2025-10-09 03:30:34
I was there on that early October day 14 years ago when Apple—led on stage by Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall—rolled out iOS 5, the iPhone 4S, and one of the most important iOS features ever, Siri. (Steve Jobs wasn’t there, an empty seat left for him in the front row. He died the next day.)
Siri was the first true “voice assistant,” a voice-driven interface that Jobs clearly thought would be a huge part of the future of how we use our devices. He legendarily called Siri’s co-founder 24 straight days to express his desire to buy the app and add it to iOS.
While Apple got there first, competitors followed. In some ways, it’s the contrary example to what Apple normally does: Instead of entering a category late and perfecting it, Apple entered this category first and found itself limited by those early decisions. The company has been struggling to make Siri better for more than a decade now, and it’s generally perceived as being a feature that fails to live up to Apple’s brand promise.
The shift to modern AI-driven technology is an opportunity for Apple to revamp Siri, but the company has struggled to get a smarter version of Siri out the door. While the original version of Siri was more of a novelty, with every passing year, it becomes more critical to Apple’s future—and its troubling state becomes more of a red flag about the future of all of Apple’s products.
2025-10-09 02:29:51
Whether color e-ink displays feel compelling or like a fad, our impressions of OpenAI’s Sora and text-to-video tech, how we manage Mac menu bar icons, and whether we’ll use the new resizable Slide Over feature in iPadOS 26.1 and for what purpose.
2025-10-09 00:07:42
Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica reports about how Elon Musk’s satellite broadband ambitions are clashing with Apple’s current strategy:
Apple is partnering with satellite company Globalstar for the iPhone’s emergency SOS feature. The service is free to iPhone users, at least for now. Apple declined a pitch from [Elon] Musk, who reportedly sought a $5 billion payment from the iPhone maker in exchange for an 18-month exclusivity deal.
There’s some internal frustration at Apple about Globalstar’s limited capabilities compared to Starlink, according to a May report by The Information. The concerns are that the Globalstar network is “outdated, slow, and limited in what features it can support compared with offerings from SpaceX and others.”
Brodkin’s piece is a good deep dive into the issues here. With SpaceX’s purchase of spectrum from EchoStar, and SpaceX’s enormous advantage in launching satellites (the entire Starlink business is built on SpaceX’s fleet of cheap, reusable rockets), it may be tough for competitors to keep up. Which has an impact on Apple’s strategy when it comes to providing access outside of traditional cellular networks.
2025-10-08 23:41:58
My iPhone is orange.
I mean, really orange. Not “brown but if you hold it in a certain light, it kind of looks orange if you squint.” That in and of itself is a cause for celebration, as it finally brings some much-needed fun to Apple’s pro phone lineup. Pros like color too, you know? And for the ones that don’t there are perfectly respectable options of traditional silver or subdued blue. But the orange phone, well, you can’t forget the orange phone is orange, even when looking at it straight on where the orange frame limns the display with a constant halo.
The iPhone 17 Pro marks the most significant redesign of Apple’s pro phone lineup since its introduction with the 11 Pro. Sure, over time the phone has gotten a little larger, traded out the notch for the dynamic island, and added a few additional buttons. But the 17 Pro’s two-tone back and—sigh—iconic plateau make this phone instantly identifiable.
Also, the orange.
The color seems to have been enabled by the change in construction for this model, which eschews the previous titanium frame (first introduced in the iPhone 15 Pro to replace the original pro models’ stainless steel frames) in favor of an aluminum unibody. Along with the phone’s incremental size increase—it’s a fraction of a millimeter bigger in every direction—it also means somewhat more weight: at 7.27 ounces, it’s slightly heavier than its predecessor’s 7.03 oz. But, it should be noted, it’s exactly the same weight as the iPhone 14 Pro, back before the switch to titanium.
To help mitigate that heavier weight, Apple’s also slightly changed the physical shape of the phone. The edges, especially on the back of the case, are more rounded, lacking the sharper delineation between earlier generation’s metal frames and back glass. That glass is not wholly absent here, as it’s a necessity for enabling wireless charging. Apple’s carved out a panel from the rear case and popped in a slab of its Ceramic Shield material1. Interestingly, that material has the side effect of making the Apple logo look practically invisible in some light—speaking of things you have to squint to see.
There’s been some of the usual foofaraw around whether the phone scratches more easily than its predecessor, and I’ve seen comments from acquaintances who’ve nicked theirs already. After more than two weeks, mine has not suffered any ill effects, despite both being dropped more than once and simply existing in a household with a maverick three-year-old. I do, however, tend to keep it in my pocket by itself, or occasionally with my AirPods Pro 2 case. If my previous iPhones are any indication, it will likely acquire some dings and scratches by the time I turn it in next year, though I’m hoping that Ceramic Shield 2 lives up to its promise, as my 16 Pro’s screen had some significant scratches by the end.
The additional space in the design also helps Apple pack in more battery, which the company says can keep the iPhone 17 Pro going for up to 33 hours of video playback (the Pro Max tacks an extra 6 hours onto that). That’s up from just 27 hours of rated life on the 16 Pro, and in my entirely anecdotal experience over the last two weeks, I’ve rarely had my automation for low power mode, which turns on at 40%, kick in. Towards the end of my 16 Pro’s tenure, it was getting down under 20% most days. But a phone’s battery life is always better at the beginning of its lifespan, so it’s hard to judge the effect over the long term.
Better charging support in the 17 Pro also means that you can theoretically charge this phone to 50 percent of capacity in just 20 minutes—though with the caveat that you’ll need a 40W adapter like Apple’s new model. (A MagSafe Charger with a 30W or better adapter will get you to 50 percent in 30 minutes.) I haven’t bothered upgrading my chargers as I rarely am fussed about mid-day charging, but if you need to charge and go, that’s a plus.
All in all, the phone is a pleasure to hold, and—in my opinion—looks great too.2 I’d hoped the addition of the plateau stretching the width of the back would make it less wobbly on a table and while it is somewhat reduced, it hasn’t been eliminated, thanks to the fact that lenses themselves are still raised above the plateau. I’d love to see Apple figure a way to deal with that in the future, but I’ll accept for now that this is just a fact of life in current smartphone design.
Plus, did I mention it’s orange?
Apple loves to tout the performance of its Pro phones, and unsurprisingly the 17 Pro is no exception. The A19 Pro is the most powerful chip the company’s ever produced, even if its CPU performance improvements are predictably incremental.
Its GPU fares somewhat better on benchmarks—but how does that translate into real world performance? I admit that I don’t find myself often taxing the graphical capabilities of my iPhone—perhaps I’m simply not pro enough. I did play a few minutes of Assassin’s Creed Mirage, and it looked good enough, if not quite up to par with my PlayStation 5. I caught a few slowdowns and glitches here and there, but nothing that impacted playability.3
Apple also touts its addition of “Neural Accelerators” to the A19 Pro’s GPU cores. The implications of that are still not quite clear; while it should boost some artificial intelligence applications, it’s unclear as to whether it’s the kind of thing that the average user is going to notice. I’ve seen reports that this enables “matrix multiplication” or “matmul” acceleration, which does seem like it has some possible ramifications for AI, but again, it’s a bit above my head.
One other major change aids performance on the 17 Pro: its new cooling system, designed around a vapor chamber, a first for the iPhone. Here’s how Apple describes the tech:
Deionized water is sealed inside the vapor chamber, which is laser-welded into the aluminum chassis to move heat away from the powerful A19 Pro, allowing it to operate at even higher performance levels. The heat is carried into the forged aluminum unibody, where it is distributed evenly through the system, managing power and surface temperatures to deliver incredible performance while remaining comfortable to hold.
That’s a lot of promise, especially as my experiences with the 16 Pro often led it to getting warm enough that I could use it as a heating pad. In my admittedly short time with the 17 Pro, I’ve found it to generally remain cooler. I was impressed during the setup process, which is usually intensive enough to make the phone quite warm, the 17 Pro remained pretty cool to the touch. Since then, I’ve encountered a couple times when it seemed to heat up4, but it hasn’t been nearly as frequent as with the 16 Pro. Even playing Assassin’s Creed, as I mentioned, the phone was only slightly warm, perfectly comfortable in the hands. Apparently that vapor chamber is doing its job!
Like the 16 Pro before it, the iPhone 17 Pro has three rear lenses, which Apple has extrapolated to five different “cameras” in various levels of zoom, ranging from the .5x ultrawide to the 8x telephoto. This is enabled by the fact that all three rear cameras are now 48 megapixel sensors, thus enabling the company to provide different crops that simulate the 2x and 8x zoom levels.
Look, I’m not a camera person. I’m the Joe Average camera user: I like to snap a shot and not worry about settings. I enjoy having different zoom options because it gives me more choice about how to frame something, but I’m generally a “hit it and quit it” person. Does the 17 Pro take very nice pictures? It does! Can I, at a glance, tell the difference between photos taken with it and the 16 Pro or 15 Pro or 14 Pro…not really? This probably says more about my capabilities as a photographer than anything else.
As long as we’re talking camera features, though, it is worth noting that all of Apple’s latest phones, including the 17 Pro, add a couple of new capabilities. The first is a dual capture mode that lets you record video from both the front- and rear-facing cameras at the same time. It’s available by tapping the “settings” icon in the top right of the camera app while in Video mode (yes, it’s only a video feature, just in case you were hoping for dual still photos for some reason). If you find yourself using it a lot, you can pin that icon to overlay for quick access by going to Settings > Camera > Indicators.
Once you turn it on, you get a FaceTime-like interface with the front-facing camera in a little picture-in-picture window. A few notes: while you can change the optical zoom of the rear-facing camera, you can’t zoom or crop the front-facing camera in this mode—the Center Stage feature tries to keep you in frame and can expand to take in more than one person, but you don’t have manual control. Also you can’t swap which camera is where; if you tap the button to flip to the front-facing camera for the main shot, the picture-in-picture window disappears.
As in FaceTime, however, you can drag your thumbnail image around the screen to any of the corners. Keep in mind, however, that since the dual camera mode is “baked in” to the final result, whatever adjustments you make will be reflected in the video itself. That also means that you can’t move, edit, or even get rid of the picture-in-picture video after the fact.
While I appreciate this feature, I haven’t used it very much. I thought it might come in handy when recording my kid doing stuff, but it turns out I’m generally less interested in preserving my reaction. I imagine those creating video content on their phones will be happy to have this in their toolbox, though.
As long as we’re talking about the front-facing camera, it gets some new tricks on the iPhone 17 line too—and they’re kind of brilliant. Thanks to the use of a square sensor, you no longer have to turn the phone into landscape orientation to take a landscape selfie. What? Even parsing that sentence makes my brain hurt. It’s a bit like the first time I used Live Text to select text from an image: something that has been essentially impossible since the origin of the technology has suddenly been upended.
There’s also a control to zoom in or out if you wanted to take a selfie with a wider angle than the default crop. Apple’s also taken it one step further by integrating the same Center Stage technology in use on most of its other devices’ front-facing cameras. If the camera detects more than one person, it will widen the shot automatically to include them. As someone who generally ends up taking group selfies by virtue of having of a) the newest phone and b) the longest arms, this makes my life noticeably better. While I haven’t had many opportunities yet to try this out, I’m looking forward to it being a less awkward experience than it used to be. Or at least, feeling less like I’m about to drop my phone.
Thanks in part to the addition of the iPhone Air to the lineup5, the iPhone 17 Pro starts at $100 more than the 16 Pro did. But, for that extra $100 you get twice as much storage as the base iPhone 16 Pro—256GB compared to 128GB. As someone who had finally hit the limit of a 128GB phone, I was planning to go up to 256GB anyway, but it’s disappointing to lose that $999 price point.
Still, the iPhone 17 Pro is not the base level iPhone. You pay more because you get more. That gap has narrowed a bit this year, as the 17 finally gets a ProMotion always-on display and the same new front-facing camera, and the new iPhone Air offers an entirely different proposition of thinness and lightness in exchange for fewer cameras and lower battery life. But the 17 Pro still boasts that telephoto lens, better thermal system, and more powerful chip. Not to mention true “pro” features like ProRes RAW, Genlock, and support for USB3—though, if you don’t know what most of those are, they probably aren’t for you.
So do most people need an iPhone 17 Pro? Probably not! But for those that are happy to spend more to get more, the option is there. Some people always want the best there is, and Apple is more than happy to oblige. For the rest, the iPhone 17—or, if you want a light, thin phone, the iPhone Air—will probably suffice.
Then again, neither of them come in orange…
2025-10-08 22:00:00
This week we discuss Apple leadership, whether or not Tim Cook loves Donald Trump and our glorious headset future.
2025-10-08 04:50:05
The more I think about the iPhone Air, the more I think back to the introduction of the MacBook Air back in 2008. I used the word “compromise” ten times in my review of that first lightweight Mac laptop.
If the story of the MacBook Air is a story about compromise, the decision about whether the MacBook Air is a product worth having can be answered by one question: How much are you willing to compromise?
And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
This year’s selection of iPhones offers users a ridiculous amount of choice. The iPhone 17 has gained numerous features previously limited to the high-end iPhone Pro line. The iPhone 17 Pro has powerful new cameras and a new unibody look, including a spectacular Cosmic Orange color option. Back in 2008, the low-end MacBook and high-end MacBook Pro held similar positions.
Just like back then, an interloper has arrived that completely breaks up the high-end/low-end dynamic. The iPhone Air is priced in the middle, but doesn’t quite fit there. It’s an iPhone that doesn’t share the design priorities of other iPhones. It’s designed for people who also have different priorities.
There are dozens of obvious reasons to buy an iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro instead of the iPhone Air. But when I hold the Air between my thumb and index finger and feel its weight and thinness, I begin to wonder how much those reasons matter.
The iPhone Air feels great. It’s light (5.8 ounces/165 grams, compared to 7.3 ounces/206 grams for the iPhone 17 Pro and 6.2 ounces/177 grams for the iPhone 17). That weight seems even lighter because it’s distributed over a wider surface area than those other models, owing to the Air’s 6.5-inch diagonal screen.
It’s a screen size that’s larger than all but the iPhone 17 Pro Max, so it’s not really fair to say that the iPhone Air is small. It’s small in some dimensions and surprisingly large in others. This is a wider and taller phone than I’m used to, and it took me a little while to adapt.
Every time I pick up the iPhone Air, I notice how thin and light it feels. After a week’s usage, I switched to the iPhone 17 Pro and was struck by how different that phone felt: thick and heavy, like a TV remote control or something. And, to my surprise, the screen seemed small. I’ve always shied away from large iPhones, but maybe those large screens aren’t so bad when they’re attached to lightweight phones? I found myself missing the iPhone Air’s larger screen when I switched to the 17 Pro.
I used the iPhone Air exclusively without a case, and I endorse the school of thought that there’s not a lot of point to using it if you’re going to put a case on it. A case diminishes the unique feature of the Air, which is how thin and light it is. If you can’t imagine using an iPhone without a case, don’t even consider the iPhone Air. (As someone who generally does not use his iPhone with a case, it doesn’t bother me at all.)
During my week of primary use, I gradually figured out grips that made the iPhone Air feel safe in my hands. It’s thin, but wedging those titanium rails between my thumb and opposing fingers kept it safe. I also found pressing my index finger up against the bottom of the plateau on the phone’s back created a pretty good bit of leverage. After a few days, it all became muscle memory, and I stopped worrying about it.
Most of the time when I leave the house to run or walk the dog, I don’t bother taking my iPhone and just use a pair of AirPods playing podcasts from my Apple Watch. I started doing this because I hated bringing my iPhone with me in my pocket, where it would wiggle around and sometimes even begin to swing like a pendulum as I ran. Walking with the iPhone Air in my pocket felt a lot less obtrusive, perhaps because of the lighter weight, perhaps because it’s wider and therefore has less room to wiggle. In general, I enjoyed having a wider, thinner phone in my pocket instead of a narrower, thicker one.
Finally, the camera. I know that the iPhone Air’s camera system is intended to be listed among the device’s most severe compromises, and I don’t disagree with that assessment overall. But I will say this: the single 48MP camera on the iPhone Air is the best single camera Apple has ever made. While its lack of companion cameras limits the versatility of this device, the main camera (which can bin those 48MP together to create a more nuanced 12MP image, a super-resolution 24MP image, or—yes—can be tasks with capturing a single 48MP image) is very good. It’s worth being said.
Hold the iPhone Air in your hand, and it’s easy to become so intoxicated that you forget all the things you’re foregoing.
The single camera means there’s no telephoto camera, like on the iPhone 17 Pro, which offers an excellent 4x zoom with 8x digital crop this year. There’s also no ultra-wide camera, which offers an expansive view and macro mode, like on all the iPhone 17 models. You give up a lot of flexibility when you go down to a single camera. Just this weekend, I was using an iPhone 17 Pro on a trip to the country and used that phone’s zoom camera to capture lots of interesting wildlife. With the iPhone Air’s camera, many of those images would’ve lacked an impact.
The iPhone Air also has less battery capacity than other iPhones. Apple rates it at 27 hours of video playback, versus 33 hours on the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17. If you need to squeeze every hour out of your iPhone’s internal battery, taking a 20 percent cut is not going to work for you. However, for some use cases, it’s not a big deal: I am rarely away from charging opportunities for my iPhone for a long period of time, and when I am, I frequently carry a battery with me. I doubt the iPhone Air would really change that behavior appreciably. (I like that Apple offers a MagSafe battery pack, which allows you to use the iPhone Air in its thin and light mode whenever possible, and then weighs you down a little when you need some extra life. Better than carrying all that extra battery around 100% of the time.)
In a year where Apple seems to have gotten the message and introduced Cosmic Orange, the most interesting iPhone Pro color ever, the iPhone Air’s color palette is quite muted. There’s Space Black, and then three shades of white (Sky Blue, Cloud White, Light Gold). My Light Gold model is more gold than silver around the edges if you look really close, but I read it as silver until I really, really looked. The back glass similarly reads as white, but I’m sure it’s a yellow off-white. I don’t mind the iPhone Air being black or white, really, but it’s funny that choosing one means foregoing some fun colors that have finally extended across the rest of the product line.
Apple has generously bestowed the latest and greatest iPhone processor, the A19 Pro, on the iPhone Air. But it’s not quite that simple. The iPhone Air’s A19 Pro has one fewer GPU core than the one on the iPhone 17 Pro. The iPhone Air also lacks the thermal management updates that Apple rolled into the iPhone 17 Pro, so the back of the phone can get noticeably hot right up by the plateau into which most of its brains are tucked. Once those brains get too hot, the system has to cool them off by throttling the processor, reducing performance.
In other words, this phone has a fast processor, but it’ll heat up and slow down in extended work far more than the comparable iPhone 17 Pro. If you’re someone who pushes your iPhone hard, especially when playing games, this phone is not going to give you the best performance.
In short, the iPhone Air is not for you if you have severe battery demands, want maximum camera zoom flexibility, need to maximize processor performance, or want to flash a flashy color. In every case, the iPhone 17 Pro is a better bet.
In 2017, Apple released the iPhone X, which was possibly the iPhone’s biggest step forward technologically since the original. We’ve been living in the wake of the iPhone X ever since: it brought us OLED and Face ID and also created a split between high-end and low-end models that has persisted since then. It pushed the standard iPhone price up to a thousand dollars for the first time.
And yet time marches on, and yesterday’s cutting-edge technology becomes today’s bog-standard features—this year, Apple brought always-on displays with ProMotion to the low-end iPhones. To stay in the high-tech game, you always need a fresh supply of new designs and innovations.
The iPhone Air marks the biggest change to the iPhone line since the iPhone X. It prioritizes thinness and lightness above all else. It uses a larger screen to create volume beneath which Apple can tuck enough battery to cross some invisible threshold of viability.
Most interestingly, Apple has adapted its signature camera bump, now extended to a full “iconic plateau,” to be the place where all the assorted computery bits of a phone are hidden. There’s only one camera on the iPhone Air, but the rest of that space is packed full of technology. Since Apple has changed its terminology, I guess I can’t call this a “computer bump,” but what about “processor plateau?”
Again, the memories of the MacBook Air keep rushing back. Apple’s goal there was to make a thin and light laptop, and along the way, it learned to pack the bottom mostly with battery and leave just enough space for an ever-smaller chunk of computing power. To get the physics to work out, it measured thinness from the front edge and then allowed it to grow thicker as it reached the back, very much the equivalent of offering a thin phone with an appreciable plateau at the other end.
You know how the MacBook Air story went. It was impractical at first, full of those compromises, but as Apple iterated from generation to generation, the compromises dropped away. The MacBook Air became Apple’s most popular laptop, but more than that, the innovations and priorities in the MacBook Air pointed the way forward for all Mac laptops, and really, almost all laptops of any kind.
I’m not saying the iPhone Air will follow quite the same trajectory, but it’s not hard to imagine that the difficult engineering decisions made to fulfill the iPhone Air’s design goals might spur innovation that drives all iPhones to be thinner and lighter and even to tuck most of their brainpower up in that brain bulge.
Still, that’s all about tomorrow. What about today?
Today, the iPhone Air feels like no other iPhone ever made. It’s just so appealing. But it’s got so many qualities that are simply disqualifying for so many use cases. If it were the only iPhone Apple sold, it would be a disaster. But it’s one of five new iPhones introduced in 2025, so it can afford to be what it is and see if it can find an audience.
No, the iPhone Air doesn’t make the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro feel like the past. Those phones still feel like the present.
But the iPhone Air feels like the future.
