<story><title>iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/09/apple-debuts-iphone-16-pro-and-iphone-16-pro-max/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mithr</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know that I completely agree. To some degree, sure — most folks probably don&amp;#x27;t notice the year-to-year updates in e.g. computing power.&lt;p&gt;But my 70yo mother, who is pretty far from being technologically savvy, uses continuity every day to copy one-time-use codes from her phone to her computer, even though she&amp;#x27;d have no idea what the term &amp;quot;continuity&amp;quot; means in this context. She notices that it&amp;#x27;s easier to snap better pictures in more conditions than it was a few years back (and that pictures she receives are better looking on average, too). She uses 1Password with FaceID, which I set up for her, because it&amp;#x27;s so easy to just look at your phone to unlock that there&amp;#x27;s very little in the way of enabling and using that, and she doesn&amp;#x27;t need to write down passwords anymore.&lt;p&gt;I think some of the magic of the Apple ecosystem is that you don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; to know about these things in order to use them. Someone shows you how to do something (Apple could certainly improve on the organic discoverability of many of these features! Some are impossible to find without looking), and then it often just works. And these things do keep getting closer to that ideal over time, with each generation. When I first started using continuity — long before my mother did — it definitely did not work all the time, and I persisted because I&amp;#x27;m a techie early adopter. Eventually, though, it reached a state where once folks learn about it, they can just use it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also not sure about the 3-4 year number, at least from personal experience, fwiw. We pass down phones in my family, and it easily takes 5-6 generations for them to reach the end of that chain and be in use for a year or two before they&amp;#x27;re switched out for the next model. Battery has never been the reason someone in that chain switched phones.</text></item><item><author>iteratethis</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m conflicted.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s absolutely stunning what smartphones can do these days and Apple makes an excellent product. It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I&amp;#x27;ll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.&lt;p&gt;She can&amp;#x27;t tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.&lt;p&gt;You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter. Her only awareness of features is when she accidentally enables one and doesn&amp;#x27;t know how to get back.&lt;p&gt;You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn&amp;#x27;t know they even exist.&lt;p&gt;All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.&lt;p&gt;You might assume my girlfriend is perhaps lowly educated or just not tech savvy. Wrong, she&amp;#x27;s highly educated, even works in IT, although not in an engineering role. It&amp;#x27;s not that she&amp;#x27;s unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn&amp;#x27;t care.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies. Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.&lt;p&gt;I think this is also why Apple put many Pro features into the regular model. Most people don&amp;#x27;t buy the pro and they&amp;#x27;re desperate for selling points in the regular model.&lt;p&gt;If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kristianc</author><text>Nearly all of the things you describe there aside from the camera are software&amp;#x2F;services based and don’t require improved hardware year-on-year at all. This is a problem for a company that makes its money selling expensive hardware.</text></comment>
<story><title>iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/09/apple-debuts-iphone-16-pro-and-iphone-16-pro-max/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mithr</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know that I completely agree. To some degree, sure — most folks probably don&amp;#x27;t notice the year-to-year updates in e.g. computing power.&lt;p&gt;But my 70yo mother, who is pretty far from being technologically savvy, uses continuity every day to copy one-time-use codes from her phone to her computer, even though she&amp;#x27;d have no idea what the term &amp;quot;continuity&amp;quot; means in this context. She notices that it&amp;#x27;s easier to snap better pictures in more conditions than it was a few years back (and that pictures she receives are better looking on average, too). She uses 1Password with FaceID, which I set up for her, because it&amp;#x27;s so easy to just look at your phone to unlock that there&amp;#x27;s very little in the way of enabling and using that, and she doesn&amp;#x27;t need to write down passwords anymore.&lt;p&gt;I think some of the magic of the Apple ecosystem is that you don&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; to know about these things in order to use them. Someone shows you how to do something (Apple could certainly improve on the organic discoverability of many of these features! Some are impossible to find without looking), and then it often just works. And these things do keep getting closer to that ideal over time, with each generation. When I first started using continuity — long before my mother did — it definitely did not work all the time, and I persisted because I&amp;#x27;m a techie early adopter. Eventually, though, it reached a state where once folks learn about it, they can just use it.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also not sure about the 3-4 year number, at least from personal experience, fwiw. We pass down phones in my family, and it easily takes 5-6 generations for them to reach the end of that chain and be in use for a year or two before they&amp;#x27;re switched out for the next model. Battery has never been the reason someone in that chain switched phones.</text></item><item><author>iteratethis</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m conflicted.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s absolutely stunning what smartphones can do these days and Apple makes an excellent product. It feels ungrateful and cynical to keep calling new models &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The reality though is that normie needs were accomplished several generations ago. I&amp;#x27;ll use my girlfriend as a sample of such user.&lt;p&gt;She can&amp;#x27;t tell the difference between LCD and OLED nor would she notice Pro-motion.&lt;p&gt;You can add a million features to the camera app but she opens it and presses the shutter. Her only awareness of features is when she accidentally enables one and doesn&amp;#x27;t know how to get back.&lt;p&gt;You could set her back 8 iOS versions and she probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t notice. Because she uses none of the hundreds of features released since. Not because she dislikes them, she doesn&amp;#x27;t know they even exist.&lt;p&gt;All the spectacular advances in computing power are lost on her as this makes zero difference for the Facebook cat video group and Pinterest.&lt;p&gt;You might assume my girlfriend is perhaps lowly educated or just not tech savvy. Wrong, she&amp;#x27;s highly educated, even works in IT, although not in an engineering role. It&amp;#x27;s not that she&amp;#x27;s unable to understand the advances, she simply doesn&amp;#x27;t care.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s becoming ever harder to justify new models for normies. Pretty much they buy the new one when the battery of their current one runs bad, typically every 3-4 years.&lt;p&gt;I think this is also why Apple put many Pro features into the regular model. Most people don&amp;#x27;t buy the pro and they&amp;#x27;re desperate for selling points in the regular model.&lt;p&gt;If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ern</author><text>I pay very little attention to features on phones, especially things like improved cameras, but I finally upgraded my iPhone X to an iPhone 15 (one of my kids needed a phone). I&amp;#x27;ve noticed that I&amp;#x27;ve been able to take some stunning pictures out of planes when flying, as well as low-light photos.&lt;p&gt;I agree that even when they aren&amp;#x27;t explicitly highlighted, they do make a substantial difference, especially when comparing models over a span of a few years.</text></comment>