Apple’s new iPhone 15 is an underwhelming ‘slap in the face,’ say disappointed fans::Apple unveiled its new iPhone 15 models this week, and some fans say they lack innovation.
I don’t know why people expect massive jumps every single year. There’s only so much you can really change year over year at this point.
You don’t need to upgrade every damn year. Apple supports each phone for a minimum of 5-6 years.
Yeah, I’m sure if you just upgrade every 3-4 years there’s plenty that’s been added that makes it worthwhile.
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.
Also on an XR and just bought a 15 Pro.
The XR is still snappy. The battery only is at 80% of its original life, but otherwise it’s fine.
I’m very excited for the USB-C and wifi 6E. The rest I don’t care about, but I imagine I will be impressed by the speed when I get it.
XR to 15 is more like 5 cycles, so I think this upgrade is going to be a huge improvement for you. I upgraded from it after a mere two (though to the 12 Pro and not the 12) and the difference was very noticeable, especially in the display and camera, but also just in how much smoother and snappier everything got.
I honestly don’t understand. I’m on my 11 pro at 86% battery. Might just use it for many more years after a battery swap, why would I want to change every year? I love the sharper edges of the new ones, and now also the dynamic island and USB C, but I’m not going waste money when my current phone still can do anything as fast as the day I purchased it.
Then they shouldn’t release every year and create a new batch of endless ewaste and demand in natural resources mined by exploited labor.
Your talking about where you place the blame: the drug dealer with no regard for human life as long as they are profitable, or the drug user who is weak, sick and often incapable of breaking their unhealthy habit.
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?
Shit, even my 5-6 year old S9 was pretty decent at the end, and fairly similar to my new phone. I only upgraded because the network chip was getting wonky, which made me a bit uneasy about getting stranded somewhere.
I can’t wait for the EU regs about removable batteries to kick in. Now, if only we could finally move to a display technology that doesn’t suffer from burn-in…
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.
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.
I fall squarely into that 3-year cycle. My old iPhone 12 Pro, which is—as others would very plainly say—still pretty capable, is liable to go to my mother. My husband’s will go to one of the nieces or nephews.
For me, this “slap in the face” upgrade is shaping up to be a pretty substantial upgrade. And, I’m good with spending my money on that.
Yup. I’ve got a base 12. Jumping to a 15 pro max will be a pretty huge upgrade for me. Almost double the battery life, pretty much all the cameras will be massively better, I’ll get the third telephoto lens, the chip is massively faster than the one I have, usb-c, the dynamic island, the action button. A ton will be a jump for me.
For someone with a 14 pro max, there’s no real reason to. Nor is it really intended for them. Now, Apple sure as shit isn’t going to come out and say “no don’t buy our product”, because that would be stupid. But they make it easy to keep a phone for longer with the support for those of us that want to do that. Most companies will maybe give 3 OS and 3 years of security updates. Apple does 5-6 years for OS and still randomly patch old phones like the iPhone 5s with security updates.
Fully agree. It’s like people have no impulse control, and feel like they need to have the shiny new gadget, then cry when it’s not radically different from last year’s model. I’m still on my 11 pro, was holding off for the arrival of USB C, but it’s still working perfectly, so I might just upgrade in 1-2 years.
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.
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.
I’d add a personal assistant that lives up to the promise. It can make reservations for you, find out when your friends are available, navigate phone trees, etc.
What’s funny is this is the biggest update in years. The action button and USB C by themselves are a much bigger difference than last year was. Base models also got dynamic island. Smaller bezels, rounded edges, new colors. I dk how much more could change visually besides those things anyway?
The pros also have 3nm, armv9, wifi 6e, thread connectivity, new cellular bands, ai 5g modem, ray tracing, more ram, Qi2, 10 gbps port, increased repairability, titanium. 5x zoom on the Pro Max.
I think the problem that people are picking up on is that the base model is turning into a budget version of the previous year’s pro model. If you want newer tech you are forced to pay over $1,000 now. Before they had the same internals as the pros.
correct me if I’m wrong, but literally the first 3nm computing devices to land in consumer’s greedy paws. 12-atom wide transistors. what a SLAP IN THE FACE
3nm refers to the smallest possible feature size - the transistor would be bigger than this.
It can correlate with performance, but it is not performance.
Because people lost their shit when the iPhone moved from the 30 pin to the lightning.
Apple significantly helped develop USB-C. They were always going to move to it eventually, and have been staying with the Mac and the iPads.
People buy a LOT more accessories for iPhones though that a port change obsoletes. You see videos now about how many of your accessories you’re going to have to rebuy or buy an adapter for.
It’s not a minor change at all. They said 10 years for lightning when they introduced it, and went exactly 10 years.
“New iphone sucks”, says fans while standing in line at the store the night before the launch.
Absolutely this, we made them this big. Well, some of you lot not me. Android 4 life!
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.
Slow news day at Business Insider, I see.
So what the fuck do you all want? It’s a phone. All the innovations that could be crammed into a candybar-style phone have pretty much been done.
If you want real innovation that means a return to the early 2000s when there were tons of different form factors in the market. Sliders, flips, phones with full keyboards, etc. But that means you either need The Only Phone Manufacturer to produce more than one product line of phones, or it means you need to consider other options.
There’s a LITTLE innovation happening- Samsung and Google are both using the new flexible OLED panels to make flipbook-style phones that look pretty cool. Motorola has one too that’s a flip phone style gadget, kinda square when closed but flips open to be a standard phone size. Sadly I don’t see any real contenders with a physical keyboard.
I’m also not convinced the new flip phones are the new way forward and not just a gimmick. Like we got a few years of rapid flatscreen TV development, and after it started to stall manufacturers tried to push it the 3D route, but it never caught on.
I don’t want or need innovation in my phone or TV.
Personally, I would like to see miniaturization become the the trend again.
I haven’t been interested in a new release since phablets became the standard. I don’t need my phone to replace my PC. It just needs to be able to run a web-search in a pinch.
I was really hoping the Apple Watch was going to be the next leap forward, but they were very careful about making sure most people didn’t replace their phones with them.
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.
Sci-fi phones are the best. I like the slide ones alright, but I was always a huge fan of the mid-air projections. Seems like we are decent way off from either right now.
Also, I keep hoping we get a short term pair of glasses or ultra light weight VR/AR goggles before we figure out projection anywhere tech.
I’ve no interest in a flip phone. Why? Why is my option a foldable screen, but no head phone jack? That’s not something I want, that’s something I need.
You’re so right.
I miss the days where the new phone came out and it had five brand new amazing features, but 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.
It’s absolutely not worth paying $1000+ for the latest flagship anymore and it hasn’t been for years. Buy a $300 phone that came out a couple years ago, it’s the same thing.
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.
