I didn’t get organized to order my iPhone 18 Pro Max until 8:09 am, a full nine minutes after the start of ordering. To get in touch with my feminine/2SLGBTQQIA+ side, I ordered the new light blue color. (“All of us have a homosexual part of 25 per cent, which I also have,” Silvio Berlusconi told the crowd. “The only thing is that I, after a profound examination, have realised that my homosexual part is lesbian.”) Because I don’t want to fight with our AI overlords for SSD, I ordered the stripped 256 GB device. This should be one of the most popular combinations and yet Apple promises that it will be delivered on Friday, i.e., Day 1 of deliveries with no lining up or camping out.
For previous generations of phones, wouldn’t someone who was this late to the party have had to wait beyond Day 1 for delivery? ChatGPT:
iPhone 15 Pro Max (2023): Within the first hour, many Pro Max configurations had slipped to October or November, and some buyers who finally got through around the 10-minute mark were already seeing delayed delivery.
Update at 10:28 Eastern time (2.5 hours after ordering began): the same phone won’t be delivered until October 6-13:
Related:
Everyone is waiting to order the Duo 😂
I don’t want a Duo. I NEED a Duo.
Almost like prices & wages moved in opposite directions for the last 50 years, with credit filling the gap.
If I want to simplify (decomplect) my life, should I get an iPhone. Will have to get a Mac too though.
Been an android user all my life but my phone is dying time to change.
Want to assimilate more into America if that makes sense. And make my life easier. I’m living alone now can’t handle all this extra complexity
The good news is that you don’t need a Mac in order to use an iPhone. In fact, the typical owner may not even own a computer anymore! I personally use Windows 11 for desktop and notebook machines and iPhone for smartphone. I lose some convenience, e.g., being able to rearrange the iPhone screens from a computer, but everything works fine. I use Dropbox to sync the photos to my Windows C: drive, but iCloud for Windows also works.
The bad news is that I don’t think that iPhone, contrary to Apple’s glorious advertising, is simpler than Android. In fact, if the iPhone is doing something that you don’t like you’ll probably have to ask ChatGPT or Gemini to help. So if you already know how to use Android I think it makes sense to stick with Android. Some Android phones actually have better camera hardware than Apple’s, though maybe they aren’t widely available in the U.S. The Google Pixel is rated exactly the same as the best current iPhone for camera quality at https://www.dxomark.com/smartphones/#sort-camera
Where I think that Apple has the edge is in the camera software for real-world photographic situations. Maybe Google has caught up at this point, though. I haven’t tried a Pixel phone lately.
Of course. Or at least logic would say so.
RAM prices are way up, and many other chips; the bill of goods inflation means Apple is charging more for the same products, Pro and Pro Max.
They didn’t even bother to release a basic iPhone 18 — a sign they know it would be a very tough sell at these nosebleed prices (or, equivalently, that they’d take a bath if they offered it at an attractive price because they’d have to subsidize the purchases).
None of this is Apple’s fault. But for those of us with working iPhones in hand, why would we pay inflated prices to upgrade?
Historically these moments of component inflation inevitably are followed by a crash. So the consumer must ask, why pay today’s higher prices if it feels certain there will be a price crash on RAM and other chips once the capacity build out happens (and as speculatively funded demand curtails just as the new factories come online).
If you want to compete with OpenAI, Antrhropic, Google, and Meta for chips by all means buy a new iPhone now. I’ll stay on the sidelines!
Ryan: You don’t think the claimed camera upgrade is worth paying for? https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2026/09/09/iphone-18-pro-camera-improvements/
(since the trade-in value of an iPhones each year, I don’t think the cost of doing annual upgrades with trade-ins is all that much higher than doing upgrades-with-trade-in every two years; maybe ChatGPT can do the math since it is already proven to be better at math than human math professors… $414/year for annual, $345/yr for every 2 years, $281/yr for every 3 years. So the cost of having Apple’s latest camera at all times is vastly lower than the cost of having Canon’s, Sony’s, or Nikon’s latest camera at all times!)
For us non-camera experts, how do iphone cameras measure up vs. high end Canon, Sony, Nikon? Always wondered.
iPhone has a tiny sensor, which means that image quality in low light is terrible compared to an APS-C or “full frame” (the old 24x36mm size of 35mm film). On the other hand, the iPhone has much better software and, therefore, the images straight from the phone in medium or bright light are often much better than from the pro/huge/heavy cameras. An expert Photoshop user who spent 15 minutes with the RAW file out of a Sony/Canon/Nikon could probably get the image to where the iPhone started, in terms of contrast, white balance (compensation for the color temperature of the ambient light), etc. But for people who don’t have infinite time and infinite skill, the phone camera is often better except in specialized situations (fast-moving sports, birds, etc.).
philg – maybe I don’t love my kids enough but, no 🙂 every time I upgrade (3-5 years) I am delighted with the camera improvements. I am sure this year’s are solid. But for the price of one of these I could rent a car in nyc for a whole week and pay half the charge on a cabin upstate. Not quite a whole trip but not bad!
Due to the continuing depreciation on the older phone, though, you don’t save $1000+ out of pocket by not buying a new one. As noted above, “$414/year for annual, $345/yr for every 2 years, $281/yr for every 3 years” The difference is $133/year by keeping to a 3-year upgrade cycle rather than a 1-year upgrade cycle. So that’s a couple of days of car rental per year.
Maybe that’s not the correct analysis because you also save about 8 hours of time by not upgrading! So if Congress imposes my dream $100/hour minimum wage then everyone who refrains from upgrading will save a huge amount and federal/state/local governments will collect a lot more in tax revenue (not state/local governments here in income-tax-free Florida, though).
Good point about depreciation. I just checked and I seem to average about 4 years. Since I’m holding an iPhone 14 I suppose it will be time soon. If my wife asks about the splurge I’ll tell her an MIT PhD said it was basically free.
Interesting about your 2.5 hours later info… I was not about to get up at 2:00 AM HST to do my pre-order and when I pre-ordered while eating my breakfast I was still able to get a Sept. 18 delivery.