iPhone 11 Thoughts On the iPhone 11 in a post-iPhone 12 world...

[Blue Quark]

Hello Folks!

I'm a brand new member here, and outside of my introduction post, this is my first real message (and thread).

I did do some searching because I'm not a fan of repetitive posts, and since I didn't really find any thread titles suggesting what I'm going to ask about, I decided to create this thread. If anyone here has seen this kind of thread before and feels I would be better advised to review it and post there, then so be it. Oh, and thank you in advance.

Anyhow, very short background to this. I've been a GNU+Linux user for quite a number of years. Back in the day, I was in the tech support industry. Well, back in the day I did quite a number of different things, but nevertheless I've been in my own world and working in jobs which are not tech industry related, and earlier this year I decided to get back into the industry I still kind of have a passion for. With that bent of mind, I bought a new computer and I (kind of, sort of) dual boot it with Linux Mint and Windows 10.

In parallel with that, of late I've really started to get a bit tired of the situation in the Android world. I think the single biggest issue I've got with it is what they call "fragmentation". That is, what version and what point release of Android you have, and what security updates you get, and whether or not you can update it at all (and for how long) depends on the hardware manufacturer and/or the carrier if you have a carrier-provided phone.

So, the TL;DR of it is... I'm looking to buy an iPhone, and now that the iPhone 12 series is out, Apple's dropped the prices on the iPhone 11 series, so I'm seriously considering an iPhone 11 256GB. The U.S. price point ($749, €632) is within my price range. I want a decent amount of local storage. Also, as someone who's lived through the roll outs of 3G, of Sprint's abortive attempt to push WiMax as the 4G standard, and then the industry standard LTE's roll-out, I know good and solid and, frankly, local coverage is going to take a while. Besides, 4G LTE is plenty fast for my needs, so I'm not particularly obsessed about 5G.

Why am I posting this thread? Well, I'd like input from the community and see if there's a real, credible reason I should wait and get an iPhone 12 instead. Also, I'm kind of curious about two other things.

Unlike probably many of you, I don't own a Mac running the latest version of macOS, which means I'm still stuck in the land of iTunes on Windows 10. Does anyone know or has there been any discussion about Apple maintaining parity of support for being able move files back and forth between a computer and an iPhone, between macOS and Windows?

Secondly, I also make use of a number of self-created custom sound files for alarms, notifications, and ringtones. I've already been through the process I found for converting my materials into .m4r files. Is it still fully supported to add those into iTunes and move them across and then having direct access to them on the phone to pick for custom ringtones, notification sounds, etc.?

Again, thanks in advance to those who respond. I'm grateful for any and all insight you folks might have.

The Blue Quark

 

[Zazoh]

You have a few topics in your message. Like you, 5G didn’t doesn’t excite me. In fact, if LTE worked like it was supposed to, probably wouldn’t even need 5G in the industry.

I came from Pixel 4. Before that, used iPhone since iPhone 3. Had the Xr upgraded to the 11 last Friday. I went to Apple site and compared Xr / 11 / 12. With trade in, I’m getting 11 for $389. 12 wasn’t a big enough bump, but I did want the ultra-wide lens.

I’ve been around computers since 1980s. But! The only way this stuff really works anymore is to go all in. Forget the cables, forget the file collecting and syncing. Put everything in the cloud. Access everything from any device.

This will be hard for you. You like to do things the hard way. I did too, I was a Linux guy in a windows world. You like to tweak and configure and own the data. That era has kinda ended. Sure you can still do it, but it is a hobby at this point.

The way Apple is going is providing improvements to iCloud, moving away from Cables, see discussions on portless. And, allowing you to access all your data regardless of the device in hand, on disk.

But also, you are no longer tied to using Apple cloud, google has stuff and there are a score of others as well. You could even set up your own local cloud on your own network.

I don’t like the term future proof, but in my opinion, the future we are dealing with, with these devices, changes every 3 years.

 

[Blue Quark]

I’ve been around computers since 1980s. But! The only way this stuff really works anymore is to go all in. Forget the cables, forget the file collecting and syncing. Put everything in the cloud. Access everything from any device.

This will be hard for you. You like to do things the hard way. I did too, I was a Linux guy in a windows world. You like to tweak and configure and own the data. That era has kinda ended. Sure you can still do it, but it is a hobby at this point.

I don’t like the term future proof, but in my opinion, the future we are dealing with, with these devices, changes every 3 years.

If data storage / access is a tool, then I say one should use the best tool for the job at hand.

I make reasonably extensive use of Google's cloud storage and online office suite, along with Google Maps & Navigation, primarily for my job, and really only for myself personally when I'm doing a similar kind of task.

For example, I travel to different locations for my job, one a day, five days a week. I take the location's information for each day and build a series of Google Calendar events, which include the address. In this way, I simply get up in the morning, have breakfast, head out to my car, set up my phone, bring up the calendar event for that day, tap on the address, and then use Google's navigation app to guide me there.

I've taken the regional list of locations from my company's location list and used Google Maps to verify every single address in the region, enabling me to correct the many errant addresses they have (which they refuse to fix, btw). I also used Google Maps to preflight every location so that I have drive time and mileage from my home to all of them. This I then used to create a spreadsheet which makes extensive use of the VLOOKUP function so that I can build four report pages, one per week, out to one month in advance, so that I can build all these calendar events. However, I also have automated things so that I know exactly what mileage to put into the expense system. Come the end of the expense period, all I have to do from my phone is hit "submit" because I have already put everything in.

However, I also have weekly paperwork to file, so I created another tool based on the same database information and use it to generate a form layout-compatible copy-n-paste job so I never have to manually fill in the form. I just finish off entering the raw data I need to. This file, along with a couple others, lives in my Google Drive cloud, so that I can enter data as needed (or look things up) on my phone when I'm out and about, and likewise I can access it on my computer when I need to copy-n-paste the week into the Excel spreadsheet. So, instead of having to spend 10-20 minutes every week filling it out (as essentially is the case for all my co-workers) I can spend more like 2 minutes generating that week's form from a template, pasting in the data, saving it, and attaching it to an email to my boss.

To do that using ONLY local storage would be insane.

On the other paw (as my cat would no doubt meow) I have redundantly-backed-up local storage of all my own stuff, like photos and movies and music and other things, and while I don't necessarily mind having some of those things also in the cloud, there are things I will never put in the cloud for security reasons, and there's plenty of things which I simply wouldn't want in the cloud, like my movies and tv shows.

As far as just ports and/or portlessness itself goes, I can completely see the benefit. If you put no ports at all on the phone, and only had some kind of protected access for speakers to play audio, that means you would have a much easier time as the designer to make the thing waterproof. Every time you have a port somewhere, that's just so much more design work you have to undertake, and ultimately you can only protect the insides of a port just so much. Also (obviously) it results in a visually cleaner look.

Lately, I've been playing with iOS 14 on the various iPhone displays in Best Buy, Target, and Walmart, and there's two specific things I've noticed that I really like. First, you can really customize the desktop layout, and there's some really nice pre-canned layouts shown. They are as nice as anything I've ever seen on Android. The second thing is the button-less new UI (gestures... or whatever it is Apple calls it) system for switching between open apps, and closing out apps you're no longer using, and so forth, is so much better implemented than what I have on my Moto G Power (which, btw, I've tried using a few times, the latest of which was for one month solid) that on my Motorola, I turned it off and went back to the three UI buttons mode. But in iOS, I think I could much more easily stomach it.

 

[shady16]

Honestly the iPhone 12 is worth it for the Qualcomm modem alone over the iPhone 11’s intel modem you will get faster LTE and better reception over the iPhone 11 for that reason. My LTE speed almost tripled compared to my 11 pro max.

 

[Dejected]

In may opinion, iPhone 11 is good enough for now and no need for the 12..
iPhone 13 maybe is more promising since the rumors says it may have TouchID

 

[IsaacM]

iPhone 11 is still an amazing phone. It has the same amount of RAM as the iPhone 12 and the difference between A13 and A14 chips is negligible in real life use.

Only get the iPhone 12 if you really want an OLED screen, but keep in mind that the LCD on iPhone 11 is one of the best LCD's on a phone ever.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Last year’s phone doesn’t suddenly become less useful or obsolete. You will only find that mentality on forums like this one.

 

[Hyloba]

Following this thread because I plan on getting the 11 pro at Black Friday. At the moment the 12 or the 12 pro changes seem incremental at best, and I do love the bigger battery of the 11 pro. The only downside I have came across is the Intel modem of the 11 pro mentioned above. However, I have the iPhone XS at the moment and I believe it also has the Intel modem and I can’t say I’ve noticed it. Yes reception isn’t good everywhere but will the other modem really be that much of a difference? I wonder.

 

[Thoradin]

As a fellow user of Linux kernel based operating systems, who used Android until the beginning of this year. I’d say go for it, the 11 from what I’ve heard is a great phone.
I was an Android user for a long while, on and off from launch, but exclusively from around 3 years ago until January. I had grown tired of the disjointed ecosystem and lacking security updates and decided to try an iPhone in January. I started with the original SE, due to its cheap price and still being supported. I loved it that much I moved up to an XR in April and then again last week to the 12 Pro as I’m a photography lover and wanted the camera upgrades.
I can’t see any way back to Android for me now and if it hadn’t been for the move to night mode on all cameras I would have stayed with my XR quite happily, it may have been 2 year old hardware but it did absolutely everything I could ask for.
I do keep some files in iCloud and find that by far the best way of accessing them. My personal cloud system is a nextcloud server run from home with all my music and videos stored there with the iPhone has no problem accessing. My personal computer runs Arch and has a windows 10 VM, I have never needed at any point to connect up to my computer or it’s virtual machine for anything. It’s been that easy setting up and doing everything in other ways.
I can’t help with the custom sounds at all I’m afraid as I never have my phone leave the do not disturb mode where it only rings of certain numbers call me so the default time works fine in my case.

TLDR: Go for it and buy the 11, the 12 isn’t a huge upgrade and the 11 will serve you well for many years if you enjoy the iPhone way of life and decide to stay.

 

[shady16]

The difference for me was night and day I used to drop calls all the time on my 11 pro max and my LTE speeds were slow in comparison to how my 12 pro has been, I wouldn’t recommend 11 series at all, I’d recommend a iPhone X with a Qualcomm modem over the 11 even

 

[Joho2078]

I can change anything on my pre iohone 12

 

[rambo47]

Hello Folks!

...Also, as someone who's lived through the roll outs of 3G, of Sprint's abortive attempt to push WiMax as the 4G standard, and then the industry standard LTE's roll-out, I know good and solid and, frankly, local coverage is going to take a while. Besides, 4G LTE is plenty fast for my needs, so I'm not particularly obsessed about 5G.


The Blue Quark

I completely agree with your thoughts on 5G. I think we're a year away from meaningful 5G usability so if that's a person's main reason for upgrading to the iPhone 12 I think they're making a mistake.

 

[TechLord]

If 5g isn’t useful to you atm and you don’t care about oled then 11 is worth it.