The most interesting part of this to me isn't the titanium or the camera (impressive as it looks), it's the GPU.
They made a point of saying that the GPU had been completely ground-up re-designed, and I assume they're intending to keep scaling that up over the next few iterations.
They didn't talk about it for very long, but that the phone is able to convincingly run AAA games, even at playable if not great frame-rates, is really impressive. This puts the iPhone up against devices like the Switch and Steam Deck for a lot of users. Granted, they don't have Nintendo's games, and they don't have Steam's massive back catalogue, but looking forward it does make a dedicated handheld gaming system harder to justify, or at least makes the phone easier to justify if you're not buying both.
It also makes me really interested to see where Apple is going with Apple TV and the Mac. With the game porting toolkit already announced (and the results people are already getting just using it directly to run Windows games), it seems like Apple really could eat at least some portion of the gaming market by already having a handheld (phone), console (Apple TV), and gaming PC (Mac) ready to go in the next few years.
I'm expecting the new M3 Macs next month to lean really heavily into discussing the GPU advances and (hopefully) announce a lot more support from big studios to bring more games to the Mac.
Is it though? The promise of gaming on iPhone (and mobile gaming in general) has been taken over and destroyed by freemium games whose only goal is to push microtransactions. What is a marginally better GPU going to accomplish? Help games sell me their "bundle of gems" faster?
Developers simply do not have the incentive to build any other kinds of games when the current crop of addictive shovelware is so damn profitable. The sad part is that Apple encourages this practice because it is easy money for them (via their 30% cut). The problem needs to be fixed by better quality control and transaction/gambling rules, not a faster processor.
Early mobile games were such a delight. I have fond memories of Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, Cut the Rope, Flight Control, Threes, Monument Valley, Bad Piggies...
But then predatory freemium games like Clash of Clans and newer replacements for Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies burned me out. They eliminated any desire I had to invest time or money or attention into mobile games. Popular freemium games in the App Store now bury any new gems. It's quite disappointing.
This is a really short sighted and defeatist view on the potential of mobile gaming. Mobile gaming started before iPhones, and it will be around probably for the rest of human civilization.
There is no way 1 generation of games can "take over and destroy" the "promise of gaming" because there are no restrictions on what future innovators can do with the tools and the platforms. The existence of some bad games doesn't preclude future good games.
As an example, my favorite mobile game is Slay the Spire
I really wish micro transactions were made illegal in applications on the app stores…and video games in general. It encourages additive behaviour and lowers the quality of games as the purpose becomes to make the additive micro transaction aspect as addictive as possible.
If some new policy changed this, I think we’d see a whole new wave of higher quality games
Between terrible incentives created by Apple's cut structure, and Apple's disregard for backwards compatibility, mobile indie devs never stood a chance. Rami from Vlambeer said it well.
“You earn $3 and then you update it for the next 10 years. If you’re making free-to-play games, if you keep earning money with a game, yeah, that’s a great model because you can make more money by updating.”
Ismail pointed to Vlambeer’s “Ridiculous Fishing,” which won a number of awards from gaming publications and Apple.
“‘Ridiculous Fishing’ is never going to make more money,” he said. “Yeah, some new people might buy it, but we made our money with ‘Ridiculous Fishing’ in 2013 and that money is spent, It’s spent on ‘Luftrausers.’ It’s spent on ‘Nuclear Throne.’ If somebody upgrades their phones to the new iPhone. Yeah. You have ‘Ridiculous Fishing’ in your account, Yeah you paid $3 for it. Yeah, it’s broken.”
That’s what caused the last major update Vlambeer did for the game. A major change by Apple in 2017 that switched from 32-bit to 64-bit apps, breaking a slew of content on their phones … including “Ridiculous Fishing.”
“All games broke,” he said, “Every game that wasn’t programmed for it broke. We updated ‘Ridiculous Fishing’ then but it feels like a mistake almost. It feels like, OK it’s 2018 and this game that we made money with that somebody bought in 2013 is now broken outside of our fault. We didn’t change anything. We didn’t break the game. We didn’t introduce a bug, but this continuous ecosystem that Apple has created, that comes with you with every new phone, broke it. “
Ismail said that either Apple has to start designing for backward compatibility support on their end or that people are going to have to get used to the idea of games dying and disappearing.
“Some of the best ios games from 2010 are gone,” he said. “Those developers, they don’t exist anymore. They went out of business. They split up. They started a new thing and they just don’t have the money or time to do it.”
Apple's new gaming strategy (as of today) is ports of console games. It's not worth developing good games specifically for mobile but that's not necessary if iDevices can run console ports.
> The promise of gaming on iPhone (and mobile gaming in general) has been taken over and destroyed by freemium games whose only goal is to push microtransactions.
Wasn't that a reaction to users who refused to pay for games and just sideloaded them instead?
I can remember there being five dollar games in the early days of iOS that sold well. I can also remember developers trying games that had ads until you paid to remove them.
Before smart phones became something for everybody, 99% of "gamers" would game on lottery tickets, casinos, slot machines and such. They are still the majority and they want their slot machines, where they don't have to think or learn to progress. Computer / video game tropes are just an aesthetic to skin a slot machine on your phone.
Yeah, exactly. They’ve been playing up how the latest iPad/iPhone/etc. is just as powerful as <some previous generation console> for years now. And I don’t doubt that. But it doesn’t do much good when barely anything approaching AAA gaming shows up on the platform. The potential is wasted on lots of garbage freemium games.
One of the main benefits of Apple Arcade was to recognize this problem and carve out a space for games that do not suffer from these issues (while making services revenue at the same time). I think it worked pretty well. It doesn't have the AAA though.
I think there will always be a market for freemium games, because it's nice to try things without having to put money down. But I think the freemium market can co-exist with a premium game market. Like, the premium game market still exists and still is going strong, no reason it couldn't live on mobile devices also.
> Developers simply do not have the incentive to build any other kinds of games when the current crop of addictive shovelware is so damn profitable.
Personally, I don’t have the incentive because 1) paid mobile gaming isn’t a big market (see: top paid apps being the exact same years-old, curated Apple apps not having many reviews/downloads), 2) there aren’t many options to develop games targeting iOS which also target Android and Windows/Linux (at least if you want to use Swift), and 3) Apple could remove my game at any notice and I don’t get 30% of the revenue.
If Apple introduces a way to easily port desktop games to iOS, or even develop entirely new games which can run on Linux and mac and iPhone, I think we’d see a lot more iOS games. Maybe the new GPU isn’t only faster but also supports Vulkan/wgpu better?
At least on a positive note: an iPhone + Dev account + some tiny controller addon can equal a great pocket emulation machine on the go. If someone can design a nice controller add on, we can ditch the Chinese pocket gameboy/switch/other extra devices you dont need.
It so absurd: We need to carry the device anyway since its a phone, it has a great GPU and there are thousands of existing great games that have been created that the device can easily run. The only problem has always been the stupidity of the code not being available to run on this device. :/
Never had much trouble finding quality phone games which don’t use this model. Some of the most popular mobile games in the world like PUBG are not like this.
Most smartphones are already faster than the Switch. The quality of games on a platform is not directly related to its technical capabilities or SDK, but to the business model and platform incentives.
Apple has fueled a race-to-the-bottom followed by an almost forced transition to f2p, and they benefited immensely in the process (30%), but I think that most gamers and indie devs are not satisfied.
It seems so immensely cynical. The latest-and-best Apple Event PR is in a car crash with the reality - from a gaming POV, the iPhone is a platform for user addiction.
I've been watching people around me and the amount of time everyone seems to spend tapping away at a phone, head down, is like something out of a dystopian movie.
The game addiction market must be worth billions to Apple. For all the environmental and other ad copy, there doesn't seem to be any concern about the mental and psychological effects of creating an ecosystem that knowingly relies on exploitative behaviour modification.
I also think the colour scheme is quite cynical. Pastel shades on the base model for the - let's say - less technically-oriented users. Strong blacks, whites, and metallics for the hard-core performance nerds who want that Pro tag.
I remember being completely impressed by my Note 3 (10 years ago almost exactly) playing games like Dead Trigger 2 and NFS: Underground. From then on, GPU performance / graphics on these tiny displays seemed good enough for me with only minor subjective improvements.
I'll second another comment, that another big challenge is the simple lack of ergonomics on any phone.
> The quality of games on a platform is not directly related to its technical capabilities or SDK, but to the business model and platform incentives.
And also (mostly) the ergonomics.
Comparing a phone whose main purpose is definitely not gaming (at least the iPhone, I know there are some gaming-first phones) to a handheld console will always make the former look pathetic for this use-case.
I question if Apple really cares about or is serious about gaming. My impression is they use it as an excuse to showcase hardware improvements since games are happy to soak up pretty much any hardware that's thrown at it.
That seems to be where their concern for gaming stops. There is Apple Arcade, but it feels like the least amount they could do for the size of their company.
I do think they care about it over the longer-term, particularly in light Vision Pro and their overall AR strategy.
Apple is making 30%, just like all the console makers and Steam, on every single game transaction on iPhone.
What you're forgetting, and pushing aside, is that the mobile gaming market is as big as the traditional gaming market. All the phone games make as much money as all the consoles and PC gaming together. Apple, with its command of all the valuable phone customers, is pulling an estimated 14 billion dollars in 2021 in mobile gaming. So Apple is very dumb if they don't care about 14 billion in annual services revenue.
What you're thinking is that traditional gaming is big-boy gaming and where the big bucks are. The growth market is mobile gaming, with the other segments being stagnant outside of big hits. The reality is that Apple is a bigger gaming company, by revenue, than Microsoft or Sony, is controlling the growth sector, and is thinking accordingly. They have financed all on their own a new GPU generation for their phone and justified it as a need for gaming and gaming alone. Those other companies need partners, like AMD or Nvidia, to make them GPUs.
Based on the last two events, they increasingly invest more and more money into games. And to be honest, it absolutely makes sense — apple’s biggest competitor in many areas is themselves: people use their iphones for many many years. So it does makes sense to invest into services as well.
AAA-like titles were previously tried at the beginning of the App Store, mostly ports of older titles. Most Indie Games would also run fine on most Smartphones, but never succeeded. Stuff that sold great on the Switch. I think the lack of "official" nice, high-quality, hasslefree Gamepad, continuing cooling-issues and especially the expectation of consumers for low prices on Apps results in the Market for "real" games on Phones remaining very small.
Apple tried to counteract it with Apple Arcade, but that hasn't worked out.
There are a few major missteps Apple made over the years that make me hesitant to buy any games on iPhone or iPad.
With my Steam catalog I can download something I bought in 2004 and still be confident I can play it. I spent $20 on Monster Hunter for iPhone and one day iOS updated and it just didn’t work anymore.
My Switch games will assumably work until the console dies.
Another reason I completely stopped buying games on iOS was when The Binding of Isaac was suddenly delisted from the App Store. I never got a refund or anything, and because of this new versions of Binding of Isaac aren’t compatible with Macs either. I have hundreds of hours played in that game and it’s ridiculous that Apple censored it as “depicting child abuse”.
I don’t know if this is still the case, but for a long time, your game would get rejected from the App Store if it required an external controller to play. And yet being able to design games around that baseline is critical for triple-A.
I’m super curious to see what they’ve done with this current–gen, mainline Assassin‘s Creed game coming to iPhone: there is no way the core gameplay of that franchise could translate to touch controls, so either Apple dropped the requirement, some poor team had the doomed project of building an abysmal fallback touch control scheme, or they implemented some kind of semi-automated scheme for touch that makes traversal and combat less interactive.
Just gonna throw this out there... for me, one of the main reasons I don't play games on my phone, is because it will absolutely tank the battery life.
A dedicated device has the benefit of having a sole purpose: gaming. If I kill the battery, I just can't play anymore games. I can still take calls, browse the web, and text my partner.
>Apple tried to counteract it with Apple Arcade, but that hasn't worked out.
I'm not really a gamer but I get Arcade as part of a bundle and it doesn't really wow me. I sometimes look at "Best of..." lists and try a few out on a plane flight and I'm mostly meh.
It's hard to charge for full priced AAA-games too. There's still plenty of good ports on mobile. Games like Civ VI and Minecraft, but my friends who have a console or PC would rather buy it on mobile. Even if it was a reduced price, which Civ VI is.
Maybe even making deals to compete with emulators + pirated ROMs.
Just fantasizing a bit here... thinking of Apple-approved N64, GameCube, GBA, PSP, even PS4 emulators with licensed games for a somewhat medium to high price tag - why not?
To me this is a signal of reusing the GPU innovations that were required for the Vision Pro in currently available products and then finding a martket for it (gaming)
Eh, the GPU changes with ray tracing were supposed to land last year as part of A16 but heat issues required them to pull it.
The bright side is that if you are on a yearly release cadence then you don’t let one thing slip the whole SOC (assuming, as Apple does, that you have a risk on and risk off design going simultaneously).
Your are right on that the Vision Pro will have a M3 not M2.
This applies to the Switch too. It’s touch screen but has external controls (they detach and you can use the kickstand). iOS supports gaming controllers so you could use it in the same way as the Switch (albeit it doesn’t have a built in kickstand).
People have been saying that Mac gaming is around the corner for years now. GPU upgrades are the least exiting part of new iPhones. I have zero faith that they move the gaming needle, especially on iPhones.
The most exciting thing for Mac gaming is probably the Game porting toolkit.
I'm not sure they have. When Macs came with Intel processors, everyone who wanted to play games on their Mac just booted into Windows for gaming, so there wasn't much pressure to make them work on the MacOS side. Because Bootcamp no longer works, Apple is under increased pressure to improve game performance.
Also interesting was the large number of Neutral engine cores.
These two together seem to be very much about enhancing AI and Siri to be mostly on-device (something which they already started on).
A frequent complaint I read on HN is "why aren't there LLM based assistants as yet from any vendor" - but the answer to this is straightforward, it's not realistic to deploy cloud-based LLM at Siri-size user bases. Most queries also don't need LLM-style responses. (Also the rapid development of the field means that processing requirements are rapidly decreasing.)
In a prior keynote Apple noted that Siri was the most used assistant in the world. I don't have 3rd party data to support that, but it's a big enough claim that we could take their word on it just for conjecture purposes about the processing power needed to deploy LLM-based Siri.
So if we're going to see LLM-based usability enhancements to Siri, both in the types of data it's allowed to work with and enabling natural, context-driven interactions. That will have to be fully on device, and ultimately that will be a better experience for users as internet connectivity is an unreasonable barrier for such interactions (especially as it can stutter natural-language conversations).
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On the gaming topic: Look at the newly released Hello Kitty Island Adventure on Apple Arcade. It is an exclusive and playable across iPad/iPhone/Mac/AppleTV. The quality of this game is unusual, it delivers an experience that equals/exceeds Nintendo's wildly popular Animal Crossing. This signals that Apple are refocusing on gaming in a new way: bringing popular game paradigms to Arcade in a compelling, exclusive way, and this perhaps forms an extension of Arcade bringing ad-free versions of the App Store's most popular titles.
So while I think we're far off Apple's hardware being a destination for gaming enthusiasts, we're now definitely past the point of Apple pushing people with an itch for gaming onto other platforms.
Unfortunately, PC games, and most "AAA" titles are so shit lately, i just don't bother anymore. I just play the same game even while beefing up my PC. They even destroy amazing games like the old CoD Warzone. All trash now.
You are saying this as we are having one of the best years in gaming in a long time, and it includes both indies and AAA.
Baldur's Gate 3, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, some amazing remakes (Metroid Prime: Remastered, Resident Evil 4, Dead Space), Street Fighter 6 (which was loved by the community upon release unlike SF5, which had to be iterated on for a bit of time before becoming decent), Hi-Fi Rush, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Pikmin 4, Armored Core 6, Blasphemous 2, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. I even ommitted quite a few that are a bit controversial or not "amazing", like Starfield or Hogwarts Legacy.
And that's only off the top of my head, with a good chunk of the year left to go with hitters like Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk rework+expansion, Spiderman 2, MGS Collection vol1, and Cities Skylines 2 on the horizon.
There is no shame in losing interest in gaming, but claiming that "most AAA titles are so shit lately", all while I don't even remember the last time we had a year so chock full of amazing games, is a bit questionable.
Phone gaming has been the biggest market in gaming for awhile, and Apple has long had some of the highest gaming revenues or any company. Phones are already more powerful than a switch although much less powerful than the steam deck.
It is a ceaseless source of bafflement for me how people continually treat Apple as though it’s not already one of the biggest players in the gaming world with an utterly massive library of games you can’t find on any console or on Steam.
Apple has recently made some real strides with making it easier to port games recently because of the need to port VR games to the Apple Vision Pro.
I could totally see Apple turning the iPhone into a Nintendo Switch type device. You can connect it to your Apple TV (maybe even wirelessly) and stream games + play with a controller. The HW is definitely impressive.
The problem is apple actively working against the game developers, or they just ignore the market completely. See the example of vulkan, and deprecation of 32bit games. It doesn't matter how good the hardware is. If the platform is not supporting the games and all they have are the occasional courting of the some of the games, the games won't come to the apple platform for free.
Also they are already making the mobile gaming money which is already lucrative. Are they also committing enough to the 'conventional' gaming?
The App Store is the real issue. Apple's antipathy towards developers is perplexing. The number of stories I've heard about companies having problems due to some interpretation of their policies is ridiculous. There are even horror stories about businesses going bankrupt simply because Apple decided they were in violation of something and banned them from the App Store entirely. I mean, no game company wants to spend millions on a game only to have all of their games pulled because one of them was too similar to someone else's game or something (according to some Apple reviewer with way too much power!).
They do have Nintendo games. They are just not very popular, because Nintendo chose to simplify them. You can use the Switch controller with your Apple devices, but they apps they made are just for simply touch control. Also AppleTV is not supported by the apps. But I guess that's more a decision from Nintendo, because they want their hardware to be used.
I don't think they care about Switch or other consoles, really. Switch sales are nothing compared to what they already sell for non-gaming systems.
You'll be able to play the same AAA games on your desktop Mac, your Macbook, your iPhone, your iPad, and your Apple Vision Pro (on a virtual gigantic screen), locally on the device with no WAN streaming required. That will be a relatively large market of people with money to spend, hard to ignore.
Didn't Nintendo appear on stage at the 2016 keynote event to announce Nintendo's foray into mobile gaming (on 3rd party hardware, anyway) with Super Mario Run? And didn't Apple add native support for the Switch Pro and Joycon controllers to iOS 16 last year? Nintendo has always hated being in the hardware business...
The M1 closely mirrored the A14 Bionic from the iPhone 12 (Pro), M2 the A15 Bionic from the iPhone 13 (Pro) and this the M3 “should” mirror the A16 Bionic from the iPhone 14 Pro / iPhone 15. If this continues we won’t have the new ray tracing GPU until M4.
Yes, but the A16 was a stopgap release, which only happened because Apple has to release a new iPhone CPU every year. The M-series does not update as frequently, and so it seems reasonable to imagine that the M3 is of the same "generation" as the A17.
I also expect Apple to become much more serious about gaming. They might even see gaming as an important item in their balance sheet in a few years time. They have the hardware, and the Vision Pro might need gaming to break even and turn a profit.
>I'm expecting the new M3 Macs next month to lean really heavily into discussing the GPU advances and (hopefully) announce a lot more support from big studios to bring more games to the Mac.
Assuming the trend of iPhone Ax chips showing up in Macs holds up, this would be late 2024 / early 2025 Macs and M4, not M3.
M2 is based based on A15, M3 is expected to be based on A16, M4 would be A17.
iPhones are useless for AAA games unless they open the platform up more.
One of the reasons stadia failed is that gamers that spend the most do not want to keep rebuying games. Apple seems to expect people to also keep rebuying games. Just. No.
hmmm... i want an app that uses geolocation to have my iPhone start to mine bitcoin whenever it's plugged in to a charger that's not in a location where I pay for the electricity
It looks like the one feature I was more eagerly awaiting is there: It can drive a display through the USB-C cable (https://www.apple.com/iphone-15-pro, scroll down to "Gigablast your gigabits" and then click on "Explore Connectivity".
Looking forward (assuming it will work like the iPad Pro) to not carrying a laptop with me when I know there is a USB-C or HDMI (with an adapter) screen available at my destination. Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and I'm set. No more syncing with the phone - I am using the phone itself.
I bought an Android phone that transforms into a desktop computer when you plug in a USB-C monitor, and the entire experience is mind blowing. You can even connect a bluetooth keyboard and use the phone screen as a touchpad. Unfortunately I don't think Apple is going to go in that direction anytime soon.
Ooooh more info please! Which phone? And what's the experience like? Are you using it for development at all or is it more things like word? I wanna know all about this setup, since I'm definitely going to need to upgrade my phone soon.
I'm kind of doing this with iPad, and microsoft remote desktop. it allows me to just carry an ipad and be able to access my CAD machine in work. Love it.
I doubt they would sneak in such a feature without at least mentioning it. I expect this to be even more limited, perhaps just tethered airplay for better resolution.
I don't think Apple will ever do that, to be honest. It took nearly a decade for them to get keyboard support working properly on the iPad, and they have zero incentive to copy Samsung DeX given they prefer to sell 3 different devices to people.
What they will do is allow you to record video directly to storage devices and preview photos on large displays as they are taken.
> I don't think Apple will ever do that, to be honest.
Apple sells lightning->HDMI adapters that could drive a display at 1080p and it’s been possible to pair a keyboard with your iPhone. I know folks that used that setup for writing longer texts while traveling.
Given that a lot of the infrastructure was already there, I wouldn’t be surprised if it trickles in over time.
You can see the same trajectory with iPads: At first they could mirror screens only, but with the recent changes to stage manager, they’re a pretty full-featured laptop if you use a keyboard and trackpad. My 11” pro is capable of driving a huge widescreen.
I regularly use my bluetooth mechanical keyboard (nuphy air 75) with both ipad and iphone. Works fine. Much better than the keyboards sold by apple. What are you missing?
I use blink[0] with a 40% keyboard to develop linux program on a vps.
If you want to do programming without wireless interenet, another option is to connect a raspberry pi zero 2w (with usb gadget mode enabled) to the usb c port using a single usb cable. Then the rpi zero will share a ethernet network with iOS device. Then you can use blink (again) to mosh to raspberrypi.local to do the development on the pi.
The reason that I don't do it on android with termux is that there's no high quality terminal emulator like blink on android.
I have to go this way with some apps, because the PC/Mac desktop versions are unavailable (banking apps), or are missing significant numbers of features (CapCut). So I have to use a smartphone as my primary work terminal, which is impossible if you just use the touchscreen.
FWIW keyboards have worked OK all along, I regularly use one of my wireless keyboards switched over to the phone to type longer stuff, though the autocorrect gets more annoying in that case.
Mice are a lot more annoying, because they're part of the assistive devices, so you need to enable Assistive Touch, and then you either have the mouse connected or the Assistive Touch menu taking space on the display, which is probably not useful if you're abled. If Assistive Touch is disabled, the mouse "works" but you don't get a visible pointer which is completely stupid.
Possibly connecting to an external display won't have that issue, or iOS 17 will make the experience a bit better for non-assistive mousing.
I don't see anything about displays on that page. All I see is "iPhone 15 Pro lets you shoot ProRes video directly to external storage, so you can quickly switch drives and keep your iPhone camera rolling on set. Want to capture slow motion Hollywood style? Now you can record ProRes 4K at 60 fps to an external SSD."
I highly doubt the 15 Pro can drive a display. In the unlikely case that it can, you'll be limited to very low res. Why would they limit USB to 10gbps if the PHY can push the ~32gbps eDP bandwidth required for a modern display?
The "Explore Connectivity" modal window you can open in the "Gigablast
your gigabits" (meh) section, as I quoted in my original post, has this block of text:
USB‑Convenient.
Now you can connect USB‑C gear like thumb drives, fast external storage, 4K displays, and microphones. And you can charge Apple Watch or AirPods from your iPhone.9
Apple's continued focus on gaming image quality is weird (ray tracing?), since despite Apple Arcade the mobile market still is still dominated by freemium games with simple graphics / lower graphical requirements.
There are precisely two freemium games that take advantage of the power of the Apple Silicon chips: Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, which were coincidently the two released games highlighted. (it may be interesting to see what Ubisoft and Capcom put out but the I suspect they'll price their games too high)
It bodes well for a M3 Pro chip for the next MacBook Pros, though.
> Apple's continued focus on gaming image quality is weird (ray tracing?), since despite Apple Arcade the mobile market still is still dominated by freemium games with simple graphics / lower graphical requirements.
They use the same GPU core design from handheld to desktop, so the improvement will apply everywhere as chips are updated.
I think their strategy is that iOS makes too much money for gaming companies to ignore, which means those companies are going to have an easy time reworking iOS games to target a mouse/keyboard/gamepad UI on Macs, since the two existing platforms (and even their upcoming AR/VR platform) have common APIs and CPU/GPU cores.
It also can improve DX and make for easier ports downstream. If the new Assassin's Creed uses some ray tracing on their console version, they use the same technique on the iPhone.
It's a way to increase profits in an area of R&D that's required for the AR side of things.
Gaming is an easily marketable profit funnel that directly relates with all the necessary advancements needed to pursue the Vision Pro/Visual Compute/LLM side of things. In my opinion, anyway.
This was my first thought too, Apple always plays the long game and that's why people keep saying "no innovation" after every single keynote :D
Stuff that was added today will pay of in 3-4 years after it has trickled down to enough users. Like the spatial camera, now it's a curiosity on the top-end model, but in 5 years it might be a standard feature in phones with great synergy with the Apple Vision non-pro model they just happen to release when there are enough devices to produce content for it.
Interesting to think about how many pieces are almost in place for this. The two big players in game engines have had a huge iOS presence for years, just for a different segment of the gaming market; PC game developers have had a few years now to optimize titles for the constraints of the Steam Deck; Apple's game porting toolkit was just announced this past WWDC…
If Valve gets the opportunity to gain a foothold on iOS, the landscape could change very quickly.
Sometimes directions that don't make sense from a technical or market point of view are made with something much further in the future in mind. This could be the case here.
I guess they need such hardware for the Apple Vision Pro, and are working with several heavily NDA-ed companies to get software out that uses it when that launches.
Sticking the 23-year-old USB 2.0 port on a device that is made in 2023 and costs $1k is inexcusable. [non-pro]
There is absolutely no excuse when we're talking about a device at this price point and this age.
It doesn't matter that it wouldn't be fully exercised by most users. These are premium products at a premium price point. It's insulting that they would cheap out like that.
It makes sense though. The non-pro models are using last year’s A16 SOC without any updates. I assume they’ll get USB 3 next year when the SOC is updated. I’d be much more disappointed if that’s not the case though.
I'd assume the non-pros will remain on USB2, and that serves as a segmentation feature. Especially since only the pros can shoot in ProRAW and ProRES.
On iPads, the "base" iPad is on USB2 speeds, the mini supports 5Gbps, the air 10, and only the pro supports 40Gb USB4. And while SoC differences could explain differences between the iPad (A14) and Mini (A15), the 5th gen Air uses the same SoC as the 5th gen Pro which already did support 40Gb USB4. So it's not an SoC limitation.
Although they ended up putting the 48MP main camera on the non-pro and I thought that'd remain pro-exclusive as well so...
The Pros do use USB3? Or are you talking about the regular 15? I still agree with you, but unfortunately the vast majority of regular iPhone users aren’t transferring large files over a cable and won’t care.
The regular 15. And 3.0 also supports much faster charging.
Maybe most won't care, but I still think it's disgusting and pathetic for a company this size with products this expensive to cheap out by using USB 2.0.
I'm mostly interested in the manufacturing technology -- seems like they're doing some kind of friction/ultrasonic/diffusion welding between the titanium frame and the aluminium insides.
Apple is fairly silent on these kinds of things, but it really is impressive how much they invest in leading edge manufacturing - huge CNC factories, this insane mixed metal weld, laser precision drilling…
I'm excited for the most silly pedestrian reason: Because I detest the Apple 'DRM' chip that is implicit in Lightning even when used just for charging. I call it "DRM'd Electricity."
Choices of cables we've had for the whole existence of the iPhone:
• Apple cables, $20-30, not even nice, cheap plastic with poor strain relief, work reliably until they succumb easily to damage
• Licensed (like Belkin), $20-30, nicer, work reliably
• 1,000 brands on Amazon, etc. Not licensed, 10% DOA rate, sometimes just stop working. Physically nearly always nicer than Apple. $3-12.
I'm really excited to be able to just have many of the same charging cables everywhere, and to buy them for $5 or less. Even buying cheap cables, I've never once had a USB-C (or even the terrible micro-B) cable fail to work.
Note: I actually feel just as strongly even though I only even use a cable in the car, and charge with "Magsafe" everywhere else. I just hate Lightning that much. Also, I could easily afford the Apple cables, but it would physically pain me to waste that much money knowing it's purely additional margin for Apple.
I wouldn't get excited yet. TMK they are only required to implement the connector and certain charging requirements, not any particular complete USB protocol spec, so it seems likely they'll continue the same MFi program over USB-C cables.
I would be extremely surprised if Apple introduced a requirement for specially marked USB-C cables for the iPhone. The iPad already uses USB-C, and works with any USB-C cable.
I must be the only consumer who despises the thin edges on my current iPhone 14 pro. I'd like to be able to hold my phone and not randomly trigger edge-sensitive gestures like "scroll to top" (that you can't disable!).
Same here. I dont mind the larger trackpad with smaller edge on the new MacBook, or the thin edge on iPhone, providing they can make the false sensitive trigger at 100% accuracy. Not 99%, or 99.9999%, but infinitely close to 100%. I am not sure even sure if that is possible. But right now it isn't. And the random trigger is annoying enough to side with you on the subject matter.
Does that mean that iPhone 15 Pro camera has the same physical module as iPhone 14 Pro, apart from some software changes? Or did they release a wrong data for their comparator on apple website?
It's not the same physical module. The physical aspects they list (megapixels, aperature) are the same, but the actual 48MP sensor they use is improved.
"iPhone 15 pro features a more advanced 48MP main camera, with an even larger sensor than iPhone 15 [and therefore iPhone 14 Pro]. The camera includes a new nanoscale coating to reduce lens flare."
Readit News
They made a point of saying that the GPU had been completely ground-up re-designed, and I assume they're intending to keep scaling that up over the next few iterations.
They didn't talk about it for very long, but that the phone is able to convincingly run AAA games, even at playable if not great frame-rates, is really impressive. This puts the iPhone up against devices like the Switch and Steam Deck for a lot of users. Granted, they don't have Nintendo's games, and they don't have Steam's massive back catalogue, but looking forward it does make a dedicated handheld gaming system harder to justify, or at least makes the phone easier to justify if you're not buying both.
It also makes me really interested to see where Apple is going with Apple TV and the Mac. With the game porting toolkit already announced (and the results people are already getting just using it directly to run Windows games), it seems like Apple really could eat at least some portion of the gaming market by already having a handheld (phone), console (Apple TV), and gaming PC (Mac) ready to go in the next few years.
I'm expecting the new M3 Macs next month to lean really heavily into discussing the GPU advances and (hopefully) announce a lot more support from big studios to bring more games to the Mac.
Developers simply do not have the incentive to build any other kinds of games when the current crop of addictive shovelware is so damn profitable. The sad part is that Apple encourages this practice because it is easy money for them (via their 30% cut). The problem needs to be fixed by better quality control and transaction/gambling rules, not a faster processor.
But then predatory freemium games like Clash of Clans and newer replacements for Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies burned me out. They eliminated any desire I had to invest time or money or attention into mobile games. Popular freemium games in the App Store now bury any new gems. It's quite disappointing.
A better GPU isn't going to help the situation.
There is no way 1 generation of games can "take over and destroy" the "promise of gaming" because there are no restrictions on what future innovators can do with the tools and the platforms. The existence of some bad games doesn't preclude future good games.
As an example, my favorite mobile game is Slay the Spire
If some new policy changed this, I think we’d see a whole new wave of higher quality games
“You earn $3 and then you update it for the next 10 years. If you’re making free-to-play games, if you keep earning money with a game, yeah, that’s a great model because you can make more money by updating.”
Ismail pointed to Vlambeer’s “Ridiculous Fishing,” which won a number of awards from gaming publications and Apple.
“‘Ridiculous Fishing’ is never going to make more money,” he said. “Yeah, some new people might buy it, but we made our money with ‘Ridiculous Fishing’ in 2013 and that money is spent, It’s spent on ‘Luftrausers.’ It’s spent on ‘Nuclear Throne.’ If somebody upgrades their phones to the new iPhone. Yeah. You have ‘Ridiculous Fishing’ in your account, Yeah you paid $3 for it. Yeah, it’s broken.”
That’s what caused the last major update Vlambeer did for the game. A major change by Apple in 2017 that switched from 32-bit to 64-bit apps, breaking a slew of content on their phones … including “Ridiculous Fishing.”
“All games broke,” he said, “Every game that wasn’t programmed for it broke. We updated ‘Ridiculous Fishing’ then but it feels like a mistake almost. It feels like, OK it’s 2018 and this game that we made money with that somebody bought in 2013 is now broken outside of our fault. We didn’t change anything. We didn’t break the game. We didn’t introduce a bug, but this continuous ecosystem that Apple has created, that comes with you with every new phone, broke it. “
Ismail said that either Apple has to start designing for backward compatibility support on their end or that people are going to have to get used to the idea of games dying and disappearing.
“Some of the best ios games from 2010 are gone,” he said. “Those developers, they don’t exist anymore. They went out of business. They split up. They started a new thing and they just don’t have the money or time to do it.”
https://variety.com/2019/gaming/features/android-ios-apple-g...
Wasn't that a reaction to users who refused to pay for games and just sideloaded them instead?
I can remember there being five dollar games in the early days of iOS that sold well. I can also remember developers trying games that had ads until you paid to remove them.
Personally, I don’t have the incentive because 1) paid mobile gaming isn’t a big market (see: top paid apps being the exact same years-old, curated Apple apps not having many reviews/downloads), 2) there aren’t many options to develop games targeting iOS which also target Android and Windows/Linux (at least if you want to use Swift), and 3) Apple could remove my game at any notice and I don’t get 30% of the revenue.
If Apple introduces a way to easily port desktop games to iOS, or even develop entirely new games which can run on Linux and mac and iPhone, I think we’d see a lot more iOS games. Maybe the new GPU isn’t only faster but also supports Vulkan/wgpu better?
It so absurd: We need to carry the device anyway since its a phone, it has a great GPU and there are thousands of existing great games that have been created that the device can easily run. The only problem has always been the stupidity of the code not being available to run on this device. :/
Apple has fueled a race-to-the-bottom followed by an almost forced transition to f2p, and they benefited immensely in the process (30%), but I think that most gamers and indie devs are not satisfied.
I've been watching people around me and the amount of time everyone seems to spend tapping away at a phone, head down, is like something out of a dystopian movie.
The game addiction market must be worth billions to Apple. For all the environmental and other ad copy, there doesn't seem to be any concern about the mental and psychological effects of creating an ecosystem that knowingly relies on exploitative behaviour modification.
I also think the colour scheme is quite cynical. Pastel shades on the base model for the - let's say - less technically-oriented users. Strong blacks, whites, and metallics for the hard-core performance nerds who want that Pro tag.
There's something regressive about it all.
I'll second another comment, that another big challenge is the simple lack of ergonomics on any phone.
And also (mostly) the ergonomics.
Comparing a phone whose main purpose is definitely not gaming (at least the iPhone, I know there are some gaming-first phones) to a handheld console will always make the former look pathetic for this use-case.
That seems to be where their concern for gaming stops. There is Apple Arcade, but it feels like the least amount they could do for the size of their company.
I do think they care about it over the longer-term, particularly in light Vision Pro and their overall AR strategy.
What you're forgetting, and pushing aside, is that the mobile gaming market is as big as the traditional gaming market. All the phone games make as much money as all the consoles and PC gaming together. Apple, with its command of all the valuable phone customers, is pulling an estimated 14 billion dollars in 2021 in mobile gaming. So Apple is very dumb if they don't care about 14 billion in annual services revenue.
What you're thinking is that traditional gaming is big-boy gaming and where the big bucks are. The growth market is mobile gaming, with the other segments being stagnant outside of big hits. The reality is that Apple is a bigger gaming company, by revenue, than Microsoft or Sony, is controlling the growth sector, and is thinking accordingly. They have financed all on their own a new GPU generation for their phone and justified it as a need for gaming and gaming alone. Those other companies need partners, like AMD or Nvidia, to make them GPUs.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
It's a digital company that is trying to increase revenue with services instead of just hardware.
How can you ignore gaming whilst offering your own streaming service? The gaming market is many multiples in size of all of Hollywood.
Apple tried to counteract it with Apple Arcade, but that hasn't worked out.
With my Steam catalog I can download something I bought in 2004 and still be confident I can play it. I spent $20 on Monster Hunter for iPhone and one day iOS updated and it just didn’t work anymore.
My Switch games will assumably work until the console dies.
Another reason I completely stopped buying games on iOS was when The Binding of Isaac was suddenly delisted from the App Store. I never got a refund or anything, and because of this new versions of Binding of Isaac aren’t compatible with Macs either. I have hundreds of hours played in that game and it’s ridiculous that Apple censored it as “depicting child abuse”.
I’m super curious to see what they’ve done with this current–gen, mainline Assassin‘s Creed game coming to iPhone: there is no way the core gameplay of that franchise could translate to touch controls, so either Apple dropped the requirement, some poor team had the doomed project of building an abysmal fallback touch control scheme, or they implemented some kind of semi-automated scheme for touch that makes traversal and combat less interactive.
A dedicated device has the benefit of having a sole purpose: gaming. If I kill the battery, I just can't play anymore games. I can still take calls, browse the web, and text my partner.
I'm not really a gamer but I get Arcade as part of a bundle and it doesn't really wow me. I sometimes look at "Best of..." lists and try a few out on a plane flight and I'm mostly meh.
Maybe even making deals to compete with emulators + pirated ROMs.
Just fantasizing a bit here... thinking of Apple-approved N64, GameCube, GBA, PSP, even PS4 emulators with licensed games for a somewhat medium to high price tag - why not?
The bright side is that if you are on a yearly release cadence then you don’t let one thing slip the whole SOC (assuming, as Apple does, that you have a risk on and risk off design going simultaneously).
Your are right on that the Vision Pro will have a M3 not M2.
Dead Comment
So some people are seriously playing it with no physical controls. =)
For "serious" mobile gamers there are devices like the Razer Kishi: https://www.razer.com/mobile-controllers/razer-kishi-v2
On this site people tend to forget that there actually are people under 30 whose only computing device is a phone. They use it for everything.
The most exciting thing for Mac gaming is probably the Game porting toolkit.
My faith is placed in the fact that they have been pouring resources that amount close to billions on making gaming a thing on iPhones and Macs.
As a long time Mac and iPhone gamer, I have seen slow and steady incremental progress. I'm personally excited for the new GPU.
Besides, I think they get the benefit of the doubt at this point. This is Apple, not Google, after all.
These two together seem to be very much about enhancing AI and Siri to be mostly on-device (something which they already started on).
A frequent complaint I read on HN is "why aren't there LLM based assistants as yet from any vendor" - but the answer to this is straightforward, it's not realistic to deploy cloud-based LLM at Siri-size user bases. Most queries also don't need LLM-style responses. (Also the rapid development of the field means that processing requirements are rapidly decreasing.)
In a prior keynote Apple noted that Siri was the most used assistant in the world. I don't have 3rd party data to support that, but it's a big enough claim that we could take their word on it just for conjecture purposes about the processing power needed to deploy LLM-based Siri.
So if we're going to see LLM-based usability enhancements to Siri, both in the types of data it's allowed to work with and enabling natural, context-driven interactions. That will have to be fully on device, and ultimately that will be a better experience for users as internet connectivity is an unreasonable barrier for such interactions (especially as it can stutter natural-language conversations).
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On the gaming topic: Look at the newly released Hello Kitty Island Adventure on Apple Arcade. It is an exclusive and playable across iPad/iPhone/Mac/AppleTV. The quality of this game is unusual, it delivers an experience that equals/exceeds Nintendo's wildly popular Animal Crossing. This signals that Apple are refocusing on gaming in a new way: bringing popular game paradigms to Arcade in a compelling, exclusive way, and this perhaps forms an extension of Arcade bringing ad-free versions of the App Store's most popular titles. So while I think we're far off Apple's hardware being a destination for gaming enthusiasts, we're now definitely past the point of Apple pushing people with an itch for gaming onto other platforms.
Baldur's Gate 3, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, some amazing remakes (Metroid Prime: Remastered, Resident Evil 4, Dead Space), Street Fighter 6 (which was loved by the community upon release unlike SF5, which had to be iterated on for a bit of time before becoming decent), Hi-Fi Rush, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Pikmin 4, Armored Core 6, Blasphemous 2, Star Wars: Jedi Survivor. I even ommitted quite a few that are a bit controversial or not "amazing", like Starfield or Hogwarts Legacy.
And that's only off the top of my head, with a good chunk of the year left to go with hitters like Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk rework+expansion, Spiderman 2, MGS Collection vol1, and Cities Skylines 2 on the horizon.
There is no shame in losing interest in gaming, but claiming that "most AAA titles are so shit lately", all while I don't even remember the last time we had a year so chock full of amazing games, is a bit questionable.
It is a ceaseless source of bafflement for me how people continually treat Apple as though it’s not already one of the biggest players in the gaming world with an utterly massive library of games you can’t find on any console or on Steam.
Apple has recently made some real strides with making it easier to port games recently because of the need to port VR games to the Apple Vision Pro.
Also they are already making the mobile gaming money which is already lucrative. Are they also committing enough to the 'conventional' gaming?
You'll be able to play the same AAA games on your desktop Mac, your Macbook, your iPhone, your iPad, and your Apple Vision Pro (on a virtual gigantic screen), locally on the device with no WAN streaming required. That will be a relatively large market of people with money to spend, hard to ignore.
Didn't Nintendo appear on stage at the 2016 keynote event to announce Nintendo's foray into mobile gaming (on 3rd party hardware, anyway) with Super Mario Run? And didn't Apple add native support for the Switch Pro and Joycon controllers to iOS 16 last year? Nintendo has always hated being in the hardware business...
Relying on touch controls limits gaming to low pace, imprecise casual/idle games.
Be interesting to see how the new iPhone 15 Pro benchmarks on single-core and GPU.
That should be a leading indicator on what we can expect from the new M3!
I'll believe their GPU is decent when I see it
Assuming the trend of iPhone Ax chips showing up in Macs holds up, this would be late 2024 / early 2025 Macs and M4, not M3.
M2 is based based on A15, M3 is expected to be based on A16, M4 would be A17.
One of the reasons stadia failed is that gamers that spend the most do not want to keep rebuying games. Apple seems to expect people to also keep rebuying games. Just. No.
hmmm... i want an app that uses geolocation to have my iPhone start to mine bitcoin whenever it's plugged in to a charger that's not in a location where I pay for the electricity
"mind if I charge my phone?"
"you again!? get out!"
Looking forward (assuming it will work like the iPad Pro) to not carrying a laptop with me when I know there is a USB-C or HDMI (with an adapter) screen available at my destination. Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and I'm set. No more syncing with the phone - I am using the phone itself.
That sounds about as productive as the never ending stream of “I tried switching to an iPad for dev” blogs
I doubt they would sneak in such a feature without at least mentioning it. I expect this to be even more limited, perhaps just tethered airplay for better resolution.
What they will do is allow you to record video directly to storage devices and preview photos on large displays as they are taken.
Apple sells lightning->HDMI adapters that could drive a display at 1080p and it’s been possible to pair a keyboard with your iPhone. I know folks that used that setup for writing longer texts while traveling.
Given that a lot of the infrastructure was already there, I wouldn’t be surprised if it trickles in over time.
You can see the same trajectory with iPads: At first they could mirror screens only, but with the recent changes to stage manager, they’re a pretty full-featured laptop if you use a keyboard and trackpad. My 11” pro is capable of driving a huge widescreen.
LOL - I have to get my Apple news from tidbits in comments nowadays as I cannot stand to watch the saccharine overproduced videos that Apple make.
I used to love an Apple Keynote... but now, they are a huge turnoff.
If you want to do programming without wireless interenet, another option is to connect a raspberry pi zero 2w (with usb gadget mode enabled) to the usb c port using a single usb cable. Then the rpi zero will share a ethernet network with iOS device. Then you can use blink (again) to mosh to raspberrypi.local to do the development on the pi.
The reason that I don't do it on android with termux is that there's no high quality terminal emulator like blink on android.
[0]: https://blink.sh
Mice are a lot more annoying, because they're part of the assistive devices, so you need to enable Assistive Touch, and then you either have the mouse connected or the Assistive Touch menu taking space on the display, which is probably not useful if you're abled. If Assistive Touch is disabled, the mouse "works" but you don't get a visible pointer which is completely stupid.
Possibly connecting to an external display won't have that issue, or iOS 17 will make the experience a bit better for non-assistive mousing.
I highly doubt the 15 Pro can drive a display. In the unlikely case that it can, you'll be limited to very low res. Why would they limit USB to 10gbps if the PHY can push the ~32gbps eDP bandwidth required for a modern display?
USB‑Convenient.
Now you can connect USB‑C gear like thumb drives, fast external storage, 4K displays, and microphones. And you can charge Apple Watch or AirPods from your iPhone.9
Right in the linked site
There are precisely two freemium games that take advantage of the power of the Apple Silicon chips: Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, which were coincidently the two released games highlighted. (it may be interesting to see what Ubisoft and Capcom put out but the I suspect they'll price their games too high)
It bodes well for a M3 Pro chip for the next MacBook Pros, though.
They use the same GPU core design from handheld to desktop, so the improvement will apply everywhere as chips are updated.
I think their strategy is that iOS makes too much money for gaming companies to ignore, which means those companies are going to have an easy time reworking iOS games to target a mouse/keyboard/gamepad UI on Macs, since the two existing platforms (and even their upcoming AR/VR platform) have common APIs and CPU/GPU cores.
Gaming is an easily marketable profit funnel that directly relates with all the necessary advancements needed to pursue the Vision Pro/Visual Compute/LLM side of things. In my opinion, anyway.
Stuff that was added today will pay of in 3-4 years after it has trickled down to enough users. Like the spatial camera, now it's a curiosity on the top-end model, but in 5 years it might be a standard feature in phones with great synergy with the Apple Vision non-pro model they just happen to release when there are enough devices to produce content for it.
If Valve gets the opportunity to gain a foothold on iOS, the landscape could change very quickly.
It does raytracing because it has raw power. What you use this power for is another story. It can easily augment the neural engine for example.
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Guessing it’s important for an eventual vision pro integration
There is absolutely no excuse when we're talking about a device at this price point and this age.
It doesn't matter that it wouldn't be fully exercised by most users. These are premium products at a premium price point. It's insulting that they would cheap out like that.
On iPads, the "base" iPad is on USB2 speeds, the mini supports 5Gbps, the air 10, and only the pro supports 40Gb USB4. And while SoC differences could explain differences between the iPad (A14) and Mini (A15), the 5th gen Air uses the same SoC as the 5th gen Pro which already did support 40Gb USB4. So it's not an SoC limitation.
Although they ended up putting the 48MP main camera on the non-pro and I thought that'd remain pro-exclusive as well so...
Maybe most won't care, but I still think it's disgusting and pathetic for a company this size with products this expensive to cheap out by using USB 2.0.
It also says "The included USB‑C Charge Cable is compatible with AirPods Pro (2nd generation) with MagSafe Charging Case (USB‑C)."
That's a notoriously difficult weld to make: https://doi.org/10.1177/14644207211010839
I would love to know what process they're using and how they've got it reliable!
Choices of cables we've had for the whole existence of the iPhone:
• Apple cables, $20-30, not even nice, cheap plastic with poor strain relief, work reliably until they succumb easily to damage
• Licensed (like Belkin), $20-30, nicer, work reliably
• 1,000 brands on Amazon, etc. Not licensed, 10% DOA rate, sometimes just stop working. Physically nearly always nicer than Apple. $3-12.
I'm really excited to be able to just have many of the same charging cables everywhere, and to buy them for $5 or less. Even buying cheap cables, I've never once had a USB-C (or even the terrible micro-B) cable fail to work.
Note: I actually feel just as strongly even though I only even use a cable in the car, and charge with "Magsafe" everywhere else. I just hate Lightning that much. Also, I could easily afford the Apple cables, but it would physically pain me to waste that much money knowing it's purely additional margin for Apple.
One cable might only support power, one might only be for data and one supports USB-PD up to 120W. How can you know? By trying them all!
I must be the only consumer who despises the thin edges on my current iPhone 14 pro. I'd like to be able to hold my phone and not randomly trigger edge-sensitive gestures like "scroll to top" (that you can't disable!).
But tiny bezels on tablets? Oof. Like the lates Galaxy Tab. How are you supposed to hold it without pressing at least 5 icons accidentally?
https://pasteboard.co/2vRyDDgKlHCV.png
"iPhone 15 pro features a more advanced 48MP main camera, with an even larger sensor than iPhone 15 [and therefore iPhone 14 Pro]. The camera includes a new nanoscale coating to reduce lens flare."
See here: https://www.youtube.com/live/ZiP1l7jlIIA?si=FFSYTVqY0unVRSqu...
They also mention it enabling new focal lengths and better low light performance.
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