Okello Chatrie’s cellphone gave him away. Chatrie made off with $195,000 from the bank he robbed in suburban Richmond, Virginia, and eluded the police until they turned to a powerful technological tool that erected a virtual fence and allowed them collect the location history of cellphone users near the crime scene… Now the Supreme Court will decide whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches… Chatrie’s appeal is one of two cases being argued Monday…
Civil libertarians say that geofences amount to fishing expeditions that subject many innocent people to searches of private records merely because their cellphones happened to be in the vicinity of a crime. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the technique could “unleash a much broader wave of similar reverse searches,” law professors who study digital surveillance wrote the court…
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In Chatrie’s case, the geofence warrant invigorated an investigation that had stalled. After determining that Chatrie was near the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian around the time it was robbed in May 2019, police obtained a search warrant for his home. They found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. Chatrie’s lawyers argued on appeal that none of the evidence should have been used against him. They challenged the warrant as a violation of his privacy because it allowed authorities to gather the location history of people near the bank without having any evidence they had anything to do with the robbery.
Prosecutors argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy because he voluntarily opted into Google’s location history. A federal judge agreed that the search violated Chatrie’s rights, but allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly.
If the diesel engine in your vehicle suddenly decides not to play ball and loses power, or is restricted to a certain speed, then it’s possible that the engine has been derated. While this is undoubtedly inconvenient, this is actually a feature of modern diesel engines that’s designed to protect them.
Put simply, engine derating happens when engine sensors detect an issue with it. When this happens, the engine control unit initiates an intentional power drop. Importantly, this power reduction isn’t the failure, it’s a protective response designed to prevent damage or excess emissions. In short, although it probably doesn’t feel like it at the time, this system is there to help and can stop minor issues from becoming wallet-draining trips to the workshop.
The triggers for this can vary depending on the vehicle, but typically, it happens when engine sensors detect that it’s operating outside of its designed operating limits. High running temperatures are a common cause — excessive heat is never a good thing in engines. Modern engines can also derate in response to emission-related issues. The latter can be caused by blocked diesel particulate filters, or even faults with the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) valve.
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So, while the loss of performance might feel like something’s gone wrong, the reality is that the system is working exactly as intended. Let’s have a closer look at the double-edged sword that’s both inconvenient, but potentially engine-saving.
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What engine derating feels like behind the wheel
Mr.Anuwat Rumrod/Shutterstock
When an engine has been derated, the most obvious symptom is a noticeable drop in performance, often accompanied by the driver simultaneously experiencing a severe sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach. Acceleration might feel sluggish, with a muted throttle response, and engine revs and speed can also be restricted.
In some instances, the top speed can be restricted to as low as 5 mph. Essentially, this is a self-imposed limp mode that allows the vehicle to keep moving, but only enough to reach a safe location or a workshop. Depending on the particular engine and/or the severity of the issue, dashboard warning lights or messages may appear. Understanding what common dashboard warning lights mean can help you get an idea of what the underlying problem is.
This is important, as not all derating is equal. In some situations, the power reduction is intermittent and relatively mild. For instance, if the problem is temperature-related, then the restriction may be lifted when the temperature normalizes. Of course, if this is a persistent problem, then a trip to the mechanic is probably wise. Even if the engine appears fine, there are plenty of ways that cars can lose coolant without a leak.
What is important to understand when the engine’s power is derated is that although the vehicle may be driveable, it isn’t happy. The reduced performance is there to tell you that things aren’t well under the hood — and how you respond to it is important.
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What to do and what not to do when your engine derates
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A derated engine might not always be an immediate emergency. For instance, if a temperature-related derate occurs when the engine is operating under high loads and in high-ambient temperature situations, then it could be a one-off triggered by those operating conditions. This is especially true if the engine goes back to normal once the temperature normalizes.
However, if the problem is more persistent, or the vehicle has entered a restrictive limp mode, then this isn’t something that can be tucked away as next week’s problem. Continuing to drive the vehicle in these circumstances, especially over long distances, can turn a relatively minor issue into an expensive and sob-inducing one. Warning lights, repeated derating, any indications of low-oil pressure or persistent overheating should always be treated seriously.
It’s also worth noting that what a derate does to your vehicle’s performance today, might not be the case tomorrow. For instance, if the derate is linked to high-emissions from a vehicle, then the control system can add further restrictions until the underlying cause is addressed.
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Ultimately, while it might not seem like it, an engine derating might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Frustrations aside, in most cases, this is the system stepping in to prevent a much more serious failure from developing.
In this week’s “Sunday Reboot,” a changing of the guard, the DOJ becomes a tattling schoolchild, and the expensive Apple Vision Pro saves Disney money.
John Ternus, the DOJ, and the Apple Vision Pro
Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step. This week, Apple Music users aren’t listening to AI-generated music that’s now flooding the service, Apple won’t benefit from the tariff refunds for months, and the company faces a $38 billion fine in India as part of an App Store antitrust investigation. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
Apple just might make a big aesthetic splash with its debut foldable. A new leak has added more shape to Apple’s long-rumored foldable iPhone, and this time the focus is on thickness. Renders shared by South Korean tipster yeux1122 on Naver, reportedly sourced from an Apple casing supplier, show the device with a folded body thickness of about 9.23mm. That is slimmer than the roughly 9.6mm figure mentioned in earlier rumors.
The renders also point to a maximum thickness of about 13mm when the camera area is included. That would make the camera module a major part of the phone’s profile, even if the folded body remains surprisingly thin for a book-style foldable. The same leak also repeats earlier claims that Apple is preparing two color options, silver and black.
yeux1122 / Naver
Just how thin are we talking about here?
For comparison, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 measures 8.9mm when folded and 4.2mm when unfolded. That would still make Samsung’s current foldable slightly thinner in its folded form, but the leaked figure would place the iPhone Fold surprisingly close to a well-established product.
Honor’s Magic V6 and the Oppo Find N6 also fall in the same slimness ballpark as their Samsung rival, and soon, Apple, as well. Samsung’s rumored Galaxy Z Fold 8 Wide has also been tipped at 9.8mm folded and 4.3mm unfolded, which would make Apple’s first-ever foldable iPhone thinner, at least before accounting for the camera bump.
What else is on the table?
Foldable iPhoneMajinBuofficia
Reports around Apple’s foldable have pointed to a book-style design with a 5.5-inch outer display and a 7.8-inch inner screen, giving it a tablet-like layout when opened. Another recent claim from Weibo leaker Instant Digital suggested that Apple may include the Camera Control button despite the slim frame.
On the software front, it could borrow some multi-tasking tricks from iPadOS, but don’t expect any functional fireworks like Stage Manager appearing on the foldable. Pricing is still unconfirmed, but current reports have suggested a starting price above $2,000. Apple is reportedly targeting a September 2026 introduction for the iPhone Fold. Availability may be limited at first, and the device could ship later than the iPhone 18 Pro models.
Theo Baker is graduating from Stanford this spring with something most seniors don’t have: a book deal, a George Polk Award that he received for his investigative reporting as a student journalist, and a front-row account of one of the most romanticized institutions in the world.
His forthcoming How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was excerpted Friday in The Atlantic and based on that alone, I can’t wait to see the rest. The only question worth asking is the same one Baker himself might be too close to answer, which is: Can a book like this actually change anything? Or does the spotlight, as it always seems to, send more students racing to the place?
The parallel that keeps coming to my mind is “The Social Network.” Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was an indictment in many ways of the particular sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. What it seemingly did was make a generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became a recruitment video. The story of the guy who — in the movie, at least — steamrolled his best friend on his way to billions didn’t discourage ambition; it further glamorized it.
Judging by the excerpt, Baker’s portrait of Stanford is far more granular. He talks with hundreds of people to roundly describe the “Stanford inside Stanford.” “You sort of join it freshman year or you don’t,” one student tells Baker. It’s an invite-only world where venture capitalists wine and dine 18-year-olds, where “pre-idea funding” worth hundreds of thousands of dollars gets handed to students before they’ve had an original idea, and where the boundary between mentorship and predation is nearly impossible to discern. (The shame of chasing teenage founders, if it ever existed, is gone; not chasing them is no longer an option for most VCs.) Steve Blank, who teaches the school’s legendary startup course, tells Baker that “Stanford is an incubator with dorms,” which is not meant as a compliment.
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What’s new isn’t that this pressure exists but that it has been fully internalized. There was a time, maybe 10, maybe 15 years ago, when Stanford students felt the weight of Silicon Valley expectation pressing down on them from outside. Now, many of them arrive on campus already expecting, as a matter of course, to launch a startup, to raise money, to become rich.
I think about a friend — I’ll call him D — who dropped out of Stanford a few years ago, partway through his first two years, to launch a startup. He was barely past his teens. The words “I’m thinking of take a leave of absence” had just escaped his mouth before the university, by his own account, gave him its cheerful blessing to dive full bore into the startup. Stanford doesn’t fight this anymore, if it ever did. Departures like his are an expected outcome.
D is now in his mid-twenties. His company has raised what would register in any normal context as an astonishing amount of money. He almost certainly knows more about cap tables, venture dynamics, and product-market fit than most people learn in a decade of conventional careers. By every metric the Valley uses, he’s a success story. But he also doesn’t see his family (no time), has barely dated (no time), and the company, which keeps growing, doesn’t seem inclined to provide him with that kind of balance anytime soon. He is already, in some meaningful sense, behind on his own life.
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This is the part that Baker’s excerpt hints at without fully landing on, maybe because he’s still inside it himself. The costs of this system aren’t just distributed in the form of fraud — though Baker is direct about this, describing it as pervasive and largely consequence-free. The costs are also more personal: the relationships not formed, the ordinary milestones of early adulthood traded away in exchange for a billion-dollar vision that, statistically, almost certainly won’t materialize. “100% of entrepreneurs think they’re visionaries,” Blank tells Baker. “The data say 99% aren’t.”
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What happens to the 99% at age 30? At age 40? These aren’t questions Silicon Valley is set up to answer, and they’re certainly not questions Stanford is about to start asking.
Baker also surfaces something that Sam Altman articulates best. Altman — OpenAI CEO, former Y Combinator head, precisely the kind of person these students aspire to become — tells Baker that the VC dinner circuit has become an “anti-signal” to the people who actually know what talent looks like. The students doing the rounds, performing founder-ness for rooms full of investors, tend not to be the real builders. The real builders, presumably, are somewhere else, building things. The performance of ambition and the thing itself are increasingly hard to tell apart, and the system that was ostensibly designed to find genius has gotten very good at finding people who are good at seeming like geniuses.
How to Rule the World sounds like exactly the right book for this moment in time. But there’s a certain irony in the strong likelihood that this critically minded book about Stanford’s relationship to power and money will be celebrated by the same class of people it critiques, and — if it does well (it has already been optioned for a movie) — used as further evidence that Stanford produces not just founders and fraudsters but important writers and journalists, too.
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More than three years after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk says he’s nearing his long-stated goal of turning it into an “everything app” with a new financial services tool that he pledged to launch for the public this month… Early users testing the service have touted competitive perks, including 3% cash back on eligible purchases and a 6% interest rate on cash savings — the latter of which is roughly 15 times the national average. Musk’s new product is also expected to offer free peer-to-peer transfers, a metal Visa debit card personalised with a user’s X handle, and an AI concierge built by Musk’s xAI startup that tracks spending and sorts through past transactions, according to reports from users with early access.
Musk, who first rose to prominence in Silicon Valley by co-founding PayPal Holdings Inc, sees payments as crucial to creating a so-called super app similar to social products that have flourished in China. WeChat, for example, lets users hail a ride, book a flight and pay off their credit card… If it works, X Money would sit at the intersection of social media and finance in a way no American product has attempted at this scale… Creators who currently receive payments from X for engagement will be switched from Stripe to X Money as their payment platform, according to early users — a move that guarantees an initial base of active accounts. Some have already been testing X Money to send payments to one another through the app’s chat feature or directly through their profiles, according to early participants in the rollout…
X currently holds licences in 44 states, according to its website, and likely won’t be able to operate in states where it hasn’t obtained a licence.
For those first venturing into sailing, it can be overwhelming since the experience is thick with jargon and skills that don’t often show up in life ashore. With endless choices, including monohulls versus catamarans, fiberglass versus wood, fractional versus masthead rigs, and sloops versus ketches, a new sailor risks doing something like single-handing a staysail schooner when they should have started on a Bermuda-rigged dinghy without a spinnaker. Luckily, there are some shortcuts to picking up the hobby, like the venerable Sunfish or Hobie ships. It’s also possible to build a simple sailing vessel completely out of materials from a local hardware store, as [Cumberland Rover] has been demonstrating.
[Cumberland Rover] has a number of homemade vessels under his belt, from various kayaks and rowboats. His latest project is a 12-foot rowboat, which has the option to add a mast and sail. The hull is made from two 1×12 pieces of lumber, bent around a frame and secured. Plywood makes the bottom, and a few seats finish out the build. He’s also using standard hardware to fasten everything together, which helps with maintenance. It came in handy when he recently added some height to the bow of the boat to improve seaworthiness.
For sailing, the mast is made out of two pieces of 2x lumber glued together and then worked into a more cylindrical shape. It’s unstayed, reducing complexity, and although he broke one in extremely high winds, it is more than strong enough for most of his sailing. The ship is gaff-rigged, with a square sail hoisted up the mast by a wooden spar. All of these design choices make it quick and easy to set the sail up when the wind is good or pack it away fast when it’s time to row.
Although there are paid plans available on his website, the methods used in the video show how simple it can be to get into rowing or sailing with a minimal cost. You’ll still want to learn the basics of sailing before taking one of these out into open water. DIY speedboats are also possible and accessible as well, but there’s the added complexity of a motor here to think about, as well as registration requirements that often accompany powered craft.
X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, has officially launched its standalone messaging app, XChat, on iOS. The move marks a significant step in the company’s broader push to evolve beyond a traditional social network and into a more expansive communication ecosystem.
A Messaging App That Signals X’s Bigger “Everything App” Strategy
At launch, XChat brings a familiar but feature-rich messaging experience. Users can connect directly with their existing X contacts, send messages, share files, and make audio or video calls, along with participating in group chats.
The app also leans heavily into privacy-focused features. It supports disappearing messages, the ability to edit or delete messages for everyone in a chat, and even includes protections like blocking screenshots. X has also claimed that the app does not include ads or tracking mechanisms, positioning it as a cleaner alternative to traditional messaging platforms.
This launch is important because it reflects a broader strategic shift. X is no longer trying to keep everything inside a single app. Instead, it is beginning to break out core features – like messaging – into standalone experiences. That approach aligns with Elon Musk’s long-stated ambition to turn X into an “everything app,” similar to China’s WeChat, but executed through a modular ecosystem.
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Why This Move Matters In The Messaging Landscape
The messaging space is already crowded, dominated by platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal. X entering this space with a standalone app signals that it wants to compete more directly, rather than treating messaging as a secondary feature.
What makes XChat notable is its integration with the existing X network. Unlike most messaging apps that rely on phone numbers or contact syncing, XChat leverages social graph connections already built within the platform. That lowers friction for users and could make onboarding significantly easier.
At the same time, the app’s privacy claims and features suggest X is trying to position itself as a more secure alternative. However, questions remain about how robust those protections are, especially compared to established end-to-end encrypted platforms.
Why You Should Pay Attention As A User
For users, XChat introduces a different way to think about messaging. Instead of being tied to phone numbers, communication becomes account-based, similar to social media interactions but in a private setting.
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This could simplify how you connect with people online, particularly if you already use X regularly. It also means fewer apps competing for attention, as conversations tied to your social presence move into a dedicated space.
However, it also raises practical considerations. Adopting a new messaging app requires network effects – your contacts need to be there. Without that, even feature-rich apps struggle to gain traction.
What Comes Next For XChat
The iOS launch is just the beginning. Reports suggest that an Android version is expected soon, which will be critical for broader adoption. X is also restructuring other parts of its platform, including shutting down underperforming features like Communities, as it shifts focus toward messaging and AI-driven experiences.
If successful, XChat could become a central pillar of the platform’s future. If not, it risks becoming another entrant in an already saturated market. Either way, the direction is clear. X is no longer just a place to post – it wants to be where conversations happen.
A new Quordle puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing ‘today’s game’ while others are playing ‘yesterday’s’. If you’re looking for Sunday’s puzzle instead then click here: Quordle hints and answers for Sunday, April 26 (game #1553).
Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,400 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.
Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.
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SPOILER WARNING: Information about Quordle today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
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Quordle today (game #1554) – hint #1 – Vowels
How many different vowels are in Quordle today?
• The number of different vowels in Quordle today is 4*.
* Note that by vowel we mean the five standard vowels (A, E, I, O, U), not Y (which is sometimes counted as a vowel too).
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Quordle today (game #1554) – hint #2 – repeated letters
Do any of today’s Quordle answers contain repeated letters?
• The number of Quordle answers containing a repeated letter today is 1.
Quordle today (game #1554) – hint #3 – uncommon letters
Do the letters Q, Z, X or J appear in Quordle today?
• No. None of Q, Z, X or J appear among today’s Quordle answers.
What letters do today’s Quordle answers start with?
• A
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• L
• S
• T
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
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Quordle today (game #1554) – the answers
(Image credit: Merriam-Webster)
The answers to today’s Quordle, game #1554, are…
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Thankfully I had lines to spare today, but it was still really annoying to guess “sewer” instead of SEVER.
Beyond that I had plenty of clues to help me out, including a word that ended IR. It wasn’t “tapir”, so there was only one other option I could think of.
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Daily Sequence today (game #1554) – the answers
(Image credit: Merriam-Webster)
The answers to today’s Quordle Daily Sequence, game #1554, are…
A new NYT Connections puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing ‘today’s game’ while others are playing ‘yesterday’s’. If you’re looking for Sunday’s puzzle instead then click here: NYT Connections hints and answers for Sunday, April 26 (game #1050).
Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.
What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.
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SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Connections today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Article continues below
NYT Connections today (game #1051) – today’s words
(Image credit: New York Times)
Today’s NYT Connections words are…
RADIOACTIVE MAN
RAGING BULL
RED ONION
REGINA KING
RESERVOIR DOGS
REVEREND LOVEJOY
ROMAN HOLIDAY
ROASTED CHICKEN
ROE BUCK
REAR WINDOW
ROMAINE LETTUCE
ROD FLANDERS
RAIN MAN
ROTARY CLIPPER
RALPH WIGGUM
RANCH DRESSING
NYT Connections today (game #1051) – hint #1 – group hints
What are some clues for today’s NYT Connections groups?
YELLOW: A healthy lunch
GREEN: 5-star movies
BLUE: Straight outta Springfield
PURPLE: Think: Basketball teams
Need more clues?
We’re firmly in spoiler territory now, but read on if you want to know what the four theme answers are for today’s NYT Connections puzzles…
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NYT Connections today (game #1051) – hint #2 – group answers
What are the answers for today’s NYT Connections groups?
YELLOW: SALAD INGREDIENTS
GREEN: CLASSIC FILMS
BLUE: “THE SIMPSONS” CHARACTERS
PURPLE: ENDING IN NBA PLAYERS
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
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NYT Connections today (game #1051) – the answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
The answers to today’s Connections, game #1051, are…
GREEN: CLASSIC FILMS RAIN MAN, REAR WINDOW, RESERVOIR DOGS, ROMAN HOLIDAY
BLUE: “THE SIMPSONS” CHARACTERS RADIOACTIVE MAN, RALPH WIGGUM, REVEREND LOVEJOY, ROD FLANDERS
PURPLE: ENDING IN NBA PLAYERS RAGING BULL, REGINA KING, ROE BUCK, ROTARY CLIPPER
My rating: Hard
My score: Perfect
Usually when I am faced with a slightly different Connections grid my brain goes into panic mode, resulting in completely bafflement. Not today.
Somehow I managed to see all four groups immediately and decided to play a new game: guess which one of them warranted being the purple/hardest group. The singular NBA teams seemed the most obscure, so I went with that.
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The only thing that gave me pause was RADIOACTIVE MAN, which I was uncertain was a character from The Simpsons but very certain did not belong among the CLASSIC FILMS.
Yesterday’s NYT Connections answers (Sunday, April 26, game #1050)
YELLOW: STIPULATION CATCH, CAVEAT, FINE PRINT, STRINGS
GREEN: VOCAL CHARACTERISTICS PITCH, RANGE, REGISTER, TONE
BLUE: CHARACTERS IN “DICK AND JANE” DICK, JANE, MOTHER, SPOT
PURPLE: THINGS WITH FACES BUILDING, CLIFF, CLOCK, POLYHEDRON
What is NYT Connections?
NYT Connections is one of several increasingly popular word games made by the New York Times. It challenges you to find groups of four items that share something in common, and each group has a different difficulty level: green is easy, yellow a little harder, blue often quite tough and purple usually very difficult.
On the plus side, you don’t technically need to solve the final one, as you’ll be able to answer that one by a process of elimination. What’s more, you can make up to four mistakes, which gives you a little bit of breathing room.
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It’s a little more involved than something like Wordle, however, and there are plenty of opportunities for the game to trip you up with tricks. For instance, watch out for homophones and other word games that could disguise the answers.
It’s playable for free via the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
I was using the iPhone 17 when I picked up my iPhone 16 to look at an older video, and it led to an epiphany: nothing about the iPhone 16 felt any worse than its successor. It wasn’t any slower, the design didn’t feel dramatically different, and nothing about it screamed “old” or “outdated.” That feeling stuck with me for a few days.
Over the years, the smartphone industry has trained us to treat one year of upgrades (no matter how incremental) as something that should feel significant, but upon switching back to the iPhone 16 after using the iPhone 17 for over six months, I realized that wasn’t the case. We’re so stuck in finding the smallest changes in the spec sheet that we forget that a company’s product cycle isn’t a measure of obsolescence.
Shikhar Mehrotra / Digital Trends
A phone that doesn’t feel outdated next to its predecessor
The moment I picked up the iPhone 16 (which was resting without a case in my drawer), I couldn’t help but notice its cool aluminum frame and the matte glass back in the Teal finish, and it brought a smile to my face. The next moment, I took out my iPhone 17 and held it side-by-side.
If you leave out the larger form factor (due to a bigger screen) and the different finishes, the iPhone 16 shares all its design elements, including the Dynamic Island on the front, the vertical camera layout on the back, and the buttons (including the Action button and Camera Control), with the iPhone 17.
And that’s when it hit me: the iPhone 16 doesn’t feel all that old, even next to its successor.
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Shikhar Mehrotra / Digital Trends
The chip gap isn’t as wide as the ProMotion display makes it feel
Over the next couple of days, I started using the phone as my daily driver, just to check whether there were any noticeable differences in the performance, and I came to a rather nuanced conclusion.
Had Apple equipped the iPhone 16 with a 120Hz ProMotion display, it would have felt as smooth as the newer iPhone 17. This is the reason why the Pixel 10a feels so smooth despite featuring a less powerful chipset.
Shikhar Mehrotra / Digital Trends
But even otherwise, in third-party apps that only support a 60Hz refresh rate, it was quite hard to differentiate between the phones in terms of performance (unless you time the export of the same video via a third-party editing app).
The A19 chip on the iPhone 17 is barely 8-10% faster than the A18 chip on the iPhone 16; that’s a difference most users will never notice with their day-to-day tasks.
4,000 photos later, the main camera still holds its ground
More importantly, both the phones fully support iOS 26 and run all the available Apple Intelligence features. Another major similarity between the phones is their primary camera.
I’ve taken over 4,000 photos and 800 videos on my iPhone 16 as a daily driver for months, and the 48MP holds up really well, even next to those from the iPhone 17. Color science and skin tones remain accurate, dynamic range rarely disappoints, plus there’s plenty of detail in pictures.
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Shikhar Mehrotra / Digital Trends
I’d say that the 12MP ultrawide and the 12MP selfie cameras sound like the iPhone 16’s weak spots, especially since Apple upgraded the camera hardware on the iPhone 17, but how much it bothers you depends on how frequently you use these cameras and for what purposes. What’s more important is that the iPhone 16 has a Camera Control button, something that I personally find very useful.
All-day battery and MagSafe convenience at an affordable price
The battery on my iPhone 16, even though it’s at 91% battery health, still lasts an entire day on a charge, and supports the same MagSafe accessories (wireless powerbank and wallet) I use with my iPhone 17. All these things made me realize how Apple’s latest iPhone is based on some useful but mostly incremental updates, and how the overall experience could feel awfully similar, barring a few things.
Shikhar Mehrotra / Digital Trends
iPhone 16
What iPhone 17 Adds
60Hz OLED display, 2,000 nits peak
120Hz ProMotion OLED, brighter display
A18 chip, full Apple Intelligence
A19 chip, ~8-10% faster, better efficiency
48MP main + 12MP ultrawide
48MP main + 48MP ultrawide (major upgrade)
12MP front camera
12MP Center Stage front camera
6.1-inch compact form factor
Slightly larger screen
MagSafe, same accessory ecosystem
Same MagSafe ecosystem
Camera Control + Action button
Same buttons
Full iOS 26 + Apple Intelligence
Same software, same AI features
All-day battery
Longer battery, better efficiency (A19)
All these realizations, along with the fact that the iPhone 16 currently costs $699 for the baseline variant with 128GB of storage, made me arrive at a solid conclusion: the iPhone 16 isn’t last year’s baseline iPhone, but it’s this year’s most sensible iPhone, for most users who’re aware of the compromises and aren’t bothered by them.
Shikhar Mehrotra / Digital Trends
If you’re upgrading from an ancient Android phone, or an iPhone 11 or iPhone 12, the iPhone 16 could strike the perfect balance between a meaningful and affordable upgrade.
That said, there are some solid reasons why you still might want to upgrade to the iPhone 17. If a smoother 120Hz display, a brighter screen, better ultrawide and front cameras, and a longer-lasting battery matter to you, and you’re upgrading from a relatively newer model, like the iPhone 14 or iPhone 15, the iPhone 17 could provide a better sense of upgrade for you.
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