If this was true wouldn't there be a market for a ruggedized version that has the toughness of a case, from the factory as shipped? Its a little silly for Apply to shave every possible half-millimeter from the design and then have 99% of people add back the thickness plus a lot of extra by adding a case. Why not have a factory-ruggedized version which isn't as thick as adding that case but is just as rugged?

If you like the color, you can use a transparent case.

Transparent cases are a thing dontchaknow!

I bought a blue iPhone 16 last year at this time; I've never used a case. More people are going case-less these days.

Ask workers of cell phone stores and you’ll find that figure is way off. Not everyone wants a case. Having a case significantly changes the feeling of the device in hand.

Anodizing titanium creates an oxide layer, the thickness of which varies with the voltage used. The thickness of that oxide layer determines which wavelengths of light it refracts [0]. In practical terms, your choices for color are pretty limited[1].

I'm not a chemist, but I looked into this years back when I was wondering why everything titanium is offered in the same couple of colors. Personally, I like the plain gray.

[0] https://wisensemachining.com/titanium-anodizing-guide/

[1] https://www.snowpeak.com/collections/cups/products/ti-single...

But even the non-Pro phones had mostly ugly colors in the last couple years. Maybe to match the ugliness of the Pro models?

The changed colors are the signal that you have the new one.

And i have no idea what color my phone was when i got it. It has been inside an otterbox case since the hour i first had it. For me, the color of a cellphone is about as relevent as the color of a motherboard. It will look cool for, at most, a few minutes before it is forever locked inside a case.

> I don't get why Apple doesn't do consistent colors

The materials used is a factor: the last few iPhones were built with aluminum (iPhone 16), titanium (iPhone 16 Pro) and stainless steel (iPhone 13 Pro).

Not all colors work with all materials; my understanding is titanium is particularly bad for bright colors. The colors for the iPhone Pro models have been pretty drab--not this year.

I have that one, I sometimes take the case off just to look at it.

It certainly took them a while to introduce MTE! Pixel 8 came out in 2023. I wonder how it compares against hardened_malloc with 48-bit address space and 33-bit ASLR in Graphene. Apple's security team has reported that MIE could break all "known" exploit chains, but so does hardened_malloc. Hard to tell right now which one is best (most def MIE) but everything else included in Graphene is probably making the point moot anyway.

Yes, but it is not MTE, they are technically different. That's what I was attempting to point out but thought it may have been a typo

It's the same for the Afib detection.

The point of the detection features are to notify people who are not diagnosed with the condition to go to the doctor about it possibly get diagnosed with it.

It's not useful for people already diagnosed because they already know they have it, so the notification is just telling them something they already know.

legal, and also: if you already have been diagnosed, you should already be under medical professional supervision (meds, checkups,…) anyway.

my guess is this is more like the heart irregularities feature: it’s for the first diagnosis. (a relative of mine actually got diagnosed that way)

I believe this is for the fringe cases where you have been diagnosed with hypertension, but your apple Watch does not tell you that you have hypertension risk, then you may decide to not take your drugs, since your watch told you all clear. This could trigger lawsuits if complications set in when you decide not to take your drugs because of "lack of alarm"

Exactly. And most folks are using a framework like llama.cpp which does control where it’s run.

A couple more examples would have been nice; it took a while to understand your point.

Made my day lol thanks

Hey man, it helps you think different. You just never knew your neurons needed accelerating.

I really hope someone got fired for this blunder

Which means what, exactly, to someone whose not a machine learning researcher?

Yes, they do. They're called Neural Engine, aka NPUs. They aren't being used for local LLMs on Macs because they are optimized for power efficiency running much smaller AI models.

Meanwhile, the GPU is powerful enough for LLMs but has been lacking matrix multiplication acceleration. This changes that.

Each GPU core, but yes, this was part of what they announced today - it’s now integral rather than separate.

The NPU is still there. This adds matmul acceleration directly into each GPU core. It takes about ~10% more transistors to add these accelerators into the GPU so it's a significant investment for Apple.

1. It adds new features. Eg. see matmul and other to-be-detailed-soon features.

2. It moves some stuff from the external Neural Engine to the GPU, which substantially increases speeds for those workloads. That itself is a feature.

Will any of this really matter much to the average consumer at this point? Probably not. Not until Apple Intelligence gets off the ground.

You have to take any of those numbers and multiply them by two, since you have to go there and then back again.

I'm sure the people placing multibillion dollar bets have done their research, but the trends I see are AI getting more efficient and hardware getting more powerful, so as time goes on, it'll be more and more viable to run AI locally.

Even with token consumption increasing as AI abilities increase, there will be a point where AI output is good enough for most people.

Granted, people are very willing to hand over their data and often money to rent a software licence from the big players, but if they're all charging subscription fees where a local LLM costs nothing, that might cause a few sleepless nights for a few execs.

Sure, that's why local LLMs aren't popular or mass market as of September 2025.

But cloud models will have diminishing returns, local hardware will get drastically faster, and techniques to efficiently inference them will be worked out further. At some point, local LLMs will have its day.

"Servers are more powerful" isn't a super strong point. Why aren't all PC gamers rendering games on servers if raw power was all that mattered? Why do workstation PCs even exist?

Society is already giving pushback to AI being pushed on them everywhere; see the rise of the word "clanker". We're seeing mental health issues pop up. We're all tired of AI slop content and engagement bait. Even the developers like us discussing it at the bleeding edge go round in circles with the same talking points reflexively. I don't see it as a given that there's public demand for even more AI, "if only it were more powerful on a server".

I switch between gpt-oss:20b/qwen3:30b. Good for green fielding projects, setting up bash scripts, simple CRUD apis using express, and the occasional error in a React or Vue app.

well, another way to recount it is that google tried and it worked okay but they decided it wasn't moving the needle, so they stopped trying.

Huh? GeForce NOW is a resounding success by many metrics. Anecdotally, I use it weekly to play multiplayer games and it’s an excellent experience. Google giving up on Stadia as a product says almost nothing about cloud gaming’s viability.

Do you mean Stadia? Stadia worked great. The only perceptible latency I initially had ended up coming from my TV and was fixed by switching it to so-called "gaming mode".

Never could figure out what the heck the value proposition was supposed to be though. Pay full price for a game that you can't even pretend you own? I don't think so. And the game conservation implications were also dire, so I'm not sad it went away in the end.

But on technical merits? It worked great.

Clearly the Large part, given the context...LLMs usually miss stuff like this, funnily enough.

Do you see the C for Cheap in there? Me neither.

Username checks out.

Yeah you can, so long as you're hosting your local LLM through something with an OpenAI-compatible API (which is a given for almost all local servers at this point, including LM Studio).

https://opencode.ai and https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code both allow you to configure any API as the LLM provider.

That said, running agentic workloads on local LLMs will be a short and losing battle against context size if you don't have hardware specifically bought for this purpose. You can get it running and it will work for several autonomous actions but not nearly as long as a hosted frontier model will work.

LM Studio lets you run a model as a local API (OpenAI-compatible REST server).

Except now your phone is getting energy wirelessly, which is less efficient and gets hot...

A big loss for a small coolness factor.

The Moto Z was ahead of its time! (it was thinner and had a magnetic battery add-on).

You did have to pay extra for the battery, mind.

Yes, and then don’t even make it compatible with other phones. I’m a big fan of their previous (discontinued) MagSafe battery as that supports reverse charging, charge state display on phone and has the perfect size.

This new battery however is only compatible with the Air as other phones have a bigger camera bump.

What on earth are you talking about? It includes a battery and there is both a cheaper and a more expensive version that has more battery, plus an add on battery pack. And you’re complaining about what exactly?

You could get an iPhone Max as your iPhone Air backup. Or maybe just get the iPhone Max...?

Seems like Apple is way ahead of you.

Some people: I don’t want to carry extra battery all the time for the one day a month I need it.

Other people: how dare you

I, for one, am looking forward to being forced to purchase the add-on MagSafe headphone adaptor. (And the MagSafe floppy drive.)

Pebble had like a week long battery life. Apple’s pitch wasn’t better battery life, it was just “that thing for nerds? This is the same, but for everyone else.” I.e. it came with seamless integration with your phone, rings to close, a more expensive look, and more polished fitness tracking.

The breakthru that made touchscreen phones works wasn’t an app ecosystem. That came after people were already crazy about iPhones. It was capacitive touch screens. Basically everything before was resistive touch, which is why they usually had styluses. Getting touch, and really multi-touch, working well was the game changer that redefined cell phones.

To be fair, Apple Watch battery life is atrocious compared to competing models. Their marketing and ecosystem is better.

> Is this a thing?

From Google's official Pixel 9 Pro Fold handling instructions: (https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/15090466?hl=en#...)

> Flexible screens are softer than traditional phone screens, so avoid contact with sand, crumbs, *fingernails* and sharp objects.

-> sour apple

I'm sure that if Apple invented the exact same thing in the exact same way, it would have been the "greatest thing since sliced bread".

I have an OG Pixel Fold and the inner screen is flawless. My iPhone 14 Pro screen is visibly scratched. The Fold replaced tablets and e readers for me.

it's invisible if you look straight at your phone, never bothered me

> the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come

I have several apps that no longer work on my otherwise good phone bought in 2018 because I can no longer update the OS that they require.

It's the software updates that's the problem. Apple aren't too bad, but their hardware support only seems to last 7 years.

The S7 you mention lasted 4 years, and received the last patch in 2020.

Not convinced that doing online banking on a phone that hasn't had software updates for 5 years is a good idea.

Samsung Galaxy A40 checking in.

It's small, has dual sim card sockets, and a headphone jack.

I'm not sure how I'd replace it to be honest.

I’ve dropped my iPhone 15 more times than any phone I’ve ever had. Still fine. I don’t know how I got away with it.

Am I representative? Dunno.

I am getting more and more nervous that there will be no good upgrade for me. 13 Mini is such a good size!

yeah.. and I am buying $2k unopened on eBay to keep for the future, if my current one is lost.

The Samsung Flip 7 costs $900 and is less than most iPhones...

Sure, but I wouldn't buy one even if it was in the same price range as phones I usually buy. For me, it will be useful rarely and cumbersome to use the rest of the time.

I picked up a folding phone a while back just to test it out, and honestly they're still pretty underwhelming.

The screen isn't really big enough or the right shape to feel like a real upgrade for movies, and a lot of apps just aren't built with foldables in mind. Most of the time it just feels like a weirdly shaped, less powerful, less durable tablet.

On top of that you're dealing with a visible crease across the screen, higher prices for something that's actually more fragile, and bulkier hardware with smaller or split batteries. The tech is cool in theory, but in practice it's a lot of compromises without a clear killer use case.

I have a folding android and it’s very meh. Wouldn’t get one again. It was also free with a prepaid phone plan so I doubt cost is really the factor.

I'm with you. Long term Apple customer and it feels like they really don't care about anything that I would like them to do.

It's OK but it feels bad because you are kind of trapped with their stuff if you invested in their ecosystem.

>Apple watch is like the definition of dorky looking

Meanwhile my Casio calculator watch: "bonjour"

Don't know why you're downvoted. My boyfriend wears the Apple Watch Ultra in public and looks like a complete dork. He's got a pretty big wrist, too!

I left the ecosystem after Catalina, and my experience with macOS at work has horrified me enough to stay well away. Nowadays I'm happily using NixOS on the desktop, laptop and homeserver. My biggest gripe is that I didn't switch sooner, probably could have saved a decent amount of cash eschewing the Apple tax, SaaS fees and macOS migration hamster-wheel.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with the Apple Watch being labeled "dorky". I think they look pretty nice - and I don't own one. I wear a Timex Ironman.

That Apple Watch is ubiquitous suggests that it's not seen as dorky.

Apparently in 2022, 80% of iPhone owners also had the AW.

Maybe half length, not sure half space.

That’s because most Android phones are tablet sized. We could simply have smaller phones.

I tested the Samsung one in the store and that groove thing in the screen would drive me crazy

They have a nightmare of a crease. Every single one. Even slight warping causes me to recoil. No, I've used one, they are absolutely unusable for me.

I'd agree if there were fewer compromises required to pull it off.

What’s the main use case of this?

so what do you use on yours with more dexterity than without it?

It's great for watching shows on a stationary bike, reading manga, and as a drawing tablet. There's a bunch of artists that only use procreate.

Schools--for better or for worse, schools buy gobs of ipads.

i see one at basically every store or bar as an easily configurable POS

Are you serious? For anything that needs more screen estate - reading, browsing, photo/video watching/organizing, or simply if your sight is not as good anymore, it's so much better than phone. And with the pricetag around $350 that is amazing value.

Owner of the pixel 9 folding here and I drop it constantly, no issues

what? why? they're already bigger than one hand -- way too big! Get a computer