[UPDATE] Wonderlust – Apple September event; new iPhones and watches

[HenrySalayne]

5 hours ago, hishnash said:

They will simply price the SDK as the rev share 30% of all your revenue from users on iOS (regardless of how you make that revenue). This is just like Epic with the Unreal engine. If you use the Epic store they take rev share just from the store cut but if you use steam they take rev share from all rev sources (including ads, paid product placements etc).

Epic takes a 12% cut through for sales in their store and a whopping 5% of revenue made outside their store (with the piece of software using the UE). These terms are freely negotiable and are the base-line of talks (so this is the WORST CASE SCENARIO).

 

"This is just like Epic with the Unreal Engine." is factually false. Your post is literally made up numbers and speculation. What is the point of this? "In my imagination Apple will do this" and "here are some arbitrary numbers I pulled out of my nose" is not the basis of a discussion.

 

[hishnash]

18 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Your post is literally made up numbers and speculation.

No these are the numbers apple proposed in the Dutch dating apps case were they wanted to be able to not use App Store payments.

 

And by the way apples terms are negotiable if you are large enough (just like Epics). There are companies in the App Store that pay 15% (regardless of size) others that might well have other terms. 

The just like `Epic with the Unreal Engine` is not about the $ value but the fact that it is  REV share for using the SDK.  Epic and unreal are by no means the only SDK that charges a rev share, this is the most common licensing pattern out there for SDKs, the other alternative is a per install license model but that ends up pricing out small vendors who cant afford to pay $$$ per user (in the mining industry there are some SDKs for reading/wriring file formats that can cost well over $100 per user per year to include in your app!). Almost all devs perfume rev share as it provides much more freedom than seat licensing.  

[HenrySalayne]

4 hours ago, hishnash said:

No these are the numbers apple proposed in the Dutch dating apps case were they wanted to be able to not use App Store payments.

No. That was 27% or 12% respectively commission and it was not all revenue but all in-app purchases...

 

 

4 hours ago, hishnash said:

And by the way apples terms are negotiable if you are large enough (just like Epics). There are companies in the App Store that pay 15% (regardless of size) others that might well have other terms. 

Funny how you ignored the word "freely". Apple making exceptions from the rules, if the potential damage is larger than the loss of income, is not "negotiating".

 

4 hours ago, hishnash said:

The just like `Epic with the Unreal Engine` is not about the $ value but the fact that it is  REV share for using the SDK.  Epic and unreal are by no means the only SDK that charges a rev share, this is the most common licensing pattern out there for SDKs, the other alternative is a per install license model but that ends up pricing out small vendors who cant afford to pay $$$ per user (in the mining industry there are some SDKs for reading/wriring file formats that can cost well over $100 per user per year to include in your app!). Almost all devs perfume rev share as it provides much more freedom than seat licensing.  

Can you show me again which platform with millions of users Epic controls? The platform you can only access via the tools Epic provides and there is no alternative way to reach these users?

Your excuses for Apple's gatekeeping are egregious and disgusting. It's absolutely NOT comparable.

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

Your excuses for Apple's gatekeeping are egregious and disgusting. It's absolutely NOT comparable.

You misunderstand i'm comparing to Epic as they charge an SDK rev share license fee, as a data point of the fact that it is infact common in our industry to charge a rev share on SDKs.  This is nothing at all to od with gatekeeping, it's about how you license the SDK.   

None of the current EU laws (proposed or starting soon) will limit Apples ability to license the SDK and put restrictions, these laws are all about apples ability to limit the access to customers and non of them say anything about apple having to provide the SDK or dev tooling of free to developers. 

Does not matter how many users have iOS devices, unless you want to build your app based on the minimal open source apis (the kernel is open source) you will need to pay for the SDK, and trust me building your own text rendering engine is not fun and for most developers it is worth paying for someone to do this for you.

 

An alternative is to build your app based on the web standards (that again are open so you do not need apples SDK). 

 

[HenrySalayne]

9 hours ago, hishnash said:

You misunderstand i'm comparing to Epic as they charge an SDK rev share license fee, as a data point of the fact that it is infact common in our industry to charge a rev share on SDKs.  This is nothing at all to od with gatekeeping, it's about how you license the SDK.   

Which is speculation about something we currently know nothing about. If Apple only allows access to iOS with malicious compliance, the EU will react.

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

If Apple only allows access to iOS with malicious compliance, the EU will react.

No they will not, they had a clause during debate of the law that would require free SDK and dev tools and they removed it, they are well aware this is going to happen.   As long as apple does not charge overly more than using the App Store then there is nothing they will do about it, the entier goal of the law was about the freedom to sell to your customers not about the freedom to not pay for the software, its about apple refusing to let you have a given app on the App Store or have a customer relationship with your users.  It's not about having to pay for your tools. 

 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

On 9/3/2023 at 11:03 PM, HenrySalayne said:

whopping 5% of revenue made outside their store (with the piece of software using the UE).

hell, this doesnt even start until your game has made a million dollars, so for lots of smaller indie games, its effectively free to use.

[Lightwreather]

So, biggest updates:

Brighter (2k nits for series 9, 3k for the ultra 2), carbon neutral watch; 

Apple FineWoven instead of Leather;

iPhone 15 = iPhone 14 Pro BUT WITH USB-C (iirc USB3, but I have to re-check; apparently, not. USB3 is for the pro models only)), also replaceable glass;

iPhone 15 Pro with USB-C, A17 Bionic, some other stuff; all iPhones same price

some other stuff, I'll get around to making a proper update later

[Dracarris]

Just now, Lightwreather JfromN said:

iPhone 15 = iPhone 14 Pro BUT WITH USB-C (iirc USB3, but I have to re-check)

unfortunately that seems to be a no, and it sucks

1 minute ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

iPhone 15 Pro with USB-C, A16 Bionic,

That‘s A17 Pro IIRC

 

Nearby, I know the ages of earth shattering news at Apple events are long gone, but nobody up until now commented here??

[saintlouisbagels]

Regular iPhone 15 only having 2.0 USB-C speeds means I'll be keeping my 14 Pro for another year (or two?) lol.

I'm a yearly upgrader- currently using  a 14 Pro- and the only worthwhile upgrade would've been USB3/4/TB4 since I like to keep music stored locally on my phone. Oh well. I also HATE the massive camera bump on the Pro-line so I would've liked to downgrade to the regular series.

[BondiBlue]

20 minutes ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

iPhone 15 = iPhone 14 Pro BUT WITH USB-C (iirc USB3, but I have to re-check)

The regular iPhone 15 has USB-C, but it's only USB 2.0, which is honestly just plain disappointing for a phone that starts at $800. Only the Pro models (which start at $1000) have support for USB 3. Here's a screenshot from the Apple page for the regular iPhone 15: 

 

 

For comparison, Samsung has been using the USB-C connector on phones going all the way back to the Galaxy Note 7 from 7 years ago, and the regular Galaxy S series since the S8 in 2017. Both of those phones had USB 3 connectivity, but for some reason Apple feels the need to keep USB 3 exclusive to their Pro phones. I don't get it. 

[Paul Thexton]

17 minutes ago, saintlouisbagels said:

and the only worthwhile upgrade would've been USB3/4/TB4 since I like to keep music stored locally on my phone

I mean... That's literally what the iPhone Pro is getting isn't it? Pretty sure they said they've put USB3 on the A17 Bionic, it's the regular (non-pro) iPhone that's sticking with USB2?

 

Bit of a nothing update for me, the hardware RT in the A17 Bionic looks kinda cool, USB3 transfer speeds are a few years late in coming.... and I prefer small phones anyway (currently on an iPhone 12 mini), so buying a bigger phone would mean a major, major compromise for me as I dislike larger phones intensely.

 

For me my current plan is get the battery in my 12 replaced whenever it's degraded to the point of being annoying, and then keep an eye on what smaller phones do get released over the following few years.

[HenrySalayne]

19 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

The regular iPhone 15 has USB-C, but it's only USB 2.0, which is honestly just plain disappointing for a phone that starts at $800. Only the Pro models (which start at $1000) have support for USB 3. Here's a screenshot from the Apple page for the regular iPhone 15: 

 

 

For comparison, Samsung has been using the USB-C connector on phones going all the way back to the Galaxy Note 7 from 7 years ago, and the regular Galaxy S series since the S8 in 2017. Both of those phones had USB 3 connectivity, but for some reason Apple feels the need to keep USB 3 exclusive to their Pro phones. I don't get it. 

Note 3 from 2013 didn't have USB C, but USB 3.

[Dracarris]

Two things besides USB speed the withholding of which from the regular models really trigger me:

• action button. what the actual fuck, Apple. What's Pro about that? 90% of users keep their bloody phone in silent all the freakin time, and using the switch for rotation lock apparently seems to be no problem on ipads. Nothing Pro, just super handy.
• "Pro Motion", just catch up already, ffs, it's not that revolutionary anymore

[BondiBlue]

14 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Note 3 from 2013 didn't have USB C, but USB 3.

Yep, and it was compatible with both regular Micro USB cables and the 3.0 variety. Same with the Galaxy S5.

[WolframaticAlpha]

55 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

action button

Legitimately one of the best things apple has done. 

54 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Two things besides USB speed the withholding of which from the regular models really trigger me:

• action button. what the actual fuck, Apple. What's Pro about that? 90% of users keep their bloody phone in silent all the freakin time, and using the switch for rotation lock apparently seems to be no problem on ipads. Nothing Pro, just super handy.
• "Pro Motion", just catch up already, ffs, it's not that revolutionary anymore

I dislike the fact that apple decided to relegate the base model to essentially previous years phone, but revamped. Instead of actually offering pro features(I understand telephoto or thunderbolt), they really decided to just make the base a shittier version of the pro. The base ipad, the base iPhone and the base MacBook pro are all relegated to being upsells for their higher end tiers it seems.

 

1 hour ago, Dracarris said:

but nobody up until now commented here??

A very meh event in my opinion, as expected. The new pro looks cool, but everything else was extremely meh. I was excited for a bit to play one of my favourite games(re4) on mobile. The USB c is nice, I guess.

[LAwLz]

Here are my thoughts in case anyone cares:

 

Apple Watch:

• New processor that enables on-device Siri processing. Pretty neat but nothing too groundbreaking in my opinion.
• New brighter display that goes from 1 nits to 2000 nits. Very nice and impressive, but I am not sure how useful it will actually be. Is the current Apple watch hard to view in daylight?
• Double tap feature similar to the VR headset. I am skeptical if people will actually use this. I suspect that this will be one of those things that are impressive that they got working, but ultimately will be forgotten, kind of like the 3D touch or whatever it was called on the iPhone. The pressure-sensitive display they used to have.
• Ultra wideband support.

 

Did they even do anything except swap out the processor in the new Watch Ultra 2?

 

 

Environmentalism stuff:

• Good message and seemingly good efforts, but the video was cringe.

 

non-Pro iPhone stuff:

• It now has dynamic island. That's neat.
• The display is brighter, that's neat.
• Did they give the iPhone 15 the main camera from the iPhone 14 Pro? That's neat I guess. 
• The SoC is the A16, which is the same as the iPhone 14 Pro.
• Now has a USB-C connector!! But it's only USB 2.0 speeds...
• The new "voice isolation" phone calling mode seems nice. 
• Upgraded ultra wideband chip. Longer range.

 

Overall it seems like the iPhone 15 is kind of like an iPhone 14 Pro, except still missing a few things like a third camera and high refresh rate screen.

 

 

Pro iPhone stuff:

• New titanium body. I wonder how big of a difference that actually makes. I guess we'll see.
• A smaller bezel is nice but kind of meh.
• Making the iPhone easier to repair sounds good, but I wonder how useful it will actually be.
• Replacing the silence switch with an action button sounds like a good design decision. I don't see the point of a silence switch so having it do things like open apps sounds a lot more useful. 
• The new SoC, the A17 Pro sounds really nice. Fairly minor performance bump in some areas (like the CPU which is 10% faser) and big improvements in some areas such as the NPU which is twice as fast, and GPU which is 20% faster. The GPU also supports hardware accelerated ray tracing now.
• AV1 decoder support! I would have liked to see AV1 encoding too but baby steps. We are finally at the point where all major CPU/GPU/SoC vendors support AV1 decoding.
• New, bigger main sensor in the camera is nice. 
• USB-3 with USB 3.0 support (10 Gbps) is very nice. It's about damn time that Apple adopted USB-C on the iPhone.
• They kept talking about it being like having 7 camera lenses, and that the main camera can switch between 24mm, 28mm and 35mm focal length. Is this an actual zoom lens, or is this them cropping the sensor to get "zoom"? If it's the former then that's amazing. If it's the latter, then I think they are being quite deceptive in their terminology.
• It feels weird that they are using different telephoto cameras for the Pro and Pro Max. 3x vs 5x telephoto, and the Pro Max also gets a bigger sensor.
• Wi-Fi 6E support is nice.

 

 

Summary: A lot of "that's nice" or "that's neat", but not much "wow". Seems like a pretty minor iterative upgrade. 

[Paul Thexton]

5 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Is this an actual zoom lens, or is this them cropping the sensor to get "zoom"?

What I heard during the presentation was they do a crop essentially, I don’t recall hearing them say 7 lenses, presumably I stopped paying attention at that point or something.

 

 I definitely didn’t come away with the impression that the zoom was anything other than a crop, but I do think using the term optical (I can’t remember if they actually said “optical zoom”) to describe it is stretching the truth to breaking point. 
 

I often wonder if Apple’s employee healthcare plan covers concussions from engineers facepalming so much when seeing how the matketroids present the results of what they’ve worked on.

[Dracarris]

16 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

but the video was cringe.

oh yes. so much damn cringe. and so brute-forced "diverse" an "inclusive".

[Retro_R]

On 8/30/2023 at 2:25 AM, Dracarris said:

If it‘s true that „ProMotion“ will remain exclusive to the Pro models, it‘ll be a hard disappoint. It‘s about damn time every iphone gets this.

well at that point, there's not that much distinguishing the 15 pro from the 15. I mean, besides screen the only thing major between the two is the extra camera and the faster data transfer (altho imo that doesn't rlly matter for most ppl). At that point it's the same phone but cheaper and apple isn't that stupid. Although i would like to see a 75hz screen on that model just to give it a bit of a leg up.

 

Although, either way, i'm still gonna buy a 15 (or pro idk yet). The 60hz isn't rlly a deal breaker since i haven't had a phone that goes above 60hz so its not like a downgrade. It's pretty much the same as the pro, but just one less camera, which doesn't bother me. Plus it's cheaper. It should do everything i need it to, and maybe some more. Also, the colors for the 15 are rlly cute. I love the pastel.

[Dracarris]

3 minutes ago, Retro_R said:

I mean, besides screen the only thing major between the two is the extra camera and the faster data transfer

plus the titanium frame and the bloody action button. There should be no Pro model,, except for maybe the fancy telelense and the titanium frame, all of those features belong in the regular model.

[Retro_R]

1 minute ago, Dracarris said:

plus the titanium frame and the bloody action button. There should be no Pro model,, except for maybe the fancy telelense and the titanium frame, all of those features belong in the regular model.

Yeah, but i doubt the titanum frame is like a deal breaker for most ppl if yk what i mean. But I think the pro has a place, even besides tried to segment the market to get as much money from their die-hard fans, theres probably some people that would much rather go w the pro than the 15 for some other reason. I mean maybe not a ton but it's not like it shouldn't exist. I feel like most of the features also translating to the 15 is a good thing, basically the 14 pro for a $200 less starting price.

[Paul Thexton]

With the A17 going to 3nm, I'm most interested to hear real world reports on battery life vs. the non-pro... Always pretty hard to objectively measure though as it's going to depend on all sorts of factors.

[SlashedM]

New AirPods with USB-C seem to be a half upgrade, IP54 resistance on both the case and buds, and ??? lossless audio for vision pro, only on the USB-C variant

[Retro_R]

Ok, i have some thoughts about the "new" airpod pros they kinda announced today. I say quote on quote new, because they're not really new. They're the same 2nd gen pros, but now with USB-C charging. Soo, what about the people who already have the 2nd gen pros with lightening? Are we just fucked and have to carry a lighting cable just for my airpods? "Oh but just buy another pair" i'm not paying $250 for the same product with a different port, and i think most people won't either. Will there be some type of replacement program for old ones? There was no talk of it and this is apple we're talking about, i dont think they're gonna do that.

 

But another thing. I was looking around through the airpods pro page, like a sane human would and i noticed something.

So these "new" airpods pro are lossless? But only with vision pro (as far as i can tell)? This makes no sense. Especially since the "last" 2nd gens were expected to be lossless, but they weren't. Now this "new" pair of the same pros are now lossless? But only with one product? I don't know if this is supposed to be like some thing where apple tries to make it's most loyal fanboys waste their money to like get the apple experience or whatever, but i feel even then it makes no sense. Like it can't do lossless on the mac either? Those both have the same processor, or i guess it's because of the other chip in it? But like then why can't the previous model do that too? they should both have the same chip. Maybe it does work on that model, but what i can see, it isn't. Like??