By Innovation Only, iPhone (and more!) event Sept 10 2019 (1 Viewer)

[Johnny Angell]

I haven’t seen a thread, much to my surprise. If I’ve missed one, feel free to shut this down.

So I’ve read there will be 3 forward facing cameras and 3D Touch may be dropped. Any other news?

MOD NOTE: Making this the official thread!

Thanks @Johnny Angell

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I haven’t seen a thread, much to my surprise. If I’ve missed one, feel free to shut this down.

So I’ve read there will be 3 forward facing cameras and 3D Touch may be dropped. Any other news?

Johnny,

The really big news is the 2020 iPhones.

Really.

There are more leaked rumors about next year's phones, and far more excitement surrounding their possible features than this year.

Basically, the camera is getting revamped in the 2019 phones.

From most of the reading I have done, those who own last year's phones aren't going to upgrade this year and wait till 2020.

...that is, unless Apple pulls some really big innovation out of its arse on the 10th to surprise us. However, rarely is anyone surprised anymore as most of the leaks are accurate.

 

[Cranston37+]

Yeah until 5G comes out I just have no interest in any new of the new iPhones...

 

[Rodney]

I'm holding off for 5G and Touch ID in the screen.

 

[Johnny Angell]

I already knew I wasn’t upgrading. I’ve got a X and i’m not an every model upgrader. I like the idea of my monthly payments going down. The only thing that would get me to upgrade is the lowering of my monthly bill.

Still, I was surprised no one was discussing the new phones since many here upgrade every year.

Speaking of lowering my bill, I called ATT to see if a long time customer (wireless, internet, DTV) could get a break. Nope, couldn’t get a penny out of them. They did offer me a new phone. I’m on payment 20 of 30 and if I pay ATT about $135, give them my old phone, I could get a new phone with a monthly payment of course. Jeez, what a one-sided deal. I declined. Basically between the payment and the phone, I’d be giving them something 6-800 bucks for the privilege of paying for a new phone.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I left AT&T a year ago for similar reasons.

They were very expensive and I wasn't getting anything out of them.

Switched to Verizon. I am paying basically the same price but also getting unlimited (75GB) data and Apple Music subscription included.

Recently, I believe AT&T added Spotify to one of their subscription tiers. I prefer Apple, as it puts my personal library in the cloud so I can access it on all my devices.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I left Verizon for Sprint after I retired. I loved Verizon's network coverage, but they were just too expensive. Since I no longer needed to be reachable from everywhere 7x24x365, it was time to find something cheaper. We get real unlimited voice, data (no cap) and texting, plus free international coverage for data and texts ($0.25/minute voice) for $40 each for our two phones with their 55 and over plan. I also started leasing our phones, which allows us to get new phones every 12-18 months. With the leases and taxes, our monthly bill is about $110, which is about $30 less than we were paying Verizon for a non-unlimited plan and still had to pay for our phones.

Verizon recently added their own 55 and over plan, but it's still a little more expensive than Sprint. I am not sure if they now offer leases for phones.

 

[Johnny Angell]

I left Verizon for Sprint after I retired. I loved Verizon's network coverage, but they were just too expensive. Since I no longer needed to be reachable from everywhere 7x24x365, it was time to find something cheaper. We get real unlimited voice, data (no cap) and texting, plus free international coverage for data and texts ($0.25/minute voice) for $40 each for our two phones with their 55 and over plan. I also started leasing our phones, which allows us to get new phones every 12-18 months. With the leases and taxes, our monthly bill is about $110, which is about $30 less than we were paying Verizon for a non-unlimited plan and still had to pay for our phones.

Verizon recently added their own 55 and over plan, but it's still a little more expensive than Sprint. I am not sure if they now offer leases for phones.

Your monthly bill is $110 which includes all fee and taxes, that’s the grand total? May I pry and ask what your phones and memory capacities are?

 

[John Dirk]

AT&T and Verizon are the big bullies of the cell phone industry today. They generally do offer more robust networks but they're not going to negotiate on costs. If you're in an area well-served by either Sprint or T Mobile then my advice would be to switch while the getting is good. Once their merger goes through [and it will] they will eventually start raising prices to match the others.

 

[Johnny Angell]

I just talked to Sprint. Twice. If we do their clean slate plan where they pay off our phones and we send them to Sprint and we got an X R (autocorrect won’t allow it without the space) and an 8 (what my wife has now), using their 55+ plan we would pay $97 a month before taxes and fees. We are currently paying $113 (before t&f) to ATT. So we would save about $16 a month and I’d get an upgraded phone.

Of course the sprint person is telling me this is a promotion expiring tomorrow. So I ask myself, would I pay the same for the latest phones in September? Could I get the X R for less in September? I’m not really motivated by upgrading, I just want to cut my monthly bill.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Your monthly bill is $110 which includes all fee and taxes, that’s the grand total? May I pry and ask what your phones and memory capacities are?

Actually, with tax it's now $116 since we recently upgraded my phone -- before that it was about $105/month (my wife had a low-end phone that we turned in). My wife and I both have Android phones -- she has LG's flagship ThinQ 8 and I have a Samsung's Galaxy S10e (the smaller size model of Samsung's latest phones). I think we each have 128GB of built-in storage, but each phone has a microSD card slot. I added another 128GB card to mine for under $20 to put my music on, and I may do the same for my wife's phone. We used to upgrade our phones every 3-4 years when I bought them, but the last year or so of that cycle the phones would be losing battery capacity. Now we get new phones every 12-18 months for less money per month than what we paid to buy a flagship phone every 3-4 years. I just wait during the 6 month upgrade window for a good lease deal from Sprint and switch phones at that time.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Of course the sprint person is telling me this is a promotion expiring tomorrow. So I ask myself, would I pay the same for the latest phones in September? Could I get the X R for less in September? I’m not really motivated by upgrading, I just want to cut my monthly bill.

Sprint always has another promotion in the works. Since we have Android phones we have more options, but the reason my wife has an LG instead of a Samsung is because that was the phone that had the best lease deal when we were upgrading. I have not paid much attention to their iPhone deals, since we have always been Android users.

 

[Sam Posten]

Buying an XR now would be a terrible decision.

 

[Johnny Angell]

Buying an XR now would be a terrible decision.

Would you care to elaborate? If I were to do this, I would save money on my monthly bill.

Perhaps you are saying wait for this years phone? The 19’s. I know we’ve discussed waiting for the 20’s but if I save money now, what’s the harm?

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I'm on the "replace my phone when it stops working" plan and not the "upgrade when Apple or the phone company tell you to" plan.

I think ultimately if you need a phone now, either for technical reasons or financial reasons, there's no reason not to get one.

The truth is that Apple is on a yearly upgrade cycle, so there's always a new phone coming. Always something newer around the corner. It's one thing to wait for the right time if you're perfectly happy with what you have, and are only willing to upgrade if the new phones have new features that you're waiting for. But it's another thing to have a need today and not to fulfill it out of fear that you might be missing out on something better in the future.

I previously had an iPhone 5, and it worked well for my needs, so I ended up using that 2012 phone long past its prime. When there were all the rumors in 2017 about a super mega awesome new iPhone, I made the decision not to upgrade when my phone needed one, because I wanted to hold out for the latest and greatest. So I did wait until Apple announced the iPhone X. And, as it turns out, that phone didn't appeal to me on a design level, and didn't offer any extra functionality that was important to me. I had waited for months for the new phones to be announced, and then the thing they announced wasn't something I wanted anyway. I wound up getting the (now discontinued) iPhone SE and was completely satisfied with it. And if I had just picked that up in the first place, instead of waiting for the unknown, I could have spared myself several months of dealing with a dying phone.

I remember that experience and kept it in mind when recently, I had a situation with my MacBook Pro laptop where I just needed to upgrade. My wife and I both had much, much older MacBook Pros (one was ten years old, the other was eight) and both cannot support the newest versions of Apple's operating system, and can take more than half an hour just to turn on, and frequently take just as long for simple tasks like opening a new browser window. These machines were in desperate need of replacement, and we found ourselves in a situation where we could no longer wait to see what the latest and greatest new models would bring; we just needed to get a new machine that worked immediately.

Now it turns out (and I had an inkling of this beforehand, so it wasn't a surprise development) that Apple will most likely be announcing an even more super duper laptop this fall. But so what? It may or may not do things that I need. It may or may not be released at a price point I'm able and willing to afford. Maybe I'm missing out on something cool. But it doesn't really matter to me. I had a problem that needed to be solved in the immediate present, and I was able to solve it to my satisfaction with what Apple had available today. Having a computer that works well today was more important to me than having a computer that didn't work well and waiting for something to be announced. My time and my wife's time has value too; there was no value in getting frustrated every single time what should have been a 30 second task turned into a 30 minute one.

All of that's to say - there are reasons for Apple enthusiasts and people who care about always having the latest model to delay upgrades when new products are close to being announced, but for many of us, getting the best available product as the need arises is a perfectly reasonable approach.

 

[DaveF]

I’m waiting for the 2019 iPhones to be announced. I have a 2017 8+ I’m considering replacing this Fall. But I’ve never been big in following the rumors, and mostly wait for the announcements to get into the new-phone discussions.

But this year the rumors are unavoidable.

I was getting exciting about potentially getting a new XSS with the three camera system. But with the new “iPhone Pro” naming rumor, it makes me worried the triple camera will be in a $1200+ Pro model, and I might just need to wait a third year before upgrading with whatever the 2020 amazingness is.

 

[DaveF]

Would you care to elaborate? If I were to do this, I would save money on my monthly bill.

Perhaps you are saying wait for this years phone? The 19’s. I know we’ve discussed waiting for the 20’s but if I save money now, what’s the harm?

There’s always a promotion. Sometimes they’re better or worse month to month. In about a month there will be new trade-in deals against the new iPhones.

Only you can say if the current deal is a deal for you, given the particular iPhone models, looming new product launch, and your taste for new tech.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Three cameras? I barely use the one!

 

[DaveF]

My wife and I use our iPhone cameras nearly daily. I bought the iPhone 8+ to get the dual-lens portrait system. I don’t use it as much as I hoped, but I still love it! It’s fantastic on vacations.

I have no doubt I’ll get use out of a new phone camera, dual or triple camera.

Here’s a “portrait” my wife took of me last year in Edinburgh. See the fancy bokeh!


And here’s a portrait photo of my favorite whiskey I discovered on that vacation!

 

[Johnny Angell]

My wife and I use our iPhone cameras nearly daily. I bought the iPhone 8+ to get the dual-lens portrait system. I don’t use it as much as I hoped, but I still love it! It’s fantastic on vacations.

I have no doubt I’ll get use out if a new phone camera, dual or triple camera.

Here’s a “portrait” my wife took of me last year in Edinburgh. See the fancy bokeh!
View attachment 61971

And here’s a portrait photo of my favorite whiskey I discovered on that vacation!
View attachment 61972

2 comments: OMG, Dave. You've got two eyes. Also, I've gotten into bourbon lately. How would you describe the difference, taste-wise, between bourbon and whiskey?