Other iPhone followers - has the iPhone advanced like you thought it would?

[tagsaid]

At this point the iPhone is 16 years old and Apple has released a total of 38 versions of it (not including every color or size, just number increments and “SE” and “mini”)

With it being 16 years old, granted we couldn’t predict what was coming, but is the iPhone 14, and assuming the rumors are correct, the iPhone 15, as advanced as you thought they would be? Are they more advanced or do you feel like they are lacking for the tech improvements that we’ve witnessed?

 

[Shirasaki]

Heavy reliance on 4/6 digit code for anything iCloud-related is just far too much. No one saw that coming, and it becomes a huge security risk.
Tech-wise I am not that selective so it's fine for me.
But seriously, figure out a way to reduce the power of passcode...

 

[Mikeske]

I am actually not surprised by the advancement that the iPhone has made over the past 16 years. When it first came out it was interesting. The advancement of cloud computing that has a link to the phone is one thing I never saw coming but being a child of the 1960's and reading comic books and cartoons that even went back further into the 1930's was a interesting one in the Dick Tracy comics with the wrist watch that doubled as a walkie talkie. Swing into today and I have an Apple Watch series 8 GPS. My wife sent me out to our detached garage to get something out of our 2nd deep freezer and since it was raining she decided to call me to get a 2nd item. My iPhone sitting in the house on my computer desk my watch rings me up and I answer that she wanted a second item. Sure saved me some time. Well I felt like Dick Tracy talking to my watch in that instant.

The 2nd thing is the great pictures that can be taken with the phone who would have thought that 16 years ago of quality of the pictures that can now be taken. Earlier Monday I was driving home and saw a barred owl fly from the ground to a branch of a tree. I snapped a picture and shared it family and friends. Pretty amazing in the fact we have the ability to share some really great pictures

 

[eyoungren]

At this point the iPhone is 16 years old and Apple has released a total of 38 versions of it (not including every color or size, just number increments and “SE” and “mini”)

With it being 16 years old, granted we couldn’t predict what was coming, but is the iPhone 14, and assuming the rumors are correct, the iPhone 15, as advanced as you thought they would be? Are they more advanced or do you feel like they are lacking for the tech improvements that we’ve witnessed?

When the iPhone launched I had a Sanyo Katana and I upgraded in 2009 to an HTC Touch Pro. I am still waiting for the Windows update on that phone.

My first iPhone was a gifted 3GS for Christmas 2011. I bought an iPhone for myself the first time in 2012, the iPhone 5.

I wasn't expecting anything.

I bought a phone. It makes phone calls, it allows me to text, it allows me to email and it allows me to browse the web. Later on I started using it to stream music from time to time. It does that, it's done it since before 2011.

Sometimes I take pictures. The iPhone can take pictures, just like my Sanyo Katana could.

Was there something I was supposed to be expecting?

Or perhaps I am getting your question wrong. There are things I assumed. I assumed the phone would get better each year. At least as much as it can. Just how much better can you make phone calls, texts and emails? The camera sure, but I don't really use that so it doesn't matter to me that I can take micro pictures of my salad on Earth while I am standing on Pluto.

I did not assume phones would get bigger, so that happening was a pleasant surprise. I did not assume Apple would double down on the fugly camera boil as a design element (yes I know, the current level of hardware tech means a bump -doesn't mean I have to like it), so that happening was not a pleasant surprise.

I assumed that the design of the phone would change over time. But once we hit the iPhone 4, Apple settled on the basic slab. I probably shouldn't have assumed anything would have changed on that.

 

[5105973]

I thought battery technology would develop faster than it has, because everything else has moved along so quickly. They’ve managed to eke out increasing efficiency out of the displays and the processors and so forth, but we are all still trying to baby and coax more life out of our batteries. This isn’t exclusively an Apple problem, of course. But I thought Apple might be one of the innovators working to figure this out.

I did also expect Siri to be much further along than it is. I didn’t expect Apple to drop the ball with the Siri team.

I also thought iPhone would have the best camera controls, but for that I give the nod to Google.

As someone who suffers pwm sensitivity, I thought once Apple was made aware of the issues, they would be the ones, not the Chinese companies, to provide ways of mitigating the health effects on their consumers. I guess I expected displays to become easier and healthier to look at as time went on, not less so.

This is more an observation about the company than the iPhone, but it impacts the user experience: I thought they would have implemented a more responsive system to handle bug reports and bug fixes. Years ago when my husband was still active as a developer he reported bugs to Apple and waited years for a fix to many of them. I’m not sure all of them got fixed.

I’m amazed how much audio on their external speakers has progressed on the iPhone. It’s one area where I think they worked a miracle given how small the speakers have to be.

But I’m surprised phone calls still sound like hot garbage so often. To some extent all of my latest and greatest phones have tripped on their own feet a little in call quality. But Apple was always atrocious in my experience and persisted the longest in remaining atrocious throughout so many generations of iPhones. Once I ventured out of the walled garden and tried Android and saw what was out there I was shocked at how poorly served iPhone users have been by our iPhones because of the Apple vs Qualcomm ridiculousness.

My best phone conversations were on Android phones. My HTC 10 was the most divine. I had calls so clear on that phone that made it sound like the person I was talking to was in the room with me. That phone was from 2016, if I remember correctly. So that level of excellence could exist back that far and yet took so long to reach iPhones. Actually, I personally haven’t yet had an iPhone that lived up to what I experienced on that HTC 10. That was the only Android I carried as my main phone for a significant period of time.

I blame Apple’s penny pinching insistence on staying with intel modems rather than paying Qualcomm to give customers the best call quality. They reportedly also allowed themselves to fall down on other aspects that impact call quality like antenna design and quality of mics. I was shocked. This is something my friends in the minivan mom world who are iPhone loyalists seem completely unaware of.

In terms of the iPhone designs, they’re not what I expected because of the camera bumps. I think Jony Ive made the earlier iPhone designs seem inevitable. Once he showed the way on the early iPhones, it’s like everyone else woke up and realized smartphones didn’t have to look like ugly awkward little boxes. iPhones were so sleek and graceful compared to their rivals. And then…what the heck happened?

We got these massive camera bumps. They throw the feel off by imposing awkward weight distributions across the slab. They throw the look off. And if you look at the Samsung s23 Ultra and the designs that came before it, you can see it’s not strictly necessary to have a gigantic lump in order to offer very capable lenses. The s23 Ultra has a periscope lens. And yet the phone feels fairly well balanced and comfortable to hold and the lenses are almost flush against the back. They evolved from streamlined lumps to this sleek design. But they were never massive growths bristling with protruding lenses.

I’ve long been impressed by how reliable and tough iPhones have been compared to the competitors.