The Apple Problem ⭐

A friend texted me the other day and randomly (to me) brought up a topic that’s been on my mind for years and surfaced here most recently in How I Configure My Phone Camera Apps for Snapshots ⭐️. Like me, he’s a digital photography enthusiast, but we approach this process from entirely different directions. That is, I prefer an “it just works” shoot and click experience, which is one of many reasons I prefer Pixels over iPhones for photography, whereas he typically shoots in RAW and then edits and manages photos in Lightroom.

As I told him in my first reply, this is a topic I obsess over, and it’s something we’d discussed more than once in person. Which makes sense, as it comes up here on Thurrott.com in different ways as well. As I wrote in The Perfect Phone (Premium) two years ago, there is no one perfect phone, and I wish I could combine elements from the iPhone, Pixel, and Samsung Galaxy into a single phone that would be, to me, perfect. But that’s a fantasy, and so I and many others have to compromise, regardless of which device we pick.

Of course, there is one major difference between me and the typical consumer: I always have multiple phones, the later generation of each, and I move back and forth between them to stay up on the latest platform and hardware developments. It’s part of my job, as I see it. This creates some complexities, but it each time I switch phones, I’m reminded, often instantly, of those things I prefer on each, but also those things I miss that are better elsewhere. Again, there is no perfect phone.

My friend’s text message was about an ah-ha moment he had while doing some research using AI. I don’t know what led him down this path, exactly, but we had had a conversation months ago about this notion that professional photographers and other creators tend to gravitate to the iPhone, and most ignore the Pixel entirely. I find this odd, given how good the Pixel camera systems are, but also because the iPhone camera experience is a nightmare thanks to convoluted user interfaces (like Photographic Styles, a great idea ruined by the worst UI since Apple Watch’s ridiculous grid view of bubble-like app icons) and missing features (like on-screen controls for white balance, exposure, and shadows in the view finder, as you can enable on Pixel).

The way that I walked into this topic is a bit convoluted, but the short version is that I wanted to gain a deeper understanding of phone-based video recording as part of my series of articles and reviews of the Pixel 10-series phones. In the course of this research—meaning, searching Google and YouTube—what I found is what I note above, that there are tons of professionals out there that use and recommend the iPhone for photography and videography, but there’s precious little on the Pixel side. I wrote about this in From the Editor’s Desk: Seeking a Little Expertise ⭐ in November, and that’s probably what triggered the conversations I later had with this friend. Who uses an iPhone and is, again, a digital photography enthusiast.

Anyway. That was months ago, and in his recent text message, he attached a PDF-based report that AI had generated for him explaining how the iPhone and Pixel photography experiences differ. It’s a nice report, honestly, but perhaps my opinion is biased because it lines up exactly where I do on the topic. The primary complaint about the iPhone is that its photos look dull or lifeless by default, not because the hardware is no good but because Apple is attempting to create realistic photos. With a Pixel, you take a shot and it’s great every time. With an iPhone, you need to work at it.

As to professional photographers and creators preferring the iPhone, that’s tied to Apple giving them the ability to shoot in ProRAW/ProRes and then edit the photos in a professional tool like Lightroom. “The iPhone defers creative decisions to the photographer rather than making them automatically [as Pixel does],” the report notes. It concludes that you should choose Pixel if you want the best possible photo with a single tap and no editing, which I think is the case for 99 percent of people, and you should choose iPhone if you live in Lightroom or some other professional tool. Right. That’s exactly right.

To me, this text message came out of nowhere. But the thing is, I really do think about this stuff all the time. And in trying to figure out solutions to the problems I see here, I was confronted by what I think of as the Apple problem. But it’s not one Apple problem. There are big Apple Problems, as in problems with a capital P. And then there are a host of smaller Apple problems, as in problems with a lower-case p. And I am surprised that neither gets more air time.

Let’s start small and keep this mostly to digital photography. Life’s too short.

🥺 The Apple problems with a lower-case “p”

I had used the iPhone during most of our trip to Mexico City between January and May, except for some time spent with the Pixel 10a and Pixel 10 Pro Fold for those reviews. But I switched back to the Pixel 10 Pro XL right before we flew back to Pennsylvania. And I experienced that all-too-familiar disconcerting and contrary set of observations. I love how the Pixel takes photos, and some other things, like its terrific anti-spam call and text functionality, which puts the iPhone to shame. But I miss certain things from the iPhone, including the basic cleanness of the UI, cross-device integrations between Apple Watch, AirPlay, and all kinds of other things, and its superior battery life. Round and round we go.

In that article How I Configure My Phone Camera Apps for Snapshots ⭐️, I describe the steps I take to somewhat mimic the point-and-shoot perfection of the Pixel camera experience. But it’s not perfect, and one thing I may not have stressed enough, in part because these things are difficult to remember and describe correctly, is that it’s far too easy to make some settings change on the fly in the iPhone Camera app and then screw things up going forward.

This is a common example of an Apple problem. Not the Apple problem, I’ll get to that shortly. But this is a curious company that does things in unique Apple-y ways, sometimes for the better and sometimes just weirdly. Consider the UI for configuring the Action button in iOS settings, which looks absolutely nothing like any other UI in iOS settings and would be easily handled by standard controls.

One major oddity to iOS is that the settings for each app aren’t typically found in those apps, they’re collected together in an Apps sub-page in the iOS Settings app. For some reason. I guess these things are a bit subjective, but it’s reasonable to assume that you configure app settings inside that app, as we do on every other personal computing platform. But not on iOS. In the Camera app, there are a few settings you can toggle on the fly, like capture format, the timer, and night mode. But there’s not even a link to the full list of settings. Which, again, are found buried in the iOS Settings app.

But not in that Apps sub-page I just mentioned. No, the Camera app settings are available, inconsistently, from outside Apps settings, there’s a Camera entry right on the main Settings page, between Appearance and Control Center in a non-alphabetized and non-organized list because that’s exactly where anyone normal would expect to find this interface. (Sigh.)

But whatever, you find it, and once you get in there, there are a ton of settings to consider and configure. Some of which could really screw things up.

Consider the Preserve Settings sub-page.

Here, there are toggles for Camera Mode, Photographic Style, Creative Controls, and several others. So you can determine on a feature-by-feature basis whether the iPhone will stick to the defaults or use the last configuration change you made. For example, by default, the iPhone Camera app will default to Photo mode on launch. But if you toggle that setting to Off, it will launch into whatever mode you previously used, perhaps Video.

That one is straightforward. But you have to be careful with some settings. In How I Configure My Phone Camera Apps for Snapshots ⭐️, I describe the laughably bad UI for configuring Photographic Styles and how difficult it is to precisely line up the intersecting warmth and tone sliders on the on-screen grid once you’ve chosen a style. This is maddening to do with a finger, so much so that you only want to do it once. But if you don’t enable the Photographic Style feature to preserve settings, which again, occurs outside the Camera app in the iOS Settings app, then you could easily tap in the Photographic Styles icon that appears in the viewfinder while you’re taking a photo and, inadvertently or not, completely change that carefully-selected nexus of warmth and tone. And that change will impact every single photo you take going forward until and unless you notice and then go through the time-consuming process of re-configuring it.

I know this all too well because I’ve done it multiple times. Once I locked that down, all was well. But I had to screw up a lot of photos before I figured it out. And there are other settings that are similarly problematic. For example, we often go to a bar/restaurant up the street from our apartment in Mexico City, and because they have a red neon sign outside, it often discolors the photos I try to take with a vibrant red cast. On the Pixel, this is no problem: I can use those on-screen white balance, exposure, and shadows controls to color correct the shot on the fly, and the resulting photos look normal. On the iPhone, I just get red photos.

Yes, you can edit the photo later, but I typically take photos and post to social media while I’m still out, and these are snapshots, not professional photos. I just want to take the shot and forget it. I tried to solve the problem by seeing what it I could do to adjust the color/warmth while taking a shot, but the iPhone camera app, beloved by professionals, just comes up short. The only thing you can do is access an Exposure control, hidden in a submenu in the app, and that doesn’t fix the red.

Worse, Exposure Adjustment is one of the camera features hidden in Preserve Settings in Camera settings, which, again, is not just in the iOS Settings app but hidden in there outside the Apps subpage. And because Exposure Adjustment isn’t one of those things I thought or worried about initially, I would experiment with it in that bar/restaurant and then ruin future shots until I realized what was happening. Eventually, I turned it off in Preserve Settings (as I did with Night Mode at that time, too).

Just ahead of WWDC this week, I saw an article in my news feed about an expected change to the iPhone Camera app in iOS 27 (which is not in Beta 1, sadly). And while its author wants to see some changes to that app, as I do, the article starts off with the usual throw-away claims I always see. “Apple has always prioritized a ‘point-and-shoot’ experience for the iPhone’s Camera app,” it reads. “Instead of offering complex controls, Apple’s Camera app has always focused on being simple and intuitive.”

Nope.

Not even close. And seriously, only a person who has never once used a Pixel would ever make such a claim. The iPhone does not prioritize simplicity or the snapshot experience that most people want. The author is correct that the iPhone Camera app needs basic and pro modes, a system I know works well because Pixel Camera has offered that for years. But the iPhone, as noted by the AI report I referenced above, prioritizes post-shot editing over getting it right every time when you take a photo. I find this kind of thing frustrating in general, but specifically in this case because this opinion is so common in the Apple community.

These guys need to study the competition more. I’m reminded of the experience I had meeting my eventual wife’s parents and seeing how they treated their teenaged children at the time like adults, letting them make their own decisions even when they disagreed. This was eye-opening because my parents were completely different and I didn’t even realize you could approach life that way. Being confronted by this was pivotal, and I will never forget it. (I’m almost 60 years old now and my mother still treats me like a child.)

Anyway. That’s the Apple problem with a small “p.” But there are bigger problems. Much bigger.

🤯 The Apple Problem with a capital “P”

This one is a lot easier to explain because, like all enshittification, it’s obvious as soon as you see it.

Apple is a Big Tech abuser like none other. It is involved in major antitrust cases in the United States, the European Union, and elsewhere. And its belligerent indignation at being forced to abide by the law has reached the point where a U.S. judge has thrown the book at them after they most won a case with Epic Games and then referred an executive of the company to the U.S. Attorney General for lying under oath. Its latest bit of nonsense was the announcement, just yesterday, that it will delay the release of Siri AI in the EU because of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) regulations that require it to operate in a procompetitive fashion. But this is on Apple, not the DMA, and it’s using scare tactics to make it seem like the EU just wants it to violate everyone’s privacy when, in fact, this continent has the most stringent privacy protections on earth.

Apple, of the infamously arbitrary, made up, and undeserved 30 percent App Store fees, has its fans. And those fans do love to defend this company, which is a misguided example of being so uninformed that they’ve reached a form of the sunken costs fallacy and have stopped seeing the world, or at least Apple’s part in it. They will tell you that they’re not impacted by those fees at all, which is untrue, as they just don’t experience the impact directly.

But Apple’s abuses are like the bizarre Action Button and Photographic Styles user interfaces described above. Meaning they are numerous and scattered throughout its products. There are far more of them than you realize. And they impact the way everyone uses Apple’s hardware, software, and services even if you don’t know it’s happening.

One small example of this abusive behavior is tied to Apple’s Camera app and the iPhone photography experience. But this is a “big P” Problem, and not just a problem.

If you find the iPhone Camera app to be lackluster, as I do, the solution appears obvious. The iPhone has an App Store with a curated collection of over two million apps that’s used by over 850 million people each week. Which I know because Apple incessantly promotes it. And there are a lot of third-party camera apps, as you might expect. Given that professional photographers and creators prefer the iPhone, it’s likewise reasonable to expect that there are pro camera app alternatives in the Store, too. And there are.

In late May, Lux, the makers of one of those apps, called Halide, announced a major update called Halide Mark III. I had tried earlier Halide versions in the past, but reading the announcement, I figured I should take another look. The app is great, for whatever that’s worth, so much so that I could see paying for it (at $19.99 per year or a $59.99 one-time fee). But in testing it, I ran across a curious problem. An Apple Problem.

One of the nice things about using a modern iPhone Pro is that they support three high-resolution rear camera lenses, and you can configure the Camera app to take (JPEG/HEIC, non-RAW) shots in either 12 MP or 24 MP. (The lenses are each roughly 48 MP in resolution, which you can take advantage of fully by using ProRAW instead of JPEG/HEIC). On the Pixel Pros, which have similarly high resolution rear camera lenses, you get 12 MP and 50 MP (really, 48 MP) choices only, with no 24 MP choice.

But in working my way through the Halide Mark III settings interface—which is in the freaking app, go figure, and not in the iOS Settings app, God love them—I found that there were only two resolution choices, 12 MP and 48 MP. Halide doesn’t offer the 24 MP mode that I really like on the iPhone. Why?

I Googled it. And when I saw the answer, it all made sense.

“[The app] cannot take 24 or 48 megapixel photos [in its unique Process Zero mode],” Lux explained in an older blog post. “Both of these limitations are because we do not get 48 raw sensor data from iOS. We’ve filed a request with Apple for this, as we’d love to have it added in the future. It also does not work with Night mode or Portrait mode because— you guessed it— iOS limitations at present.”

In other words, Halide can’t support one of the things that makes the iPhone camera system so special. Because Apple is terrible.

This feels arbitrary, but there must be reasons for this and the thousands of other limitations for third party developers that Apple scatters all throughout its products. In this case, I can only guess at the intent, however. Perhaps users that stick to the default Camera app tend to use Apple Photos and pay for iCloud+ storage, whereas those who move to third-party apps tend to choose third party photo management apps and cloud storage services. I don’t know. The ways of Apple are sometimes inscrutable.

But the one thing I think we can all agree on—well, not all of us, the Apple defenders will always rise to that challenge—is that this is bad for developers and users and contrary to how Apple constantly markets itself. There’s no good reason for this limitation, not if you care about the product and the people who support and use it. So this is just one small example of enshittification in a galaxy of enshittification that is the Apple ecosystem. Where you play by Apple’s rules, no matter how arbitrary.

And that’s the Apple Problem, the one with a capital P. It doesn’t make sense to us as users, but it makes sense to Apple from a strategic perspective.  This is enshittification.

In an ideal world, in a healthy relationship, Apple’s actions would make sense for the company, its developers, and its users. But that’s not the world that Apple is fighting for in the U.S., the EU, and elsewhere. It’s important to remember that whenever you fall into the trap of believing that this company is somehow better than its competitors. It’s not.