This is Technology Bytes, episode 134, for September 28th, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So this week I’m back on the Apple event talking about the iPhones 17 and the iPhone Air.
In the iPhone 17 world, you get the standard iPhone 17, some people call it the iPhone 17 nothing, which is a bad word because it’s a great phone.
You get the two Pros, the Pro and the Pro Max, and then you also get the iPhone Air, which doesn’t carry the 17 number, yeah, maybe for reasons that are important, it may not be something that happens every year.
So just a couple things, I’m just going to run through some of the specs.
The brains of the system on the Pros is an A19 Pro chip and also in the iPhone Air, while the standard iPhone 17 just comes with the A19.
Again, super powerful processor, probably more than most of us use when we use our iPhones.
The other thing that they’ve changed this year is they’ve changed the Pro versions and the standard iPhone to an aluminum unibody construction, I think they call it.
The Air, because it’s so thin, still uses titanium, but I think the aluminum was there for more heat control, and they actually, for the first time, have what they’re calling kind of a liquid-cooled iPhone, so I guess that’s been around before.
I never really pay attention to other phones at all.
So as it goes, sizes, you know, they’re huge phones.
The Pro Max has a 6.9-inch screen, the Pro is 6.3, the Air is 6.5, and I think the iPhone standard is also 6.5.
So big phones all the way around.
No one’s making a small phone anymore, as far as I know.
So one of the things that sets the iPhone apart, well, not really.
Everybody has good cameras, but the camera is often what is talked about on the iPhone, not so much the phone part.
It’s kind of funny that it’s not called an iCamera and it comes with a phone, but, you know, naming conventions.
But in the world of the iPhone 17, the standard comes with two lenses, the Pros come with three lenses, and the iPhone Air comes with just a single lens.
Now, they’re all 48-megapixel sensors, and so they do some photo magic, and I don’t know.
I’m not fully up on how they do it with the optical telephotos and those kind of things.
And also the macro version, which I think on the macro photography only comes on the Pro versions.
But you get anywhere from, you know, 0.5x, so that’s kind of the wide angle, up to 8x telephoto on the Pro versions.
And those are optical numbers, and I think on the Pros you can go up to like 40x digital.
I’ve never really liked the digital version of Zoom, but I see a lot of people use that, my family included.
So I think there’s some magic with how they’re cropping the 48-megapixel to call it an 8x optical.
It’s almost like as good as 8x optical.
I’m not sure, and I fully don’t understand that camera system.
But they have made improvements.
The 40x digital is like almost double what was available before on the 16.
And so it’ll be interesting if I get to have one of these phones to see what that camera difference is.
From what I’ve read and what I’ve heard, one of the big things that Apple did was changing the selfie camera.
Now this is across the board.
It doesn’t matter what new iPhone you get.
All of them have this 48-megapixel center stage camera.
So I’ve used the center stage function in calls on my computer before, and it’s kind of cool when someone sits down beside me how the camera looks like it just shifts so that both people are in the picture fully.
And that’s really what center stage does.
And so what happens with this, it’s a square sensor, so that’s new.
What it does is as more people are entered into the photo and the camera recognizes how many faces, it just automatically changes the format of the photo without changing the orientation of the phone.
So with the phone and what we would call a portrait instead of the landscape orientation, you can still get a landscape selfie out of that because of the way they can crop on the square sensor and still get a great photo.
These are what I’ve seen, what I’ve read, but not what I’ve personally experienced.
The other thing you get is dual capture video.
I’m not sure why this can’t come to other versions of the iPhone.
In fact, I think it’s there with third-party camera systems and even a little bit different how it works.
But with the new iPhones, you are able to capture simultaneous video from the selfie cam and from the back cameras.
And basically what that does is it allows you to capture a reaction of people to something that is happening out in front of them.
And so, I don’t know, it’s an interesting thought.
I’ve heard journalists talk about being able to record two sides of a conversation without having to have two cameras, so that’s maybe something cool.
But also, again, only what I’ve read, not personally experienced.
Other things in the video mode are the video ability to capture videos.
Oh, I forgot, I’m going to go backwards.
The screens have this ceramic shield or whatever, so they’re supposed to be super strong, plus everything gets ProMotion, which is the 128 hertz.
And so, that is new and that happens across all the iPhones.
The screens, as always, are very good.
Always making them stronger is a good thing.
I don’t use a case on my phone, so the stronger it is, the better off I am.
And I also didn’t cover the scratch gate or whatever.
The new aluminum bodies may be scratched easier than the titanium.
But, I don’t know, I guess I’ll have to see if I get one.
But at the moment, a lot of people that I listen to that have the new one are not paying any attention to that.
So back to video capture, so they’ve got like ProRAW video.
I thought they had that before, but there’s some differences there in the version that it captures and the rate, the frame rate at which it captures, and that makes a big difference if you’re like a professional videographer.
I just read last night that they’ve used iPhones to do the Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV+.
I think I’m going to have to check that out.
It’ll be interesting to see how that looks.
And then they have something called Genlock, which allows you to use multiple iPhones in a multi-camera shoot through a given, you know, in this case maybe a Blackmagic dock of some kind, that allows the audio and video to be perfectly synced when you’re recording, so you don’t have to try to match it up in the post-processing of that video.
I don’t understand that at all.
All I know is, while many people think it’s just a small upgrade in this year’s iPhone, it always has some major things.
I mean, going through the processor changes to the screen changes to the metal changes, Apple’s always putting a lot of work into what their phone does.
And as always, even though mine is only a year old, I always want the new one.
Not sure I’m going to get it, but today my wife has agreed to go to the Apple Store with me.
She’s agreed that if the price is right, she would not be against using my massive iPhone 16 Pro Max against her iPhone 14 Pro.
I’d still like to get her an upgrade in case Apple Intelligence actually makes a difference at some point, so she would have that capability.
And so we’ll see what happens.
Maybe trade my Apple Watch Ultra 2 for an Ultra 3.
At one point I was thinking it’d be fun to have both because I’m a two Apple Watch person, but that seems not very likely.
And probably don’t have the money to get the AirPod Pro 3, although with that purchase my wife would have a good set of AirPods as well.
So we’ll see what happens.
Fingers crossed.
Wallets maybe need to be tightly closed when I go to the Apple Store, but we’ll see when we get there.
Well that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together, taking another bite of technology.
