[riebalas]

Except it’s 24-100 mm. They’re scamming with the 8x “optical quality” claims. Every year the scams (aka marketing) get deeper, Apple wasn’t as bad in the past.

The “Air” one is probably a test if they could stop those camera scams and simplify the phone maybe focusing on some other things. It barely even matters, one lens is enough, if you need more you’ll want a proper camera anyway.

This year I’d say the phone itself looks like some joke. From orange colors — probably some “diversity” team though it would be funny, because they don’t like the president — to overall cheap looking design, which looks like some unfinished AI generated, 3D printed prototype. You can tell Ive is gone and nobody replaced him.

At least they still have some engineers who scored big with the M chips back in 2020, but barely anyone cares about the chips anymore, they’re all good enough today and competition somewhat caught up.

[snowwrestler]

> orange colors — probably some “diversity” team though it would be funny, because they don’t like the president

For sure, anything orange is obviously a reference to the U.S. president. I’m hearing that liberals are planning a mass protest of carving scary faces into pumpkins in about 6 weeks.

[riebalas]

Not that big of a stretch. Apple numerous of times was involved politically, like disabling parts of Apple Music and encouraging to protest because a drug addict was killed. Also the pride wallpapers, what is that all about? What if I want MAGA wallpapers? Wouldn’t people mind some of those on their iPhones?

[seec]

I agree very much.

People arguing about photo quality on phones (and particularly iPhones who always have smaller sensors to begin with) is just proper nonsense. No matter what garbage AI processing they come up for the picture, they still take pretty bad photos that only look good when they are viewed on device with their small size and embellishing displays.

But there are always a bunch of idiots who want to show off instead of shutting up and actually taking worthwhile photos with proper hardware.

To me they are like the housewives who can't stop arguing about their trashy cooking robot that are supposed to do everything but can't do a single thing right. If they could just shut up and just learn the skills, their cooking would be infinitely better.

[freetime2]

> Except it’s 24-100 mm.

I guess the proper claim would be to say that it has three prime lenses at 13mm, 24mm, and 100mm equivalents. The larger sensors in the 13mm and 100mm cameras, along with improvements in processing, should make for a significant upgrade over my current iPhone.

I agree that Apple's "optical quality" claims are BS. I was actually so confused initially by the claim that I had to do some research to figure out if they are doing anything special to claim "optical quality" zoom on a fixed lens. There is some computational photography going on that may muddy the waters a bit, but I'd definitely still call it a digital zoom.

That being said, the 48MP sensors do provide some latitude for cropping that wasn't available in the older 12 MP sensors. A very charitable reading would be that this "8 pro lenses in one" claim, all of which match the "optical quality" of the previous generation of sensors is the simplest way that Apple's marketing team could describe the increased versality to regular users without resorting to jargon that only photographers would understand. But still... it feels like false advertising to me.

Regarding the design - I actually view the orange color as being a nod to the Apple Watch Ultra and its orange accents. My impression is that they are going with a more rugged, masculine look with the iPhone 17 Pro. The "PRO" lettering almost feels like something you'd see in an ad for a pickup truck. This is in contrast to the more elegant, feminine look for the iPhone Air. I think this differentiation could actually be a successful strategy for Apple, and I also think that one reason that most of the tech reviewers and commenters on HN don't see the point of the Air is because that demographic tends to be largely male.