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#iphone#phone#pro#apple#battery#years#image#need#more#camera
Discussion (195 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
> 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.
It helps but doesn't solve credibility issue.
We really need Apple to open up true depth APIs to make forgery non trivial.
https://c2paviewer.com/articles/samsung-galaxy-s25-c2pa
https://security.googleblog.com/2025/09/pixel-android-truste...
https://c2paviewer.com/supported-devices
https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html
We really need it for journalism. Otherwise we will not know what is real and what fabricated with ai.
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.
Small, memory efficient programs run better everywhere. It feels like theft to make consumers pay for our inefficient software. Electron / react on the desktop is such a rort.
Also, if they make a neo 2 from the A19 with 12 GB that'd be cool.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Please, not again.
– Sincerely yours mobile developer
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.
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.
I don’t think Siri is sentient yet.
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.
Not unlike the "Best jacket of the season" being the one that is most fashionable as opposed to the most functional.
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...
"MASSIVE improvements in Camera". Where? Evolution, refinement, sure. Massive? Hm.
Wait, that is gated to the $1999 duo device, with untested reliability.
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.
Just coming up to five years on mine and it is still at 87% capacity.
Really it mostly depends on how heavily you use it, and maybe to a lesser extent charging habits (charging slowly, not charging to 100%, etc).
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 damaged my first iPhone repair even after multiple years of active hardware modification on other consumer devices. The older models really only go smooth if you have the Apple tools. A nice $149 of tool rental to swap the $50 part at home, rather than paying the $199 to get Apple to swap it for you. Odd how that math works out.
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.
Even Apple can’t eat hundreds of dollars in extra cost per phone in competition with AI memory consumption.
Every one else is raising prices at so they will too.
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
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)
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.
Hopefully these models have a longer lifespan before the battery life forces a replacement. If they truly offer 36 hours, there's more runway before they hit the < 18 hours point at which many people need a refresh
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.
— "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."
- 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36201593
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.
Yeah Apple TOTALLY doesn't astroturf HN.
Eh, that's maybe about it.
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.
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.
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...)
Not quite sure where you are seeing this. Maybe games?
And on the iOS side, Tahoe inserts all sorts of overdone, ridiculous animations that slow down phone interaction, but delaying presentation of
In this system. Of 'smartphones', where a small handful of corporate masters - who also happen to (now!) be a big share of the world's largest and most profitable corporations - now own over half of the computing world that we love, following their whirlwind 20-year takeover of it.
"No I need better phone app developers." - Hmmm. Commiserations. The trend of developer quality (and/or it's inverse - e.g. system complexity and overheads) has been fairly constant since the term 'developer' became mainstream parlance, and you won't need me to point out what effect AI coding agents have had upon the doorway-to-entry.
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!
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.
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.
https://lobste.rs/s/4netv1/c2pa_cameras_do_not_survive_conta...
"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.
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.
(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 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.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/change-face-id-and-at...
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.
Apple was the last hold out with small phones, years after everybody else moved to huge phones.
But even Apple couldn't resist the pressure from the consumers, and eventually yielded.
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.
I did, however, take a series of photos comparing the Mini to the SE- and the packaging of the 6 (I think I gave the phone away but still had the box).
https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...
Rinse and repeat.
If you have a "known" or "expected" cycle, people can rely on that.
Wish I'd got the biggest storage size when I bought it though :(
https://photos.reportinglive.com/p/2026-09-09/f-bf86c6f5adb3...
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...
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?
Edit: Nevermind, it has made the front page now