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It’s nearly impossible to buy a crap smartphone these days.
Nearly. If you look hard enough, I’m sure there’s some garbage out there. But of all the phones I’ve tested over the last couple of years, I genuinely can’t think of a single instance where the manufacturer let me down.
Displays are brighter, faster, and more immersive than ever before. The chips inside these devices offer more power than most users will ever get to explore. We’ve even reached the point where you can spend well below £1,000 to obtain a smartphone with flagship build quality.
The problem is that this leaves very little room for invention or genuinely exciting features. Now that the initial wave of excitement (if, indeed, it was ever there) about AI has passed and everyone and sundry – bar Apple, at the time of writing – has shoehorned that stuff into their devices, what’s left?
Not much. But, sometimes, it takes something really simple to get me excited. Even if that ‘something’ isn’t at all unique or groundbreaking.
Apple has achieved that this year in the most unlikely of ways.
The iPhone 16 launch (hasn’t been great)
It really hasn’t. No matter how much that share price keeps shooting upwards, when you view the impact of the recent iPhone 16 launch on Apple in terms of PR, it’s a bad look.
There are three reasons people are throwing so much shade Apple’s way. The first is entirely normal and happens immediately after every iPhone launch. A lack of innovation… it looks the same… there’s still a 60Hz display on the standard model… Apple knows that it doesn’t have to do anything groundbreaking to tempt ‘fanbois’ through the pre-order process.
Etcetera.
The other two reasons are rather more troubling. The new Camera Control button has been panned in every iPhone 16 review and social post I’ve seen about it – including mine. Uncomfortably placed, fiddly to use, and, worse, attempting to solve an issue that didn’t exist, it feels like the antithesis of what Apple has always been about. How it got through the door is anyone’s guess.
Then, we have Apple Intelligence. Or, more specifically, we don’t have Apple Intelligence. In the UK, Apple’s take on “AI for the rest of us” won’t arrive until December, when it’ll be in beta form and missing half of the features that were previewed at WWDC back in June – including the fancy new Siri.
This has left me with a smartphone that features a useless new button and a feature which I cannot review because it doesn’t exist yet. I can’t remember the last time that happened with an Apple product.
All hope is not lost, though; my Apple fanboiism has remained partially intact due to one stellar release this year.
Getting back to what makes Apple great
If you’ve got iOS 18 running on your iPhone and a Mac with macOS Sequoia installed, you can now call up your iPhone’s display on your Mac and use it as though your phone is in your hand. It’s called iPhone Mirroring and it is utterly wonderful.
Read our macOS Sequioa guide to learn how to get the most out of it
It is biblically useful, too; more so than I ever thought it would be when I first saw Craig Federighi demo it at WWDC.
I’ve found myself using iPhone Mirroring every day. The ability to hop into iOS from my Mac and reply to a WhatsApp message alone is so useful. The same goes for social media apps like Instagram and TikTok; they’re super important to my business but usually involve picking up my iPhone to conduct any kind of meaningful work on them. Not any more – I just fire up iPhone Mirroring and do what I need to do without changing context.
If you’re wondering, while you’re in iPhone Mirroring mode, the iPhone itself remains locked. No one can see what you’re doing on the phone – there’s just a notification to say that it’s in use on a Mac.
iPhone Mirroring isn’t perfect. For instance, one of its key features is actually rather annoying at times. While connected to your Mac, your iPhone’s notifications appear within macOS, and if you’ve got the same notification taking place in macOS, you get duplicate notifications. You also can’t access the Control Centre on your iPhone in iPhone Mirroring or fire up the camera. This is version 1, though, so we’ll let them off those niggles.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that iPhone Mirroring is the best thing Apple has released this year.
Final thought: why iPhone Mirroring matters
iPhone Mirroring isn’t unique. There are plenty of other smartphone manufacturers who have been offering this kind of functionality (usually in conjunction with Windows) for a long time. Samsung has gone a step further with DeX, which enables users to connect their smartphone directly to a monitor and unleash a laptop-like experience without a laptop involved.
This is classic Apple. They’ve steamed in, late, but with a solution that is just as good as the rest. It just works. It’s abundantly useful. Immediately, I’d be lost without it.
More importantly, it reveals why Apple isn’t ‘doomed’ or on the verge of falling from its perch. I’m not suggesting that they’ve done something groundbreaking with iPhone Mirroring, but I am suggesting that Apple clearly still has a handle on what people want.
It’s a similar story with AirPods 4, and the new health features that have been added to AirPods Pro 2. The former sit in a class of their own (providing they stay in your ears) and the latter can now act as medical-grade hearing aids. More of this please, Tim!
Read our full AirPods Pro 2 review to learn more
The iPhone 16 is indeed a troubling release. The hardware remains the best on the market, and iOS is still just a notch above Android in terms of usability and the attention it gets from developers. But the Camera Control and Apple Intelligence debacle reveals that there are clearly some tussles taking place behind the scenes which are spilling over into poor feature implementations and unfathomably staggered software releases.
I’m just glad iPhone Mirroring has saved the day for this particular fanboi in 2024.
Before you go
