Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max

I bought my wife an iPhone 11 Pro Max in 2020, and, knock on wood, outside of replacing the battery it has been going on like a champ. I've offered to buy her a replacement phone but at this point I think she's kind of curious as to how much life she can get out of it. I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max; I bought it in 2023 but it was a refurb so I don't actually know how old it actually is. Regardless, it's still going strong, and I am hoping it can last through whatever RAM crunch is going on.

It's that but it's also that their phones are only seeing incremental updates. I bought a iPhone 11 Pro Max almost 2 years ago, when the 12 came out I looked at it and decided to skip the upgrade, my 11 was almost identical. Now that the 13 is out I'm saying the same thing, skip to the next one because there aren't enough changes. I think the "keep your phone for 2 years" is a thing of the past now. Back in the late 2000's and 2010's I remember when phones made massive leaps every year. The iPhone 3G was awesome until the 3GS came along and blew it out of the water, when the iPhone 4 came out it blew the 3GS out of the water. Back then upgrading to new devices carried some major benefits. The 3GS wasn't just "faster" than the "3G", it was very noticeably faster. Nowdays thought, I can pick up a iPhone 13 and compare it to my iPhone 11. The 13 has better cameras, better battery life, and is more powerful. But it's not 3G -> 3GS powerful, when I picked up a 3GS for the first time I was blown away how much better it was than my 3G. When I looked at the iPhone 13 the other day I was hard pressed to find areas where it was better than my iPhone 11.

Kudos to Apple for still having their latest iOS run on hardware as old as iPhone 11, which was released 7 years ago. How is the Android world faring in this regard? My last Android device was an Android One, but that seems to have been cancelled. edit: holy crap, iOS 27 made an iPhone 11 pro max I just installed it on so much snappier! Absolutely crazy level of improvement.

A Camp Snap is more than good enough to have fun with. That's an entirely different requirement. I had an iPhone 11 Pro Max in 2019 and its camera quality was miles ahead of the linked photos, even if you assume raw output and post-processing. (The video, as you note, is even worse.) The link provided are shill posts of photos shot mostly under highly favorable conditions, with massive amounts of post-processing happening with much newer tech. I'm looking at casual photos straight out out of my 2019 device and they're vastly better than these. Linux phones aren't going to get better by pretending the experience is something it isn't, and telling people not to believe their lying eyes. If everyone's cameras were suddenly replaced with the Librem 5's, the number of camera quality complaints would explode. It's not good enough for anything beyond novelty use.

I’m often surprised that my iPhone photo app show old photos in the widget that look stunning and were taken with the iPhone XS and 11 PM. Night photos are better now but day photos stalled a long time ago. I find joy taking some shots with halide or photon in trueRaw where all processing is removed and grain is present. It gives an authentic look … so all HDR stuff is often too much

I dunno, my wife has has the same iPhone 11 Pro Max since 2020. She had to get the battery replaced once at an Apple store, which I believe cost $99, and it took like thirty minutes and it wasn't that hard. I'll admit it's a little annoying that I have to pay a hundred bucks to get the battery replaced, but the phone is otherwise fine and still gets updates, so I don't know that I buy that it's "planned obsolescence".