Apple's new iPhone 15 is an underwhelming 'slap in the face,' say disappointed fans

Most definitely. Phones are no longer really throw away devices. They’re full fledged little supercomputers in your pocket and they’re expensive as fuck.

Nobody upgrades their laptop or PC every year. Hell, the most important components like CPU, GPU, and RAM don’t even get new releases every year.

Phones are damn near as powerful today. Nobody but someone that is already pushing the most powerful flagships to the limit can or will take advantage of the incremental updates.

I’m 85% sure I’m going to get the 15. I’m upgrading from my XR so hopefully it’ll be pretty major for me.

Agree 3-4 cycle makes it feel amazing.

I upgraded from 11 to 14 pro and was pretty underwhelmed. It was kinda worth it for the camera but besides that, it’s the exact same phone.

There’s no requirement for you to upgrade every year if you don’t want to but without it, what would the people who need something new do? I’m upgrading this year from an iPhone X that is really on its last legs. Broken screen, charging more than once a day etc. It’s served it’s purpose well but now is the time for a new one. A two or three year refresh cycle would mean I would be potentially buying a two year old phone today. Why would I want that when I keep things for several years?

I'd be more interested in legislation forcing them to release at least security updates for a decade. My phone is 6 years old, works absolutely fine (even the battery), but it hasn't received any security parches for a couple of years, meaning it's insecure and I have to replace it even though it works great. Complete buffoonery.

Edit: I mean more than the screen thing, not the battery thing.

I'm still on an S10. Battery life sucks and the screen has been cracked for years, but she still works just fine. No motivation at all to spend $1k on an 'upgrade'

This year's new phones are for people that last bought a phone in 2020 or earlier. If the average user is on a three year upgrade cycle (what the data shows as I recall) then you'd expect roughly 1/3 of people to upgrade every year.

This is better for Apple, as it keeps their revenue more spread out instead of heavily concentrated in year one of a three year cycle.
This is better for consumers, as it means new features and upgrades are constantly being made. If they want to upgrade early they can, and they'll get new features even if it's only been two years.
This is also better for both Apple and consumers because there's more opportunities to course-correct or respond to feedback over issues. If Apple only released a phone every other or every three years, it'd take that much longer for the switch to USB-C.

Just because a new product is launched does not mean you need to buy it. Nvidia released a new GPU last year, but I didn't buy it even though it's newer than what I currently have. Arguing that new phones shouldn't come out each year is like arguing that new cars shouldn't come out each year. It makes no sense.

Person with iPhone 11 can still upgrade. Not everyone buys phone on same cycle. So they have to release it. But you don’t have to buy it.

That doesn’t solve anything though. There are improvements every year, just not enough to upgrade every single year.

And there are always people that do keep their device for several years upgrading in any given year.

Stop buying $1000+ flagships if they're not worth it. No company is going to stop producing anything that people are willing to pay for.

Because cellphones were just emerging then. The technology was rapidly changing all the time

And when you look back, a ton of the innovations were trying to solve a part of the problem that modern smartphones have solved and then some.

When texting took off, companies tried to innovate better ways than T9 to do that. So you ended up with variations of full keyboards. Slide out, on the face, swivel, etc.

Flip phones and other slide outs tried to maximize screen space before touchscreens were around or good. When the screen is only useable as a screen you have to get creative to still have a keyboard.

When cameras first got out into phones they sucked. So companies put a ton of effort into innovating that. Hell cameras are still one of the main focuses on innovation. It’s just that there are diminishing returns with what you can package in a phone. So it takes a lot more work to get a small improvement.

Beyond that, most of the innovation is under the hood and less noticeable. Improving the chip architecture to be more powerful and more efficient. On device encryption for security. Lidar scanning for 3d modeling. Better integration with the ecosystems.

Beyond those you still have innovations like the foldable, which right now still kinda suck. Just like phones did when they started trying to innovate. Foldables will lead to crazier innovation down the line with the added space. Right now they’re still just trying to get the folding screen decent.

Once a technology matures, you stop seeing massive jumps and innovation becomes evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Another 10-15 years and you may see phones slow down to laptop pace, where a new model is only released every few years and then the jump between generations is bigger by comparison because you’ll have three years of work into it rather than one.

What would you add to a flagship smart phone that hasn't already been done and is actually possible with the technology available?

The solution here is to vote with your wallet and not pay $1000+ for the latest flagship if you can buy a $300 phone from a couple years ago that's pretty much the same thing.

WHERE ARE MY 11-ATOM TRANSISTORS?? HOW CAN YOU SLAP?!!

3nm does not refer to the size. It refers to performance

Because Apple were slow to implement the standard

It's not that USB C is amazing, but that it is a big change for iphones. Especially compared to the past couple of years where they changed even less.

Android 4 is a pretty old version, try and update to 13

Fuck yeah, android ftw

And this is why Lemmy is absolutely less about "techy people who know security" and more about people who just want everything to be free for some damn reason.

Interesting. Personally I was planning to buy a phablet for my next phone but they've gone out of style it seems and been replaced with folding phones.

I would be interesting to see something with a rolled up slide out display like the Global communicator from Earth: Final Conflict, basically a slim stick of a phone with a larger display rolled up inside that can be pulled out as much as necessary for the desired screen size.

Yeah I agree. It seems brain dead- you're making a $1200 book-flip phone that opens up like a laptop to a giant screen, so you have tons of space for ports, and you can't re-add the headphone jack? Seems overly focused on profits rather than usability.

Perfect example of the problem.

CPU was lower-mid-range back in 2020, will be horribly out of date now. No 5G. No wireless charging. No detail on which Android version(s) it supports.

Or, just buy a 2 year old flagship for $300.

phone design has pretty much been perfected now and the only room for innovation is going to be on the software side of the UI and a better camera.

Strong disagree.
Phone design in one form factor has been mostly perfected, but even there room for innovation exists. More ports, more features- remember how the early Galaxy phones had IR blasters and headphone jacks? That could make a comeback. Or maybe make the phone 2mm thicker and put a battery that will last for days. Or make the phone 5mm thicker and put rubber padding around it so it's indestructible even without a case. Or do like the old Compaq iPaq and make dockable modules that add significant functionality (week long battery, small projector, full HDMI/USB suite, etc).

There's a bit of innovation happening with other form factors- foldable screens are being used in the most boring and basic ways possible. I want to see something more like the Global Communicator from Earth: Final Conflict- little stick of a device that has a pull out video screen that can be pulled out to various sizes.

I think there IS room in the market for innovation, it just requires companies that are willing to a. take the risk and b. commit to better software support than Samsung.

On the Google point, Google has always been an ad company first, and then started making hardware. Advertising is like 90% of their revenue

This is an overstatement. My first smartphone was an old Sony in 2014 and it was good.

My second phone was a crappy Samsung in 2017 and it was bad. Slow data rates. Horribly over saturated photos.

My third smartphone was a pixel 2 and it was remarkable. Better battery life than I was used to. The photos looked amazing.

Then the released the night mode feature and I realized I had never seen a good phone Pic taken in a bar, but I was, on last year's hardware taking decent photos in dive bars...

Then pixel eventually started supporting portrait mode. That was cool.

But really? Apps and websites have gotten so bloated with shit we don't realize how capable phone processors have become. If the data on websites now had been this way in 2013? Forget about it. People would have hated smartphone.

Progress on cameras has been pretty obvious. Batteries and screen size slightly less obvious. But I feel the counter acted gains on processor speeds have gone unnoticed. Phones have changed in the past ten years.

I'm happy as long as Siri doesn't get worse like Alexa, who will turn on a fan in another room when I say "Alexa, turn on the fan" but if I say turn off the fan it turns off the correct one.

I have a collection of wired headphones. I did use it, when phones had it.

Now it's dongle life.

Do you own a wired earphone?

Hell yeah!

🙄 yourself. Adding a 3.5 jack doesn't stop anyone from using Bluetooth, and only adds functionality. Being able to get a cheap pair of headphones that actually sound decent and don't run out of batteries is pretty nice

Bluetooth earbuds all suffer from the same problem: latency. Let me know when I can reliably get zero latency then I'll switch to wireless.

I use my phone to play rhythm games where 5 ms matters.

We are both engaging with the topic. That's the problem.

You haven’t been to car forums

You do know that Apple gives pretty damn solid trade ins right?

If you have a 14 pro and want to upgrade to a 15 pro, you get $570 for your 14 if it’s in good shape. So a 15 pro is only $429.

If you really enjoy having the latest and greatest, it’s not that hard to put away $35 a month towards upgrading.

Well the phone market is mostly needs-met so it's not like anyone is dying because the iphone 15 is not a blockbuster

Well the phone market is mostly needs-met so it's not like anyone is dying because the iphone 15 is not a blockbuster

It actually is and the world would be a better place if people were more willing to vote with their wallets.

Phone companies will absolutely take notice if people start choosing cheaper models over the latest flagships.

I haven't bought a flagship for my last two generations of phones, I've never once regretted not buying the top of the range option and I'm over £1000 better off because if it.

The iPhone's portrait mode uses actual depth information captured from the separate depth sensor. The new feature is that it will always capture the depth information for every picture you take so that at a later point you can use it to blur parts of the image at different depths. Google's version of portrait mode just uses image recognition to detect what's in the background. It does a good job, but not as good as if it had actual depth information.

It is bokeh - in some ways similar to a DSLR - I’d say the apple implementation is better - but that’s just me