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Does anyone here actually get extra tangible uses out of the new iphone versions?
I have owned the 4, 5, 6, 8, and currently 11. Upon recent reflection, I that all the iPhones past the 5 have added nothing of meaningful value in terms of new features only minor quality of life updates like a better battery and camera, but nothing that has actively changed how I use the product. For this reason I won't be buying any of the newer versions of the iPhone.
So I'm curious if anyone here has an experience where there WAS a new feature added (past the iPhone 5) that has actively changed how they use their iPhone in some tangible way.
The LIDAR scanner is niche but sufficiently transformative (the FaceID camera can be used in this way as well due to the way its hardware works- and yeah, it actually does require special hardware for the required depth mapping). I'll likely be upgrading to a model that has it, because sometimes I want to 3D print things I find difficult to measure directly (curved internal surfaces are a real bitch to get right the first time).
Of course, that generally requires third-party applications to create and export the mesh as opposed to a first-party "we designed the phone to do this" philosophy Apple has always had, so I'm not entirely sure that counts. And it's not something I do every day, either.
The same conditions are true for most Android devices; the iPhone just has far more useful lifespan per dollar especially once you're in the sub-500 price range (I legitimately don't understand the point of buying a new phone before the hardware physically dies or the software is too old to run anything, but I'm probably in the minority here).
There is one exception to this, however, and that's the folding-screen phones: they're ludicrously expensive, but being able to have 2 apps open at the same time is a really big deal just like it was for PCs back in the 1980s.
I think Google is wise to go all-in on this tech, even though it's going to take a while to trickle down into the 400-dollar phone market, because this really does bridge the usefulness gap between phone and tablet, and it's easier to stomach replacing a 200-dollar phone every 2 years than it is a 1000-dollar phone because the screen physically can't hold up to being bent that many times.
It's also not something Apple is going to be able to match for a long time if ever; multi-tasking has always been an afterthought for them.
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The Face ID thing is kind of nice. But yeah; marginal improvements. Nothing transformative.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't Face ID completely a software change. So theoretically couldn't apple have put that same software on the iPhone 5? Or would the specs of the iPhone 5 not cut it to run whatever ML model they are running?
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