It’s going to be a busy day, juggling several different things with work and life. Starting the morning with Summer Moon. Love that exclamation point. ☕️
As you know, for the first time since the iPhone era began, I didn’t attend the iPhone launch event. I am gutted that I didn’t get to see the new iPhone 17 devices in person. Still, I couldn’t help myself. I tweeted a bit about the event whilewatching the stream. What can I say? I still like to believe that I am the grand poohbah of the peanut gallery around Apple events.
And when the dust settled and I had some time during the evening, I started to put together my thoughts about the event. Apple’s iPhone 17 event had only one true awe — the massive capabilities of the team behind Apple Silicon and their counterparts in engineering.
Yes, we all know that these events are carefully staged PR shows, like fashion week for tech. Yes, they reflect the painful reality of the twilight of the smartphone era. Yes, we know that the rectangular slab that has revolutionized our lives since 2007 is on its final countdown, just like those 12-keypad phones before it.
We’re watching history rhyme — better cameras, longer battery life, new colors, thinner profiles. As someone who has covered smartphones since the concept first emerged from Nokia’s labs, the déjà vu is almost painful. (Nokia nerds, share a comment in the section below.)
I get it. Enduring design doesn’t need constant reinvention, and Apple doesn’t want to mess with a winning formula. It has worked for Porsche, and it has so far worked for Apple. You can see that engineering and chip skills can only mask the need for real reinvention for so long. The iPhone 17 lineup — with its Air, standard, Pro, and Pro Max variants — is Apple doing what it does best: polishing a form factor that has plateaued.
To argue with my own criticisms, I am also the first to appreciate the real innovation happening under the hood. That new A19 Pro chip with its desktop-class GPU capabilities, the vapor chamber cooling system borrowed from desktop engineering, the Ceramic Shield that’s now 50% tougher? This isn’t sexy stuff you can Instagram, but it’s the engineering excellence that keeps Apple ahead, for now at least, when it comes to hardware.
Apple Silicon is the Real MVP
The silicon team at Apple remains the pointy end of the spear. The A19 Pro, with its 6-core CPU and 6-core GPU featuring built-in Neural Accelerators, delivers up to 40% better sustained performance than the A18 Pro. This isn’t just another chip — it’s the foundation that makes everything else possible on the iPhone 17.
As I said on Twitter, “Apple Silicon keeping Apple relevant. Let just apps enjoy this ‘edge AI’ power. Let others build the AI. You focus on devices and chips, Apple.” Desktop-level GPU on a phone? Check. 35% better energy efficiency? Check. The computational power to run on-device AI without burning through your battery? Check and mate.
Mad science and crazy cutting-edge engineering are Apple’s actual moat. This is a company that knows how to build things well. But AI and internet software are a difficult beast for them to tame, and it’s not because they don’t have the talent. It’s because their DNA is hardware-first engineering and design. Every time I use my Vision Pro, I can’t believe that it is actually a product on the market.
The new iPhone 17 Pro only proves that they are the only company that will spend hundreds of millions to build a new cooling gizmo for the phone.
The new internal architecture features an Apple-designed vapor chamber to enhance heat dissipation and performance. Deionized water is sealed inside the vapor chamber, which is laser-welded into the aluminum chassis to move heat away from the powerful A19 Pro, allowing it to operate at even higher performance levels. The heat is carried into the forged aluminum unibody, where it is distributed evenly through the system, managing power and surface temperatures
Most companies do vaporware. Apple does vapor chambers.
Apple makes gigatons of money. But then it spends it well. Who else is doing this kind of wizardry in hardware at present? No one with Android margins. While others scramble to stuff Qualcomm or MediaTek chips into their devices, Apple’s vertical integration lets them build silicon that’s perfectly matched to their software ambitions. That new N1 wireless chip enabling Wi-Fi 7 and Thread? The C1X modem that’s 30% more efficient? These aren’t headline features, but they’re what make the iPhone experience feel seamless.
Battery Is The Revolution
Here’s what really impressed me but won’t make headlines: the iPhone 17 Pro Max now delivers up to 39 hours of video playback — up from 29 hours last year. That’s not just a spec bump; it’s a fundamental rethinking of power management. The combination of that vapor chamber cooling (which lets the A19 Pro run more efficiently), the larger battery made possible by the unibody design, and iOS 26’s Adaptive Power Mode that learns your usage patterns — this is systems-level engineering at its finest.
I was there for the first iPhone launch in 2007. The 1,400 milliamp-hour (mAh) battery was puny, no matter what Steve Jobs said. It was always a race from one charging outpost to another. Today, the new pretty thing, the iPhone Air can pack an estimated 3,500-3,800 mAh into an impossibly thin design and deliver all-day battery life. The iPhone of 2007 worked on 2G. Today, we’re streaming videos on 5G.
Battery is the real improvement story here. I interviewed some senior executives and chip designers at the company a few years ago, and they pointed out that because Apple makes its own chips, its own OS, and knows how its customers use the phone, it can build smarts into its products to squeeze a proverbial drop of blood from a proverbial stone, aka the battery. Looking beyond the PR, this is Apple saying that different models need different trade-offs and different engineering.
What we’re seeing is Apple solving the battery problem not through some breakthrough in battery chemistry (that’s still years away), but through obsessive optimization of every other component. The new C1X modem alone contributes to 30% better power efficiency. This kind of invisible innovation — where hundreds of small improvements compound into meaningful gains — is exactly what Apple does best and what its competitors struggle to match.
The Fully Frontal Camera
After 500 billion selfies (Apple’s count, not mine), they finally acknowledged what we all knew: the front camera is the real camera for most people.
The square sensor design on the iPhone 17 Air and the 18-megapixel Center Stage front camera across the lineup makesme wonder what took them so long. I mean, if anything, TikTok shows the world is now front camera first. Chinese phone makers know this well. From using them as tools for makeup or AI shopping, they have taken the lessons of TikTok (or its equivalent) and made front cameras not only an art form but some kind of voodoo. I think Apple has whiffed on this, but hopefully, this is the start of a new journey for them. Yes, I am excited.
The single-lens aesthetic on the Air is clean, purposeful, almost philosophical in its simplicity. With its 48MP Fusion camera system, it gives users the equivalent of four lenses – the main 28mm and 35mm focal lengths, plus an optical-quality 2x Telephoto that leverages the Photonic Engine for better details and color. This reminds me of the old Lytro camera and its computational photography capabilities. If memory serves me right, Apple bought their IP assets.
What left me gobsmacked was that they packed all that into what Apple is calling “Camera Plateau.” Not a great name, but still a great technical achievement to really put all the brains of the phone into that small slice. Yes, I get emotional about such boring nerdy stuff. So sue me.
Meanwhile, the Pro models with their 48MP sensors and that 8x optical zoom are doing what Apple does best: making pro-level photography accessible to amateurs who will never use half the features but love knowing they’re there.
iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max feature Appleʼs best-ever camera systems with higher-resolution sensors front and back — equivalent to having eight pro lenses in a userʼs pocket. Three 48MP Fusion cameras capture sharper and more detailed images. A new 48MP Telephoto camera has a next-generation tetraprism design with a sensor that is 56 percent larger than the previous generation to improve sharpness in bright light and bring more detail to darker shots. The new 4x optical zoom at 100mm offers a classic lens for portraiture, while the 8x optical zoom at 200mm, the longest ever on iPhone, provides longer reach and more creative choice.
I can’t wait to put this new iPhone to use.
What irritates me? Apple’s insistence on showcasing these cameras with “pro photographers.” Give me real people taking real photos in real situations. I’ve dragged my iPhone to the ends of the earth and made magic with it, and I’m barely competent with a camera. Don’t they get that real people buy the phones for the cameras? The pros just want freebies and move on to the next Pixel or whatever.
Look Ma, No AI
Notice what Apple didn’t do? They didn’t spend the entire event breathlessly hyping “AI” like every other tech company. This is good, Apple: do what you know best. Let others pioneer the technology, then mainstream it when it’s ready for normal humans.
And that is why the company needs to go back to its old playbook. Just as Apple lets Google handle search and pays them for it, why not let the big players in AI do their thing? Just protect our identity, data, and privacy, and act as an intermediary between us and the AI companies. Charge them a premium. Trust me, they would want access to all your customers.
My Final Word
Here’s what this event really told us:
Orange iPhone Pro — we’ve come a long way from 2007’s single color option.
The engineering team remains “G” (as we old-timers say) — that vapor chamber cooling is legitimately impressive.
Apple Silicon continues to be the engine that matters — everything interesting flows from chip innovation.
Minimal AI talk was smart — under-promise, over-deliver.
The iPhone Air will sell like hotcakes — thin and light always wins.
Apple’s renewed focus on accessories — Apple is introducing new TechWoven cases, Crossbody Straps, and MagSafe external batteries. My bet is that they need to boost the revenue stream with sales of accessories, insteadof letting third-party accessory makers walk off into the sunset.
Which iPhone 17 will I buy? — I’m sticking with the Pro Max. I will go for the Blue model. I am a “blue” kinda guy. Just peek at my collection of blue inks. It’s a form factor I like and feel gives me everything I need.
The smartphone as we know it may have about five years left in this form factor. No one, including Apple, wants to upset the apple cart (pun intended). But while everyone else is trying to figure out what comes next, Apple is pushing the current paradigm as far as engineering allows. That’s not sexy, but it’s smart.
It’s not revolutionary, but it is excellent engineering. And in a world where everyone else is chasing AI chatbots and foldable gimmicks, there’s something reassuring about Apple’s relentless focus on making the rectangle in your pocket a little bit better year after year.
Even if that rectangle is fundamentally the same shape it’s been since 2007. Sort of like a Porsche from the 1950s looks vaguely like the latest EV rolling off their factory floor.
And yet, I am craving something new. Not a foldable phone. Not a skinnier phone. But an un-phone that sparks a new revolution, like the iPhone did by reimagining the phone. I want Apple’s chip, engineering, and design teams to dream up a new future and show the world that it is doable, without Steve Jobs and without Jony Ive’s baritone saying — “aluminum.”
It’s the Tenth of Bleptember, and this doggo is desperately trying to stay awake in case the postman comes back or something else equally interesting happens, but I reckon she’s going to nod off any… second… now…
💖 RSS is fantastic, and so are you for using it. 🎆
Redefining authenticity lets us construct idealized selves online
Aesthetic signaling shapes how others perceive us online
Culture is an ecosystem, explains W. David Marx, made of “discrete taste world[s, each] adhering to its own specific conventions (i.e. styles, norms, rules). Individuals inside each taste world appreciate and advocate specific aesthetics and cultural artifacts, while simultaneously disdaining other groups’ aesthetics and artifacts — e.g. punks pogo but don’t line dance, literary snobs like James Joyce but not Danielle Steel.”
We signal belonging — and status — within our taste world by following its aesthetic preferences, be those the clothes we wear, the products we buy, the media we consume, the terms we use. Signals can be tangible, like wearing a fitness band, or intangible, like posting a link to an article. Social media amplifies the signaling power of aesthetics, extending the reach of our physical signals and expanding the realm of intangible signals.
Everything we post is abstracted and interpreted as a representation of us.
Because most people online are funneled into a handful of websites, the signaling environment is competitive. “Status” isn’t like a leaderboard with direct rankings, but we can be high or low status within our taste world. Social media rewards our desire for status with attention and validation for treating every pursuit as an opportunity to signal. Haley Nahman explains how the right aesthetic signal can position us as high status within our community:
“To live an aesthetic life is to understand meaning through signs and symbols—through what the appearance of your life might communicate about you to others and yourself. A morning routine is perfect if it looks perfect.”
Authenticity has devolved from a value to an aesthetic
Ad-funded social media helped dilute authenticity from something that demanded labor and commitment — being a hipster meant spending hours thrifting or listening to shitty new bands — to something you could buy. Authenticity become a commodity to sell, not a value to embody,writes Toby Shorin (emphasis mine):
“Carles recognized that aestheticizing authenticity would allow the popular, the generic, and the standardized to become authentic. This meant even commodities could be authentic—as long as the commodities signalled how authentic they were. You already know what the language of authenticity sounds like: “artisanship,” “craft,” “small-batch,” “single-lot,” and so on.”
We have a specific idea of what authenticity looks like, and it leans heavily on signifiers. Rahel Stephanie describes how restaurants play on our perceptions of authenticity to capitalize on nostalgia:
“What gets called ‘authentic’ today is often performance, shaped not by those who live the culture but by those who stand to profit from staging it. The spaces don’t just sell food – they sell a mood, a memory, a moment. A ‘vibe’ that flatters the diner into thinking they’re connecting with culture, when really they’re connecting with the menu design – flavour borrowed to fill the void.”
Though originating with businesses, our new understanding of authenticity spread to people as well. That made traditional authenticity — rooted in doing the work and living the values — a chump’s game, when the markers of the authenticity aesthetic could be had much cheaper. Aesthetics become shorthand for values in post-authenticity culture; authenticity has shifted towards aesthetic appearances and away from actions. Posting about your work ethic on LinkedIn is just as important as how you actually work. Posting about BLM is more important than attending a BLM rally — unless you also stream it 😉
Without authenticity, aesthetics diverge from values
Olivier Roy writes in The Crisis of Culture, “We are in a world that is more performative than ever, where speech is action. The declarative world is replacing the world of action.”
The internet is a space of abstraction, where sending the right signals is equivalent to action.
Aesthetic signals are about demonstrating alignment with one’s group; online, what you choose to signal matters more than that you act in accordance with your claimed values offline. Consistency between action and values isn’t required when aesthetics reign. “In an algorithmic age, hypocrisy isn’t a bug; it’s a feature,” writes Sarah Johnson, explaining how the Gen Z “Quarantine Cohort” has disassociated their online lives from their material realities and choices:
“Social media created a parallel reality where performance and practice coexist without contradiction. They identify as anticapitalists while building dropshipping empires and as environmentalists while consuming at record rates.”
Capitalism has primed us to accept this divergence between reality and belief. “Capitalist realism entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic,” writes Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism:
“Capitalist ideology in general, Žižek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief – in the sense of inner subjective attitude – at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior.”
We count our internal belief as more representative of ourselves than our actions, which are shaped by external forces. Aesthetics are a balm for what we can’t fix about capitalism, a patch for the compromises we’re forced to make, a bootloader for the chances we never had.
Aesthetics allow us to express our “truest” selves
Online, signaling becomes more meaningful than reality. It creates a hyperreal self which “substitut[es] the signs of the real for the real,” as Jean Baudrillard* describes the hyperreal. In Self Made, Tara Isabella Burton lays bare the modern assumption “that who we are – deep down, at our most fundamental level — is who we most want to be:”
“Taken to its logical conclusion, this assumption means that we are most real when we present ourselves to the world as the people we most want to become.“
Who we want to be says more about us than who we are now. These “truer” online selves supersede who we are offline. When we can’t afford to live “authentically” to our desires, we simply signal our aspirations.
This is authenticity redefined for individuals:
what we signal is more authentic to who we are than what we do.
Aspirational abstractions subsume material realities
The real has been made to feel less real
Grocery stores present a cornucopia of abundance year-round, making seasonality irrelevant to what we eat. Food advertising constructs a world in which aesthetics, not hunger, determine what we eat — a world in which only our wants, not our needs, matter.
Culturally, our physical spaces are converging on what’s salable, creating “non-places” that feel interchangeable. Digital mockups fill house listings instead of photos. High-end looks cover for shoddy construction. Observing the uniform decor of coffee shops internationally, Kyle Chayka concludes they are “authentic to the internet” — spaces “optimised for consumption as a digital image.”
In our postmodernist perception, what is real needs to be proven online, writes Haley Nahman:
“Today, we actually tend to consider representations more real, or more meaningful, than the subjects they represent, like how a person is more legitimate if they have a web presence, or an event is more legitimate if it’s photographed or recorded. This view of reality funnels us deeper and deeper into the theoretical—everything a representation of something else.”
Squarespace’s “a website makes it real” ad campaign reinforces the authoring power of the web. Caitlin Dewey found herself slipping into conspiracy when an author’s online presence seemed suspiciously limited: “Given the current capabilities of generative AI tools, across multiple mediums, what level of online evidence would prove to me beyond a doubt that this person, or any person, actually existed?”
We see horrible destruction in real time on the far side of the world (or country) while our lives hum along apparently untouched, creating a psychic disconnect between how our lived reality feels and our perception of the world from what we see online. Our online world begins to feel more real than the evidence of our own eyes because the algorithm only shows us information that reinforces our existing views.
Our culture rejects embodiment
Our portal to hyperreality — the smartphone — creates a further tactile alienation from reality. “It denies the body its place in the interface,” writes Jay Springett. Buttons have devolved from tactile, interactive elements to mushy rubber to mere brushes against a featureless screen, which has “contributed even further to our sense of passivity and our awe at our appliances’ omnipotence,” concludes Daniel Harris.
The internet is inherently reductive: we must make sense through only what we can see and what we can hear. Without touch, smell, and taste, we can only have their simulation and symbology. Online, we must interpolate our limited sensory inputs into full-bodied mental models. Social media “reduce[s us] to mere “operators,”” writes Kevin Munger, “experiencing life primarily through the apparatus, which “programs” both the producers and consumers of media.”
Science fiction, the genre where we explore possible futures, offers dystopias where we plug in to escape our grim reality: Blade Runner, The Matrix, Ready Player One. We accept the premise that our bodies are something we have, not our selves and imagine a day when we’ll become immortal, uploaded to the cloud, free of physical restrictions.
The concept of downloading physical skills, as Neo does in The Matrix, segues into idea reductionism, where ideas trump execution… the mindset behind generative AI. It’s appealing to believe that ideas matter more than actions when ideas are within our control but our physical world is controlled by oligarchs and authoritarians.
The web lets us pretend our aestheticized selves are real
“Digital technology doesn’t merely convey our bodies, but ourselves,” writes Douglas Rushkoff in Program or Be Programmed:
“Our screens are the windows through which we are experiencing, organizing, and interpreting the world in which we live. They are also the interfaces through which we express who we are and what we believe to everyone else. They are fast becoming the boundaries of our perceptual and conceptual apparatus; the edge between our nervous systems and everyone else’s, our understanding of the world and the world itself.”
Modern life trains us to think in abstractions, so abstracted humans are not such a big leap. Sara Johnson observes that Gen Z kids who came of age during the quarantine “experience virtual worlds as ‘real’, while physical reality becomes an anxiety-inducing obligation. Their digital avatars aren’t representations of their physical selves; rather, their physical selves have become imperfect avatars of their digital identities.”
Naomi Klein describes our digital identities as self-constructed doppelgangers. The increasing importance of our online taste worlds encourages us to let the doppelganger take the lead. Creating personas that align with group norms limits our vulnerability while allowing us to perform in line with expectations. Today, we’ve learned that looking the part, performing the right aesthetic signaling, is nine-tenths of success. As Aidan Walker riffs:
Does it matter more to the interviewer that you can actually do the job or that you can perform the look of doing the job? Does it matter more to the President that the tariff regime accomplishes a policy goal, or that it performs for his base? Does it matter more to the AI company that people pay for and use the product, or that people believe the product will change the world?
We can be anything we want online, aesthetic signals allowing us to bound past the barriers and constraints imposed by physical reality. Olivier Roy theorizes (emphasis mine):
“[The internet’s] ultimate logic is probably to make any reference to reality useless by creating metaverses, in other words virtual and self-sufficient worlds.”
In a world of growing inequality, where the American Dream has become an impossible dream for too many, why wouldn’t people choose a world where they can design their own reality? Christine Rosen writes in The Extinction of Experience, “As with any pleasure we choose to mediate, the image begins to seem more satisfying than the unpredictability and hassle of the real thing.” It’s manifestation theology for the secular, rejecting the value of labor. We can be exactly who we want, without even trying: instant gratification identity wish fulfillment.
Stephanie Booth, an OG blogger of great renown, now has a FeedLand blogroll on her WordPress blog. It is I believe going to make her blog feel less lonely. If anyone else wants to get one going, I have more confidence that it's pretty do-able. Screen shot.#
Heh. Yesterday I started writing a post about something Brent wrote on his blog, and then I must've gotten distracted and didn't finish it. I will now proceed to explain. #
Brent said he cares about desktop software but not about phone and tablet versions of same. I found that liberating. It's always been a pain in the ass to do something beautiful on the desktop only to have to destroy its utility by squeezing it into a space with no keyboard or pointing device that's more accurate than my finger (I have huge fingers, and a normal size phone). I found it liberating, but -- I'm working on the design of an app that should work well on either a phone or a laptop, and I've had that in mind the whole life of the product. But now I realize in a new way that it's a choice. It always was, but it didn't feel that way. #
