Whatever. No plastic in packages and a watch that has an apparently bragging worthy 36 hours of battery life. When I bother to wear a watch at all (never since clocks are literally everywhere and modern watches are obnoxiously huge) they last like a few years without needing a new little coin battery replacement thingy. Not exactly advancement here. Oh and Siri can data mine your health information better. Yay for less privacy!
That "9th gen parity" is no way happening. This A17Pro can outperform the PS5 and XBSX Consoles ? That's a big no. These games have different HUD elements they are clearly downgraded versions.
Ubisoft's optimization on PC is gutter trash. How can they run on an SoC with limited battery again it's a reduced game not real one.
I want to see how their new A17Pro fares vs the competition.
Those features exist so Apple nerds can argue with the nerd opposition that will invariably cause both sides to get themselves upset over obsolete-by-next-year consumer electronics which are 100% worthy of emotional investment.
Not to mention 95% of iPhone users could care less about many of the improvements. In fact, most of them are entirely transparent to the end user so the gimmicks are necessary to make them feel something special and different and magic.
Seriously, people just don't care. The best selling iPhones are the cheap ones; the only people who buy the Pro and Max are lawyers, celebrities and suckers conned into the most expensive thing on a contract; most of these people don't buy it for the features. There are rare exceptions of people who do research, actually desire a feature set, and spend hard earned money to get it. This crowd will often include some nerds, but most nerds will buy a regular iPhone or Galaxy, not a Pro\Max or Note or Z Flip.
Why else do so many people have impractical $100k luxury cars when we all know at that price the only one worth buying is a Lexus LC with the Porsche Panamera a worthy runner up. But most people blast their wad on a trash BMW, Mercedes or Audi. Why else do most people buy hilariously large, overpriced OLED TV's when they don't even know what OLED is. Why else do people buy [insert market brainwashing terminology here]
"Not to mention 95% of iPhone users could care less about many of the improvements."
Again that's a silly statement. Most computer users do not care about technology, yes; BUT they care about what the technology can do. That extra GPU functionality allows for, among other things, better photography, or better speech synthesis/dictation, or better language translation; and those all are things users DO care about.
Likewise your statements about who buys Pro and Max is silly. Among other things, older people buy them so they can get a bigger screen (scale everything larger), or people who care a lot about photography.
But you are clearly one of those people who seems to feel it is your business to tell everyone else how to prioritize the spending in their life...
I work in IT, and this is my daily observation among the thousands of users I manage around the world.
As anecdotal as it sounds, my observations of compulsory human behaviors are well documented in the big book of crazy. Sure, extra GPU functionality allows for better photo processing, and more powerful SoC's in general allow for additional functionality. But people don't realize those things enable that functionality. Even Apple, the king of marketing, focuses on performance over predecessors more than how and why certain functions are enabled in this generation over last, people they know people can't make the correlation.
I'll agree with (what I think) your point was regarding enabling new functions, which I crassly referred to as gimmicks, when taking into account user expectations. When people spend a lot of money on a new device, they expect it to do things better, especially photography. But the computational power difference between a base iPhone and the iPhone Pro Max is virtually nothing in regard to photo processing. And the extra GPU core will net an incredible 12% difference (assuming they scale 100% efficiently - they don't) in games, which few people who have enough time to play games can afford a $1200 phone unless Daddy bought it for them (and sure yeah that happens) but they still won't notice a difference between the same generation base iPhone and the one that's nearly double the price.
I think you are taking it too personally when I target the luxury products here, their buyers, and that yeah, it's their money, but my point is the cash cow, where 90% of Apple's sales come from, is the base model, regular iPhone, because the other models just aren't compelling enough for well informed people who value their dollar to be bothered with.
I'm sorry, not to be crass, but mentioning you work in IT doesn't automatically gift you with intelligence. There are plenty of IT professionals out there that aren't that knowledgeable.
In this day and age, all people have to do is go to one of the hundreds of youtube videos by some "tech professional" to find out what all these "gimmicks" as you put it, will affect the usability of the phone, what features they might want, etc. If not youtube, then most likely they have someone in their life that is more involved in the tech side to tell them what each feature does.
As for the statement that "few people can afford it," well there are tech professionals, lawyers, doctors, all sorts of professionals all around the world that *can* afford it. Especially if they don't upgrade their phones every year. Phones are basically a critical part of everyone's life. Paying $1200 for a phone you only upgrade every 3-5 years (average people) will not bankrupt anyone. Not to mention anyone that uses the "upgrade path" with their providers.
If i'm not wrong, the cheaper iphones (base model) were the poorest in sales compared to the bigger iphones (more expensive), as it has shown so far with the presales of the iphone 15 pro max.
I agree with the previous comments, it's not really anyone's business to tell people where to spend their money or criticize apple for their marketing. Obviously it has worked to this point as apple dominates the phone market... Anyone who says different is uninformed.
All it really needs is performance parity with the Xbox Series S or run the same games at 720p, then it can call itself a 9th gen console in my book. Might get kneecapped by the 8 GB of RAM though.
The point of having features is to allow developers to start exploring them and learning how to use them...
For example the change Volta made to thread execution (allowing for thread synchronization within branches) does not obviously increase performance, more the reverse. BUT it allows for the exploration of a whole new set of algorithms and usability (eg libraries no longer have to worry whether they will be called from within branches).
The biggest disappointment for me is the Type C cable. Even after they make the switch, they refused to give it USB 3 base speed of 5 Gbit per second to the base model iphone. Instead they left it at 2.0 speeds. That is just apple being petty imo.
Apple would need a new SoC for that. Previous looks at the A16 have indicated it's a USB 2.x controller. Presumably, Apple's engineers opted not to bake-in a 3.x controller when the port at the time (Lightning) can't fully support USB 3.x.
They don't need to new SoC to have USB 3.x speed, that's what a USB bridge controller is for. They nerfed the non-Pro model because they couldn't be bothered to rework the signaling between the existing SoC lightning interface and the port. It's impossible to prove as Apple keeps SoC designs and even non-press block diagrams secret, it's presumable there are external interface lanes SOMEWHERE in silicone. Hell, they could just disable and reallocate functionality if necessary; disable the display output, camera array, etc, to gain the necessary bandwidth needed by the bridge.
While my experience with interface bridges\transcoders is limited to older PCI-X to PCI and more recently (circa 2005) PLX designed for PCIe to AGP applications, I've worked with Avago (broadcom) and other modern PCIe interfaces (that I did not design) using visionpak and other host-robbing switches that reallocate (gated) bandwidth to increase host throughput and presumably Apple could do much more than the industrial systems teams I've worked with. This isn't rocket science, it's laziness.
There is no PCIe bus on the A16. Your solutions (turn off the display or camera) are not practical. They're re-using an existing SoC, they *have* a solution for USB 3, and it'll be in next year's non-pro phone. Now, an argument could be made that they should have put a costed down version of A17 in the phones instead of re-using A16, but arguing that they should have gotten USB 3 in A16 doesn't make any sense.
Where did I imply there is a PCIe bus in the A16? That would be an astonishing assumption since the architecture is a trade secret and nobody even knows this for a fact.
And my experience with interface bridging and silicon gating makes it entirely practical to disable an interface (alas, probably not the display or camera, but certainly another bidirectional interface such as an external coprocessor (such as the motion engine, or whatever provides additional bandwidth to a USB bridge.)
Saying this couldn't be done is a ridiculous assertion. It sems I spent a decade of my electrical engineering career prior to becoming an IT director building things that "couldn't be done." We retrofit interfaces into SoC's all the time, and bandwidth was often a priority so it was stolen from somewhere. You get creative.
If you have an iPhone 13 or iPHone 14, wait for the iPhone 18 before upgrading. Apple always does incremental improvements. The iPHone 15 is meant for iPhone X and iPhone 11 users.
USB-3 speeds for the pro model. The base model is running last year's A-series chip. One year from now, the base model will get this year's chip and with it, usb-3 speeds.
No, that’s just Apple being practical. The iPhone 15 is getting the existing A16 chip. They’re not fabbing a new version of the chip that just adds a USB3 controller.
"It'll be better for everyone in the long run to be on a common port standard" Obviously, Apple prefers having incompatible standards that aren't better for everyone, and they only changed due to government standardization!
"the iPhone" Look how many times that was said! This is blasphemous to the Apple religion.
Final observation: they still haven't come to their senses to use a damn rubber chassis at least on the phone's corners. They go to great lengths to minimize every 0.1mm, and it's squandered by having to add massive cases for protection. Just put rubber on the phone.
The new telephoto seem revolutionary to me. The problem with all those folded solutions is giant size and small apertures. This design kind of dodges all of that. It has larger sensor, and the same aperture as the 3x lens. All while having some seriously overengineered stabilisation (which is in need for such zoom, hope it works as advertized). And it looks like it fits in a very compact size. On the slideshow it could be seen that the lens is way bigger than last gen. The 48Mpx main Cam is 3.85 mm aperture the new telephoto looks like 5 or even 6 mm. This means we might actually see a real improvement in captured detail as it is not as diffraction limited as the competition.
A17 seems dissapointing (aggain) but for the first time since A13 we got some performance quites eg 10% more for big cores and 20% for the GPU. We will see about efficiency, this side might be big.
Refarding battery life, all aligns - we have bigger batteries and more efficient SoC and screens… why not promise at least an hour more ? Just telling us it the same as 14 (and thus 13) is suspicious.
Also why the Pro is 8,25 mm eg 0,45 more than the 15 ? If it is not because of the bigger and better battery then why ? Usually a thicker i Phone means some asociated feature -3D touch, wireless charging….
The Pro models are thicker due to the more easy to fix design. About the A17, since the A15 at least, Apple take months or even nearly a year (in the case of the A16 Bionic with iOS 16) to optimize their OS to fully take advantage of their new SoCs, the performance achieve by their silicon improves with the updtates.
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PeachNCream - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
Whatever. No plastic in packages and a watch that has an apparently bragging worthy 36 hours of battery life. When I bother to wear a watch at all (never since clocks are literally everywhere and modern watches are obnoxiously huge) they last like a few years without needing a new little coin battery replacement thingy. Not exactly advancement here. Oh and Siri can data mine your health information better. Yay for less privacy!name99 - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
PeachNCream, meet Anand Chandrasekher and Jim Balsillie.You three clearly have a lot to talk about given your visionary attitude towards tech...
Hxx - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
lol the comments in parenthesis are priceless - keep them coming.Silver5urfer - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
That "9th gen parity" is no way happening. This A17Pro can outperform the PS5 and XBSX Consoles ? That's a big no. These games have different HUD elements they are clearly downgraded versions.Ubisoft's optimization on PC is gutter trash. How can they run on an SoC with limited battery again it's a reduced game not real one.
I want to see how their new A17Pro fares vs the competition.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
Feature parity. No one is claiming performance parity. 3nm is good, but it's not that good.Jorgp2 - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
Is that even worth pointing out?If none of the features are fast enough to be usable, what's the point of having them?
PeachNCream - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
Those features exist so Apple nerds can argue with the nerd opposition that will invariably cause both sides to get themselves upset over obsolete-by-next-year consumer electronics which are 100% worthy of emotional investment.Samus - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
Not to mention 95% of iPhone users could care less about many of the improvements. In fact, most of them are entirely transparent to the end user so the gimmicks are necessary to make them feel something special and different and magic.Seriously, people just don't care. The best selling iPhones are the cheap ones; the only people who buy the Pro and Max are lawyers, celebrities and suckers conned into the most expensive thing on a contract; most of these people don't buy it for the features. There are rare exceptions of people who do research, actually desire a feature set, and spend hard earned money to get it. This crowd will often include some nerds, but most nerds will buy a regular iPhone or Galaxy, not a Pro\Max or Note or Z Flip.
Why else do so many people have impractical $100k luxury cars when we all know at that price the only one worth buying is a Lexus LC with the Porsche Panamera a worthy runner up. But most people blast their wad on a trash BMW, Mercedes or Audi. Why else do most people buy hilariously large, overpriced OLED TV's when they don't even know what OLED is. Why else do people buy [insert market brainwashing terminology here]
name99 - Wednesday, September 13, 2023 - link
"Not to mention 95% of iPhone users could care less about many of the improvements."Again that's a silly statement. Most computer users do not care about technology, yes; BUT they care about what the technology can do. That extra GPU functionality allows for, among other things, better photography, or better speech synthesis/dictation, or better language translation; and those all are things users DO care about.
Likewise your statements about who buys Pro and Max is silly. Among other things, older people buy them so they can get a bigger screen (scale everything larger), or people who care a lot about photography.
But you are clearly one of those people who seems to feel it is your business to tell everyone else how to prioritize the spending in their life...
Samus - Wednesday, September 13, 2023 - link
I work in IT, and this is my daily observation among the thousands of users I manage around the world.As anecdotal as it sounds, my observations of compulsory human behaviors are well documented in the big book of crazy. Sure, extra GPU functionality allows for better photo processing, and more powerful SoC's in general allow for additional functionality. But people don't realize those things enable that functionality. Even Apple, the king of marketing, focuses on performance over predecessors more than how and why certain functions are enabled in this generation over last, people they know people can't make the correlation.
I'll agree with (what I think) your point was regarding enabling new functions, which I crassly referred to as gimmicks, when taking into account user expectations. When people spend a lot of money on a new device, they expect it to do things better, especially photography. But the computational power difference between a base iPhone and the iPhone Pro Max is virtually nothing in regard to photo processing. And the extra GPU core will net an incredible 12% difference (assuming they scale 100% efficiently - they don't) in games, which few people who have enough time to play games can afford a $1200 phone unless Daddy bought it for them (and sure yeah that happens) but they still won't notice a difference between the same generation base iPhone and the one that's nearly double the price.
I think you are taking it too personally when I target the luxury products here, their buyers, and that yeah, it's their money, but my point is the cash cow, where 90% of Apple's sales come from, is the base model, regular iPhone, because the other models just aren't compelling enough for well informed people who value their dollar to be bothered with.
melgross - Thursday, September 14, 2023 - link
40%of Apple’s phone sales have been for the Pro models, and most of that is for the Pro Max. So your suppositions are wrong.argmagnon - Tuesday, September 19, 2023 - link
I'm sorry, not to be crass, but mentioning you work in IT doesn't automatically gift you with intelligence. There are plenty of IT professionals out there that aren't that knowledgeable.In this day and age, all people have to do is go to one of the hundreds of youtube videos by some "tech professional" to find out what all these "gimmicks" as you put it, will affect the usability of the phone, what features they might want, etc. If not youtube, then most likely they have someone in their life that is more involved in the tech side to tell them what each feature does.
As for the statement that "few people can afford it," well there are tech professionals, lawyers, doctors, all sorts of professionals all around the world that *can* afford it. Especially if they don't upgrade their phones every year. Phones are basically a critical part of everyone's life. Paying $1200 for a phone you only upgrade every 3-5 years (average people) will not bankrupt anyone. Not to mention anyone that uses the "upgrade path" with their providers.
If i'm not wrong, the cheaper iphones (base model) were the poorest in sales compared to the bigger iphones (more expensive), as it has shown so far with the presales of the iphone 15 pro max.
I agree with the previous comments, it's not really anyone's business to tell people where to spend their money or criticize apple for their marketing. Obviously it has worked to this point as apple dominates the phone market... Anyone who says different is uninformed.
nandnandnand - Wednesday, September 13, 2023 - link
All it really needs is performance parity with the Xbox Series S or run the same games at 720p, then it can call itself a 9th gen console in my book. Might get kneecapped by the 8 GB of RAM though.name99 - Wednesday, September 13, 2023 - link
The point of having features is to allow developers to start exploring them and learning how to use them...For example the change Volta made to thread execution (allowing for thread synchronization within branches) does not obviously increase performance, more the reverse. BUT it allows for the exploration of a whole new set of algorithms and usability (eg libraries no longer have to worry whether they will be called from within branches).
coolrock2008 - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
The biggest disappointment for me is the Type C cable. Even after they make the switch, they refused to give it USB 3 base speed of 5 Gbit per second to the base model iphone. Instead they left it at 2.0 speeds. That is just apple being petty imo.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
Apple would need a new SoC for that. Previous looks at the A16 have indicated it's a USB 2.x controller. Presumably, Apple's engineers opted not to bake-in a 3.x controller when the port at the time (Lightning) can't fully support USB 3.x.Samus - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
They don't need to new SoC to have USB 3.x speed, that's what a USB bridge controller is for. They nerfed the non-Pro model because they couldn't be bothered to rework the signaling between the existing SoC lightning interface and the port. It's impossible to prove as Apple keeps SoC designs and even non-press block diagrams secret, it's presumable there are external interface lanes SOMEWHERE in silicone. Hell, they could just disable and reallocate functionality if necessary; disable the display output, camera array, etc, to gain the necessary bandwidth needed by the bridge.While my experience with interface bridges\transcoders is limited to older PCI-X to PCI and more recently (circa 2005) PLX designed for PCIe to AGP applications, I've worked with Avago (broadcom) and other modern PCIe interfaces (that I did not design) using visionpak and other host-robbing switches that reallocate (gated) bandwidth to increase host throughput and presumably Apple could do much more than the industrial systems teams I've worked with. This isn't rocket science, it's laziness.
Guspaz - Wednesday, September 13, 2023 - link
There is no PCIe bus on the A16. Your solutions (turn off the display or camera) are not practical. They're re-using an existing SoC, they *have* a solution for USB 3, and it'll be in next year's non-pro phone. Now, an argument could be made that they should have put a costed down version of A17 in the phones instead of re-using A16, but arguing that they should have gotten USB 3 in A16 doesn't make any sense.Samus - Thursday, September 14, 2023 - link
Where did I imply there is a PCIe bus in the A16? That would be an astonishing assumption since the architecture is a trade secret and nobody even knows this for a fact.And my experience with interface bridging and silicon gating makes it entirely practical to disable an interface (alas, probably not the display or camera, but certainly another bidirectional interface such as an external coprocessor (such as the motion engine, or whatever provides additional bandwidth to a USB bridge.)
Saying this couldn't be done is a ridiculous assertion. It sems I spent a decade of my electrical engineering career prior to becoming an IT director building things that "couldn't be done." We retrofit interfaces into SoC's all the time, and bandwidth was often a priority so it was stolen from somewhere. You get creative.
DannyH246 - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
Completely agree. They could have done it if they wanted to. Oh well, my Iphone 13 can do me another couple of years until the IPhone 16 is out.rmari - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
If you have an iPhone 13 or iPHone 14, wait for the iPhone 18 before upgrading.Apple always does incremental improvements.
The iPHone 15 is meant for iPhone X and iPhone 11 users.
Glaurung - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
USB-3 speeds for the pro model. The base model is running last year's A-series chip. One year from now, the base model will get this year's chip and with it, usb-3 speeds.techconc - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
No, that’s just Apple being practical. The iPhone 15 is getting the existing A16 chip. They’re not fabbing a new version of the chip that just adds a USB3 controller.AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
"It'll be better for everyone in the long run to be on a common port standard"Obviously, Apple prefers having incompatible standards that aren't better for everyone, and they only changed due to government standardization!
"the iPhone"
Look how many times that was said! This is blasphemous to the Apple religion.
Final observation: they still haven't come to their senses to use a damn rubber chassis at least on the phone's corners. They go to great lengths to minimize every 0.1mm, and it's squandered by having to add massive cases for protection. Just put rubber on the phone.
meacupla - Tuesday, September 12, 2023 - link
Does anyone else find it hilarious they only bothered with USB3?USB4 exists, it's a thing, ya know?
GC2:CS - Wednesday, September 13, 2023 - link
Well a heated discusion as always.The new telephoto seem revolutionary to me. The problem with all those folded solutions is giant size and small apertures. This design kind of dodges all of that. It has larger sensor, and the same aperture as the 3x lens. All while having some seriously overengineered stabilisation (which is in need for such zoom, hope it works as advertized). And it looks like it fits in a very compact size. On the slideshow it could be seen that the lens is way bigger than last gen. The 48Mpx main Cam is 3.85 mm aperture the new telephoto looks like 5 or even 6 mm. This means we might actually see a real improvement in captured detail as it is not as diffraction limited as the competition.
A17 seems dissapointing (aggain) but for the first time since A13 we got some performance quites eg 10% more for big cores and 20% for the GPU.
We will see about efficiency, this side might be big.
Refarding battery life, all aligns - we have bigger batteries and more efficient SoC and screens… why not promise at least an hour more ? Just telling us it the same as 14 (and thus 13) is suspicious.
Also why the Pro is 8,25 mm eg 0,45 more than the 15 ?
If it is not because of the bigger and better battery then why ? Usually a thicker i Phone means some asociated feature -3D touch, wireless charging….
Orfosaurio - Saturday, September 23, 2023 - link
The Pro models are thicker due to the more easy to fix design. About the A17, since the A15 at least, Apple take months or even nearly a year (in the case of the A16 Bionic with iOS 16) to optimize their OS to fully take advantage of their new SoCs, the performance achieve by their silicon improves with the updtates.J&J@chatland - Wednesday, September 27, 2023 - link
Whats uptarrybrad - Thursday, October 19, 2023 - link
Apple products will never fall down, Cuz Apple has better built quality instead of others.Thanks, tarrybrad