Lots of people have creative hobbies that involve their phone in some capacity—music and photography are common—and basically everyone takes family photos and videos with them, so new photo capabilities are always welcome even for non-hobbyist users. Personally, I think it’s awesome that my kids could borrow my phone and make their backyard movies a hell of a lot more “cinematic” than mine on the family camcorder ever could have been, even if I’d had some idea of what I was doing.
Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases.
Plus, you’re on HN: your complaint about iPhones is supposed to be that they’re just “mindless consumption devices” for sheeple who want to drool at YouTube shorts, wildly worse for any conceivable creative or practical, serious endeavor than Linux phones or a Thinkpad, because you can’t get a root shell. You’ve gone entirely the wrong direction for this site, with your post :-)
I do a bit of creative audio work and consider my iPhone next to useless. iPads are useful in some contexts.
I've returned to the stone ages of digital tuners and metronomes for practice(1), and any recordings I make use a laptop. Not that there are good options for quick and dirty recordings, just that they're better than using a phone.
If I were making podcasts or something like that the phone would be a lot more useful, but for music, not so much.
(1) there was awhile back that my phone was integral to practicing music but now I can't use it at all, because every decent metronome/tuner app is trash.
For an increasing amount of people, "making music" is recording a tiktok of themselves singing or playing a guitar or recording themselves rapping directly into the phone mic for soundcloud.
Not trying to judge what counts as making music - just saying that the times are changing a bit and the GP probably wasn't referring to traditional DAW usage and stuff like that.
> Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases.
We must live on different planets. Are you really going to send your friends and family AI-generated emojis, or rewrite your texts to them with Apple Intelligence? I sure know they won't.
No, I don’t even use the “stickers” and shit they have now, but the enhanced photo and moment-in-video natural language search are gonna make any OS without that built in feel broken when I get used to that and try to use it anywhere that doesn’t have it, I bet. Same as their existing transparent image OCR has left me going “wtf?” when I forgot I wasn’t on an Apple OS and tried to use it. The AI-assistant stuff via camera for quick searches and item identification look great, too. If it’s good enough it’ll Sherlock multiple existing apps, all in one.
Once you start making silly stickers from photos, they are surprisingly fun. I have a bunch of my dogs in poses that can fit on and around the message bubbles.
Several of the “AI” features looked like the kind of thing any phone will feel incomplete without as soon as I use them the first time, for normal-user use cases.
Plus, you’re on HN: your complaint about iPhones is supposed to be that they’re just “mindless consumption devices” for sheeple who want to drool at YouTube shorts, wildly worse for any conceivable creative or practical, serious endeavor than Linux phones or a Thinkpad, because you can’t get a root shell. You’ve gone entirely the wrong direction for this site, with your post :-)