5 best and worst features of the iPhone X
Apple’s new iPhone X, unveiled on Tuesday
with an edge-to-edge OLED display and a $999 price tag, damn thats alot of money,this is bound to
shake up the high-end smartphone market in unforeseen ways. We don’t
know how it will impact Apple’s overall sales, or whether it will set
off a kind of mobile arms race to see which phone maker can outdo the
other in the upper premium price point.
It’s already dividing both diehard Apple fans and
longtime iOS detractors over the very idea of a phone costing into the
four digits. More than any device before it, the X is testing both the
value we put on smartphones and consumers’ willingness to pay for the
best Apple to has offer.
The iPhone X doesn’t go up for preorder until
October 27th, so you have quite a while to think over a potential
purchase and decide whether the iPhone X is worth the extra cash over
the equally powerful iPhone 8, which differs in only a few key areas from its bezel-less counterpart. (Of course, there’s also the now more affordable iPhone 7, which starts at a reasonable $549.)
The easiest way to dissect the decision is to do a bit of
cost-benefit analysis, starting with what the iPhone X appears to do
better than less pricey Apple models:
The edge-to-edge OLED screen is gorgeous
The most obvious standout feature of the iPhone X is the OLED screen, which the lucky few who’ve held it say is probably the most stunning smartphone screen they’ve ever seen. The edge-to-edge display is copied from past Android devices, starting more or less with the Xiaomi Mi Mix last year and making its way to global mainstream prominence in the Samsung Galaxy S8 back in April. But the lack of originality hasn’t stopped Apple from manufacturing a beautiful piece of hardware.
There are some weird quirks to contend with, like the controversial rectangular “notch” cut-out
at the top of the screen, where Apple has stored a bevy of camera and
sensor parts to perform tasks like Face ID and Animoji recordings. But
Apple’s proprietary advantages include the coloration and
brightness-adjusting True Tone display tech and a new Super Retina
moniker that means the iPhone X sports a 2436 x 1125 resolution at 458
ppi across 5.8 inches of real estate. It’s also Apple’s first smartphone
to come HDR-ready. All this adds up to an impressive display that is
clearly the top differentiator between the iPhone X and the iPhone 8.
Whether it’s worth the extra $200 or so is a harder call.
The front-facing camera is more powerful
Hidden inside the small notch cutout at the top of the
iPhone X is a significant number of new camera parts and sensors that do
more than just transpose your face onto an emoji cat or scan it to
unlock your phone. The front-facing camera module now contains an
infrared camera, flood illuminator, proximity scanner, ambient light
sensor, speaker, microphone, 7-megapixel camera, and dot projector. All
of that together combines into what Apple calls its TrueDepth camera,
used for Animoji, Face ID, and a number of cool camera tricks.
TrueDepth is what makes the iPhone X’s front-facing
camera capable of performing the aperture-reduction trick in its
Portrait mode, a feature just a year ago restricted to the back camera of only the iPhone 7 Plus.
It also makes the front-facing camera capable of Apple’s new Portrait
Mode effects, which lets you replicate more professional flash lighting.
These won’t make too big a difference to most of us, unless you happen
to be an obsessive selfie taker who’s been clamoring for DSLR-quality
capabilities. But having the most cutting-edge mobile photography
features at your fingertips could be a big draw to a sizable segment of
the iPhone-using population, and a good reason to upgrade to the X.
Animoji is a neat and novel face mapping concept
Animoji are cartoon animals that replicate your face movements,
expressions, and speech using the front-facing camera and 3D mapping
sensors of the iPhone X. It relies on the very same TrueDepth components
required by Face ID and is another perfect example of Apple’s marriage
of hardware and software to yield something more advanced than the
industry standard. Apple’s implementation here feels like a wildly fun
and goofy blend of cutting-edge tech with selfie-obsessed excess, if not
also a bit of an extravagant resource waste. (Yes, that $1,000 iPhone
can turn you into a poop emoji.)
At best, the iPhone X will only sell as many units as
Apple can manage to manufacture this holiday season, which won’t be all
that many we can assume. So you probably won’t see animoji populating
your iMessage chats all that often, or at all in the near term. It might
be years before the feature has the platform breadth to be a
commonplace form of mobile communication. Still, these novel camera and
software advancements prove that Apple can still perform a bit of magic,
even if it’s of the childish variety, at the intersection of tech and
art.
5.8-inch screen means more real estate in a smaller package
Apple’s new edge-to-edge display on the iPhone X means
you’re getting a larger screen in a smaller package, at least compared
with the iPhone 8 Plus. If you take a look at the dimensions, you’ll see
that the display, measured diagonally, comes to 5.8 inches. That’s
actually bigger than the height of the device itself, which comes in at
5.65 inches.
The iPhone 8 Plus, on the other hand, has those signature
giant bezels. That means it has only a 5.5-inch screen, at a lower 1920
x 1080 resolution and 401 ppi, in a device that stands 6.24 inches. If
you’re someone who treasures screen real estate for everything from
movies to games to reading the news, the iPhone X’s screen is in every
conceivable way a superior piece of hardware.
Face ID feels like the future
At first blush, Face ID may feel like a setback, and
there’s validity to that view. We don’t yet know how secure it will be,
or whether it will come close to the efficiency of Touch ID and
fingerprint reading. It’s also evident that if Apple could have built a
fingerprint sensor underneath the glass of the iPhone X’s OLED display,
that it probably would have.
Still, it’s easy to watch live demos of Face ID and feel
like it could be the future of technological interaction. We had similar
apprehensions about mobile fingerprint readers when they arrived on the
scene more than half a decade ago, before the tech became ubiquitous
and beloved, and now it feels like we’re entering the next chapter in
mobile security. (Naturally, like with the edge-to-edge screen, Apple
didn’t arrive here first, but it’s conceivable its facial recognition
tech will be superior to past implementations.)
There will be security kinks to iron out, for sure, and
unpleasant law enforcement intricacies to dig into it, but the iPhone
X’s ability to map your face, recognize it, and use that information
intelligently is exciting. There’s a chance it will move beyond
unlocking your phone, just as Touch ID became central to mobile payments
on the iPhone. What that new use case looks like is anyone’s guess —
artificial intelligence reading and responding to your emotional state,
perhaps — but 3D face mapping will surely open up some interesting new
possibilities down the line.
As is the case with many Apple products, there are
compromises, even with a device that costs as much as a mid- to
upper-tier PC. For as many benefits as the iPhone X grants you, with its
extra-large screen and new 3D mapping capabilities, there are as many
drawbacks worth considering before you make such a hefty purchase.
It’s not just that last year’s model is so cheap — now
only $549 — or that the iPhone 8 comes with the same processor. The
iPhone X, because it ditches the home button and packs in so many
aggressive forward-looking features, is bound to feel at times like it’s
got a foot stuck in two different eras of technology.
So here’s where the most expensive iPhone ever made appears to falls short:
The iPhone X is expensive... very expensive
The only aspect of the iPhone X perhaps more noticeable
than its display is its price tag. Apple has set the starting cost for
its flagship product, for the very first time, at north of $1,000, when
you factor in taxes or the 256GB storage configuration. The device is even more expensive outside the US
— customers in Italy, Russia, and Poland, for instance, will all have
to pay around $1,600 for a 256GB version of the iPhone X.
There is no getting around this being an eye-popping
price for a device most customers associate with a $600 to $800 range.
We’ve also only just become accustomed to seeing the real cost of a
smartphone, after cell carriers here in the US have all moved away from
the two-year contract subsidy model that obscured a phone’s true price.
But the reality of the situation is that Apple’s business
continues to depend primarily on iPhone sales, which peaked in unit
volume back in 2015. The company knows that there’s a market out there
for premium, high-end smartphones, and there’s surely going to be no
shortage of Apple fans eager to buy the X when preorders go live later
in October. However, on a deeper level, the shift upward in pricing, for
both Apple and Samsung, represents a new era for the smartphone, when
the predominant computing platform on the planet has a price tag to match its significance. It’s just going to hit our wallets now harder than ever before, and that’s a tough pill to swallow for most.
The loss of Touch ID
You can embrace the bold, 3D mapping future promised by
Apple’s new Face ID while at the same time bemoaning the loss of Touch
ID. While it may not work on the edge-to-edge OLED display of the iPhone
X, at least not yet, Touch ID has grown over the years into one of the
fastest, most secure biometric unlocking system of any modern
smartphone, if not the best. Losing it will be an annoying compromise
for many X buyers who must now contend with a new, unproven system.
The verdict’s still out on whether Face ID will seamlessly work for
users of all colors and ethnicities, a severe bias hurdle tech
companies, which are primarily white and male, have fallen victim to in
the past. (Apple says the tech will work in the dark and adapt to
changes in your appearance, like the inclusion of hats and glasses, over
time.)
There’s also a growing debate over what it means for law
enforcement, who can easily point the device at you to unlock your
iPhone, as opposed to compelling you to put your thumb on the device’s
home button or copying it from a fingerprint record. (For reference, you
do not have to give law enforcement your numeric passcode, as that’s protected by the Fifth Amendment as “testimonial” evidence). There is a way to instantly disable Face ID
by pressing the side button on the iPhone X five times, but that seems
like a messy workaround that could go wrong in stressful situations. So
it’s safe to say that there is a real possibility Face ID is arriving
too soon for society to have fully worked out its implications.
UI complexity makes one-hand use difficult
Because the iPhone X does not contain a home button, or
even a software version of one, the entire user interface of iOS 11 on
the device has been altered. There’s a whole new system of gestures and
swipes to learn and master, and many of them will be annoying to
remember and difficult to perform with just one hand. Closing apps now
requires you swipe up from the bottom, while swiping up and then holding
opens the multitasking app switcher. Control Center is now surfaced by
swiping down from right corner, while a swipe down from the left gets
you to the notification list.
There are a bunch of other weird quirks involved, like
accessing Siri by holding down one of the side buttons, which raises the
question of how you turn the phone off now. There’s also the matter of
capturing a mobile screenshot, which used to involve holding down the
home button and power button. But perhaps the most perplexing change
here is how difficult it will be to use the iPhone X with one hand, now
that very useful sections of iOS 11 are buried behind high-cornered
downward swipes. If you don’t have exceptionally large hands, it seems
as if the iPhone X will be a strictly two-handed device.
AppleCare+ costs $199, up from $129
Apple has set the price for its AppleCare+ insurance plan for the iPhone X at $199,
a big jump from the current $129 for both the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8.
While it may be related to the more expensive screen — Apple is still
charging only $29 for a broken screen repair through AppleCare — a $199
charge on top of a $999 or $1,149 device makes the purchase that much
more unattractive.
AppleCare+ is in fact bundled with Apple’s iPhone Upgrade
Program, so you get that added benefit if you lease the phone from the
company itself. However, it’s likely a lot of buyers won’t be using
Apple’s program, choosing instead to buy the device outright or going
through a cell carrier instead. And with a display this large, despite
Apple’s claims of using “the most durable glass ever in a smartphone,”
you’re probably going to want insurance (or a big case) for that
seemingly inevitable sidewalk pavement drop.
A11 Bionic chip and wireless charging also on the iPhone 8
Apple made a strategic decision to include its most
powerful chip, the new A11 Bionic, in both the iPhone 8 and the iPhone
X. That way, the company wouldn’t split its user base and developer
community by pushing app makers toward optimizing for a device only a
small number of consumers might have by year’s end. That’s a smart move.
But it also undermines the value of the iPhone X, restricting its
uniqueness to the OLED screen and front-facing camera tech. The same
goes for Apple’s new wireless charging feature, which will work across the iPhone 8 family and the X because both devices have the same glass back.
When considering which device you really want to buy,
knowing that you’ll still get the fastest chip Apple has ever made, all
the benefits of its new wireless charging feature, and the known
security and familiarity of Touch ID makes the iPhone 8 that much more
attractive, on top of its lower price point. Of course, those early adopters and diehard fans already considering the X
may not care about all that when faced with the possibility of having
the greatest and latest Apple phone. For everyone else, this lack of
substantial distinction should make buying a less flashy model that much
easier.