I'm actually considering buying myself an iPhone for the first time. I have basically two priorities when buying an phone:
1. Freedom. I should be able to build and run apps on it without the platform holder having a barrier on it.
2. Privacy. The phone shouldn't be an object to track me for better ad sales or any other purpose.
Of course, priority 1 has until recently always led to Android while priority 2 has always led to Apple.
But with the upcoming announced changes where google is going to require registration and signing for even third party sideloaded apps, while at the same time the EU is forcing Apple to open up and allow sideloading, it seems pretty clear that in the near future both Apple and Google's policies regarding point 1 are going to converge. On a position less free than Android has hitherto been, and less free than I would like, but unfortunately they are the two options on the market.
So with priority 1 no longer a differentiating factor, it comes down to priority 2.
I've used both Android and iOS over the years, as while my personal phones have always been Android, my employer provided phones have always been iOS. I think I do prefer the Android user experience and have used enough of both that that's not just a factor of which I'm accustomed to, but it's also not the huge difference it once was for a lot of apps.
Right now I'm using a Pixel 7 Pro and I might weigh sitting it out another year, but my USB-C port is failing and I'm also watching the pixel battery issues creep up the model range to newer and newer models...
and apple has all kinds of nonsense like deep links (apps can intercept links), bluetooth beacons (apps can talk to stuff in a store/location), and lots of other stuff behind the scenes. You can't find out if it is in use.
If you go to Settings > Privacy & Security > App Privacy Report you can see domains contacted by an app, which apps contact a specific domain, and data and sensor access logs. Can also export it as a JSON file.
I think the data and sensor access logs is a newer feature since I don’t think I’ve seen it before, but network activity has been in there for at least a few years. The network activity is also only domains and ip addresses, nothing about protocol or what data was sent unfortunately.
It’s like in politics, it’s not about absolute, it’s all relative.
What is the least worse option in terms of privacy, when comparing apple and google? I think there’s a broad consensus it’s apple. But let’s not call it the “best” option please.
You can go with something else than google and apple, they are not an inevitability. Alternate OSes offer significantly more freedom and privacy.
My Pixel 5 made me switch to iOS after a software update made it unusable.
A year later, the iPhone mostly gets out of my way. However the keyboard and browser options are artificially limited. I can't easily set my own search engine on Safari either. Ad blocking works fine though.
The hardware is the best I've had in years. Battery life is really good. Airdrop and Airplay are very useful, as are many other small features.
I have come to prefer the iOS experience, but don't expect a life changing upgrade, just a longer-lasting phone.
I wasn't aware about how bad the situation was for devices, in general, about privacy until I installed a Pi-Hole in a Raspberry and used it as DNS service at home.
It's really surprising the amount of data that tries to leave the premises, and this just the one that I block with a mid-range security ban list.
Has something changed in the Apple ecosystem to put item one anywhere near the table?
Let's be very clear here: all Google has announced so far is that installing apps from anonymous builds is going to be taken away and only if you want your phone to be considered "certified". Let's not get drawn too far into hysteria.
In some regions of the world a phone that is not considered "certified" by Google is only useful as a paperweight. For example, I wouldn't be able to interact with government services or use any banking with such a phone. (Notice the any and with — no, I can't switch to another bank except by emigrating somewhere, and banks are only available as mobile applications. No web.)
So unless you're willing (and can afford!) to buy and carry multiple phones, the new severely downgraded Android is about as open as iPhone, but with zero expectation of it respecting your privacy.
Or... you just register with Google and sign things using your own keys to authorize them before sideloading. Or setup an LLC or whatever and register that entity with Google or whatever.
Battery and USB-C ports can easily be changed. You don't need to change the whole thing to fix that. Just like you don't buy a new car when you have a flat tire or broken AC.
The comparison is a bit off. A replacement battery as a part alone does cost more than 10 % of a completely new Pixel 7 Pro. So definitely not comparable with a cars flat tire or broken AC...
I'm having the same issue with my pixel 8 (along with the screen randomly turning green out of nowhere, so I have to "ground" the display to get it to work again)
In general the 8 feels a lot more cheaply made than the 6
I agree that the android UX is better than apple (or at least, it makes more sense to me). But I'd consider moving to iphone for build quality alone
I'm in the exact same position down to the Pixel 7 pro. It feels like my options are either to move to graphene os or move to iOS. But grapheneos seems like it'll cause headaches that I am not that interested in dealing with, however my wish to escape vertical integration which plagues tech ecosystems still tempts me.
It seems you are searching for Librem 5 (my daily driver). It runs PureOS (a Debian derivative) and turns into a desktop when connected to a screen and keyboard.
Out of curiosity, how often do you use your bank's app? I don't have my bank's app on my phone. Pretty much nobody ever gives me paper checks, and all of my employers have strongly encouraged/required direct deposit as part of the usual onboarding process. If I want to check balance or move between checking/savings, I use their website. I have a debit card, and my (Android) phone has tap-to-pay built-in.
For both banks I use, setting up Google/Apple Pay requires you to install the app on your phone to approve it.
It's also the only permitted method for 2FA which is required to make online payments. Even logging into the website requires you to approve the login on the app.
The second bank app is also my primary way of sending money to/from my friends, for example if we split the bill at a restaurant.
So the answer is several times a day.
Nobody has used paper checks here since the 90s, that's not what the app is for.
This is where iphones are a risk actually. Android webapps on old phones with their original OS installed have a better chance of working compared to old iphones with their original iOS version. This is both due to Apple's continued stubborness in keeping Safari releases tied to iOS releases (eg. "to get the banana you need the gorilla holding the banana and the entire rainforest the gorilla lives in...") and the dominance of Chromium browsers in webapp testing.
On old Android phones it's easier to install newer browsers without having to update the OS.
Edit: your comment is also not valid on occasion. I've recently witnessed some banking mobile webapps being broken for long periods of time and one bank that decided to remove the agreement approval function from their webapp, forcing you to download the app in order to approve updated agreements.
It appears there's a third priority then. That's not a criticism, it's true of all of us, I'm curious where it ranks and how you make that work with the other two. I'm in the same boat of being pissed at Google for destroying Android.
True, that priority is probably "runs the apps which I require to function in society", which basically means Revolut for payments and Whatsapp for messaging here. Oh and the occasional taxi app.
I mean the fact that GrapheneOS and PureOS and Plasma Mobile etc. are not even in the running for me is probably a good indicator that where it's placed is first.
- Uber/Lift/ Whatever your local flavor of theses are, or even regular taxi apps
- Deliveries and Groceries (I don't have/need a car, I get most of my groceries delivered, and just but fruits and vegetables on a farmers market near my house)
- Some payments app
- Access control for my building
- Navigation
- Entertainment
- 2FA/OTP
Many of these are local apps that have 0% chance of getting built for anything outside of Android and iOS, and further, some would break on GrapheneOS / Plasma / A stock rooted device (I'm pretty sure at least one of my banking apps auto closes if it even detects Developer options enabled)
It would be cool if these sorts of internal references were implemented as a feature of HN, so the headlines and comment counts are up to date whenever they are displayed.
Maybe someday! but it's not always easy to do this without human intervention, since the matches aren't strictly URL based. Maybe a good LLM could do it.
I meant a feature a human activates. Like if you manually drop a HN URL into a comment, the site adds in the visible metadata when it publishes.
Or a “related” feature, separate from normal comments, that only admins can access. You manually designate the related posts and then the site displays them dynamically.
But yeah, fully automated would be pretty amazing, but challenging.
I always have a hard time swallowing the price of modern smart phones. Having something so ridiculously expensive and fragile as an everyday carry seems absurd to me. For reference, you can buy two Steam Deck LCDs for the price of one iPhone 17.
I agree. I've started thinking about phones like cars. I'd never consider buying a brand new car, and I generally wouldn't buy a brand new phone either (although they're not quite as expensive as cars). I've found that year-old models are typically around half the price of new ones.
1 year old sure unlikely 50% cheap but 2 years old for sure can get for 50%. I don't see much difference between iphone 15 pro and iphone 17 pro. Honestly I'm still having iphone 13 mini and don't see much reason to upgrade but if decide to upgrade I will most likely buy 2nd hand iphone 15 pro.
the iphone 17 is like the peak of consumer technology. They have the SOC manufactured on the newest TSMC node, they have cutting edge radio, decent camera system, etc. And all have to fit into a body that small enough for your pocket.
It’s pretty instructive to compare an iPhone to a consumer product that’s priced for affordability first, like a Nintendo Switch. The differences in build quality are very evident.
I see your point, on the other hand I have never lost or broken a phone by dropping it. I also use mine around 3h per day. From that perspective, it is definitely something I get a lot of value out of.
you're gonna carry those two Steam Decks in your pockets?
I think modern smart phones are pretty remarkably un-fragile compared to 20 years ago before the iPhone ($300-700 for a Symbian with a tiny plastic screens that got scratched super fast) or even 10-ish years ago with much more fragile screen glass and cases. Last phone I did major damage to was my HTC Evo in 2012.
> you're gonna carry those two Steam Decks in your pockets?
Watch me! My point was more about how expensive phones are.
I'm not so sure about modern smart phones being less fragile. My first phone was a Nokia 3310-descendent, and my second a Samsung Beat flip phone. Neither were over $100 at the time of purchase, and both were rugged devices I could throw in my pocket or in a bag without thinking it would need a protective case or that their screens were going to break.
The screens could definitely break, they were just very small so the likelihood that they would suffer an impact that would break them was comparatively small. In fact, the reason for the flip form factor was to protect the increasingly fancy displays when it’s in your pocket. They also didn’t weigh very much so they didn’t fall as hard.
Modern phones are extremely sturdy, people are just more precious about them because they’re much fancier and more expensive and more of a requirement for everyday life.
I always think the same when I see people complain about the price of weird new niche computers (think new Amiga-like computers and stuff) and then you realise it's cheaper than an iPhone. Something created by a cottage industry for a tiny market with blood sweat and tears, it's still cheaper than mass-produced smartphone.
As a constrasting comparison data point, a Nokia 8800 cost around USD 900 in 2005 when it launched, which is approximately USD 1450 in the 2025 USD.
The buyer would get a chromium-plated metal case within which a slightly fancier version of a dumb phone was enclosed, and bragging rights as a bonus, and that would be it.
So, today’s USD 1k (or less, for the non-Pro versions) buys the user – depending on one’s point of view – either a commodity appliance or a personal computing contraption whose performance exceeds that of many high-end RISC workstations that once commanded five-digit price tags, and all for a ⅓ less than the launch price of the Nokia 8800.
Apple is the pioneer of 'expensive is the new cool' phenomenon. Like the pied piper, with every release, Apple keep leading the fan boys to jump off progressively taller cliffs. Meanwhile, other manufacturers realized that they, too, can play this game. Rather, they gets looked down upon if they don't amp up their prices. It's amazing to witness this happening.
Seems like the harder part would be getting the folding piece down - foldable is going to have much more volume for components than the air; but I'm sure getting it as thin as it is was already challenging
Foldables need to have very thin construction as when folded, you essentially have two phones on top of each other. There's speculation online that the air was launched off the back of their internal foldable R&D.
They stacked almost ALL the actual stuff, like the camera system, SOC, etc. inside that little plateau and the rest of the slab is basically just display and battery. If I was going to make a clamshell phone, experimenting with miniaturizing and arranging the whole thing into a small corner of the footprint would be where I’d start.
I've been wondering why they haven't had this before even is using 3rd party modems. Seems like an obvious play unless they feel like that would cannibalize their tablet market??
Because until the C1, Apple did not have their own, and there were not that many viable options available with Qualcomm 5G modems being the «best» (however one defines it) and the fastest albeit power hungry and running very hot at high speeds.
Outside Qualcomm, there has been a limited number of players out there, with MediaTek seeming to pick up the pace and giving Qualcomm a serious run for its money – if not now then pretty soon.
What is left is… not a lot and appears to have constraints of one sort or another:
Samsung – with 5G-integrated Exynos SoC's. It doesn't make sense for Apple to house 2x SoC's in the same appliance;
Huawei – they target the mainland Chinese market with its own flavour of 5G. One doesn't want their modem anyway due to national security concerns;
Sequans Communications – they focus on the IoT market, which is a niche and has its own unique constraint space;
Intel – they quit the 5G modem market in 2019 and sold the IP to Apple, which has given them the C1/C1X.
It is odd that you've long been able to buy a cellular iPad but not a cellular MacBook.
Perhaps people who buy a MacBook are likely to have an iPhone in their pocket that will function as a hotspot and iPads are much more often used by people who are otherwise outside of Apple's ecosystem?
If you are signed into the same Apple account on your iPhone and your MacBook, the iPhone shows up as a WiFi network option you can select without having to do any additional configuration.
It's one of those "It just works" continuity features, like sharing the clipboard between your Mac and iPhone without needing to configure anything.
> I would assume this means Apple laptops with integrated cellular modems are on the near horizon.
ROFL. Apple wants to sell as much different devices to a single person as possible. What next, you expect cellular iPads to be able to make calls without tethered iPhone?
Same here. I’m going to get a new battery soon, so that’ll give me a few more years. I’m hoping something comes along in that time that I want. Otherwise, I may just go to a Japanese eInk phone.
It isn't a phone (no cellular) but the BOOX Palma 2 is a fantastic phone-sized Android-running eInk device. Pair it with a hotspot in your bag or pocket and it would be good enough (as long as you don't make actual calls).
I'd be curious to understand their rationale for not making a small, reasonably priced phone like the iPhone SE used to be. I probably will be leaving the iPhone ecosystem the next time I have to buy a smartphone (even though I use a Mac, iPad, and Airpods, which all work together really well) because I'm uninterested in using a large phone.
Thinking through my own use case, I just use my phone for messaging, maps, and the occasional app, so I'm not going to need a big screen for consuming content. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on a phone, since I don't need any fancy features. So perhaps that intersection of use cases doesn't make much sense to target?
Phones are used to consume content. Bigger screens make consuming content better. Therefore smaller screens do not sell well.
The sales back up my statements.
Yes I romanticize about an iPhone 17 mini pro but in the end I like being able to watch some downloaded content on a plane without having to bring an iPad from time to time and I'm not going to do that on a tiny screen.
I feel like the sales data would back you up, if it wasn’t for the fact that the 12 and 13 mini were larger than the iPhone 6 and 6S which for many people was too large.
It’s a bit like selling increasingly carbonated water and then selling slightly less carbonated water and pretending that it was still water that you were selling- and using the data (of nobody buying it) to tell everyone that “nobody likes the still water; so we will continue only selling carbonated and carbonated+.”
> if it wasn’t for the fact that the 12 and 13 mini were larger than the iPhone 6 and 6S which for many people was too large.
I don't get why people make statements like this.
6: 2.64 (W) x 5.44 (H) x .27 (D)
6s: 2.64 (W) x 5.44 (H) x .28 (D)
13 mini: 2.53 (W) x 5.14 (H) x 0.30 (D)
The only dimension in which the mini was larger than the 6 or 6s was in depth, and that was just barely. It was smaller otherwise.
It did have a larger display, but it fit it into a smaller device.
----
All iPhones before the iPhone 6 were smaller than the 12 and 13 minis. The 1st gen SE was smaller. Everything from 6 on, including the 2nd and 3rd gen SEs, have been larger, though barely for the SEs. The downside to the SEs compared to the minis was that they have smaller displays than the minis.
I literally laid them on top of each other and the 6 was marginally larger.
Betrays the point anyway: the ideal size was the 5 and it was nowhere near that, even by your official numbers (which I would guess are excluding the rounded edges maybe? - regardless, not the point)
Apologies, what I meant was "larger than an iPhone 5/5s";
I provided pictures in a sibling comment thread to show what I mean, there's about 20% of a difference between the iPhone 5 and 6, and that size difference is very similar for the mini.
If people wanted to buy a phone that was the size of the 6, they would have purchased the SE from 2020, which was that roughly that size.
The SE didn't sell well. They want people who not only buy the phone but also buy content through the App Store and through the media services like Apple TV/music.
It's my thinking too but Android phones are just as big so I really don't know where to go when I won't be able to fix my iphone SE 2016... Maybe a 13 mini...
The point of the SE line was never to provide a small phone, it was to provide a cheap phone. The first SE reused their manufacturing process from the 5/5s, and the later SEs used the chassis they were using from the 6 to the 8.
You won’t find anything smaller in the android ecosystem without sacrificing security. The smallest android phones with good security are the same size as the base iPhone model.
Problem with used phones: no guarantee of water resistance. Many of the resold phones got their battery replaced, which itself it a good thing, but they are usually not applying the gasket required for water resistence.
30+ years on this planet and I've yet to have any issue with water and electronics. Even if your phone died every single year from water damage it would still be cheaper to buy a beater every year than a new iphone every 3-5 years
Some of the best video I have from my honeymoon was taken on an iPhone while floating in the Pacific Ocean with my (new!) wife. I wasn't going to grab a GoPro or some kind of Ocean Case for a video camera, I had a phone in my hand.
I’m still using iPhone 12 mini running iOS 26 beta and it’s good enough. OS is definitely not polished, some of the design choices don’t even make sense but in general I believe it’s the right direction - spatial + maxing out visual looks.
Being able to turn Liquid Glass off to sth like flat design would be nice but this probably won’t happen.
Now when it comes to the event itself, it felt so cartoonish.
I switched to 12 mini about a year ago from 1st gen SE because it broke down. I agree that it would be more than enough for years to come.
I cannot agree more on the event video. It looks like a pure TV ad for a full hour long. Also, it used to cover more diversity in terms of presenters. Where are they now? I want to hear lovely accents from people all around the world.
Every event has been a fairly transparent ad. I think for this one, they may not have had as big a variety of people to choose from. Apple has always been big on diversity; long before it was fashionable.
In this one, I noticed that the presenters all stood very still; more still than in previous ones.
It looks like they were all green screen, and the video composer was just very good. I was impressed by the woman standing in grass. It looked fairly “natural.”
Maybe they're super still because all the video is recorded, at night, on an iPhone 17 Pro, which has less ideal stabilization and long-shutter-exposure than a real camera.
> Thread is an IPv6-based, low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of things (IoT) products.
> Often used as a transport for Matter (the combination being known as Matter over Thread), the protocol has seen increased use for connecting low-power and battery-operated smart-home devices.
> Thread uses 6LoWPAN, which, in turn, uses the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol with mesh communication (in the 2.4 GHz spectrum), as do Zigbee and other systems. However, Thread is IP-addressable, with cloud access and AES encryption. A BSD-licensed open-source implementation of Thread called OpenThread is available from and managed by Google.
Thank you, stranger! And all the other sibling comments too. Sometimes, it’s not trivial to search things on my own, when I don’t understand what the result I’m looking for.
Funny thing, I know very little of networking, but this bears more sense than just Thread.
A very badly named mesh networking protocol designed for IoT applications, usually used as the transport layer for the equally badly named "Matter" IoT protocol.
The 17 Pro has a much higher resolution camera than the 13 Pro, so even if you center crop of a photo taken with the 2x optical zoom to get you what you'd see with a 3x, it will still be higher resolution than the same photo taken with the 13 Pro.
That said, I too like a 70 mm lens, but I long ago got used to just moving closer to or further away from subjects to take photos with dedicated cameras depending on what lens I had on.
Pre-iPhone 15, the Pro models used stainless steel for the frame. Not sure exactly why they ditched it, but it did have a reputation for collecting fingerprints.
The weight difference in the hand between the 14 pro in stainless and the 15 pro in titanium is considerable, I use both every day. Sometimes weight is a way to denote solid and premium like in watches, but with the size of phones and how we use them, being lightweight is really where it’s at.
Each new model has an asymptotically smaller feature bump. In 10 years we may have converged on the complete cell phone.
Maybe the recent introduction of foldable phones indicates the opposite. Is it the final blip, or will something similarly disruptive happen every 5-7 years?
It's a remarkably good camera for a phone. But I agree. I went from the 2020 SE to the 15 Pro and it was kind of whatever. Well, the screen's higher refresh rate is nice to look at too. That isn't really new to phones in general so much as it is to iPhones, though.
It seems strange no one is giving any credit to 17, when it is one of the best value iPhone Apple has to offer for quite some time.
It is either equal to or better than iPhone 16 Pro. A year ago iPhone 16 Pro 256Gb would be $1099, iPhone 17 256GB today is $799, with a better SoC, better WiFi, same display and ProMotion, better screen protective layer. The only thing worst is the lack of Telephoto camera.
I recently started studying metal, so I was watching their metal choices with a bit of curiosity.
Apple switched iPhone 17 Pro from Titanium (used in earlier versions) to aerospace-grade Aluminium for Superior Heat Dissipation.
But for the iPhone Air, they are using Titanium because it's lightweight, strong, and durable.
Aluminum is definitely a softer metal, so using aerospace-grade aluminum makes sense. So, is Titanium not a good thermal conductor? If it is not, then why is it used in the iPhone Air?
Sorry! Their choice is not clear to me. Can someone throw light on it?
Since iPhone Air is thinner, it needs to use titanium for the increased rigidity to avoid another iPhone 6-eqsue 'bendgate' at the risk of worse heat dissipation
I have a 12 Pro, I am definitely going to be upgrading, I've had my phone for 5 years now (since 2020) that's actually longer than I've owned any other cell phone without upgrading.
I think I could probably squeeze more life out of my phone, but the 17 has a nicer camera, me and my wife are noticing our relatives with newer iPhones have photographs that look slightly (I meant to write NOTICEABLY here) better. As we raise our first child, having a quality camera is definitely important to us.
I was really tempted by the iPhone Air, but the Pro has better camera features. I am actually really excited to see what they will do for the iPads. If they release a thin iPac Mini similar to the iPhone Air, I would immediately buy it. I am not usually a fan of thin, but something in me has always wanted a thin iPad Mini, not sure why, but I'm waiting for it still.
Great demo, the most impressive demo had to have been the Airpod Pros translation piece.
Edit: Needed to annotate that I wrote 'slightly better' but its not just slightly, we both visually noticed a different in quality.
One last note, the 12 Pro was my first iPhone ever. I was on Android since 2009, every Android I had lasted about 2 years. My last one probably would have lasted me 5 years but I was tired and wanted a change at my 2 year mark. I have not regretted my decision to date.
The issue with the camera in newer iphones is that it uses an Ai engine to smooth things and add details that aren’t there.
If you want reference tier photos for documenting family history, modern mirrorless is better. DSLR from 10-15 years ago is also still great in all but the most challenging light conditions, where you could simply use a flash.
Especially on babies, the smoothing or noise reduction is weird. A newborn has a very specific skin with an enormous amount of details/speckles/marks. It’s very hard to capture for some reason. Couldn’t do it with my phone, only with a proper camera and shooting in raw.
Hard agree. As a new parent, I bought a modern mirrorless camera before my kid was born, and the difference is noticeable. Especially, as you say, around skin details like milia (white spots on a newborn's skin) which often get wiped out on my Pixel (I'm sure by the AI processing).
If you are considering an expensive phone upgrade based off of the camera alone, consider buying a dedicated camera first, I say. I know the best camera is the one you have on you, etc...
If you want another big bump in image quality I recommend you use Adobe’s Project Indigo app instead of the default camera app.
Difference is especially startling for HDR and portraits, particularly backlight ones where the stock app does some hideous segmentation-based “enhancements”.
Yeah. Comparing to my iPhone 14 Pro, improvements are mostly just the camera and the screen. So it's really just about what you want a newer/better camera in your pocket. I'm going to wait one more year, but I do love that we're at the stage where a phone and a laptop can go for 4-5 years without feeling less than "modern".
Just be mindful that those extra megapixels will need some extra storage.
I’m in the exact same boat. Also toying with the idea of going back to android for the pixel 10 pro. I do miss android notifications and keyboard. Are there any features keeping you from going back?
The whole family is on iPhone, we use Mac now the way everything integrates together I just dont see myself going back. I spent way more on Android and Windows than I have on Apple products. My Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro chip costs half of what my Surface Book 2 laptop costs, and I can do more on it especially with AI locally.
Something about iOS and macOS just feels right. Any time I boot up my old Android phones they feel like a convoluted mess.
> As we raise our first child, having a quality camera is definitely important to us.
A phone camera isn't really a camera, it's a digitally-airbrushed impression of reality. There just isn't enough light hitting the tiny sensor through the tiny lens.
I have 20 year old 5MP DLSR portrait photos that are still better than what a 120MP phone can produce, because it's the lens that counts.
I have a couple DSLR's and a large frame compact, and I wholly get your point. The image quality on even an older DSLR is better, mainly due to the physics of the optics - there's nothing like a high quality lens dumping a bunch of light on a large sensor.
However.... it's really hard to overstate the workflow and convenience aspects of shooting with a phone. (Particularly as a parent, and even moreso when I was a new parent of a small child.) The phone has the twin benefits of 1) being present almost always and 2) being immediately able to process and transmit an image to the people you might want to see it. For the 99% case, that's far more useful than even a very significant improvement in image quality. For the 1% where it matters, I can and do either hire a professional (with better equipment than my own) or make the production of dragging out my DSLR and all that it entails. This is like so many other cases where inarguable technical excellence of a sort gives way to convenience and cost issues. IOW, "Better" is not just about Image Quality.
My ancient Canon Rebel camera, I think a T3i, takes stunningly detailed photos against even my iPhone 15 Pro.
But, I never have my Canon and it's too bulky to carry around everyday. I do carry my iPhone everywhere I go. And so, the capabilities of my iPhone camera are more important.
I imagine this is the same for the overwhelming majority of people.
Having said that you also have the midway option with large sensor compact cameras. A ricoh GR III/IV with an APS-C sensor is heavier than a smartphone but not overly so and more compact as it actually fit a pocket. A Canon G9X is even lighter with a 1" sensor.
Some of it's size, some of it the fact that the camera is a second device, and some of it's workflow.
I tried a Sony RX100 (1" sensor) when they first came out, optimistic about the possibility of using it for 'general purpose' photography. After all, it's small enough.
The problem was, it's a second device to carry around and keep charged. Then once you capture the image, it's largely stuck on the device until you find a way to offload your images. I briefly experimented with cables that would let me do things like transfer images from the RX100 to my (Android at the time) mobile phone, for archiving and sending to family and friends. That turned the whole thing into the sort of science fair project that I didn't have time for as the parent of a very young child. (Although in fairness, I can't think of a single time in my life when I'd have had the patience, kids or not.)
This is why, for all the arguments you can make against them as cameras, I've come to be very thankful for the amount of effort that Apple and others have made to get appealing images out of devices I always carry around anyway. I can take a set of pictures, edit them, have them automatically archived to cloud storage, and send them to whoever I want.. all with a single device I was carrying around anyway.
This leaves open the fact that the 'real' camera workflow is still an option when there's the need for higher image quality and the time (or money to hire a photographer) to take advantage of what a DSLR or the like can do.
(When I compare what I can do with my iPhone to what my parents had available to them (a 110 format camera and 35mm Nikons), I like the tradeoffs a lot better. the image quality available now is definitely better than the 110. Some of those 35mm exposures are probably better quality than what I can get out of an iPhone, but they're all stuck in albums and slides, and nobody ever looks at them. )
> Then once you capture the image, it's largely stuck on the device until you find a way to offload your images. I briefly experimented with cables that would let me do things like transfer images from the RX100 to my (Android at the time) mobile phone, for archiving and sending to family and friends. That turned the whole thing into the sort of science fair project that I didn't have time for as the parent of a very young child. (Although in fairness, I can't think of a single time in my life when I'd have had the patience, kids or not.)
Most modern cameras now have a WiFi-based photo transfer system that works pretty well. It's not instantaneous, but it is quick enough to copy the photo you want to share with a friend or partner while you finish a meal or drink your coffee.
This is true, but switching to that mode is frustrating and you often have to use AWFUL mobileOS software to get the images. And my DLSL shoots like 25FPS and each raw file is 80MB. This is NOT fast to send over the wifi.
Waiting until I can plug in the 2TB memory card to my Mac and use a huge screen to review all the photos is far more efficient even if it has much higher startup latency.
Honestly this is a good reason to choose the iPhone Pro over the Air or Standard: 10gbps USB port. Plug the Nikon in to the phone for cloud upload. This would be the fastest path of all. Most people are only focused on the USB bandwidth in the iPhones for download from the phone.
The RX100 has had wifi transfer since the 3rd gen.
I understand the "second device to carry around" but it isn't a real point for baby pics you might take at home. A ridiculous number of times I have no idea where I last put my phone anyway and sometimes have to make it ring from kde connect on my laptop so it is not like a smartphone is necessarily readily available at all time anyway.
I also know a number of people who don't leave home with their smartphone amyway for short errands since they have an apple watch, that leave one pocket available for those that would prefer having a camera.
> The RX100 has had wifi transfer since the 3rd gen.
On an iPhone, I can take the picture and I'm immediately a button press away from a photo editor and then whoever I want to send it to.
(A camera that automatically tethered to a phone and dumped pictures into the phone's camera roll would mostly solve the workflow issues I'm mentioning here. Would not surprise me if this already exists.)
> I understand the "second device to carry around" but it isn't a real point for baby pics you might take at home.
Maybe. The camera still has to be charged and in mind and hand. (Then as soon as the kids leave the house you're back to where you were and having to carry something around that you might not otherwise.)
> I also know a number of people who don't leave home with their smartphone anyway
I see that... different people have different sorts of relationships with personal electronics. For me, it wound up being that I'd carry a cell phone and that was about it. Even in the pre-smartphone days, when I might have carried a PDA, I either wouldn't or couldn't.
I am looking to upgrade my phone, and at the same time leave my carrier (Verizon). The price I pay for 2 people compared to the price I see out there for other carriers is just too large.
Any suggestions for me while I shop around for "tier 2" carriers? I am primarily concerned with price, and then network coverage second (I am OK with sometimes being throttled, but would prefer to avoid large gaps in any coverage).
You've got other good answers. But basically: there's no reason to not go with an MVNO. It's literally the same service for a fraction of the price. Pick one with whatever main carrier has the best coverage in your area.
What happens when the sub-carrier gets deprioritized so that the main carrier's customers get priority? How frequently does your bandwidth suffer? You say never, but is that really the case or you've just become used to it? I know several people on these places like Boost or Metro or whatever, and their streaming experiences definitely take hits
I use Mint which was an MVNO for T-Mobile. They've since been acquired by T-Mobile, but I haven't really experienced any difference in service. I also haven't used Visible, so I can't directly speak to that but Visible is owned by Verizon FWIW.
I probably experience times with deprioritization. 5G service can go from getting several hundred megabits with pretty low latencies to only getting a few megabits with potentially up to 100ms or so latency, depending on crowds. I don't recall any times where I had good signal but couldn't get any data, but definitely been in places where it'll struggle to do video chats or something at a big live event that doesn't have the extra 5G infra deployed. For example, an extra large crowd at the park for some event will probably give poor network experience but I'll otherwise get good connectivity in a modern sports arena.
In the end it's just a value proposition. Is having really fast network everywhere, all the time really that worth it to you? For many the answer is yes. But for me, on my personal device, if I'm getting poor data rates that's probably a clue I should really be putting my phone down and get back into whatever is happening in the park so I don't mind and the savings are quite nice.
For Visible, anything above their cheapest plan will give you the same priority as postpaid Verizon. Many prepaid carriers will gladly take more money to shift you to a higher priority.
There is a list of all the prioritization tiers (aka QCI, or premium data) on all the three main US carriers here:
1. Their international plan is garbage, and if you don’t use the international plan, you cannot usefully use them as a phone-and-SMS-over-WiFi only solution in conjunction with another carrier. Competitors like USMobile do not have this problem.
2. Their customer support and website are very bad.
Yeah Visible keeps popping up on recommendation threads. I'll take a look at their offers. Do you suggest I buy a phone through them, or purchase from apple directly and bring it to the plan?
I've got a Pixel, this new iPhone hasnt got anything that convinces me to move to Apple. There's nothing compelling there, not technologically or aesthetically. Yes its more powerful, but what do they do with that power but play games? Until some new application emerges where that much power is needed I'll stick to the cheaper phones.
The Pixel is not cheaper. When comparing the Pixel 10 to the iPhone 17, the iPhone offers double the storage for the same price, while having all other iPhone features.
Surprising there’s no matte-black iPhone 17 Pro - dark, low-reflectance finishes are standard in pro video kit because they minimise specular reflections and stray highlights; keeping a shiny silver finish and skipping a subdued matte black feels like a strange choice and undercuts the “Pro” claim.
It's not a strange choice at all when you realize that the majority of people use phone cases and it's more difficult to make matte "pop" in promotional content
Movie people don't normally care about the finish of the iPhone they are using. And the ones that do, use a case.
I've seen all sorts of non-black (let alone matte black) iPhone rigs used for motion pictures, including white and natural titanium colors. Eg. 28 Years Later used a variety of iPhone configurations and colors.
But yeah, I'm surprised there's no black/space gray option this year. Some consumers won't buy any other color.
I wonder if someone will come up with the idea of vinyl wrap to protect your phone rather than using a slipon phone case. Then...you could have your phone be thin and get that matte finish. Couple that with a matte phone screen protector and I think the result would be pretty nice.
These have never been actual pro devices. Arguably not even prosumer. You probably don’t want scorched earth ai processing done on your photos as a pro but that is what the iPhones have been doing as of late. Most damning is no way to turn that off.
There is no such thing as a digital camera without processing. But third party camera apps can get images as raw as they want them and it supports professional video standards.
Try Halide with "Process Zero" if you want that, but I'm pretty sure the most popular 3p camera apps are Asian beauty apps that do far more and far worse quality processing.
Sure there is. Shoot in Raw format. Get a file representing a matrix of the sensor readout for each rgb pixel. Your post processing software of choice handles interpolation to the method of your choice.
There is a big difference between interpolation (dealing with the bayer or xtrans array and delivering a 3 layer image file in your choice of format and bit depth using your choice of algorithms), shooting for white balance or tone mapping with a color card and calibrated monitor if you care about that level of accuracy, and what Apple is doing which is black box ML subtly yassifying your images and garbling small printed text. Especially when the commenters use case is building out the family archive and not posting selfies on Instagram.
> shooting for white balance or tone mapping with a color card and calibrated monitor if you care about that level of accuracy
You need to do this if you want to see the image at all, and it involves a lot of subjective choices. The objective auto white balance algorithm usually described is objectively quite bad; for instance it's always described as a single transformation on the image, which doesn't make sense if there are multiple light sources.
The reason you'd want to render humans differently in the image is that a) if you don't get skin tones just right they'll look like corpses b) in real life you can choose to focus on a subject in a scene and this will cause them to appear brighter (because your eyes will adapt to them) but in an image there isn't that flexibility and so it helps to guess what the foreground of the image is and expose for that.
I forgot to say recent iPhone cameras let you turn off the sharpening effects anyway, just move the photographic style control down to Natural. It is true that the sharpening is kind of bad. This is because someone taught everyone that digital images are bandlimited so they use frequency-based sharpening algorithms, but they aren't, so those just give you ringing artifacts. For some reason nobody knows about warp-sharpen anymore.
I really like the new unibody design on the 17 Pro, as well as the orange. That seems like the first iPhone might feel like bypassing the case. However, seeing as I just got a 16 Pro last year, I don't think I can justify an upgrade just yet.
Overall this year seemed much better than last year.
I think I'm throwing in the towel on my 7 Plus this year. I'd love to keep it around for a bit longer but too many apps and websites are no longer functional. It's starting to become a usability issue.
Live photos don't use all that much. I went and checked my library and they are all 2-4MB. Which seems to be roughly the same as the non live photos. Vs a 20 second 4k60fps video which was 240MB
Through the last iterations I only ever upgrade my iPhone whenever there is a "meaningful" RAM upgrade in it for me. So this one here is not too bad going from 8GB to 12GB (Air, Pro, Pro Max).
Unless we get to see someone doing more in-depth profiling we can't know. This should still give more headroom across app usage; especially when not using the camera then and probably even with (it's a 50% increase versus last mem max).
Still no reason to upgrade. My shift from iPhone 8 to iPhone 13 was qualitative. Now much of the barrier to improvement is software, and they’re all gated by Apple.
I think iPhone 17 is the first worthy upgrade to the base model in years, LPTO is a huge upgrade to the aging pre-iPhone 17 screen. The difference between Pro and non-Pro is pretty thin this year. I currently have a 16 Pro, might upgrade, but mostly because models are typically shifted through our family (so everyone gets an upgrade).
What I found with screens going back to an old 1280px macbook screen when the retina was in the shop is that you quickly lose appreciation for quality when you don’t have an example next to you. This is why the Apple Store model is good for sales, you can dangle the new screens on an hdr wallpaper and its clear that it is different to the one you already have. But again, it only became an issue because one day you made it an issue.
I agree. Though I would formulate it a bit differently. You can live fine without HiDPI or >60Hz. But once you have used them for a few days, it's really hard to go back.
Our daughter still has an older iPhone with 60Hz and I cannot look at it. The flickery animations drive me crazy. Yet, I have had iPhones with < 120Hz screens for well over a decade.
I went back pretty easy. The real thing is the pixel viewing distance. At laptop viewing distances I couldn't see the pixels on the low res screen anyhow. The only real noticeable difference was ui text was a little bigger. Refresh rate you stop noticing fast. I personally can't tell when my m3 mbp is on 120hz on the power adapter or 60z on battery, maybe if I hunted for it specifically by scrolling at lightspeed.
USB C by itself is enough of a reason to upgrade. I have one set of cords that work everywhere and the iPhone supports all of the standard USB-C standards - video, storage, audio, and networking using the same devices you use on computers.
I am with you- magsafe is great for charging all the things and it is how I charge all my stuff currently. I will say that despite that, moving to USB-C is a big deal for me. As a household of 7 having different cables for everything becomes a chore whereas standardizing on USB-C saves us a ton of headaches. Kids phones need charging? Grab one of our dozens of USB-C cables and one of our many USB bricks and go.
For me- it has been a slow climb but I have been slowly moving everything we have over to USB-C. When completed I can put all the other cables (mini usb, micro usb, lightning, that weird usb-3 thing some androids/ext harddrives used, etc) into my old cable foot locker.
Even an iPhone X was running great in 2025, until it finally gave up to age and the network module stopped working. iPhone 13s are lightning quick for me still.
The pixel 10 is different trade off. Base pixel is cheaper than base iPhone and has an extra camera, upgrading it to 256 gets you slightly more expensive. And for the pro models it flips with the pixel cheaper even with same storage.
I'm still on an iPhone 11 and this might finally be the one to get me to upgrade. I don't need the "Pro" stuff, but the ProMotion was always frustratingly only associated with the Pro phones.
That said, I'm sort of frustrated with iOS overall, and sorely tempted to go back to Pixels, so I can't decide.
I have a Pixel 9 to check out where Android is standing and for GrapheneOS. Unfortunately Pixel OS still has pretty bad bugs all the time (oneUI is much more polished, but has other issues) and the Pixel 10 is really overpriced compared to the iPhone 17 (the Pixel 10 is more midrange than a flagship, even though it has a flagship price).
I got my first Pixel (10 Pro XL); Only because their AI integration felt cool. My iPhone 11 Pro is still doing great overall, besides sluggishness here and there, and random Chrome crashes. I might consider upgrading to 17 now due to speed and camera upgrades. Honestly, it was not an exciting upgrade, just like their last 5.
The notifications are the biggest one. iOS insists on this Banner -> Lock Screen -> Notification Center lifecycle, and it drives me crazy that notifications move from Lock Screen to Notification Center simply by unlocking the phone and then doesn't show Notification Center notifications at a glance. I've missed so many notifications that way, because I quickly unlocked my phone to deal with something, thereby dismissing my current Lock Screen notifications, and then failing to realize that I had some, because when I tap my screen to light it up they don't show up (you have to explicitly swipe up to reveal Notification Center). Beyond that, I really appreciated Android's little top bar that shows the app icons that had notifications so I could quickly see if it was Slack, email, etc, that I had. Finally, Android lets you opt out of "Marketing" notifications at an OS level, while iOS doesn't have that.
Beyond that, I get frequent spam SMS's which are stupid. Android blocks all those. I have a Junk mail folder in email and hardly get email spam anymore. It feels like going back 20 years getting these random spam SMS's.
Finally, "glanceability" doesn't seem as good with the iPhone. One silly little thing is that if I'm using my iPhone it's sometimes very hard to see the date! If you have notifications you have to swipe down quite a bit to reveal that.
I'm surprised that Apple is giving every single iPhone model 256 GB starting capacity. My prediction would've been 256 GB for the Pro and 128 GB for the base iPhone 17. Guess those AI models need space?
I didn't pay attention for the non-Pro, but for the Pro they 'said' they give you 256GB for the price of last year's 256 GB. So it seems like another step in moving the prices up.
Edit: 16 Pro 128 GB was $999 at introduction iPhone 17 Pro 256 GB is $1099. Better for the non-Pro though - the 16 128 GB was $799, the 17 256 GB is also $799.
Every single new iPhone costs more than $1000 in Canada. Even the older/cheaper models cost more than $1000 after tax and environment fees. I knew this day was coming but damn.
It's odd that the Air has 4 GB more RAM than the regular 17 even though it's meant to replace the Plus models from previous years (same specs, same difference in price point, etc.)
The iPhone 17 Air has the Pro SoC in it. It's sort of a in-between model between the base iPhone 17 and the luxury iPhone 17 Pro. Pro performance, base camera.
I've been waiting for this for a year, but I'm a bit disappointed. It's larger than the 17 and 17 pro, and it weighs more than my SE 3rd gen. The price is also insane. It costs the same as an entire computer.
I just want a lightweight device that makes calls, send texts, can snap a quick photo, has maps, mobile payments, and can order a cab. These phones are clearly aimed at consuming content, and I've been pushed out of the market. What to do?
You can still buy a decent budget android phone that meets most of your requirements for only a few hundred dollars. The Samsung Galaxy M56 5G is only $400. The pixel 9a is only $499. Android probably has something that you are looking for, Apple isn't really competing in that space.
I just browse the web on my phone. In fact, my phone is already too expensive just for that one thing. I’m not upgrading until the new phones can run a 5B model with adequate context size and adequate inferencing speeds.
Most of my circle seems to like that crap. You can opt out, all of the carriers have prepaid offerings with much lower rates and a lot less financing. Maybe you get less data priority, almost certainly you get a lower tier of customer service, but those are ok tradeoffs for me. If you want to save more money, you can go to former MVNOs now owned by the carrier they run on or actually independent MVNOs. https://prepaidcompare.net/ seems like a good place to compare plans. They also have deals listings if you want to have fun with subsidy locked phones.
If I trade in my phone, I want my trade-in offer now. Instead, the full value of whatever trade-in deal provided is split over 36 months as bill credits.
While the new phone might actually be “free” in one of these promotions, it’s not, naturally, because you’ve been thrown into a 36 month installment agreement separate of the cellphone service they’ve sold you on (that they also claim is “price locked” while independently raising surcharges and other fees).
With inflation such as it is, finance it and don't be concerned about a temporary lock. Most carriers will unlock it after X months and/or for travel. Let the phone carrier eat it and conserve capital.
I'm actually considering buying myself an iPhone for the first time. I have basically two priorities when buying an phone:
1. Freedom. I should be able to build and run apps on it without the platform holder having a barrier on it.
2. Privacy. The phone shouldn't be an object to track me for better ad sales or any other purpose.
Of course, priority 1 has until recently always led to Android while priority 2 has always led to Apple.
But with the upcoming announced changes where google is going to require registration and signing for even third party sideloaded apps, while at the same time the EU is forcing Apple to open up and allow sideloading, it seems pretty clear that in the near future both Apple and Google's policies regarding point 1 are going to converge. On a position less free than Android has hitherto been, and less free than I would like, but unfortunately they are the two options on the market.
So with priority 1 no longer a differentiating factor, it comes down to priority 2.
I've used both Android and iOS over the years, as while my personal phones have always been Android, my employer provided phones have always been iOS. I think I do prefer the Android user experience and have used enough of both that that's not just a factor of which I'm accustomed to, but it's also not the huge difference it once was for a lot of apps.
Right now I'm using a Pixel 7 Pro and I might weigh sitting it out another year, but my USB-C port is failing and I'm also watching the pixel battery issues creep up the model range to newer and newer models...
Thing is, privacy with apple is a marketing term.
if apple offered actual privacy, you could:
- find out what/when apps are running
- find out who they are talking to
- prevent it, including apple if you want
and apple has all kinds of nonsense like deep links (apps can intercept links), bluetooth beacons (apps can talk to stuff in a store/location), and lots of other stuff behind the scenes. You can't find out if it is in use.
If you go to Settings > Privacy & Security > App Privacy Report you can see domains contacted by an app, which apps contact a specific domain, and data and sensor access logs. Can also export it as a JSON file.
I think the data and sensor access logs is a newer feature since I don’t think I’ve seen it before, but network activity has been in there for at least a few years. The network activity is also only domains and ip addresses, nothing about protocol or what data was sent unfortunately.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188
> - prevent it, including apple if you want
It's even worse than that:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/04/10/apple-makes-it-re...
https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
> find out what/when apps are running
How do you do that on Android? You can inspect the manifest to see some triggers, but an app can set more triggers when it first launches.
Task managers have been killed by Google about 10 years ago and it's impossible to see that's running in real time.
If you enable developer mode you can kind of see a partial list of what's currently running I guess, is that what you're talking about?
It’s like in politics, it’s not about absolute, it’s all relative.
What is the least worse option in terms of privacy, when comparing apple and google? I think there’s a broad consensus it’s apple. But let’s not call it the “best” option please.
You can go with something else than google and apple, they are not an inevitability. Alternate OSes offer significantly more freedom and privacy.
Not to mention Apple allows itself to use the data it gathers from you for itself, which is no different than Google.
Apple anonymises all data to a ridiculous degree, even when it's detrimental to the product's efficiency.
Like fetching map routes in multiple anonymised parts so that they don't know where you're going.
My Pixel 5 made me switch to iOS after a software update made it unusable.
A year later, the iPhone mostly gets out of my way. However the keyboard and browser options are artificially limited. I can't easily set my own search engine on Safari either. Ad blocking works fine though.
The hardware is the best I've had in years. Battery life is really good. Airdrop and Airplay are very useful, as are many other small features.
I have come to prefer the iOS experience, but don't expect a life changing upgrade, just a longer-lasting phone.
You can't set a search engine on mobile safari?
I wasn't aware about how bad the situation was for devices, in general, about privacy until I installed a Pi-Hole in a Raspberry and used it as DNS service at home.
It's really surprising the amount of data that tries to leave the premises, and this just the one that I block with a mid-range security ban list.
Has something changed in the Apple ecosystem to put item one anywhere near the table?
Let's be very clear here: all Google has announced so far is that installing apps from anonymous builds is going to be taken away and only if you want your phone to be considered "certified". Let's not get drawn too far into hysteria.
In some regions of the world a phone that is not considered "certified" by Google is only useful as a paperweight. For example, I wouldn't be able to interact with government services or use any banking with such a phone. (Notice the any and with — no, I can't switch to another bank except by emigrating somewhere, and banks are only available as mobile applications. No web.)
So unless you're willing (and can afford!) to buy and carry multiple phones, the new severely downgraded Android is about as open as iPhone, but with zero expectation of it respecting your privacy.
Or... you just register with Google and sign things using your own keys to authorize them before sideloading. Or setup an LLC or whatever and register that entity with Google or whatever.
Nobody is going to setup LLC to sideload shii.
Well not to sideload generally but if someone wanted to distribute an app "anonymously" wrt what the public sees.
That’s already annoying and the same process as ios currently
iOS requires XCode (only available on MacOS computers) so that's at least one difference
Well said! I share those two priorities, and am now moving in the inverse direction, but I plan to use GrapheneOS.
Battery and USB-C ports can easily be changed. You don't need to change the whole thing to fix that. Just like you don't buy a new car when you have a flat tire or broken AC.
The comparison is a bit off. A replacement battery as a part alone does cost more than 10 % of a completely new Pixel 7 Pro. So definitely not comparable with a cars flat tire or broken AC...
There a tens of millions of cars on the road worth less than 10x that of a broken AC repair cost.
> but my USB-C port is failing
I'm having the same issue with my pixel 8 (along with the screen randomly turning green out of nowhere, so I have to "ground" the display to get it to work again)
In general the 8 feels a lot more cheaply made than the 6
I agree that the android UX is better than apple (or at least, it makes more sense to me). But I'd consider moving to iphone for build quality alone
I'm in the exact same position down to the Pixel 7 pro. It feels like my options are either to move to graphene os or move to iOS. But grapheneos seems like it'll cause headaches that I am not that interested in dealing with, however my wish to escape vertical integration which plagues tech ecosystems still tempts me.
It seems you are searching for Librem 5 (my daily driver). It runs PureOS (a Debian derivative) and turns into a desktop when connected to a screen and keyboard.
It doesn't run my banks' apps so it can't be more than a secondary device for playing around.
Out of curiosity, how often do you use your bank's app? I don't have my bank's app on my phone. Pretty much nobody ever gives me paper checks, and all of my employers have strongly encouraged/required direct deposit as part of the usual onboarding process. If I want to check balance or move between checking/savings, I use their website. I have a debit card, and my (Android) phone has tap-to-pay built-in.
For both banks I use, setting up Google/Apple Pay requires you to install the app on your phone to approve it.
It's also the only permitted method for 2FA which is required to make online payments. Even logging into the website requires you to approve the login on the app.
The second bank app is also my primary way of sending money to/from my friends, for example if we split the bill at a restaurant.
So the answer is several times a day.
Nobody has used paper checks here since the 90s, that's not what the app is for.
Millions of people in the US use their banking online apps. A lot of people don’t own a computer at all, just a mobile device.
You can still use the bank website on the phone.
This is where iphones are a risk actually. Android webapps on old phones with their original OS installed have a better chance of working compared to old iphones with their original iOS version. This is both due to Apple's continued stubborness in keeping Safari releases tied to iOS releases (eg. "to get the banana you need the gorilla holding the banana and the entire rainforest the gorilla lives in...") and the dominance of Chromium browsers in webapp testing.
On old Android phones it's easier to install newer browsers without having to update the OS.
Edit: your comment is also not valid on occasion. I've recently witnessed some banking mobile webapps being broken for long periods of time and one bank that decided to remove the agreement approval function from their webapp, forcing you to download the app in order to approve updated agreements.
not GP, also not in US, but i use app bank to do everything related to banking. It's kind of a must now.
Do you have to do that on the go? Can you keep a dedicated phone at home?
Yes we have to, our bank app support QR payment.
And while we have something similar to Venmo, we don't see any good reason why should we use them. Back transferring already happen instantly.
It appears there's a third priority then. That's not a criticism, it's true of all of us, I'm curious where it ranks and how you make that work with the other two. I'm in the same boat of being pissed at Google for destroying Android.
True, that priority is probably "runs the apps which I require to function in society", which basically means Revolut for payments and Whatsapp for messaging here. Oh and the occasional taxi app.
I mean the fact that GrapheneOS and PureOS and Plasma Mobile etc. are not even in the running for me is probably a good indicator that where it's placed is first.
For me that looks something like:
- N Banking Apps
- Whatsapp / Telegram
- Uber/Lift/ Whatever your local flavor of theses are, or even regular taxi apps
- Deliveries and Groceries (I don't have/need a car, I get most of my groceries delivered, and just but fruits and vegetables on a farmers market near my house)
- Some payments app
- Access control for my building
- Navigation
- Entertainment
- 2FA/OTP
Many of these are local apps that have 0% chance of getting built for anything outside of Android and iOS, and further, some would break on GrapheneOS / Plasma / A stock rooted device (I'm pretty sure at least one of my banking apps auto closes if it even detects Developer options enabled)
Many bank apps can work with Waydroid. If your bank forces you to use the duopoly, you should switch the bank and complain to regulators.
Funny that EU made iPhones more compelling by enforcing USB-C and side loading.
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Related ongoing threads:
Compare the New iPhone Models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186294 - Sept 2025 (95 comments)
iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186044 - Sept 2025 (42 comments)
iPhone Air - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186015 - Sept 2025 (431 comments)
It would be cool if these sorts of internal references were implemented as a feature of HN, so the headlines and comment counts are up to date whenever they are displayed.
Maybe someday! but it's not always easy to do this without human intervention, since the matches aren't strictly URL based. Maybe a good LLM could do it.
I meant a feature a human activates. Like if you manually drop a HN URL into a comment, the site adds in the visible metadata when it publishes.
Or a “related” feature, separate from normal comments, that only admins can access. You manually designate the related posts and then the site displays them dynamically.
But yeah, fully automated would be pretty amazing, but challenging.
I always have a hard time swallowing the price of modern smart phones. Having something so ridiculously expensive and fragile as an everyday carry seems absurd to me. For reference, you can buy two Steam Deck LCDs for the price of one iPhone 17.
If you're like me, you buy a brand new one then keep it for 4-5 years.
I could buy two Steam Deck LCD's, but an iPhone has a much higher resolution display and I also use it every day and take it everywhere I go.
Buying one every year, not worth it in my opinion. Buying one and using it for many years is. I still have my 12 and will likely upgrade to the 17.
I agree. I've started thinking about phones like cars. I'd never consider buying a brand new car, and I generally wouldn't buy a brand new phone either (although they're not quite as expensive as cars). I've found that year-old models are typically around half the price of new ones.
Not iPhones anyway, that's for sure. Not even used. Maybe if it's dodgy.
1 year old sure unlikely 50% cheap but 2 years old for sure can get for 50%. I don't see much difference between iphone 15 pro and iphone 17 pro. Honestly I'm still having iphone 13 mini and don't see much reason to upgrade but if decide to upgrade I will most likely buy 2nd hand iphone 15 pro.
the iphone 17 is like the peak of consumer technology. They have the SOC manufactured on the newest TSMC node, they have cutting edge radio, decent camera system, etc. And all have to fit into a body that small enough for your pocket.
It’s pretty instructive to compare an iPhone to a consumer product that’s priced for affordability first, like a Nintendo Switch. The differences in build quality are very evident.
I see your point, on the other hand I have never lost or broken a phone by dropping it. I also use mine around 3h per day. From that perspective, it is definitely something I get a lot of value out of.
you're gonna carry those two Steam Decks in your pockets?
I think modern smart phones are pretty remarkably un-fragile compared to 20 years ago before the iPhone ($300-700 for a Symbian with a tiny plastic screens that got scratched super fast) or even 10-ish years ago with much more fragile screen glass and cases. Last phone I did major damage to was my HTC Evo in 2012.
(That Nokia N95 was in 2007 dollars, too!)
> you're gonna carry those two Steam Decks in your pockets?
Watch me! My point was more about how expensive phones are.
I'm not so sure about modern smart phones being less fragile. My first phone was a Nokia 3310-descendent, and my second a Samsung Beat flip phone. Neither were over $100 at the time of purchase, and both were rugged devices I could throw in my pocket or in a bag without thinking it would need a protective case or that their screens were going to break.
The screens could definitely break, they were just very small so the likelihood that they would suffer an impact that would break them was comparatively small. In fact, the reason for the flip form factor was to protect the increasingly fancy displays when it’s in your pocket. They also didn’t weigh very much so they didn’t fall as hard.
Modern phones are extremely sturdy, people are just more precious about them because they’re much fancier and more expensive and more of a requirement for everyday life.
I always think the same when I see people complain about the price of weird new niche computers (think new Amiga-like computers and stuff) and then you realise it's cheaper than an iPhone. Something created by a cottage industry for a tiny market with blood sweat and tears, it's still cheaper than mass-produced smartphone.
As a constrasting comparison data point, a Nokia 8800 cost around USD 900 in 2005 when it launched, which is approximately USD 1450 in the 2025 USD.
The buyer would get a chromium-plated metal case within which a slightly fancier version of a dumb phone was enclosed, and bragging rights as a bonus, and that would be it.
So, today’s USD 1k (or less, for the non-Pro versions) buys the user – depending on one’s point of view – either a commodity appliance or a personal computing contraption whose performance exceeds that of many high-end RISC workstations that once commanded five-digit price tags, and all for a ⅓ less than the launch price of the Nokia 8800.
The first iPhone (2007) was priced at $800 in 2025 dollars, and iPhone 17 has a heck of a lot more in it.
For a phone similar to the feature set of the original iPhone, you can get a Jelly Pro today for $100.
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You can get good, new motorolas for ~$400usd every so often on sale. They feel less premium, but they work well.
I’ve always bought the cheapest model in the range however I’m inclined to spend more next time because I get so much utility from it.
It will be another three or four years yet though as my SE is only three years old.
Just buy the mid/high range from a few gens ago, I never spent more than $400 on a phone. When my pixel 3a died I bought an 8a instead of a 10
Apple is the pioneer of 'expensive is the new cool' phenomenon. Like the pied piper, with every release, Apple keep leading the fan boys to jump off progressively taller cliffs. Meanwhile, other manufacturers realized that they, too, can play this game. Rather, they gets looked down upon if they don't amp up their prices. It's amazing to witness this happening.
Economists knew this phenomenon well before, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good.
but this one can make text messages and calls using the legacy phone system, so it's a totally different product category
Same with cars. You can't get a decent one without dropping at least a million.
No Mini. Not surprised. I guess I'm gonna replace the battery in my 13 mini finally.
Wonder if we'll ever see folding phones. I'm not concerned with the thickness but the overall foot print that's pocketable would be amazing.
No Mini. Not surprised. I guess I'm gonna replace the battery in my 13 mini finally.
There are more people on HN claiming to use a 13 mini than Apple actually sold.
There are dozens of us!!
The iPhone Air is definitely a testing ground for folding phone technologies.
As in, it will accidentally fold in people’s pockets?
Seems like the harder part would be getting the folding piece down - foldable is going to have much more volume for components than the air; but I'm sure getting it as thin as it is was already challenging
At first I thought I disagreed because they put the glass on the back but on further thought, I agree because they put the glass on the back.
How so? That would be great either way.
Foldables need to have very thin construction as when folded, you essentially have two phones on top of each other. There's speculation online that the air was launched off the back of their internal foldable R&D.
Which is mad becausw the Chinese are already making super thin foldable phones for consumers
Another area where we're falling behind in tech
That's just par for the course with Apple. Late to the party, but they tend to nail it when they show up
Like AI ?
They stacked almost ALL the actual stuff, like the camera system, SOC, etc. inside that little plateau and the rest of the slab is basically just display and battery. If I was going to make a clamshell phone, experimenting with miniaturizing and arranging the whole thing into a small corner of the footprint would be where I’d start.
If you scroll halfway down the press release page you can see an image of the internals https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-ai...
Presumably because a folding phone needs each half to be quite thin to still produce a reasonably normal phone thickness when folded.
Speculative renders of iPhone Fold size, https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/rumoured-iphone-fold-si...
That's very cool thanks for sharing!
There are some great renders in the first post in the thread, and towards the end you can see 3d printed mocks [0] of foldable devices. Very cool.
0: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/rumoured-iphone-fold-si...
Yeah, are they all large form-factor iPhones now?
Apple shipping their in-house network silicon (5G cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc) to their wider product line is certainly a long time coming.
I would assume this means Apple laptops with integrated cellular modems are on the near horizon.
I've been wondering why they haven't had this before even is using 3rd party modems. Seems like an obvious play unless they feel like that would cannibalize their tablet market??
> why they haven't had this before even is using 3rd party modems
Because Qualcomm charges a percentage of sale price for use of their modem.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/23/gurman-apple-modems-integrati...
Because until the C1, Apple did not have their own, and there were not that many viable options available with Qualcomm 5G modems being the «best» (however one defines it) and the fastest albeit power hungry and running very hot at high speeds.
Outside Qualcomm, there has been a limited number of players out there, with MediaTek seeming to pick up the pace and giving Qualcomm a serious run for its money – if not now then pretty soon.
What is left is… not a lot and appears to have constraints of one sort or another:
It is odd that you've long been able to buy a cellular iPad but not a cellular MacBook.
Perhaps people who buy a MacBook are likely to have an iPhone in their pocket that will function as a hotspot and iPads are much more often used by people who are otherwise outside of Apple's ecosystem?
> Perhaps people who buy a MacBook are likely to have an iPhone in their pocket that will function as a hotspot
You don't need an iphone, even a $50 phone will hotspot just fine. How many people travel with a laptop but no phone ?
Apple cares about ease of use.
If you are signed into the same Apple account on your iPhone and your MacBook, the iPhone shows up as a WiFi network option you can select without having to do any additional configuration.
It's one of those "It just works" continuity features, like sharing the clipboard between your Mac and iPhone without needing to configure anything.
Hotspot eats a lot of battery. If you charge your phone 1 per day, that can make difference between getting to the end of day or not.
You just made my heart go pitter-patter
> I would assume this means Apple laptops with integrated cellular modems are on the near horizon.
ROFL. Apple wants to sell as much different devices to a single person as possible. What next, you expect cellular iPads to be able to make calls without tethered iPhone?
Sigh, the only upgrade for my 12 mini is still the 13 mini?
Same here. I’m going to get a new battery soon, so that’ll give me a few more years. I’m hoping something comes along in that time that I want. Otherwise, I may just go to a Japanese eInk phone.
which Japanese eInk phone?
It isn't a phone (no cellular) but the BOOX Palma 2 is a fantastic phone-sized Android-running eInk device. Pair it with a hotspot in your bag or pocket and it would be good enough (as long as you don't make actual calls).
I'd be curious to understand their rationale for not making a small, reasonably priced phone like the iPhone SE used to be. I probably will be leaving the iPhone ecosystem the next time I have to buy a smartphone (even though I use a Mac, iPad, and Airpods, which all work together really well) because I'm uninterested in using a large phone.
Thinking through my own use case, I just use my phone for messaging, maps, and the occasional app, so I'm not going to need a big screen for consuming content. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on a phone, since I don't need any fancy features. So perhaps that intersection of use cases doesn't make much sense to target?
Phones are used to consume content. Bigger screens make consuming content better. Therefore smaller screens do not sell well.
The sales back up my statements.
Yes I romanticize about an iPhone 17 mini pro but in the end I like being able to watch some downloaded content on a plane without having to bring an iPad from time to time and I'm not going to do that on a tiny screen.
I feel like the sales data would back you up, if it wasn’t for the fact that the 12 and 13 mini were larger than the iPhone 6 and 6S which for many people was too large.
It’s a bit like selling increasingly carbonated water and then selling slightly less carbonated water and pretending that it was still water that you were selling- and using the data (of nobody buying it) to tell everyone that “nobody likes the still water; so we will continue only selling carbonated and carbonated+.”
> if it wasn’t for the fact that the 12 and 13 mini were larger than the iPhone 6 and 6S which for many people was too large.
I don't get why people make statements like this.
6: 2.64 (W) x 5.44 (H) x .27 (D)
6s: 2.64 (W) x 5.44 (H) x .28 (D)
13 mini: 2.53 (W) x 5.14 (H) x 0.30 (D)
The only dimension in which the mini was larger than the 6 or 6s was in depth, and that was just barely. It was smaller otherwise.
It did have a larger display, but it fit it into a smaller device.
----
All iPhones before the iPhone 6 were smaller than the 12 and 13 minis. The 1st gen SE was smaller. Everything from 6 on, including the 2nd and 3rd gen SEs, have been larger, though barely for the SEs. The downside to the SEs compared to the minis was that they have smaller displays than the minis.
I literally laid them on top of each other and the 6 was marginally larger.
Betrays the point anyway: the ideal size was the 5 and it was nowhere near that, even by your official numbers (which I would guess are excluding the rounded edges maybe? - regardless, not the point)
> I literally laid them on top of each other and the 6 was marginally larger.
So you did that and still wrote that the minis were larger? Or you did that after I pointed out that the minis were smaller?
Apologies, what I meant was "larger than an iPhone 5/5s";
I provided pictures in a sibling comment thread to show what I mean, there's about 20% of a difference between the iPhone 5 and 6, and that size difference is very similar for the mini.
If people wanted to buy a phone that was the size of the 6, they would have purchased the SE from 2020, which was that roughly that size.
no way the 6/6s smaller than 12mini/13mini. The 13mini is like 5s, but with notch-screen and no home button
No, its not.
https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...
Thanks, has been a while since i last hold the 5s, so forgive my mistake.
hear me out: a low powered, larger screened iphone!
When they do release small phones not enough people buy them so they don't see the cost as worth it. Simple market dynamics I assume.
The SE didn't sell well. They want people who not only buy the phone but also buy content through the App Store and through the media services like Apple TV/music.
> I'd be curious to understand their rationale for not making a small, reasonably priced phone like the iPhone SE used to be.
People who want cheap iPhones buy older models. You get better specs buying a used or NOS premium model than a new budget model.
It's my thinking too but Android phones are just as big so I really don't know where to go when I won't be able to fix my iphone SE 2016... Maybe a 13 mini...
The point of the SE line was never to provide a small phone, it was to provide a cheap phone. The first SE reused their manufacturing process from the 5/5s, and the later SEs used the chassis they were using from the 6 to the 8.
You won’t find anything smaller in the android ecosystem without sacrificing security. The smallest android phones with good security are the same size as the base iPhone model.
One reason might be that they have a minimum duration of software support—a low powered device might hold back future software?
Generally speaking there are more margins on premium goods
Looking at it from my 2020 iPhone SE I bought used for 120€.
Still good, still works.
Problem with used phones: no guarantee of water resistance. Many of the resold phones got their battery replaced, which itself it a good thing, but they are usually not applying the gasket required for water resistence.
30+ years on this planet and I've yet to have any issue with water and electronics. Even if your phone died every single year from water damage it would still be cheaper to buy a beater every year than a new iphone every 3-5 years
How often you take your phone underwater? If so, why?
Some of the best video I have from my honeymoon was taken on an iPhone while floating in the Pacific Ocean with my (new!) wife. I wasn't going to grab a GoPro or some kind of Ocean Case for a video camera, I had a phone in my hand.
It’s more about using it while it’s raining on my bike (attached to the handle). No need for a water-thight case so far.
I’m still using iPhone 12 mini running iOS 26 beta and it’s good enough. OS is definitely not polished, some of the design choices don’t even make sense but in general I believe it’s the right direction - spatial + maxing out visual looks.
Being able to turn Liquid Glass off to sth like flat design would be nice but this probably won’t happen.
Now when it comes to the event itself, it felt so cartoonish.
I switched to 12 mini about a year ago from 1st gen SE because it broke down. I agree that it would be more than enough for years to come.
I cannot agree more on the event video. It looks like a pure TV ad for a full hour long. Also, it used to cover more diversity in terms of presenters. Where are they now? I want to hear lovely accents from people all around the world.
Every event has been a fairly transparent ad. I think for this one, they may not have had as big a variety of people to choose from. Apple has always been big on diversity; long before it was fashionable.
In this one, I noticed that the presenters all stood very still; more still than in previous ones.
It looks like they were all green screen, and the video composer was just very good. I was impressed by the woman standing in grass. It looked fairly “natural.”
Maybe they're super still because all the video is recorded, at night, on an iPhone 17 Pro, which has less ideal stabilization and long-shutter-exposure than a real camera.
> iPhone 17 introduces N1, a new Apple-designed wireless networking chip that enables Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread.
What is Thread?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)
> Thread is an IPv6-based, low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of things (IoT) products.
> Often used as a transport for Matter (the combination being known as Matter over Thread), the protocol has seen increased use for connecting low-power and battery-operated smart-home devices.
> Thread uses 6LoWPAN, which, in turn, uses the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol with mesh communication (in the 2.4 GHz spectrum), as do Zigbee and other systems. However, Thread is IP-addressable, with cloud access and AES encryption. A BSD-licensed open-source implementation of Thread called OpenThread is available from and managed by Google.
Thank you, stranger! And all the other sibling comments too. Sometimes, it’s not trivial to search things on my own, when I don’t understand what the result I’m looking for.
Funny thing, I know very little of networking, but this bears more sense than just Thread.
A very badly named mesh networking protocol designed for IoT applications, usually used as the transport layer for the equally badly named "Matter" IoT protocol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(network_protocol)
A newish IOT protocol, think Zigbee 2.0 kinda.
https://www.threadgroup.org/
Thread is a mesh networking protocol mostly targeted at IoT and smart-home connectivity - it's basically a Zigbee competitor.
Zigbee like thing for IoT and Matter.
Camera lens angles of the 17 Pro seem strange to me.
Either too wide (1x) or too narrow (4x), as seen in the live stream video, which was recorded with the iPhone 17 Pro.
I am currently on the 13 Pro, I find the 3x mode ideal for portrait photos and videos.
Is it only me with this impression? Could someone help me to jump back into Apple's reality distortion field?
The 17 Pro has a much higher resolution camera than the 13 Pro, so even if you center crop of a photo taken with the 2x optical zoom to get you what you'd see with a 3x, it will still be higher resolution than the same photo taken with the 13 Pro.
That said, I too like a 70 mm lens, but I long ago got used to just moving closer to or further away from subjects to take photos with dedicated cameras depending on what lens I had on.
Same. Because zooming from 1x to 3.99x is digital zoom - IMHO too much quality is lost.
I would really like stainless as a material, not AL/TI alloy. It'd be a few grams difference, but infinitely more scratch and bend resistant.
Maybe if the Larrin Thomas came up with some catchy new stainless formulation and called it AppleCut or something...
Pre-iPhone 15, the Pro models used stainless steel for the frame. Not sure exactly why they ditched it, but it did have a reputation for collecting fingerprints.
The weight difference in the hand between the 14 pro in stainless and the 15 pro in titanium is considerable, I use both every day. Sometimes weight is a way to denote solid and premium like in watches, but with the size of phones and how we use them, being lightweight is really where it’s at.
Each new model has an asymptotically smaller feature bump. In 10 years we may have converged on the complete cell phone.
Maybe the recent introduction of foldable phones indicates the opposite. Is it the final blip, or will something similarly disruptive happen every 5-7 years?
Discuss.
Imho, there are only two unsolved problems in mobile devices: (1) maximizing screen size (in a portable form factor) and (2) input method.
Anything else on the hardware side is mostly noise.
If I had to futurism bet, it'd be on eyeglass AR + pocket device being the next major change. With input method for that still tbd.
We converged already 5 years ago, the feature bumps we're getting now are artificially created for marketing reasons.
Yeah. When I refreshed from an 11 to a 15 Pro… the only noticeable difference was the better camera.
It's a remarkably good camera for a phone. But I agree. I went from the 2020 SE to the 15 Pro and it was kind of whatever. Well, the screen's higher refresh rate is nice to look at too. That isn't really new to phones in general so much as it is to iPhones, though.
The number of models increase, the number of noticeable features decrease. All marketing, no vision.
It seems strange no one is giving any credit to 17, when it is one of the best value iPhone Apple has to offer for quite some time.
It is either equal to or better than iPhone 16 Pro. A year ago iPhone 16 Pro 256Gb would be $1099, iPhone 17 256GB today is $799, with a better SoC, better WiFi, same display and ProMotion, better screen protective layer. The only thing worst is the lack of Telephoto camera.
I recently started studying metal, so I was watching their metal choices with a bit of curiosity.
Apple switched iPhone 17 Pro from Titanium (used in earlier versions) to aerospace-grade Aluminium for Superior Heat Dissipation.
But for the iPhone Air, they are using Titanium because it's lightweight, strong, and durable.
Aluminum is definitely a softer metal, so using aerospace-grade aluminum makes sense. So, is Titanium not a good thermal conductor? If it is not, then why is it used in the iPhone Air?
Sorry! Their choice is not clear to me. Can someone throw light on it?
Since iPhone Air is thinner, it needs to use titanium for the increased rigidity to avoid another iPhone 6-eqsue 'bendgate' at the risk of worse heat dissipation
My guess would be that an aluminum iPhone Air would bend, so they were forced to make it from titanium to keep it thin.
Aluminum conducts heat about 10 times more effectively than titanium.
Phone material choices come down to which compromises you will settle for.
There are similar compromises with types of glass chosen. One type is more scratch resistance, but more prone to shatter from falls, and vice versa.
Smaller frame on the Air, so titanium for additional strength and resistance to bending?
I have a 12 Pro, I am definitely going to be upgrading, I've had my phone for 5 years now (since 2020) that's actually longer than I've owned any other cell phone without upgrading.
I think I could probably squeeze more life out of my phone, but the 17 has a nicer camera, me and my wife are noticing our relatives with newer iPhones have photographs that look slightly (I meant to write NOTICEABLY here) better. As we raise our first child, having a quality camera is definitely important to us.
I was really tempted by the iPhone Air, but the Pro has better camera features. I am actually really excited to see what they will do for the iPads. If they release a thin iPac Mini similar to the iPhone Air, I would immediately buy it. I am not usually a fan of thin, but something in me has always wanted a thin iPad Mini, not sure why, but I'm waiting for it still.
Great demo, the most impressive demo had to have been the Airpod Pros translation piece.
Edit: Needed to annotate that I wrote 'slightly better' but its not just slightly, we both visually noticed a different in quality.
One last note, the 12 Pro was my first iPhone ever. I was on Android since 2009, every Android I had lasted about 2 years. My last one probably would have lasted me 5 years but I was tired and wanted a change at my 2 year mark. I have not regretted my decision to date.
The issue with the camera in newer iphones is that it uses an Ai engine to smooth things and add details that aren’t there.
If you want reference tier photos for documenting family history, modern mirrorless is better. DSLR from 10-15 years ago is also still great in all but the most challenging light conditions, where you could simply use a flash.
Especially on babies, the smoothing or noise reduction is weird. A newborn has a very specific skin with an enormous amount of details/speckles/marks. It’s very hard to capture for some reason. Couldn’t do it with my phone, only with a proper camera and shooting in raw.
Hard agree. As a new parent, I bought a modern mirrorless camera before my kid was born, and the difference is noticeable. Especially, as you say, around skin details like milia (white spots on a newborn's skin) which often get wiped out on my Pixel (I'm sure by the AI processing).
If you are considering an expensive phone upgrade based off of the camera alone, consider buying a dedicated camera first, I say. I know the best camera is the one you have on you, etc...
When you think about all the stuff you schlep around with a kid, whats a few more ounces in a camera at that point.
big discussion was had around this a month ago https://candid9.com/phone-camera/
If you want another big bump in image quality I recommend you use Adobe’s Project Indigo app instead of the default camera app.
Difference is especially startling for HDR and portraits, particularly backlight ones where the stock app does some hideous segmentation-based “enhancements”.
Wait WHAT! Thank you so much!
Yeah. Comparing to my iPhone 14 Pro, improvements are mostly just the camera and the screen. So it's really just about what you want a newer/better camera in your pocket. I'm going to wait one more year, but I do love that we're at the stage where a phone and a laptop can go for 4-5 years without feeling less than "modern".
Just be mindful that those extra megapixels will need some extra storage.
Thats fair, I dont see people two generations behind benefiting from it, but for me its a bit of a bump up.
I’m in the exact same boat. Also toying with the idea of going back to android for the pixel 10 pro. I do miss android notifications and keyboard. Are there any features keeping you from going back?
The whole family is on iPhone, we use Mac now the way everything integrates together I just dont see myself going back. I spent way more on Android and Windows than I have on Apple products. My Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro chip costs half of what my Surface Book 2 laptop costs, and I can do more on it especially with AI locally.
Something about iOS and macOS just feels right. Any time I boot up my old Android phones they feel like a convoluted mess.
> As we raise our first child, having a quality camera is definitely important to us.
A phone camera isn't really a camera, it's a digitally-airbrushed impression of reality. There just isn't enough light hitting the tiny sensor through the tiny lens.
I have 20 year old 5MP DLSR portrait photos that are still better than what a 120MP phone can produce, because it's the lens that counts.
I have a couple DSLR's and a large frame compact, and I wholly get your point. The image quality on even an older DSLR is better, mainly due to the physics of the optics - there's nothing like a high quality lens dumping a bunch of light on a large sensor.
However.... it's really hard to overstate the workflow and convenience aspects of shooting with a phone. (Particularly as a parent, and even moreso when I was a new parent of a small child.) The phone has the twin benefits of 1) being present almost always and 2) being immediately able to process and transmit an image to the people you might want to see it. For the 99% case, that's far more useful than even a very significant improvement in image quality. For the 1% where it matters, I can and do either hire a professional (with better equipment than my own) or make the production of dragging out my DSLR and all that it entails. This is like so many other cases where inarguable technical excellence of a sort gives way to convenience and cost issues. IOW, "Better" is not just about Image Quality.
My ancient Canon Rebel camera, I think a T3i, takes stunningly detailed photos against even my iPhone 15 Pro.
But, I never have my Canon and it's too bulky to carry around everyday. I do carry my iPhone everywhere I go. And so, the capabilities of my iPhone camera are more important.
I imagine this is the same for the overwhelming majority of people.
Having said that you also have the midway option with large sensor compact cameras. A ricoh GR III/IV with an APS-C sensor is heavier than a smartphone but not overly so and more compact as it actually fit a pocket. A Canon G9X is even lighter with a 1" sensor.
Some of it's size, some of it the fact that the camera is a second device, and some of it's workflow.
I tried a Sony RX100 (1" sensor) when they first came out, optimistic about the possibility of using it for 'general purpose' photography. After all, it's small enough.
The problem was, it's a second device to carry around and keep charged. Then once you capture the image, it's largely stuck on the device until you find a way to offload your images. I briefly experimented with cables that would let me do things like transfer images from the RX100 to my (Android at the time) mobile phone, for archiving and sending to family and friends. That turned the whole thing into the sort of science fair project that I didn't have time for as the parent of a very young child. (Although in fairness, I can't think of a single time in my life when I'd have had the patience, kids or not.)
This is why, for all the arguments you can make against them as cameras, I've come to be very thankful for the amount of effort that Apple and others have made to get appealing images out of devices I always carry around anyway. I can take a set of pictures, edit them, have them automatically archived to cloud storage, and send them to whoever I want.. all with a single device I was carrying around anyway.
This leaves open the fact that the 'real' camera workflow is still an option when there's the need for higher image quality and the time (or money to hire a photographer) to take advantage of what a DSLR or the like can do.
(When I compare what I can do with my iPhone to what my parents had available to them (a 110 format camera and 35mm Nikons), I like the tradeoffs a lot better. the image quality available now is definitely better than the 110. Some of those 35mm exposures are probably better quality than what I can get out of an iPhone, but they're all stuck in albums and slides, and nobody ever looks at them. )
> Then once you capture the image, it's largely stuck on the device until you find a way to offload your images. I briefly experimented with cables that would let me do things like transfer images from the RX100 to my (Android at the time) mobile phone, for archiving and sending to family and friends. That turned the whole thing into the sort of science fair project that I didn't have time for as the parent of a very young child. (Although in fairness, I can't think of a single time in my life when I'd have had the patience, kids or not.)
Most modern cameras now have a WiFi-based photo transfer system that works pretty well. It's not instantaneous, but it is quick enough to copy the photo you want to share with a friend or partner while you finish a meal or drink your coffee.
This is true, but switching to that mode is frustrating and you often have to use AWFUL mobileOS software to get the images. And my DLSL shoots like 25FPS and each raw file is 80MB. This is NOT fast to send over the wifi.
Waiting until I can plug in the 2TB memory card to my Mac and use a huge screen to review all the photos is far more efficient even if it has much higher startup latency.
Honestly this is a good reason to choose the iPhone Pro over the Air or Standard: 10gbps USB port. Plug the Nikon in to the phone for cloud upload. This would be the fastest path of all. Most people are only focused on the USB bandwidth in the iPhones for download from the phone.
The RX100 has had wifi transfer since the 3rd gen.
I understand the "second device to carry around" but it isn't a real point for baby pics you might take at home. A ridiculous number of times I have no idea where I last put my phone anyway and sometimes have to make it ring from kde connect on my laptop so it is not like a smartphone is necessarily readily available at all time anyway.
I also know a number of people who don't leave home with their smartphone amyway for short errands since they have an apple watch, that leave one pocket available for those that would prefer having a camera.
> The RX100 has had wifi transfer since the 3rd gen.
On an iPhone, I can take the picture and I'm immediately a button press away from a photo editor and then whoever I want to send it to.
(A camera that automatically tethered to a phone and dumped pictures into the phone's camera roll would mostly solve the workflow issues I'm mentioning here. Would not surprise me if this already exists.)
> I understand the "second device to carry around" but it isn't a real point for baby pics you might take at home.
Maybe. The camera still has to be charged and in mind and hand. (Then as soon as the kids leave the house you're back to where you were and having to carry something around that you might not otherwise.)
> I also know a number of people who don't leave home with their smartphone anyway
I see that... different people have different sorts of relationships with personal electronics. For me, it wound up being that I'd carry a cell phone and that was about it. Even in the pre-smartphone days, when I might have carried a PDA, I either wouldn't or couldn't.
> and more compact as it actually fit a pocket
People not gonna let their phone at home and carry the camera only. Having separate camera means you have to carry 2 devices at the same time.
The best camera is the one you have on hand.
The actual best camera is the one you have on your head (Meta Glasses / Vision Pro / GoPro).
I have a number of great videos with my baby that required me to have both hands in-use. Only have those videos because of the above devices.
I am waiting for someone to clear the iphone air with the jeans back pocket test :)
Fair! I am also curious, I do hope they keep making iPhone Air models, I could see myself buying it in the future.
I am looking to upgrade my phone, and at the same time leave my carrier (Verizon). The price I pay for 2 people compared to the price I see out there for other carriers is just too large.
Any suggestions for me while I shop around for "tier 2" carriers? I am primarily concerned with price, and then network coverage second (I am OK with sometimes being throttled, but would prefer to avoid large gaps in any coverage).
You've got other good answers. But basically: there's no reason to not go with an MVNO. It's literally the same service for a fraction of the price. Pick one with whatever main carrier has the best coverage in your area.
Wikipedia has a solid table of U.S. MVNO's, for a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...
I use Visible which uses Verizon’s network, at a steep discount. Never had any issues.
What happens when the sub-carrier gets deprioritized so that the main carrier's customers get priority? How frequently does your bandwidth suffer? You say never, but is that really the case or you've just become used to it? I know several people on these places like Boost or Metro or whatever, and their streaming experiences definitely take hits
I use Mint which was an MVNO for T-Mobile. They've since been acquired by T-Mobile, but I haven't really experienced any difference in service. I also haven't used Visible, so I can't directly speak to that but Visible is owned by Verizon FWIW.
I probably experience times with deprioritization. 5G service can go from getting several hundred megabits with pretty low latencies to only getting a few megabits with potentially up to 100ms or so latency, depending on crowds. I don't recall any times where I had good signal but couldn't get any data, but definitely been in places where it'll struggle to do video chats or something at a big live event that doesn't have the extra 5G infra deployed. For example, an extra large crowd at the park for some event will probably give poor network experience but I'll otherwise get good connectivity in a modern sports arena.
In the end it's just a value proposition. Is having really fast network everywhere, all the time really that worth it to you? For many the answer is yes. But for me, on my personal device, if I'm getting poor data rates that's probably a clue I should really be putting my phone down and get back into whatever is happening in the park so I don't mind and the savings are quite nice.
For Visible, anything above their cheapest plan will give you the same priority as postpaid Verizon. Many prepaid carriers will gladly take more money to shift you to a higher priority.
There is a list of all the prioritization tiers (aka QCI, or premium data) on all the three main US carriers here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/1mxogtx/data_pr...
I used to use them, and I had two issues:
1. Their international plan is garbage, and if you don’t use the international plan, you cannot usefully use them as a phone-and-SMS-over-WiFi only solution in conjunction with another carrier. Competitors like USMobile do not have this problem.
2. Their customer support and website are very bad.
SMS works over WiFi? Or is that only RCS? Not familiar with this
SMS seems to work on “Wi-Fi Calling” aka “VoWiFi” despite the name rather strongly suggesting voice.
Yeah Visible keeps popping up on recommendation threads. I'll take a look at their offers. Do you suggest I buy a phone through them, or purchase from apple directly and bring it to the plan?
Unless they offer a discount, there won’t be a benefit buying through them, especially with eSIM.
US Mobile is really good. You can also get on any carrier you want via it (and multiple if you are really inclined)
I've been satisfied with Mint. I look a Google Fi 2x a year, but Mint is still cheaper.
Can confirm. I’m currently on Mint and have used Tello before. They both offer great service.
I've got a Pixel, this new iPhone hasnt got anything that convinces me to move to Apple. There's nothing compelling there, not technologically or aesthetically. Yes its more powerful, but what do they do with that power but play games? Until some new application emerges where that much power is needed I'll stick to the cheaper phones.
The Pixel is not cheaper. When comparing the Pixel 10 to the iPhone 17, the iPhone offers double the storage for the same price, while having all other iPhone features.
Pixels usually offer better black friday deals, you can get 100-200 off (at least when I got my 8)
Surprising there’s no matte-black iPhone 17 Pro - dark, low-reflectance finishes are standard in pro video kit because they minimise specular reflections and stray highlights; keeping a shiny silver finish and skipping a subdued matte black feels like a strange choice and undercuts the “Pro” claim.
It's not a strange choice at all when you realize that the majority of people use phone cases and it's more difficult to make matte "pop" in promotional content
Movie people don't normally care about the finish of the iPhone they are using. And the ones that do, use a case.
I've seen all sorts of non-black (let alone matte black) iPhone rigs used for motion pictures, including white and natural titanium colors. Eg. 28 Years Later used a variety of iPhone configurations and colors.
But yeah, I'm surprised there's no black/space gray option this year. Some consumers won't buy any other color.
I wonder if someone will come up with the idea of vinyl wrap to protect your phone rather than using a slipon phone case. Then...you could have your phone be thin and get that matte finish. Couple that with a matte phone screen protector and I think the result would be pretty nice.
Isn’t this d-brands original business model?
Dbrand makes those
These have never been actual pro devices. Arguably not even prosumer. You probably don’t want scorched earth ai processing done on your photos as a pro but that is what the iPhones have been doing as of late. Most damning is no way to turn that off.
There is no such thing as a digital camera without processing. But third party camera apps can get images as raw as they want them and it supports professional video standards.
Try Halide with "Process Zero" if you want that, but I'm pretty sure the most popular 3p camera apps are Asian beauty apps that do far more and far worse quality processing.
Sure there is. Shoot in Raw format. Get a file representing a matrix of the sensor readout for each rgb pixel. Your post processing software of choice handles interpolation to the method of your choice.
> the sensor readout for each rgb pixel
Camera pixels are only one color at a time:
GGRR
BBGG
(quad-Bayer; Fujifilm uses a weirder one called X-Trans. And some of them will be missing because they're damaged or are focus pixels.)
And then you still have to do white balance and tone mapping, because your eyes do that and the camera sensor doesn't.
There is a big difference between interpolation (dealing with the bayer or xtrans array and delivering a 3 layer image file in your choice of format and bit depth using your choice of algorithms), shooting for white balance or tone mapping with a color card and calibrated monitor if you care about that level of accuracy, and what Apple is doing which is black box ML subtly yassifying your images and garbling small printed text. Especially when the commenters use case is building out the family archive and not posting selfies on Instagram.
> shooting for white balance or tone mapping with a color card and calibrated monitor if you care about that level of accuracy
You need to do this if you want to see the image at all, and it involves a lot of subjective choices. The objective auto white balance algorithm usually described is objectively quite bad; for instance it's always described as a single transformation on the image, which doesn't make sense if there are multiple light sources.
The reason you'd want to render humans differently in the image is that a) if you don't get skin tones just right they'll look like corpses b) in real life you can choose to focus on a subject in a scene and this will cause them to appear brighter (because your eyes will adapt to them) but in an image there isn't that flexibility and so it helps to guess what the foreground of the image is and expose for that.
I forgot to say recent iPhone cameras let you turn off the sharpening effects anyway, just move the photographic style control down to Natural. It is true that the sharpening is kind of bad. This is because someone taught everyone that digital images are bandlimited so they use frequency-based sharpening algorithms, but they aren't, so those just give you ringing artifacts. For some reason nobody knows about warp-sharpen anymore.
Which you can do on an iPhone, so I’m not sure what the complaint is.
I really like the new unibody design on the 17 Pro, as well as the orange. That seems like the first iPhone might feel like bypassing the case. However, seeing as I just got a 16 Pro last year, I don't think I can justify an upgrade just yet.
Overall this year seemed much better than last year.
The AT&T carrier deals this year are wild. It seems like they’ll just throw a new phone at you for free as long as you agree to stay for 3 years.
Beyond the price of their services, they're probably thinking of all the data they can collect and sell in that time.
Prepaid is so competitive now that "a free phone" is one of the few reasons to go postpaid (other than ignorance).
The glass screen is why you want a case not the frame.
I'm typing this on a 6S Plus, and so far it seems like this'll do until iOS 15 patching stops.
I think I'm throwing in the towel on my 7 Plus this year. I'd love to keep it around for a bit longer but too many apps and websites are no longer functional. It's starting to become a usability issue.
At the rate of camera image size upgrades, we are going to need a 5TB icloud storage plan.
Video has always been the real storage eater. A few minutes of video is larger than the whole years worth of photos.
Don't forget live photos as well
Live photos don't use all that much. I went and checked my library and they are all 2-4MB. Which seems to be roughly the same as the non live photos. Vs a 20 second 4k60fps video which was 240MB
Through the last iterations I only ever upgrade my iPhone whenever there is a "meaningful" RAM upgrade in it for me. So this one here is not too bad going from 8GB to 12GB (Air, Pro, Pro Max).
You won't notice a difference, RAM upgrades get used by new camera features.
Use an ad blocker if you want Safari tabs to stay open longer.
Unless we get to see someone doing more in-depth profiling we can't know. This should still give more headroom across app usage; especially when not using the camera then and probably even with (it's a 50% increase versus last mem max).
Still no reason to upgrade. My shift from iPhone 8 to iPhone 13 was qualitative. Now much of the barrier to improvement is software, and they’re all gated by Apple.
I think iPhone 17 is the first worthy upgrade to the base model in years, LPTO is a huge upgrade to the aging pre-iPhone 17 screen. The difference between Pro and non-Pro is pretty thin this year. I currently have a 16 Pro, might upgrade, but mostly because models are typically shifted through our family (so everyone gets an upgrade).
What I found with screens going back to an old 1280px macbook screen when the retina was in the shop is that you quickly lose appreciation for quality when you don’t have an example next to you. This is why the Apple Store model is good for sales, you can dangle the new screens on an hdr wallpaper and its clear that it is different to the one you already have. But again, it only became an issue because one day you made it an issue.
I agree. Though I would formulate it a bit differently. You can live fine without HiDPI or >60Hz. But once you have used them for a few days, it's really hard to go back.
Our daughter still has an older iPhone with 60Hz and I cannot look at it. The flickery animations drive me crazy. Yet, I have had iPhones with < 120Hz screens for well over a decade.
I went back pretty easy. The real thing is the pixel viewing distance. At laptop viewing distances I couldn't see the pixels on the low res screen anyhow. The only real noticeable difference was ui text was a little bigger. Refresh rate you stop noticing fast. I personally can't tell when my m3 mbp is on 120hz on the power adapter or 60z on battery, maybe if I hunted for it specifically by scrolling at lightspeed.
USB C by itself is enough of a reason to upgrade. I have one set of cords that work everywhere and the iPhone supports all of the standard USB-C standards - video, storage, audio, and networking using the same devices you use on computers.
And MagSafe charging and stands.
I don't know if it is enough of a reason, I still use by 12 and charge it and my Airpods all via magsafe which is USB-C
If I don't need to use the lightning port, I don't need to use what would be the USB C port.
I am looking to upgrade to the 17 potentially, but USB-C to me isn't a key factor.
I am with you- magsafe is great for charging all the things and it is how I charge all my stuff currently. I will say that despite that, moving to USB-C is a big deal for me. As a household of 7 having different cables for everything becomes a chore whereas standardizing on USB-C saves us a ton of headaches. Kids phones need charging? Grab one of our dozens of USB-C cables and one of our many USB bricks and go. For me- it has been a slow climb but I have been slowly moving everything we have over to USB-C. When completed I can put all the other cables (mini usb, micro usb, lightning, that weird usb-3 thing some androids/ext harddrives used, etc) into my old cable foot locker.
Even an iPhone X was running great in 2025, until it finally gave up to age and the network module stopped working. iPhone 13s are lightning quick for me still.
256 GB base storage without a price increase is good to see.
Makes the Mac Mini look weird now with 256 GB base storage.
Pretty shameful of Google to stick to 128 GB on the Pixel 10.
The pixel 10 is different trade off. Base pixel is cheaper than base iPhone and has an extra camera, upgrading it to 256 gets you slightly more expensive. And for the pro models it flips with the pixel cheaper even with same storage.
Base Pixel 10 is the same as iPhone 17 at USD 800.
Yes the Pixel 10 now has telephoto but they nerfed the cameras from the Pixel 9 for that.
In the Pro models for both the pricing is comparable, yeah.
Also realized that Apple charges $200 to jump from 256 GB to 512 GB. That's ridiculous.
So there is no more 'Plus' version? That was the sweet spot for many - non-pro pricing, yet the same large screen as the pro max. RIP
HN is always saying Apple has too many models where it's hard to choose and how they should go back to a simple line up.
I'm still on an iPhone 11 and this might finally be the one to get me to upgrade. I don't need the "Pro" stuff, but the ProMotion was always frustratingly only associated with the Pro phones.
That said, I'm sort of frustrated with iOS overall, and sorely tempted to go back to Pixels, so I can't decide.
I have a Pixel 9 to check out where Android is standing and for GrapheneOS. Unfortunately Pixel OS still has pretty bad bugs all the time (oneUI is much more polished, but has other issues) and the Pixel 10 is really overpriced compared to the iPhone 17 (the Pixel 10 is more midrange than a flagship, even though it has a flagship price).
> tempted to go back to Pixels
I got my first Pixel (10 Pro XL); Only because their AI integration felt cool. My iPhone 11 Pro is still doing great overall, besides sluggishness here and there, and random Chrome crashes. I might consider upgrading to 17 now due to speed and camera upgrades. Honestly, it was not an exciting upgrade, just like their last 5.
What kind of frustrations do you have on iOS. Since you've used Pixels, you probably are in a good position to compare.
The notifications are the biggest one. iOS insists on this Banner -> Lock Screen -> Notification Center lifecycle, and it drives me crazy that notifications move from Lock Screen to Notification Center simply by unlocking the phone and then doesn't show Notification Center notifications at a glance. I've missed so many notifications that way, because I quickly unlocked my phone to deal with something, thereby dismissing my current Lock Screen notifications, and then failing to realize that I had some, because when I tap my screen to light it up they don't show up (you have to explicitly swipe up to reveal Notification Center). Beyond that, I really appreciated Android's little top bar that shows the app icons that had notifications so I could quickly see if it was Slack, email, etc, that I had. Finally, Android lets you opt out of "Marketing" notifications at an OS level, while iOS doesn't have that.
Beyond that, I get frequent spam SMS's which are stupid. Android blocks all those. I have a Junk mail folder in email and hardly get email spam anymore. It feels like going back 20 years getting these random spam SMS's.
Finally, "glanceability" doesn't seem as good with the iPhone. One silly little thing is that if I'm using my iPhone it's sometimes very hard to see the date! If you have notifications you have to swipe down quite a bit to reveal that.
The air and the non-pro 17 have ProMotion
Right! That's why I said this might be the one to finally get me, since I'm not interested in Pro, other than ProMotion.
Sorry, I misread your comment and thought you thought it was still exclusive to the pro
I'm surprised that Apple is giving every single iPhone model 256 GB starting capacity. My prediction would've been 256 GB for the Pro and 128 GB for the base iPhone 17. Guess those AI models need space?
I didn't pay attention for the non-Pro, but for the Pro they 'said' they give you 256GB for the price of last year's 256 GB. So it seems like another step in moving the prices up.
Edit: 16 Pro 128 GB was $999 at introduction iPhone 17 Pro 256 GB is $1099. Better for the non-Pro though - the 16 128 GB was $799, the 17 256 GB is also $799.
What AI models?
The AI models that take up 7 GB of your storage.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/121115
Every single new iPhone costs more than $1000 in Canada. Even the older/cheaper models cost more than $1000 after tax and environment fees. I knew this day was coming but damn.
It's odd that the Air has 4 GB more RAM than the regular 17 even though it's meant to replace the Plus models from previous years (same specs, same difference in price point, etc.)
The iPhone 17 Air has the Pro SoC in it. It's sort of a in-between model between the base iPhone 17 and the luxury iPhone 17 Pro. Pro performance, base camera.
I’ve been keen on having something that can do decent on-device inference. Otherwise my 14 Pro is still fantastic and probably will be for some time.
All models are so uninteresting to me. Maybe its finally time I try the Nothing Phon
I've been waiting for this for a year, but I'm a bit disappointed. It's larger than the 17 and 17 pro, and it weighs more than my SE 3rd gen. The price is also insane. It costs the same as an entire computer.
I just want a lightweight device that makes calls, send texts, can snap a quick photo, has maps, mobile payments, and can order a cab. These phones are clearly aimed at consuming content, and I've been pushed out of the market. What to do?
You can still buy a decent budget android phone that meets most of your requirements for only a few hundred dollars. The Samsung Galaxy M56 5G is only $400. The pixel 9a is only $499. Android probably has something that you are looking for, Apple isn't really competing in that space.
I just browse the web on my phone. In fact, my phone is already too expensive just for that one thing. I’m not upgrading until the new phones can run a 5B model with adequate context size and adequate inferencing speeds.
I will upgrade when I see actual 10x optical zoom
Once again disappointed that we’re getting screwed over by “bill credit” carrier offers for 36 months and wish that US carriers would stop that crap.
Most of my circle seems to like that crap. You can opt out, all of the carriers have prepaid offerings with much lower rates and a lot less financing. Maybe you get less data priority, almost certainly you get a lower tier of customer service, but those are ok tradeoffs for me. If you want to save more money, you can go to former MVNOs now owned by the carrier they run on or actually independent MVNOs. https://prepaidcompare.net/ seems like a good place to compare plans. They also have deals listings if you want to have fun with subsidy locked phones.
The 2 year contracts from the 2000s and early 2010s are back with a vengeance.
What's the concern here? Can the phone not just be bought outright?
If I trade in my phone, I want my trade-in offer now. Instead, the full value of whatever trade-in deal provided is split over 36 months as bill credits.
While the new phone might actually be “free” in one of these promotions, it’s not, naturally, because you’ve been thrown into a 36 month installment agreement separate of the cellphone service they’ve sold you on (that they also claim is “price locked” while independently raising surcharges and other fees).
Then I'd just buy the phone outright and sell it at the end or use another trade in route through Apple directly
Sell your phone, never trade it in. That's the surest way to lose money.
Do a little more work and sell it on Facebook Marketplace.
Convenience comes at a cost.
With inflation such as it is, finance it and don't be concerned about a temporary lock. Most carriers will unlock it after X months and/or for travel. Let the phone carrier eat it and conserve capital.
It seems like you can also finance it interest free through Apple themselves without being locked to a carrier.
[flagged]
Mind walking through what you saw that helped you make the decision?
> Mind walking through what you saw that helped you make the decision?
I upgrade every year to impress friends, family, and colleagues. I don’t use a case.
I’ll be ordering the orange 17 pro.
At least he's honest.
Tbh I would order an orange phone... but i bet Apple will make it muted and boring instead of really orange.
Toyota not Renault.
Haha, badass comment. I love that you are so pumped you couldn’t help creating a hackernews account just to let us all know.
Being able to impress people with 1099$ sure is strange
I wonder - are they impressed?
I wish I have a friend or colleague that could be impressed by a new phone.
haha, more power to you!
based
Not the Op but I’m in the same boat. I get the latest and whoever has the oldest phone among my wife and two kids will get my 16 pro.
"New shiny!"
Congratulations, good to know.
iPhone 16 Pro owner will not be upgrading because there's no value in it.