> Users can now prove the authenticity of a photo taken on iPhone 18 Pro models with Apple Reference Image, powered by the new sensor in the Main camera that can sign every pixel it sees. When a photo is taken in the new Reference mode, the camera captures signed sensor data that Private Cloud Compute develops into an unalterable reference image.5 Reference images can be viewed in the Photos app alongside the main image, like a digital negative, to visually compare the two assets and determine if any edits were made. APIs are available in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27 for third-party apps to enable viewing of these reference images.
A depth map from the apple camera (again, signed) would show that the entire image had the same distance from the camera.
This is a pretty standard application of trusted computing and can be done entirely on the iPhone. A server would only possibly be needed for anonymization (while retaining key revocation capabilities if a key does end up leaking), but there are serverless ways to do even that (TPMs have supported these for a while now).
I think a big part of validation for things like these are just "could it have been modified since Z event happened", because Z was not something people paid attention to before.
It may not be in reach for you and I - but within reach of anyone with the budget to run a 'bot farm'
Proof of captured image with hardware-based-attestation can be increased by adding extra information besides the RGB channels, like depth mapping (which a projected screen wouldn't be able to fake), and eventually light field recording (plenoptic imaging, e.g. Lytro).
things like color rendering, sharpness, screen door/morie, motion blur, and yup even good ole depth queues in the lens system all show up as artifacts.
case in point, outside of a few specific niche cases like the mandalorian, that virtual production video wall thing is not actually being used all that much because of the amount of post shoot cleanup required to fix all those issues, it wasnt actually that much cheaper and its not really better either. especially when you factor in how hard it is to shoot that way.
Pre-AI fake videos sidestep this sort of issue by lowering the video quality.
Add some motion blur, some camera shake, some poor lighting, the camera being slightly out of focus, and make the video 720p instead of 4k.
I suspect it’s significantly less than millions.
It helps but doesn't solve credibility issue.
Then we might move to an age where photos which were not signed by someone will be treated as fake.
What we need is almost something like the classic "press C+A+D to log in" or the idea of "above the browser pane"... something an image cannot show you unless it's legit. Perhaps a personal thumbprint icon that is different for each viewer, so you know its your device telling you that something is real and not just some mock fake thing?
Will this also work with third-party camera apps like ProCam?
It's still distinct from actual AI generation imo.
Congrats to Apple achieving nation-wide tracking, embedding some kind of yellow dots[1], but this time this time this is based on strong cryptography and non-removable, targeting people who don't use AI under the slogan "we are fighting AI fakes", but people still "love the feature".
The problem is real, but this solution seems to not really solve it in any practical sense.
So, 90% of photojournalism outside of the major cities, then.
We really need Apple to open up true depth APIs to make forgery non trivial.
1) I see a photo online and doubt it's provenance
2) I contact the photographer and ask to see their cloud image (???!)
2a) I borrow someone's mac to download the image (.jpg?) and it can be verified on that?
We really need it for journalism. Otherwise we will not know what is real and what fabricated with ai.
On the other hand if this becomes mandated by law I can see it become treacherous for endusers.
I wonder what the common thread is.
Regulation.
For China I would assume like other services, if there's some cloud involved, it should be on Chinese soil and accessible to China.
For EU harder to guess, but again the lock-in with "Private Cloud Computing" feels related.
It’s likely DMA — Apple would be required to provide APIs for signing for 3rd party apps too.
https://c2paviewer.com/articles/samsung-galaxy-s25-c2pa
https://security.googleblog.com/2025/09/pixel-android-truste...
On the other hand, ignoring standards altogether is the wrong way to go because the ecosystem after capture won't be there.
Or feature Thunderbolt rather than normie USB-C so you can record 4/8K ProRes to an SSD, and power a multi monitor setup with your iPhone Pro. macOS would be sick. Or (waterproof) exposed PCIE lanes so 3rd parties can integrate an ecosystem of backpacks like how Pi Hats work.
The old iPhone 17 Pro has USB 3.2 Gen 2, which is good for 10Gb/s.
You can already record 4K60 ProRes to an external SSD. This feature already existed for a year, so I assume you didn't actually need it?
> and power a multi monitor setup with your iPhone Pro. macOS would be sick.
I think you're looking for a MacBook Pro the size of an iPhone.
[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/app/samsung-dex
You could argue most people wont need that speed, but most people don't need pro phone too.
Can you show me the workflow which uses this and has an iPhone as the bottleneck
Can already do iMessage over satellite. Most “data” is download and I predict some satellite service that sends basic broadcasts (traffic, news, Text-to-speech podcasts) squeezed into a few mbps by pointing your phone at the sky (or a small cabled antenna for around the clock use). Would love to go carrier-less.
My iphone 16 pro max can do 4K ProRes HDR or Log at 120 FPS when plugged into a SSD. If I had more builtin storage I could do it without the SSD. If you don't mind more dongling you can also have an external display along with the external SSD.
I actually do this because it's the behavior I've wanted for years, and I care about it enough to go through the relentless annoyance.
Never thought they would do it all within one update. In terms of hardware that is pretty much everything I wanted other than Silicon Battery.
The only thing that need radical change is iOS.
Please, not again.
– Sincerely yours mobile developer
That’s partially why they’re in the mess they’re in with AI. The CFO wouldn’t let them buy enough GPUs to train their models.
They needed all that money for more important expenses, like share buybacks, instead.
I don’t think Siri is sentient yet.
Personally iSO 26 is so unbelievably glitchy, it's only not embarrasing because you know others spent $$$ on the same thing so everyone pretends it's fine.
I don't use the apple podcasts or music apps. (Overcast and Spotify for me). I haven't run into any serious problems.
I have Reduced Transparency, Reduce Motion, and Prefer Cross-Fade Transitions, all enabled. You have to have Liquid Glass set to Clear for Reduce Transparency.
I do use the Apple Podcasts app, but YouTube Music and DI.FM Radio apps for music.
I never see any rendering issues / glitches, and the UI is smooth & snappy.
It's NOT possible to turn LG off in iOS 26. It is possible to reduce transparency and motion (i tried with and without enabling those and it's broken anyway).
Yet that’s still just repairing what they previously broke. I still can’t listen to music AND listen to a voice memo or a video clip.
I have no idea how much ram my phone has. So long as apps run well, why would I care?
> the most important property of compute devices right now
Memory didn't matter when iPhone 12 was released, but these days it determines which local LLMs you can run on device. That's the point of that comment.
How about avoiding that scenario again? Is that a good enough reason? Being a diligent, informed consumer?
You can't possibly expect Apple to take that market segment seriously.
I am not sure single digit tk/s on weak model like ChatGPT OSS 20b @ Q3_K_M is going to be worthwhile.
Not to mention this has to be <0.01% of users who "want" to do this. The iPhone tooling would make it hard to even configure and spin up a local LLM.
According to what? (I don't disagree, just curious)
Small, memory efficient programs run better everywhere. It feels like theft to make consumers pay for our inefficient software. Electron / react on the desktop is such a rort.
Sure. Right along with Intel Core 2 Duo and Windows Vista.
Also, if they make a neo 2 from the A19 with 12 GB that'd be cool.
It’s just a software restriction. I’m sure they have macOS running on iPhones and iPads internally, probably both through a VM and natively. But it’s very Apple to block this use case.
> iPhone
Pick one.
The A19 Pro had 12 GB and was around 77GB/sec memory bandwidth for reference. If I was a betting man, I'd say the memory bandwidth on the A20 Pro is the same.
Since 1984, Apple has targeted regular people, not spec nerds. You're not the market.
Threadcount, Watts, cubic inches: different products use different misleading measures.
It will probably keep most of its value too, if hardware price inflation continues.
Always said that I didn't see a reason to upgrade once I had 5G UW
Apple basically need to release a new model every year to fit the phone upgrade cycle so I suppose it’s not that surprising to see one with so few compelling features. Maybe next year.
I mean, I can't remember the last time they DIDN'T say that. Variable aperture is kinda cool I guess. 256Gigs of storage basically means everyone's going to have to upgrade their iCloud storage monthly spend just to back this thing up. I've stopped sending my camera roll to iCloud just to save on space.
This is an interesting choice. Photos from my phone would literally be the last thing I ever turned off backup for.
To each their own...
Which means this original comment is somewhat disingenuous: "256Gigs of storage basically means everyone's going to have to upgrade their iCloud storage monthly spend just to back this thing up."
Clearly there is another option (as evidenced by your own behavior). But let's not pretend that option is free, either.
Likewise the 6th gen iPad Mini is what I was waiting for to get a tablet to sketch.
Sometimes a device hits just right.
how do you backup your photos when the phone gets full. I dont have a mac and the process is excruciating. Also the formats get messed up so some photos become unusable. I stopped taking 'live' photos because of this.
The two formats I've found that they don't back up accurately are rotated photos (if one's a stickler for "originals") and cropped screenshots (JPEG instead of PNG). Possibly the sidecar files for edits too.
Sometimes Google photos shows the wrong orientation for my pixel photos/videos but it's just a display issue.
Everything you stated to is useless to the person you replied.
Not unlike the "Best jacket of the season" being the one that is most fashionable as opposed to the most functional.
Now I think all the iphone cameras still suck compared to an actual camera, but the improvement over the last 10 years has been dramatic.
"MASSIVE improvements in Camera". Where? Evolution, refinement, sure. Massive? Hm.
The downside is that you need more money up front to purchase it.
- can I get a 5 inch phone please?
Unless you’re using photos or videos like an expert, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to go for a heavy Pro anymore.
Since last year’s promotional display came equipped with the standard model, I just can’t find it appealing.
Ah, of course, since it has AI features, we’ll have to see how much the RAM difference matters, but
Could it be that Apple is going to put so little RAM in the standard model that they can’t really use AI well?
I hope you won’t go that far.
I wish they’d put a zoom lens instead of a wide angle on the standard iPhone, but alas, you need a Pro for that.
That might convince me to upgrade. Not because I care about watching video for two days straight, but hopefully it means the battery is large enough that it'll last 5+ years before battery degradation becomes annoying.
Just coming up to five years on mine and it is still at 87% capacity.
I follow the estimate that lipos lose 2-4% capacity per year without any use beyond recharging for safety. If the battery sees daily use that number gets a lot worse.
My guess is everyone else is the perfect mix of hardly any use and winning the battery lottery.
Really it mostly depends on how heavily you use it, and maybe to a lesser extent charging habits (charging slowly, not charging to 100%, etc).
Big phones are overrated.
I'm not sure where the capacity will end up after 5 years, but I think my iPhone 14 pro was at less than 95% at this point. Apple refused to replace just the battery on that one because of a small crack in the screen.
The SE versions have a history of board level issues so I have been afraid to touch any of them.
I damaged my first iPhone repair even after multiple years of active hardware modification on other consumer devices. The older models really only go smooth if you have the Apple tools. A nice $149 of tool rental to swap the $50 part at home, rather than paying the $199 to get Apple to swap it for you. Odd how that math works out.
But I also don't see it failing me any time soon on battery. I think local AI models in a future iPhone could be an actual reason to upgrade.
How do you see the capacity?
Waiting 15 seconds for a simple app is just infuriating in this day and age. This is mostly on crappy app developers, but a lot of that falls on Apple for not having a rating system that encourages basic good app behavior.
Every bad app that I encounter, which sends advertising notifications, takes a long time to launch, etc. is dominated by 5 star reviews, somehow. The whole ecosystem feels broken.
(And I'm also really offended by how ugly, unpolished, and broken the Tahoe visual style is on iPhone. The whole thing feels like a buggy beta, something completely unworthy of Apple of the past. That it's still not fixed is an indication of the Apple of the future, unfortunately...)
And on the iOS side, Tahoe inserts all sorts of overdone, ridiculous animations that slow down phone interaction, but delaying presentation of
In this system. Of 'smartphones', where a small handful of corporate masters - who also happen to (now!) be a big share of the world's largest and most profitable corporations - now own over half of the computing world that we love, following their whirlwind 20-year takeover of it.
"No I need better phone app developers." - Hmmm. Commiserations. The trend of developer quality (and/or it's inverse - e.g. system complexity and overheads) has been fairly constant since the term 'developer' became mainstream parlance, and you won't need me to point out what effect AI coding agents have had upon the doorway-to-entry.
iOS 18 corresponds to macOS 15 (Sequoia)
Can't believe the crap OSes and frameworks add these days in terms of performance cost (and sadly, Apple doesn't exactly shine in that regard)
Not quite sure where you are seeing this. Maybe games?
Forgive my skepticism that Apple will get it right. Even the lauded latest version of Siri is far worse than the labs' offerings or Android at voice dictation (I now have to fix 1 word per sentence instead of 4, previously)
I personally don't care if Siri is the worst LLM of the big players, as long as it can answer my basic questions and search my texts, I'm happy. I don't need "frontier intelligence" for that kind of stuff.
As for dictation, they say the new dictation is much better, requiring an iPhone 17. Unfortunately, I won't get to find out if that's true for another five or so years, but I'm hopeful for a better dictation on device, because you're right.
Hopefully these models have a longer lifespan before the battery life forces a replacement. If they truly offer 36 hours, there's more runway before they hit the < 18 hours point at which many people need a refresh
I’ll finally, albeit reluctantly, upgrade this year. I really liked the mini form factor.
Using chatGPT voice i can see Open AI's push for pushing us to a new Internet voice paradigm 1st with screens/visuals secondary & complimentary to possibly none at all. It would be much safer especially when driving to get super intelligent human like directions where voice says drive to the mcdonalds on dorset you go to all the time and across the street is the new 7 Brew coffee shop.
— "There is no contact named 'Chronometer'"
Maybe if we mock the iPhone enough, they'll stop autocorrecting words with other words that are on the opposite side of the keyboard. Or mistype letters with the letters just next to them.
iPhone is laughing stock. A neverending comedy of "There is no track named 'Call Mom' in your Apple Music library."
Wait, that is gated to the $1999 duo device, with untested reliability.
From Apple: "Apple Reference Image provides users with an unalterable reference photo, visually confirming what the sensor saw at the moment of capture."
The pixels that arrive in the final image have already been significantly altered from what the sensor saw: demosaicing, noise reduction, Deep Fusion, artificial bokeh, etc. Is the signature anchored to raw sensor readout (making the reference a de-mosaiced digital negative, with all CIP processing deliberately left outside the trust boundary), or to the CIP's emitted image (in which case what does 'unalterable' actually protect against)? If it is the latter, then Apple are essentially saying some forms of computational (and ML) manipulation are acceptable in a signed capture, so long as it is their manipulation.
No details on satellite comms, but the predecessor C1X also handles satellite communication and competitor Qualcomm also does satellite comms on the same silicon, so I'd say yes.
My wife just preordered an 18 pro. She’s the family photographer and is still on a 128gb iPhone 12, so it’s time for an upgrade and she fell in love with the cherry color.
She bought the 12 instead of the more appropriate 12 pro years ago because she loved the purple that she couldn’t get with a 12 pro.
Edit:typo
I guess this is from a reseller, and not from Apple.
0. https://www.biopharmawatch.com/news/DGX/apple-health-app-que...
Eh, that's maybe about it.
Now given that they already have a lower photon budget, you now want to add aperture control, which when stopped down physically reduces the amount of light from the scene that reaches the sensor. Thus you need to compensate for these lost photons somehow, so gain will probably have to increase quite a bit, but then you get noisier, grainier photos. This then leads to the suspicion that you will need some sort of AI denoising or computational processing to recover some of that lost image quality. Though of course you can comp in other way such as exposure time (they can make big wins here with their stabilization) and tons of lighting.
Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field because again smaller sensor size thus smaller focal length etc. Most images at their lower f stop is already in focus. So the ability to reduce aperture or simulate shallow DOF is trying to give users more of the creative control that larger sensor cameras naturally have (need to manipulate because of their larger sensor size) and doesn't make much sense to me.
Totally agreed. I wonder if it will make 180-degree shutter angle video easier to achieve. The only way to achieve this on current iPhones during the day is using a pretty strong ND filter.
>Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field
Fairly deep. You can easily see background blur on a modern iPhone camera if you focus on something close. The very fact that the cameras all have variable focus shows that depth of field isn't as deep as all that. The extra depth of field from a narrower aperture could certainly be useful in some cases, such as landscapes. Here's a question for your favorite LLM:
"If I am shooting an iPhone 17 Pro main camera, what aperture would I theoretically need to get perfect focus from 1.5 meters to infinity, assuming a CoC suitable for a 12MP shot?"
Answer: about f3.2 if you manage to focus at the optimum hyperfocal distance.
>which when stopped down physically reduces the amount of light from the scene that reaches the sensor
As you say, this is only the case if you can't increase the exposure time to compensate. In daylight you will often have plenty of latitude to do so, even without image stabilization. Typical daylight shutter speeds at f/1.78 can be around 1/1000 at base ISO, so there is plenty of room to increase exposure time by 2-3 stops in those conditions.
It's nothing new, Samsung has done thing on the S9/S10, and recently Sony is also doing this, they even come with movable zoom lens
Even Apple can’t eat hundreds of dollars in extra cost per phone in competition with AI memory consumption.
Every one else is raising prices at so they will too.
"On iPhone 18 Pro Max, five minutes of wired charging provides around seven hours of video playback"
Materially impactful feature holy moses! I can plug it in, brush my teeth and I'm set for the work day.
Not sure you can really extrapolate non-video battery life from video battery life. I have an ageing iPad and I can get a couple of hours of video when the battery is at 30%, but it would be gone in 45 minutes if I was browsing.
Web browsing is typically significantly harder on power. Plus these benchmarks usually mean in a perfectly dark room with the backlight at close to zero.
(Pixel 11 512GB / 16GB RAM is also £1200 - not an endorsement)
edit: and Apple Care got a huge price increase (31%) on the new Pro: the 2 year £179 option is gone - now it's £129 for 1 yr.
I bought an iPhone 11 in 2019 I think? It last until 2 years ago when I limped along until the iPhone 16 Plus. I like the big screen area. The premium for Pro isn't worth it to me. I hope to get another 3 years out of it.
What I would like is an iPhone with Touch ID as an option and no, I don't mean the small one (SE?). I want a big screen. Put the Touch ID on the back of the phone like the samsung Galaxy did.
I literally hate Face ID with a passion and it's a massive accessibility issue for people with visual impairments.
No amount of slightly better CPU and camera is going to get me to upgrade every year anymore.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/change-face-id-and-at...
The Mini thus, undersold, because if you were fine with the 8 then iPhones of that size were still available (2nd Gen SE). Nobody bought: So Apple thinks theres no market.
It was smaller than the iPhone 8. It was slightly thicker (0.01"), shorter (by 0.27") and narrower (0.13"). And it had a bigger display despite being overall smaller. It was bigger than the 5, though.
I did, however, take a series of photos comparing the Mini to the SE- and the packaging of the 6 (I think I gave the phone away but still had the box).
https://imgur.com/a/iphone-mini-vs-iphone-5-vs-iphone-6-case...
The SE was the one that shared the 8's dimensions, the Mini was smaller than both. That Mini appears to be in a case, so the comparison photos aren't as useful as they'd be otherwise.
(Also, it looks like I couldn't do arithmetic earlier or typo'd the number, the Mini is 0.12" narrower, not 0.13").
Maybe because it's the dark version of the phone you can barely make out the shiny apple logo, but it's there, you can see the metal edge of the phone.
It's not in a case.. obviously, that would be a stupid comparison.
"SE" is a nondescript product line and the only physical differences are the tone of the chassis and a stamp; it's a fair representation of the size of a 5.
Apple was the last hold out with small phones, years after everybody else moved to huge phones.
But even Apple couldn't resist the pressure from the consumers, and eventually yielded.
And somehow we ended up with more Pixels and not minis.
Rinse and repeat.
If you have a "known" or "expected" cycle, people can rely on that.
Wish I'd got the biggest storage size when I bought it though :(
https://photos.reportinglive.com/p/2026-09-09/f-bf86c6f5adb3...
Height
4.64 inches (117.8 mm) closed / 4.64 inches (117.8 mm) open
5.18 inches (131.5 mm)
Width
3.31 inches (84.1 mm) closed / 6.48 inches (164.6 mm) open
2.53 inches (64.2 mm)
Depth
0.44 inch (11.3 mm) closed / 0.21 inch (5.2 mm) open
0.30 inch (7.65 mm)
Weight
8.96 ounces (254 grams)
4.97 ounces (141 grams)The body shapes and cases seem to change each year anyway now, so it's not like people get to re-use cases that much anyway...
Sometimes I tell my teenage daughter “stop inventing things to be mad about”. Good advice for HN commenters, too.
And even in a case now that they have those huge camera plateaus you can still definitely tell what color iPhone someone has.
- Apple has this event because it generates buzz, which increases sales.
- You do not need to watch the event.
- You do not need to pay attention to anything about the event.
- You do not need to buy the new device.
Like on the post about the No Man's Sky update: "Oh these devs have been putting out free updates for 10 years? So what? I don't like it"
The worst thing about cynical-for-the-sake-of-being-cynical goons is that they drown out the actual legitimate complains and concerns about something.
Yeah Apple TOTALLY doesn't astroturf HN.
Still. This must be the first iPhone not to break page one.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Edit: Page one I guess?
Instead of proving some image on some platform is not AI or severely edited, we can simply prove it was original by verifying unforgeable signature made by a camera / microphone baked into each image produced by it.
And of course in future it could be done for video and audio! This would be absolutely HUGE!
The image data the sensor physically receives passes through a ton of processing steps before the image lands in your phone. If there is some watermarking/signature doing on, on the image, it'd be that the device at that moment capture that data, not that it's not AI, or not edited, or "truthful" or whatever. That's still an unsolved problem to figure out.
Still no solution if the image posted online is not that reference image or that reference image is actually a photo of an AI picture.
https://lobste.rs/s/4netv1/c2pa_cameras_do_not_survive_conta...
Edit: Nevermind, it has made the front page now
When did Qualcomm start eclipsing apple?