mpantone

dewme said:

The only thing that could hold back the thinnest iPhone is the battery run time. If they can get good battery run time I think they will sell extremely well, especially to people who like slender pants, small purses, or hate the weight of the other iPhones. I get chided nearly every day by my wife because of the size and weight of her standard iPhone 16. 

First of all, it's not your fault that Apple doesn't sell smaller, thinner phones, don't know why your wife is chiding you.

Moreover, the iPhone 16 is very similar in size and weight to the 6.5 year old iPhone X. That's been the standard size for the mainstream smartphone from Apple for almost seven years.

And Apple has made smaller, lighter phones. And they don't sell those anymore. Just not enough interest. That's why your wife doesn't own one right now.

This thin iPhone might get some attention for a few months but soon every Instagram and TikTok influencer is going to wave one on camera yet will be using an iPhone 16 Pro Plus behind the scenes as their daily driver.

Let's face it, the battery life of this purported iPhone Thin will be worse than what's in the iPhone 16 and 16e. As I mentioned earlier, the 6.3mm thick iPod touch (6th generation) had piss poor battery performance (even with an underclocked CPU) and this rumored thin phone is even thinner than that.

My guess is that this will flop hard unless there's some revolutionary new battery technology waiting in the wings. We haven't seen that yet from Apple's competitors so the likelihood of that is pretty slim.

I am still clinging on to my trusty iPhone 12 mini. There's an iPhone 16 waiting to replace it but I'm waiting for iOS Software Engineering to clean up iOS 18 to the point that it doesn't suck so much and I can use it as my daily driver. Maybe June.

But I'm not delusional, I know Apple isn't bringing back small handsets. Consumer preferences have evolved over the years and almost everyone doesn't want a smaller phone.

I think I saw one folding smartphone before the pandemic (one of the ill-fated Samsung models) but nothing in the past few years. And I live in Silicon Valley and if there was a lot of interest, I'd probably see several of them every day at the coffee shop, beer garden, pub, grocery store, whatever. 

So both the iPhone Fold or iPhone Slim are pretty sketchy rumors. I absolutely believe that there are prototypes in a lab in Cupertino and probably have been for a decade. I just don't see any major advantages here. I mostly just see increased COGS and worse battery life.

Only knuckle-dragging chip dorkwads care about process node naming conventions. Apple doesn't even mention what node or manufacturer is being used in iPhone marketing materials. Whether Chip Firms call it 10nm, 8nm, 7nm, 4nm, Joe Consumer really doesn't give a carp. Nintendo doesn't talk about the Nintendo Switch's Tegra X1 chip process node and they sold 150 million devices. Apple has been selling iPhones since 2007 and they still don't publish much in the way of that sort of silliness.

Real chip nerds don't care about process node names. They look at real metrics like performance-per-watt or performance-per-dollar.

It's similar to vanity sizing in the apparel industry. It really doesn't matter what number (Size 2, Size 4) is on the label, it matters that it fits. And anyone in the women's fashion industry knows that Size 0 in some places is Size 4 somewhere else. It's only relevant to that specific vendor.

Intel didn't lose marketshare to AMD because the process node numbering was a debate. They lost on head-to-head competition. Remember Rocket Lake? Some people called it a "waste of sand".

Joe Consumer doesn't care about A14 or N3P or FinFET or any of that other gobblygook. They see one phone that lasts 15 hours and another phone that lasts 18 hours.

The only thing that really matters here is that TSMC is moving to a smaller process node in the future which has a different name than what's being shipped NOW. As long as they stay consistent within their own nomenclature methodology, there's really little else to be said because companies have been disagreeing with this for years.

And if any given company thinks they are at a "competitive disadvantage" (LOL) just because a letter or a couple of numbers on a marketing e-mail, well, they'd be morons if they didn't adapt to what the competition is doing.

keithw said:

As I've pointed out on some YouTube channels, why doesn't Apple simply add touchscreen capabilities to MacOS and then let anybody (with adequate hardware) run MacOS as an option on their iPad.  It would seem much simpler to do that than to do all of the coding gymnastics in the current iPadOS.

My guess is that they have tested prototype touchscreen Macs for 20+ years in their labs and decided that it's a poor and/or confusing user experience. For sure, a touchscreen MacBook would probably cannibalize some iPad Pro sales. Hell, it took them years to bring a stylus to the iPad. Remember how Steve denigrated the stylus when he unveiled the iPad?

Steve's dead and the world changes. But I'm not sure if Apple thinks there's enough to make a touchscreen MacBook worthwhile even in 2025. But without a doubt, they have experimented with the concept.

Touchbar's flop is reason enough for hesitation and skepticism.

If Apple wants a menu bar in iOS/iPadOS, they could have added it to the original iOS 18 years ago or any point since then. It has undoubtedly been trialled in their labs over the years. Even today, it's probably trivial for a software engineer to fire up Xcode and create a test app with a menu bar navigation system.

Moreover, Apple actually has released a touchscreen device with a menu bar on the bottom: the Newton. They already know what this user experience is like. Newton flopped and Apple clearly looked at the device's design to figure out what went wrong. The fact that they did not include the menu bar on the iPad (or iPhone) speaks volumes.

If you look at a simple task like selecting text, it's crystal clear. When you press and hold some text, a contextual menu (Select, Cut, Copy, Paste) appears right above the selection. You don't need to navigate to the top of the screen to perform an action. On a Mac you have the option to use keyboard shortcuts to copy, cut, paste. Or you can mouse over to the menu bar and locate the appropriate action under the Edit Menu. On an iPhone or iPad (without keyboard), you don't have keyboard shortcuts at your disposal.

Apple got it right by ditching the menu bar on iPhone and iPad. Essentially they brought the menu bar to where your finger is rather than mindlessly and inefficiently tacking it to the top (or bottom) of the screen.

In that way, a lot of computer software interfaces are still trapped in this outmoded paradigm. Back in the Nineties Autodesk Maya brilliantly introduced a contextual radial menu that would appear where the mouse pointer was. While the standard menu bar interface existed the tutorial itself guided the new user into using the radial context menu and hiding the traditional menu bar layout. It's more efficient.

danox said:

Didn’t Apple quite clearly say the features will be rolled out over a period of time it hasn’t even been a year yet (WWDC 2025 around the corner) with Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and Qualcomm making plenty of announcements beforehand and releasing products way down the road what’s the problem?  I thought everyone wanted Apple to be more open like the other companies and talk/socialize.

Apple did qualify it but not everyone watches the WWDC keynote address or Apple product videos. NAD's objection was focused on Apple's written language on the website.

Apple did comply with the request and removed the text in question (which had a tiny footnote) without admitting guilt. But leaving it up would probably attract more scrutiny and subject Apple to more class-action lawsuits. 

You really don't want to ignore the Better Business Bureau. They are supposed to be protecting the consumer, something they occasionally have to remind companies about.

Most of the new features in iOS 18 have already been deployed and iOS 18.5 betas aren't showing much in the way of major new functionality. In less than two months, Apple's attention will pivot at WWDC 2025 to iOS 19 and iOS 18 will go into maintenance mode, a release that ended up being far less than what was set up in early announcements. Both Apple and NAD probably know that major new Apple Intelligence features won't be arriving until fall 2025 at the earliest.

I don't need Apple to socialize with me (even though I occasionally chat with the random Apple engineer at local watering holes). I do need Apple to deliver functional and reliable software that prioritizes my privacy and data security. Apple's software QA has declined dramatically over the past ten years (I now typically upgrade Apple operating systems in June, about nine months after launch) so I can maintain relative reliability because Apple doesn't deliver that anymore at launch.

Apple Marketing can talk all they want but Engineering needs to walk the walk. This didn't happen in iOS 18 or Sequoia.