Apple Debuts Iphone 17
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Apple debuts iPhone 17 with new features and upgrades, sparking discussion among HN users about upgrade motivations, design choices, and the value proposition of the new device.
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That said, I'm sort of frustrated with iOS overall, and sorely tempted to go back to Pixels, so I can't decide.
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 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.
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.
And MagSafe charging and stands.
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.
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).
Convenience comes at a cost.
Use an ad blocker if you want Safari tabs to stay open longer.
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.
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.
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...
Something about iOS and macOS just feels right. Any time I boot up my old Android phones they feel like a convoluted mess.
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.
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.
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. )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Difference is especially startling for HDR and portraits, particularly backlight ones where the stock app does some hideous segmentation-based “enhancements”.
Just be mindful that those extra megapixels will need some extra storage.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
Another area where we're falling behind in tech
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...
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...
There are more people on HN claiming to use a 13 mini than Apple actually sold.
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 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.
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.”
What is Thread?
> 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.
Funny thing, I know very little of networking, but this bears more sense than just Thread.
https://www.threadgroup.org/
Overall this year seemed much better than last year.
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?
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.
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+.”
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.
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)
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?
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.
https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...
People who want cheap iPhones buy older models. You get better specs buying a used or NOS premium model than a new budget model.
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.
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.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/121115
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.
Still good, still works.
I would assume this means Apple laptops with integrated cellular modems are on the near horizon.
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?
You don't need an iphone, even a $50 phone will hotspot just fine. How many people travel with a laptop but no phone ?
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.
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:
Because Qualcomm charges a percentage of sale price for use of their modem.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/23/gurman-apple-modems-integrati...
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?
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