iPhone 15 Rant

[nbohr1more]

My wife got me my first iPhone around 2013 I believe ( old iPhone 4 classic ).

At the time I had very mixed feelings as I really hated Apple's walled garden OS, lack of MicroSD slots, lack of replaceable battery,

and proprietary charging \ data transfer port.

That said I was still a little jealous of my old co-worker who had the first iPhone and showed off the wonders of the Lightsaber App and reading websites with pinch zoom so it was cool to finally have these capabilities on my own device.

Since I am ostensibly a hermit and do not really "consume" digital goods like paid apps and music, I jailbroke the phone not long after owning it and gleefully installed a number of janky retro emulators on it.

I kept that phone for a LOONG time. I believe it was about 1.5yrs ago when my phone provider was acquired \ merged and the new owners mandated that I could no longer use my ancient beast on their new network.

 

My wife ( who is now thoroughly entrenched in the iPhone world ) insisted I get a newer iPhone as a replacement so I got a slightly aged iPhone 11 due to the supply shortages.

At first I was thrilled at the increases in storage and processing power but then using phone began to sour my mood.

They removed the headphone jack in iPhone 8 (?) I believe so obviously this was strike one against the device.

I think the home button was removed in iPhone 10 so "strike two". Then the charging cable does not connect to a standard USB port on a PC

or standard USB charger so I could no longer sync iTunes over a cable without buying some specialized adapter cable. Third strike.

Since the whole world followed Apple's lead and no other phones offered these features either I was consigned to fume about the supposed "progress" of my new device.

 

Flash Forward to 2023 and the iPhone 15 Pro launch and now we can see that they are removing the "Easy silent mode toggle switch"

and are replacing it with a haptic multi-function button. Garbage.

The point of having a silent toggle is that you can quickly silence your phone even if it's dark or in your pocket. Now you need to look at your phone to see that you actually succeeded in silencing it. How can they possibly think this was an improvement?

I really am stumped here. Did someone at Apple think that forcing you to look at your phone to silence it will give advertisers more time to show you advertisements on lock-screen news-feed? Are the trying to make going to the movies more inconvenient so that you will stay home and watch Apple TV+ instead? Did the US Government tell Apple to change this so that law enforcement or intelligence agencies and explicitly tell when you are silencing your phone so that no clandestine recordings can be captured without an easily spotted visual of someone struggling to silence their phone? Is this just more "reduce the number of buttons" Apple insanity?

It really boggles the mind.

When they got rid of the Home Button, they seriously damaged the product brand in my opinion. The whole point of having a Home Button is that if you are stuck in some misbehaving App or Website and you need to get back to the starting GUI you can press a button to get safely home. Now if the bottom swipe is obscured by a misbehaving App your only choice is to power off the phone.

The excuse for the removal of the Home Button as that it made the phone less water resilient. In that case, how did the buttons on the side of the phone continue to persist? If there is some absurd logic that can be put forth about why side buttons are more water resilient than a front button, then why not move the Home Button to the side?

 

So I went around looking for iPhone 15 critique videos and to my utter dismay nobody was complaining about the removal of the Silence Toggle switch. Instead they bemoan that the iPhone 15 is "more of the same" even though the CPU, GPU, RAM, and Storage are all significantly upgraded.

The common complaint is that Apple hasn't improved the physical aspects of the phone such as not having a folding or flip phone design.

I find that to be a completely crazy take on things. The classic buttons worked fine. The form factor did not need to be substantially changed. The underlying CPU and GPU is where you should expect to see improvements for products like these.

Beyond bringing back the Home Button and Headphone Jack ( and preventing the full removal of the Silent Mode toggle ), the only "form factor" change I would like to see is some sort of accessory that approximates a slider era cellphone keyboard so I can type out texts or phone numbers with real keys as feedback.

Nakey Jakey sorta touched on a few of these issues in one of his newer videos:

 

 

[Xolvix]

I promise I'm not trying to be "that guy", but I feel like this is one of those cases where the answer is staring you right in the face - Android. Not that Android doesn't have its own issues of course, but it does have the value of a huge variety of models and by extension an increased chance in finding one that suits your needs better. Apple likes to keep things simple by having total control over the design of its hardware and software, which is great... if your needs and wants align with theirs.

I guess what I'm trying work out is if this is a rant and then back to business, or a rant and then an opportunity to try something different.

[nbohr1more]

That would be a completely valid response if not for:

1) The Android phone manufacturers proclivity for following Apples design choices

2) My wife's addiction to the Apple ecosystem

I just wish someone in the tech journalism sphere would call out these glaring downgrades and get folks to focus on the correct things.

Remove useful physical interfaces == Terrible

Upgrade computing power and efficiency == Should be "celebrated" instead of being yawned at

Its an overall sign of intellectual decadence that the tech press are ignoring the most critical and difficult technical advancements and concerning themselves only with form factor and aesthetics.

[chakkman]

47 minutes ago, nbohr1more said:

That would be a completely valid response if not for:

1) The Android phone manufacturers proclivity for following Apples design choices

True. But, that's solely because Apple is so successful with what they do. I.e., obviously, a lot of customers want it that way.

[jaxa]

I noticed the mixed response to the silent toggle change. I haven't had such a toggle on any of my Android phones. I don't want it silenced very often, and if I did I can spare the 2 seconds to look at the screen. I have noticed older folks will silence their phones on accident and then misplace them, wasting much more time.

If someone is hiding in a closet and can't silence their phone fast enough and it alerts the nearby axe murderer, c'est la vie.

While a physical interface was removed, technically another, different one was provided. I'm annoyed at buttons and ports being taken away in the pursuit of waterproofing, thinness, selling expensive accessories, etc. There were rumors of portless iPhones that have not come to pass (yet), and a real example of a portless laptop.

People do take incremental performance and efficiency improvements for granted. There are not many areas of life where something would suddenly get 10.. 15... or 20% better, but that's what you tend to see with SoC improvements every 1-2 years, and they compound over time. Smartphone performance has reached a "good enough" level for many use cases, but additional silicon improvements can be used to extend battery life, and it looks like Apple is trying to make AAA gaming a thing on iPhone 15 Pro.

Apple has always been stingy with RAM, while fanboys have insisted that iOS uses RAM more efficiently than Android. In reality, Apple may be slightly better at RAM management, but they are still cheaping out, and no amount of magic can stop you from running out if you open lots of large websites, apps, or whatever. On the Android side, there are gratuitous amounts of RAM thrown into phones for marketing purposes, especially in China which pushed some models up to 18 GB and now 24 GB, and there may be poor utilization of what there is. For example you get pages/apps reloading instead of using all of that extra RAM.

[Xolvix]

12 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

That would be a completely valid response if not for:

1) The Android phone manufacturers proclivity for following Apples design choices

2) My wife's addiction to the Apple ecosystem

I just wish someone in the tech journalism sphere would call out these glaring downgrades and get folks to focus on the correct things.

Remove useful physical interfaces == Terrible

Upgrade computing power and efficiency == Should be "celebrated" instead of being yawned at

Its an overall sign of intellectual decadence that the tech press are ignoring the most critical and difficult technical advancements and concerning themselves only with form factor and aesthetics.

It's true some Android phone manufacturers copy Apple even after making fun of them. Samsung are notorious for mocking Apple then copying the exact thing they mocked them for (removal of headphone jack, removing charging power brick, the notch, etc.), but they're just one manufacturer. I have a Motorola Android phone for example and baring a few annoyances it tries to stay fairly traditional with a mostly stock Android system and a headphone jack. Options exist, is what I'm saying. But then again tech companies are very, very good at building ecosystems that can be painful to move out of. Apple do it, Google does it, Microsoft does it, etc. It's why I think it's best to never fully go all-in if possible, so that you can pull the ripcord if it gets too much.

As for your concerns about tech journalism, don't fret. Journalism as a whole has been shit for ages, it ain't just in the tech sphere. So many people sucking up to companies in the hopes they'll get free gear or swag or an invite to their next reveal, whatever it is (tech, entertainment, whatever). People don't like asking hard-hitting question because it puts them on a "list" - there's always plenty of sycophants, and the bills needs to be paid.

[datiswous]

20 hours ago, nbohr1more said:

2) My wife's addiction to the Apple ecosystem

Why do you need to be in the same ecosystem? Just accept that your wife made the wrong choice but is addicted.

[revelator]

must be something contagious hehe , but yeah no need to allways follow suit unless the wife threatens to beat you to death with it imagine the headlines "killed by apple".