iPhone 17

[Bobby5280]

I do graphics work full time, but I'm stuck with Windows PCs due in part to some of the industry-specific software we use. In the signage and large format printing categories there is far more support on the Windows side than OSX.

There are things about Windows 11 that I dislike more than Windows 10 (or Win7 prior to that). Microsoft just loves to bury all sorts of things under extra layers of user interface trash rather than keep things simple. The Start menu is now more of a screen-hogging mess than ever. A recent update changed the list of applications into different grid tiles. It's like they're trying to bring back the crap from Windows 8. I just want a simple list of my applications with fly-out menus when necessary.

The mainstream graphics applications I use seem to work fine in Win 11 Pro. That's mostly Adobe Creative Cloud apps along with CorelDRAW. I have a copy of Affinity Designer 2, but I don't use it very often. I mainly have the app in case I receive any customer provided art files in .afdesign format. I haven't got around to downloading the new "free" version of Affinity Designer since Canva bought the company.

[Scott5114]

I do graphics work full time, but I'm stuck with Windows PCs due in part to some of the industry-specific software we use. In the signage and large format printing categories there is far more support on the Windows side than OSX.

I'm probably one of the few people in the universe that does full-time graphics work on Linux. It works well for us because we often need to convert graphics from one format to another in standardized ways (e.g. to convert a sign image in a vector format to a raster product preview image simulating the appearance of a finished sign with a drop shadow and a background). It makes sense to run a custom script to do that, rather than spend time clicking the same buttons in the same order over and over again. Linux is very good at making that easy to do (I think some of the same tricks we use are possible on OS X, but on Linux writing your own custom scripts is something the OS kind of just expects you to want to do, so it caters to that use case in a way which I don't think OS X does).

[Molandfreak]

Apple stopped its obsession with the number 10 and the Roman numeral X. Now all of its operating systems use the year of release like a model year.

Side question that nobody seems to know the answer to: since the iPad forked over to its own operating system, why not revert iOS to the old iPhone OS moniker? The iPod touch is no longer being produced...

[Scott5114]

Apple stopped its obsession with the number 10 and the Roman numeral X. Now all of its operating systems use the year of release like a model year.

Ubuntu has done that forever (its very first release was 4.10, which came out in 10/2004).

[Bobby5280]

I'm probably one of the few people in the universe that does full-time graphics work on Linux. It works well for us because we often need to convert graphics from one format to another in standardized ways (e.g. to convert a sign image in a vector format to a raster product preview image simulating the appearance of a finished sign with a drop shadow and a background). It makes sense to run a custom script to do that, rather than spend time clicking the same buttons in the same order over and over again. Linux is very good at making that easy to do (I think some of the same tricks we use are possible on OS X, but on Linux writing your own custom scripts is something the OS kind of just expects you to want to do, so it caters to that use case in a way which I don't think OS X does).

A shop's work flow will often dictate the computing platform used.

A person who creates graphics work on a solo basis, never has to touch art files made by other people and doesn't have to send files to other companies to get certain things produced can pretty much use whatever software and computing platform he prefers.

Many graphics people get locked into using Adobe's software due to various factors present in multiple industry niches of the graphics industry. I handle a lot of brand assets from major companies; that stuff is almost always Adobe-centric. Some of those art files will "break" when taken outside an Adobe Illustrator or InDesign environment due to certain features/effects people bake into the artwork. The expensive RIP applications we use for large format printing all work better when fed PDF files from Adobe applications like Illustrator. I still have to keep CorelDRAW around since many other sign shops use it and we have many thousands of archive CDR files. Hardly any other applications can import CDR files and the few that do (such as Inkscape) usually do a terrible job at it.

Apps like Illustrator and CorelDRAW can run scripts or macros. I don't know if Affinity Designer can do so.

[Plutonic Panda]

Apple stopped its obsession with the number 10 and the Roman numeral X. Now all of its operating systems use the year of release like a model year.

Side question that nobody seems to know the answer to: since the iPad forked over to its own operating system, why not revert iOS to the old iPhone OS moniker? The iPod touch is no longer being produced...

Idk why but personally the X was my favorite iPhone.

[Plutonic Panda]

I didn't feel like making a new thread on this. I'm probably gonna purchase the iPhone 18. If I don't notice it getting better, I'm probably just gonna end up switching back to a flip phone. I can't stand android at all.

But I upgraded to iOS 27, and I've noticed what I talked about in my original post, the speech to text function getting noticeably worse. Has anyone else noticed that, or is it just me?

[fwydriver405]

I didn't feel like making a new thread on this. I'm probably gonna purchase the iPhone 18. If I don't notice it getting better, I'm probably just gonna end up switching back to a flip phone. I can't stand android at all.

But I upgraded to iOS 27, and I've noticed what I talked about in my original post, the speech to text function getting noticeably worse. Has anyone else noticed that, or is it just me?

I couldn't tell if Dictation got better or worse in the iOS 27.0 betas (Beta 1 thru Release Candidate), but on a related note, the new Siri AI seems to be taking longer to respond to basic tasks, such as asking for sports scores, the weather, and turning on smart home functions.

This is on iPhone 16 Pro which doesn't support many of the advanced features such as on-device processing and upgraded Dictation - those require iPhone with an A19 Pro chip or later, iPad with an M4 chip or later and 12 GB of RAM, Mac with M3 or later, or Vision Pro (M5).

[elsmere241]

Back in the analogue TV days, PAL is a format used in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe, one of three major analogue colour TV standards, the other two being NTSC and SECAM.

North America, Japan, and parts of South America use NTSC. By default (at least phones sold in the United States and Canada from what I've seen), this setting is disabled. Enabling PAL will allow you to record at 1080p25, 4k25, 4k100 on the native iOS camera. Most people in North America can just leave this setting disabled unless they need to record at the mentioned resolutions for some reason. (50fps recording requires the use of a third party application)

It's my recollection that Italy didn't have color television until they adopted PAL until about 1970.  It took so long because they argued all that time over whether to with PAL or SECAM.

[formulanone]

iPhone 14: I turned off the HEIC compression; it makes a photo look smooth so as long as you don't crop or zoom-in. One you take a closer look, then everything has the pattern of swirled dog fur. Back to JPEG and turned off the Live Photo features for me.

On the plus side, I'll be the first to admit the long exposure feature is a nice touch.

[RoadWarrior56]

Responding to the iPhone dictation comment, I have an iPhone 17e, and I have used Siri dictation to text message for several years, especially when driving, and it basically sucks.

However, since I installed iOS 27 on my phone last Friday, it is not perfect, but it is clearly much better than any of the prevous versions, and the 17e is new enough to let the A.I. help Siri do a better job.  It doesn't misintrepret my own pronounciation as much as it used to, and it uses more punctuation in the texts it generates.  I am very pleased so far. And no, I don't have a thick reginoal accent that is  hard to understand.  I sometimes talk too fast if I am excited, but my formative years were spent in southwestern Indiana and I basically talk like a midwesterer with a slight tinge of southern.