Linked List: September 22, 2021

Wednesday, 22 September 2021

Ben Bajarin, writing at Creative Strategies:

While I will admit there is a small percentage of Apple customers who upgrade every year and a percentage more who upgrade every two years because they are on upgrade plans, the vast majority of consumers upgrade every 3-4 years. I thought it would be interesting to look at some basic iPhone benchmarks through the years and look at how much performance improvement happens every four years.

Incremental improvements every year turn into profound improvements over 3–4 years. It’s like the technology version of compound interest. It adds up.

As I benchmarked the A15 Bionic in different ways and pondered how Apple spends its transistor budget with each A-series chip cycle, an interesting shift emerged for iPhone 13. Going back to how Apple spends their transistor budget on features, not necessarily performance, for the A15, Apple looks to have had the most GPU gains YoY since the A9. For the past five years, Apple has had an average of 19% GPU gains YoY but for the A15 Bionic, Apple has increased GPU performance by 52%.

This intentional increase in GPU performance over CPU performance speaks to the more graphically intense features Apple had in mind for iPhone 13 that is demonstrated in things like macro photography, macro video, and Cinematic Mode. Developers also now have a dramatically increased GPU at their disposal to create new app experiences around and can leverage new augmented reality techniques, visual computing and AI, and more.

It’s almost enough to make one think that Apple is ready to release high-end professional Macs built around Apple GPUs.

Music Video Shot With iPhone 13 Pro Cinematic Mode: Julia Wolf – ‘Falling in Love’ ★

Jonathan Morrison:

Went hands on with the iPhone 13 Pro and immediately wanted to test out the camera and cinematic mode. It’s limited to 1080p 30fps but I was surprised to see how sharp it was AND that it retained Dolby Vision.

Interesting to see Cinematic mode in the hands of a talented videographer. Easily the best “in the wild” Cinematic mode video I’ve seen. (Explicit lyrics in the song.)

Wired’s 2011 Review of the iPhone 4S ★

From Wired’s review of the iPhone 4S:

Apple never specified what the “S” stands for in iPhone 4S, and it may as well stand for Siri. Sure, the fifth-generation iPhone’s superb camera and speedy dual-core processor are classy additions. But Siri is the reason people should buy this phone. […]

The iPhone 4S looks exactly the same as its predecessor — but who cares? If it was shaped even slightly differently or came in a new color, people would still go nuts over the stuff that’s more important anyway: the insides. And both inside and out, this is a magnificent smartphone.

The late Steve Jobs once called the computer the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. I think of the smartphone as the rocket ship for our minds. With increasingly powerful sensors and technologies, and access to hundreds of thousands of apps enabling us to do just about anything, the iPhone keeps soaring to incredible heights and taking us to places with limitless potential. I guess that’s what you have to do to create a ding in the universe.

I don’t know what happened to the fellow who wrote this review 10 years ago, but The New York Times could sure use a personal tech critic with this sort of enthusiasm and insight into the way that incremental improvements aggregate in just a few years in profound ways.

‘The Most Important iPhone Ever’ ★

Horace Dediu, writing at Asymco:

There are more than 1 billion iPhone users. The total number of users has been rising steadily. iPhone users make up about 26% of all smartphone users (3.8 billion is the current estimate). The share of users in the US is about 60% (or soon will be.) The share in UK is close to 50%. All these share numbers are higher than ever. Over 14% of US and 10% of UK survey respondents have switched to an iPhone in the past two years.

I was not aware that churn was so strongly in the favor of iPhone over the last two years. Pretty good for a phone that Henry Blodget declared “dead in the water” in 2012. The downside to this trend, if it continues, is Apple might start running into being deemed an actual monopolist — by which I mean holding a monopoly share of phones period, not just a monopoly on iPhones. And with its sole OS competitor increasingly showing signs of losing institutional interest in Android, that trend might continue.

Dediu on the iPhone 13 and Apple’s camera improvements over the last few years in general:

We did not ask for rack focus, post-production focus (!), night mode, macro photography and portrait bokeh. But once we have these features we begin, ever so slowly, to use them and then we start demanding them. Conversely it seems that what people mostly ask for — that is what the critics ask for — are extrapolations of existing features. The “faster horse” dilemma.

On the surface, the physics of photography are stacked against Apple. Apple’s “cameras” are pancake-thin phones that people rightfully expect to comfortably carry in a jeans pocket. The technically-best photos and videos you can create today are shot using very large, very heavy cameras. But in a very meaningful way, this severe disadvantage works in Apple’s favor. It’s good to be the underdog. It keeps you hungry. And in photography, Apple is very much the underdog — not to any competing company but to the laws of physics. They’ve been making better smartphones than their competition since the day the first iPhone went on sale. That can make a company lazy, and lose focus. The worst thing that ever happened to the Mac was Microsoft Windows going to shit after Windows XP.

But Apple will be chasing “real” cameras in image quality for at least another decade, maybe forever. Settling for nothing less than making the best cameras, period, despite the severe form factor constraints of a “phone”, is the sort of north star that keeps a company focused.

Who Needs to Shoot Photos in Low Light Anyway? ★

Nilay Patel, on Brian X. Chen’s iPhone 13 review for ~~Pravda~~ The New York Times:

The NYT does not believe regular people stand to benefit from better iPhone photos in the dark. I live for this review from another planet every year.

I thought this was a really strange passage too. Quoting from Chen’s review:

So in summary, the iPhone 13 cameras are slightly better than those of last year’s iPhones. Even compared with iPhones from three years ago, the cameras are much better only if you care about taking nice photos in the dark.

Just how important is night photography? I posed the question to Jim Wilson, a longtime staff photographer for The New York Times, as he was taking pictures of the new iPhones for this review. He said it would be a crucial feature for people like him, but not as important for casual shooters.

I enjoy how Chen’s review opens with an egalitarian slam that Apple and Samsung’s annual phone updates are “a mirage of tech innovation” and instead are “a celebration of capitalism”, but when it comes to explaining why typical users shouldn’t care about low-light photography, he basically says “because a professional staff photographer at The New York Times says they shouldn’t care”.

Ben Thompson recalled (as I should have, but did not) that this is something of a recurring theme. From Chen’s review of the iPhones 11 and 11 Pro two years ago:

Photos taken with the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro looked crisp and clear, and their colors were accurate. But after I finished these tests, I looked back at my archived photos taken with an iPhone X.

Those pictures, especially the ones shot with portrait mode, still looked impressive. Some of the low-light ones looked crummy in comparison with the ones taken by the iPhone 11s, but I wouldn’t recommend that you buy a new phone just to get better night photos. You could always just use flash.

“You shouldn’t feel the need to buy a new iPhone every year” is a fine sentiment, one that many, if not most, reviewers make each year. Arguing, repeatedly, that your readers should not be concerned at all about taking better photos in low light is bizarre. The single biggest change in consumer photography over the last 3–4 years is the exponential improvement in low light and night mode photography on new mobile phones.

And again, as I mentioned yesterday, Chen’s iPhone 13 review doesn’t even mention battery life, even though almost every other reviewer noted significant improvements across the lineup.