Well, I didn’t think I needed a new phone, but if there are really going to be tariffs and the kinds of economic shenanigans that wreck the economy, better to have all the semi-durable goods in the barn. So now in have an iPhone 16 Pro, with a gargantuan 512 GB of storage. Which is insane. That’s 2000 times as much space as the hard drive of my first Mac thirty years ago. It has 1000 times the RAM. I don’t want to think how much faster the M18Pro processor is than a PowerPC 601.
It’s the same principle as anything these days: the phone is your primary computing device, your window to the internet for better or worse, an extension of your conscience into cyberspace. It pains me to admit it but it’s true: the 6.3″ display is better than the 5.4″ was for work and for reading, and the battery being half again as capacious makes all the difference. I don’t feel I have to stay in low power mode. The size is bigger, which means a lot of two handed use, but it also means it stays out of my front pocket, which reduces the odds of scratching the screen on a pen or a Leatherman or something.
Jury’s out on the slowly-rolling-out Apple Intelligence, although being able to magically clean up a napkin from a picture of my table at Original Pattern was cool (if a little creepy). Hopefully having all this storage means local LLMs will be enough to get the job done, because I’ll be damned if I let some third party run. If they can just make Siri usable, that’s all I really need.
so I guess let’s go. This is my phone of record for the foreseeable future. Who knows what comes next, but if this is going to be The One Device, best to have it be one that can do the job of the iPhone and iPad mini both. We’re going to need all day reading and listening material for a long time.