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.
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.
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.
It's absolutely a wish I had, and I spent a lot of time and money trying to make it real!
There's a huge difference between an audio player and having spotify (or apple music, or whatever you prefer) where you can play effectively any song you want at effectively any time.
There's a huge difference between having a camera and something which can record 4k video or take photos which surpass any digital camera we had in the early 2000s and even today surpasses virtually any camera in the price range of the whole phone. You would need something like a Leica fixed lens camera or a mirrorless DSLR with multiple lenses at several times the cost of a smartphone to equal the photo and video capabilities. This also ignores the fact that I can snap these amazing pics or videos and send them to a friend instantly.
I know I wanted mobile internet and was very frustrated with things like WAP at the time. I know that having mobile internet made me more productive. Sure some phones could play music but it was nothing like a dedicated music device, the software and storage were just awful, so you had to have two devices when it was obvious that it should be just one. Something like the iPhone was pretty obviously being desired at the time, we just didn't see how to do it and thought it would be something more like what blackberry and Microsoft were doing.
I have mobile internet since 2001. Those dumbphones had access to the full internet, not just WAP.
Mobile internet was not a mistake, we just started to use it wrongly. It's your choice to not use it to browse internet aimlessly. It's your choice to make yourself available all the time. You can definitely use it how I did for more than a decade before everybody realized what being always online means. It definitely improved my productivity before that, but it's true that the added benefit is about flat in the past decade.
I don't think it's that we use it wrong exactly. I'm not trying to judge anyone who spends hours of time on Instagram sending photos or scrolling X.
I 100% agree that if I was doing those things, they would be wrong for me so I avoid doing them.
I don't like people who say "I don't like when I do this thing, so, this thing should not be available for people to do!"
I equally don't like people who say "I don't like when other people do this thing, so, this thing should not be available for people to do!"
I know that social media is designed to be addictive. This is why I'm mostly absent from it for most of my life.
If you use and enjoy social media and it brings joy to your life, great, have fun. It wasn't doing that for me (or more directly, I realized very early on it was going down a bad path) so I cut it out.
If you're lamenting social media and bothered by how much time you spend on it, or how it negatively impacts your life, or whatever: I am definitely going to advocate to you that you do simply have the option to turn it off. Life will move on!
You can also have a smart phone and not feel the need to immediately respond to every text message, nor, click every notification. You can even choose to not pick up phone calls if you want.
In the past decade while the reality of mobile connectivity hasn't changed much, the quality and ubiquity of it has improved dramatically.
10 years ago I would have agreed that in most places it was possible to get some form of internet connectivity, today, it's deeply unusual to travel anywhere in the USA and not get >100Mbit on LTE with "good enough" latency.
Of course, most people goes to places with coverage, but for example if you travel between population centers (cities, towns, etc), then it's quite frequent that you don't have internet, or just terrible one. Especially if you're on a train which insulates somewhat, and of course speed is also a degrading factor.
Years ago I thought mobile Internet didn’t add anything to my life. I bought a smartphone but was skeptical.
Then one day I was at the airport waiting in a long check-in line. I got out my Motorola Droid, dug though my email, checked in to the flight, and got out of the line.
After that I was convinced of the value of it, and I’m reminded every time I’m standing on the street, waiting for an Uber rather than looking around for a cab.
I was a long-time holdout on getting a smartphone at all, then on really embracing it. Now I gotta admit, it’s the only computing device I use that really delivers ROI for my everyday life (aside from my work computer, for… work, but that’s not mine). All the rest could vanish and it’d mostly just give me fewer ways to frustratingly waste my time. Phone dies, and I gotta replace it ASAP. Everything important happens on there. A compact sensor package glued to good touchscreen, with an Internet connection, is just too useful.
I have everything I need with a 5s. The only thing making me ponder updates is shit like “hi the new T-mobile app requires a newer version of iOS than is available for your phone”. Web still works though.
What is the benefit of a non-OLED screen, and how niche is that ask? I'm assuming the benefit is "no burn-in" but is the risk of burn-in going to affect people in a 5 year timespan?
And I think the 3.5mm ship has sailed, right behind the "persistent notification LED" ship. Fsck me if I can understand how not a single manufacturer has figured out that a bright, persistent, multi-color LED/OLED notification is a desirable zero-hardware-cost feature.
a LED has nonzero cost. The case having a hole for it also has a cost, as does engineering the hole not to be a weak point. It may not be hard or expensive, but nonzero nonetheless.
The software to control a reliable AOD LED light is trivial.
Some phones like OnePlus do temporary lighting. Persistent lighting without burn in is doable and I wish someone would take it up. Aodnotify is glitchy.
Accessibility also doesn't "sell". Apple used to care about making their products actually accessible. They already have all the money. What's the real excuse? Do they just not care?
Flagship iPhones are premium products. Many "regular users" don't see value in getting a $/€1k phone every couple of years - this is the entire point of this thread.
I don't disagree, but the market placement of the iphone has nothing to do with the continued poor sales of the mini series every time it's been tried.
And the mini ran for multiple generations and none of them sold well.
Much like the 3.5mm jack, people just cannot admit that it's not a very popular idea. Extremely popular among a very small niche, incredibly unpopular if not actively dispreferred outside of it.
OK? Well, the iphone mini series did not sell fine, objectively so. It was a bad seller even with the bump from the novelty of apple releasing a mini, and it declined even further the next generation. Probably at minimum it's not worth doing more than one every couple generations.
idk why you guys are continuing to rage at the messenger here, I'm not the one who canceled it and the reason it was canceled is widely acknowledged. Your refusal to accept reality does not constitute a problem on my part.
You and two other people want that. Every time they've released small phones they've not sold well. It's a small but extremely vocal community of people that constantly ask for this stuff.
Many women I know would be interested in a small phone (in part because for some reason clothes makers collectively decided that women should not have big pockets, or any at all, and in part because of smaller hands on average).
It's probably not all women, maybe not most, but I can't believe there's not an important market, it seems like a common enough situation.
I'm not a woman, but I know many who 1. refuse to carry a purse; 2. are deeply unsatisfied with trends in clothing such as small pockets (and no they can't just wear men's clothes because women's bodies are shaped differently); 3. whose hands are too small to comfortably use a large (branded as "normal") or even medium (branded as "mini") phone.
There's a billion other ways women are being discriminated against every day. But yeah, it doesn't sell.
It's still millions of people who buy an iphone mini, but that's basically a rounding error when they're selling hundreds of millions per year, 3-5% from a quick google.
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.
I'm under no impression that my phone will continue to work until "the end of time", but if I can get 5-7 years out of a device then I think I got more than my money's worth. The last phone I had before this lasted 2 years before it became practically unusable.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
