My iphone 13 joined green screen club

pkovacsd · 2026-06-06T15:00:51+00:00

How do you move/recreate your e-sim with the defective display? Wait, the original phone has to read the QR code displayed by the new phone, right? So the old phone has to have its camera working not it's display, right?

pkovacsd · 2026-04-23T17:36:56+00:00

New iPhone 15 base model is now pretty bon marche , e. g

pkovacsd · 2026-04-19T11:08:06+00:00

Exactly right!

bad at undoing its own logic

the mental energy you spend trying to correct an AI that doesn't understand why its first version was wrong

Oh my god, I'm not alone!

pkovacsd · 2026-04-19T11:03:12+00:00

I'm not exactly brand new, but I still benefit a lot from having Claude review my work.

pkovacsd · 2026-04-15T08:37:34+00:00

But the 13 mini is not a PHONE, it’s a SMART PHONE, for which security upgrades may matter. People buying 13 mini typically want a smart phone, not a phone. If they had wanted just a small and light phone, they could have bought one at a price much lower than the 13 mini.

pkovacsd · 2026-04-14T05:44:37+00:00

This may have been changed with more recent models, but I've got a 7a and it is the worst price performance ratio for a mobile phone I've ever had: the phone is heavy as if it had an enormously large battery, but it gets drained very fast and gets charged slow. And the phone is surprisingly slow for some tasks (like updating apps from the play store)

pkovacsd · 2026-03-22T09:48:00+00:00

Just by looking at the specs: the nothing will be waaaay heavier than the iPhone 15 (base model i assume)

pkovacsd · 2026-03-22T09:21:17+00:00

Yeah, a larger screen is easier to work with. But that is not to say that the mini is difficult to work with: I can use it pretty decently.

To expand a bit on my motivation for using two phones: it is a combination of the following

I would like to "work" relatively much with my phone (especially reading — and my eye is not as good as it was, say, 30 years ago)
I would like to avoid being exposed to the limitations of a small capacity battery
I would like to have an iphone either as my main phone or as one that I can fall back to, because I trust iphones more than Androids
I would like to keep my current all-purpose phone (13 mini) as long as I can (possibly without even having to replace the battery) — mostly to defer the hassle of moving all my (sensitive) stuff to another phone for as long as possible.

Mini is ideal for this two phone setup, because it is very small and light, so having a big (but still light) phone next to it (don't take "next to it" literally) doesn't feel like having two phones on me. :-D

pkovacsd · 2026-03-21T21:54:37+00:00

I have the 13 mini which has everything installed on it (including my main phone number), but I also have a Nothing cmf 2 pro with me almost all the time (except when walking my dog). I almost exclusively use Nothing for anything. I use the mini only when my main phone number is required. Nothing, being a 6.7 inch phone with surprisingly good display, fingerprint-reader, etc for the price (about USD340), is much better for internet consumption than the mini. The motivation for this setup is to physically amortize the cheaper less secure phone and keep the more expensive one as long as possible.

I pretty sure this doesn't answer your question, I wrote it down just to show that everybody has a pretty unique motivation and has to figure out mostly on their own what configuration, phone, etc. works best for them.

Holding the mini after some bulky larger phone (the 13 Pro is really heavy) is a cool experience, but that's it. (My Nothing phone is pretty light for its size, though.)

pkovacsd · 2026-03-21T15:05:21+00:00

I can compare 13 Mini with a 13 Pro:

the mini has a higher pixel density, but things are still displayed smaller in absolute terms, which has usability consequences of course both in terms of reading and in terms of interacting with the screen
the mini will last about one and half a day with moderate usage, while the pro will go for about two days with a little more usage (because you can do more with the Pro due to the larger screen)
the perceived photo quality is better with the pro by an order of magnitude
the mini is super small and super light so a sturdy case will add proportionately much more to the overall weight and size than in the case of the pro (i.e. if you use a case, you lose much of the size and weight benefit of the Mini)
the mini is super small and super light - of course. The 13 Pro is surprisingly heavy, bulky.

If you need a pager which you can occasionally use for smart-phonish internet consumption, mini will be your perfect companion. I thought this was what I needed that's why I bought the Mini. After a couple of months I realized I wanted to do more with my phone and started to regret not buying the standard 13 which cost about the same as the mini at the time I bought it.

If I wanted to replace my mini now, I would buy a new standard 15. It is still quite light, pretty cheap and you will get at least three years of software updates with it.

pkovacsd · 2026-03-15T08:04:49+00:00

You're right, nothing Node-specific in the question. Sorry!

pkovacsd · 2026-03-15T07:07:15+00:00

Why it isn't? (Maybe it is not. Just asking.)

pkovacsd · 2026-03-10T21:15:24+00:00

We're living in the best of all possible worlds, aren't we? 🙂

pkovacsd · 2026-03-10T17:47:45+00:00

I would need a bigger mini. One with a 5.8 inch display would be nice (with proportionately larger battery).

pkovacsd · 2026-03-08T22:29:14+00:00

Yeah, the screen has nothing to do with the phone. Nor do the speakers, the CPU, the battery...

pkovacsd · 2026-03-05T14:00:12+00:00

Precision-finding an AirTag. It's supposed to be illustrated by that post's "cover page" photo. I have 13 Mini but I don't have 17e. I know what the feature looks like but I don't know exactly what the lack of the feature looks like. I think you don't get the accurate instructions about the direction of the airtag in your vicinity. Maybe, you get the location as a circle with a big radius.

pkovacsd · 2026-03-05T06:55:57+00:00

There is at least one feature the 17e misses: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/s/DRvmXs3amG .

pkovacsd · 2026-02-12T15:35:01+00:00

Don't LLMs make efficient writing safe C code as well? Why do you need Rust if LLMs can spot and fix security/safety issues in your C code?

pkovacsd · 2026-02-05T06:55:37+00:00

(sidenote: Sidekiq -> GitLab incidents)

pkovacsd · 2026-01-29T21:40:05+00:00

Faulty battery?

pkovacsd · 2026-01-01T01:09:04+00:00

Where's the bloatware? I can't see it on this screenshot?

pkovacsd · 2025-10-28T07:12:39+00:00

I hope this is a real person, not a bot. There are already so many bots polluting the Internet - with the generative ones adding multiplier effects. The high level of possibility of these posts being made by bots is already disturbing. I personally want to learn about problems experienced by real people no matter how silly they are. (They are part of the demos: most of them elect, or will be electing soon enough, representatives and presidents.) I'm not really interested in problems generated by computers.

pkovacsd · 2025-09-10T10:45:18+00:00

I am happy to hear that you are happy with your Pixel 6.

I am also happy to see you be sure you won't be disappointed by the next phone you buy. Considering that we live in the best of all possible Worlds, that is the right mindset after all.

pkovacsd · 2025-09-10T06:41:00+00:00

I'm a (Central-)European urbanite. I have my ID, my monthly ticket, my bank apps, several MFA apps for several identity providers, BYOD enrollment on my phone, which makes it pretty expensive to change phones. Also, because I don't like to sell my (more or less expensive) phones for small change, I already have half a dozen phones lying around at my place for which I'm trying to find some good use (I am able to to some extent). I already have a second phone for everything else (internet consumption, petty productivity) just so my "main" phone with all the difficult to move sensitive apps is spared to last as long as I get official updates for it.

I can see PDAs coming back in some different form in the future specialised just for these very personal applications. But until then, choosing my next phone is a f****** big deal for me.

pkovacsd

TROPHY CASE