Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).
I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.
Costs are a big thing, sure, but for me it's electrical reliability. For better or worse our heating oil and natural gas supply are both more reliable than our electricity supply. I don't need the heat going out in the dead of winter when some wind storm drops a bunch of branches on power lines.
I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.
You can have both, though. A person doesn't have to make a binary decision of heatpump OR natural gas.
Please remember that traditional aircon is also literally a heat pump. It's perfectly acceptable to have a ducted heat pump and a ducted natural gas furnace both sharing the same ductwork.
In this use, the heat pump and the furnace are just installed series with eachother, with one singular blower motor that is used for both roles. This arrangement is very similar (identical, really) to the layout that combined (heat+aircon) systems have used for many decades.
Power out, or simply very cold outside? Your house still has a natural gas furnace (which can be made work with a fairly small generator), and your rig doesn't require expensive-to-use heat strips for the coldest days either.
I have a house where the first floor is served by a gas/ac combo unit, and the second floor with a heat pump.
I literally see no advantage to the heat pump and wish I didn't have it. It takes forever to heat and cool, comparitively, and likes to ice over when it gets too cold in the winter while running 24/7 doing nothing. The emergency heat eventually kicks in and fixes it, so I'm considering just running emergency heat all winter.
The fact that your heat pump setup is also taking longer to cool suggests there's something fundamentally different between the setup on your different floors, not that there is something bad with heat pumps in general.
A heat pump in cooling mode works exactly like an AC unit, because that's exactly what it is. So if your AC unit on the first floor cools more quickly than you AC unit (i.e. heat pump) on your second floor, it's because A) your floors are different sizes or insulated differently or something else is different about their construction, B) your units are sized differently, or C) your heat pump has some mechanical problem. But the fact that it's a heat pump should make no difference to its cooling performance.
When it’s running in reverse then it’s acting as an air conditioner blowing cold air into the house. So usually the heat strips are used then to reheat the air and prevent it from blowing cold air in the middle of winter. Not strictly necessary but most people demand it.
the aux heat comes in because their output is a multiplier. At 30F, perhaps they produce 4x the heat as the electricity put in. At 0F, perhaps they produce 1.8x the heat. This means the output declines with temperature, until eventually they don't produce enough heat to hold temperature. Enter aux heat.
Cold weather heat pumps help because they stay above 1x for longer, but you also wind up needing to oversize a bit.
>Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year.
Don't forget that those costs are going up in large part because heat pump subsidies are being rolled into electricity prices.
Imagine being a ~$100k HHI household and paying $300+/mo for electricity so that $200+k HHI doctor/lawyer/HN households can have subsidized heat pumps and our sleazy contractors, and the dealers, and everyone else upstream) can over-charge us for the privilege (thereby getting their cut of the subsidy).
It's a miracle we haven't all caught hot lead yet.
A heat pump just makes no sense whatsoever for me in my northeast town. The electric bill alone would outpace the old propane bill, not to mention installation.
And it won't even work during some of the coldest winter weeks when you _really_ need it to work.
Maybe I would consider it if I was in, like, Nevada or somewhere.
The notion that heat pumps don’t work at low temperatures hasn’t been true for years. I think you may be surprised to find that just about any heat pump you look at has good efficiency down to very low temperatures.
That’s true, but still doesn’t always make heat pumps the most cost effective choice to operate. For example, last winter I paid an average of $0.24/kWh for electricity vs $0.05/kWh for natural gas. Even if a heat pump had a perfect 4.0 COP all winter, gas would be ~15% cheaper. Electricity prices really need to come down before it will be viable for everyone.
This varies quite a bit based on location for instance here in Florida natural gas is $0.13/kWh while electricity is about $0.12/kWh, also where I live there is no piped NG so it would be propane delivered to a storage tank which is even more expensive.
Also the winters are mild here so basically everyone has either a heat pump or the further south you go it's just heat strips because heat is rarely used so not worth the cost.
So any kind of blanket statement about heat pumps vs gas heat would be folly, but due to improvements in cold weather heat pumps and solar power are allowing them to make much more sense in more places.
There are many advantages to decoupling fuel combustion from its energy use, burning NG at a power plant relatively efficiently with much better emission controls, then distributing on electric grid for use more than just heating, while allowing the home to heat from many different energy sources and allow for grid down backup as well.
Does your 0.05/kWh include the distribution costs? The thing to do once you go to heating with gas is to just switch completely to electricity and turn off gas. In my experience (admittedly not in the US, but several other countries) distribution cost often more than double the $/kWh for natural gas (especially if you only heat part of the year).
Not to mention, lots of places have time of use electricity pricing which makes it even worse. This is the problem with running my heatpump when its cold, some of the coldest times (right before dawn) coincide with peak time-of-use prices
I’ve tried. For it to be at all viable on my property, I’d need to cut down a bunch of trees. I’d rather keep the trees and pay someone else with solar panels.
I mean, in many countries, often either the government or a company closely allied to the government has been granted a legal monopoly on selling electrical energy, so buying electricity from other people is illegal.
ASHRAE—an HVAC organization—has data on the coldest and hottest days for areas so that you can design things for the coldest or hottest 1% of the year (4 hottest/coldest days):
I think that if you have an older, leaky/ier, less-insulated house you may need to 'brute force' heating your (probably older) domicile. But if you have a <4 ACH@50 air tightness, and reasonable insulation levels, a good portion of the US population could make do with a heat pump.
Mitsubishi publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:
It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
ASHRAE are the folks that publish the heating/cooling standards that are used in building codes for estimate heating/cooling equipment capacities (Manual J) and selecting the right equipment (Manual S).
Here's a PDF with a lot of locations in the US and CA (and other countries further down), and if you look under the "Heating DB" column, you'll find very few US locations that have -30F under the 99% (or even 99.6%) sub-columns:
So unless you're in AK, MN, or ND, long runs of temperatures colder than -20F/-30C don't happen too often. Of course if you have a leaky house with little insulation, you're throwing money out the window/door, so the first consideration for a good ROI is better air sealing and insulation.
I think the comment was saying below 30F and below 10F. Much warmer than you're saying.
Also..
> It is warmer than -16C/3F at Chicago (O'Hare) for 99% of the time (i.e., except for 4 days a year), and warmer than -18.7C/-2F for 99.6% of the time (2 days).
If my heat doesn't work for those days, I'm kind of boned. Four days per year without a working heat pump? That's a mess.
At face value, then in the worst case that's just 4 days per year of using resistive heat to keep a home warm.
Which is, of course, very expensive to use -- but it's only expensive for those 4 days. Resistive heat can be avoided for the other 361.2425 days in a year.
In the US (as of August of 2025), the average price of residential electricity per delivered kWh is $0.1762 [1].
If using resistive heat averages 4kW during each of those 4 days (it's probably either more than that, or less than that, but ballparks are ballparks), then that's about $16.92 for each of those days. Or: $67.66, per year.
> At face value, then in the worst case that's just 4 days per year of using resistive heat to keep a home warm.
The design philosophy for using 1% is that you may end up having to run your heating (or cooling) 24/7 to keep up with temperature delta between outside and desired inside, but it will keep up with the demand.
The rest of the time (99%) the mechanicals only run intermittently. Also note that the 1% would not necessarily occur every year: it is just the historical average. The charts also have the 0.4% extremes if you want to be extra conservative, but most building codes specify 1% because that is what experience has shown is a good trade-off.
Part of the process (in the US) is to use what is called the Manual J to determine/estimate/calculate how much energy is needed to maintain a particular temperature (typically ≥70F/21C in winter, ≤75F/24C in summer):
> The Cooling Design Day is effectively the "worst case" day for your air conditioning loads. The "worst case" hour of this day determines equipment capacity, fan sizes, and subsequently duct sizes. This largely impacts first cost. The Design Hour also impacts peak KW demand which often has a huge impact on the utility bill.
So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
I’ve had a gas furnace keep me and the water heated multiple times in a cold weather power outage.
> So gas hash higher reliability and is cheap for the times you need heat the most, whereas heat pumps might not work and are not cheap at the times you need them the most?
The major manufacturers have systems that will use the heat pump when the temperatures are not 'crazy', and kick in fossil at a certain point:
Depending on the cost of power and fossil fuels, you can program it to switch over once the COP becomes too low to justify running up kWh on your meter.
But whereas in the past heat pumps would have their COP drop around 40F/5C, modern systems can be fairly efficient at much lower temperature nowadays:
That's one of the older style units. Starting in 2007 when Mitsubishi introduced their "Hyper-Heating Inverter" heat pumps, and continuing with Fujitsu and Daikin following with similar technology in the 2010-12 timeframe, and others a few years later, heat pumps got way better in the cold.
Mitsubishi's maintain 200%+ efficiency down to -4℉ (-20℃) and 150% down to -22℉ (-30℃) [1]. Only a few towns in the continental US get below that, and even those aren't going to get cold enough long enough to make it worth it an an all electric home to switch to your emergency electrical resistance heating.
Their capacity doesn't start dropping until you get down to 23℉ (-5℃), dropping to 76% at -13℉ (-25℃).
Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
That’s not going to be particularly helpful for a structure that needed 24k BTU/hr during warmer temps, meaning the owner of the unit is likely mixing in a lot of 1.0 BTUs to meet the heat loss at -13°F.
> Though it’s worth noting that that first 2 ton rated unit is putting out 0.5 tons (6k BTU/hr) at that temp and rating.
I just did a quick search for "all" units and sorted the result list/table by COP@5F. If one was actually shopping/designing a solution then a more nuanced search criteria would be used.
Further, you'd probably want to do a (US ACCA) Manual J calculation to first determine how much energy is needed (j = joules)
I've got one about 8 years old, and it does just fine down to 0°F (it hasn't gotten colder than that here). It doesn't even have any kind of auxiliary heat.
It's fine. The only difference when it's super-cold is that the air coming out of it isn't as warm, so the heating cycle stays on for a longer proportion of the time. But it keeps it 70°F inside no problem at all.
I don't know what sort of heat pump systems are common in the US, but Sweden (and AFAIK Norway and Finland as well), are probably >%80 heat pump for single family homes (most apartments are community heating at least in the larger cities). So it's absolutely now problem to run a heat pump even if it is very cold outside, but if you want to improve efficiency in areas that are super cold you can drill into the ground for a heat sink (those are called Bergvärme in Sweden).
Regarding cost, in most of the countries I've lived in a large fraction of the cost in the gas bill was the distribution cost. So once you switch to a heat pump, you also switch to electric cooking and even if heating with electricity would be significantly more expensive you would still win. Is that different in the US?
It varies significantly by locale. I've seen people post online about how it made little sense to keep just one gas appliance because of significant savings. I'm in Iowa, which typically heats on natural gas in urban areas. I have a natural gas central furnace and water heater. My clothes dryer is electric, and I have a 3 head heat pump which I use for comfort in a couple rooms. The house is an early 2000's standard builder-grade home.
For September, $12.31 of my $27.01 gas bill was variable based on my consumption.
In December, $84.82 out of my $99.65 total was consumption driven.
I've run numbers on whether it'd make financial sense to go electric for heating, and the break even point is in the 30-40 degree vicinity. With temperatures 20 and under a healthy chunk of the year, unfortunately the added expense doesn't make financial sense.
Heat pumps are just air conditioners in reverse. They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling. While many people have air conditioners, and grids seem to be able to handle them in the summer, an assertion that the grid can’t handle them in the winter is doubtful. Plus there are fewer people using them in the winter (just because fewer are installed). Most people in the NE heat with oil, gas, or wood, so that would reduce the electric load (compared to summer) even further.
There would be an increase only if people were supplementing the heat pump with electric heat, which to be fair is a possibility.
There’s a lot of misinformation about heat pumps, especially by HVAC people who don’t have a lot of experience with them, so they tend to recommend what they’re more familiar with.
But yes, understanding the electricity cost is essential when considering one.
> They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling
This is completely wrong. The amount of power depends on the temperature delta. When cooling, you are typically not cooling your home to 30 degrees Celsius below the outdoor temperature. However, when heating, you are typically heating your home to around 20 degrees above outdoor temperature. Heating consumes more power than cooling.
It is approximately correct as long as the temperature deltas are approximately the same for heating vs cooling.
(And as long as we're dispelling generalizations: Those deltas do vary wildly based on local climate, such that they're impossible to generalize and typify.
For instance: The city of Saint Paul, Minnesota [USA] has a very different climate compared to the city of São Paulo in Brazil, with accordingly-different heating/cooling deltas.
I would be curious to know the difference. In summer you might find 30c outside and inside 20c so a difference of 10c. In winter it can reach -30c and inside is 20c. This is 5x more!
I’m not an expert, and it would depend on the system you have anyway, but AFAIK the main differentiator between a cooling air conditioner and a heat pump is a “reversing valve”. You may simply need to change the mode to reverse it, then you get cooling. From what I understand, it would be unusual for it only to work in heat mode.
I agree with some aspects, and think the author perhaps misunderstood some others.
> If I collect 100 XP, what does it mean for my language skills? For that matter, why do I collect extra XP when I receive a potion? Can the XP I collect be used in a way to carefully guide me towards the specific language skills I would explore next?
Using XP to guide the user towards a particular path is an idea, but it's just not one that Duolingo uses. The purpose of XP in Duolingo is simpler: people like numbers to go up, so they get XP for using the app. It also enables an ecosystem of rewards; I'm generally not a competitive person, and there have still been days where I took a few more Duolingo lessons because I was close to completing a "daily challenge".
Similarly, friend streaks, leaderboards, etc, all have innately appealing hooks. They won't all appeal to everyone all the time, but one of them will appeal to someone some of the time. If they get you to practice for 5m a day more than you would've otherwise, I think they've served their purpose.
Broadly, I agree with other comments about expectation management and time commitment. Could you get yourself to a solid level of understanding in a new language only by using Duolingo? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of dedication and hard work, and much more than 5m a day. If you really wanted to learn a language, and had the time, there are much more effective ways to get there.
Duolingo isn't really built towards encouraging that kind of intense learning, because they know most people who download the app are looking for a bite-sized learning experience, and are willing to accept bite-sized results in return. For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.
> For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.
This has been exactly my experience with it. I would probably progress faster if I had others to speak with, but for just doing the lessons offered, I'm pretty happy with my results.
By contrast, when I was studying Spanish using something more similar to the Assimil method, I was reading full length novels and watching Yo Soy Betty, La Fea within about six months.
It's not just me. There's been some research on this sort of thing, and it tends to find that just about the only thing that's slower than Duolingo is traditional classroom language education.
Admittedly I was doing more than 10 minutes a day. But that's because I was legitimately having heaps of fun. I wanted to spend a bunch of time with Spanish, and I didn't need any weird gamification tricks to help me sustain that level of motivation.
Yeah, same for me using Assimil for French (along with a few other tools). Six months in I could read L'Étranger in French.
My next project once I can pass the C1 test is to use their French -> Spanish course. I kind of recommend them to anyone that will listen, as their method worked really well for me.
For me I mostly use Duolingo as a mechanism to encourage myself to spend time learning each day. I find that it's helpful for reviewing a lot of basic vocabulary, but I typically supplement it with other stuff (listening to music, watching shows, youtube language channels, AI conversations, etc). I find I make the most progress when I choose to do things that are challenging which Duolingo really is not.
This. The idea is super cool in theory! But given how these sort of things work today, having a toy that can have an independent conversation with a kid and that, despite the best intentions of the prompt writer, isn't guaranteed to stay within its "sandbox", is terrifying enough to probably not be worth the risk.
IMO this is only exacerbated by how little children (who are the presumably the target audience for stuffed animals that talk) often don't follow "normal" patterns of conversation or topics, so it feels like it'd be hard to accurately simulate/test ways in which unexpected & undesirable responses could come out.
I'm trying to use my imagination, but what exactly is the fear? Perhaps the AI will explain where baby's come from in graphic detail before the parent is ready to have that conversation or something similar? Or, for us in US, maybe it tells your kid they should wear a bullet proof vest to pre-K instead of bringing a stuffy for naptime?
Essentially, telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship? Or is there some other fear, like the AI will get compromised by a pedo and he'll talk your kid into who knows what? Or similar for "fill in state actor" using mind control on your kid (which, honestly, I feel like is normalized even for adults; eg. Fox News, etc., again US-centric)
I'll respond to the content, because I think there are some genuine questions amongst the condescension and jumping to conclusions.
> telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship
Does AI today reliably respond with "the truth"? There are countless documented incidents of even full-grown, extremely well-educated adults (e.g. lawyers) believing well-phased hallucinations. Kids, and particularly small kids who haven't yet had much education about critical thinking and what to believe, have no chance. Conversational AI today isn't an uncensured search engine into a set of well-reasoned facts, it's an algorithm constructing a response based on what it's learned people on the internet want to hear, with no real concept of what's right or wrong, or a foundational set of knowledge about the world to contrast with and validate against.
> what exactly is the fear
Being fed reliable-sounding misinformation is one. Another is being used for emotional support (which kids do even with non-talking stuffed animals), when the AI has no real concept of how to emotionally support a kid and could just as easily do the opposite. I guess overall, the concern is having a kid spend a large amount of time talking to "someone" who sounds very convincing, has no real sense of morality or truth, and can potentially distort their world view in negative ways.
And yea, there's also exposing kids to subjects they're in no way equipped to handle yet, or encouraging them to do something that would result in harm to themselves or to others. Kids are very suggestible, and it takes a long while for them to develop a real understanding of the consequences of their actions.
Bravo, this is an answer beyond the outright fearmongering that actually makes sense and I wasn't considering. I still struggle with how it's much different than social media in terms of shaping what kids believe and their perception of reality, but I do get what you're saying - that this could be next level dangerous in terms of them believing what it says without much critical thinking.
Can this not occur on Youtube/Roblox and other places where kids using tablets go? Mass generalizations about what I observe -> I don't see why/how parents do the mental gymnastics that tablets are acceptable but AI is to be feared. There's always going to be articles like this, it's a big world everything will have a dark side if you search for it. It's life. [Actually, I think a lot of parents are willing to accept/ignore the risks because tablets offer too great of a service. This type of AI simply won't entertain/babysit a kid long enough for parents to give into it.]
I have a 6 year old FWIW, I'm not some childless ignoramus I just do my risk calcs differently and view it as my job to oversee their use of a device like this. I wouldn't fear it outright because of what could happen. If I took that stance, my kid would never have any experiences at all.
Can't play baseball, I read a story where kid got hit by a bat. Can't travel to Mexico, cartels are in the news again. Home school it is, because shootings. And so on.
A 6yo can not meaningfully give informed consent to ToSs or privacy polies of YouTube and Roblox so even supervised is ethically problematic depending on how it's done. Unsupervised is obviously not safe and I do not see anyone here arguing that.
I don't think that argument needs to be made here, I mentioned it because it's something I observe daily in the real world. I talk to parents who let their kids use these things, I inquire about their reasons for doing so and their level of oversight. It's something I've personally taken an interest in as a parent myself who has a no tolerance policy towards it; I like to know other people's justifications for allowing it. Many of them do not supervise the use BTW. Even people I consider great parents otherwise, they may setup some parental control stuff initially but then the kid is off with their device in another room.
When it comes to privacy policies and ToS, I think a 6yo is reading into it just as much as their parent does. And by that I mean just looking for the [Agree] button.
> Perhaps the AI will explain where baby's come from in graphic detail before the parent is ready to have that conversation or something similar?
I mean, that's not a silly fear. But perhaps you don't have any children? "Typical parental censorship" doesn't mean prudish pearl-clutching.
I have an autistic child who already struggles to be appropriate with things like personal space and boundaries -- giving him an early "birds and bees talk" could at minimum result in him doing and saying things that could cause severe trauma to his peers. And while he uses less self-control than a typical kid, even "completely normal" kids shouldn't be robbed of their innocence and forced to confront every adult subject until they're mature enough to handle it. There's a reason why content ratings exist.
Explaining difficult subjects to children, such as the Holocaust, sexual assault, etc. is very difficult to do in a way that doesn't leave them scarred, fearful, or worse, end up warping their own moral development so that they identify with the bad actors.
I have a 6 year old. I don't let him use the internet or tablets or phones, so I get it, question was out of curiosity of other people's thought process. I just lack the imagination to know what other people are actually afraid of as I often find people have what I consider far fetched boogeyman imaginations. Yet, they allow their infants to play on an iPad for hours, etc. which I find no more/less risky especially as they become older and can seek out content they prefer. My ban on it for my kid is more so based on my parenting opinion that boredom is a life skill and beneficial to young minds (probably all ages actually) and constant entertainment/screentime is unhealthy. I don't ban the devices because I'm afraid of the content he may encounter, I just want him to enjoy his childhood before it's inevitably stolen by screens.
I think my theory is kind of correct, people generally 'trust' a YouTube censor but an AI censor is currently seen as untrusted boogeyman territory.
"The cost of treating illnesses has gone up due to X" rather than "more people are getting sicker due to X".
Makes it more of a detached conversation about pricing than about how something is hurting actual people, who perhaps have value beyond a purely economical one.
In Massachusetts, Kia has disabled Kia Connect for all vehicles purchased over the past few years. Any data collected by cars must be made accessible to third-party shops, and Kia opted to disable any data collection (and thus disable Connect entirely) rather than allow that to happen. It doesn't matter where you actually live — as long as you bought in MA, the car's VIN is locked out and no one can do anything about it. You're typically told this at the very end of the sales process, after everything is signed, and it's framed as "oh, by the way, MA has a terrible right-to-repair law that has forced Kia to disable Connect, you should write your state senator."
It's... interesting to see just how easy it is to access this functionality if the VIN check is bypassed.
its brought about a lot of shops that can rip the electronic tracking devices out of your car pretty easily too, which is nice in case you don't feel like being someone's datapoint
I don't know that I completely agree. To some degree, sure — most folks probably don't notice the year-to-year updates in e.g. computing power.
But my 70yo mother, who is pretty far from being technologically savvy, uses continuity every day to copy one-time-use codes from her phone to her computer, even though she'd have no idea what the term "continuity" means in this context. She notices that it's easier to snap better pictures in more conditions than it was a few years back (and that pictures she receives are better looking on average, too). She uses 1Password with FaceID, which I set up for her, because it's so easy to just look at your phone to unlock that there's very little in the way of enabling and using that, and she doesn't need to write down passwords anymore.
I think some of the magic of the Apple ecosystem is that you don't have to know about these things in order to use them. Someone shows you how to do something (Apple could certainly improve on the organic discoverability of many of these features! Some are impossible to find without looking), and then it often just works. And these things do keep getting closer to that ideal over time, with each generation. When I first started using continuity — long before my mother did — it definitely did not work all the time, and I persisted because I'm a techie early adopter. Eventually, though, it reached a state where once folks learn about it, they can just use it.
I'm also not sure about the 3-4 year number, at least from personal experience, fwiw. We pass down phones in my family, and it easily takes 5-6 generations for them to reach the end of that chain and be in use for a year or two before they're switched out for the next model. Battery has never been the reason someone in that chain switched phones.
Nearly all of the things you describe there aside from the camera are software/services based and don’t require improved hardware year-on-year at all. This is a problem for a company that makes its money selling expensive hardware.
Even the camera quality could be improved with post-processing like upscaling and color correction, which have somewhat recently become much better.
Although my understanding is that the new cameras are incredible, so while you could get a "decent" photo on an old phone, unlike the other features it would be noticeably worse than the new phone.
It’s not the cameras that are bad. In fact, I sold my Canon with a 24-70mm f2.8 L because the iPhone photos were great!
The HUGE L by Apple is their shitty Photo App. It’s great if you have under 1Gb of photos, but over 100Gb - forget it - it is fucking. God. Aweful. PAINFUL!
And then they have the nerve of once in a while having a non-compatible Photo database format and so your WHOLE photo collection has to be converted… over 4 days wtf!
I specifically learned Rust so I could make a better Photo app. Sadly, time has shelved that project like many others, but man I would like be for someone to solve the iPhone -> Laptop photo management problem.
… and no, cloud backups? Not for > 400Gb thanks. All it takes is for Apple to kill your account and then ALL your family photos are gone. F that.
I use PhotoSync to sync all photos to MiniO s3 docker container on my desktop pc. The only issue is the initial upload that I slowly did over a week (only synced when charging etc). Works quite well as a iCloud replacement for photos. I use syncthings for anything else like my keepassxc files.
Yeah, I use PhotoSync to sync back to FileRun. FileRun places all files in a basic share, which I access by smb on-prem and via FileRun's webdav server elsewhere. When I'm at home, transferring over LAN direct to storage was the fastest option for offloading volleyball videos, which I can then promptly share with others without waiting for upload to a service like iCloud or OneDrive.
Why would Apple delete your photos, and why would your solution for storing them be more robust than Apple’s?
I rarely relate to issues people paint about Apple products. The Photos app is great, and moving stuff around between my MacBook and iPhone is seamless.
You’ve never heard of people getting locked out of their accounts? Or companies shutting down services? Apple is no different.
How many hundreds of gigs is your Apple Photo library? And have you used it long enough that you’ve had to bare the pain of an Apple Photo database upgrade?
> Even the camera quality could be improved with post-processing like upscaling and color correction, which have somewhat recently become much better.
Sorry, but this is the one feature I hate (not being able to turn off) on today's phones. All the wannabe HDR, noise reduction, upscaling, color corrections that make the pictures look plasticky and overly colorful and just plain kitsch when compared to the same scene taken with a 10-15yo pocket camera.
Agree. But the company also pays a large chunk of its services R&D and operations by bundling it with the hardware and have people pay upfront for it.
New hardware would not be needed for most of it, but then Apple would have to make every iOS user a fixed yearly fee for a generic package of "some services at our disclosure". And that's quite impossible to achieve and stay competitive...
Here’s the rub though: convincing customers to pay for something they used to think they got as part of the hardware package isn’t going to be easy.
People love the seamless integration of hardware, software, and services that Apple provides, but introducing a mandatory yearly fee would erode that goodwill pretty much instantly.
I think you hovered over something significant: yes, most of the "new features" of the new phones are software features … but the line between "what is software and what is hardware" may not be crystal clear to a lot of the population.
Imagine the effect of a TV spot touting a new OS feature on the new iPhone. Do I need the new phone to get that feature? As soon as you've asked the question, you're at the doorstep of "I wasn't thinking about it, but I will need to replace the battery soon ($$) and it's been getting slower …"
You may learn the feature is available in an OS update, but it's inconsequential: you've already rolled the idea of a new phone around and remember how nice it is to start fresh. This one may not get you, but next year's definitely will.
Some confusion around hardware -vs- software is key to draw people in.
> Imagine the effect of a TV spot touting a new OS feature on the new iPhone. Do I need the new phone to get that feature? As soon as you've asked the question, you're at the doorstep of "I wasn't thinking about it, but I will need to replace the battery soon ($$) and it's been getting slower …"
I’d say this works exactly once - Apple will get a one time hit out of customers upgrading to an AI enabled phone, which will have a SOC capable of running AI (customers don’t need to know what a SOC is).
For anything beyond that, the media will likely pick up that it’s not strictly necessary and you’ll already have pocketed a lot of the benefit from having your first AI integrated phone.
I've nursed my wife's SE along until this past week when we bought a used 13 Mini. She has small hands ( not exceptionally small, just small ) and the larger sizes just weren't appealing to her. I've replaced screens, even have a battery for it ready, but the lightning connector finally wearing out and impending End of Support made her upgrade.
You will get held back by software updates in ios then apps long before the device is useless. I have a few perfectly good iphones in a drawer like this. Can’t use any apps anymore.
Yep, Apple has made a lot of marketing around the concept of updates and all that jazz but the reality is that the primary beneficiary are them.
Even when you are potentially interested by features update there is always a weighting to be made about slowdowns or things that change that you wish didn't.
In the end I don't think updates should be much of a thing, apart from security updates. You should buy a device with a set of capabilities and it should stay mostly the same all its life.
And then we should make laws about the minimum amount of time a device has to be supported with its original software.
The problem with computer technology is that we always go with updates, just because we could even though we need to ask if we should. In some ways it's a problem the internet created, the expectation of always being connected to bring in new stuff.
I had no idea this was possible, but yeah, going to “battery health” in my Settings shows battery health is degraded, and provides a link to schedule a replacement.
Battery replacements are priced <100 CAD for for all supported Apple phones. In my opinion, it's a pretty good option given the support period these devices enjoy now.
I had two apple US$49 battery replacements both of my iPhone 8 phones before my wife and I jumped to a 14 pro max.
I preferred touchid over faceid. Sure, there was always the SE option, but if I was buying a newer phone then it was going to be new one, damn it.
What pushed the needle in the upgrade vs repair decision for me was wear concerns on the nand flash. I've encountered plenty of stories of flash failures after the 4th, 3rd or even 2nd battery replacement. I never found a way to get a meaningful health check for iphone flash lifetime but I really didn't want to find out the hard way.
That was in addition to 5G vs LTE. LTE in our area is a quagmire.
I went 8 -> 13 mini recently and I strongly preferred Touch ID also. It doesn’t require light, the right angle, or a button press to confirm the intentionality of actions like a purchase.
But yeah overall it’s bonkers how similar the two devices are for purportedly between four generations apart.
Main issue for me in bed is failure to identify face smooshed into pillow. Raise head and unlock fine, even in full dark. Still requires neck muscle actuation that wasn't required with touch id.
Depending on where you sit on the conscience/security sliding scale you might want to considering turning off “Require attention”. That solves 90% of glasses/sunglasses related issues.
I do it all the time, fwiw, but my girlfriend cannot get it to work reliably. So your mileage might vary, but in my experience ambient light does not matter.
No, but for me it often fails when outside in bright sunlight, especially if the sun is low in the sky, as it often is in my latitude. Perhaps it might work better if I try training it on my squinting face.
Sort of the same experience in some specific lighting conditions.
What I found out though is that it's because in such lighting conditions I don't blink, compounded by the fact that if it doesn't unlock I unconsciously keep on not blinking to... see it hopefully unlock! So when this happens I consciously blink and it unlocks immediately, which is kind of cognitively dissonant.
Unknown if that would apply to your situation, YMMV but I thought I'd throw this one out.
There's also a kind of annoying recurring situation where I want to look at stuff on the lock screen but don't want to actually unlock...
I do wish they'd have reintroduced Touch ID in the camera control button sensor (or just in the power button, as for the iPad Air) but I guess cases would cause a problem.
To me the best iPhone was the iPhone 7, with TouchID but no physical button. If I wanted, there was a completely silent mode that didn't have that "clunk" when you press that button.
I preferred the physical button. I hate the feel of "fake" clicks.
I used to think I wanted FaceID over TouchID, because TouchID would regularly fail to recognise my thumb if I'd recently washed my hands, or was a little dehydrated. Anything that affected my skin tension.
In practice, FaceID fails way more often, and also "resets" (the phone decides it wants a passcode before it'll trust my face again) multiple times a day. TouchID almost never did that.
You can disable "Require Attention for Face ID" under Settings > Face ID & Passcode. That makes Face ID far more reliable and consistent in my experience (assuming you're okay with the reduced security tradeoff).
If you have an Apple Watch, you can also configure it to unlock your phone automatically when an obstruction prevents Face ID from recognizing your face.
I'd never go back to Touch ID. Face ID works in the dark, at pretty much any angle, and requires zero interaction.
> You can disable "Require Attention for Face ID" under Settings > Face ID & Passcode. That makes Face ID far more reliable and consistent in my experience (assuming you're okay with the reduced security tradeoff).
I have had it in this mode for years. It's still very fragile and/or skittish regarding making me use my passcode. Intuitively, it feels like about 10-15% of logins require the code rather than my face.
> If you have an Apple Watch, you can also configure it to unlock your phone automatically when an obstruction prevents Face ID from recognizing your face.
That's a very expensive solution.
> Face ID works in the dark, at pretty much any angle, and requires zero interaction.
Yeah, my experience is very similar. Unlike the other replier I don't think there was much gained with FaceID in the end, especially with that stupid notch would made their remove useful information. Also considering the added cost and the even worse repairability than TouchID it's not a very good deal for the consumer.
Especially since it makes many operations a 2-step process when it was much smoother before; like for example Apple Pay where you find yourself looking at your phone like an idiot instead of doing it all in a single movement.
When my girlfriend saw the new camera button, she thought Touch ID had been added to the new iPhone, just like on her iPad mini. She got super excited for a moment, and I felt bad having to tell her that the new button doesn’t have Touch ID.
I feel the same way. If there’s one feature I miss, it’s toichid.
On the other hand, my parents, who are older, find Face ID to be a lifesaver since their fingerprints have mostly worn out.
I switched to Samsung partly because of the lack of Touch ID. Face ID was annoying, it didn't work well with masks (even with the special option turned on), it didn't work well in the morning when I'm lying in bed, it didn't work well when I was carrying my son in a carrier because the angle was wrong.
My memories of Android phones are bad enough that I can’t imagine actually switching back over this feature — there’s just way too much else I appreciate about the Apple ecosystem. But respect to you!
I'd say it's significantly better... I did a brief stint with android a long time ago but didn't like it, but now I've been using it for 3 yearsish and I actually get annoyed when I use my wife's iphone. There's a lot to like from F-Droid, the fact that the quick settings menu is better (just a recent example, you long press on the hotspot button you get sent to the settings showing you the hotspot password),...
Yeah, I think the hardware has improved so much that now the more complexe software can now be much more useful.
This is what Apple has missed in my opinion; the iPhone is no longer a no-nonsense, simple as it gets, with a strict selection of features (both hardware and software) to meet a palatable price point, device that it once was.
But then in comparaison to modern Android it feels like at the same time it is too complicated but also missing a lot of options/features/freedom.
Apple is working hard to add all kinds of "missing" features and complexity all over the place, all while raising the price of the device as much as possible. But in the end, what kind of client will be satisfied with this approach but noy with an Android?
Not a whole lot I believe.
I’m not saying you’re making the wrong move, but if you’re willing to go with a carrier like ATT, you can get $1000 trade-in value for that iPhone 13 Pro towards a new iPhone 16 Pro. You can even just buy an unlocked iPhone 12 off of eBay (for about $250) and get the same $1000 trade-in credit for you son. There are some caveats. For example, the credits are paid out evenly over 24 months, but if you plan to keep it for 2 years, you basically get a $250 iPhone 16 Pro.
Again, it might not be the right decision for you, but I thought you might like to be aware of the option.
I've tended to buy iPhones that are 2 or 3 generations old from eBay and Swappa for my family and use Mint or Tello for cheap cellular service. Our costs might be $350 for a phone and $100 - $150 per year for service.
We do get them a nice new phone when they graduate high school.
I consider that state of the art and brand new. I just inherited an iPhone XS and the battery is at 91%. I figure I can go at least another 3 years. For reference I was using a Oneplus 3T which is still going strong.
I have that same phone and have been using it now for six years, and according to the battery health in the settings, the battery is still in good shape, there’s no notice of it being degraded.
I used the same OnePlus 3T that I bought used, until it was stolen. Would have probably considered a new OnePlus but all their models were too big and expensive at the time, so went Pixel 7 near the end of the cycle. Even though I've been a mac user for about 12 years, iPhones have never made it into the realm of consideration.
It is indeed the most comfortable of the phones in the last decade perhaps. I am still rocking it. Recently my battery died and they replaced it but that battery too wouldn’t charge for hours and then would charge by a trickle. They said they’d just replace my phone so now I have a brand new XS max ready for another 5 years.
I do at least one battery replacement on all my iphones. It extends the life by years IMO. I'm currently coming up on 5 years with my current phone and it's still on the first battery. Seems iPhone battery tech has gotten better.
Same same, 12 mini here (with small battery), still going strong, but I have to say, I have chargers everywhere and when traveling I grab one of my Makita batteries with the USB cap which can charge it 6-7 times (5 Ah). So honestly I wouldn't know how long the battery actually lasts, I suspect less than a full day, or just about a day.
Battery is at 78%, as Apple says: Degraded considerably...
I hope to get it a new bat when I goes to my son in a few years. Really hope the new SE models are the mini form factor...
It has, they don't intentionally ruin your battery when you plug it in at night now at least.
It's pretty common knowledge that most (not all) batteries shouldn't be charged past 80%. Which isn't really true either, but it has to do with voltage going up when the battery gets hot, meaning overvolting your battery and causing bad things to happen.
I'm disappointed in my Fairphone 4 not having an option to limit charge to 80%, though the battery is very replaceable.
I pay very little attention to features on phones, especially things like improved cameras, but I finally upgraded my iPhone X to an iPhone 15 (one of my kids needed a phone). I've noticed that I've been able to take some stunning pictures out of planes when flying, as well as low-light photos.
I agree that even when they aren't explicitly highlighted, they do make a substantial difference, especially when comparing models over a span of a few years.
your grandma is certainly a small minority. I am a software developer and i barely know or care about most features on my ios phone. If my apps are not slow and require me to update and my battery is good, i have no reason to get a new iphone. Apple knows it since they require their apps to be updated every year so that it won't be supported on older devices.
By design, 1Password always makes you re-authenticate every time you lose focus on the app. But Face ID (or Touch ID) makes reauthenticating a lot less painful.
Setting FaceId is the first step, but you can also decide how often you have to reenter your password for reauthentication, or just so you don’t forget it. Directly beneath the face-id option.
Not exactly - you can lose focus without a problem
Recently 1Password has change on IOS (and I assume Android) to ask every two weeks for the password even if you use FaceId/TouchId - it says so on the app. This is probably what the poster was complaining about - I agree it is a nuisance.
For macOs and Windows it asks for the password every time the screen saver or sleep happens.
My grandma is 80-ish old and she watches youtube, tiktok, reads “google”, does banking, e-shopping (a lot), messengers, puzzles. All that on a serious level.
When she visits friends and tells stories, they always lament that they refused to learn “these computers”. She’s around 6 years into her tablet which I brought her spontaneously. She collected questions (we write everything down as a rule) and I had to find the way to manage the learning complexity at each visit.
Don’t look at age, just go and buy it for them. With a little help they’ll figure it out just fine.
That's so cool! I had no idea about universal copy/paste and I struggle a lot with one time codes across devices since I don't have universal iMessage set up for privacy reasons. I usually just send them to myself via telegram for simplicity.
Significantly less secure at that. I imagine GP has iMessage disabled on their computer because other people use their computer, and they don't want iMessages/SMS going anywhere other than their phone.
Well, Telegram is by definition not as a secure as iMessage. Telegram messages are by default not encrypted on the server. Even when it is encrypted on the server, telegram has the keys and can decrypt it.
Telegram isn't as private as iMessage, but that doesn't mean it's not as secure. Security-wise, exploiting iMessage is easier than exploiting telegram, since iMessages has some special privileged access. Security doesn't mean privacy.
This is true (one is talking about zero-click zero days, the other is talking about “privacy,” not sure if they mean privacy against Facebook or privacy against other users of their device).
But the comment that kicked off the thread was the one about privacy.
I think they mostly targeted font/image/url parsing which are used across the OS. iMessage was somewhat privileged at some point in the back but was compartmentalized later and media processing was the only escape, but that’s out of process now too I believe.
This kind of proves the point? Presumably your mother didn't buy the latest phone for "continuity" or camera improvements. The features and additional hardware improvements might be noticeable after being used, but are they driving sales to people who aren't tech enthusiasts?
> "Ground-Breaking" New Magnet Free of Rare Earth Metals Developed Using Machine Learning
Would've been a more accurate, but less click-baity title, that didn't imply the existence of an artificially intelligent entity developing something by itself. Human researchers used machine learning to comb through many possibilities and find one that fit the bill — which is still interesting and cool.
My first thought after seeing the end of the video was "why is this video flipped?" until I realized that it was only the train that was "upside down".
I do think this modified scenario makes the solution much clearer. At the same time, I also think that it feels like a significantly-enough different scenario from the original that saying the two scenarios have the same probability then becomes the non-intuitive part. The act of revealing what's behind the second door seems like it should change the probability from 1/3 (one door) vs. 2/3 (one of two doors) to 1/2 (one door of the remaining unopened two) vs. 1/2 (one door of the remaining unopened two, since one was "eliminated").
It's amazing how even seeing the probabilities written out, or running simulations, doesn't really make it easier to truly understand the result.
Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).
I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.