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.
> 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".
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
>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'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)
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!
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm an Apple fanboy, and I think OP is probably right? Having a distinctive colour that marks a phone as being the latest one is definitely a great marketing idea.
I don’t know, in both the USA and Vietnam I see a massively disproportionate amount of people with the orange iPhone 17 Pro. Personally I like the orange color, but based on how ubiquitous the color choice seems to be, is does look a lot like conspicuous consumption to me.
And even in a case now that they have those huge camera plateaus you can still definitely tell what color iPhone someone has.
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.
> 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
> 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
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.
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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
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Stamp only proves you did the photo and probably some metadata like when where etc.
It helps but doesn't solve credibility issue.
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I bet there exists data from the 3 cameras to represent some depth to the image.
Yes.
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.
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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.
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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.
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lol, called it month ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138302#49142011
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.
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.
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So does that mean only the main sensor can do this ?
That's more of a software feature..
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.
That smells like "show don't tell", but who knows.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
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.
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 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
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.
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> 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.
Apple Reference Image is the new "pro" feature.
*not so "pro" in EU and China
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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.
[dead]
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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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.
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I only care about it because I'm waiting for a MacBook Neo with more than 8gb of memory.
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Ok Bill.
sell another phone with "more than iPhone" and claim is better because "more X" right ?
People who actually care about their money often like to compare competing products and decide which one provides them the best value.
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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.
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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.
12GB of ram and double the memory the bandwidth over the previous model.
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.
I personally prefer 17 pro for better value for money.
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.
Changed my 14 PRO battery last week. See you @ iPhone 22
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 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 still have my 11. The battery is garbage on it, but everything is still totally fine. Haven't upgraded to iOS 26 though...
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.
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.
> 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?
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> 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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
Incremental changes year/year to a mature product line means if you skip a couple years you get a BIG upgrade
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
- tired of fitting all the 7 inch phones
- can I get a 5 inch phone please?
refurbished 13 mini for me
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.
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 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.
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'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/
> 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.
My iPhone 13 Pro will be 5 years old next month. Battery capacity at 82%. Does that count as lasting 5+ years?
>I doubt any phone battery is lasting 5+ years.
Just coming up to five years on mine and it is still at 87% capacity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Samsung phones still have better cameras. Nothing that special over the Pixel 10.
Holding onto my 14 for as long as possible as it is safe from the absolute nonsense AI features.
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.
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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
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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 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.
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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."
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.
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?
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.
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[flagged]
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.
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.
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.
Reminds me of nba2k: same game every year
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.
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> My wife just preordered an 18 pro.
I guess this is from a reseller, and not from Apple.
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Yeah I wish they made a Macbook that color, it's pretty nice.
...and a brave new price
$300 price increase in India.人
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.
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
I find it really strange they don’t mention the zoom magnification.
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.
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Try $12,000 for that.
This is the kind of nonsense I come here for… can I follow you? :D
Just say no to phablets
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.
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 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!
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£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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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I swear only Apple brings out comments where people will insinuate a whole nefarious conspiracy over phones being sold in different colors.
I'm an Apple fanboy, and I think OP is probably right? Having a distinctive colour that marks a phone as being the latest one is definitely a great marketing idea.
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99% of people put their iPhone in a case that covers up the color. This is not something anybody actually thinks.
Sometimes I tell my teenage daughter “stop inventing things to be mad about”. Good advice for HN commenters, too.
I don’t know, in both the USA and Vietnam I see a massively disproportionate amount of people with the orange iPhone 17 Pro. Personally I like the orange color, but based on how ubiquitous the color choice seems to be, is does look a lot like conspicuous consumption to me.
And even in a case now that they have those huge camera plateaus you can still definitely tell what color iPhone someone has.
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Yeah I had a pink iPhone 13 for ages when my 15 pro got stolen.
Mine is in a blue case. My last case was black. Only when my cases wear out do I remember that my phone is actually white.
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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
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Things were simpler in the Slashdot/iPod era.
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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.
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