1. Freedom. I should be able to build and run apps on it without the platform holder having a barrier on it.
2. Privacy. The phone shouldn't be an object to track me for better ad sales or any other purpose.
Of course, priority 1 has until recently always led to Android while priority 2 has always led to Apple.
But with the upcoming announced changes where google is going to require registration and signing for even third party sideloaded apps, while at the same time the EU is forcing Apple to open up and allow sideloading, it seems pretty clear that in the near future both Apple and Google's policies regarding point 1 are going to converge. On a position less free than Android has hitherto been, and less free than I would like, but unfortunately they are the two options on the market.
So with priority 1 no longer a differentiating factor, it comes down to priority 2.
I've used both Android and iOS over the years, as while my personal phones have always been Android, my employer provided phones have always been iOS. I think I do prefer the Android user experience and have used enough of both that that's not just a factor of which I'm accustomed to, but it's also not the huge difference it once was for a lot of apps.
Right now I'm using a Pixel 7 Pro and I might weigh sitting it out another year, but my USB-C port is failing and I'm also watching the pixel battery issues creep up the model range to newer and newer models...
if apple offered actual privacy, you could:
- find out what/when apps are running
- find out who they are talking to
- prevent it, including apple if you want
and apple has all kinds of nonsense like deep links (apps can intercept links), bluetooth beacons (apps can talk to stuff in a store/location), and lots of other stuff behind the scenes. You can't find out if it is in use.
I think the data and sensor access logs is a newer feature since I don’t think I’ve seen it before, but network activity has been in there for at least a few years. The network activity is also only domains and ip addresses, nothing about protocol or what data was sent unfortunately.
How do you do that on Android? You can inspect the manifest to see some triggers, but an app can set more triggers when it first launches.
Task managers have been killed by Google about 10 years ago and it's impossible to see that's running in real time.
If you enable developer mode you can kind of see a partial list of what's currently running I guess, is that what you're talking about?
What is the least worse option in terms of privacy, when comparing apple and google? I think there’s a broad consensus it’s apple. But let’s not call it the “best” option please.
You can go with something else than google and apple, they are not an inevitability. Alternate OSes offer significantly more freedom and privacy.
A year later, the iPhone mostly gets out of my way. However the keyboard and browser options are artificially limited. I can't easily set my own search engine on Safari either. Ad blocking works fine though.
The hardware is the best I've had in years. Battery life is really good. Airdrop and Airplay are very useful, as are many other small features.
I have come to prefer the iOS experience, but don't expect a life changing upgrade, just a longer-lasting phone.
It's really surprising the amount of data that tries to leave the premises, and this just the one that I block with a mid-range security ban list.
Let's be very clear here: all Google has announced so far is that installing apps from anonymous builds is going to be taken away and only if you want your phone to be considered "certified". Let's not get drawn too far into hysteria.
So unless you're willing (and can afford!) to buy and carry multiple phones, the new severely downgraded Android is about as open as iPhone, but with zero expectation of it respecting your privacy.
I'm having the same issue with my pixel 8 (along with the screen randomly turning green out of nowhere, so I have to "ground" the display to get it to work again)
In general the 8 feels a lot more cheaply made than the 6
I agree that the android UX is better than apple (or at least, it makes more sense to me). But I'd consider moving to iphone for build quality alone
Compare the New iPhone Models - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186294 - Sept 2025 (95 comments)
iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186044 - Sept 2025 (42 comments)
iPhone Air - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45186015 - Sept 2025 (431 comments)
I could buy two Steam Deck LCD's, but an iPhone has a much higher resolution display and I also use it every day and take it everywhere I go.
Buying one every year, not worth it in my opinion. Buying one and using it for many years is. I still have my 12 and will likely upgrade to the 17.
I think modern smart phones are pretty remarkably un-fragile compared to 20 years ago before the iPhone ($300-700 for a Symbian with a tiny plastic screens that got scratched super fast) or even 10-ish years ago with much more fragile screen glass and cases. Last phone I did major damage to was my HTC Evo in 2012.
(That Nokia N95 was in 2007 dollars, too!)
Watch me! My point was more about how expensive phones are.
I'm not so sure about modern smart phones being less fragile. My first phone was a Nokia 3310-descendent, and my second a Samsung Beat flip phone. Neither were over $100 at the time of purchase, and both were rugged devices I could throw in my pocket or in a bag without thinking it would need a protective case or that their screens were going to break.
The buyer would get a chromium-plated metal case within which a slightly fancier version of a dumb phone was enclosed, and bragging rights as a bonus, and that would be it.
So, today’s USD 1k (or less, for the non-Pro versions) buys the user – depending on one’s point of view – either a commodity appliance or a personal computing contraption whose performance exceeds that of many high-end RISC workstations that once commanded five-digit price tags, and all for a ⅓ less than the launch price of the Nokia 8800.
For a phone similar to the feature set of the original iPhone, you can get a Jelly Pro today for $100.
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It will be another three or four years yet though as my SE is only three years old.
Economists knew this phenomenon well before, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good.
Wonder if we'll ever see folding phones. I'm not concerned with the thickness but the overall foot print that's pocketable would be amazing.
There are more people on HN claiming to use a 13 mini than Apple actually sold.
There are some great renders in the first post in the thread, and towards the end you can see 3d printed mocks [0] of foldable devices. Very cool.
0: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/rumoured-iphone-fold-si...
I would assume this means Apple laptops with integrated cellular modems are on the near horizon.
Because Qualcomm charges a percentage of sale price for use of their modem.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/23/gurman-apple-modems-integrati...
Outside Qualcomm, there has been a limited number of players out there, with MediaTek seeming to pick up the pace and giving Qualcomm a serious run for its money – if not now then pretty soon.
What is left is… not a lot and appears to have constraints of one sort or another:
Samsung – with 5G-integrated Exynos SoC's. It doesn't make sense for Apple to house 2x SoC's in the same appliance;
Huawei – they target the mainland Chinese market with its own flavour of 5G. One doesn't want their modem anyway due to national security concerns;
Sequans Communications – they focus on the IoT market, which is a niche and has its own unique constraint space;
Intel – they quit the 5G modem market in 2019 and sold the IP to Apple, which has given them the C1/C1X.Perhaps people who buy a MacBook are likely to have an iPhone in their pocket that will function as a hotspot and iPads are much more often used by people who are otherwise outside of Apple's ecosystem?
ROFL. Apple wants to sell as much different devices to a single person as possible. What next, you expect cellular iPads to be able to make calls without tethered iPhone?
Thinking through my own use case, I just use my phone for messaging, maps, and the occasional app, so I'm not going to need a big screen for consuming content. I also don't want to spend a lot of money on a phone, since I don't need any fancy features. So perhaps that intersection of use cases doesn't make much sense to target?
The sales back up my statements.
Yes I romanticize about an iPhone 17 mini pro but in the end I like being able to watch some downloaded content on a plane without having to bring an iPad from time to time and I'm not going to do that on a tiny screen.
It’s a bit like selling increasingly carbonated water and then selling slightly less carbonated water and pretending that it was still water that you were selling- and using the data (of nobody buying it) to tell everyone that “nobody likes the still water; so we will continue only selling carbonated and carbonated+.”
People who want cheap iPhones buy older models. You get better specs buying a used or NOS premium model than a new budget model.
Still good, still works.
Being able to turn Liquid Glass off to sth like flat design would be nice but this probably won’t happen.
Now when it comes to the event itself, it felt so cartoonish.
I cannot agree more on the event video. It looks like a pure TV ad for a full hour long. Also, it used to cover more diversity in terms of presenters. Where are they now? I want to hear lovely accents from people all around the world.
In this one, I noticed that the presenters all stood very still; more still than in previous ones.
It looks like they were all green screen, and the video composer was just very good. I was impressed by the woman standing in grass. It looked fairly “natural.”
What is Thread?
> Thread is an IPv6-based, low-power mesh networking technology for Internet of things (IoT) products.
> Often used as a transport for Matter (the combination being known as Matter over Thread), the protocol has seen increased use for connecting low-power and battery-operated smart-home devices.
> Thread uses 6LoWPAN, which, in turn, uses the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol with mesh communication (in the 2.4 GHz spectrum), as do Zigbee and other systems. However, Thread is IP-addressable, with cloud access and AES encryption. A BSD-licensed open-source implementation of Thread called OpenThread is available from and managed by Google.
Funny thing, I know very little of networking, but this bears more sense than just Thread.
Either too wide (1x) or too narrow (4x), as seen in the live stream video, which was recorded with the iPhone 17 Pro.
I am currently on the 13 Pro, I find the 3x mode ideal for portrait photos and videos.
Is it only me with this impression? Could someone help me to jump back into Apple's reality distortion field?
That said, I too like a 70 mm lens, but I long ago got used to just moving closer to or further away from subjects to take photos with dedicated cameras depending on what lens I had on.
Maybe if the Larrin Thomas came up with some catchy new stainless formulation and called it AppleCut or something...
Maybe the recent introduction of foldable phones indicates the opposite. Is it the final blip, or will something similarly disruptive happen every 5-7 years?
Discuss.
Anything else on the hardware side is mostly noise.
If I had to futurism bet, it'd be on eyeglass AR + pocket device being the next major change. With input method for that still tbd.
Apple switched iPhone 17 Pro from Titanium (used in earlier versions) to aerospace-grade Aluminium for Superior Heat Dissipation.
But for the iPhone Air, they are using Titanium because it's lightweight, strong, and durable.
Aluminum is definitely a softer metal, so using aerospace-grade aluminum makes sense. So, is Titanium not a good thermal conductor? If it is not, then why is it used in the iPhone Air?
Sorry! Their choice is not clear to me. Can someone throw light on it?
Phone material choices come down to which compromises you will settle for.
There are similar compromises with types of glass chosen. One type is more scratch resistance, but more prone to shatter from falls, and vice versa.
I think I could probably squeeze more life out of my phone, but the 17 has a nicer camera, me and my wife are noticing our relatives with newer iPhones have photographs that look slightly (I meant to write NOTICEABLY here) better. As we raise our first child, having a quality camera is definitely important to us.
I was really tempted by the iPhone Air, but the Pro has better camera features. I am actually really excited to see what they will do for the iPads. If they release a thin iPac Mini similar to the iPhone Air, I would immediately buy it. I am not usually a fan of thin, but something in me has always wanted a thin iPad Mini, not sure why, but I'm waiting for it still.
Great demo, the most impressive demo had to have been the Airpod Pros translation piece.
Edit: Needed to annotate that I wrote 'slightly better' but its not just slightly, we both visually noticed a different in quality.
One last note, the 12 Pro was my first iPhone ever. I was on Android since 2009, every Android I had lasted about 2 years. My last one probably would have lasted me 5 years but I was tired and wanted a change at my 2 year mark. I have not regretted my decision to date.
If you want reference tier photos for documenting family history, modern mirrorless is better. DSLR from 10-15 years ago is also still great in all but the most challenging light conditions, where you could simply use a flash.
Difference is especially startling for HDR and portraits, particularly backlight ones where the stock app does some hideous segmentation-based “enhancements”.
Just be mindful that those extra megapixels will need some extra storage.
Something about iOS and macOS just feels right. Any time I boot up my old Android phones they feel like a convoluted mess.
A phone camera isn't really a camera, it's a digitally-airbrushed impression of reality. There just isn't enough light hitting the tiny sensor through the tiny lens.
I have 20 year old 5MP DLSR portrait photos that are still better than what a 120MP phone can produce, because it's the lens that counts.
However.... it's really hard to overstate the workflow and convenience aspects of shooting with a phone. (Particularly as a parent, and even moreso when I was a new parent of a small child.) The phone has the twin benefits of 1) being present almost always and 2) being immediately able to process and transmit an image to the people you might want to see it. For the 99% case, that's far more useful than even a very significant improvement in image quality. For the 1% where it matters, I can and do either hire a professional (with better equipment than my own) or make the production of dragging out my DSLR and all that it entails. This is like so many other cases where inarguable technical excellence of a sort gives way to convenience and cost issues. IOW, "Better" is not just about Image Quality.
But, I never have my Canon and it's too bulky to carry around everyday. I do carry my iPhone everywhere I go. And so, the capabilities of my iPhone camera are more important.
I imagine this is the same for the overwhelming majority of people.
Any suggestions for me while I shop around for "tier 2" carriers? I am primarily concerned with price, and then network coverage second (I am OK with sometimes being throttled, but would prefer to avoid large gaps in any coverage).
Wikipedia has a solid table of U.S. MVNO's, for a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_virtual_network...
1. Their international plan is garbage, and if you don’t use the international plan, you cannot usefully use them as a phone-and-SMS-over-WiFi only solution in conjunction with another carrier. Competitors like USMobile do not have this problem.
2. Their customer support and website are very bad.
I've seen all sorts of non-black (let alone matte black) iPhone rigs used for motion pictures, including white and natural titanium colors. Eg. 28 Years Later used a variety of iPhone configurations and colors.
But yeah, I'm surprised there's no black/space gray option this year. Some consumers won't buy any other color.
Try Halide with "Process Zero" if you want that, but I'm pretty sure the most popular 3p camera apps are Asian beauty apps that do far more and far worse quality processing.
Overall this year seemed much better than last year.
Use an ad blocker if you want Safari tabs to stay open longer.
It is either equal to or better than iPhone 16 Pro. A year ago iPhone 16 Pro 256Gb would be $1099, iPhone 17 256GB today is $799, with a better SoC, better WiFi, same display and ProMotion, better screen protective layer. The only thing worst is the lack of Telephoto camera.
And MagSafe charging and stands.
If I don't need to use the lightning port, I don't need to use what would be the USB C port.
I am looking to upgrade to the 17 potentially, but USB-C to me isn't a key factor.
Makes the Mac Mini look weird now with 256 GB base storage.
Pretty shameful of Google to stick to 128 GB on the Pixel 10.
Yes the Pixel 10 now has telephoto but they nerfed the cameras from the Pixel 9 for that.
In the Pro models for both the pricing is comparable, yeah.
Also realized that Apple charges $200 to jump from 256 GB to 512 GB. That's ridiculous.
That said, I'm sort of frustrated with iOS overall, and sorely tempted to go back to Pixels, so I can't decide.
I got my first Pixel (10 Pro XL); Only because their AI integration felt cool. My iPhone 11 Pro is still doing great overall, besides sluggishness here and there, and random Chrome crashes. I might consider upgrading to 17 now due to speed and camera upgrades. Honestly, it was not an exciting upgrade, just like their last 5.
Beyond that, I get frequent spam SMS's which are stupid. Android blocks all those. I have a Junk mail folder in email and hardly get email spam anymore. It feels like going back 20 years getting these random spam SMS's.
Finally, "glanceability" doesn't seem as good with the iPhone. One silly little thing is that if I'm using my iPhone it's sometimes very hard to see the date! If you have notifications you have to swipe down quite a bit to reveal that.
Edit: 16 Pro 128 GB was $999 at introduction iPhone 17 Pro 256 GB is $1099. Better for the non-Pro though - the 16 128 GB was $799, the 17 256 GB is also $799.
I just want a lightweight device that makes calls, send texts, can snap a quick photo, has maps, mobile payments, and can order a cab. These phones are clearly aimed at consuming content, and I've been pushed out of the market. What to do?
While the new phone might actually be “free” in one of these promotions, it’s not, naturally, because you’ve been thrown into a 36 month installment agreement separate of the cellphone service they’ve sold you on (that they also claim is “price locked” while independently raising surcharges and other fees).