Agreed. At this point the iPhone is basically a slab of glass. The are not many form factor changes to be made except the further shrinking of bezels and the notch. They could swap the back materials or flatten the sides like the iPhone 4, but that's just change to change.
IMO, +4 hours of batter life on the new Pro is a huge deal. Every person I know carries around portable battery packs and is always stressing over battery life. Adding 4 hours (even if it ends up only being 2 in real world) is a bigger deal than probably even the cameras.
> At this point the iPhone is basically a slab of glass. The are not many form factor changes to be made except the further shrinking of bezels and the notch.
You're thinking of that backwards, I think. You don't change the hardware first. You come up with some new software (an OS feature; a library) that requires hardware that isn't already in the phone, and then redesign the phone to fit that new hardware in there. Like with the face sensors, or the ML-model-running cores. The hardware is designed, certainly, but it's designed as an answer to a constraint-satisfaction problem (i.e. a checklist of everything the new model needs to have/do), and big changes in the offered solution only happen when there are big changes in the constraints.
That being said, Apple seems to be lacking, lately, in inventing (or acquiring!) the kind of software features that necessitate new hardware. They're not even first to the Night Mode thing, which would totally have been one of their type of differentiators just a few years ago. Have they lost some critical software-R&D talent or something?
I agree with the OP, there’s only so much you can do with a phone, camera and battery life are one of the remaining things left with scope to improve. Apple are broadening as a company and the iPhone alone doesn’t define them anymore, that coupled with people holding on to phones for longer means innovation will die down.
Agreed. At this point the iPhone is basically a slab of glass. The are not many form factor changes to be made except the further shrinking of bezels and the notch. They could swap the back materials or flatten the sides like the iPhone 4, but that's just change to change.
IMO, +4 hours of batter life on the new Pro is a huge deal. Every person I know carries around portable battery packs and is always stressing over battery life. Adding 4 hours (even if it ends up only being 2 in real world) is a bigger deal than probably even the cameras.