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Yeah I was never the biggest fan of Craig Federighi previously but contrasted against the new generation of usual suspects being fielded by Apple, he actually stands out as having character.

But yes the format of the Apple Event was formulaic and way too scripted/produced. Sure there's a place for some scripted content but losing the live unscripted element makes it like a corporate event from Microsoft or IBM. In fact those guys probably do more live unscripted stuff nowadays.

The iPhone Duo is a nice change from formulaic iPhone designs but it's long overdue and is at best a sideways step not a forward step by an Apple that seems increasingly out of touch and driven by cloud service KPI-targets over all other metrics. I wonder how long it will be before the customer revolt manifests, not because I dislike Apple (I loved their products for years) but because I believe that their current business focus leads them to erode trust and play it safe which ultimately alienates the very demographics that made Apple cool and then persuaded all those wanting to emulate that demographic to join the Apple bandwagon. Many of those power users are increasingly moving to Linux or using Mac/Apple ecosystems tactically. It won't be many release cycles for Apple to become the new Microsoft - something you have to use for certain tasks in certain industries but increasingly something you would choose to avoid.

I saw ~20 year old presentation where Craig Federighi presented (for first time??) - dude was shaking like leaf and could hardly do the demo.

It turned out fine and now he’s one of more charming presenters.

> Can't believe they flew all these people in to play them a video.

Apple can't afford to have demo problems or presentation glitches anymore. Hence the system that they have now.

A live presentation fail could take 5~15% off their stock price in minutes, for no good reason at all.

People’s life savings are at stake.

I really miss the live presentations. They had a lot more humanity.

But I miss the Steve jobs presentations the most. I was watching one of his old presentations the other day from when he was in his 20s - he’s just so engaged and present and speaks from the heart compared to the polished media trained drivel of modern ceos

It feels like Apple is a company on autopilot, a well oiled money making machine, nothing else.

Does he have a problem with his hands shaking ? Or you just mean he's nervous

Everybody is nervous their first few times. Hell, I’d rather see that somebody’s nervous and actually human at this point lol.

Apple’s post-COVID keynotes have been like watching plastic people try to out virtue signal one another as they do their best Zuckerberg imitations. Nervousness and humanity anytime, please.

Only people who don't use foldables worry about crease. I've used one for 5-6 years, and even with an older generation it has never been an issue. Half the time it's literally bent, so obviously there is a kink. At this point my screen has hairline fractures down the middle and even that doesn't actually bother me.

I would wait until there's a display model at an Apple Store, then give it a week while it goes through approximately a bajillion fold/unfold cycles, then see what the crease looks like.

It's glass, dude. There's not gonna be a crease.

Creases are overblown. Z7 Fold had a somewhat noticeable one, except... I stopped noticing it after first few minutes of use, and only realized it's there when light reflected off it at weird angle. Didn't get worse over a year.

With Z8 Fold Ultra, the crease is much more subtle and flat enough that I sometimes don't feel it while sliding my finger over it. Doesn't show signs of worsening over a month of rather intensive use (average 27 folds per day, yes there's an app that counts it, and it's underreporting because it took me two weeks to remember and exempt it from background activity limits and battery use optimizations...).

Point being, crease has stopped being an issue for actual use experience at least a generation or two of foldables ago. It's only something you worry about before purchase.

I know we aren't allowed on this website to say Apple marketing is posting comments.........

But, reddit either has fully religious people devoted to the Apple cause, or Apple is using their marketing team on Reddit.

Sorry for posting old news.

I watched this video by Marques Brownlee on the Oppo Find N6 (foldable).. https://youtu.be/eFUB_jL_XcM

It apparantly is a magic creaseless breakthrough... I'm eyeing one, and might put it on the Christmas wishlist...

That's how it is on my Z Fold 8, I can really only see it with the screen off.

Yeah, I'm interested but I'll definitely give it a year or two for other people to discover any durability problems before committing (plus it's missing a lens option compared to the 18 Pro but that's a minor quibble.)

Z fold 8 comes slightly creased out of box, and creases within a week [1]. My 7 was significantly creased out of the box!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ8SH1RvYyc

Months is a long time. You're supposed to return your iphone to apple and get a newer one as per your subscription.

Based on rumours Samsung finally cracked the secret on removing creases…iPhone is just the latest model on the market with the technology from them.

That said..I believe I’ve also seen some Chinese models ready claim this.

I really do love the idea. It just comes down to the idea that a cell phone shouldn’t cost as much as a run down, but serviceable used car used to cost in a world where inflation hasn’t run rampant.

The solution, of course, is the idea of leverage. 12 easy installments, or just lease it bro which apparently we’re doing now..for cell phones. But this solution isn’t sustainable. I’d have rather Apple not brought it to market it at all.

Maybe next year. It is a bit of an ask for someone who is just in the job for a few weeks. (Of course he has been groomed to get there. But still.)

I agree on that, just like the iPhone Air, feel more like clumsy Samsung phones, seems there are a lot of compromises.

the core problem seems to be you can't make something that fold in half, yet has 4 curved corners both when folded and unfolded.

very visible with a dark/black image https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2d-Mgaw9kXY

I would be more worried about the weird white stuff squeezing out of the lower right of the screen.

What's the name for this?

Apple distortion field or something?

Since we can't mention Apple marketing making comments on hacker news, let's say they are on Reddit. :D

>Open a bottle of champagne anyone?

Over the top European celebration that doesn't translate to the rest of the world. Especially countries in the Middle East that don't drink.

I have a few qualms with this phone:

For an Android user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting two phones, attaching them with a small hinge or case, and using an app to synchronise content between the displays. From a laptop or tablet, the same applications and files could be accessed through existing cloud services

I have a Samsung Z Fold 7. The stock keyboard is split so it's a bit more comfortable to type on with my thumbs. Granted, this phone is the square form factor and not the wide version but I think the concept stays.

My iPad from 2018 still has a full width keyboard so I have to hunt and peck which is annoying. I would hope that apple designs this better for the iPhone duo.

Given that it's basically an iPad at that size, and those have been around for 16 years, I wouldn't be so sure about that.

> I predict the form factor will be gone within two years.

I predict you will be wrong.

You ladies have pockets?

fwiw, Apple had a PowerBook Duo line in the mid 90s, so maybe that's the reference

I kept an iPhone Mini until an App I need for work started consuming so much memory it became unusable on it (iOS would kill it after 15s). Even then, I raised ticket after ticket with support to get them to fix their app – which they did, then slipped again, for months.

Now I own a 17 pro, which feels like a brick in comparison but has 12 GB of RAM instead of 4.

I really miss my mini.

Apple sold around six million Mini models per year that they were on sale.

It's hard to envisage a boardroom scenario where that's not considered successful, but apparently it exists.

https://youtu.be/FJgTKx-rg18?si=LRWaCeOMC5z-dLOg very relevant video from almost 10 years back which was about Oneplus but says the same thing in much greater depth.

I'm going on ebay to buy old iPhone 13 Minis because I hate giant phones

> Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.

And by "nobody", you mean "actually a lot of people, just not as many as the bigger model". It's ok to have a model that meets a less common, but still extant, need in the market. If everyone followed Apple's logic on this, people with very small or very large bodies would have to go naked because companies would go "that size doesn't sell as much, we have to kill it" rather than (as actually happens) charging more per unit to make up for the overhead of lower volumes of sales.

An average person would ironically be quite unique.

https://www.buildingtheelite.com/average-fails-everyone/

Also you get most anonymity on the internet because they can't fingerprint you.

Except there’s no average person, the average itself is a combination of people with the most diverse needs and constraints. It’s like the joke that the average human being has 1 breast and 1 testicle.

The Mini 14 never existed. Perhaps you're thinking of a specific (non-mini) model of the iPhone 12 which was temporarily banned in France or maybe the USB C requirement which went into effect ~1 year after new sales of the iPhone 13 mini were already discontinued by Apple worldwide?

I think you meant to say “due to correct belief, Apple did kill the mini due to sales”?

Another reason is hardware fragmentation. An Android developer has to account for over 20,000 unique devices, compared to an Apple developer targeting around 40 supported models at most.

> Instead, they just hand you some poorly documented loose parts in a box and tell you, “good luck” and you’re on your own to fill the gaps.

Google is fundamentally a spy company, not a product company

???

WindowSizeClasses, Postures, Navigation3, ListDetailScaffolds, the list goes on. Android & Compose is pretty much flawless when it comes to develop for it, it's thoroughly documented and works well.

Layouts will not magically be not dog shit on iOS because Apple put out another version of SwiftUI that you can't use in prod because nobody has the update. 90% of the apps will be stretched. Horizontally. The reality of it is, it's pretty much never worth it to make layouts that are specialised for foldables/tablets.

Also, it's pretty fucking funny to be worshipping Apple like that when they have a single device to support, and then complain about Android that literally had to pave the way and today works on phones that can unfold three times, phones like the galaxy Z Flip that have instead half screens, etc. Apple will tell you they can't back port dynamic islands on last year's release, while latest Compose is happily running on devices from 10 years ago.

I still think that there are very few examples of apps that utilize tablets well even among the apps that aren't stretched phone apps. I don't know if it is the ergonomics of the large screen or what, but the experience of using a tablet has always been pretty bad in my opinion.

Maybe the folding phone form factor will inspire some better UI/UX for apps.

Exactly, I remember until recently even instagram didn’t have a proper iPad app that uses the complete screen space

The rumours say 10 million iPhone Duo are being made, there are hundreds of millions of iPads so the numbers might not sway any opinions for a while.

I think they need to aggressively court developers, just give a buttload of advertising credit to nice apps that predate AI slop if they add compatibility, what does it cost Apple to "give" you $10k or $20k credit in their own ad system...

But the rumours also say they are going to squeeze the App Store for higher margins so maybe it is too late.

Like one of the things I hate about frontend development - and admire people who do this professionally - is the stupid and arbitrary rules browsers impose on you.

'You may only play audio if such and such conditions are met. However these are different based on browser and platform. Good luck making a solution fitting all these.'

'The browser might lie about what's the available screen estate is, but only sometimes'

'There is a perfect API for what you wanna do, however it's not in Safari'

And a testament on how obscure and arcane knowledge is on doing things right is that I thought there would be some npm packages that do these things for me, but no - you have to hunt around for solutions and fix things yourself.

And LLMs are completely useless and confidently wrong mostly about everything involving this.

Subway surfers and tiktok at the same time. The future is now chud.

Instagram posts on one side and reels on the other side

Cross-platform is a thing.

If anyting, Apple stands to gain from what was already developed for Android.

Like https://developer.android.com/phones-tablets-foldables

Which targets iOS also: https://kotlinlang.org/compose-multiplatform

Thought it will bring "desiging for foldables" onto the table which would benefit Android foldables too.

The folks around me that computing includes a lot of social and game consumption.

I know many people without a laptop or desktop at home. They don't find it strange. I can't imagine not having at least a laptop in my life.

AppleCare exists. Honestly worth just pricing that in.

https://www.samsung.com/fi/smartphones/galaxy-z-fold8/buy/ I think that the form factor is pretty much the same?

Good news! According to some, we don’t have more than 3.5 years in the career path, so that’s 10x less time you have to survive.

Go work for companies you like. There are plenty of good people out there making useful software. Or make your own opensource software and put your effort where your heart is.

It’s easy in our industry to burn out doing commercial work with no soul. But it’s not the only kind of work out there.

They've always been greedy villains.

Spend less money, save more money, then retire. I'm retired at 42 and I hardly had a top shelf career, middle of the pack at best. Even if you're starting at zero you can do it in 10 years very easily, 5 if you haven't spent every dime up till now and you are aggressive.

> Sir, I’m 40 and I’m already at the stage of not wanting to do any programming.

It's a shame you didn't come to this conclusion 10 years ago!

Find a hobby that doesn’t involve computers. It’s the only thing that will keep you sane in these trying times.

Switch the work mindset off, turn your nose up at technology and go touch grass. I wouldn’t be recommending if it didn’t work for me.

If nothing else it helps reframe your perspective on the world which technology companies as of late have been trying to distort to enrich the dozen or so people at the helm to their own benefit..

Holy batman, are you me?? I too am 40 and so sick of this industry after the masks came off and AI greed forced all CEOs and execs to salivate like hungry hyenas.

Are you sure you're just not frustrated that you didn't win the greedy villain lottery?

Im not 87 and have great vision but I recently got some magnifying shop style glasses for close up work on tiny stuff. It also has the advantage of being like readers in that it corrects for close vision (closer point of focus) in addition to magnifying. That could also help.

This would actually be a growing market in 10-15 years due to increased life expectancy and every boomers has reached retiring age by then. Maybe Apple would introduce an iPhone optimized to be used especially for older people

Iphone 15 counting as "small form factor" says a lot.

We (the HN audience) have disposable income for that type of thing, I don’t see the issue with being a casual user of an expensive device

A $2200 device and still limited to running dumbed-down touchscreen 'apps' from the App Store.

OP is 75 years old and belongs to the generation that already own a house and pretty much comfortable in their lives and any money they have/earn is just to consume things and live life. So why not spend it on a first generation device

It does far more than just a tablet. If it was easy, there would be one or two other companies out there who is this other vertical computer company?

Most tablets can't make cellular phone calls.

i've been hearing this critique of new apple products for about two decades now and inevitably: - apple's product "does the same thing" as [device sold at 25% of the cost] AND - apple's product "does the thing" at a level of polish that's in an entirely different league from every competitor.

siri is the great exception here. jesus christ what a piece of shit

They can charge as much as they think people will pay for.

Fact is, having a better pocket computer (that is your only pocket computer I might add) is probably going to have a lot of value for people.

Nah, let's just throw a new web framework at them that consumes all their newfound computing capacity. Always leave em' wanting more

You sound like ESR ranting about how Apple was doomed by Android back when the iPhone came out. He would rant and rant every time about how there was no conceivable way that Apple could survive. Somehow, Apple has managed to survive by the skin of it's teeth.../s

We can do this now, but I don't think the user experience makes it worth it compared to casting. Bandwidth limitations require lower frame rates and responsiveness, which is fine for video but bad for interactive apps (most phones are native 120+hz + VRR_. But re-encoding video is (processor & battery life) expensive and probably lower quality than the original stream.

People who do this a lot probably just use a DV adapter (maybe it just works with USB-C, but I haven't tried it) for native apps, or casting for streaming video.

Right — I would have hoped a while ago already that we transcend past the notion of an endpoint device. A tablet, a laptop, or a phone should all just be entry points to access my one OS instance.

You could think this a bit further still, and have all kinds of devices offer an interface to nearby endpoints with a display or controls, establishing connectivity automatically.

Apple does this right now. I use AirPlay to extend one laptop into an older laptop so I can have 2 displays when I’m away from home

I mean you kinda can do that now.

I presume you're trying to be friendly here, but your first couple sentences come off a bit harsh.

I like that he's well into his life and still enjoying writing (or authoring, or whatever we call it now) code, and looks forward to a nice long life. No one lives forever, and I'm sure he's aware of that.

It doesn't seem like a joke?

>"I am in my 50s and don’t see myself staring at screens for too long, let alone coding."

I am 65 and still enjoy software development (not coding in particular) but decomposing business idea into software architecture and functionality. Decomposing is the part I really enjoy, the rest is a necessity but with AI that rest takes way less of my time than it used to.

I do not work for someone though. I develop products for clients or for my own business, was doing it all my life and was doing it from my own office for last 26 years. Not overworked either. Have enough time to enjoy life. Al in all very happy

Modern phones are all phablets and it sucks but it's the only format they offer. Smaller phones are nicer to hold and nicer to use for everyday tasks. My thumb can actually reach things. At least AI will no doubt reduce the need for pressing buttons.

Manufacturers want phones to be thin so the only way to fit in the battery life is for the whole phone to be larger. In case you didn't notice it's really really difficult to find a side on photo of the iPhone Duo closed. They don't want to show the thickness.

Phablets are still bad, and yes, I am aware that a lot of phones today are just phablets. Everyone uses them, doesn't mean they're not bad.

Did the “phablets” take over the world?

I bought my Steam Deck for a similar imagined use case but I find myself way too aware of the visibility of a larger than average screen to all those around me.

Modern foldable phones are, fundamentally, different than clamshell phones like a Motorola razor

You think foldables will replace phones and tablets?

Certainly not at $2000.

Why does the future require two hands to operate?

My current iPhone I can hold and use with one thumb - what makes this better than that?

It's bigger and heavier than a phone.

It has a smaller display with a crease[1] and has less battery than a tablet. The screen is even smaller than an iPad mini. IMO that form factor only really works for like a Kindle.

And the screen has a matte finish which is only going to reduce contrast.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1wbx1wo/there_is_a_cr...

It’s the exact same price point as the Samsung Z Fold 8, which is this phone’s exact competitor.

$2k is a lot to ask, but it answers the market 100% on “I’d like a Samsung Fold 8, but as an iPhone”.

Considering the most important parts of the Duo are the screen and the hinge, yes it's a first generation device.

The previously released iPhone Air looks very similar to the fold, and I believe it even used the Apple modem C1 generation.

It'll be interesting to see how many/how quickly apps adopt the UI that lets you make the most of the foldable screen. If it doesn't sell in big numbers app developers might not feel the need to and the user experience will be subpar. ...but I suspect it will.

There is a lot of software support needed to make this work great. So first generation of all that for sure.

Well, the screen is the new/groundbreaking part!

Yeah, I wish they would go back to live, or at least parts of it live. They did a great job during the pandemic but it has lost some humanity and authenticity.

>The Apple Vision Pro was a rare early entry into a field.

It was not an early entry into the field. Many well established devices already existed. It was an uncharacteristic entrance into a niche.

Which is exactly what foldable phones are. 1.6% of phone sales in 2025 were foldable.

Maybe they will take off. But the odds are this will be discontinued.

The marketing pilled postures seem to have been toned down a bit.

I wish they would stop changing speakers every other sentence though. I swear drone cameras were the worst thing to happen to video, I'm gettin seasick over here!

> with fake hand movements

I don't get this complaint. People talk with their hands, it'd look more fake if they just stood there all stiff and wooden.

I wish these posts came with a demo video of you doing it better.

The truck metaphor is actually incredibly apt, because if you want to do "truck stuff" with your PC, a lot of people think you can't do that on a phone, but 90% of what people need a beefy computer for could be done on a phone if we had that kind of culture around it.

Trucks analogy is interesting. I (temporarily) live in the US South and trucks are 3:1 to all other vehicles here.

Steve Jobs didn't foresee that Americans would basically only buy trucks (and SUVs) in 20 years. You can barely buy a sedan in the US anymore.

Maybe small phones are like sedans, and the bigger and bigger iPhones are the trucks? Take this analogy where you will.

If that's the case, then why do we go to work on a computer instead of a phone? Oh, wait. A screen. A mouse, a keyboard. Really, if they wanted to, you could simply dock your phone and have that experience if the company was willing to put in the time.

Esp for Samsung as they don't have a consumer PC division that they would be concerned about killing...

I did that a few times with a 10 inches Samsung tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard, using the DeX UI. It had Linux on DeX with some Ubuntu version. 16.04?

I can't think about a good way to do it with a phone screen, unless you know that you can find a TV set to connect to. But hotel rooms usually place their TV sets very inconveniently and if you stay at a friend's home, their TV sets will be not so well placed too to be used as a monitor. So maybe a costly large foldable as your next phone?

This company https://nexphone.com/ has been doing something like that since 2016 but of course in a different way, by attaching the phone to a laptop shell or more simply to a USB hub.

At least some of the time, when people refer to using their phone as a computer, I think they're talking about plugging into an external monitor through USB-C, and using the phone as a desktop with a keyboard and mouse.

I've tried every so often, and while I think all the hardware is there, the software wasn't. Perhaps Android has improved on this recently? I know there have been niche attempts in the past, like Samsung DeX or Ubuntu Touch, which may have been more solid. I've never tried out any of those.

The 7.6" screen here is far too small to function as a second monitor type device. This is going to be for pure content consumption

If you still need a remote computer to do your work, in what way are you doing work on the phone?

Lots of computers have external keyboards, mice, and displays. Why not a powerful computer like the iPhone? Who cares if it's small? Lots of SBCs are small and are quite useful. This one even has a built in UPS.

Android Desktop mode looks so promising, it just needs to support higher resolutions/refresh rates but this is probably a side effect of at least the Pixel having weaker performance versus other flagships.

Although I can’t wait for the more powerful Motorolas with GOS to release. Maybe that’d be enough to make a phone my sole computing device.

Run game emulators with JIT. Currently you have to accept emulators either running very slow without JIT, or go through massive hurdles to enable it.

3rd party app store.

I'm guessing they mean one of the following:

-Installing software without App Store approval filtering

-True multi-tasking and background execution (though this hurts battery)

-Write iOS apps from an iPad

I certainly don't. You simply cannot get actual work done on a phone anywhere near as easily as on a real computer. There's a reason that companies issue laptops (or have desktops even) instead of giving employees a phone.

Will they though? They would capture more windows users. They already have the Neo actually. iPad still has another job mainly around simpler tasks. I’ve not yet got to love the Macosy windows management.

That's what I thought when they announced the folding phone, but iPad sales

What are you talking about?

A MacBook is optimized for a larger screen and comes with a better keyboard and trackpad.

I use both my MacBook and iPad all the time, because their hardware form factors are better for different things.

I don't want to read books on my MacBook and I don't want to do development or writing on my iPad.

I briefly tried using my iPad as a Mac through the screen sharing. It's not as useful as you are imagining.

Have you ever tried to do serious work on a tablet?

Absolutely sales of laptops would continue.

and increase power usage?

The iOS app iSH [0] allows you to do this, it’s a full blown Alpine environment running through x86 emulation in the app. I’ve been using it for a while, as far as I can tell almost all of the Alpine packages run without any issues.

You can already run postmarketOS or PureOS on a phone and get the full desktop mode with no restrictions, except the computing power.

Put a screen on that last 1/2 of the back and sell as Duo Max.

Agree - this is going to have pretty wide adoption.

> making doing so more or less “free”

except for those monthly payments you never get to stop making, yeah it's free.

Even in Canada, it starts at $3000

If leasing a fucking phone isn't a sign of the times then I don't know what is.

The Pixel Fold 10 (and 11) is IP68 rated

I get the form factor difference but Windows Hello (which actually works extremely well, probably due to its incubation with Xbox) came out two years before FaceID.

I really don’t know how you can say he wouldn’t do this things.

The Air particularly - the thinnest, lightest feeling, nicest to hold iPhone ever made, I think that might have been his favorite.

The Vision Pro is clearly an interesting category of device, Apple needs to be in, if it would have seen the light of day under Steve Jobs is unknowable.

He was ruthless at Apple because back then he had to be - now they can run Vision Pro and it not impact their ability run the business, if Apple had A product that did not succeed in the 90s it might have sank them.

Apple threw plenty of shit at the wall when Jobs ran the ship. The hockey puck mouse and the Mac Cube was under Jobs. The first Apple TV. That was pretty much what the Vision Pro is: a side project to test the waters and get some experience with a new format. It’s just that the Vision Pro by its nature is a much more expensive and ambitious side project.

All the three product you mentioned is exactly the kind of things Steve Jobs did. Don’t make him into this mythological flawless visionary.

You can bash the Air all you want, but it's the iPhone I love the most by far, and I had many iPhones since the 3G. It's such a pleasant phone to hold and the screen size is lovely.

If they release a second version with a ultrawide and maybe tele camera, it would be perfect.

Tim Cook:

[Jobs’] advice to me was ‘Never ask what I would do, just do the right thing,’

He had watched Disney go through this paralysis of sitting around and talking about what Walt [Disney] would do. And he did not want that for Apple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLqUXIwPGUo

He launched the macbook air. Iphone air seems right up his alley.

I could definitely imagine him loving the Air. But I don’t think he’d segment the market; he’d probably get rid of the normal iPhone

The iPhone Air is an absolutely beautiful product.

I’m having your post read out loud and am listening with my Apple Hifi.

> you could never do fancier than a 1500 buck iphone

There's always high-end commercial modders like Caviar [0], who help customers flex both their wealth and their extremely bad taste...

[0] https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/

> Apple IMO is just trying to capitalize on this phenomenon and capture the pretentious luxury market.

Yes, that aligns with Apple offering their ridiculous golden watch faces and bands of $1000s for their Watch - it's all just about projecting wealth and 'success' (i.e. in these days of capitalism: mostly exploiting others and/or making them depended).

Asia and America are very different

> You now can have multiple iPhones.

Thanks, I'd rather pull my fingernails.

Same here: 13 Mini (bought new at launch) with renewed battery.

I took my passport in my hand yesterday to see how it feels. Yikes, it feels even harder to control the whole screen with your thumb.

My 12 was refurbished like... 5 times already - I break various parts of it, and I have a spare 13 that was refurbished 2 times. Even though I can allow myself newer phone, nothing comes close to these models in portability, yet speed.

This is likely a technical limitation rather than a preference; with the requirement to be so thin, there is probably not enough room for the necessary depth scanning hardware required for Face ID.

It's quite a lot wider and thicker than a mini, and imho looks quite ugly when folded, I don't see the appeal as a single-handed device.

+ the pricing anchor drags the others models up and makes them look "better value" ... vs a lower price model selling 4% but anchoring the price downwards.

> None of that matters for a phone.

Of course it does. They show the most basic example right on the page, which is that you can side-by-side full screen apps.

Proportions absolutely matter for displays, both for aesthetic comfort and for efficient scaling. Most of the world uses ISO216 and its pleasing 1:sqrt(2) proportions. Leveraging aspect ratios with wide acceptance is a win both psychologically and for graphic designers.

Our world is full of artifacts from a previous ages and using some of those as standards is useful/convenient.

We still use QWERTY keyboards even though our highly futuristic typewriters don't jam anymore. We type commands on tty teleTypeWriter, we save files with buttons using a floppy disk icon, etc etc.

How can you forget? Growing up in Australia, every computer I’ve ever owned has defaulted to “US Letter” as the paper size. (Even when your computer was set to use Australian localisations.) If you didn’t change the setting, you couldn’t print. The printer would complain that it was out of paper, because it didn’t have a tray with the requested us letter paper in it. It was one of those things you always had to check.

I don’t think I saw a “us letter” sized piece of paper until I was an adult.

We (normal citizens, businesses, government) mostly use “Letter” size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_(paper_size) which is slightly shorter than A4

Apparently the reagan admin is responsible for making this our official government document size, and no one knows exactly why this size was chosen.

Like as a standard? No. But I can go to a stationery shop and buy an A4 notebook.

No, "letter" is the standard

From Apple's diagonal measurements [1], it looks like the screen is actually a few mm off from the closest ISO 216 sizes.

d = 7.58in = 192.532mm [1]

d^2 = w^2+h^2

Unfolded:

h = d/sqrt(3) = ~111.1584mm

w = h*sqrt(2) = ~157.2017mm

Closest ISO 216 size: A6 (105x148)

Folded:

D = 5.36in = 136.114mm [1]

H = D/sqrt(3) = ~78.5855mm

W = H*sqrt(2) = ~111.1366mm

Closest ISO 216 size: A7 (74x105)

[1] https://www.apple.com/iphone-duo/specs/

If you unfold and have two apps side-by-side, then the aspect ratio (and seemingly size?) is the same as having one app, closed. Seems nice to have.

I want to be able to open the phone and get the original closed-state image, but stretched to fit the new total hardware viewport size.

It’s the size of a passport, which does fit in most pockets.

With a ratio of 1:√2, you can cut the sheet in half parallel to its shorter side, and each half keeps the same proportions.

Aspect ratios are very important for UI design.

It's to make commercial use of paper mind-numbingly easy in terms of calculation and avoiding waste.

I would imagine this helps a lot having two screens side by side. You can remote into another phone and help a user like an old relative accomplish something. Or run a virtual machine or AI control panel

I often make the argument about whether metric is "better" being split by "is it better on paper" vs "is it better in day to day life" - and most metric stuff breaks down in the latter, meaning, the non metric systems seem to be perfectly fine in day to day life, but almost always better on paper.

Like Celsius - sounds great on paper, not any better (and in some ways, worse) in day to day weather/temperature.

One of the few exceptions I find is metric paper sizes. It's such a beautiful way of designing the sizes that is not only perfect on paper (pun proudly intended), is also totally practical in real life.