I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world:
> Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with Apple Reference Image, powered by the new sensor in the Main camera that can sign every pixel it sees. When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image.5 Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image, like a digital negative, to visually compare the two assets and determine if any edits were made. APIs are available in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27 for third-party apps to enable viewing of these reference images.
It would be great if they could use the LiDAR scanner to sign a depth map of the scene in front of the camera. It would show if you photographed a flat image.
The sensor already uses phase detection autofocus. You can create a depth map out of it. iPhone X used its dual cameras and that phase data for depth maps.
How? Is this for every image taken, or does one need to take a second photo? Or is it "in theory phase detection hardware would let you make a depth map"
Images that are meant to be 2d (E.g. a photo of something on paper) isn't going to look 3d. I guess this approach will just have to let anything flat through?
How would that work? I thought the premise here is that you can fool the apple camera by taking a (very carefully aligned) picture of a still image (printed out).
A depth map from the apple camera (again, signed) would show that the entire image had the same distance from the camera.
The photos are cryptographically signed in the apple image pipeline so it's not as simple as just AI generating something. That said, I can't see how this is any different to all the other times we have embedded crypto keys in consumer hardware where eventually someone finds a way to extract the key and the whole thing is busted open.
How would the server know that the request is coming from a real iPhone?
This is a pretty standard application of trusted computing and can be done entirely on the iPhone. A server would only possibly be needed for anonymization (while retaining key revocation capabilities if a key does end up leaking), but there are serverless ways to do even that (TPMs have supported these for a while now).
It wouldn't, but you could validate that a particular picture was created at a particular time, and had not changed, for example, especially with metadata that you may not want to share but that establishes certain parameters like gps coordinates. A lock, rather than an end-to-end pixel signature, which shows what was contemporaneous rather than exact provenance. If an event happened on day 0000-00-00 00:00:00am, but your photo was taken at some other time, it casts doubt.
I think a big part of validation for things like these are just "could it have been modified since Z event happened", because Z was not something people paid attention to before.
That's just a timestamping service then, not a content provenance/authentication scheme. Timestamping has been a solved problem for years; certificate authorities offer this, or you could just throw a hash onto any sufficiently trusted blockchain.
Nothing prevents anyone from opportunistically pre-generating and timestamping millions of permutations of fake kompromat and then selectively revealing the one that turns out to be useful after the fact.
You could charge per attestation, but the economics of that don't look great; you could demand publication of the image itself before attestation, but that would obviously not fly for most use cases out of privacy concerns.
I think there's a chain of trust. The sensor signs raws, and the private cloud takes signed raws, does minimal processing so they're at least coherent, and re signs that output (maybe even including the original signed raw as well in the image file).
That's a good point, You might still be able to trick the cloud to sign your photos, but that's something they could patch in updates without losing control of the key. They could have the server only sign photos taken on the latest ios version.
And honestly you could have a similar antitampering oracle that was at least obscured, in terms of "we've detected tampering but won't tell you how or why", which is frustrating but I have to imagine that 99.9%+ of images are clean.
... don't make it so shallow then. Perfectly possible in a consumer-friendly 3D printer for a face or even human body if you have lots of time for the prints.
You’re well on the way to 1:1 replicas at this point. Next you’ll need to match the thermal signature and the exact weather in the sky for the time at that location.
People have constructed video walls so high resolution they can film TV series in front of them and to an audience it's indistinguishable from a real set. It's extremely cost-effective for things like space fantasy that needs lots of exotic-looking backdrops, apparently.
It may not be in reach for you and I - but within reach of anyone with the budget to run a 'bot farm'
The high resolution video wall is quite simple. The hard part and why this has not been done earlier is that for filming, they had to synchronize the rendered background with the movement of the camera.
Movement is solved by tracking the camera's position and projecting the background from there.
Proof of captured image with hardware-based-attestation can be increased by adding extra information besides the RGB channels, like depth mapping (which a projected screen wouldn't be able to fake), and eventually light field recording (plenoptic imaging, e.g. Lytro).
also no, even in the high rez video walls its still possible to tell. maybe to an "audience" no but there are lots of fundamental flaws with video walls that make them not the same as filming it for real. all of those flaws show up in the final image and could be detected.
things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.
case in point, outside of a few specific niche cases like the mandalorian, that virtual production video wall thing is not actually being used all that much because of the amount of post shoot cleanup required to fix all those issues, it wasnt actually that much cheaper and its not really better either. especially when you factor in how hard it is to shoot that way.
> things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.
Pre-AI fake videos sidestep this sort of issue by lowering the video quality.
Add some motion blur, some camera shake, some poor lighting, the camera being slightly out of focus, and make the video 720p instead of 4k.
The credibility comes from who took the photo. The next logical and easy step is for this metadata to flow to the user agent. I'll know that it was taken by a legit journalist photographer. And id not, I can have my user agent make it fuzzy or replaced with
a kitten photo.
I think this is where we are headed. This feature seems useless on it's own since someone will eventually find a way to extract the key from the iphone and sign any image. But if they could make it so every iphone uses it's own key and the photos show "Taken by xyz" and it's linked to their icloud or identity somehow. That way images shared around will still be able to be linked to a source that you can choose to trust and the viewer can know it wasn't modified from what that person shot.
Then we might move to an age where photos which were not signed by someone will be treated as fake.
You may have forgotten that the world is driven by screenshots, and so a screenshot of a picture with the `(X) Verified by Apple to be Joe Schmoe` tacked on will be just as good as real verification for a lot of people.
What we need is almost something like the classic "press C+A+D to log in" or the idea of "above the browser pane"... something an image cannot show you unless it's legit. Perhaps a personal thumbprint icon that is different for each viewer, so you know its your device telling you that something is real and not just some mock fake thing?
I don't think we'll treat them as fake but they would probably undergo more scrutiny - perhaps in a crowd-sourced manner that provides an overall score of probable legitimacy.
> I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world
Congrats to Apple achieving nation-wide tracking, embedding some kind of yellow dots[1], but this time this time this is based on strong cryptography and non-removable, targeting people who don't use AI under the slogan "we are fighting AI fakes", but people still "love the feature".
On the opposite side, this read to me like there was so much image processing going on in the background and off device that they felt like they needed to prove that there was a real image backing the creation, and that it was not all AI. It really begs the question of what the extent is of image processing.
The iphone image pipeline is mostly just playing with exposure and color, things that we widely regard as fair game in editing. Where the line was crossed was magic eraser and reframe where the iphone is straight up making objects in the image.
That could be a result of a failed exposure stack. Phone sensors and lenses suck for light gathering so they have to take multiple photos and merge them together to create one that's less noisy. Occasionally you get artifacts where the merge failed.
It's still distinct from actual AI generation imo.
> Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with Apple Reference Image, powered by the new sensor in the Main camera that can sign every pixel it sees.
Will this also work with third-party camera apps like ProCam?
Not available in EU. The reason Siri AI and other iOS features are not available in the EU is the issue of Apple not opening up the same API for other apps. Therefore I think it might be the same case here, which would mean that third-party camera apps wouldn't be compatible.
I don’t know too much about image processing, but my intuition tells me that distinguishing a photo of a 3d scene from a photo of a photo of a 3d scene is a much easier engineering problem than distinguishing it from an AI-generated diffusion. So even just reducing the problem to the former is still a worthy accomplishment.
Agree with the weakness, but the benefit of provenance is still there. You can't tell if the picture that person took is of an AI image, but there's some value in saying "I took this" and being able to prove it.
I hope future social media presents this metadata so if someone claims a photo is from the BBC, it actually gets checked against the keys the BBC sign their photos with.
Ideally it’d be linked to public key on a DNS txt record or similar, and trustworthy clients (including social media apps) show the domain linked to the photo.
Reporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc...
The problem is real, but this solution seems to not really solve it in any practical sense.
You want to do all that, then still can prove the picture is authentic. The editing history show what had been changed compare to the previous version, from the color adjustment to blur areas... it's not about preventing editing, it's about proving the authenticity when needed.
> The editing history show what had been changed compare to the previous version, from the color adjustment to blur areas...
That's not a thing. Straight from Apple:
"When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image. Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image"
So this only helps prove anything if you can share the original, unedited image. You can share it alongside an edited one, but you must also be comfortable sharing the unedited original if you want to prove you own an iPhone 18 Pro. Er, I mean prove it's "authentic"
Now I think C2PA had allowances for what you're talking about, but that also ended up resulting in it being easier to break.
Reporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc...
So, 90% of photojournalism outside of the major cities, then.
It also sounds pretty useful for anyone involved in a lawsuit to be able to present photographic evidence again. I’m sure GenAI is already a big headache for forensics, and enforcing AI watermarks will clearly not be bulletproof.
Will it ever work until a TPM like module is directly integrated into camera sensor? Older attempts of Nikon and Canon got broken, same had happened with C2PA implementation for Android - if it gets anywhere close to CPU it is insecure.
Yes, presumably there will be a cat and mouse game until the entire system including all peripherals has been brought into the trusted computing base, either physically or logically (usually with secured/authenticated communication). This has been the case for all applications of trusted computing.
Security is never a binary property, however, and can usually be better expressed in terms of how expensive it would be to subvert a given mechanism. "This image is either authentic or would have cost at least $x to fake" is already much more useful than nothing at all even without $x trending to infinity.
Canon's original high end digital models had this as a feature, that your images could be digitally signed in-camera based on raw sensor data. Primarily for law enforcement. Obviously a far broarder use case, now.
Nah, it’s an optional feature, so by using it you provide express consent. GDPR gives users more data ownership; GDPR does not stop you from choosing to do what you want with your data.
It’s likely DMA — Apple would be required to provide APIs for signing for 3rd party apps too.
Cynical take: A single photo to now consume up 50mb of cloud storage, adding to the demand for more data centers that supported the creation of this authenticity issue in the first place.
Finally. Android phones have been shipping with C2PA since last year, so it's great that the final holdout has capitulated, though with its own set of nonstandard tools.
Indeed, on top of Google's implementation being a bad joke, it sounds like the C2PA specifications in general are a massive fail so far. https://arxiv.org/html/2604.24890v1
On the other hand, ignoring standards altogether is the wrong way to go because the ecosystem after capture won't be there.
How will this work against rehosted images on all the platforms people actually share photos from? It’s a good feature but many popular services apply metadata stripping and basic image adjustment before resharing. That seems like the place where people would actually want to verify authenticity.
I would love to see some "pro" features hit the Pro or Pro Max. Something I've wanted for a while is the ability to have more than 2 active eSIMs; I think a dual modem would be really cool, maybe with some features targeting users in poor cell coverage/ spotty service areas.
Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD, and power a multi monitor setup with your iPhone Pro. macOS would be sick. Or (waterproof) exposed PCIE lanes so 3rd parties can integrate an ecosystem of backpacks like how Pi Hats work.
Yes, and TB5 also uses around 10x as much power, around 4W rather than 0.4W for USB3, which would consume the majority of the sustained power budget of the entire phone.
The point is, with your example the link speed of the iPhone isn't the limiting thing of your example. You'll likely be limited by the speed of your storage before you saturate that link.
> I think a dual modem would be really cool, maybe with some features targeting users in poor cell coverage/ spotty service areas.
Can already do iMessage over satellite. Most “data” is download and I predict some satellite service that sends basic broadcasts (traffic, news, Text-to-speech podcasts) squeezed into a few mbps by pointing your phone at the sky (or a small cabled antenna for around the clock use). Would love to go carrier-less.
>Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD,
My iphone 16 pro max can do 4K ProRes HDR or Log at 120 FPS when plugged into a SSD. If I had more builtin storage I could do it without the SSD. If you don't mind more dongling you can also have an external display along with the external SSD.
You can almost achieve this by setting a reminder to turn on "sync immediately" manually every single day (because Apple decided there should be no permanent or indefinite option, and went through the extra effort of making it timed simply for the sake of inconvenience).
I actually do this because it's the behavior I've wanted for years, and I care about it enough to go through the relentless annoyance.
I just don't understand why they wouldn't enable something p2p. We have handoff, screen mirroring, etc, but simple photo sync is impossible scientifically.
I am actually quite excited on this iPhone 18 Pro. Seems to pack a a lot of exciting stuff. 2nm A20 Pro, C2. I wish they have N2 but I guess not. 2nd Generation Vapour Chamber. I thought I would have to wait another generation because Apple like to use new product features for two generation before moving on. And it seems this Vapour Chamber along with other heat desperation features are much better built. Much better Camera. And larger battery. With 60W charging that finally matches or closes to a lot of Android phone has been doing.
Never thought they would do it all within one update. In terms of hardware that is pretty much everything I wanted other than Silicon Battery.
I mean, isn’t that how like 90% of new SwiftUI apps are created these days? Just telling an AI what you want? Apple already can’t keep up with the review.
Besides a better camera what all this along with the past generations have so exciting ? I just fail to see a reason to upgrade. Maybe I am getting old?
Because of a very, very last minute AppleCare replacement (like, 35 months after purchase), I have a year-old iPhone 14 Pro.
I figured there was nothing Apple could introduce yesterday that would turn my head, but the 40+ hour battery life AND the adjustable aperture on the camera are, by themselves, making me consider it. It'll all come down to what discounts or carrier subsidies are available to me, and what the trade-in value is for my phone. But as a shutterbug who travels, those two things are VERY interesting.
It could be as simple as Apple committed to a certain volume with Qualcomm before they were certain they could get mmWave working so they have to keep using Qualcomm modems somewhere while they burn down the commitment.
Personally iSO 26 is so unbelievably glitchy, it's only not embarrasing because you know others spent $$$ on the same thing so everyone pretends it's fine.
They seem to have ironed most of the problems now. You can disable liquid glass if you hate it, and as a result iOS 26 is nearly as good as the previous version. I’m running it on my iphone12. I hated it when it first came out. But it seems fine now.
I don't know how you're using it. The most broken (so it needs to be restarted sometimes) is Podcasts, but Music, Safari, Settings etc have glaring visual glitches too.
Well, it might help that on day 1, I turned off the liquid glass effects in accessibility settings. At first there were several small layout / UI bugs that came from turning liquid glass off. But it seems fine now.
I don't use the apple podcasts or music apps. (Overcast and Spotify for me). I haven't run into any serious problems.
I'm not sure if you're an iphone user or did you root your iphone?
It's NOT possible to turn LG off in iOS 26. It is possible to reduce transparency and motion (i tried with and without enabling those and it's broken anyway).
Oh my mistake. I just reduced transparency and motion. I’m not surprised that some things are still broken. Liquid Glass seems like a promotion ticket someone cashed at the expense of all iPhone users.
I have Reduced Transparency, Reduce Motion, and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions, all enabled. You have to have Liquid Glass set to Clear for Reduce Transparency.
I do use the Apple Podcasts app, but YouTube Music and DI.FM Radio apps for music.
I never see any rendering issues / glitches, and the UI is smooth & snappy.
0. none of the options you describe really disable LG and the glitches it introduced.
1. you don't need to switch LG to clear to reduce transparency. you can use reduce transparency with any LG theme. you just need to reenable "reduce transparency" after changing the theme. why? ask Tim.
2. in Podcasts you can tap between Home and Library to see the selection jank around the middle New tab. happens every time.
and if you tap to change episode sorting oldest to newest, then change it back, it 100% of the time won't ever change back again, unless you exit and enter the show again.
and semi daily when switching to it from lock screen the now playing layout will be garbled, either just the bottom card or the entire now playing screen is empty (at which point i usually restart the app).
and of course janky layout shifts and adjustments when switching between screens like search, show, episode, transcript, etc (which additionally also all involve sliding motion despite reduce motion + prefer fade on, but i will let that slide)
What do you do with your phone that requires you to know the memory details? Genuine question, I have absolutely no idea how much memory my iPad or phone have and don’t see why I would need to know
With the price of ram going up by 5x, I want to see our industry move in the opposite direction. Computers for regular people should go back to 4gb or even 2gb of ram, just to keep the prices sane. We should get software working well on those devices, just like it did a decade or two ago.
Small, memory efficient programs run better everywhere. It feels like theft to make consumers pay for our inefficient software. Electron / react on the desktop is such a rort.
>With the price of ram going up by 5x, I want to see our industry move in the opposite direction. Computers for regular people should go back to 4gb or even 2gb of ram, just to keep the prices sane.
Sure. Right along with Intel Core 2 Duo and Windows Vista.
Yes and no. If I recall, 32 bit windows has a fixed allocation of 3gb for userland and 1gb for the kernel’s memory space. I think 32bit only really works well for memory sizes smaller than 4gb. It might not be worth it, given a lot of OSes are in the process of deprecating 32bit support.
I'm waiting for a software release for my iPhone 16 Pro Max that will let me plug in a dock that has an attached SSD, keyboard, mouse, and display, and an option to pop up on my phone to reboot into MacOS.
Also, if they make a neo 2 from the A19 with 12 GB that'd be cool.
You’ll be waiting awhile. iPads have had desktop M-series CPUs for ages now, and you still can’t run macOS on an iPad.
It’s just a software restriction. I’m sure they have macOS running on iPhones and iPads internally, probably both through a VM and natively. But it’s very Apple to block this use case.
The amount of RAM doesn’t tell you anything about "the best value". Bad software with a large amount of RAM provides less value than highly-optimized one with a lower amount of RAM, for example.
This was the whole advantage of the iPhone at the beginning: not a lot of RAM (meaning less energy needed) but a highly-optimized OS that works well even with that constrained environment.
Because I am buying a phone to use for the next 3 years and want to buy it based on the most important property of compute devices right now. I couldn't care less about the camera and the 13 random metrics that all look the same as every other camera announcement. I will happily take 96GB of RAM in my phone (and I know what that means) and would gladly allow you to make it 1.2mm thicker in the process.
You want a 96GB RAM phone and only plan to keep it 3 years? I cannot fathom the way some of you live. I have an iPhone SE from 2022 that I don’t expect to get rid of before at least 2-3 more years, meaning it would have been in use for 6-7y at minimum. And it’s perfectly comfortable to use, I’m not forcing myself in any way to keep it longer. And you’re talking about wanting a ridiculously expensive phone and only have it for 3 years? That sounds so wasteful and unnecessary
I couldn’t agree more. I’m typing this on an iPhone 12, bought new 6 years ago. My phone still feels snappy. And it gets me through a whole day with 60%+ battery remaining. The only real complaint I have is that I only have the 64gb model. I need to delete things every time a software update comes out because of how bloated modern software has become. But the hardware is fantastic.
I have no idea how much ram my phone has. So long as apps run well, why would I care?
It's about multitasking. RAM is the upgrade trigger for me. I'm so exhausted by developer introduced bloat in software such that almost every app fully reloads when switching. Devs ruin multitasking every few years until another RAM upgrade.
You're missing the important bit in the GP comment:
> the most important property of compute devices right now
Memory didn't matter when iPhone 12 was released, but these days it determines which local LLMs you can run on device. That's the point of that comment.
People sued apple for selling a device with no mention of ram and then apple released the next gen saying "this has more ram, you need to upgrade to it to use the features we advertised for last gen."
How about avoiding that scenario again? Is that a good enough reason? Being a diligent, informed consumer?
I’m being hyperbolic. Sharing the amount of RAM seems table stakes with the current demand and failing to disclose it seems like the answer wouldn’t be positive.
What on earth would you do with an iOS device that has 96GB of RAM? You realize the last generation (i.e, the most powerful consumer phone in the world today) had 12 GB of RAM? You feel the need for eight times that amount?
Number go up, I guess? A lot of people derive great satisfaction from ever larger (or sometimes smaller) number. But, uh, 8X is probably too much, need to spread that out over a few generations.
Very obviously you get a Mac Studio for that, not a phone. (Oh, the 96GB Studio is almost $6000, you counter? Imagine how much it would cost in a phone form factor).
You can't possibly expect Apple to take that market segment seriously.
Based on supply chain leaks, it's pretty safe to assume 12 GB memory with up to 100GB/sec memory bandwidth at best.
The A19 Pro had 12 GB and was around 77GB/sec memory bandwidth for reference. If I was a betting man, I'd say the memory bandwidth on the A20 Pro is the same.
The non-max 18 Pro getting 17 Pro Max battery is quite a great leap, no? This is actually the most surprising announcement today, given how Duo was anticipated.
Apple basically need to release a new model every year to fit the phone upgrade cycle so I suppose it’s not that surprising to see one with so few compelling features. Maybe next year.
I mean, I can't remember the last time they DIDN'T say that. Variable aperture is kinda cool I guess. 256Gigs of storage basically means everyone's going to have to upgrade their iCloud storage monthly spend just to back this thing up. I've stopped sending my camera roll to iCloud just to save on space.
Apple events are full of these meaningless statements, which always drive me crazy. Of course it's the "best iPhone Apple has ever made." If it wasn't, then wouldn't I be better off buying an older model?
> Oh I back them up to Immich self-hosted. I just stopped paying Apple.
Which means this original comment is somewhat disingenuous: "256Gigs of storage basically means everyone's going to have to upgrade their iCloud storage monthly spend just to back this thing up."
Clearly there is another option (as evidenced by your own behavior). But let's not pretend that option is free, either.
Agreed. The photo backup is so seamless. I’ve been documenting my electronics and other possessions for insurance purposes and in anticipation of a move. It’s been so easy to go around the house taking photos of serial numbers and such with the better camera on my phone. Then I grab my iPad and update the spreadsheet. Nothing needed to happen on my end, the photos are just there for my iPad to access and as later proof if I ever need it.
>I've stopped sending my camera roll to iCloud just to save on space.
how do you backup your photos when the phone gets full. I dont have a mac and the process is excruciating. Also the formats get messed up so some photos become unusable. I stopped taking 'live' photos because of this.
Not the parent, but Google Photos has been decent as a secondary backup. They even backup Live Photos now.
The two formats I've found that they don't back up accurately are rotated photos (if one's a stickler for "originals") and cropped screenshots (JPEG instead of PNG). Possibly the sidecar files for edits too.
There’s this MacOS native application called Image Capture, use it to backup 100GB of photos. I then partitioned the photo by year and 7zipped them with encryption.
This is not even close to true. I took a bunch of photos side by side with the iphone 13 pro and the 17 pro. The 17 pro was unmistakably much better, particularly on the telephoto, it wasn't even close. There was a very clear improvement in detail and sharpness, and not in a crunchy post processing way, the sensor is simply larger and higher resolution.
Now I think all the iphone cameras still suck compared to an actual camera, but the improvement over the last 10 years has been dramatic.
You say that, but I've bought the non-pro iphones the last few generations (13, 15 currently) and consistently wanted a better camera, so this upgrade cycle I'll probably shell out for the 18 pro.
Still on a 12 Pro Max, which I bought near the original launch. It is in need of its first replacement battery. I’m very curious to see how much snappier it feels with this next iOS release which is focused a bunch on performance; in addition to a new battery, since I believe my iOS is throttling performance given the health.
Still using my 12 Pro Max as well. Battery is still okay-ish on mine. Not good, but I don't have to actively worry about it. Will be looking forward to all the fancy new features when I replace it in 3-4 years
I bought a 12 Pro Max around the time the 13s came out, still at 92% max battery capacity, and still feels very snappy. Every year I wonder if the new models are going to entice me to upgrade, and every year I find myself saying meh.
I still use a 13 Pro Max for travel. Incredible longevity. The only downside is it requires a battery pack to last a full day but those are slim and compact now. I intend to replace the battery soon since it still has 2-3 years left as a backup.
It will probably keep most of its value too, if hardware price inflation continues.
Yeah I tend to squeeze the life out of my Apple purchases. iPhone 4s -> 7 -> 12 Pro Max. And still on a 2017 MBP at home, running Sequoia via Open Core Patcher.
The only thing that’s interesting to me about this release are the “Reference Images”. Seems like it could be a genuinely useful feature, especially in a world of AI generated content. I wonder if a similar system exists in other cameras?
Nothing. I’m going to run my 13 Pro Max into the ground. I do find the “Reference images” interesting, but not so much in going to run out and buy one. Other than than it’s the same old “everything is better” marketing shtick
I'm finding it really hard to justify buying a new iPhone. They're so expensive these days for marginal improvements that seems if you're not an avid photo taker/media maker you don't get much back from.
It makes a lot more sense to purchase one if you consider their residual value when you sell it to upgrade later. A typical Android phone depreciates much more quickly than an iPhone. My three-year-old iPhone 15 Pro is still worth $500 or more on the open market--about half of what I spent. That's only $166/year.
The downside is that you need more money up front to purchase it.
TBH I don't think I've ever bought a new phone because there was something new and fancy that I could justify. Every phone I've bought has been because my previous phone stopped receiving software updates, or in the case of my Pixel 6a, had a hooped battery.
Then don't. Isn't the whole point of long support cycles that you can keep using your phone for 5 years +, if it serves you well? (typing this from an S22)
The 17 is 969 euros. The 18 Pro is 1479 euros. How can I justify the difference? I'm on 13 now and I wanted to get an 18 but since there is no such thing I will probably end up with the 17.
I'm still on a 12 pro. Was considering the 17 a couple months back, decided to wait for the 18 and now I'm in the same boat as you. The 18 just doesn't really seem worth the huge difference...
> eSIM-only models deliver up to 36 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro and up to 45 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro Max.
That might convince me to upgrade. Not because I care about watching video for two days straight, but hopefully it means the battery is large enough that it'll last 5+ years before battery degradation becomes annoying.
I doubt any phone battery is lasting 5+ years. But I can say modern iPhones are pretty easy to swap the battery on. They designed it so the back plate gets removed to open the phone rather than the screen. No more risk of cracking the display.
That is genuinely shocking to hear. You have to be like 3+ sd above the mean. Do you know how many charge cycles you have? I recall that most batteries need replacing after 300-500 cycles.
I follow the estimate that lipos lose 2-4% capacity per year without any use beyond recharging for safety. If the battery sees daily use that number gets a lot worse.
My guess is everyone else is the perfect mix of hardly any use and winning the battery lottery.
I hear you, but the convenience of 30W charging is very hard to give up. The only downside is it damages the battery, which makes it harder to give up, which damages the battery more.
My 13pro is at 84% capacity, but in the last month or two it seems to lose charge much more rapidly than it used to. Probably the only reason I'll consider an upgrade.
The maximum capacity of my iPhone 17 pro is still at 100% after 192 charges, that's after 1 year of usage. The extra battery life does reduce the amount of charges I have to do so that helps with the battery life.
I'm not sure where the capacity will end up after 5 years, but I think my iPhone 14 pro was at less than 95% at this point. Apple refused to replace just the battery on that one because of a small crack in the screen.
I took an iPhone SE generation three to Apple Store to replace battery and they broke the NFC functionality in a way that passed their simple diagnostic tool but failed to work in the real world. I had to go back and reset the phone and upgrade my IOS so they could troubleshoot it (the phone menu for setting appointments does not allow you to pick repair broke NFC funny enough) and they were nice enough to give me a new iPhone SE to replace we proved it was broken. But that was kind of worrisome and put me off any kind of Apple self repair for something they still make.
With reason. That glue is a nightmare to deal with. I would not advise anyone start with iPhone repair.
I damaged my first iPhone repair even after multiple years of active hardware modification on other consumer devices. The older models really only go smooth if you have the Apple tools. A nice $149 of tool rental to swap the $50 part at home, rather than paying the $199 to get Apple to swap it for you. Odd how that math works out.
I'm on the iPhone 13 pro max since launch and my phone comfortable gets through an entire day of usage. (Given my usage is pretty light). If the battery fubars in one of the next years I wouldn't be upset, 5+ years of battery life is enough.
But I also don't see it failing me any time soon on battery. I think local AI models in a future iPhone could be an actual reason to upgrade.
I have a 12 Pro Max purchased at release, battery is now at 83% capacity. Still lasts all day and then some, rarely think how much I've got left on a charge.
Meh I just replaced a battery in my 14 pro (and the charging port) for ~200 EUR. I didn't want to upgrade yet and I would not even be considering upgrading if the device had USB-C
Don't. Large iPhones are the deadweight of a ball and chain, and fits in no pockets. Next one will be the SE, and even if I buy an external battery, it's still lighter than the ingot Pro Max. Also you can buy one every 1.5 years.
Sadly my 14 pro has a crack in the lower right screen, and the tele lense has some issue with fixing lens position / focus (? I hear some clickering and it doesn’t focus). Otherwise I would just stay another few years with it, now I’m going to upgrade - and yeah I’ll stay with Apple. I have some devices quite a few years old by them and still working flawlessly.
I really don't care at all about phone models, I just want software to launch quickly.
Waiting 15 seconds for a simple app is just infuriating in this day and age. This is mostly on crappy app developers, but a lot of that falls on Apple for not having a rating system that encourages basic good app behavior.
Every bad app that I encounter, which sends advertising notifications, takes a long time to launch, etc. is dominated by 5 star reviews, somehow. The whole ecosystem feels broken.
(And I'm also really offended by how ugly, unpolished, and broken the Tahoe visual style is on iPhone. The whole thing feels like a buggy beta, something completely unworthy of Apple of the past. That it's still not fixed is an indication of the Apple of the future, unfortunately...)
I try and pick apps based on package size the rare time I look for some app. There are still apps out there made like they were 10 years ago (that probably haven't been updated in 10 years) where the package size is sub 10mb, sometimes sub 1mb. You get an app like that it is performant and will fly on any iphone really, and barely impact battery life in all likelihood.
Package size has very low correlation to launch time. The binary and assets are separate. Additionally some slow app launches are simply waiting for a network request or chain before the view controller renders.
Situational. But often these apps are doing something just using that standard ios ux library from the really old days, and they open almost instantly as a result as it was designed to work on an iphone 3gs.
No I need better phone app developers. The fastest phone has the same issues. New phones are just as sluggish. And, it's a phone, there's not going to be fast networks everywhere, and a whole generation of poor developers was raised to believe that the network was always present and always fast.
And on the iOS side, Tahoe inserts all sorts of overdone, ridiculous animations that slow down phone interaction, but delaying presentation of
We are up to the iphone 18 now. The iphone is said to be about 50% of Apple's revenue since 2012. Regardless of app developer quality, it is quite literally Apple's now-well-honed job to ensure that enough people want to buy next year's model, by various types of forced obsolescence. Indirectly, this means that the durably snappy and non-sluggish experience you're forever wanting can never actually happen. 'Forever wanting it' is an essential part of the business design here!
In this system. Of 'smartphones', where a small handful of corporate masters - who also happen to (now!) be a big share of the world's largest and most profitable corporations - now own over half of the computing world that we love, following their whirlwind 20-year takeover of it.
"No I need better phone app developers." - Hmmm. Commiserations. The trend of developer quality (and/or it's inverse - e.g. system complexity and overheads) has been fairly constant since the term 'developer' became mainstream parlance, and you won't need me to point out what effect AI coding agents have had upon the doorway-to-entry.
Indeed, on modern laptops and phones every UI interaction should be instant (check out BeOS in 1995 for comparison). For background stuff, add some progress indicator.
Can't believe the crap OSes and frameworks add these days in terms of performance cost (and sadly, Apple doesn't exactly shine in that regard)
The bigger question is what are these apps doing that they aren't doing 10 years ago that they now need all this extra compute for to serve the same basic functionality? It always amazes me how stuff like instagram just tanks my battery life. It is instagram its basically wgetting image urls same as its always done but it is taking over system resources for reasons...
I just tested a number of apps on my 15pm connected to WiFi and could not find anything that took longer than 5 seconds. That includes some small developers and bad developers.
Not quite sure where you are seeing this. Maybe games?
I’ve never been more baffled by an Apple event in my life.... We in Norway are part of the first batch of the rollout for the new AI/language feature?!??!?! Something’s fishy. Somethings up!
I have no idea which iPhone version I have anymore. It doesn't feel as though it's missing anything, though.But I'd upgrade immediately if the new models truly offered better AI experience.
Forgive my skepticism that Apple will get it right. Even the lauded latest version of Siri is far worse than the labs' offerings or Android at voice dictation (I now have to fix 1 word per sentence instead of 4, previously)
Agreed on iPhone versions not feeling significant. I personally consider it a good thing. I'll keep my phone for as long as possible and not feel the need to upgrade.
I personally don't care if Siri is the worst LLM of the big players, as long as it can answer my basic questions and search my texts, I'm happy. I don't need "frontier intelligence" for that kind of stuff.
As for dictation, they say the new dictation is much better, requiring an iPhone 17. Unfortunately, I won't get to find out if that's true for another five or so years, but I'm hopeful for a better dictation on device, because you're right.
I update my phone now when the battery requires two full charges to 100% to last throughout the day. But there's no feature I'm looking for. My current phone is a 13 -- so I guess it lasted five years, which seems crazy long for it to be perfectly fine from a functionality perspective.
I would probably still have my iPhone 12 mini if not for what happened to its battery. Loved that form factor, but the battery went from bad to worse in just a couple of years.
Hopefully these models have a longer lifespan before the battery life forces a replacement. If they truly offer 36 hours, there's more runway before they hit the < 18 hours point at which many people need a refresh
I’ve been holding on to my 12 mini for a bit too long probably. I loved the thing before iOS 26, but sadly since then, even basic tasks cause it to overheat and just hang for several minutes until it cools off. The battery is a joke of course, but I was fine with that until the overheating. I’ve swapped it 2x over the years for a new unit, but shit software, shift web, and shit cell data coverage have made it nearly unusable.
I’ll finally, albeit reluctantly, upgrade this year. I really liked the mini form factor.
Almost the same as what I did, 11->16 Pro, and really only because I wanted a nicer camera. 128Gb has been more than enough for what I need. Don't have a reason to upgrade, battery still gets me through 2 days without a charge, and with Kino the times I want to have nicer-than-stock video I can get it.
I'm on a 12. Paid really not very much to get the battery replaced recently, and I wished I'd done it sooner. There's at least another year left in this phone now if I want it.
That's kind of like saying the 2026 Corolla isn't really much different than the 2025. People don't expect to upgrade annually. I'm using an iPhone 15, and upgraded to that from a 6S+. The 15 was a night and day difference. Most people are financing their device with their service plan which is 2-3 contract.
The 13 is the last generation of the mini and I still have mine. Good to know I'm not missing anything. Battery capacity isn't even below 80% so I can't replace it under Applecare yet.
This is the problem for Apple. Expect shorter lifetime for security updates in the next few years. It’s why they’re pushing the “lease to own”, because people aren’t upgrading every year, or two, or even three any more.
Indeed been using the new Siri since June and it fails a ton in comparison to chatGPT voice!
Using chatGPT voice i can see Open AI's push for pushing us to a new Internet voice paradigm 1st with screens/visuals secondary & complimentary to possibly none at all. It would be much safer especially when driving to get super intelligent human like directions where voice says drive to the mcdonalds on dorset you go to all the time and across the street is the new 7 Brew coffee shop.
Maybe if we mock the iPhone enough, they'll stop autocorrecting words with other words that are on the opposite side of the keyboard. Or mistype letters with the letters just next to them.
iPhone is laughing stock. A neverending comedy of "There is no track named 'Call Mom' in your Apple Music library."
The photos I get on my iPhone are worse with every generation. Can anyone tell me if the photos are any good on these new ones? The hardware is fine I'm sure it's the post processing that destroys the image.
The 16 was a significant downgrade in quality due to over-processing. The hardware is actually improving, you just unfortunately need to use a third-party app to get access to the raw photos.
I haven’t upgraded since 2020 and I still don’t have a good reason to. My iPhone 12 still runs great. I use a real camera for photography. Other than the cameras, what has meaningfully improved over the last 6 years?
I'm still on an iPhone 11 that I bought second-hand a few years ago when the iPhone 15 was the newest. The battery life isn't great which is the only thing tempting me to upgrade, but I'll still put that off as long as possible.
Other than the battery I have no complaints. It's a phone. I can make calls, send texts, browse the web, check maps, take photos. What more do I need? Why waste money?
I can't even tell the difference between newer iPhone models. Why do people upgrade every year? What's the point?
Yea I just swapped my jogging/beach iPhone from an Xr to an iPhone 12 and wow, it's so much better than the Xr and pretty much as good as my "proper" phone, an 17Pro. It's got 4G RAM instead of 12G but it performs almost as well. Xr->12 is a huge leap in performance and I noticed it straight away. But the 12 against the 17 is much harder to see the difference. Less redraw of icons on the main screen is the primary thing I've noticed.
It's their in-house cellular modem for 2G/3G/4G/5G.
No details on satellite comms, but the predecessor C1X also handles satellite communication and competitor Qualcomm also does satellite comms on the same silicon, so I'd say yes.
I wonder how this works in tandem with the Computational Image Pipeline?
From Apple: "Apple Reference Image provides users with an unalterable reference photo, visually confirming what the sensor saw at the moment of capture."
The pixels that arrive in the final image have already been significantly altered from what the sensor saw: demosaicing, noise reduction, Deep Fusion, artificial bokeh, etc. Is the signature anchored to raw sensor readout (making the reference a de-mosaiced digital negative, with all CIP processing deliberately left outside the trust boundary), or to the CIP's emitted image (in which case what does 'unalterable' actually protect against)? If it is the latter, then Apple are essentially saying some forms of computational (and ML) manipulation are acceptable in a signed capture, so long as it is their manipulation.
Looking forward to the photo samples with the variable aperture. If it's something you can manually set (with the Camera app or third party), that would be neat. The miniaturization of this mechanical piece is really quite wild.
While it is a cool technical advance to see, its use case is probably niche. One of the biggest things people say about photography is lighting. In general, if you can get more photons onto your imaging plane, you will have a better picture. This is why phone cameras, despite advertising 100s of MPs, still fall short. For the same field of view and capture conditions, fewer photons are collected because phone sensor sizes are much smaller. This is a physical limitation that cannot be overcome.
Now given that they already have a lower photon budget, you now want to add aperture control, which when stopped down physically reduces the amount of light from the scene that reaches the sensor. Thus you need to compensate for these lost photons somehow, so gain will probably have to increase quite a bit, but then you get noisier, grainier photos. This then leads to the suspicion that you will need some sort of AI denoising or computational processing to recover some of that lost image quality. Though of course you can comp in other way such as exposure time (they can make big wins here with their stabilization) and tons of lighting.
Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field because again smaller sensor size thus smaller focal length etc. Most images at their lower f stop is already in focus. So the ability to reduce aperture or simulate shallow DOF is trying to give users more of the creative control that larger sensor cameras naturally have (need to manipulate because of their larger sensor size) and doesn't make much sense to me.
>Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field because again smaller sensor size thus smaller focal length etc. Most images at their lower f stop is already in focus. So the ability to reduce aperture or simulate shallow DOF is trying to give users more of the creative control that larger sensor cameras naturally have (need to manipulate because of their larger sensor size) and doesn't make much sense to me.
Totally agreed. I wonder if it will make 180-degree shutter angle video easier to achieve. The only way to achieve this on current iPhones during the day is using a pretty strong ND filter.
The iPhone 18 Pro main camera is f/1.48, which is half a stop wider than the f/1.78 main camera on the 17 Pro. An f/1.48 fixed aperture would probably not be ideal (less depth of field, more revealing of lens aberrations) so there is a real light gathering advantage to the variable aperture.
>Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field
Fairly deep. You can easily see background blur on a modern iPhone camera if you focus on something close. The very fact that the cameras all have variable focus shows that depth of field isn't as deep as all that. The extra depth of field from a narrower aperture could certainly be useful in some cases, such as landscapes. Here's a question for your favorite LLM:
"If I am shooting an iPhone 17 Pro main camera, what aperture would I theoretically need to get perfect focus from 1.5 meters to infinity, assuming a CoC suitable for a 12MP shot?"
Answer: about f3.2 if you manage to focus at the optimum hyperfocal distance.
>which when stopped down physically reduces the amount of light from the scene that reaches the sensor
As you say, this is only the case if you can't increase the exposure time to compensate. In daylight you will often have plenty of latitude to do so, even without image stabilization. Typical daylight shutter speeds at f/1.78 can be around 1/1000 at base ISO, so there is plenty of room to increase exposure time by 2-3 stops in those conditions.
Is anyone else intrigued by the $129 "panel of over 50 biomarkers, aimed at enhancing preventive health insights?" This was mentioned in the Apple Health segment. [0] I checked out Quest's website and there wasn't an obvious match. [1]
Yes, that felt very bizarre and glossed over. The specific details the speaker gave made me feel like it was a weird product placement, but like, _why_? Why would this multi-trillion-dollar behemoth needs to strike a brand deal with Quest?
My wife just preordered an 18 pro. She’s the family photographer and is still on a 128gb iPhone 12, so it’s time for an upgrade and she fell in love with the cherry color.
She bought the 12 instead of the more appropriate 12 pro years ago because she loved the purple that she couldn’t get with a 12 pro.
It's also because, until Apple's C-series models, they would've had to use Qualcomm modems which had a percentage-based royalty, and Apple would likely need a new contract for usage in Macs, so may had to pay even more. Even with their own modems they still have to pay Qualcomm's patent royalties, so it's likely just don't want to do that on devices which can cost over $10k today.
Ok so another “better” smartphone. To me it is very hard to get excited about the new smartphones. It really seems they have nothing new. I mean you have Apple Pay on any old iPhone and the software is more or less the same, the battery more or less the same…there is really nothing new. I am going to get a 12k or 16k camera to solve the “camera” issue and that would be it to avoid buying better iPhones every x years.
45 hours of video playback is insane?! Is this accurate, because if it is I will sell my phone and buy this. Normally my samsung discharges in about 12 hours or less when I'm out, not even watching 12 hours of video.
"On iPhone 18 Pro Max, five minutes of wired charging provides around seven hours of video playback"
Materially impactful feature holy moses! I can plug it in, brush my teeth and I'm set for the work day.
iOS video playback is pretty highly optimised and hardware-assisted, though, right?
Not sure you can really extrapolate non-video battery life from video battery life. I have an ageing iPad and I can get a couple of hours of video when the battery is at 30%, but it would be gone in 45 minutes if I was browsing.
Depends on which video codec. If it’s the most efficient one that has dedicated silicone embedded in the chip, it’s going to work great.
Web browsing is typically significantly harder on power. Plus these benchmarks usually mean in a perfectly dark room with the backlight at close to zero.
I don't know why we even have this event anymore. There's a new iPhone every September. It's incrementally better than the last iPhone. Phones keep getting more expensive while doing basically the same thing for some reason. Just buy whatever is out when you need a new phone.
I bought an iPhone 11 in 2019 I think? It last until 2 years ago when I limped along until the iPhone 16 Plus. I like the big screen area. The premium for Pro isn't worth it to me. I hope to get another 3 years out of it.
What I would like is an iPhone with Touch ID as an option and no, I don't mean the small one (SE?). I want a big screen. Put the Touch ID on the back of the phone like the samsung Galaxy did.
I literally hate Face ID with a passion and it's a massive accessibility issue for people with visual impairments.
No amount of slightly better CPU and camera is going to get me to upgrade every year anymore.
If you have to hold your phone closer to your face because of poor eyesight, Face ID will constantly fail. So you have this dance of having to pull it away to get Face ID to pass when required. Touch ID just works.
we’ll be waiting a while. The last Mini was iPhone 8 sized, when I considered anything larger than the 5 to be too much.
The Mini thus, undersold, because if you were fine with the 8 then iPhones of that size were still available (2nd Gen SE). Nobody bought: So Apple thinks theres no market.
It was smaller than the iPhone 8. It was slightly thicker (0.01"), shorter (by 0.27") and narrower (0.13"). And it had a bigger display despite being overall smaller. It was bigger than the 5, though.
I did, however, take a series of photos comparing the Mini to the SE- and the packaging of the 6 (I think I gave the phone away but still had the box).
The SE was the one that shared the 8's dimensions, the Mini was smaller than both. That Mini appears to be in a case, so the comparison photos aren't as useful as they'd be otherwise.
(Also, it looks like I couldn't do arithmetic earlier or typo'd the number, the Mini is 0.12" narrower, not 0.13").
I'm not sure I understand how you think the mini is in a case from those photos.
Maybe because it's the dark version of the phone you can barely make out the shiny apple logo, but it's there, you can see the metal edge of the phone.
It's not in a case.. obviously, that would be a stupid comparison.
Fair, zooming in I guess I can see that. You may want to correct the label on the photo though, it shares dimensions with the 5 but you've clearly photographed an SE (original, it turns out, which was part of my confusion since you switched at some point from talking about the 2nd gen to the 1st gen) not an iPhone 5.
No, I was comparing the size difference of the 5 (and lineage) to the 6 (by way of case) and Mini.
"SE" is a nondescript product line and the only physical differences are the tone of the chassis and a stamp; it's a fair representation of the size of a 5.
Always seemed like a marketing issue on Apple's part. People have different opinions when they actually see and handle the Mini. Apple appended so many "Pro" and "Max" names to everything which ended up creating a "status symbol" that was contrary to the actual needs of the consumer to have a more reasonably sized phone. "Fablets" weren't particularly popular for that reason, and Apple still managed to lead people down this road.
The mini was released six months after the SE2 was released, which many SE1 owners holding out for a new smaller iPhone had already migrated to. Then Apple presented the mini in a joke-y manner in the keynote, didn’t do any publicity afterwards, and neither did the carriers (because the mini was lower-margin for them I presume). Lastly, the iPhone 12 gen had particularly bad battery life, which also hurt the mini. With today’s battery improvements, it would be much better (as demonstrated by the iPhone Air’s good battery life). Apple could at least have taken the option to make the “e” line mini-sized.
An updated 13 Mini with USB-C and modern chipset would be fantastic. That would get me to upgrade. My hope is that Apple decides the world needs an iPhone Mini once in a while, just not a new one every year.
My contention is every 5 years release a mini spec with hardware bumps. Everyone jumps in and everyone upgrade. It only has the larger size space spec.
Rinse and repeat.
If you have a "known" or "expected" cycle, people can rely on that.
I really liked my iPhone 12 mini. But Apple also makes a lot of money from app sales, so I wonder if there’s a connection between screen size and app purchases.
Maybe users with larger screens spend more time in apps and are therefore more likely to buy apps or make in-app purchases. The more screen real estate people have, the more they might engage with apps, which could translate into higher spending.
Same diagonal doesn’t mean same size. The Duo is also much thicker (the camera plateau in particular) and heavier, and the front screen is so wide (a good bit wider than the Pro Max) that it’s hardly suited for one handed use.
Me too. Everyone who sees my phone loves it, and I always share a nod with my fellow mini owners. I really don’t want a huge phone and it is still more than fast enough (a 12 at that!)
iPhones got Good Enough at least 6 years ago. Same with macbooks.
There are endless posts on HN about how Macs are good for LLMs. Somoene is running some model on their Mac for local inference.
What the posts dont mention is how unusable that experience is with dogshit slow tokens/second. To make a local model usefull you need to run the highest parameter models at 100+ tok/sec, otherwise you are just better off paying for cloud inference. So either all those people are dumb as hell, or Apple is doing clever advertising. And I personally have more faith in the tech sector.
Did they just announce the ultimate solution to image authenticity online?
Instead of proving some image on some platform is not AI or severely edited, we can simply prove it was original by verifying unforgeable signature made by a camera / microphone baked into each image produced by it.
And of course in future it could be done for video and audio! This would be absolutely HUGE!
> that image shared online is original and unedited?
The image data the sensor physically receives passes through a ton of processing steps before the image lands in your phone. If there is some watermarking/signature doing on, on the image, it'd be that the device at that moment capture that data, not that it's not AI, or not edited, or "truthful" or whatever. That's still an unsolved problem to figure out.
From an Android perspective we have the new upcoming Snapdragon which is going to be more powerful and more efficient. Just for anyone thinking of switching though I share that :)
They’re not. They’re both playing the same ARM mobile chip game though and recent Qualcomm chips have been decent. Just a pity about their weak software support
I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world:
> Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with Apple Reference Image, powered by the new sensor in the Main camera that can sign every pixel it sees. When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image.5 Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image, like a digital negative, to visually compare the two assets and determine if any edits were made. APIs are available in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27 for third-party apps to enable viewing of these reference images.
Can't I just point my camera at an AI generated image? And it will get the stamp of authenticity?
It would be great if they could use the LiDAR scanner to sign a depth map of the scene in front of the camera. It would show if you photographed a flat image.
The sensor already uses phase detection autofocus. You can create a depth map out of it. iPhone X used its dual cameras and that phase data for depth maps.
How? Is this for every image taken, or does one need to take a second photo? Or is it "in theory phase detection hardware would let you make a depth map"
The 'ol "analog hole". Never been able to patch that gap.
Yes, if your adversary can generate a high-fidelity 3D moving replica of a scene, they can deceive you that it’s real. But can they really?
Images that are meant to be 2d (E.g. a photo of something on paper) isn't going to look 3d. I guess this approach will just have to let anything flat through?
They could use the camera aperture to take a second photo and calculate blur.
And what if you take a picture across a IR-filtered window?
Then you won’t be able to prove it was a genuine photograph? That sounds like the right failure mode.
Pretty sure it does that already.
That's a cool idea.
If that became popular, the AIs would learn how to generate a realistic depth map along with any generated image.
How would that work? I thought the premise here is that you can fool the apple camera by taking a (very carefully aligned) picture of a still image (printed out).
A depth map from the apple camera (again, signed) would show that the entire image had the same distance from the camera.
You're right. I think my comment above doesn't make sense - it wouldn't help in this case.
The photos are cryptographically signed in the apple image pipeline so it's not as simple as just AI generating something. That said, I can't see how this is any different to all the other times we have embedded crypto keys in consumer hardware where eventually someone finds a way to extract the key and the whole thing is busted open.
Nobody has breached the Secure Enclave, not sure it’s doable without investing millions in direct circuit manipulation. Seems good enough
Given the whole private cloud bit, I am assuming they keep the private keys server side and never let them out.
How would the server know that the request is coming from a real iPhone?
This is a pretty standard application of trusted computing and can be done entirely on the iPhone. A server would only possibly be needed for anonymization (while retaining key revocation capabilities if a key does end up leaking), but there are serverless ways to do even that (TPMs have supported these for a while now).
It wouldn't, but you could validate that a particular picture was created at a particular time, and had not changed, for example, especially with metadata that you may not want to share but that establishes certain parameters like gps coordinates. A lock, rather than an end-to-end pixel signature, which shows what was contemporaneous rather than exact provenance. If an event happened on day 0000-00-00 00:00:00am, but your photo was taken at some other time, it casts doubt.
I think a big part of validation for things like these are just "could it have been modified since Z event happened", because Z was not something people paid attention to before.
That's just a timestamping service then, not a content provenance/authentication scheme. Timestamping has been a solved problem for years; certificate authorities offer this, or you could just throw a hash onto any sufficiently trusted blockchain.
Nothing prevents anyone from opportunistically pre-generating and timestamping millions of permutations of fake kompromat and then selectively revealing the one that turns out to be useful after the fact.
You could charge per attestation, but the economics of that don't look great; you could demand publication of the image itself before attestation, but that would obviously not fly for most use cases out of privacy concerns.
I think there's a chain of trust. The sensor signs raws, and the private cloud takes signed raws, does minimal processing so they're at least coherent, and re signs that output (maybe even including the original signed raw as well in the image file).
That's a good point, You might still be able to trick the cloud to sign your photos, but that's something they could patch in updates without losing control of the key. They could have the server only sign photos taken on the latest ios version.
And honestly you could have a similar antitampering oracle that was at least obscured, in terms of "we've detected tampering but won't tell you how or why", which is frustrating but I have to imagine that 99.9%+ of images are clean.
> generate a realistic depth map along with any generated image.
There are already pretty good depth map generation algorithms (for a decade or so) which works on 2D images.
Generate the image, feed it to a depth map generator, viola.
However, you can't get it signed by the sensor itself. That'd be hard.
Even simpler, a 3D printed relief with an image "stamped" on it, now you effectively have a 3D image.
…and the PDAF data will show how shallow it is.
... don't make it so shallow then. Perfectly possible in a consumer-friendly 3D printer for a face or even human body if you have lots of time for the prints.
You’re well on the way to 1:1 replicas at this point. Next you’ll need to match the thermal signature and the exact weather in the sky for the time at that location.
Then take and sign a one-second video and you’re adding a few orders of magnitude of complexity again.
but what are we really trying to solve here. you're suggesting a helluvalota work for what purpose?
Sounds like Rincewind's spell from the Octavo.
One can 3d-print the AI generated image and photograph that. /s
that's an authentic photo, not the subject/image, the photo is authentic.
It will look like you took a picture of a screen or print out
People have constructed video walls so high resolution they can film TV series in front of them and to an audience it's indistinguishable from a real set. It's extremely cost-effective for things like space fantasy that needs lots of exotic-looking backdrops, apparently.
It may not be in reach for you and I - but within reach of anyone with the budget to run a 'bot farm'
The high resolution video wall is quite simple. The hard part and why this has not been done earlier is that for filming, they had to synchronize the rendered background with the movement of the camera.
Movement is solved by tracking the camera's position and projecting the background from there.
Proof of captured image with hardware-based-attestation can be increased by adding extra information besides the RGB channels, like depth mapping (which a projected screen wouldn't be able to fake), and eventually light field recording (plenoptic imaging, e.g. Lytro).
also no, even in the high rez video walls its still possible to tell. maybe to an "audience" no but there are lots of fundamental flaws with video walls that make them not the same as filming it for real. all of those flaws show up in the final image and could be detected.
things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.
case in point, outside of a few specific niche cases like the mandalorian, that virtual production video wall thing is not actually being used all that much because of the amount of post shoot cleanup required to fix all those issues, it wasnt actually that much cheaper and its not really better either. especially when you factor in how hard it is to shoot that way.
> things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.
Pre-AI fake videos sidestep this sort of issue by lowering the video quality.
Add some motion blur, some camera shake, some poor lighting, the camera being slightly out of focus, and make the video 720p instead of 4k.
If they’re spending millions on faking an image, okay fine. That’s clearly not the security model intended for this feature though.
How large and pixel dense does a display need to be for it to convincingly fill an image sensor?
I suspect it’s significantly less than millions.
Stamp only proves you did the photo and probably some metadata like when where etc.
It helps but doesn't solve credibility issue.
The credibility comes from who took the photo. The next logical and easy step is for this metadata to flow to the user agent. I'll know that it was taken by a legit journalist photographer. And id not, I can have my user agent make it fuzzy or replaced with a kitten photo.
I think this is where we are headed. This feature seems useless on it's own since someone will eventually find a way to extract the key from the iphone and sign any image. But if they could make it so every iphone uses it's own key and the photos show "Taken by xyz" and it's linked to their icloud or identity somehow. That way images shared around will still be able to be linked to a source that you can choose to trust and the viewer can know it wasn't modified from what that person shot.
Then we might move to an age where photos which were not signed by someone will be treated as fake.
You may have forgotten that the world is driven by screenshots, and so a screenshot of a picture with the `(X) Verified by Apple to be Joe Schmoe` tacked on will be just as good as real verification for a lot of people.
What we need is almost something like the classic "press C+A+D to log in" or the idea of "above the browser pane"... something an image cannot show you unless it's legit. Perhaps a personal thumbprint icon that is different for each viewer, so you know its your device telling you that something is real and not just some mock fake thing?
I don't think we'll treat them as fake but they would probably undergo more scrutiny - perhaps in a crowd-sourced manner that provides an overall score of probable legitimacy.
Phones all have hardware security modules with keys stored inside. That will absolutely be in use for this new feature.
You actually think the Secure Enclave is useless.
Right. All of your pictures will include identifying information. Same will happen for LLM generated text.
what is it missing then?
I bet there exists data from the 3 cameras to represent some depth to the image.
Yes.
> I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world
Congrats to Apple achieving nation-wide tracking, embedding some kind of yellow dots[1], but this time this time this is based on strong cryptography and non-removable, targeting people who don't use AI under the slogan "we are fighting AI fakes", but people still "love the feature".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
Are the yellow dots not opt in?
If you have a colour laser printer, not only are the tracking dots not opt in, but there is no way to opt out.
I meant the metaphorical iphone ones
On the opposite side, this read to me like there was so much image processing going on in the background and off device that they felt like they needed to prove that there was a real image backing the creation, and that it was not all AI. It really begs the question of what the extent is of image processing.
The iphone image pipeline is mostly just playing with exposure and color, things that we widely regard as fair game in editing. Where the line was crossed was magic eraser and reframe where the iphone is straight up making objects in the image.
there is definitely some generative pixel stuff in the iOS pipeline as i've noticed garbled deepdream-esque letters when zooming before
That could be a result of a failed exposure stack. Phone sensors and lenses suck for light gathering so they have to take multiple photos and merge them together to create one that's less noisy. Occasionally you get artifacts where the merge failed.
It's still distinct from actual AI generation imo.
> Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with Apple Reference Image, powered by the new sensor in the Main camera that can sign every pixel it sees.
Will this also work with third-party camera apps like ProCam?
https://www.procamapp.com/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/procam-5/id6787737491?mt=8
Not available in EU. The reason Siri AI and other iOS features are not available in the EU is the issue of Apple not opening up the same API for other apps. Therefore I think it might be the same case here, which would mean that third-party camera apps wouldn't be compatible.
The weakness of this is that a person can take a picture of a high resolution screen or print.
We really need Apple to open up true depth APIs to make forgery non trivial.
I don’t know too much about image processing, but my intuition tells me that distinguishing a photo of a 3d scene from a photo of a photo of a 3d scene is a much easier engineering problem than distinguishing it from an AI-generated diffusion. So even just reducing the problem to the former is still a worthy accomplishment.
Agree with the weakness, but the benefit of provenance is still there. You can't tell if the picture that person took is of an AI image, but there's some value in saying "I took this" and being able to prove it.
I hope future social media presents this metadata so if someone claims a photo is from the BBC, it actually gets checked against the keys the BBC sign their photos with.
How does this actually work though?
1) I see a photo online and doubt it's provenance
2) I contact the photographer and ask to see their cloud image (???!)
2a) I borrow someone's mac to download the image (.jpg?) and it can be verified on that?
Ideally it’d be linked to public key on a DNS txt record or similar, and trustworthy clients (including social media apps) show the domain linked to the photo.
Yes, this is really a "Pro" feature, while C2PA exists, not many consumer products have it, iPhone will be the game changer for reporters.
Reporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc...
The problem is real, but this solution seems to not really solve it in any practical sense.
You want to do all that, then still can prove the picture is authentic. The editing history show what had been changed compare to the previous version, from the color adjustment to blur areas... it's not about preventing editing, it's about proving the authenticity when needed.
> The editing history show what had been changed compare to the previous version, from the color adjustment to blur areas...
That's not a thing. Straight from Apple:
"When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image. Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image"
So this only helps prove anything if you can share the original, unedited image. You can share it alongside an edited one, but you must also be comfortable sharing the unedited original if you want to prove you own an iPhone 18 Pro. Er, I mean prove it's "authentic"
Now I think C2PA had allowances for what you're talking about, but that also ended up resulting in it being easier to break.
Reporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc...
So, 90% of photojournalism outside of the major cities, then.
you could do edits like crops in a way that preserves the signature using ZK proofs
I wish next year for videos too.
We really need it for journalism. Otherwise we will not know what is real and what fabricated with ai.
This feature is not enabled in the eu
lol, called it month ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138302#49142011
Feels like the only ones who'd benefit from this are AI companies that are afraid of tainting their post 2023 datasets with their own slop.
On the other hand if this becomes mandated by law I can see it become treacherous for endusers.
It also sounds pretty useful for anyone involved in a lawsuit to be able to present photographic evidence again. I’m sure GenAI is already a big headache for forensics, and enforcing AI watermarks will clearly not be bulletproof.
Will it ever work until a TPM like module is directly integrated into camera sensor? Older attempts of Nikon and Canon got broken, same had happened with C2PA implementation for Android - if it gets anywhere close to CPU it is insecure.
Yes, presumably there will be a cat and mouse game until the entire system including all peripherals has been brought into the trusted computing base, either physically or logically (usually with secured/authenticated communication). This has been the case for all applications of trusted computing.
Security is never a binary property, however, and can usually be better expressed in terms of how expensive it would be to subvert a given mechanism. "This image is either authentic or would have cost at least $x to fake" is already much more useful than nothing at all even without $x trending to infinity.
Canon's original high end digital models had this as a feature, that your images could be digitally signed in-camera based on raw sensor data. Primarily for law enforcement. Obviously a far broarder use case, now.
So does that mean only the main sensor can do this ?
That smells like "show don't tell", but who knows.
That's more of a software feature..
A mobile phone.. an internet communicator.. a music player.. don't you get it? well, steve, actually 18 years later it's a .. camera
*Not available in EU or China.
I wonder what the common thread is.
> I wonder what the common thread is.
Regulation.
For China I would assume like other services, if there's some cloud involved, it should be on Chinese soil and accessible to China.
For EU harder to guess, but again the lock-in with "Private Cloud Computing" feels related.
It could be because a digital signature could be use to track without consent.
Nah, it’s an optional feature, so by using it you provide express consent. GDPR gives users more data ownership; GDPR does not stop you from choosing to do what you want with your data.
It’s likely DMA — Apple would be required to provide APIs for signing for 3rd party apps too.
Cynical take: A single photo to now consume up 50mb of cloud storage, adding to the demand for more data centers that supported the creation of this authenticity issue in the first place.
Finally. Android phones have been shipping with C2PA since last year, so it's great that the final holdout has capitulated, though with its own set of nonstandard tools.
https://c2paviewer.com/articles/samsung-galaxy-s25-c2pa
https://security.googleblog.com/2025/09/pixel-android-truste...
https://c2paviewer.com/supported-devices
The Android version is useless though, TBD if Apple can do better.
https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html
Indeed, on top of Google's implementation being a bad joke, it sounds like the C2PA specifications in general are a massive fail so far. https://arxiv.org/html/2604.24890v1
On the other hand, ignoring standards altogether is the wrong way to go because the ecosystem after capture won't be there.
How will this work against rehosted images on all the platforms people actually share photos from? It’s a good feature but many popular services apply metadata stripping and basic image adjustment before resharing. That seems like the place where people would actually want to verify authenticity.
It works for the author of the image who want to prove the authenticity, and the party that publishing the image who want to maintain the trust.
I would love to see some "pro" features hit the Pro or Pro Max. Something I've wanted for a while is the ability to have more than 2 active eSIMs; I think a dual modem would be really cool, maybe with some features targeting users in poor cell coverage/ spotty service areas.
Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD, and power a multi monitor setup with your iPhone Pro. macOS would be sick. Or (waterproof) exposed PCIE lanes so 3rd parties can integrate an ecosystem of backpacks like how Pi Hats work.
> Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD,
The old iPhone 17 Pro has USB 3.2 Gen 2, which is good for 10Gb/s.
You can already record 4K60 ProRes to an external SSD. This feature already existed for a year, so I assume you didn't actually need it?
> and power a multi monitor setup with your iPhone Pro. macOS would be sick.
I think you're looking for a MacBook Pro the size of an iPhone.
The MacBook Neo runs an A18 Pro phone chip. It's appears to be all there and somewhat ready to give us something like DeX [1].
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/app/samsung-dex
yes, and the fact that it runs a phone chip is the reason why it only has one 10Gbps USB-C port and the other only supports USB 2.0 speeds...
10Gbps is 12 times slower than the maximum bw of TB5.
You could argue most people wont need that speed, but most people don't need pro phone too.
Yes, and TB5 also uses around 10x as much power, around 4W rather than 0.4W for USB3, which would consume the majority of the sustained power budget of the entire phone.
Something else will drop the ball guaranteed.
Can you show me the workflow which uses this and has an iPhone as the bottleneck
Moving my videos from ip to my TB ssd ?
are these videos larger than the iphone SSD or TB SSD DRAM buffer and will need to drop to NAND erase/write speed?
No, but i dont understand your point ?
The point is, with your example the link speed of the iPhone isn't the limiting thing of your example. You'll likely be limited by the speed of your storage before you saturate that link.
I would like to see dual Thunderbolt ports on the iPad Pro. I wonder if Thunderbolt chips would even fit in a phone.
> I think a dual modem would be really cool, maybe with some features targeting users in poor cell coverage/ spotty service areas.
Can already do iMessage over satellite. Most “data” is download and I predict some satellite service that sends basic broadcasts (traffic, news, Text-to-speech podcasts) squeezed into a few mbps by pointing your phone at the sky (or a small cabled antenna for around the clock use). Would love to go carrier-less.
>Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD,
My iphone 16 pro max can do 4K ProRes HDR or Log at 120 FPS when plugged into a SSD. If I had more builtin storage I could do it without the SSD. If you don't mind more dongling you can also have an external display along with the external SSD.
Images that sync to mac photos app instantly via wifi rather than half day via icloud.
You can almost achieve this by setting a reminder to turn on "sync immediately" manually every single day (because Apple decided there should be no permanent or indefinite option, and went through the extra effort of making it timed simply for the sake of inconvenience).
I actually do this because it's the behavior I've wanted for years, and I care about it enough to go through the relentless annoyance.
I just don't understand why they wouldn't enable something p2p. We have handoff, screen mirroring, etc, but simple photo sync is impossible scientifically.
Apple Reference Image is the new "pro" feature.
*not so "pro" in EU and China
Well it apparently is so "pro" that it got regulated out of existence.
I am actually quite excited on this iPhone 18 Pro. Seems to pack a a lot of exciting stuff. 2nm A20 Pro, C2. I wish they have N2 but I guess not. 2nd Generation Vapour Chamber. I thought I would have to wait another generation because Apple like to use new product features for two generation before moving on. And it seems this Vapour Chamber along with other heat desperation features are much better built. Much better Camera. And larger battery. With 60W charging that finally matches or closes to a lot of Android phone has been doing.
Never thought they would do it all within one update. In terms of hardware that is pretty much everything I wanted other than Silicon Battery.
The only thing that need radical change is iOS.
> The only thing that need radical change is iOS.
Please, not again.
– Sincerely yours mobile developer
Introducing SwiftUI2: Every UI is a simple prompt, and all the underlying code is generated.
I mean, isn’t that how like 90% of new SwiftUI apps are created these days? Just telling an AI what you want? Apple already can’t keep up with the review.
If they can't keep up, that means that they're not using AI to do reviews
Knowing how stingy Apple is, they’re probably still trying to get the expense approved.
That’s partially why they’re in the mess they’re in with AI. The CFO wouldn’t let them buy enough GPUs to train their models.
They needed all that money for more important expenses, like share buybacks, instead.
Besides a better camera what all this along with the past generations have so exciting ? I just fail to see a reason to upgrade. Maybe I am getting old?
Because of a very, very last minute AppleCare replacement (like, 35 months after purchase), I have a year-old iPhone 14 Pro.
I figured there was nothing Apple could introduce yesterday that would turn my head, but the 40+ hour battery life AND the adjustable aperture on the camera are, by themselves, making me consider it. It'll all come down to what discounts or carrier subsidies are available to me, and what the trade-in value is for my phone. But as a shutterbug who travels, those two things are VERY interesting.
Heat desperation?
I don’t think Siri is sentient yet.
I don’t understand why the Max version doesn’t have C2. Maybe supply constraints but I doubt it.
It could be as simple as Apple committed to a certain volume with Qualcomm before they were certain they could get mmWave working so they have to keep using Qualcomm modems somewhere while they burn down the commitment.
> The only thing that need radical change is iOS.
Personally iSO 26 is so unbelievably glitchy, it's only not embarrasing because you know others spent $$$ on the same thing so everyone pretends it's fine.
They seem to have ironed most of the problems now. You can disable liquid glass if you hate it, and as a result iOS 26 is nearly as good as the previous version. I’m running it on my iphone12. I hated it when it first came out. But it seems fine now.
I don't know how you're using it. The most broken (so it needs to be restarted sometimes) is Podcasts, but Music, Safari, Settings etc have glaring visual glitches too.
Well, it might help that on day 1, I turned off the liquid glass effects in accessibility settings. At first there were several small layout / UI bugs that came from turning liquid glass off. But it seems fine now.
I don't use the apple podcasts or music apps. (Overcast and Spotify for me). I haven't run into any serious problems.
I'm not sure if you're an iphone user or did you root your iphone?
It's NOT possible to turn LG off in iOS 26. It is possible to reduce transparency and motion (i tried with and without enabling those and it's broken anyway).
Oh my mistake. I just reduced transparency and motion. I’m not surprised that some things are still broken. Liquid Glass seems like a promotion ticket someone cashed at the expense of all iPhone users.
iPhone 15 Plus:
I have Reduced Transparency, Reduce Motion, and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions, all enabled. You have to have Liquid Glass set to Clear for Reduce Transparency.
I do use the Apple Podcasts app, but YouTube Music and DI.FM Radio apps for music.
I never see any rendering issues / glitches, and the UI is smooth & snappy.
iphone 17 pro:
0. none of the options you describe really disable LG and the glitches it introduced.
1. you don't need to switch LG to clear to reduce transparency. you can use reduce transparency with any LG theme. you just need to reenable "reduce transparency" after changing the theme. why? ask Tim.
2. in Podcasts you can tap between Home and Library to see the selection jank around the middle New tab. happens every time.
and if you tap to change episode sorting oldest to newest, then change it back, it 100% of the time won't ever change back again, unless you exit and enter the show again.
and semi daily when switching to it from lock screen the now playing layout will be garbled, either just the bottom card or the entire now playing screen is empty (at which point i usually restart the app).
and of course janky layout shifts and adjustments when switching between screens like search, show, episode, transcript, etc (which additionally also all involve sliding motion despite reduce motion + prefer fade on, but i will let that slide)
the list goes on
Really? iOS Guided Access is bugged on the whole 26, and I have been encountering system freeze many times on 26, never before on any other versions.
27 is really a lot better, even on an iPhone 13.
Yet that’s still just repairing what they previously broke. I still can’t listen to music AND listen to a voice memo or a video clip.
The things we need to know most, RAM and Memory Bandwidth, are unfortunately missing from the release. Their absence doesn't bode well.
What do you do with your phone that requires you to know the memory details? Genuine question, I have absolutely no idea how much memory my iPad or phone have and don’t see why I would need to know
Running not-particularly-useful local models.
To know what you're getting. No further reasons needed.
I want to know how it compared to what I currently have.
I only care about it because I'm waiting for a MacBook Neo with more than 8gb of memory.
With the price of ram going up by 5x, I want to see our industry move in the opposite direction. Computers for regular people should go back to 4gb or even 2gb of ram, just to keep the prices sane. We should get software working well on those devices, just like it did a decade or two ago.
Small, memory efficient programs run better everywhere. It feels like theft to make consumers pay for our inefficient software. Electron / react on the desktop is such a rort.
Let's stop filling static websites with javascript. That should instantly reduce the overhead
>With the price of ram going up by 5x, I want to see our industry move in the opposite direction. Computers for regular people should go back to 4gb or even 2gb of ram, just to keep the prices sane.
Sure. Right along with Intel Core 2 Duo and Windows Vista.
Modern CPUs and memory, just less ram
I wonder how much we could reclaim just by going back to 32-bit pointers. If we're going back to 4GB it should be fine, right?
Yes and no. If I recall, 32 bit windows has a fixed allocation of 3gb for userland and 1gb for the kernel’s memory space. I think 32bit only really works well for memory sizes smaller than 4gb. It might not be worth it, given a lot of OSes are in the process of deprecating 32bit support.
I'm waiting for a software release for my iPhone 16 Pro Max that will let me plug in a dock that has an attached SSD, keyboard, mouse, and display, and an option to pop up on my phone to reboot into MacOS.
Also, if they make a neo 2 from the A19 with 12 GB that'd be cool.
You’ll be waiting awhile. iPads have had desktop M-series CPUs for ages now, and you still can’t run macOS on an iPad.
It’s just a software restriction. I’m sure they have macOS running on iPhones and iPads internally, probably both through a VM and natively. But it’s very Apple to block this use case.
I’m pretty sure the efficiency cores in the A20 Pro have more juice than the performance cores in my M1 Pro laptop.
sell another phone with "more than iPhone" and claim is better because "more X" right ?
Ok Bill.
People who actually care about their money often like to compare competing products and decide which one provides them the best value.
The amount of RAM doesn’t tell you anything about "the best value". Bad software with a large amount of RAM provides less value than highly-optimized one with a lower amount of RAM, for example. This was the whole advantage of the iPhone at the beginning: not a lot of RAM (meaning less energy needed) but a highly-optimized OS that works well even with that constrained environment.
> best value
> iPhone
Pick one.
Because I am buying a phone to use for the next 3 years and want to buy it based on the most important property of compute devices right now. I couldn't care less about the camera and the 13 random metrics that all look the same as every other camera announcement. I will happily take 96GB of RAM in my phone (and I know what that means) and would gladly allow you to make it 1.2mm thicker in the process.
You want a 96GB RAM phone and only plan to keep it 3 years? I cannot fathom the way some of you live. I have an iPhone SE from 2022 that I don’t expect to get rid of before at least 2-3 more years, meaning it would have been in use for 6-7y at minimum. And it’s perfectly comfortable to use, I’m not forcing myself in any way to keep it longer. And you’re talking about wanting a ridiculously expensive phone and only have it for 3 years? That sounds so wasteful and unnecessary
I couldn’t agree more. I’m typing this on an iPhone 12, bought new 6 years ago. My phone still feels snappy. And it gets me through a whole day with 60%+ battery remaining. The only real complaint I have is that I only have the 64gb model. I need to delete things every time a software update comes out because of how bloated modern software has become. But the hardware is fantastic.
I have no idea how much ram my phone has. So long as apps run well, why would I care?
It's about multitasking. RAM is the upgrade trigger for me. I'm so exhausted by developer introduced bloat in software such that almost every app fully reloads when switching. Devs ruin multitasking every few years until another RAM upgrade.
You're missing the important bit in the GP comment:
> the most important property of compute devices right now
Memory didn't matter when iPhone 12 was released, but these days it determines which local LLMs you can run on device. That's the point of that comment.
People sued apple for selling a device with no mention of ram and then apple released the next gen saying "this has more ram, you need to upgrade to it to use the features we advertised for last gen."
How about avoiding that scenario again? Is that a good enough reason? Being a diligent, informed consumer?
If you keep a phone in good condition, the resale / trade-in value isn’t insignificant after 2 years.
The net price for a new phone then can be considered a relatively inexpensive hobby when looked at from a per week basis.
I’m being hyperbolic. Sharing the amount of RAM seems table stakes with the current demand and failing to disclose it seems like the answer wouldn’t be positive.
What on earth would you do with an iOS device that has 96GB of RAM? You realize the last generation (i.e, the most powerful consumer phone in the world today) had 12 GB of RAM? You feel the need for eight times that amount?
Number go up, I guess? A lot of people derive great satisfaction from ever larger (or sometimes smaller) number. But, uh, 8X is probably too much, need to spread that out over a few generations.
They obviously want to run AI models on their phone.
Very obviously you get a Mac Studio for that, not a phone. (Oh, the 96GB Studio is almost $6000, you counter? Imagine how much it would cost in a phone form factor).
You can't possibly expect Apple to take that market segment seriously.
In theory it sounds alright, although in reality, the heat and power consumption make this less than ideal.
I am not sure single digit tk/s on weak model like ChatGPT OSS 20b @ Q3_K_M is going to be worthwhile.
Not to mention this has to be <0.01% of users who "want" to do this. The iPhone tooling would make it hard to even configure and spin up a local LLM.
> the most powerful consumer phone in the world today
According to what? (I don't disagree, just curious)
Based on supply chain leaks, it's pretty safe to assume 12 GB memory with up to 100GB/sec memory bandwidth at best.
The A19 Pro had 12 GB and was around 77GB/sec memory bandwidth for reference. If I was a betting man, I'd say the memory bandwidth on the A20 Pro is the same.
But they said the memory bandwidth was double the previous generation.
This is apple. They're the kings of "memory bandwidth is 2x... (within a very specific set of test cases)"
And here we are back to the crux. Sure would be nice if the released material was verifiable instead of "trust me shitstick"
Why? What do you do on your phone that makes you care about memory bandwidth?
in 2026? LLM performance, for one.
everything. Faster memory, fast processing, making everything smoother, and you can idle faster.
If I didn't dream it, I think their presentation said something like 50% increase so you should be quite right probably around ~110GB/sec
Rumors suggested a wider memory bus on A20 Pro.
The things we need to know most, RAM and Memory Bandwidth, are unfortunately missing from the release. Their absence doesn't bode well.
Since 1984, Apple has targeted regular people, not spec nerds. You're not the market.
Regular people optimise for silly numbers too.
Threadcount, Watts, cubic inches: different products use different misleading measures.
12GB of ram and double the memory the bandwidth over the previous model.
The non-max 18 Pro getting 17 Pro Max battery is quite a great leap, no? This is actually the most surprising announcement today, given how Duo was anticipated.
Yes longer battery life if the main benefit nearly every user experiences and appreciates
That’s certainly an iPhone, alright.
Apple basically need to release a new model every year to fit the phone upgrade cycle so I suppose it’s not that surprising to see one with so few compelling features. Maybe next year.
Incremental changes year/year to a mature product line means if you skip a couple years you get a BIG upgrade
> the most advanced camera in an iPhone
I mean, I can't remember the last time they DIDN'T say that. Variable aperture is kinda cool I guess. 256Gigs of storage basically means everyone's going to have to upgrade their iCloud storage monthly spend just to back this thing up. I've stopped sending my camera roll to iCloud just to save on space.
Apple events are full of these meaningless statements, which always drive me crazy. Of course it's the "best iPhone Apple has ever made." If it wasn't, then wouldn't I be better off buying an older model?
Just once I want the CEO to go up on stage and say “this year’s model isn’t all that great tbh”.
That’s the open for an actually amazing year.
I'd be quite happy with "It's not as powerful as last years model, but it has double the battery capacity"
I haven't been this excited since Dodge released their new Caravan... or Ubuntu released their new orange and purple UI...
> I've stopped sending my camera roll to iCloud just to save on space.
This is an interesting choice. Photos from my phone would literally be the last thing I ever turned off backup for.
To each their own...
Oh I back them up to Immich self-hosted. I just stopped paying Apple.
> Oh I back them up to Immich self-hosted. I just stopped paying Apple.
Which means this original comment is somewhat disingenuous: "256Gigs of storage basically means everyone's going to have to upgrade their iCloud storage monthly spend just to back this thing up."
Clearly there is another option (as evidenced by your own behavior). But let's not pretend that option is free, either.
*Everyone that wants an easy "blessed" path.
Naturally you don't run into folks who self-host Immich very often.
Agreed. The photo backup is so seamless. I’ve been documenting my electronics and other possessions for insurance purposes and in anticipation of a move. It’s been so easy to go around the house taking photos of serial numbers and such with the better camera on my phone. Then I grab my iPad and update the spreadsheet. Nothing needed to happen on my end, the photos are just there for my iPad to access and as later proof if I ever need it.
USB-C and the 5x lens made me switch to iOS.
Likewise the 6th gen iPad Mini is what I was waiting for to get a tablet to sketch.
Sometimes a device hits just right.
>I've stopped sending my camera roll to iCloud just to save on space.
how do you backup your photos when the phone gets full. I dont have a mac and the process is excruciating. Also the formats get messed up so some photos become unusable. I stopped taking 'live' photos because of this.
I self-host Immich on a ZFS pool of older drives I had lying around.
Not the parent, but Google Photos has been decent as a secondary backup. They even backup Live Photos now.
The two formats I've found that they don't back up accurately are rotated photos (if one's a stickler for "originals") and cropped screenshots (JPEG instead of PNG). Possibly the sidecar files for edits too.
Rotation data isn't included in the file, or it just doesn't display with the correct orientation?
Sometimes Google photos shows the wrong orientation for my pixel photos/videos but it's just a display issue.
There’s this MacOS native application called Image Capture, use it to backup 100GB of photos. I then partitioned the photo by year and 7zipped them with encryption.
You missed the salient details: "I dont have a mac"
Everything you stated to is useless to the person you replied.
Maybe he interpreted the "how do you backup" as a particular question directed to him, not a general one.
Is handled by Synology DS File app. Is what I've done for 6 years. I don't send photos to iCloud.
Camera quality actually topped out a decade ago or so, and now it's become all post-processing trends that define "best".
Not unlike the "Best jacket of the season" being the one that is most fashionable as opposed to the most functional.
This is not even close to true. I took a bunch of photos side by side with the iphone 13 pro and the 17 pro. The 17 pro was unmistakably much better, particularly on the telephoto, it wasn't even close. There was a very clear improvement in detail and sharpness, and not in a crunchy post processing way, the sensor is simply larger and higher resolution.
Now I think all the iphone cameras still suck compared to an actual camera, but the improvement over the last 10 years has been dramatic.
soon we'll have a like amount predictor connected with your personal assistant talking with your social media
You say that, but I've bought the non-pro iphones the last few generations (13, 15 currently) and consistently wanted a better camera, so this upgrade cycle I'll probably shell out for the 18 pro.
And it's not even that they said that, I get marketing spiel but one the actual phrases was, emphasis his, not mine:
"MASSIVE improvements in Camera". Where? Evolution, refinement, sure. Massive? Hm.
You can always buy the $2000 edition. Or give Apple the finger. I'm leaning toward the latter.
That's the iPhone 18, over here
Still on a 12 Pro Max, which I bought near the original launch. It is in need of its first replacement battery. I’m very curious to see how much snappier it feels with this next iOS release which is focused a bunch on performance; in addition to a new battery, since I believe my iOS is throttling performance given the health.
Still using my 12 Pro Max as well. Battery is still okay-ish on mine. Not good, but I don't have to actively worry about it. Will be looking forward to all the fancy new features when I replace it in 3-4 years
I still have my 11. The battery is garbage on it, but everything is still totally fine. Haven't upgraded to iOS 26 though...
11 Pro Max. First battery needs replacement but it's ok on iOS 27. I don't need or want a new phone.
I bought a 12 Pro Max around the time the 13s came out, still at 92% max battery capacity, and still feels very snappy. Every year I wonder if the new models are going to entice me to upgrade, and every year I find myself saying meh.
Changed my 14 PRO battery last week. See you @ iPhone 22
I still use a 13 Pro Max for travel. Incredible longevity. The only downside is it requires a battery pack to last a full day but those are slim and compact now. I intend to replace the battery soon since it still has 2-3 years left as a backup.
It will probably keep most of its value too, if hardware price inflation continues.
I use a 14 Pro Max and the battery capacity is down to 75%
13 Pro here. Just upgraded my battery. May go another year or two at this rate.
Always said that I didn't see a reason to upgrade once I had 5G UW
Yeah I tend to squeeze the life out of my Apple purchases. iPhone 4s -> 7 -> 12 Pro Max. And still on a 2017 MBP at home, running Sequoia via Open Core Patcher.
The only thing that’s interesting to me about this release are the “Reference Images”. Seems like it could be a genuinely useful feature, especially in a world of AI generated content. I wonder if a similar system exists in other cameras?
- tired of fitting all the 7 inch phones
- can I get a 5 inch phone please?
refurbished 13 mini for me
My iPhone 14 Pro already does everything I need. Honestly, I can't see what a newer phone could possibly do for me that this one doesn’t.
Nothing. I’m going to run my 13 Pro Max into the ground. I do find the “Reference images” interesting, but not so much in going to run out and buy one. Other than than it’s the same old “everything is better” marketing shtick
I'm finding it really hard to justify buying a new iPhone. They're so expensive these days for marginal improvements that seems if you're not an avid photo taker/media maker you don't get much back from.
It makes a lot more sense to purchase one if you consider their residual value when you sell it to upgrade later. A typical Android phone depreciates much more quickly than an iPhone. My three-year-old iPhone 15 Pro is still worth $500 or more on the open market--about half of what I spent. That's only $166/year.
The downside is that you need more money up front to purchase it.
TBH I don't think I've ever bought a new phone because there was something new and fancy that I could justify. Every phone I've bought has been because my previous phone stopped receiving software updates, or in the case of my Pixel 6a, had a hooped battery.
If you're an avid photo taker, you need to buy a Pixel Pro.
Then don't. Isn't the whole point of long support cycles that you can keep using your phone for 5 years +, if it serves you well? (typing this from an S22)
The marginal improvements add up over time. Most people upgrade every few years, amortized over a 3 year upgrade cycle it's not really that expensive.
Don't then. Just wait until you actually need a new phone before buying a new one
The 17 is 969 euros. The 18 Pro is 1479 euros. How can I justify the difference? I'm on 13 now and I wanted to get an 18 but since there is no such thing I will probably end up with the 17.
I'm still on a 12 pro. Was considering the 17 a couple months back, decided to wait for the 18 and now I'm in the same boat as you. The 18 just doesn't really seem worth the huge difference...
It was 969€. It's 1099€ now.
FNAC/Darty/Boulanger still sell it for 969. Maybe I should pull the trigger soon.
I was waiting for the standard iPhone, so it’s a shame it’s coming out next year.
Unless you’re using photos or videos like an expert, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to go for a heavy Pro anymore.
Since last year’s promotional display came equipped with the standard model, I just can’t find it appealing.
Ah, of course, since it has AI features, we’ll have to see how much the RAM difference matters, but
Could it be that Apple is going to put so little RAM in the standard model that they can’t really use AI well?
I hope you won’t go that far.
I don’t think you need to be taking “expert” photos to want some optical zoom.
I wish they’d put a zoom lens instead of a wide angle on the standard iPhone, but alas, you need a Pro for that.
> eSIM-only models deliver up to 36 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro and up to 45 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro Max.
That might convince me to upgrade. Not because I care about watching video for two days straight, but hopefully it means the battery is large enough that it'll last 5+ years before battery degradation becomes annoying.
I doubt any phone battery is lasting 5+ years. But I can say modern iPhones are pretty easy to swap the battery on. They designed it so the back plate gets removed to open the phone rather than the screen. No more risk of cracking the display.
>I doubt any phone battery is lasting 5+ years.
Just coming up to five years on mine and it is still at 87% capacity.
That is genuinely shocking to hear. You have to be like 3+ sd above the mean. Do you know how many charge cycles you have? I recall that most batteries need replacing after 300-500 cycles.
There's no way that's true. Otherwise everyone's phone battery would need to be completely replaced every 2 years
Edit: I just googled it. Apple claims that the iphone 17 should handle 1000 full charge cycles before reaching 80% capacity
My iPhone 14 Pro is almost 4 years old and at 65% capacity. I don't know how everyone else is (not) using their phones.
I’ve got a 14 Pro Max, used it extensively for four years and got mine at 81%.
I think you are the average case.
I follow the estimate that lipos lose 2-4% capacity per year without any use beyond recharging for safety. If the battery sees daily use that number gets a lot worse.
My guess is everyone else is the perfect mix of hardly any use and winning the battery lottery.
iPhone 11 coming up on 7 years old in December, still at ~85% capacity.
Really it mostly depends on how heavily you use it, and maybe to a lesser extent charging habits (charging slowly, not charging to 100%, etc).
I hear you, but the convenience of 30W charging is very hard to give up. The only downside is it damages the battery, which makes it harder to give up, which damages the battery more.
the convenience of the old usb charging brick that has been plugged in under my bed for 15 years is very hard to give up.
I have an iphone 13mini at 5 years and 81% capacity.
My 13pro is at 84% capacity, but in the last month or two it seems to lose charge much more rapidly than it used to. Probably the only reason I'll consider an upgrade.
Very jealous over here. I had a 12 mini whose battery dropped off a cliff just in time for the mini line to get discontinued.
Big phones are overrated.
You didn't replace the battery[0]?
0. https://www.ifixit.com/products/iphone-13-mini-battery
My iPhone 13 Pro will be 5 years old next month. Battery capacity at 82%. Does that count as lasting 5+ years?
The maximum capacity of my iPhone 17 pro is still at 100% after 192 charges, that's after 1 year of usage. The extra battery life does reduce the amount of charges I have to do so that helps with the battery life.
I'm not sure where the capacity will end up after 5 years, but I think my iPhone 14 pro was at less than 95% at this point. Apple refused to replace just the battery on that one because of a small crack in the screen.
Oh that's nice. I'd always see guides talking about glue with the screen and kinda spooked me out of it.
I took an iPhone SE generation three to Apple Store to replace battery and they broke the NFC functionality in a way that passed their simple diagnostic tool but failed to work in the real world. I had to go back and reset the phone and upgrade my IOS so they could troubleshoot it (the phone menu for setting appointments does not allow you to pick repair broke NFC funny enough) and they were nice enough to give me a new iPhone SE to replace we proved it was broken. But that was kind of worrisome and put me off any kind of Apple self repair for something they still make.
I think anything after the 16 regular or 17 pro becomes easy to repair. I feel you though, my first battery swap turned into a screen swap too.
The SE versions have a history of board level issues so I have been afraid to touch any of them.
With reason. That glue is a nightmare to deal with. I would not advise anyone start with iPhone repair.
I damaged my first iPhone repair even after multiple years of active hardware modification on other consumer devices. The older models really only go smooth if you have the Apple tools. A nice $149 of tool rental to swap the $50 part at home, rather than paying the $199 to get Apple to swap it for you. Odd how that math works out.
I'm on the iPhone 13 pro max since launch and my phone comfortable gets through an entire day of usage. (Given my usage is pretty light). If the battery fubars in one of the next years I wouldn't be upset, 5+ years of battery life is enough.
But I also don't see it failing me any time soon on battery. I think local AI models in a future iPhone could be an actual reason to upgrade.
I have a 12 Pro Max purchased at release, battery is now at 83% capacity. Still lasts all day and then some, rarely think how much I've got left on a charge.
I set up a shortcut to put me into low-battery mode once I hit 95%. Works a treat.
I have the same phone, also lasts about a day and a half.
How do you see the capacity?
My three year old 15 Pro is already down to 85% capacity.
My 15 pro bought on release is at 91% and 607 cycles, for more reference.
Meh I just replaced a battery in my 14 pro (and the charging port) for ~200 EUR. I didn't want to upgrade yet and I would not even be considering upgrading if the device had USB-C
Don't. Large iPhones are the deadweight of a ball and chain, and fits in no pockets. Next one will be the SE, and even if I buy an external battery, it's still lighter than the ingot Pro Max. Also you can buy one every 1.5 years.
Sadly my 14 pro has a crack in the lower right screen, and the tele lense has some issue with fixing lens position / focus (? I hear some clickering and it doesn’t focus). Otherwise I would just stay another few years with it, now I’m going to upgrade - and yeah I’ll stay with Apple. I have some devices quite a few years old by them and still working flawlessly.
I really don't care at all about phone models, I just want software to launch quickly.
Waiting 15 seconds for a simple app is just infuriating in this day and age. This is mostly on crappy app developers, but a lot of that falls on Apple for not having a rating system that encourages basic good app behavior.
Every bad app that I encounter, which sends advertising notifications, takes a long time to launch, etc. is dominated by 5 star reviews, somehow. The whole ecosystem feels broken.
(And I'm also really offended by how ugly, unpolished, and broken the Tahoe visual style is on iPhone. The whole thing feels like a buggy beta, something completely unworthy of Apple of the past. That it's still not fixed is an indication of the Apple of the future, unfortunately...)
I try and pick apps based on package size the rare time I look for some app. There are still apps out there made like they were 10 years ago (that probably haven't been updated in 10 years) where the package size is sub 10mb, sometimes sub 1mb. You get an app like that it is performant and will fly on any iphone really, and barely impact battery life in all likelihood.
Package size has very low correlation to launch time. The binary and assets are separate. Additionally some slow app launches are simply waiting for a network request or chain before the view controller renders.
Situational. But often these apps are doing something just using that standard ios ux library from the really old days, and they open almost instantly as a result as it was designed to work on an iphone 3gs.
In theory, sure, but in practice devs who care about package size correlate to those who care about launch times.
Maybe you need a new phone. Or a faster internet connection?
No I need better phone app developers. The fastest phone has the same issues. New phones are just as sluggish. And, it's a phone, there's not going to be fast networks everywhere, and a whole generation of poor developers was raised to believe that the network was always present and always fast.
And on the iOS side, Tahoe inserts all sorts of overdone, ridiculous animations that slow down phone interaction, but delaying presentation of
We are up to the iphone 18 now. The iphone is said to be about 50% of Apple's revenue since 2012. Regardless of app developer quality, it is quite literally Apple's now-well-honed job to ensure that enough people want to buy next year's model, by various types of forced obsolescence. Indirectly, this means that the durably snappy and non-sluggish experience you're forever wanting can never actually happen. 'Forever wanting it' is an essential part of the business design here!
In this system. Of 'smartphones', where a small handful of corporate masters - who also happen to (now!) be a big share of the world's largest and most profitable corporations - now own over half of the computing world that we love, following their whirlwind 20-year takeover of it.
"No I need better phone app developers." - Hmmm. Commiserations. The trend of developer quality (and/or it's inverse - e.g. system complexity and overheads) has been fairly constant since the term 'developer' became mainstream parlance, and you won't need me to point out what effect AI coding agents have had upon the doorway-to-entry.
Indeed, on modern laptops and phones every UI interaction should be instant (check out BeOS in 1995 for comparison). For background stuff, add some progress indicator.
Can't believe the crap OSes and frameworks add these days in terms of performance cost (and sadly, Apple doesn't exactly shine in that regard)
Not that you aren't correct, but Tahoe is a MacOS release, not iOS. I assume you mean iOS 18 (the version before iOS 26)?
Tahoe is macOS 26. The corresponding iOS version is iOS 26
iOS 18 corresponds to macOS 15 (Sequoia)
The bigger question is what are these apps doing that they aren't doing 10 years ago that they now need all this extra compute for to serve the same basic functionality? It always amazes me how stuff like instagram just tanks my battery life. It is instagram its basically wgetting image urls same as its always done but it is taking over system resources for reasons...
Nah. Software took 15-20 seconds when we were back on spinning discs.
Now that we have solid state supercomputers in our pockets, even the most simple app should launch in milliseconds
I just tested a number of apps on my 15pm connected to WiFi and could not find anything that took longer than 5 seconds. That includes some small developers and bad developers.
Not quite sure where you are seeing this. Maybe games?
I’ve never been more baffled by an Apple event in my life.... We in Norway are part of the first batch of the rollout for the new AI/language feature?!??!?! Something’s fishy. Somethings up!
Will they figure out how to fit the new C2 cellular modem into a MacBook Pro?
Holding onto my 14 for as long as possible as it is safe from the absolute nonsense AI features.
I have no idea which iPhone version I have anymore. It doesn't feel as though it's missing anything, though.But I'd upgrade immediately if the new models truly offered better AI experience.
Forgive my skepticism that Apple will get it right. Even the lauded latest version of Siri is far worse than the labs' offerings or Android at voice dictation (I now have to fix 1 word per sentence instead of 4, previously)
Agreed on iPhone versions not feeling significant. I personally consider it a good thing. I'll keep my phone for as long as possible and not feel the need to upgrade.
I personally don't care if Siri is the worst LLM of the big players, as long as it can answer my basic questions and search my texts, I'm happy. I don't need "frontier intelligence" for that kind of stuff.
As for dictation, they say the new dictation is much better, requiring an iPhone 17. Unfortunately, I won't get to find out if that's true for another five or so years, but I'm hopeful for a better dictation on device, because you're right.
I update my phone now when the battery requires two full charges to 100% to last throughout the day. But there's no feature I'm looking for. My current phone is a 13 -- so I guess it lasted five years, which seems crazy long for it to be perfectly fine from a functionality perspective.
I would probably still have my iPhone 12 mini if not for what happened to its battery. Loved that form factor, but the battery went from bad to worse in just a couple of years.
Hopefully these models have a longer lifespan before the battery life forces a replacement. If they truly offer 36 hours, there's more runway before they hit the < 18 hours point at which many people need a refresh
I’ve been holding on to my 12 mini for a bit too long probably. I loved the thing before iOS 26, but sadly since then, even basic tasks cause it to overheat and just hang for several minutes until it cools off. The battery is a joke of course, but I was fine with that until the overheating. I’ve swapped it 2x over the years for a new unit, but shit software, shift web, and shit cell data coverage have made it nearly unusable.
I’ll finally, albeit reluctantly, upgrade this year. I really liked the mini form factor.
I went from a 13 Pro to 17 Pro and the battery life has been great.
I used my iPhone 8 for exactly 5 years before the battery went to hell. Been on iPhone 14 for 3 years, 9 months and see no reason to upgrade.
Same, I went from a base model iPhone 11 to a base model iPhone 16. Assuming the trend line holds up, I'm in for an iPhone 21 next!
Almost the same as what I did, 11->16 Pro, and really only because I wanted a nicer camera. 128Gb has been more than enough for what I need. Don't have a reason to upgrade, battery still gets me through 2 days without a charge, and with Kino the times I want to have nicer-than-stock video I can get it.
I'm on a 12. Paid really not very much to get the battery replaced recently, and I wished I'd done it sooner. There's at least another year left in this phone now if I want it.
That's kind of like saying the 2026 Corolla isn't really much different than the 2025. People don't expect to upgrade annually. I'm using an iPhone 15, and upgraded to that from a 6S+. The 15 was a night and day difference. Most people are financing their device with their service plan which is 2-3 contract.
I upgraded from a 13 to a 17 pro. Barely notice a different, my old phone was just dying
I got a battery replacement instead, and still use 13 pro, works like new.
The 13 is the last generation of the mini and I still have mine. Good to know I'm not missing anything. Battery capacity isn't even below 80% so I can't replace it under Applecare yet.
13 to 17 pro is a huge leap in performance, battery life, and camera features.
This is the problem for Apple. Expect shorter lifetime for security updates in the next few years. It’s why they’re pushing the “lease to own”, because people aren’t upgrading every year, or two, or even three any more.
Indeed been using the new Siri since June and it fails a ton in comparison to chatGPT voice!
Using chatGPT voice i can see Open AI's push for pushing us to a new Internet voice paradigm 1st with screens/visuals secondary & complimentary to possibly none at all. It would be much safer especially when driving to get super intelligent human like directions where voice says drive to the mcdonalds on dorset you go to all the time and across the street is the new 7 Brew coffee shop.
— "Start my chronometer"
— "There is no contact named 'Chronometer'"
Maybe if we mock the iPhone enough, they'll stop autocorrecting words with other words that are on the opposite side of the keyboard. Or mistype letters with the letters just next to them.
iPhone is laughing stock. A neverending comedy of "There is no track named 'Call Mom' in your Apple Music library."
I personally prefer 17 pro for better value for money.
I've never seen such a boring landing page from Apple.
Because they shared the Newsroom URL, instead of the Apple product page:
https://www.apple.com/iphone-18-pro/
The photos I get on my iPhone are worse with every generation. Can anyone tell me if the photos are any good on these new ones? The hardware is fine I'm sure it's the post processing that destroys the image.
Have you tried using a 3rd party photo app (like Halide)?
The 16 was a significant downgrade in quality due to over-processing. The hardware is actually improving, you just unfortunately need to use a third-party app to get access to the raw photos.
Boring.
That is a... very underwhelming strap design. Wish Apple would do something interesting with accessories like eink backscreen. It's just been so mid.
We need Apple Reference Video and Audio.
$1199 for a variable aperture camera + 12gb of ram. Why not add stylus support?
Wait, that is gated to the $1999 duo device, with untested reliability.
I think I am going to continue with my 17 pro max for another year. I usually upgrade every year, but not this time.
I haven’t upgraded since 2020 and I still don’t have a good reason to. My iPhone 12 still runs great. I use a real camera for photography. Other than the cameras, what has meaningfully improved over the last 6 years?
I'm still on an iPhone 11 that I bought second-hand a few years ago when the iPhone 15 was the newest. The battery life isn't great which is the only thing tempting me to upgrade, but I'll still put that off as long as possible.
Other than the battery I have no complaints. It's a phone. I can make calls, send texts, browse the web, check maps, take photos. What more do I need? Why waste money?
I can't even tell the difference between newer iPhone models. Why do people upgrade every year? What's the point?
Yea I just swapped my jogging/beach iPhone from an Xr to an iPhone 12 and wow, it's so much better than the Xr and pretty much as good as my "proper" phone, an 17Pro. It's got 4G RAM instead of 12G but it performs almost as well. Xr->12 is a huge leap in performance and I noticed it straight away. But the 12 against the 17 is much harder to see the difference. Less redraw of icons on the main screen is the primary thing I've noticed.
The only noticeable thing is faster screen, the 17 has 120hz screen.
my eyes are an older model
$300 price increase in India.人
Is the C2 modem the satellite data chip?
It's their in-house cellular modem for 2G/3G/4G/5G.
No details on satellite comms, but the predecessor C1X also handles satellite communication and competitor Qualcomm also does satellite comms on the same silicon, so I'd say yes.
Samsung phones still have better cameras. Nothing that special over the Pixel 10.
I wonder how this works in tandem with the Computational Image Pipeline?
From Apple: "Apple Reference Image provides users with an unalterable reference photo, visually confirming what the sensor saw at the moment of capture."
The pixels that arrive in the final image have already been significantly altered from what the sensor saw: demosaicing, noise reduction, Deep Fusion, artificial bokeh, etc. Is the signature anchored to raw sensor readout (making the reference a de-mosaiced digital negative, with all CIP processing deliberately left outside the trust boundary), or to the CIP's emitted image (in which case what does 'unalterable' actually protect against)? If it is the latter, then Apple are essentially saying some forms of computational (and ML) manipulation are acceptable in a signed capture, so long as it is their manipulation.
Reminds me of nba2k: same game every year
Looking forward to the photo samples with the variable aperture. If it's something you can manually set (with the Camera app or third party), that would be neat. The miniaturization of this mechanical piece is really quite wild.
Eh, that's maybe about it.
While it is a cool technical advance to see, its use case is probably niche. One of the biggest things people say about photography is lighting. In general, if you can get more photons onto your imaging plane, you will have a better picture. This is why phone cameras, despite advertising 100s of MPs, still fall short. For the same field of view and capture conditions, fewer photons are collected because phone sensor sizes are much smaller. This is a physical limitation that cannot be overcome.
Now given that they already have a lower photon budget, you now want to add aperture control, which when stopped down physically reduces the amount of light from the scene that reaches the sensor. Thus you need to compensate for these lost photons somehow, so gain will probably have to increase quite a bit, but then you get noisier, grainier photos. This then leads to the suspicion that you will need some sort of AI denoising or computational processing to recover some of that lost image quality. Though of course you can comp in other way such as exposure time (they can make big wins here with their stabilization) and tons of lighting.
Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field because again smaller sensor size thus smaller focal length etc. Most images at their lower f stop is already in focus. So the ability to reduce aperture or simulate shallow DOF is trying to give users more of the creative control that larger sensor cameras naturally have (need to manipulate because of their larger sensor size) and doesn't make much sense to me.
>Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field because again smaller sensor size thus smaller focal length etc. Most images at their lower f stop is already in focus. So the ability to reduce aperture or simulate shallow DOF is trying to give users more of the creative control that larger sensor cameras naturally have (need to manipulate because of their larger sensor size) and doesn't make much sense to me.
Totally agreed. I wonder if it will make 180-degree shutter angle video easier to achieve. The only way to achieve this on current iPhones during the day is using a pretty strong ND filter.
The iPhone 18 Pro main camera is f/1.48, which is half a stop wider than the f/1.78 main camera on the 17 Pro. An f/1.48 fixed aperture would probably not be ideal (less depth of field, more revealing of lens aberrations) so there is a real light gathering advantage to the variable aperture.
>Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field
Fairly deep. You can easily see background blur on a modern iPhone camera if you focus on something close. The very fact that the cameras all have variable focus shows that depth of field isn't as deep as all that. The extra depth of field from a narrower aperture could certainly be useful in some cases, such as landscapes. Here's a question for your favorite LLM:
"If I am shooting an iPhone 17 Pro main camera, what aperture would I theoretically need to get perfect focus from 1.5 meters to infinity, assuming a CoC suitable for a 12MP shot?"
Answer: about f3.2 if you manage to focus at the optimum hyperfocal distance.
>which when stopped down physically reduces the amount of light from the scene that reaches the sensor
As you say, this is only the case if you can't increase the exposure time to compensate. In daylight you will often have plenty of latitude to do so, even without image stabilization. Typical daylight shutter speeds at f/1.78 can be around 1/1000 at base ISO, so there is plenty of room to increase exposure time by 2-3 stops in those conditions.
>The miniaturization of this mechanical piece is really quite wild.
It's nothing new, Samsung has done thing on the S9/S10, and recently Sony is also doing this, they even come with movable zoom lens
Is anyone else intrigued by the $129 "panel of over 50 biomarkers, aimed at enhancing preventive health insights?" This was mentioned in the Apple Health segment. [0] I checked out Quest's website and there wasn't an obvious match. [1]
0. https://www.biopharmawatch.com/news/DGX/apple-health-app-que...
1. https://www.questhealth.com/shop-tests
Yes, that felt very bizarre and glossed over. The specific details the speaker gave made me feel like it was a weird product placement, but like, _why_? Why would this multi-trillion-dollar behemoth needs to strike a brand deal with Quest?
They want they health models to learn based on consistent set of baseline markers. Pretty cool thing to do.
If you think a cryptographically signed image can’t be JPEGed 5 times and shared on Facebook for misinformation then here’s a relevant XKCD for you:
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png
Apple innovation truly looks dead at this point. At $1200 I expect them to be made in the USA by union workers.
Hyperbole if I have ever read it. Lots of other products released I don’t think the highlight was the iPhone 18.
And even then the price of the phone ex memory is staying stable.
Even Apple can’t eat hundreds of dollars in extra cost per phone in competition with AI memory consumption.
Why would they?
Every one else is raising prices at so they will too.
Try $12,000 for that.
This is the kind of nonsense I come here for… can I follow you? :D
Seems like at this point each year the biggest new feature is a new color.
It works with normies.
My wife just preordered an 18 pro. She’s the family photographer and is still on a 128gb iPhone 12, so it’s time for an upgrade and she fell in love with the cherry color.
She bought the 12 instead of the more appropriate 12 pro years ago because she loved the purple that she couldn’t get with a 12 pro.
Edit:typo
Is it cherry? I see burgandy on the site. Also, preorders begin on the 12th.
You’re right, Apple is calling it Burgundy. Previous leaks were calling it something or other cherry but it looks to be the same color.
> My wife just preordered an 18 pro.
I guess this is from a reseller, and not from Apple.
Apple was taking orders today. Maybe not in your region.
Which country are you in?
Yeah I wish they made a Macbook that color, it's pretty nice.
...and a brave new price
Just say no to phablets
I find it really strange they don’t mention the zoom magnification.
I just want a MacBook with a cellular modem. Why is this not sold?
I would assume it's because most people just tether to their phone with a USB cable or wireless with two mouse clicks.
It's also because, until Apple's C-series models, they would've had to use Qualcomm modems which had a percentage-based royalty, and Apple would likely need a new contract for usage in Macs, so may had to pay even more. Even with their own modems they still have to pay Qualcomm's patent royalties, so it's likely just don't want to do that on devices which can cost over $10k today.
I don't want a seperate cable, and my iphone burn through battery like nothing when hotspoting.
Ok so another “better” smartphone. To me it is very hard to get excited about the new smartphones. It really seems they have nothing new. I mean you have Apple Pay on any old iPhone and the software is more or less the same, the battery more or less the same…there is really nothing new. I am going to get a 12k or 16k camera to solve the “camera” issue and that would be it to avoid buying better iPhones every x years.
£1200 / £1300 and 256GB storage lol
(Pixel 11 512GB / 16GB RAM is also £1200 - not an endorsement)
edit: and Apple Care got a huge price increase (31%) on the new Pro: the 2 year £179 option is gone - now it's £129 for 1 yr.
45 hours of video playback is insane?! Is this accurate, because if it is I will sell my phone and buy this. Normally my samsung discharges in about 12 hours or less when I'm out, not even watching 12 hours of video.
"On iPhone 18 Pro Max, five minutes of wired charging provides around seven hours of video playback"
Materially impactful feature holy moses! I can plug it in, brush my teeth and I'm set for the work day.
It's like electric car ranges. Their claim will be 45 hours under a very specific testbench. Real life results will be lower
iOS video playback is pretty highly optimised and hardware-assisted, though, right?
Not sure you can really extrapolate non-video battery life from video battery life. I have an ageing iPad and I can get a couple of hours of video when the battery is at 30%, but it would be gone in 45 minutes if I was browsing.
Depends on which video codec. If it’s the most efficient one that has dedicated silicone embedded in the chip, it’s going to work great.
Web browsing is typically significantly harder on power. Plus these benchmarks usually mean in a perfectly dark room with the backlight at close to zero.
I had no idea, I thought video was the most expensive thing to burn battery on since it's video, full screen motion, and loud sound. Interesting!
Apple quotes 30 hours of mixed use or 45 hours of video playback. So video playback is almost 50% more efficient than general use.
It is gaming if you want to burn through your phone battery.
I don't know why we even have this event anymore. There's a new iPhone every September. It's incrementally better than the last iPhone. Phones keep getting more expensive while doing basically the same thing for some reason. Just buy whatever is out when you need a new phone.
I bought an iPhone 11 in 2019 I think? It last until 2 years ago when I limped along until the iPhone 16 Plus. I like the big screen area. The premium for Pro isn't worth it to me. I hope to get another 3 years out of it.
What I would like is an iPhone with Touch ID as an option and no, I don't mean the small one (SE?). I want a big screen. Put the Touch ID on the back of the phone like the samsung Galaxy did.
I literally hate Face ID with a passion and it's a massive accessibility issue for people with visual impairments.
No amount of slightly better CPU and camera is going to get me to upgrade every year anymore.
How is Face ID un-accessible for those with visual impairment? I hadn't heard that before.
If you have to hold your phone closer to your face because of poor eyesight, Face ID will constantly fail. So you have this dance of having to pull it away to get Face ID to pass when required. Touch ID just works.
You can easily turn it off - it's a security feature:
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/change-face-id-and-at...
You’re in luck, the Duo has Touch ID and a big screen.
I’m still waiting on a mini
we’ll be waiting a while. The last Mini was iPhone 8 sized, when I considered anything larger than the 5 to be too much.
The Mini thus, undersold, because if you were fine with the 8 then iPhones of that size were still available (2nd Gen SE). Nobody bought: So Apple thinks theres no market.
> The last Mini was iPhone 8 sized
It was smaller than the iPhone 8. It was slightly thicker (0.01"), shorter (by 0.27") and narrower (0.13"). And it had a bigger display despite being overall smaller. It was bigger than the 5, though.
maybe I'm misremembering the dimensions of the 8.
I did, however, take a series of photos comparing the Mini to the SE- and the packaging of the 6 (I think I gave the phone away but still had the box).
https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...
https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-13-mi...
The SE was the one that shared the 8's dimensions, the Mini was smaller than both. That Mini appears to be in a case, so the comparison photos aren't as useful as they'd be otherwise.
(Also, it looks like I couldn't do arithmetic earlier or typo'd the number, the Mini is 0.12" narrower, not 0.13").
I'm not sure I understand how you think the mini is in a case from those photos.
Maybe because it's the dark version of the phone you can barely make out the shiny apple logo, but it's there, you can see the metal edge of the phone.
It's not in a case.. obviously, that would be a stupid comparison.
Fair, zooming in I guess I can see that. You may want to correct the label on the photo though, it shares dimensions with the 5 but you've clearly photographed an SE (original, it turns out, which was part of my confusion since you switched at some point from talking about the 2nd gen to the 1st gen) not an iPhone 5.
No, I was comparing the size difference of the 5 (and lineage) to the 6 (by way of case) and Mini.
"SE" is a nondescript product line and the only physical differences are the tone of the chassis and a stamp; it's a fair representation of the size of a 5.
Always seemed like a marketing issue on Apple's part. People have different opinions when they actually see and handle the Mini. Apple appended so many "Pro" and "Max" names to everything which ended up creating a "status symbol" that was contrary to the actual needs of the consumer to have a more reasonably sized phone. "Fablets" weren't particularly popular for that reason, and Apple still managed to lead people down this road.
I think you forgot the history.
Apple was the last hold out with small phones, years after everybody else moved to huge phones.
But even Apple couldn't resist the pressure from the consumers, and eventually yielded.
The mini was released six months after the SE2 was released, which many SE1 owners holding out for a new smaller iPhone had already migrated to. Then Apple presented the mini in a joke-y manner in the keynote, didn’t do any publicity afterwards, and neither did the carriers (because the mini was lower-margin for them I presume). Lastly, the iPhone 12 gen had particularly bad battery life, which also hurt the mini. With today’s battery improvements, it would be much better (as demonstrated by the iPhone Air’s good battery life). Apple could at least have taken the option to make the “e” line mini-sized.
Yet they sold more minis than Google sells Pixels.
And somehow we ended up with more Pixels and not minis.
Despite the Lightning port, I prefer my 13 Mini to upgrading.
An updated 13 Mini with USB-C and modern chipset would be fantastic. That would get me to upgrade. My hope is that Apple decides the world needs an iPhone Mini once in a while, just not a new one every year.
My contention is every 5 years release a mini spec with hardware bumps. Everyone jumps in and everyone upgrade. It only has the larger size space spec.
Rinse and repeat.
If you have a "known" or "expected" cycle, people can rely on that.
This has been my hope. Relase one, say "oops no market", and then come back several years later
Me too, still surviving on 12 mini. Issue a new mini and you’ll have my money the minute that the shop opens.
With SiC battery no less.
Same, got battery replaced 5 months ago.
Wish I'd got the biggest storage size when I bought it though :(
Having used a Z Fold 8, it's sort of a Mini. I'd love to see a non-folding phone in the same passport form factor, I think they'd sell a ton.
I really liked my iPhone 12 mini. But Apple also makes a lot of money from app sales, so I wonder if there’s a connection between screen size and app purchases. Maybe users with larger screens spend more time in apps and are therefore more likely to buy apps or make in-app purchases. The more screen real estate people have, the more they might engage with apps, which could translate into higher spending.
The new iPhone Duo in single screen mode is the same size (5.4") as the iPhone 13 mini but with a different aspect ratio
https://photos.reportinglive.com/p/2026-09-09/f-bf86c6f5adb3...
Same diagonal doesn’t mean same size. The Duo is also much thicker (the camera plateau in particular) and heavier, and the front screen is so wide (a good bit wider than the Pro Max) that it’s hardly suited for one handed use.
I think the screen might be the same diagonal length but it looks wider overall…
It's wider though, and surely going to weigh more...
A lot more. Almost twice as much (+80%).
I wouldn’t mind buying half of one of those for 1/4 the price.
I wish they'd alternate each year or something between iPhone / iPhone mini if they're struggling for sales.
The body shapes and cases seem to change each year anyway now, so it's not like people get to re-use cases that much anyway...
Me too. Everyone who sees my phone loves it, and I always share a nod with my fellow mini owners. I really don’t want a huge phone and it is still more than fast enough (a 12 at that!) iPhones got Good Enough at least 6 years ago. Same with macbooks.
There's a lot of misdirected complaining here, so some reminders:
- Apple has this event because it generates buzz, which increases sales.
- You do not need to watch the event.
- You do not need to pay attention to anything about the event.
- You do not need to buy the new device.
Golden HN rule: the more complaints, the more successful the product will turn out because normal people like it. It’s like the inverse Cramer.
I guess exception:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36201593
Maybe, but I would argue the Vision Pro is a devkit.
Things were simpler in the Slashdot/iPod era.
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
The Reddit Rule: The more votes someone gets for bitching about something, the more popular that thing is in the Real World.
Like on the post about the No Man's Sky update: "Oh these devs have been putting out free updates for 10 years? So what? I don't like it"
The worst thing about cynical-for-the-sake-of-being-cynical goons is that they drown out the actual legitimate complains and concerns about something.
- Top 4/6 links on HN are currently Apple news.
Yeah Apple TOTALLY doesn't astroturf HN.
That doesn’t seem to be worth the effort to astroturf HN. We are not as important in Apple sales volume scale as you think we are.
There are endless posts on HN about how Macs are good for LLMs. Somoene is running some model on their Mac for local inference.
What the posts dont mention is how unusable that experience is with dogshit slow tokens/second. To make a local model usefull you need to run the highest parameter models at 100+ tok/sec, otherwise you are just better off paying for cloud inference. So either all those people are dumb as hell, or Apple is doing clever advertising. And I personally have more faith in the tech sector.
Great
This phone is so underwhelming it doesn’t even make the frontpage of HN. And yes, I realise it was obviously overshadowed by the Duo.
Still. This must be the first iPhone not to break page one.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Edit: Page one I guess?
Hi from page 1
Did they just announce the ultimate solution to image authenticity online?
Instead of proving some image on some platform is not AI or severely edited, we can simply prove it was original by verifying unforgeable signature made by a camera / microphone baked into each image produced by it.
And of course in future it could be done for video and audio! This would be absolutely HUGE!
> that image shared online is original and unedited?
The image data the sensor physically receives passes through a ton of processing steps before the image lands in your phone. If there is some watermarking/signature doing on, on the image, it'd be that the device at that moment capture that data, not that it's not AI, or not edited, or "truthful" or whatever. That's still an unsolved problem to figure out.
It is a very old idea. But it matters a lot in iPhone’s scale. Many people will have it without buying a separate device.
From what I understand, the feature renders a signed reference image from raw sensor-data "alongside the final image".
Still no solution if the image posted online is not that reference image or that reference image is actually a photo of an AI picture.
Isn’t that done by EXIF like decades ago? Not on phones but DSLR. I would think it’s an easy software thing to add (and probably to remove)
The underlying tech is already compromised on the Android side.
https://lobste.rs/s/4netv1/c2pa_cameras_do_not_survive_conta...
Where's the foldable? :-D
In some thread not yet voted to the front page. iPhone Duo
Edit: Nevermind, it has made the front page now
Apple iPhone Duo is out
From an Android perspective we have the new upcoming Snapdragon which is going to be more powerful and more efficient. Just for anyone thinking of switching though I share that :)
I have been out of the phone tech loop for a while...
When did Qualcomm start eclipsing apple?
They’re not. They’re both playing the same ARM mobile chip game though and recent Qualcomm chips have been decent. Just a pity about their weak software support