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iphone [2024/02/14 17:26] – [No webm support] qlyoungiphone [2024/08/24 22:09] (current) – [iphone] add pixel breakage date qlyoung
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 Bit of a pace change here, I don't particularly care about consumer electronics but mobile computers aka phones are an exception since for better or worse they're inextricably tied up with much of my life. Bit of a pace change here, I don't particularly care about consumer electronics but mobile computers aka phones are an exception since for better or worse they're inextricably tied up with much of my life.
  
-After being a longtime user of Pixel devices (which pairly nicely with Google Fi cell service), the screen on my Pixel 4a broke recently (originally written: 01 July 2022). At the same time I went to Yosemite with some friends and noticed that the pictures they took with their iPhones looked a lot better than the pictures I've taken with any Android phones. I was always skeptical of iPhone's ostensibly restrictive user experience (relative to Android), but being rather bored with technology and not finding any really good Android phones on the market (where are the microsd slots?) decided to pick up an iPhone. Apple has a decent 14 day return policy, so I figured I'd try it out and if the device annoyed me I'd just return it and get whatever the current number pixel is. In short, I've been pleasantly surprised by iPhone and am keeping it. I bought the iPhone 13 Mini with 512gb of storage.+After being a longtime user of Pixel devices (which pairly nicely with Google Fi cell service), the screen on my Pixel 4a broke in June 2022. At the same time I went to Yosemite with some friends and noticed that the pictures they took with their iPhones looked a lot better than the pictures I've taken with any Android phones. I was always skeptical of iPhone's ostensibly restrictive user experience (relative to Android), but being rather bored with technology and not finding any really good Android phones on the market (where are the microsd slots?) decided to pick up an iPhone. Apple has a decent 14 day return policy, so I figured I'd try it out and if the device annoyed me I'd just return it and get whatever the current number pixel is. In short, I've been pleasantly surprised by iPhone and am keeping it. I bought the iPhone 13 Mini with 512gb of storage.
  
 ===== Preconceptions ===== ===== Preconceptions =====
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 One other note on this; I'd heard people say "oh but iOS has the Files app now" in response to concerns of restricted filesystem access. It does indeed have a Files app, and this app is interesting. It's a surprisingly comprehensive file management app. It allows you to access select application filesystems - it seems to be limited to ones that apps choose to expose - and some other parts of the filesystem, although the parts that are exposed are clearly curated by iOS. There's obviously no view of the root filesystem. Functionally it feels like porcelain over a bunch of bind mounts or a virtual filesystem being used to present a clean, access controlled interface to stuff iOS has decided you should see. To be honest, I rather like it. The Files app also has the capability to mount remote shares, another pleasant surprise; I was able to add my home Samba server easily and played around with copying music files from it into the VLC app filesystem using just the Files app, which actually worked. One other note on this; I'd heard people say "oh but iOS has the Files app now" in response to concerns of restricted filesystem access. It does indeed have a Files app, and this app is interesting. It's a surprisingly comprehensive file management app. It allows you to access select application filesystems - it seems to be limited to ones that apps choose to expose - and some other parts of the filesystem, although the parts that are exposed are clearly curated by iOS. There's obviously no view of the root filesystem. Functionally it feels like porcelain over a bunch of bind mounts or a virtual filesystem being used to present a clean, access controlled interface to stuff iOS has decided you should see. To be honest, I rather like it. The Files app also has the capability to mount remote shares, another pleasant surprise; I was able to add my home Samba server easily and played around with copying music files from it into the VLC app filesystem using just the Files app, which actually worked.
  
-=====No webm support ====+==== No webm support ====
  
 I watch a lot of webms. For some reason - I really don't care about the justification - Apple has decided webm is not an ordained format and refuses to implement a system codec for it. I watch a lot of webms. For some reason - I really don't care about the justification - Apple has decided webm is not an ordained format and refuses to implement a system codec for it.
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 ===== Positives ===== ===== Positives =====
  
-So, there are legitimate grips with iPhone. But goodness gracious, the positives.+Things I like.
  
 ==== UX ==== ==== UX ====
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 ==== Pictures ==== ==== Pictures ====
  
 +When I first wrote this section after getting the phone, I wrote:
 +
 +<blockquote>
 It is just a fact that the iPhone takes amazing pictures. Through whatever combination of camera and software, pictures on the iPhone turn out consistently better than any picture I ever took with any Android flagship - and I have owned a lot, from the Nexus 5 through the Pixel 4a. Having a wide angle camera is also awesome, I use that thing all the time. It is just a fact that the iPhone takes amazing pictures. Through whatever combination of camera and software, pictures on the iPhone turn out consistently better than any picture I ever took with any Android flagship - and I have owned a lot, from the Nexus 5 through the Pixel 4a. Having a wide angle camera is also awesome, I use that thing all the time.
 +</blockquote>
 +
 +After two years of using the phone, I now hate the iPhone "look". I think it's because in that time I purchased a mirrorless camera and started doing enthusiast photography, prompting me to be much more conscious of colors, sharpening, contrast, noise and noise reduction, and all the other things you notice when you start grading your own photography. Now when I see photos produced by the stock iOS pipeline, I'm left wondering why they frequently look *so awful*. In some scenes the photos look good, but in many cases iOS will consistently
 +
 +  * oversharpen
 +  * oversaturate
 +  * apply extreme local contrast
 +
 +It is possible to shoot in raw on my iPhone, but doing so doesn't match the type of photography I use my phone for. My phone camera is for quick snaps to capture a moment or preserve a memory when I don't have my real camera, or don't want to use it. Oftentimes I want to share the photos I take soon after shooting. Shooting in raw means I need to demosaic, grade, and export that photo. When I take 30 pictures in a day that is too much effort for each photo. I need the computational pipeline to produce something that looks at least OK. The extreme amount of oversharping and local contrast that the iOS pipeline produces just looks terrible.
 +
 +Here's two versions of the same photo I took of a rock wall in Colorado. I shot this using [[https://halide.cam/|Halide]], which produces both a raw and a HEIC that goes through the usual iOS image pipeline. I applied a neutral grade to the raw, only correcting for exposure, a little bit of chroma and a touch of contrast. Can you tell which one is the iOS photo and which is the raw? Hint: the iOS one looks like nothing that exists on planet Earth.
 +
 +{{:ooc.jpg?600|}} {{:graded.jpg?600|}}
 +
 +I guess the pipeline is optimized for what people want to see, but it looks awful to me.
 +
 +I've also noticed that iOS takes pictures of sunsets that in real life have delicate and beautiful shades of pink and maps all of the pink tones into...orange? It's so egregious I genuinely believe that the pipeline detects sunset photos and applies a specific grade that crushes pinks and produces a very generic looking [[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrangeBlueContrast|orange and blue]] photo.
  
 ==== Security ==== ==== Security ====
  
-I said most of what I wanted to say in the filesystem section, but yeah. The iOS security model is clearly much more mature than that of Android. I attend certain conferences and at those conferences there's always a talk or two about breaking iOS application sandboxing. No one gives talks like that for Android. Draw your own conclusions there.+I said most of what I wanted to say in the filesystem section, but yeah. The iOS security model is clearly much more mature than that of Android. At security conferences there's always a talk or two about breaking iOS application sandboxing. No one gives talks like that for Android. I think that's because breaking iOS is actually impressive. Nobody is surprised that Android is broken.
  
 ==== MagSafe ==== ==== MagSafe ====
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 ==== General build quality ==== ==== General build quality ====
  
-Apple's build quality is legendary, iPhone is no exception. Hardware silent mode switch is GOAT.+Apple's build quality is legendary and it's on full display in the iPhone. Hardware silent mode switch is great. 
 + 
 +==== Standard support ==== 
 + 
 +This one actually surprised me. iOS has deeply integrated support for standard protocols and technologies into the OS, including: 
 + 
 +  * CardDAV. Completely and seamlessly integrated into the OS. Configured my CardDAV server in the OS settings, contacts sync both ways. It just works. Notably it works better than the Google Contacts mess on Android. 
 +  * CalDAV. Again, configured in the OS, and it just works. Calendar events sync both ways. 
 +  * Samba. Yep. Go into the Files app, dots menu, "Connect to server", put in a ''smb:%%//%%'' URL. Login prompt, done. Mounted. 
 +  * FTP, SFTP and I believe WebDAV work same as above. 
 + 
 +Overall the situation here is far better than what I experienced on Android.
  
 ===== Negatives ===== ===== Negatives =====
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 The iPhone media library is weird. Apparently iOS has a concept of music, videos and photos being some kind of special entities above and beyond regular files. This kind of makes sense from a historical perspective; the iPhone was originally launched as a 3-in-1 combo device, as Steve Jobs said, "A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and an internet communications device" or something like that. So the media situation on iPhone is a relic of it being conceptualized as having an iPod inside of it, and you use iTunes to manage iPods. I have fond memories from the early 2000's of copying music to my iPod shuffle's mass storage using Windows XP and then the songs just never playing on the iPod because I didn't rebuild the database file...that's still a thing on iPhone, somehow. Android has this in the bag, the way media is indexed and behaves on Android isn't perfect but it's better than iPhone. Media is files. I should be able to copy the files to disk and then the Music app should see them and play them, full stop. VLC for iOS is an all-in-one alternative solution to the iOS system media apps, but again, it shouldn't be necessary. At the very least if Apple wants to lock users into iTunes it needs to support iTunes on all major operating systems. And Linux is a major operating system. I use Arch btw.  The iPhone media library is weird. Apparently iOS has a concept of music, videos and photos being some kind of special entities above and beyond regular files. This kind of makes sense from a historical perspective; the iPhone was originally launched as a 3-in-1 combo device, as Steve Jobs said, "A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and an internet communications device" or something like that. So the media situation on iPhone is a relic of it being conceptualized as having an iPod inside of it, and you use iTunes to manage iPods. I have fond memories from the early 2000's of copying music to my iPod shuffle's mass storage using Windows XP and then the songs just never playing on the iPod because I didn't rebuild the database file...that's still a thing on iPhone, somehow. Android has this in the bag, the way media is indexed and behaves on Android isn't perfect but it's better than iPhone. Media is files. I should be able to copy the files to disk and then the Music app should see them and play them, full stop. VLC for iOS is an all-in-one alternative solution to the iOS system media apps, but again, it shouldn't be necessary. At the very least if Apple wants to lock users into iTunes it needs to support iTunes on all major operating systems. And Linux is a major operating system. I use Arch btw. 
  
-=====Sharing videos ====+==== Sharing videos ===== 
 + 
 +=== Compression ====
  
 This one is bizarre. iOS heavily prioritizes the ability to share media. All of their commercials show users sharing pictures and videos. But what they don't advertise is that it is extremely difficult to share files without incurring mandatory compression. This one is bizarre. iOS heavily prioritizes the ability to share media. All of their commercials show users sharing pictures and videos. But what they don't advertise is that it is extremely difficult to share files without incurring mandatory compression.
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 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3159061/avoid-video-compression-when-selecting-movie-with-uiimagepickercontroller/5893066#5893066 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3159061/avoid-video-compression-when-selecting-movie-with-uiimagepickercontroller/5893066#5893066
  
-===== iCloud integration =====+=== iMessage video length limitations ==== 
 + 
 +iMessage is Apple's proprietary messaging protocol. Messages between iOS users are automatically upgraded to use iMessage, which adds capabilities over regular SMS like reactions, ability to share large files, and so on. 
 + 
 +However one thing that you cannot do is send long videos. I tried to send a 9 minute video to a friend via iMessage and received this message: 
 + 
 +{{:2024-05-31_12-36.png?400|}} 
 + 
 +Video is too long. Note well that this does not say "Video is too big". I could understand a file size limit. But this video is 18.4mb, very small by today's standards. To check that this is an actual limit on length, I zipped the video with a resulting file size of 17.9mb and then tried sending the zip. That worked flawlessly. 
 + 
 +As is usually the case with looking up information on iOS online, nearly all of the explanations I found for this behavior (except [[https://allthings.how/how-long-can-a-video-be-to-send-on-imessage/|this one]] incorrectly cite maximum file size limitations as the reason "Video is too long" appears. We have just shown that it is, in fact, a length limitation and not a size limitation. There is zero technical reason I can think of that there should be a length limit on videos. 
 + 
 +==== Working with large files ==== 
 + 
 +Sharing just a few files of relatively limited size works usually works flawlessly on iOS. But what if you want to share 7gb of photos? Should work exactly the same, right? 
 + 
 +If you try to share a large quantity of data, regardless of whether it is from the Photos app, or Files, iOS is liable to do one of the following: 
 + 
 +1. Nothing 
 +2. Freeze 
 + 
 +Try it for yourself. Go into your Photos app and, as a test case, select every photo in your Recents album, and then hit the share button and see what happens. Odds are that nothing will happen. The usual share dialog will simply not appear, or it might show up after a few minutes. This is very bad UX. If you are going to fail, do it immediately. 
 + 
 +If you try this same exercise in the Files app, you may even see it freeze. Not only does the share dialog not appear, the app actually goes unresponsive. This is a native system app built and distributed by Apple, running on Apple's operating system, on Apple's hardware. This is exactly what Apple claims they prevent by imposing all these limitations on iOS, yet their own system applications fail miserably as soon as you put a heavy lift on them. 
 + 
 +This is a recurring theme. Apple has very clearly designed iOS to be optimized for handling small files, small amounts of data, with a focus on the speed of sharing rather than the quality of the shared data. Android is a very strong winner here. 
 + 
 +==== iCloud integration ====
  
 Fuck off, I don't want your cloud service and it shouldn't be integrated into my $,$$$ computer. Fuck off, I don't want your cloud service and it shouldn't be integrated into my $,$$$ computer.
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 ==== Blue bubble ==== ==== Blue bubble ====
  
-Ok, this is more of an anthropology piece than anything, but it's kind of interesting to write about anyway. Many people are very preoccupied with status symbols. Apple has created a genius status symbol in iMessage. If two iPhone users text each other, Apple automatically upgrades the conversation to use iMessage, their encrypted messaging solution. In this case the text bubbles are blue. But if an iPhone user texts a non-iPhone user, iMessage is unavailable and the connection falls back to SMS. In this case, the iPhone user sees the messages as green.+Ok, this is more of an anthropology piece than anything, but it's kind of interesting to write about anyway. Apple has created a genius status symbol in iMessage. If two iPhone users text each other, Apple automatically upgrades the conversation to use iMessage, their encrypted messaging solution. In this case the text bubbles are blue. But if an iPhone user texts a non-iPhone user, iMessage is unavailable and the connection falls back to SMS. In this case, the iPhone user sees the messages as green.
  
-Because iPhones are seen as the premium choice of phone among Millenials and later generations, being a "green bubble" is tantamount to failing a status symbol check. Youth refer to non-iPhone using youth as "green bubbles". It's like showing up to home room wearing gap instead of bape. Dumb as it is, some people retain social aspects of their adolescence into adult life, so having an iPhone can be social grease when texting such people. I don't condone it but pretending it isn't real is just being naïve.+Because iPhones are seen as the premium choice of phone among millenials and later generations, being a "green bubble" is tantamount to failing a status symbol check. Youth refer to non-iPhone using youth as "green bubbles". It's like showing up to home room wearing gap instead of bape. Since many people retain this particular kind of lizard brain into adult life, having an iPhone can be social grease when texting such people. I don't condone it but pretending it isn't real is just being naïve.
  
 ===== Conclusions ===== ===== Conclusions =====
  
-I'm keeping iPhone. Overall it is MUCH more enjoyable to use than flagship Android devices, and while I have gripes with it, I've solved all of them one way or another (except for ad-free YouTube). Security is clearly much better. It's a pleasure to use because of the buttery smooth UX. Filesystem access is surprisingly good while also maintaining strong application sandboxing. The camera is by far the best mobile camera I have ever used.+I'm keeping iPhone. Overall it is MUCH more enjoyable to use than flagship Android devices, and while I have gripes with it, I've solved all of them one way or another (except for ad-free YouTube (edit: solved with [[https://invidious.io/|Invidious]] + [[https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629|Yattee]]). Security is clearly much better. It's a pleasure to use because of the buttery smooth UX. Filesystem access is surprisingly good while also maintaining strong application sandboxing.
  
 Lack of sideloading sucks and the phone is overpriced. I wish there was a company that made a good phone. Lack of sideloading sucks and the phone is overpriced. I wish there was a company that made a good phone.
  
 {{tag>from_blog technology products}} {{tag>from_blog technology products}}
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iphone.1707931601.txt.gz · Last modified: 2024/02/14 17:26 by qlyoung
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