Another year, another iPhone. I was thinking about how long I’ve been in New Hampshire and it turns out I moved to NH when the iPhone 4 came out. Pretty crazy to believe that it’s been that long. I remember buying a 4 for Laura before I left. Back then, the phones were around $500. Cheap :P
I still think the camera sucks. Seriously, it’s bad. Better than previous iPhones? Of course but until these sensors grow in size, there is nothing that can be done about this. My other camera is a full frame SLR and even though the volume of an iPhone is about 15x less than my Canon setup, I still shoot almost all of my pictures with the 5D. Next year, I’ll move to the 5D Mark V or Sony A4.
The reason I upgraded other than just buying a new iPhone every year no matter what is the camera lenses as it relates to video but then I found out that my plans were sort of invalid. The new ultra-wide lens doesn’t have Focus Pixels so you can’t really do a lot there with manual focus. Then If found that if you want to take advantage of multi-cam video (switching between lenses) you have to decrease your FPS from 60 down to 30 if you shoot 4K and you can’t switch to the front camera. So….next year? I feel like every time Apple adds a new technology, it comes with caveats. FaceID is great but I can’t use it with my helmet is a big one that I still haven’t gotten over. I didn’t need the battery life enhancements because iPhone is always at 95%+ every day of the year. I take it off my dock at home, put it in my car dock, put it in my desk dock, then go home and repeat.
It’s a good looking iPhone and since iPhone resale continues to hold up so well, I was able to get $850 for my iPhone XS that was purchased for $1150 a year ago and I rolled that into a $1350 purchase of the iPhone 11 Pro with 512GB of memory. I was constantly getting out of storage errors on my 256GB model despite auto offloading apps and optimizing storage space for both music and photos. I blame Apple because given how little I actually use the iPhone, it’s a bit mind blowing how much storage I was using. On the 512GB model, I’m using 237GB of storage and have only owned the device for 1.5 weeks. I honestly don’t know why but I am and it’s nice to have that 512GB ceiling.
It’s a good phone. It’s fast even though it’s STILL processing my photos library 10 days later. I thought this A13 was fast. I have it always locked and plugged in and it still has 35K photos to process before it can show me moments or people or suggest things. I keep thinking every iPhone / iPad will process photos faster but nope. iOS 13’s software situation is improving with every update. Overall, I’m as happy as I can be with a pocket computer with pocket software and pocket cameras and pocket features. It’ll never be a real computer for me and that’s okay. I spend about 10 hours a day on a 27” 4K (MacBook Pro + display) or 27” 5K (iMac) screen and roughly 2 hours a day of iOS Screen time which is primarily the iPad Pro during meetings or reading books. The iPhone gets about 25 minutes of my attention per day. I pick my iPhone up 68 times per day and immediately open mail (35 times) or camera (22 times) and finally Safari (13 times). 83 notifications per day but I have almost all except messages muted.
Am I Pro? I am but not an iPhone Pro and won’t ever be.
Here are some photos:
