IMO it's underwhelming considering folding phones have been out for many years now and we still don't have a folding iPhone. What are the PMs doing at Apple.
I think folding phones will remain a small niche unless someone figures out how to make a foldable screen that doesn't get permanently scratched by your fingernails.
Pebble had like a week long battery life. Apple’s pitch wasn’t better battery life, it was just “that thing for nerds? This is the same, but for everyone else.” I.e. it came with seamless integration with your phone, rings to close, a more expensive look, and more polished fitness tracking.
The breakthru that made touchscreen phones works wasn’t an app ecosystem. That came after people were already crazy about iPhones. It was capacitive touch screens. Basically everything before was resistive touch, which is why they usually had styluses. Getting touch, and really multi-touch, working well was the game changer that redefined cell phones.
IMO there's a gap between "charge every day" and "charge once a week" that needs to be crossed.
In other words, if they made the battery last twice as long it'd still be equally as annoying (since your daily routine would be nearly the same, except now you also need to remember if it's a charge day or non-charge day).
To be fair maybe 3/4 days buys you some convenience. But anyways charging once a day is a reasonable place to get to, to get something better would require at minimum a 3x improvement which probably means a ground-up rework instead of continuous refinement.
A battery band might get you there but I suspect it'd be too clunky. At best Apple may redesign their watch to support a battery band and allow 3rd parties to make them for folks that need weeks of battery life.
For me, it comes down to two things. First, I do not want to have to charge every night since I use my watch as a silent vibrating alarm, and I track my sleep. It seems like Apple has basically overcome this hurdle, now that you can charge while you shower and basically get by.
The other issue is that I don't want to have to bring Yet Another Dongle™ every time I go away for a weekend or short business trip. Most of my trips are ≤ 4 days, so if AWs could reliably go that long (including battery degradation over time) then I'd consider getting one.
Right now, only the AWU even approaches this, and only in low-power mode. If it weren't a thousand dollars, I'd consider it. But between the low-power requirement and the pricing, it's just no contest in my book. I'm getting a new Pebble, which offers a month of battery life at 1/3 of the cost.
I watched the announcement yesterday and was very surprised to hear the watch battery life is still so shocking.
Especially considering how useful sleep data is, then I was surprised to see they're only getting sleep scores now.
My dirt cheap Huawei watches have had this for years. It's accurate enough (my own perception based on use). And I get a weeks battery life too (although I don't have the distracting fancy notifications perhaps). It does check blood oxygen levels, heart rate, stress etc.
I truly thought this was a solved problem (looking at headphones battery life, although I might need to check my assumptions here also apply to Airpods).
And that's the fancy screen, gimmick edition garmin watch - the normal MIP display garmin watches (even an old, midrange Forerunner 255) will easily get a couple of weeks of battery life, more for the higher end ones.
OLED is just the wrong screen tech for these devices, never made any sense to me given how little I care about graphics and how little time I spend reading the display.
Yes. My Pebble Steel got over a week of battery in 2015, had physical, tactile buttons that worked even wearing thick winter gloves, and had an always-on-no-matter-what screen that was clearly readable in full sunlight.
Every smartwatch that hasn't met that bar, which is almost all of them ever made, is a joke to me. I'd have ordered a RePebble had I not moved back to analogue dumbwatches instead just before they were announced (and were iOS not actively hostile to competing watch implementations).
And motorcycles get way better gas mileage than cars. But it’s still odd to frame a (totally understandable!) preference for one product category in those terms.
If you are okay with less smart smart watches, and okay with no hackability, Garmin should have a few with black and white display and >1 week battery life (even indefinite with sufficient solar).
depends which camp of apple watch (or smart watch in general) users you are asking.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as an accessory to their smartphone that does fitness tracking and maybe a few other useful things to avoid pulling their phone out constantly - those people want MUCH longer battery life.
the camp that sees the smartwatch as a REPLACEMENT to their smartphone, they are perfectly fine with the current battery life.
I am closer to the first camp than the second, and I don’t understand why I would need longer battery life. The watch charges very quickly, and there is never a day when I don’t have the chance to charge at some point. I usually do it during my morning shower.
1. People use these GPS watches for Ironman triathlons, ultra running & cycling events etc. They can't and won't charge before the battery is done - and remember the battery with a daily charge will degrade significantly. If it's borderline on release, it'll be inadequate after a year.
2. Just for general convenience, having to take another special cable for every late night or overnight trip is maddening. I always have a phone anyway for any actual interactions.
I find it hard to believe many people are writing texts on their watches, it's just a nice to have gimmick feature that everyone I know has stopped using.
> and remember the battery with a daily charge will degrade significantly. If it's borderline on release, it'll be inadequate after a year.
That has not been my experience though - having used both an Apple Watch and a Pixel Watch for years on end every single day. Absolutely outside my area of expertise, but I would imagine that you can design batteries to have a much longer lifetime (no of recharge cycles) when their capacity is smaller.
That’s not how Lion charging works - degradation and lifetime (to a first approximation) depend on full charges. If you charge daily from 80% to 100% or charge every 5 days from 1% to 100%, your battery degradation and lifetime will be the same.
The new one isn't actually longer. It's just that they changed how they measure it. It assumes 16 awake hours and 8 asleep hours, so the watch lasts 24 hours, but only when you are sleeping and thus not using it for 8 hours.
Why? You can get 8 hours of sleep tracking for a 5 minute charge. You really can't charge your watch for 5 minutes before bed? How about during your bathroom routine?
You are brushing your teeth for like half that alone.
I think a lot of people reach into their pocket and get their phone out if they need "interactivity, ability to respond to notifs, cellular, etc"
But if you want to leave your smartphone at home, but you still want cellular and notifications, I agree the apple watch is the only game in town even if the battery life sucks.
Most of this is because of the always-on screen. If you can live without it and switch back to the motion or button to wake mode, you get 30-50% more usage before the battery runs out, which is not a huge improvement but is a legitimate option.
A side effect is that this makes your watch look less new, and therefore less of a theft target.
And bicycles go much further without needing petrol than cars.
I agree that Apple Watches don't last long enough between charges, but comparing them to a completely different class of device that's technically the same broad category is pointless.
Is this a thing? I've been using a Pixel 9 Pro Fold for one full year now and my inner screen looks pretty flawless. I don't see a single scratch, and I've never used any kind of protector on the inside. This kind of sounds like a "sour grapes" excuse where a really good thing is presumed to suck only because you can't have it. Personally, as someone who isn't really interested in a full tablet, the foldable is really really nice.
I have an OG Pixel Fold and the inner screen is flawless. My iPhone 14 Pro screen is visibly scratched. The Fold replaced tablets and e readers for me.
I don't know what to tell you - I don't want to brag about my eyesight, but it's pretty good - No matter what angle, no matter what phone, the crease is visible. What would I have to gain lying about this? I could say the same thing - Stop trying to copium your purchase?
For those that are not chronically online, a mobile phone from a decade ago has everything they need. If you only have to phone the family, WhatsApp your neighbours, get the map out, use a search engine and do your online banking, then a flagship phone is a bit over the top. If anything, the old phone is preferable since its loss would not be the end of the world.
I have seen a few elderly neighbours rocking Samsung Galaxy S7s with no need to upgrade. Although the S7 isn't quite a decade old, the apps that are actually used (WhatsApp, online banking) will be working with the S7 for many years to come since there is this demographic of active users.
Now, what if we could get these people to upgrade every three years with a feature that the 'elderly neighbour' would want? Eyesight isn't what it used to be in old age, so how about a nice big screen?
You can't deliberately hobble the phone with poor battery life or programme it to go slow in an update because we know that isn't going to win the customer over, but a screen that gets tatty after three years? Sounds good to me.
I'm still want a phone with expandable storage and a headphone jack. Sony had one, but I don't know if they're selling them and I've heard they have their own issues too.
One extra 'thing' to need - at the moment I know that I can play music through anything that has a line-in, with just a cable. However Bluetooth seems to work ok - for devices that support it.
Probably trying to find better screen materials, and addressing reliability issues.
I used Palm devices with resistive touch screens. It was good, but when you go glass, there's no turning back.
I would never buy a phone with folding screens protected by plastic. I want a dependable slab. Not a gimmicky gadget which can die any moment. I got my fix for dying flex cables with Casiopeia PDAs. Never again.
my girlfriend broke her iphone screen twice in two weeks, the second time we didn't bother repairing the screen and now she has a broken screen which looks really ugly. I've dropped my google pixel fold 9 countless time and the screen is still intact and flawless. So not sure what you're talking about.
Sure, but I wouldn't buy one even if it was in the same price range as phones I usually buy. For me, it will be useful rarely and cumbersome to use the rest of the time.
I picked up a folding phone a while back just to test it out, and honestly they're still pretty underwhelming.
The screen isn't really big enough or the right shape to feel like a real upgrade for movies, and a lot of apps just aren't built with foldables in mind. Most of the time it just feels like a weirdly shaped, less powerful, less durable tablet.
On top of that you're dealing with a visible crease across the screen, higher prices for something that's actually more fragile, and bulkier hardware with smaller or split batteries. The tech is cool in theory, but in practice it's a lot of compromises without a clear killer use case.
which phone was that? I bought the pixel folding 9 last year and it has basically replaced my ipad pro. I watch movies, shows, youtube videos, read PDFs on it, it's really good
Things have evolved a ton. I've got an Oppo Find N5. Thinner than iPhone Air when unfolded. Same size as iPhone 16 Pro Max when folded. 16GB Ram, fastest Snapdragon, okay cameras, the screen is magnificent, crease basically invisible in day to day use. Battery larger than any iPhone battery (thanks to Silicon Carbon)
Free with a plan just means you paid for it in installments without them breaking down how much of your monthly payment is going towards the device vs towards the network use. Had you opted for a cheaper device you could have got the same plan for less money. The phone is never actually free, just cleverly marketed to seem free.
I recently got one of these (Galaxy Z7 Fold) and I can't imagine ever going back to a regular phone. The big screen is what makes the phone finally begin to resemble actual productivity tool.
It was a prepaid plan that was the same price whether I got the phone or not. I guess you could say everyone who didn’t get the phone was subsidizing those who did, but there’s no way to opt for lower pricing if you BYOD. So no, in this case that’s not really true. If it were Verizon where you can pay less if you BYOD then sure but that’s not what I did.
> It’s not a big enough slice for them to want to chase.
Typical strat for them is not to be first with an innovation, but to wait and work out the kinks enough that they can convince people that the tradeoffs are well worth making. Apple wouldn't be chasing that existing slice, they'd be trying to entice a larger share of their customers to upgrade faster.
Yes, in some way everybody is in the 1.5% of something. Apple users will therefore never be 100% happy. Apple is a compromise. But they're also opinionated and very good at telling their users what they should like.
Folding phones are extremely popular in China, where nobody cares about Apple anymore. They are now seen as a status symbol because they are significantly more expensive.
I think they'd rather sell you an iPhone and an iPad Mini rather than one device that does both, just like they'd rather sell you an iPad Air/Pro and a MacBook with basically the same internals, rather than a convertible macOS tablet.
Aside from the obvious mechanical issues, the screen quality compromises, et cetera, folding phones are just dorky. Apple wants their products to be anything but dorky.
Apple watch is like the definition of dorky looking - so much for that theory.
Also flip phones aren't dorky and have a 2000s vibe - but they don't fit Apple "you can have any color as long as it's black" approach to design.
In some ways I can't even fault them - fragmenting your device shapes/experiences to chase a niche look is not good business. But this is exactly what's pushing me out of Apple ecosystem - it's so locked down that if you don't want to fit into their narrow product lines you have no other options. There are no third party watch makers using apple watch hardware and software. No other phone makers with access to iPhone internals and iOS. Nobody can hack a PC OS onto an iPad or build a 2in1 MacOS device.
I feel like this is the last gen of Apple tech I'm in on - I just find there are so many devices that are compelling to me personally but don't fit into the walled garden. Plus Google seems light-year ahead on delivering a smart assistant.
I was going to write that the only nerdier thing I can think of is wearing a calculator watch - but even that's like nerd fashion and having a rectangular screen strapped to your wrist is just all about utility.
If you mistake any of these for an apple watch at less than 100m you need glasses.
There's nothing wrong with rectangular watches - a fat bezel less screen rectangle around your wrist is not the same thing. The pro comes closest to a proper watch look but even that's "inspector gadget" teritory, not fashion accessory.
Don't know why you're downvoted. My boyfriend wears the Apple Watch Ultra in public and looks like a complete dork. He's got a pretty big wrist, too!
I left the ecosystem after Catalina, and my experience with macOS at work has horrified me enough to stay well away. Nowadays I'm happily using NixOS on the desktop, laptop and homeserver. My biggest gripe is that I didn't switch sooner, probably could have saved a decent amount of cash eschewing the Apple tax, SaaS fees and macOS migration hamster-wheel.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with the Apple Watch being labeled "dorky". I think they look pretty nice - and I don't own one. I wear a Timex Ironman.
It’s hard to find a source of how many iPhone owners specifically also own a smartwatch, but in the US it seems like 35% might be a decent estimate of smartwatch ownership, so it’d be more in the realm of ~28% of iPhone owners also having an Apple Watch.
True, it did seem a bit unbelievable. Either way, if you look around, Apple Watch is worn by all walks of life and just doesn't have the dorky vibe HNers might insist it has.
They're in the right. Folding phones are great, and I've used one for years, but the technology hasn't reached Apple levels. Get rid of the crease, make the screen less scratchable, and make them waterproof, and then it could go in an iPhone.
Im never going back to non-foldable. The ability to have a full sized phone take up half as much space in my pocket is amazing. Consistently more comfortable moving around.
I have a google fold 9 for a year and I've never noticed it unless I look at the phone from the side. It's interesting that this is the criticism that comes up the most here where it's already been a solved issue
If you hold it up to light to get a reflection, you are telling me there's zero perceptual warping of that reflection around the crease? None? It's as flat and perfect as a single sheet of glass?
iPads are better for watching shows on a stationary bike, since they fit on the bike
iPads are better for reading manga, since you can hold them vertically
and iPads are clearly better for drawing--you can't draw on a laptop.
There are some hybrid laptops that do these things, but they're bad at them. Especially drawing, I've used enough HP convertibles with "stylus support" over the years to know that.
> there’s essentially (literally?) no difference between an iPad and MacBook hardware
Form factor. Touch screen. GPS. Cellular. Circular polarization. These are all literal hardware differences between the iPad and MacBook, and every single one of them makes the iPad suitable for my use case (ForeFlight running on an iPad mounted to the yoke) where a MacBook would not be.
Also, can you give an example of a laptop (or non-Apple tablet) with a circularly polarized LCD? I've never been able to find one, but it's not a spec that's often published…
Are you serious? For anything that needs more screen estate - reading, browsing, photo/video watching/organizing, or simply if your sight is not as good anymore, it's so much better than phone. And with the pricetag around $350 that is amazing value.
Someone else commented that the reason the iPhone Air is so thin is the result of Apple building a folding phone (they have to be thin). I agree. The iPhone Air basically looked like a low hanging fruit while they're still at it. Apple is known to take its time so that makes sense
I've had the past three generations of Samsung folding phone (4,5,6).
My use-case is for travel, where I want to read books, and the very occasional time when I want to do some design work outside the office -- draw a diagram that sort of thing. A third rare use case is where a web site is buggy or limited in functionality for mobile browsers. In all these cases the unfolded screen allows me to do the thing I need to do without carrying a second device (tablet, eReader). Another marginal use-case is to show another person a photograph. The fold out screen is much easier to see and I think has better color rendition too.
For these use-cases I find the folding phone very worthwhile.
But...the benefit that trumps all that is that the phone itself is smaller (narrower) than the typical flagship phones these days. It fits in my pocket and my hand reaches across it. I'd never go back to a non-folding phone for this reason alone, even if I never unfolded it. In fact I almost never do unfold it, except when traveling.
fwiw it wasn't until the Fold6 that the "cover screen" typing experience was ok. I understand that the Fold7 is a bit wider and so probably better, but I can't justify the expense to upgrade so will sit out until the Fold8.
they do work well but are fragile. I broke one by gently closing it on a hot day (about 100F). Saw another break from the kind of short fall that used to break phones before they all got gorilla glass.
I guess if you're the sort that is not clumsy and you're in a mild climate you might get your money's worth
The vertical fold ones might be better. I had the newest Samsung Flip (horizontal folding) and the screen died twice. Both times from a small rupture on the seam. The tech at the phone place said it happens constantly, and it costs hundreds of dollars to replace out of warranty.
I dunno, I always felt folding phones added unnecessary complexity and moving parts. The slab phone seems closer to a platonic ideal and from a user/engineering perspective, has less compromises
> IMO it's underwhelming considering folding phones have been out for many years now and we still don't have a folding iPhone. What are the PMs doing at Apple.
They're buying another year of very-high margin phones I guess...
I would never have bought one before but nowadays it could actually be useful. You could have Codex or Claude Code in your pocket, and every ~15min check the work and write a new prompt. Tablets are too big (for me) to constantly carry around for this, and phones annoyingly small for that use.
