a thing.
  - theF00l 2y ago
    Some of us may still feel we had everything we needed before the iPhone!
  - mulderc 2y ago
    No, no we didn't. Before the iPhone we wanted a device that would be something like a Palm pilot, an iPod, a cell phone, a camera, and give us mobile internet, but it wasn't clear how to do that in a good way. Blackberry was getting there, Pocket PC was interesting, and there were various other mobile devices that had some of the pieces. It wasn't until the iPhone we saw how to put that all together properly.
    - gessha 2y ago
      I think that’s more of a hindsight than a concrete wish people had. Audio player, cell phone and camera were already implemented by “dumbphone” Nokias. I think adding mobile internet was a mistake. I use it all the time but it doesn’t add much to my life. It doesn’t make me more productive but it adds another consumption device.
lsllc 2y ago
Isn't that sort of the point though? I'm a regular phone user, but boy when I was on vacation this year, my iPhone took some fabulous pictures with stunning colors. I'm sure way better than I would with a DSLR (given I have no experience with a DSLR and/or whatever post-processing/editing suites I'd need to go with it). I totally buy into the "best camera you have is the one in your pocket" concept -- especially if that camera takes amazing photos without me needing to know how. I do agree on the other features (or lack thereof), in general I only upgrade my iPhone for two reasons: 1. Newer/better camara 2. Old iPhone is getting long in the tooth (i.e. battery degradation) I think the longest I went was maybe 3 years before the battery wouldn't really make it through the day. I'll take a look at this one and if the camera is compelling enough, maybe upgrade (the 5x optical zoom might just do that for me).
swatcoder 2y ago
The archetype of a smartphone is essentially mature at this point and has been for a while. Innovations are either going to be aimed at improving niche uses, gradual enhancements on stats like power/cpu/display/photo-quality, or accommodating fashion trends like overall size or whether it's foldable. The most original opportunity lately is generative AI integration and that's exactly what they put into focus for 2024.
throwaway918299 2y ago
As one of those users I'm still rocking my iPhone 11 and am perfectly content sticking with it The phone works. Telegram and Whatsapp works. Slack works. Safari still runs great on the web on the very few websites I use or browse. The longer I can use this without feeling "forced" to upgrade, the happier I'll be. What apple offers me is peace of mind and stability. That's all I want from a phone.
- EricE 2y ago
  If I had hadn't smashed my 11 Pro I'd still be using it. It feels wafer thin in comparison to the chunky 15 Pro I replaced it with :/
- mrzool 2y ago
  > What apple offers me is peace of mind and stability. They’ll literally make your beloved iPhone 11 obsolete in a year or so, deliberately.
  - rlpb 2y ago
    Don't Apple have a better track record for longevity of support compared to their competitors?
    - fsflover 2y ago
      Not all competitors. GNU/Linux phones will have lifetime updates (since they run mainline Linux).
      - Klonoar 2y ago
        I can only hope you’re joking. Those are not real competition to the iPhone in any meaningful way.
        fsflover 2y ago
        They are, in the long term and, for now, in a niche audience.
musictubes 2y ago
Do people cringe watching laptop updates too? Only niche, power hungry users feel constrained by hardware limitations these days. I do think some of the Apple Intelligence features are going to be pretty useful for regular folks. I also think it’s going to be the case that after a few years people will forget how limited Siri used to be while taking for granted the improved performance.

The more I watch, the sadder I get. It seems they've gone in the wrong direction. They have nothing to offer regular phone users, so they're targeting "creative professionals" with fancy features.

jamestimmins 2y ago

That's just for the pro version of the phone though. I plan to get a regular 16, for the reasons you mention. What regular features would you want to see?

souvlakee 2y ago

Also, my take on the new cinematic mode is that they should invest in a better camera if they can afford such fireworks.

vundercind 2y ago

Lots of people have creative hobbies that involve their phone in some capacity—music and photography are common—and basically everyone takes family photos and videos with them, so new photo capabilities are always welcome even for non-hobbyist users. Personally, I think it’s awesome that my kids could borrow my phone and make their backyard movies a hell of a lot more “cinematic” than mine on the family camcorder ever could have been, even if I’d had some idea of what I was doing. Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases. Plus, you’re on HN: your complaint about iPhones is supposed to be that they’re just “mindless consumption devices” for sheeple who want to drool at YouTube shorts, wildly worse for any conceivable creative or practical, serious endeavor than Linux phones or a Thinkpad, because you can’t get a root shell. You’ve gone entirely the wrong direction for this site, with your post :-)

talldayo 2y ago
> Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases. We must live on different planets. Are you really going to send your friends and family AI-generated emojis, or rewrite your texts to them with Apple Intelligence? I sure know they won't.
- vundercind 2y ago
  No, I don’t even use the “stickers” and shit they have now, but the enhanced photo and moment-in-video natural language search are gonna make any OS without that built in feel broken when I get used to that and try to use it anywhere that doesn’t have it, I bet. Same as their existing transparent image OCR has left me going “wtf?” when I forgot I wasn’t on an Apple OS and tried to use it. The AI-assistant stuff via camera for quick searches and item identification look great, too. If it’s good enough it’ll Sherlock multiple existing apps, all in one.
  - matwood 2y ago
    Once you start making silly stickers from photos, they are surprisingly fun. I have a bunch of my dogs in poses that can fit on and around the message bubbles.
duped 2y ago
I do a bit of creative audio work and consider my iPhone next to useless. iPads are useful in some contexts. I've returned to the stone ages of digital tuners and metronomes for practice(1), and any recordings I make use a laptop. Not that there are good options for quick and dirty recordings, just that they're better than using a phone. If I were making podcasts or something like that the phone would be a lot more useful, but for music, not so much. (1) there was awhile back that my phone was integral to practicing music but now I can't use it at all, because every decent metronome/tuner app is trash.
- wilsonnb3 2y ago
  For an increasing amount of people, "making music" is recording a tiktok of themselves singing or playing a guitar or recording themselves rapping directly into the phone mic for soundcloud. Not trying to judge what counts as making music - just saying that the times are changing a bit and the GP probably wasn't referring to traditional DAW usage and stuff like that.

sk11001 2y ago

We’re at a point where regular users already have everything they need, from any model in the past few years.

souvlakee 2y ago
Before the iPhone, we thought we already had everything we needed.
- gnatolf 2y ago
  Nah, but phones are commodities by now.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 2y ago
  Yes but marginal utility curves are a thing.
- theF00l 2y ago
  Some of us may still feel we had everything we needed before the iPhone!
- mulderc 2y ago
  No, no we didn't. Before the iPhone we wanted a device that would be something like a Palm pilot, an iPod, a cell phone, a camera, and give us mobile internet, but it wasn't clear how to do that in a good way. Blackberry was getting there, Pocket PC was interesting, and there were various other mobile devices that had some of the pieces. It wasn't until the iPhone we saw how to put that all together properly.
  - gessha 2y ago
    I think that’s more of a hindsight than a concrete wish people had. Audio player, cell phone and camera were already implemented by “dumbphone” Nokias. I think adding mobile internet was a mistake. I use it all the time but it doesn’t add much to my life. It doesn’t make me more productive but it adds another consumption device.

lsllc 2y ago

Isn't that sort of the point though? I'm a regular phone user, but boy when I was on vacation this year, my iPhone took some fabulous pictures with stunning colors. I'm sure way better than I would with a DSLR (given I have no experience with a DSLR and/or whatever post-processing/editing suites I'd need to go with it). I totally buy into the "best camera you have is the one in your pocket" concept -- especially if that camera takes amazing photos without me needing to know how. I do agree on the other features (or lack thereof), in general I only upgrade my iPhone for two reasons: 1. Newer/better camara 2. Old iPhone is getting long in the tooth (i.e. battery degradation) I think the longest I went was maybe 3 years before the battery wouldn't really make it through the day. I'll take a look at this one and if the camera is compelling enough, maybe upgrade (the 5x optical zoom might just do that for me).

swatcoder 2y ago

The archetype of a smartphone is essentially mature at this point and has been for a while. Innovations are either going to be aimed at improving niche uses, gradual enhancements on stats like power/cpu/display/photo-quality, or accommodating fashion trends like overall size or whether it's foldable. The most original opportunity lately is generative AI integration and that's exactly what they put into focus for 2024.

throwaway918299 2y ago

As one of those users I'm still rocking my iPhone 11 and am perfectly content sticking with it The phone works. Telegram and Whatsapp works. Slack works. Safari still runs great on the web on the very few websites I use or browse. The longer I can use this without feeling "forced" to upgrade, the happier I'll be. What apple offers me is peace of mind and stability. That's all I want from a phone.

EricE 2y ago
If I had hadn't smashed my 11 Pro I'd still be using it. It feels wafer thin in comparison to the chunky 15 Pro I replaced it with :/
mrzool 2y ago
> What apple offers me is peace of mind and stability. They’ll literally make your beloved iPhone 11 obsolete in a year or so, deliberately.
- rlpb 2y ago
  Don't Apple have a better track record for longevity of support compared to their competitors?
  - fsflover 2y ago
    Not all competitors. GNU/Linux phones will have lifetime updates (since they run mainline Linux).
    - Klonoar 2y ago
      I can only hope you’re joking. Those are not real competition to the iPhone in any meaningful way.
      - fsflover 2y ago
        They are, in the long term and, for now, in a niche audience.

musictubes 2y ago

Do people cringe watching laptop updates too? Only niche, power hungry users feel constrained by hardware limitations these days. I do think some of the Apple Intelligence features are going to be pretty useful for regular folks. I also think it’s going to be the case that after a few years people will forget how limited Siri used to be while taking for granted the improved performance.