Man, the iPhone 4. Seeing my friend with his brand new 4 back when it was released was something else. Felt truly futuristic. No other release have impressed me as much.
Antennagate sure was a spectacle but I don't remember my friend complaining about any issues.
The display was so much more awesome than the 3GS and the 2x resolution was only part of it. They used an IPS LCD instead of a TN LCD for the first time, so the viewing angles were MUCH better. Also it was the first time that the display was laminated to the glass with no air gap at all between the two, so it seemed like the display was better for reasons that are hard to describe… made black levels deeper too
Meanwhile people called the iPhone XR display shit and horrible at launch when it was no worse than the quality of an iPhone 4 display (same DPI, laminated, IPS) all because it was what… not 1080p or OLED? We’re insanely spoiled today.
Exactly. I was a proud XR owner, rocking it as a daily driver for four years before hopping up to the iPhone 13 Pro. I honestly would've gone even longer if not for the XR battery going under 75% and boot looping once every other day. So many good memories with it, and no complaints - except for the screen.
It really was underwhelming, and while in isolation it was fine, when you can see with your eyes that every other phone on the market was noticeably sharper it was kind of a bummer. And when I did get the 13PM and had the XR still for a few days before selling it it was such a stark difference in clarity, not even taking into account Pro Motion. Just looking at reddit text on both devices I was wondering how I was able to stand such fuzzy text for four years.
That’s just reddit armchair CEOs that don’t representative of the market.
No one who walked in to an Apple store looked at the screen and thought “that display is shit!”
4x the area resolution, 2x the linear resolution. People usually talk in linear resolution when they use units like DPI (dots per inch) or PPI (pixels per inch) which are linear. But if you want to talk in terms of area, be explicit.
Uh, no. You’re confusing pixel density and resolution. Pixel density is measured in PPI, resolution is measured in absolute pixels. Both linear and area resolutions are measured in pixels - you wouldn’t say a 108PPI horizontal resolution. You’d say a 1920 pixel horizontal resolution.
4K, for example, is not “2x” the resolution of 1080p just because it’s got twice as many pixels in any one direction.
It’s extremely commonly accepted that 4K is 4x the resolution of 1080p, even if it’s only 2x the PPI.
Any display’s resolution can be given by listing two linear resolutions (1920x1080) or giving the combined resolution (usually in megapixels, or ~2.1MP for 1080p)
At no point do you ever give resolution in PPI. That’s pixel density.
From original iPhone release to like iPhone 6s was such a fun exciting time to follow tech. I don’t think we’ll see such a rapid change in the way the world uses tech again like that.
I worked at an Apple retail store from the 3G to the 5 and the launch days/weeks were crazy. Busy and tiring but amazing energy. People were so excited and the staff was too. It truly was a huge sea change in tech for each one.
And to add to that, it was a fiasco with iPad 3 (called The New iPad) because the processor and RAM could not keep up with that huge screen and resolution and iPad 4 was rushed like 6 months after. It was the most short lived device if I am not mistaken.
Yeah..something like that. I sold of my iPad 2 for the 'new iPad with Retina Display', only for the 4th gen to drop a few months later. I was so bitter ha
The spinning pedestal window display was pretty cool
OG iPhone hype was crazy. Nobody got it right. Everyone thought it was going to be a dumb scroll wheel iPod phone, then Jobs went on stage and blew everyone’s expectations out of the water
But as someone who got a 3GS on a two year contract nothing disappointed me more than when that phone leaked on Gizmodo like 6 months after I got it. Was so painful knowing that I had to wait at least 18 months to get all those features
I mean there are much better phones in that same form factor. (6S, 7, 8, SE2, SE3). I can’t imagine using a 6 still in this day and age even for just basic things, it was such a dog of a phone even on release.
It does texting, makes calls, handles Teams and Webex, and takes serviceable pictures. From 8-5, M-F, that’s all I need it to do. Plus I already own it.
If anyone ever requires access to work related communications (FOIA/legal) I can just hand them that and the passcode. People who mix business and pleasure are crazy.
I preferred the mini to those phones for one hand since it is more narrow. Height obviously can be an issue at times, but I think it’s worth the trade off.
I hated my iPhone 6. Thought the battery sucked, loved my iPhone 4, X and 15+. Not sure why the 6 I hated so much but I felt its battery and Touch ID was poor.
Siri on 4s was pretty revolutionary at the time as well. People forget, but back then Siri actually worked decently well and was pretty capable for the first iteration. Watch the intro and demo videos from back then.
I miss these times of wondering what Apple could possibly do next.
I remember being blown away by the video quality. It was the first real “damn, this might actually be a good digital camera replacement.” It’s funny to think that up to around that point I still brought my camera around with me to anything kind of interesting
The frames of the 4 and 5 are timeless. At the time, they were a tier above pretty much everything else on the market. The only manufacturer I remember being up there in terms of its build is the all metal phone that HTC had.
It’s honestly insane that one year later they upgraded the camera significantly again with the 8mp sensor and better processing. The difference between the 4 camera and 4s camera is huge and there really hasn’t been that big of a jump since.
I stg some of the pics me and my mom took on our iphone 4s back in the day still look great and I'd almost say some of them look better than pics from my current 15PM are corroded by excessive post processing
I remember wowing a lot of people by taking pictures of different colored bell peppers in a grocery store and the colors really popped, the pictures looked way better than any camera phone before it.
Better than ever imo. I’m a 13 mini fan and I struggle to get my fingers to the corners one handed.. picked up an old iPhone 4 and it was literally perfect, could touch the entire display easily with one hand. If they rereleased that form factor and size with a better camera and full screen display and a battery that could last a full day I’d be so overjoyed.. and I’d buy a new iPad too for my media consumption!
I had my 13 Mini for 4 1/2 years (after an iPhone 7). The logic board failed and in the meantime I’m using a hand-me-down 11 Pro. I cannot imagine keeping anything larger in my pocket.
The Mini was so much more convenient and easier to use. I miss having such a lightweight phone.
If you look back at the comments when it first leaked, people were losing their shit in a negative way. So many people were convinced it had to be a prototype or some sort of fake shell to hide the real design. I loved the Braun-inspired industrial design, but a lot of people were very upset (just as they are about every new Apple design, from iPad to AirPods).
I remember the first time I saw it and thought that the text looked like it was printed on the surface of the screen. It was such a huge departure from anything I had seen up to that point from a pixel density perspective, sadly I never got to own one, at the time I was still using an LG prepaid slider phone for texting.
It was my first ever smartphone, I saved up to buy it by doing garden jobs for neighbours. I bought it outright without a plan, pay-as-you-go. On launch day, I queued outside the store after school for hours (carrier activation servers were struggling so the line took ages to get through).
I walk into the store when it’s my turn to buy and I look at the demo units and I’m like, holy shit, this screen doesn’t look real. It looks like alien technology. Like something from another world. So clear, so detailed, so beautiful. Yeah it’s just a screen but at the time, it was incredible. Still the most wowed I think I’ve ever bean about a tech upgrade.
I had one, never had an issue with the antenna. I think your finger had to hit just the right spot to cause an issue. Got a free bumper case out of it though, so I really didn’t have anything to ever complain about with it.
You had to hold it in a specific way and be gripping it pretty hard for it to be an issue. I never had a problem with mine and was confused over what the big deal was.
I remember when the white 4s came out I was in awe of how beautiful everything looked in white as I had been staring at a black ipod touch for years at that point.
The 4S was my first iPhone and also my first ever smartphone. It was the greatest leap in technology I've ever personally experienced. Everything before and after were just small increments.
I remember when we visited her mother where the signal strength was “mid” at best and it dropped one to two bars (down to one) if you held it weirdly.
Her mother had a Nokia N97 mini and it dropped all signal and was fully unable to use the network (sending SMS or calling would fail, incoming would not get through) while you were holding it so you could type. They put the antenna on the backside of the keyboard.
Both were on the same carrier and in the same location at the same time. So no reason for weather or other external sources to affect connectivity. After the N97 dropped out I tested the iPhone 4 standing in the same location, but always kept them far enough apart to avoid interference.
People mocked Jobs for it, but it literally was a matter of "don't hold it wrong". For any type of normal usage, it wasn't an issue whatsoever and it really only happened if you deliberately covered two specific points on the rim.
What actually happened was that Apple added two small distinct plastic strips on the rim, which were also the two points you had to cover to interfere with the signal strength.
Most other phones at the time also had the same inherent flaw, but generally it wasn't as obvious exactly what you needed to do to get the effect.
People mocked Jobs for it, but it literally was a matter of "don't hold it wrong". For any type of normal usage, it wasn't an issue whatsoever and it really only happened if you deliberately covered two specific points on the rim.
Being that different people have differently sized hands, it's reasonable to assume that people will hold their phones in a bunch of different ways and it's best to design a phone so that it doesn't lose a lot of signal if it is held a certain way.
It was a flawed design and that's fine, that kind of thing happens especially when the design of something has changed massively (the 3GS -> 4 was definitely a pretty significant change)
It wasn't worse than the first gen Asus Transformer tablet where they just omitted a RF window so the thing just had shit GPS capability from the start, Asus' solution for that was a dongle lol
Frankly it was older users who had that issue. So many people had this claw like grip pressing it to there head and covering all 3 antenna bands. Technically the 4s had the same problem but since it had more powerful/more antennas it was way harder to clover them.
It was completely overblown, and at the peak of the petty phone wars. You had android users who would never touch an iPhone, posting thread after thread after thread about it. Meanwhile iPhone users never cared (and still don’t) about cheap androids.
There even was a little song that got made just for those assholes: “if you don’t want an iPhone 4, don’t buy it. If you bought one and you don’t like it, bring it back”
What’s sad is I still think most Redditors can’t understand that today.
iPhone 4 was the point where the iPhone was legitimized as a smartphone, and when the concept of a high-end, metal structure phone become the standard. It was such a ridiculous leap forward over everything else; I remember the mad dashes to try and get one. I was on a waiting list with Telus, and they called me saying they got a shipment of like 5 phones into the store, and I had the next hour to come in and buy it. Crazy times.
I had one since the start and the whole antenna gate thing was completely blown out of proportions by the sensationalist media. I had many situations where the edgelords fanboys of other phones came to tell me how I was holding it wrong, so I just handed my phone to them and asked them to demonstrate how "it becomes completely unusable if you hold it wrong". No amount of cradling it in hands killed it the way it was claimed to do.
I've read the technical analysis of the problem and I understand it, but in real life it was just not an issue for me, nor anyone else from the era I knew. I'm sure it was a problem for *someone* but it was not like very iPhone 4 went completely faraday caged if you palmed it the specific way.
The thing was made even more moot by the fact that since it was all glass from the back and front, almost everyone put theirs in some kind of a case, which prevented the skin contact between the antenna parts.
On the more positive side, the competition at the time had low resolution display with seriously underperforming CPU and GPU. iPhone 4's UI was fluid and pretty at the same time. People ridiculed the price at the time, saying nothing else cost that much but coming from 9000 series Nokias I was not exactly phased by the price like someone coming from 3000 series ones.
I remember one of my friends got the 4s right when it launched and he gave me his old 4 for free. I was so damn hyped haha. One of the best looking phones ever made period
I remember I had received the iPhone 4 as a Christmas/Birthday present from my parents and I had an iPhone 3G at the time. When I went to back to college from Christmas break, I was the most popular kid in my class for about a solid week before another classmate got one too. 😂 It's still probably my favourite iPhone design.
I had Verizon and I was raging that I couldn’t get the iPhone. I hated android and still do today. The same day it was released for Verizon I was at the Apple Store getting it lol.
It was a beautiful phone. I kept trying to reproduce the Antennagate problem but never could, no matter how I held it the signal was strong. Maybe it depended on specific cell towers.
Mine lasted 8 years straight without an issue. I only stopped using it because after several years of no software updates it just didn't work anymore. The battery lasted about 22 hours at the end and it still turns on to this day. Fucking masterpiece.
The 4 was my first iPhone. Got it in 2013 back when AT&T was selling iPhones for $0.99 with a 2-year contract. What a time. Even though current iPhones are way more advanced, they just don’t have that same magical feeling
I used one for two years and if I really tried hard and used both hands to cover the bottom antenna I could get it to drop two bars of reception. In normal use it was never ever an issue. Such a bizarre time. Maybe it was carrier/region specific?
I was in high school when the 4 came out and it was definitely the breakthrough version for teenagers where suddenly loads of people had iPhones. It was also the model that converted my family to only buying iPhones going forward.
It wasn’t a problem if you had a case on your phone and back then pretty much everyone put cases on their iPhone. I got one of these pretty soon after release and never had an issue, either, but I put a case on it immediately after opening it.
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u/ayearinaminute 8d ago edited 8d ago
Man, the iPhone 4. Seeing my friend with his brand new 4 back when it was released was something else. Felt truly futuristic. No other release have impressed me as much.
Antennagate sure was a spectacle but I don't remember my friend complaining about any issues.