It's their in-house cellular modem for 2G/3G/4G/5G.
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.
we’ll be waiting a while. The last Mini was iPhone 8 sized, when I considered anything larger than the 5 to be too much.
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.
Same diagonal doesn’t mean same size. The Duo is also much thicker (the camera plateau in particular) and heavier, and the front screen is so wide (a good bit wider than the Pro Max) that it’s hardly suited for one handed use.
Me too. Everyone who sees my phone loves it, and I always share a nod with my fellow mini owners. I really don’t want a huge phone and it is still more than fast enough (a 12 at that!)
iPhones got Good Enough at least 6 years ago. Same with macbooks.
I really liked my iPhone 12 mini. But Apple also makes a lot of money from app sales, so I wonder if there’s a connection between screen size and app purchases.
Maybe users with larger screens spend more time in apps and are therefore more likely to buy apps or make in-app purchases. The more screen real estate people have, the more they might engage with apps, which could translate into higher spending.
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.
Now everybody who bought the orange iPhone needs to sell it and buy the burgundy one.
Because the only thing worse than not having an iPhone is having the previous one.
Brilliant strategy from Apple, make the colors stand out, then swap them for other stand out colors.
In the past the shape or camera layout would change and signal the version, but now that stabilized, so you need to use the color to clearly show what model you have.
I'm an Apple fanboy, and I think OP is probably right? Having a distinctive colour that marks a phone as being the latest one is definitely a great marketing idea.
I have no idea which iPhone version I have anymore. It doesn't feel as though it's missing anything, though.But I'd upgrade immediately if the new models truly offered better AI experience.
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)
The 13 is the last generation of the mini and I still have mine. Good to know I'm not missing anything. Battery capacity isn't even below 80% so I can't replace it under Applecare yet.
This is the problem for Apple. Expect shorter lifetime for security updates in the next few years. It’s why they’re pushing the “lease to own”, because people aren’t upgrading every year, or two, or even three any more.
That's kind of like saying the 2026 Corolla isn't really much different than the 2025. People don't expect to upgrade annually. I'm using an iPhone 15, and upgraded to that from a 6S+. The 15 was a night and day difference. Most people are financing their device with their service plan which is 2-3 contract.
> eSIM-only models deliver up to 36 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro and up to 45 hours of video playback on iPhone 18 Pro Max.
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.
Don't. Large iPhones are the deadweight of a ball and chain, and fits in no pockets. Next one will be the SE, and even if I buy an external battery, it's still lighter than the ingot Pro Max. Also you can buy one every 1.5 years.
I'm on the iPhone 13 pro max since launch and my phone comfortable gets through an entire day of usage. (Given my usage is pretty light). If the battery fubars in one of the next years I wouldn't be upset, 5+ years of battery life is enough.
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.
I have a 12 Pro Max purchased at release, battery is now at 83% capacity. Still lasts all day and then some, rarely think how much I've got left on a charge.
I doubt any phone battery is lasting 5+ years. But I can say modern iPhones are pretty easy to swap the battery on. They designed it so the back plate gets removed to open the phone rather than the screen. No more risk of cracking the display.
My 13pro is at 84% capacity, but in the last month or two it seems to lose charge much more rapidly than it used to. Probably the only reason I'll consider an upgrade.
I hear you, but the convenience of 30W charging is very hard to give up. The only downside is it damages the battery, which makes it harder to give up, which damages the battery more.
That is genuinely shocking to hear. You have to be like 3+ sd above the mean. Do you know how many charge cycles you have? I recall that most batteries need replacing after 300-500 cycles.
Looks like I am going off old info. Up until the iPhone 14 it was 500 cycles to 80%, 15 and up is 1000.
I also believe apple’s claim is assuming optimal conditions. Real life is going to do a fair bit worse. So likely 700-1000 cycles for 80% if the pattern holds up.
The maximum capacity of my iPhone 17 pro is still at 100% after 192 charges, that's after 1 year of usage. The extra battery life does reduce the amount of charges I have to do so that helps with the battery life.
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 don't know why we even have this event anymore. There's a new iPhone every September. It's incrementally better than the last iPhone. Phones keep getting more expensive while doing basically the same thing for some reason. Just buy whatever is out when you need a new phone.
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.
I really don't care at all about phone models, I just want software to launch quickly.
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...)
No I need better phone app developers. The fastest phone has the same issues. New phones are just as sluggish. And, it's a phone, there's not going to be fast networks everywhere, and a whole generation of poor developers was raised to believe that the network was always present and always fast.
And on the iOS side, Tahoe inserts all sorts of overdone, ridiculous animations that slow down phone interaction, but delaying presentation of
We are up to the iphone 18 now. The iphone is said to be about 50% of Apple's revenue since 2012. Regardless of app developer quality, it is quite literally Apple's now-well-honed job to ensure that enough people want to buy next year's model, by various types of forced obsolescence. Indirectly, this means that the durably snappy and non-sluggish experience you're forever wanting can never actually happen. 'Forever wanting it' is an essential part of the business design here!
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.
iOS and macOS don’t “correspond” in any way, shape, or form. Completely different releases. Their release windows tend to be close (by design) but there ‘s no “correspondence” here.
Yeah, they do: go and fucking educate yourself. You're one google search from the result: https://support.apple.com/en-us/123075. Fuck...
They both by design follow the same numbering scheme. By design.
Indeed, on modern laptops and phones every UI interaction should be instant (check out BeOS in 1995 for comparison). For background stuff, add some progress indicator.
Can't believe the crap OSes and frameworks add these days in terms of performance cost (and sadly, Apple doesn't exactly shine in that regard)
The bigger question is what are these apps doing that they aren't doing 10 years ago that they now need all this extra compute for to serve the same basic functionality? It always amazes me how stuff like instagram just tanks my battery life. It is instagram its basically wgetting image urls same as its always done but it is taking over system resources for reasons...
I just tested a number of apps on my 15pm connected to WiFi and could not find anything that took longer than 5 seconds. That includes some small developers and bad developers.
Not quite sure where you are seeing this. Maybe games?
I try and pick apps based on package size the rare time I look for some app. There are still apps out there made like they were 10 years ago (that probably haven't been updated in 10 years) where the package size is sub 10mb, sometimes sub 1mb. You get an app like that it is performant and will fly on any iphone really, and barely impact battery life in all likelihood.
Package size has very low correlation to launch time. The binary and assets are separate. Additionally some slow app launches are simply waiting for a network request or chain before the view controller renders.
Situational. But often these apps are doing something just using that standard ios ux library from the really old days, and they open almost instantly as a result as it was designed to work on an iphone 3gs.
I would love to see some "pro" features hit the Pro or Pro Max. Something I've wanted for a while is the ability to have more than 2 active eSIMs; I think a dual modem would be really cool, maybe with some features targeting users in poor cell coverage/ spotty service areas.
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.
> I think a dual modem would be really cool, maybe with some features targeting users in poor cell coverage/ spotty service areas.
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.
>Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD,
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.
Something like DeX is already lying dormant on iOS and it's already enabled on iPadOS.
But, if you modify the MobileGestalt plist on the iPhone, you can enable the "Stage Manager" desktop mode and connect a mouse, keyboard, and monitor and you get a desktop from your iPhone.
Caveat: due to artificial reasons, it's not really usable for daily driving due to the way the hacks work, but Apple could certainly make some trivial changes and get it going.
Yes, and TB5 also uses around 10x as much power, around 4W rather than 0.4W for USB3, which would consume the majority of the sustained power budget of the entire phone.
You can almost achieve this by setting a reminder to turn on "sync immediately" manually every single day (because Apple decided there should be no permanent or indefinite option, and went through the extra effort of making it timed simply for the sake of inconvenience).
I actually do this because it's the behavior I've wanted for years, and I care about it enough to go through the relentless annoyance.
I just don't understand why they wouldn't enable something p2p. We have handoff, screen mirroring, etc, but simple photo sync is impossible scientifically.
Fair. I usually just manually share with AirDrop when I need to have something on one of my other devices quickly, but I don't see the reason why the regular photo sync can't take advantage of the LAN
Isn't that a feature of the share menu itself? It likes to try to be "compatible" with whatever you're sharing it with. So if you try to share a video to Discord, it'll try to compress the video to fit within Discord's file size limit, etc. But AirDrop for me has always shared the full original file in Apple's native format without requiring processing steps.
I am actually quite excited on this iPhone 18 Pro. Seems to pack a a lot of exciting stuff. 2nm A20 Pro, C2. I wish they have N2 but I guess not. 2nd Generation Vapour Chamber. I thought I would have to wait another generation because Apple like to use new product features for two generation before moving on. And it seems this Vapour Chamber along with other heat desperation features are much better built. Much better Camera. And larger battery. With 60W charging that finally matches or closes to a lot of Android phone has been doing.
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.
I mean, isn’t that how like 90% of new SwiftUI apps are created these days? Just telling an AI what you want? Apple already can’t keep up with the review.
People will buy Macs and iPhones even if they don’t have AI. In fact at this point, based on revealed market preferences, it’s almost a value add. And if the AI capitalization bubble bursts, most people would be ok with OpenAI or Anthropic going bust. Both of them going bust would be really disappointing, but even that wouldn’t be the end of the world. And Meta going bust would almost be a side benefit of a market crash.
But Apple going bust would be a genuine loss for the world. So I’m glad they’re being conservative.
(Not that I would be happy with either anthropic or OpenAI going bust - I hope they can weather whatever is ahead).
Yeah, it ultimately hasn’t hurt Apple much so far. Though eventually expectations may shift as AI gets better integrated into other phones.
Of course, there are a lot of AI features that we take for granted that aren’t LLMs, like speech to text, image foreground extraction, etc. Apple does tend to do this type of AI well.
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.
They seem to have ironed most of the problems now. You can disable liquid glass if you hate it, and as a result iOS 26 is nearly as good as the previous version. I’m running it on my iphone12. I hated it when it first came out. But it seems fine now.
I don't know how you're using it. The most broken (so it needs to be restarted sometimes) is Podcasts, but Music, Safari, Settings etc have glaring visual glitches too.
Well, it might help that on day 1, I turned off the liquid glass effects in accessibility settings. At first there were several small layout / UI bugs that came from turning liquid glass off. But it seems fine now.
I don't use the apple podcasts or music apps. (Overcast and Spotify for me). I haven't run into any serious problems.
I have Reduced Transparency, Reduce Motion, and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions, all enabled. You have to have Liquid Glass set to Clear for Reduce Transparency.
I do use the Apple Podcasts app, but YouTube Music and DI.FM Radio apps for music.
I never see any rendering issues / glitches, and the UI is smooth & snappy.
0. none of the options you describe really disable LG and the glitches it introduced.
1. you don't need to switch LG to clear to reduce transparency. you can use reduce transparency with any LG theme. you just need to reenable "reduce transparency" after changing the theme. why? ask Tim.
2. in Podcasts you can tap between Home and Library to see the selection jank around the middle New tab. happens every time.
and if you tap to change episode sorting oldest to newest, then change it back, it 100% of the time won't ever change back again, unless you exit and enter the show again.
and semi daily when switching to it from lock screen the now playing layout will be garbled, either just the bottom card or the entire now playing screen is empty (at which point i usually restart the app).
and of course janky layout shifts and adjustments when switching between screens like search, show, episode, transcript, etc (which additionally also all involve sliding motion despite reduce motion + prefer fade on, but i will let that slide)
It could be as simple as Apple committed to a certain volume with Qualcomm before they were certain they could get mmWave working so they have to keep using Qualcomm modems somewhere while they burn down the commitment.
Besides a better camera what all this along with the past generations have so exciting ? I just fail to see a reason to upgrade. Maybe I am getting old?
Because of a very, very last minute AppleCare replacement (like, 35 months after purchase), I have a year-old iPhone 14 Pro.
I figured there was nothing Apple could introduce yesterday that would turn my head, but the 40+ hour battery life AND the adjustable aperture on the camera are, by themselves, making me consider it. It'll all come down to what discounts or carrier subsidies are available to me, and what the trade-in value is for my phone. But as a shutterbug who travels, those two things are VERY interesting.
There are endless posts on HN about how Macs are good for LLMs. Somoene is running some model on their Mac for local inference.
What the posts dont mention is how unusable that experience is with dogshit slow tokens/second. To make a local model usefull you need to run the highest parameter models at 100+ tok/sec, otherwise you are just better off paying for cloud inference. So either all those people are dumb as hell, or Apple is doing clever advertising. And I personally have more faith in the tech sector.
I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world:
> 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.
Reporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc...
The problem is real, but this solution seems to not really solve it in any practical sense.
Reporters who only capture pictures on an iPhone and not a "real" camera, and who also never need to edit the photo to crop off or obscure identifying information, innocent bystanders/victims, gory violence or nudity, etc...
So, 90% of photojournalism outside of the major cities, then.
You want to do all that, then still can prove the picture is authentic. The editing history show what had been changed compare to the previous version, from the color adjustment to blur areas... it's not about preventing editing, it's about proving the authenticity when needed.
> The editing history show what had been changed compare to the previous version, from the color adjustment to blur areas...
That's not a thing. Straight from Apple:
"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. Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image"
So this only helps prove anything if you can share the original, unedited image. You can share it alongside an edited one, but you must also be comfortable sharing the unedited original if you want to prove you own an iPhone 18 Pro. Er, I mean prove it's "authentic"
Now I think C2PA had allowances for what you're talking about, but that also ended up resulting in it being easier to break.
You don't need to share the original image with everyone, just like how journalists don't share their audio recordings from interviews with everyone. You share with an editor. Or a court.
Yes, which is why this doesn't really do much. Readers still have to primarily rely on trust for whether or not they believe the news and who is reporting it.
Nah, it’s an optional feature, so by using it you provide express consent. GDPR gives users more data ownership; GDPR does not stop you from choosing to do what you want with your data.
It’s likely DMA — Apple would be required to provide APIs for signing for 3rd party apps too.
It would be great if they could use the LiDAR scanner to sign a depth map of the scene in front of the camera. It would show if you photographed a flat image.
The sensor already uses phase detection autofocus. You can create a depth map out of it. iPhone X used its dual cameras and that phase data for depth maps.
How? Is this for every image taken, or does one need to take a second photo? Or is it "in theory phase detection hardware would let you make a depth map"
The sensor has special pixels which can detect phase differences in incoming light. Camera uses these pixels (aka embedded sensors) to be able to focus where you want. This is same from phones to professional cameras.
(DSLR cameras have independent phase detection arrays. This is why the mirror has a small mirror behind. To illuminate that section).
Lenses are tuned. They know how distant the thing they are focusing on, also photos' EXIF generally carries the focus point information. Side note: Apple Aperture used to be able to show where you focused with that info. Still no app does this. I'm still mad that we don't have Aperture anymore. Anyway...
So, if you collect this phasing information alongside the photo which you're taking, you are capturing the depth map of the photo. Its resolution will be lower, but not lower enough to be useless.
For example, Sony (and most probably all other big camera manufacturers) cameras use this phasing data throughout sensor in real-time for following moving subjects to keep the focus on them by predicting where they are going.
So, there's no "in theory". The phasing data is the depth map. Otherwise your camera can't focus on anything. It's there to focus, and it's done by reading the phasing data and knowing where to go by how much.
All fast AF systems are PDAF. When light is too low, then it's CDAF, which does way slower, without using any phase/depth data.
How would that work? I thought the premise here is that you can fool the apple camera by taking a (very carefully aligned) picture of a still image (printed out).
A depth map from the apple camera (again, signed) would show that the entire image had the same distance from the camera.
The photos are cryptographically signed in the apple image pipeline so it's not as simple as just AI generating something. That said, I can't see how this is any different to all the other times we have embedded crypto keys in consumer hardware where eventually someone finds a way to extract the key and the whole thing is busted open.
That's a good point, You might still be able to trick the cloud to sign your photos, but that's something they could patch in updates without losing control of the key. They could have the server only sign photos taken on the latest ios version.
I think there's a chain of trust. The sensor signs raws, and the private cloud takes signed raws, does minimal processing so they're at least coherent, and re signs that output (maybe even including the original signed raw as well in the image file).
How would the server know that the request is coming from a real iPhone?
This is a pretty standard application of trusted computing and can be done entirely on the iPhone. A server would only possibly be needed for anonymization (while retaining key revocation capabilities if a key does end up leaking), but there are serverless ways to do even that (TPMs have supported these for a while now).
It wouldn't, but you could validate that a particular picture was created at a particular time, and had not changed, for example, especially with metadata that you may not want to share but that establishes certain parameters like gps coordinates. A lock, rather than an end-to-end pixel signature, which shows what was contemporaneous rather than exact provenance. If an event happened on day 0000-00-00 00:00:00am, but your photo was taken at some other time, it casts doubt.
I think a big part of validation for things like these are just "could it have been modified since Z event happened", because Z was not something people paid attention to before.
That's just a timestamping service then, not a content provenance/authentication scheme. Timestamping has been a solved problem for years; certificate authorities offer this, or you could just throw a hash onto any sufficiently trusted blockchain.
Nothing prevents anyone from opportunistically pre-generating and timestamping millions of permutations of fake kompromat and then selectively revealing the one that turns out to be useful after the fact.
You could charge per attestation, but the economics of that don't look great; you could demand publication of the image itself before attestation, but that would obviously not fly for most use cases out of privacy concerns.
> Nothing prevents anyone from opportunistically pre-generating and timestamping millions of permutations of fake kompromat and then selectively revealing the one that turns out to be useful after the fact.
If you're doing server-side timestamping and someone is sending millions of items, I think you just ban them. Apple accounts are free but not inexpensive.
Images that are meant to be 2d (E.g. a photo of something on paper) isn't going to look 3d. I guess this approach will just have to let anything flat through?
"I took a real photo of this image printed on paper" seems possible to falsify, yeah, but that doesn't seem too surprising to me, given that anyone with a printer can print literally any possible image.
People have constructed video walls so high resolution they can film TV series in front of them and to an audience it's indistinguishable from a real set. It's extremely cost-effective for things like space fantasy that needs lots of exotic-looking backdrops, apparently.
It may not be in reach for you and I - but within reach of anyone with the budget to run a 'bot farm'
The high resolution video wall is quite simple. The hard part and why this has not been done earlier is that for filming, they had to synchronize the rendered background with the movement of the camera.
Movement is solved by tracking the camera's position and projecting the background from there.
Proof of captured image with hardware-based-attestation can be increased by adding extra information besides the RGB channels, like depth mapping (which a projected screen wouldn't be able to fake), and eventually light field recording (plenoptic imaging, e.g. Lytro).
also no, even in the high rez video walls its still possible to tell. maybe to an "audience" no but there are lots of fundamental flaws with video walls that make them not the same as filming it for real. all of those flaws show up in the final image and could be detected.
things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.
case in point, outside of a few specific niche cases like the mandalorian, that virtual production video wall thing is not actually being used all that much because of the amount of post shoot cleanup required to fix all those issues, it wasnt actually that much cheaper and its not really better either. especially when you factor in how hard it is to shoot that way.
> things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.
Pre-AI fake videos sidestep this sort of issue by lowering the video quality.
Add some motion blur, some camera shake, some poor lighting, the camera being slightly out of focus, and make the video 720p instead of 4k.
An important distinction but I have taken pics of pics, and sometimes its hard to tell I didn't take it directly. So now, its hard to tell I didn't directly take the photo AND its got the stamp of approval.
Canon's original high end digital models had this as a feature, that you images could be digitally signed in camera based on raw sensor data. Primarily for law enforcement. Obviously a far broarder use case, now.
Agree with the weakness, but the benefit of provenance is still there. You can't tell if the picture that person took is of an AI image, but there's some value in saying "I took this" and being able to prove it.
I hope future social media presents this metadata so if someone claims a photo is from the BBC, it actually gets checked against the keys the BBC sign their photos with.
Ideally it’d be linked to public key on a DNS txt record or similar, and trustworthy clients (including social media apps) show the domain linked to the photo.
I don’t know too much about image processing, but my intuition tells me that distinguishing a photo of a 3d scene from a photo of a photo of a 3d scene is a much easier engineering problem than distinguishing it from an AI-generated diffusion. So even just reducing the problem to the former is still a worthy accomplishment.
Finally. Android phones have been shipping with C2PA since last year, so it's great that the final holdout has capitulated, though with its own set of nonstandard tools.
Indeed, on top of Google's implementation being a bad joke, it sounds like the C2PA specifications in general are a massive fail. https://arxiv.org/html/2604.24890v1
On the opposite side, this read to me like there was so much image processing going on in the background and off device that they felt like they needed to prove that there was a real image backing the creation, and that it was not all AI. It really begs the question of what the extent is of image processing.
The iphone image pipeline is mostly just playing with exposure and color, things that we widely regard as fair game in editing. Where the line was crossed was magic eraser and reframe where the iphone is straight up making objects in the image.
Cynical take: A single photo to now consume up 50mb of cloud storage, adding to the demand for more data centers that supported the creation of this authenticity issue in the first place.
It also sounds pretty useful for anyone involved in a lawsuit to be able to present photographic evidence again. I’m sure GenAI is already a big headache for forensics, and enforcing AI watermarks will clearly not be bulletproof.
Will it ever work until a TPM like module is directly integrated into camera sensor? Older attempts of Nikon and Canon got broken, same had happened with C2PA implementation for Android - if it gets anywhere close to CPU it is insecure.
Yes, presumably there will be a cat and mouse game until the entire system including all peripherals has been brought into the trusted computing base, either physically or logically (usually with secured/authenticated communication). This has been the case for all applications of trusted computing.
Security is never a binary property, however, and can usually be better expressed in terms of how expensive it would be to subvert a given mechanism. "This image is either authentic or would have cost at least $x to fake" is already much more useful than nothing at all even without $x trending to infinity.
> I love that it has a feature to prove images came from the real world
Congrats to Apple achieving nation-wide tracking, embedding some kind of yellow dots[1], but this time this time this is based on strong cryptography and non-removable, targeting people who don't use AI under the slogan "we are fighting AI fakes", but people still "love the feature".
> 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.
Will this also work with third-party camera apps like ProCam?
Not available in EU. The reason Siri AI and other iOS features are not available in the EU is the issue of Apple not opening up the same API for other apps. Therefore I think it might be the same case here, which would mean that third-party camera apps wouldn't be compatible.
How would this even be tenable? Like there's no way for Apple to stand up production of hundreds of millions of iPhones per year in the US.
Like say Apple invests billions of dollars into American iPhone production to at least produce the tens of millions to sell in the US - then what? Apple just accepts the the US market is basically a wash where profits are a fraction of the rest of the world with Chinese/Vietnamese/Indian models? And you anticipate that other countries won't mandate the same thing?
Did they just announced the ultimate solution to AI slop and inauthentic images we consume online?
Instead of proving some image on some platform is not AI, you prove it was original by verifying unforgeable signature of a camera / microphone baked into each image produced by it.
Ending entire problem just like that! And of course in future it could be done for videos and audio!
> that image shared online is original and unedited?
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.
45 hours of video playback is insane?! Is this accurate, because if it is I will sell my phone and buy this. Normally my samsung discharges in about 12 hours or less when I'm out, not even watching 12 hours of video.
"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.
Depends on which video codec. If it’s the most efficient one that has dedicated silicone embedded in the chip, it’s going to work great.
Web browsing is typically significantly harder on power. Plus these benchmarks usually mean in a perfectly dark room with the backlight at close to zero.
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.
Based on supply chain leaks, it's pretty safe to assume 12 GB memory with up to 100GB/sec memory bandwidth at best.
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.
What do you do with your phone that requires you to know the memory details? Genuine question, I have absolutely no idea how much memory my iPad or phone have and don’t see why I would need to know
Because I am buying a phone to use for the next 3 years and want to buy it based on the most important property of compute devices right now. I couldn't care less about the camera and the 13 random metrics that all look the same as every other camera announcement. I will happily take 96GB of RAM in my phone (and I know what that means) and would gladly allow you to make it 1.2mm thicker in the process.
What on earth would you do with an iOS device that has 96GB of RAM? You realize the last generation (i.e, the most powerful consumer phone in the world today) had 12 GB of RAM? You feel the need for eight times that amount?
Number go up, I guess? A lot of people derive great satisfaction from ever larger (or sometimes smaller) number. But, uh, 8X is probably too much, need to spread that out over a few generations.
Very obviously you get a Mac Studio for that, not a phone. (Oh, the 96GB Studio is almost $6000, you counter? Imagine how much it would cost in a phone form factor).
You can't possibly expect Apple to take that market segment seriously.
You want a 96GB RAM phone and only plan to keep it 3 years? I cannot fathom the way some of you live. I have an iPhone SE from 2022 that I don’t expect to get rid of before at least 2-3 more years, meaning it would have been in use for 6-7y at minimum. And it’s perfectly comfortable to use, I’m not forcing myself in any way to keep it longer. And you’re talking about wanting a ridiculously expensive phone and only have it for 3 years? That sounds so wasteful and unnecessary
People sued apple for selling a device with no mention of ram and then apple released the next gen saying "this has more ram, you need to upgrade to it to use the features we advertised for last gen."
How about avoiding that scenario again? Is that a good enough reason? Being a diligent, informed consumer?
I couldn’t agree more. I’m typing this on an iPhone 12, bought new 6 years ago. My phone still feels snappy. And it gets me through a whole day with 60%+ battery remaining. The only real complaint I have is that I only have the 64gb model. I need to delete things every time a software update comes out because of how bloated modern software has become. But the hardware is fantastic.
I have no idea how much ram my phone has. So long as apps run well, why would I care?
You're missing the important bit in the GP comment:
> the most important property of compute devices right now
Memory didn't matter when iPhone 12 was released, but these days it determines which local LLMs you can run on device. That's the point of that comment.
It's about multitasking. RAM is the upgrade trigger for me. I'm so exhausted by developer introduced bloat in software such that almost every app fully reloads when switching. Devs ruin multitasking every few years until another RAM upgrade.
I’m being hyperbolic. Sharing the amount of RAM seems table stakes with the current demand and failing to disclose it seems like the answer wouldn’t be positive.
The amount of RAM doesn’t tell you anything about "the best value". Bad software with a large amount of RAM provides less value than highly-optimized one with a lower amount of RAM, for example.
This was the whole advantage of the iPhone at the beginning: not a lot of RAM (meaning less energy needed) but a highly-optimized OS that works well even with that constrained environment.
It tells you a lot about the best value. It certainly doesn't tell you everything, and you might well pick a more expensive phone with less ram for other reasons, but all else being equal a phone with more ram will be better.
I think an honest answer would be to account for software bloat over time. I'm one of those luddites who likes to keep a phone for a minimum of five years. in order to accomplish this, I select phones that have higher-than-average in-class RAM. especially for Apple, I imagine if I were buying a phone knowing they historically throttle processors on older models, I'd try to at least control the one aspect that wouldn't make sense to throttle
It's because of the local model use case. Running AI locally on the phone is a feature (they brag about the processor), but it's constrained by memory and bandwidth.
Looking forward to the photo samples with the variable aperture. If it's something you can manually set (with the Camera app or third party), that would be neat. The miniaturization of this mechanical piece is really quite wild.
While it is a cool technical advance to see, its use case is probably niche. One of the biggest things people say about photography is lighting. In general, if you can get more photons onto your imaging plane, you will have a better picture. This is why phone cameras, despite advertising 100s of MPs, still fall short. For the same field of view and capture conditions, fewer photons are collected because phone sensor sizes are much smaller. This is a physical limitation that cannot be overcome.
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. 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.
Lastly, I think for most people who casually take pictures doesn't care for bokeh and probably wouldn't be willing to take the tradeoff (less light, assuming no software adjustment) of it.
>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.
Totally agreed. I wonder if it will make 180-degree shutter angle video easier to achieve. The only way to achieve this on current iPhones during the day is using a pretty strong ND filter.
The iPhone 18 Pro main camera is f/1.48, which is half a stop wider than the f/1.78 main camera on the 17 Pro. An f/1.48 fixed aperture would probably not be ideal (less depth of field, more revealing of lens aberrations) so there is a real light gathering advantage to the variable aperture.
>Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field
Fairly deep. You can easily see background blur on a modern iPhone camera if you focus on something close. The very fact that the cameras all have variable focus shows that depth of field isn't as deep as all that. The extra depth of field from a narrower aperture could certainly be useful in some cases, such as landscapes. Here's something to paste into your favorite LLM:
>If I am shooting an iPhone 17 Pro main camera, what aperture would I theoretically need to get perfect focus from 1.5 meters to infinity, assuming a CoC suitable for a 12MP shot?
Answer: about f3.2 if you manage to focus at the optimum hyperfocal distance.
What compact camera would you recommend to get to take pictures that look noticeably better than iPhone’s? I mean without running around with a bag of lenses.
The photos I get on my iPhone are worse with every generation. Can anyone tell me if the photos are any good on these new ones? The hardware is fine I'm sure it's the post processing that destroys the image.
The 16 was a significant downgrade in quality due to over-processing. The hardware is actually improving, you just unfortunately need to use a third-party app to get access to the raw photos.
396 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 7.5 ms ] threadNo 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.
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.
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...
https://photos.reportinglive.com/p/2026-09-09/f-bf86c6f5adb3...
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.
Because the only thing worse than not having an iPhone is having the previous one.
Brilliant strategy from Apple, make the colors stand out, then swap them for other stand out colors.
In the past the shape or camera layout would change and signal the version, but now that stabilized, so you need to use the color to clearly show what model you have.
Sometimes I tell my teenage daughter “stop inventing things to be mad about”. Good advice for HN commenters, too.
Bog standard marketing strategy. Nothing at all to remark on or complain about.
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)
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.
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.
How do you see the capacity?
Big phones are overrated.
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 also believe apple’s claim is assuming optimal conditions. Real life is going to do a fair bit worse. So likely 700-1000 cycles for 80% if the pattern holds up.
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 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.
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...)
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.
iOS 18 corresponds to macOS 15 (Sequoia)
Can't believe the crap OSes and frameworks add these days in terms of performance cost (and sadly, Apple doesn't exactly shine in that regard)
Now that we have solid state supercomputers in our pockets, even the most simple app should launch in milliseconds
Not quite sure where you are seeing this. Maybe games?
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.
The old iPhone 17 Pro has USB 3.2 Gen 2, which is good for 10Gb/s.
You can already record 4K60 ProRes to an external SSD. This feature already existed for a year, so I assume you didn't actually need it?
> and power a multi monitor setup with your iPhone Pro. macOS would be sick.
I think you're looking for a MacBook Pro the size of an iPhone.
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/app/samsung-dex
But, if you modify the MobileGestalt plist on the iPhone, you can enable the "Stage Manager" desktop mode and connect a mouse, keyboard, and monitor and you get a desktop from your iPhone.
Caveat: due to artificial reasons, it's not really usable for daily driving due to the way the hacks work, but Apple could certainly make some trivial changes and get it going.
https://github.com/frs0n/GestaltEdit
You could argue most people wont need that speed, but most people don't need pro phone too.
Can you show me the workflow which uses this and has an iPhone as the bottleneck
I actually do this because it's the behavior I've wanted for years, and I care about it enough to go through the relentless annoyance.
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.
I don’t think Siri is sentient yet.
Please, not again.
– Sincerely yours mobile developer
That’s partially why they’re in the mess they’re in with AI. The CFO wouldn’t let them buy enough GPUs to train their models.
They needed all that money for more important expenses, like share buybacks, instead.
But Apple going bust would be a genuine loss for the world. So I’m glad they’re being conservative.
(Not that I would be happy with either anthropic or OpenAI going bust - I hope they can weather whatever is ahead).
Of course, there are a lot of AI features that we take for granted that aren’t LLMs, like speech to text, image foreground extraction, etc. Apple does tend to do this type of AI well.
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 use the apple podcasts or music apps. (Overcast and Spotify for me). I haven't run into any serious problems.
I have Reduced Transparency, Reduce Motion, and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions, all enabled. You have to have Liquid Glass set to Clear for Reduce Transparency.
I do use the Apple Podcasts app, but YouTube Music and DI.FM Radio apps for music.
I never see any rendering issues / glitches, and the UI is smooth & snappy.
0. none of the options you describe really disable LG and the glitches it introduced.
1. you don't need to switch LG to clear to reduce transparency. you can use reduce transparency with any LG theme. you just need to reenable "reduce transparency" after changing the theme. why? ask Tim.
2. in Podcasts you can tap between Home and Library to see the selection jank around the middle New tab. happens every time.
and if you tap to change episode sorting oldest to newest, then change it back, it 100% of the time won't ever change back again, unless you exit and enter the show again.
and semi daily when switching to it from lock screen the now playing layout will be garbled, either just the bottom card or the entire now playing screen is empty (at which point i usually restart the app).
and of course janky layout shifts and adjustments when switching between screens like search, show, episode, transcript, etc (which additionally also all involve sliding motion despite reduce motion + prefer fade on, but i will let that slide)
the list goes on
I figured there was nothing Apple could introduce yesterday that would turn my head, but the 40+ hour battery life AND the adjustable aperture on the camera are, by themselves, making me consider it. It'll all come down to what discounts or carrier subsidies are available to me, and what the trade-in value is for my phone. But as a shutterbug who travels, those two things are VERY interesting.
- 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.
Like on 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36201593
Yeah Apple totally doesn't astroturf HN.
What the posts dont mention is how unusable that experience is with dogshit slow tokens/second. To make a local model usefull you need to run the highest parameter models at 100+ tok/sec, otherwise you are just better off paying for cloud inference. So either all those people are dumb as hell, or Apple is doing clever advertising. And I personally have more faith in the tech sector.
> 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.
The problem is real, but this solution seems to not really solve it in any practical sense.
So, 90% of photojournalism outside of the major cities, then.
That's not a thing. Straight from Apple:
"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. Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image"
So this only helps prove anything if you can share the original, unedited image. You can share it alongside an edited one, but you must also be comfortable sharing the unedited original if you want to prove you own an iPhone 18 Pro. Er, I mean prove it's "authentic"
Now I think C2PA had allowances for what you're talking about, but that also ended up resulting in it being easier to break.
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.
It’s likely DMA — Apple would be required to provide APIs for signing for 3rd party apps too.
(DSLR cameras have independent phase detection arrays. This is why the mirror has a small mirror behind. To illuminate that section).
Lenses are tuned. They know how distant the thing they are focusing on, also photos' EXIF generally carries the focus point information. Side note: Apple Aperture used to be able to show where you focused with that info. Still no app does this. I'm still mad that we don't have Aperture anymore. Anyway...
So, if you collect this phasing information alongside the photo which you're taking, you are capturing the depth map of the photo. Its resolution will be lower, but not lower enough to be useless.
For example, Sony (and most probably all other big camera manufacturers) cameras use this phasing data throughout sensor in real-time for following moving subjects to keep the focus on them by predicting where they are going.
So, there's no "in theory". The phasing data is the depth map. Otherwise your camera can't focus on anything. It's there to focus, and it's done by reading the phasing data and knowing where to go by how much.
All fast AF systems are PDAF. When light is too low, then it's CDAF, which does way slower, without using any phase/depth data.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofocus#Phase_detection
A depth map from the apple camera (again, signed) would show that the entire image had the same distance from the camera.
This is a pretty standard application of trusted computing and can be done entirely on the iPhone. A server would only possibly be needed for anonymization (while retaining key revocation capabilities if a key does end up leaking), but there are serverless ways to do even that (TPMs have supported these for a while now).
I think a big part of validation for things like these are just "could it have been modified since Z event happened", because Z was not something people paid attention to before.
Nothing prevents anyone from opportunistically pre-generating and timestamping millions of permutations of fake kompromat and then selectively revealing the one that turns out to be useful after the fact.
You could charge per attestation, but the economics of that don't look great; you could demand publication of the image itself before attestation, but that would obviously not fly for most use cases out of privacy concerns.
If you're doing server-side timestamping and someone is sending millions of items, I think you just ban them. Apple accounts are free but not inexpensive.
There are already pretty good depth map generation algorithms (for a decade or so) which works on 2D images.
Generate the image, feed it to a depth map generator, viola.
However, you can't get it signed by the sensor itself. That'd be hard.
It may not be in reach for you and I - but within reach of anyone with the budget to run a 'bot farm'
Proof of captured image with hardware-based-attestation can be increased by adding extra information besides the RGB channels, like depth mapping (which a projected screen wouldn't be able to fake), and eventually light field recording (plenoptic imaging, e.g. Lytro).
I suspect it’s significantly less than millions.
things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.
case in point, outside of a few specific niche cases like the mandalorian, that virtual production video wall thing is not actually being used all that much because of the amount of post shoot cleanup required to fix all those issues, it wasnt actually that much cheaper and its not really better either. especially when you factor in how hard it is to shoot that way.
Pre-AI fake videos sidestep this sort of issue by lowering the video quality.
Add some motion blur, some camera shake, some poor lighting, the camera being slightly out of focus, and make the video 720p instead of 4k.
We really need it for journalism. Otherwise we will not know what is real and what fabricated with ai.
We really need Apple to open up true depth APIs to make forgery non trivial.
1) I see a photo online and doubt it's provenance
2) I contact the photographer and ask to see their cloud image (???!)
2a) I borrow someone's mac to download the image (.jpg?) and it can be verified on that?
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138302#49142011
On the other hand if this becomes mandated by law I can see it become treacherous for endusers.
Security is never a binary property, however, and can usually be better expressed in terms of how expensive it would be to subvert a given mechanism. "This image is either authentic or would have cost at least $x to fake" is already much more useful than nothing at all even without $x trending to infinity.
Congrats to Apple achieving nation-wide tracking, embedding some kind of yellow dots[1], but this time this time this is based on strong cryptography and non-removable, targeting people who don't use AI under the slogan "we are fighting AI fakes", but people still "love the feature".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
This is a feature because you use it when you WANT to be able to demonstrate an image wasn't altered / was yours, like for a journalist.
This is an actual question, not a dig: what do you mean by non-removable?
Will this also work with third-party camera apps like ProCam?
https://www.procamapp.com/
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/procam-5/id6787737491?mt=8
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.
Like say Apple invests billions of dollars into American iPhone production to at least produce the tens of millions to sell in the US - then what? Apple just accepts the the US market is basically a wash where profits are a fraction of the rest of the world with Chinese/Vietnamese/Indian models? And you anticipate that other countries won't mandate the same thing?
Still. This must be the first iPhone not to break page one.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Instead of proving some image on some platform is not AI, you prove it was original by verifying unforgeable signature of a camera / microphone baked into each image produced by it.
Ending entire problem just like that! And of course in future it could be done for videos and audio!
This would be absolutely HUGE!
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...
Like did they change the color grading, contrast, etc? Or did they manipulate individual pixel data?
Obviously it wouldn’t be perfect, but it’d be something.
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.
"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.
Web browsing is typically significantly harder on power. Plus these benchmarks usually mean in a perfectly dark room with the backlight at close to zero.
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
I guess this is from a reseller, and not from Apple.
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.
I am not sure single digit tk/s on weak model like ChatGPT OSS 20b @ Q3_K_M is going to be worthwhile.
Not to mention this has to be <0.01% of users who "want" to do this. The iPhone tooling would make it hard to even configure and spin up a local LLM.
You can't possibly expect Apple to take that market segment seriously.
How about avoiding that scenario again? Is that a good enough reason? Being a diligent, informed consumer?
I have no idea how much ram my phone has. So long as apps run well, why would I care?
> the most important property of compute devices right now
Memory didn't matter when iPhone 12 was released, but these days it determines which local LLMs you can run on device. That's the point of that comment.
The net price for a new phone then can be considered a relatively inexpensive hobby when looked at from a per week.
> iPhone
Pick one.
Since 1984, Apple has targeted regular people, not spec nerds. You're not the market.
Threadcount, Watts, cubic inches: different products use different misleading measures.
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. 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.
Lastly, I think for most people who casually take pictures doesn't care for bokeh and probably wouldn't be willing to take the tradeoff (less light, assuming no software adjustment) of it.
Totally agreed. I wonder if it will make 180-degree shutter angle video easier to achieve. The only way to achieve this on current iPhones during the day is using a pretty strong ND filter.
>Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field
Fairly deep. You can easily see background blur on a modern iPhone camera if you focus on something close. The very fact that the cameras all have variable focus shows that depth of field isn't as deep as all that. The extra depth of field from a narrower aperture could certainly be useful in some cases, such as landscapes. Here's something to paste into your favorite LLM:
>If I am shooting an iPhone 17 Pro main camera, what aperture would I theoretically need to get perfect focus from 1.5 meters to infinity, assuming a CoC suitable for a 12MP shot?
Answer: about f3.2 if you manage to focus at the optimum hyperfocal distance.
It's nothing new, Samsung has done thing on the S9/S10, and recently Sony is also doing this, they even come with movable zoom lens