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Comment by drexlspivey | Hacker News Reader

Wow do these really ship with last year’s A15 chip? Why would you buy them over iPhone 13?

If I recall correctly we are in the midst of a chip shortage.

Conveniently you can't get a 13 Pro anymore on their website.

These have much better cameras, crash detection and some more improvements over iPhone 13 Pro (the chip is from the 13 Pro, not from the 13).

> These have much better cameras

They say that literally every year and I never notice.

The best way to really tell the difference, in my view, is to watch YouTube videos or see comparisons of photographs. I find that a lot of written articles or comments on forums really hype up the difference (along the lines of "get the new phone, it has a better camera"), when in practice, it's not that noticeable.

For example, this YouTube video from a quick YouTube search shows fairly insignificant differences between the iPhone 11 and 13 non-Pro models: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjosGytrIJI

Back then I found that 11 had a noticable leap forward in terms of image quality, and in later version, I don't detect such an increment in quality.

As an example, I looked at this low-light photo comparison of the basic 11 and the 13 pro max:

https://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3?idType=5&idPhone1=11089...

Sometimes the later model's image looks a bit better, sometimes it's indistinguishable. Meanwhile the 13 pro max costs more than twice as much in my country.

I have an iPhone X (2017). My partner has an iPhone 12 (2020). The difference is very noticeable across those three years.

I think often a single year's improvements are negligible but real, so any given two year's improvements are much more noticeable.

> crash detection

physical crash, not the kind that can be caught

A15 is actually pretty insane, it’s the same core as M2, it’s pretty fast. GPU is amazing too, as is the ISP and everything else.

And that graph of an A11 A16 and “competing CPUs” is still true (showing A11 lightly ahead of the competition, while A16 being like 15% better than it) - apple is ridiculously ahead of the pack in CPU design.

It’s the A13 chip from the iPhone 11, not A11. That one Qualcomm has finally caught up to.

Oh yeah, I just “converted it” to which iphone had that and mixed them up, thanks for the correction!

You wouldn't. It's mostly for people who own older iPhones. Other than the pro models, it's a minor update.

Incremental changes. Several minor updates makes a big update. That's why most people don't buy two generations successively.

I think I'll be upgrading my XS to the 14 Pro. My only gripe is how big the phone is. XS is 5.8" / 177 grams, the 14 Pro is 6.1" / 206 grams.

I really wish they kept on offering a Mini. Maybe I'll just go for a 13 mini, but the camera does look substantially improved, and satellite communication would be very nice to have (I do lots of hiking away from cell reception).

I was hoping (despite no rumors to the contrary) that they’d at least keep the non-pros at slightly smaller sizes than the pros (say, 5.8” and 6.4”). But alas if you want a smaller phone your stuck with last years model.

1 extra GPU core, but otherwise, yes.

If you want to be at the leading edge you buy the 14 Pro which has the A16.

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