They're designed that way to get you to buy $50 cases injection molded from a few cents worth of plastic.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
521 points (97.8% liked)
Facepalm
3412 readers
11 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
LOL unfortunately optics don't scale.
But they could make the phone thicker.
I honestly wouldn’t mind a thick phone if it also included aux port and larger battery.
IS IT SO MUCH TO ASK FOR A PHONE THAT CAN BE MAINTAINED AND SURVIVE LIFE!?
sorry to yell. i just feel like i'm going crazy
Yep, it's practically way too much to ask from manufacturers who want to sell you a new phone every year or two.
Fairphone is the closest we have. It's trivial to replace battery and other components.
load more comments
(5 replies)
so long as the corners are sloped/rounded, phones can be like 1cm thick no problem, and i truly do not understand the obsession with thinner phones
our hands are curved, why do people want a bunch of empty space between the palm and the phone? might as well fill that space with battery.
That was basically how the pre-lenovo Motorola phones were all built. Take the Nexus 6 for example, the edges were really thin, only a few mm, but the back curved so at the middle it was nearly a cm thick.
That phone was a goddamn tank I dropped my Nexus 6 down a flight of concrete stairs without a case and by some miracle only the plastic on one corner was scratched. I stopped at HTC One down those exact same stairs and it disintegrated before it hit stair 3.
load more comments
(1 replies)
objectively superior design
Its honestly all making me think I should build a palmtop and shove a 5g module in it. Screw text messaging (matrix), screw phone service (I'll just set up VoIP), who needs a play store when ive got apt repos.
I don't care if it feels like 2007 in my pocket. I'll stick an 18650 or two in there and swap it when I need to. I can even be more ridiculous and make the keyboard mechanical.
To answer your question before its asked, yes, there is plenty wrong with me. Still though.
If you get around to making two, I'll buy the second one off of you.
(Sent from my GPD Win Max 2...)
I just want a modern phone in the body of an iPhone 5S (with an edge-to-edge display instead of the home button)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(15 replies)
Does this really sell phones? Why don't you make it match the camera bump, even just a little bit and give us back the aux and maybe more battery life.
Of course they won't do that because then they wouldn't have an excuse to force us to buy their expensive bluetooth earbuds.
My new phone that I got as a gift doesn't have a jack. I'm so petty and frugal about it that rather than ordering a wireless earbud set, I instead ordered the cheapest jack to usb-c dongle I found that wasn't on Temu. It works a charm. I will NEVER buy wireless headphones.
i have been an Android user through and through. Don't want to give an enny to the giant oligopoly spearhead if i can help it...
Anyways, my colleague had bought an iPhone 6 an year after it was released. I remember to this day vividly, we were in the elevator, we were talking about it. He took it out, I held his iPhone 6 in my hand, and it was the most surreal experience I have had with technology up until that point.
It just felt Unbelievable, Unreal, to see a phone so lightweight, so thin, so compact, and not be a toy/downscaled dummy unit. Even the curved sides, which were aesthetically unappealing at first in photos, just clicked when I actually held the phone in my own hand.
It's been almost a decade, and still I feel like I have never seen a smartphone that had such a perfect in hand feeling.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't buy it because Android just had too much going for it and for my preference and use case, iOS never was going to be a consideration. But for a fleeting moment, I really envied my colleague for having one of the best feeling smartphones at the time.
Apple is great when it comes to design and aesthetics. Jobs was known for being great at conveying a feeling in his presentations, and their products were always aimed at a "it just works, don't worry about how" crowd. It's no wonder they were copied left and right (slide to unlock, round corners etc., as ridiculous as some of those patents are).
That said, I feel like Android and iOS have come ever closer to equality. Google is locking down their walled garden, both app stores have basically become useless - apps are just custom browsers to webpages now and games suuuuck - with the exception that Apple's walled garden enables compilation and therefore better battery efficiency, which in turn makes phones lighter.
Until you put a protective case on it and it feels just like every other phone in a case.
As someone who just updated from an iPhone SE2020, the same body as the iPhone 6, I waited for the iPhone Air, no other iPhone had interest because of weight. This is the new standard.
People keep forgetting how stupid heavy carrying so much battery all the time.
iPhone Air charges from 25% -> 80% in 30min or less.
Camera is excellent and beyond my expectations.
Though amusing, I feel it's worth noting this image had to go back over a decade—eleven years—to find an iPhone without a camera bump of some kind, and would have to go back 6 years to get a pro-level camera without a plateau of some kind.
I agree that a dual measurement should be included, body thickness and camera plateau, but it never has been, so here we are.
And to give credit where it's due, I have no desire to own an iPhone Air, but it IS a bit of astonishing engineering. They've used the plateau to provide a place for the logic board, and turned basically the entire body into a battery to preserve decent battery life. Love 'em or hate 'em, Apple has a world-class engineering team.
It's not really astonishing, that's Apple's marketing speaking. Phones have been thinner than this and the tech that Apple are using now already exists in many phones. Apple are great at selling something as new and innovative, their marketing is what is astonishing.
load more comments
(13 replies)
an amazing engineering achievement for sure, but i just wonder what consumer wanted thinner phones.
I'd buy an iphone immediately if they gave me a chunky phone that lasted a week on a single charge. now THAT would be an engineering achievement lol
load more comments
(4 replies)
Love 'em or hate 'em, Apple
Sir, this is a Lemmy
And if only if it was just 1 mm thicker, or maybe 2, the battery could have been user replaceable.
I miss replaceable batteries. I replace mine myself but current phones all glue in and do waterproofing so it's a real pain and it's never quite the same. Don't let people blame the form factor or waterproofing, though, a replaceable battery is always technically possible-- there's just no incentive for companies to do it.
load more comments
(8 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Thks is what happens when you let the marketing dept. have even a taste of alcohol.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Argh I hate those bumps. My phone has one and it can't lay evenly on any surface because of this >:(
A lens (the bottom one that hits the ground first) cracked the first week I got my iPhone 16, setting it down on a glass table.
Its a hairline crack, but still.
And it was in a case, but the bump is so freaking big the camera barely sticks out.
Meanwhile my old HTC and Razer phones (and old iPhones) never had this problem... Oh, but I forgot, they were a millimeter thicker and non-rectangles, therefore unusable?
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
That is kinda what drives me away from the Xiaomi 14/15 Ultra. Amazing camera, but even with a case it sticks out, and I drop phones all the time.
Biblically accurate camera.
My god, what even is this monstrosity
It has a 1" sensor. I'm not unhappy with my S23's camera, but trying to hold a phone steady for 2-8+ seconds in low-light conditions is pretty awful.
spoiler
It has slimmed down to a gentle flat plane ... and due to underground tectonic forces, a small ridge is forming that will grow to become a mountain range in future versions
load more comments
(2 replies)
Also,
- iphone air: 156 x 74 x 5.64mm
- iphone 13 mini: 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.65mm
How about bring back the best phone you ever made you cowards.
Meh, whatever, I'll just not buy a phone then. Should be the best choice for many other reasons too.
I suspect its main purpose is not to be a product in its own right but a tech demo of half the thickness of a folding iPhone when it arrives. Being a niche product for early adopters and fashion victims to be seen with is a secondary purpose.
I still can't quite believe Apple is going down the folding route, despite all the speculation.
I can't explain, it feels like such an non-Apple move...
load more comments
(1 replies)
view more: next ›