If you had expected an incremental upgrade to the iPhone Pro series this year, you’ve been proven right. Partly. If you firmly believed it’ll define this cycle more, you’d be right too. Apple’s approach to the iPhones this year, particularly with how the Pro phones have been defined, hasn’t been binary. The familiar is interspersed with significant new additions.
Doing it later but doing it better – that’s just the iPhone way of life, whatever the Android congregation may have to say about it. You must appreciate the contrasting approaches, from the competing ecosystems. Android phone makers take more risks (some pay off and some don’t). Apple’s is a more measured approach, wherein the updates must balance the experience. More often than not, that’s the case.
Dynamic Island adoption: A year ahead
It is not always about the spec sheet. Which means we must first talk about the a second interactive interface, within the larger display (which is a newer tech too). The Dynamic Island take on display cutouts and the notch, for instance, is something no Android phone maker thought of till now. But we expect this to be replicated widely, in the coming months.
Essentially, this replaces the large notch (unusable and uninstructive – just an intrusive black space), spilling down from the top bezel. There’s visible display all around this new cutout (including at the top), and depending on app or interaction, the visible interactive area also changes width horizontally. Unlike the notch, which you were supposed to learn to ignore, the Dynamic Island is something you’re supposed to notice. How soon you get used to it is subjective.
The way Apple envisions it, and has developed its own apps in iOS 16, is to be able to use this space for active widgets. It’ll be the quick access to background tasks and notifications for instance, without having to switch apps every time. One example is quick access and control to music playback (at present, Apple Music app would be your best bet) by simply.
Beyond that, it’s a better illustrator for Face ID, charging status, ring modes and call indicator, for instance.
As is often the case with first generation implementations, it feels first generation. A simple tap on it returns you to the background app which overlays the Dynamic Island. You have to press and hold to open the quick interaction widget. That feels one step too many. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?
Now, it is over to the app developers, who will play a crucial role in ensuring Dynamic Island as a space, and is used to make things convenient for users. Apple is making the ActivityKit framework available to developers. Some are already at work.
Kriss Smolka’s Pong-style game, called Hit the Island, has a simple idea – you must bounce the ball with your paddle to hit the Dynamic Island (earn points, and life becomes self-explanatory at that point). Christian Selig, the man behind Apollo app for Reddit, feels the space above the Dynamic Island can be a great place for a virtual pet to hang out – a cat, dog, hedgehog, fox, or axolotl are your pet choices. ‘Chortley the Hedgehog’ has a nice ring to it.
At this point, we are yet to draw any conclusions on whether interacting with the expanded widgets will leave fingerprints and smudges that may get in the way of Face ID and selfies.
Performance boost alongside a longer lasting battery
Once we get past the initial excitement of usage (that’s when the battery stats stabilize), the A16 Bionic chip’s even faster performance alongside battery optimisations cannot be ignored. The iPhone in Pro Max avatar (particularly last year) has always delivered battery life bereft of anxiety. It is more of the same even this time.
An iPhone 14 Pro Max fully charged at 8 am, still registers around 37% on the metre after a moderately heavy day at work. Always on display, when turned off for comparison, figures no more than 2% drain for the entire day. This sort of battery stamina is a factor of the A16 Bionic’s power consumption improvements, because by all accounts, the battery capacity is a smidgen lesser this time around.
You probably wouldn’t have expected the A16 Bionic to be anything less than a significant step forward, year on year, over the A15 Bionic. The likes of Qualcomm and MediaTek are still far behind in the race – such is the advantage Apple has (it is almost Michael Schumacher or Mika Hakkinen-esque, those who follow Formula 1 would get the illustrative reference).
That also means the iPhones are yet to make the switch to the Apple Silicon, the M series chips that now power the iPads and MacBooks. Next year, perhaps?
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