Iphone 17: what owners actually say

Multiple commenters argue Apple treats RAM as a cost lever—engineering the OS to run on as little memory as possible to save billions—and that AI features will force either higher prices (~$250 more) or remain crippled by insufficient RAM for meaningful model context.

Several highly-upvoted commenters call on-device LLMs impractical: too energy-intensive, too slow (0.4 tok/s cited), not enough RAM for reasonable context windows, and datacenter models will always outpace local regardless of silicon improvements.

Owners and observers are frustrated that Apple deliberately degrades iPhone-to-Android communication (SMS, green bubbles) and users blame Android rather than Apple, calling it a wildly successful but scummy tactic.

Teenage and school-age social dynamics around iMessage blue vs green bubbles are seen as toxic and elitist, though commenters note this is overwhelmingly a US phenomenon.

Multiple Lemmy users describe iPhone 'coolness' journalism as secret Apple advertising or 'Hello fellow kids' nonsense, saying no one in their real social circles cares which phone anyone uses.

Apple's package-on-package design with wide memory buses and fast LPDDR5 minimizes latency, and commenters acknowledge this gives a real hardware advantage for memory-intensive tasks.

One commenter points out the iPhone 4 launched at $649 ($968 inflation-adjusted) for 16GB, making today's cheapest iPhone roughly 40% cheaper while being far more capable.

Apple's strategy of engineering the OS and apps to work well with minimal memory is acknowledged—even by critics—as a legitimate engineering achievement that saves costs at scale.