6 ms·

Even though the overall tone of this review was upbeat and positive, it seemed that the baseline conclusion was: "hopefully we find a use for the minor iterativ

by jack6e 9y ago

Even though the overall tone of this review was upbeat and positive, it seemed that the baseline conclusion was: "hopefully we find a use for the minor iterative improvements that will make this more than just the next release in a series of underwhelming releases." For one of the first, selectively-chosen reviews of what is supposed to be a ground-breaking product, the article essentially told us 1) the pictures look better; 2) Apple finally imitated Samsung's Infinity Display; 3) my fingers learned new motions that were useless with other Apple products; 4) FaceID became familiar and even worked sometimes; 5) I could put my face on a pile of poo, which required some cool technology. Not that those features or the article suggest the iPhone X is a bad product, or bug-ridden, non-usable, or anything else. But how in the world are people--is Apple--still not embarrassed pretending that this is a revolutionary device? Even if FaceID is intensely innovative and unparalleled new technology - that is just the feature that people use to get to the features they actually want to use. No one is going to buy a phone to play around with the unlocking mechanism, they buy it for what that phone can do for them once it's unlocked. Hyping on FaceID is like saying, "We are revolutionizing mobile computing by entirely overhauling the millisecond process by which you gain access to a slightly improved version of the product you already have."

mratzloff 9y ago
I keep my entire music collection on my phone, and my 128 GB 6S is tapped out (almost entirely music). That requires me to do some storage juggling every time I want to update. So I'll probably buy one for the bump to 256 GB alone. Double the storage should last me for quite awhile. The other features are largely irrelevant (except perhaps the inductive charging), but I'll get the X instead of the 8 because it will be 3-4 years before I update again. For what it's worth, the 6S's 128 GB and bump to 2 GB RAM (making Safari usable again on JavaScript-clogged sites) were what motivated me to buy that one. The X, incidentally, bumps that again to 3 GB. The 8 remains at 2.
craftyguy 9y ago
Apple could literally release a phone with zero changes to it over the previous "generation" and billions would still want it.
- tobystore 9y ago
  >Apple could literally release a phone with zero changes to it over the previous "generation" and billions would still want it. Yes, but not because of the mindless sheep angle you seem to want it to be. Lots of people are comfortable using iPhones and like how they work. They don't want to to switch to something else. The End.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    > Yes, but not because of the mindless sheep angle you seem to want it to be How do you explain the iphone x? > Lots of people are comfortable using iPhones and like how they work. They don't want to to switch to something else ok? That's not at all what I was talking about. > The End. Oh please, get over yourself.
    - yladiz 9y ago
      > How do you explain the iphone x? Is this related to the "zero changes to a phone and billions would want it" or "mindless sheep angle"?
    - criddell 9y ago
      What is there to explain about the iPhone X? It's the best new phone from Apple. If you keep a phone for two years and use it daily, then the hardware costs around $2 / day so it's affordable. If that's the ecosystem you are in and want a new phone, then that's a pretty reasonable choice.
      - mitchty 9y ago
        I'm upgrading from my iPhone 6+, so in my case 3 years. And it works out to about $1 a day. Which is in the whatever category. Expensive, sure, but at this point skipping every other generation or every every third generation is fine. The main reason for upgrading is the battery is starting to ghost. Its max charge is 1900mah from its original 2800(ish? i forget exactly)mah. Call me a sheep if you want but I've tried my friends android phones and even have a nexus tablet. It just doesn't do it for me. Plus getting rid of all my high scores in games is no bueno. I've spent many years in lines perfecting them.
conception 9y ago
The X is Apple playing catch up feature wise, but they seem to be catching up the way they always do; being a leader in the pack. Fastest phone by far, arguably the best camera (really comes down to preference vs Pixel), but what I'm excited about is for stuff I've dreamed of from Apple - OLED (dark themes matter now!), thicker phone for more battery life and Plus features without the ShoePhone size from a company that is actively trying to protect my privacy. If they complete the whole package and make it all work great, then like the iPod, it doesn't need to be first to market to be revolutionary. Just be better than all the other implementations and UX thus far. Though iOS 11 doesn't seem like that's all coming together super great but their pros still seem to outweigh all their competitors cons for what I want from a device. And of course, marketing is marketing.
- themihai 9y ago
  Apparently the OLED display is a 1st generation(older) OLED from Samsung...It really felt to me they made a big deal just like they did with 4K on Apple TV.... same technology like the competition, one year later. The camera on Samsung seems to be better too. The only thing that keeps me on Apple ecosystem is iOS and MacOS...
  - dpark 9y ago
    Citation? I cannot imagine that my years old Nexus 6 has a more recent display than the new iPhone X.
    - themihai 9y ago
      Check the specs. It's AMOLED vs OLED. Also check the ppi, brightness etc. It was so embarrassing to watch the keynote when Phil was explaining that it took longer to upgrade to OLED because they had to perfect the technology. I guess that's why they haven't upgrade Mac Pro line for so long either...same with Mac Mini and 4K on Apple TV..they are perfecting it... The truth is that the old LCD was cheaper and now after they upgraded to OLED they bumped the price as well.
dntrkv 9y ago
What was so revolutionary about the original iPhone? I don't think anyone could point at any single feature throughout the whole smartphone revolution and claim it was "revolutionary." It was always a combination of features and design decisions that made the phones so easy and pleasant to use. There were many phones before the iPhone that were way more capable, yet nobody talked about them. Siri, TouchID, FaceID, capacitive touch screen, great cameras, app store, full fledged browser, LTE, etc... Any of these features by themselves aren't "revolutionary" until you combine it all into a cohesive experience where you look at your phone to unlock it, take a photo that until very recently could only be produced by a DSLR, upload it nearly instantly to a social network within 5 taps, and then receive real time notifications when other people comment on it, all on a device you can hold in one hand. Sure, you could say this is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but again, I don't believe there was this time where it was revolutionary to the extent you claim. It's always been a slow iterative process.
- ggg9990 9y ago
  I've always upgraded my iPhone only for the camera and I've never regretted that. There are so many photos I have from a long time ago that I wish were higher quality, so I'm always willing to spend $ to make sure that today's photos are as good as they can be. 90% of the time I don't have my proper camera with me, so the phone is what it is. Tangentially, after seeing some NFL replay highlights this weekend, I really wish HD high-frame rate cameras had been invented when Barry Sanders (perhaps the most electrifying football player of all time) played.
  - photojosh 9y ago
    Yep, I'm more excited about the 56mm-e camera getting a wider aperture and image stabilisation than I am FaceID in the immediate sense. But I am interested in what app developers will be able to do with a miniature 3D scanner!
- jack6e 9y ago
  I am not saying the phone is revolutionary, I am saying that Apple and some supporters/reviewers call it revolutionary. See Apple's own page for the X[1]. The use the slogan, "Say hello to the future", and for the FaceID section, literally call it "A revolution in recognition" (emphasis mine). The point that I was drawing out from the review was that all the hoped-for fulfillment of Apple's marketing seems to rely on 3rd-party developers making this new hardware useful, but Apple itself has not really delivered to the hype. It is as if the English colonists in America had written the Declaration and then the Constitution and said, "Hopefully in the future some nations out there will know what to do with democracy and can make it successful, but we'll stick with being slightly more-autonomous subjects of King George for now." Some "revolution" that would have been. [1] https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/
ggg9990 9y ago
FaceID is extremely uninteresting but the hardware used for it could be game-changing. A depth camera on 100m devices in the world is pretty novel. I can imagine pretty cool gaming and communications apps that project a user's face into the virtual world, and held backwards you could use the depth camera to scan a room.
jpalomaki 9y ago
There's no room for revolution in smartphone space anymore. The market is too competitive and everybody is tracking it too closely. Revolution can take place in overlooked product categories (think tablets when iPad was introduced - I'd claim that was true revolution since it took significant time for the competitors to really catch up with Apple). On one hand this is pretty sad. There's no wow factor, no truly exciting product releases. On the other hand the frequent releases mean that you can upgrade whenever and you always get pretty much latest available technology thanks to the yearly incremental updates vendors are releasing. I'm getting suspicious if anything revolutionary can happen in the consumer electronics space. Companies are too eager to release early instead of keeping the stuff under wraps until it is amazing. Take wearable augmented reality devices as an example. We saw Google Glass years ago and then Microsoft Hololens. Now if somebody actually delivers a reasonably good mass market device in 2019 it hardly feels revolutionary after these prototypes. Same thing with VR headsets and smart watches.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Have there ever been any truly revolutionary products on the market that came out of nowhere? Before the iPad there were quite a few attempts at tablets (e.g. Apple Newton) that tested out certain features and got market feedback. The main thing Apple did was to learn from other failures and create an appealing package. I bet at some point someone will learn from all the attempts at wearable devices and develop something users actually will like. Or maybe we will decide that something like Google Glass simply doesn't work and move on to something else.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  There's no room for revolution in smartphone space anymore. The market is too competitive and everybody is tracking it too closely. Revolution can take place in overlooked product categories What about in overlooked user interface technologies? I think FaceID would be great for unlocking the a MacBook laptop. Also, the face that Apple can now get ahold of those sensors for cheap and at scale probably opens up the opportunity for user interface innovation. People like to use touch for certain operations on current laptops with a touch screen, but some of those might be better done with a gesture away from the screen the doesn't cover up the view of the screen. (Or require the user to lift their hands up from the palm rest to avoid gorilla arm.) Tablets existed before multitouch and the first iPad. It was a thinner form factor enabled by better battery and more frugal processors combined with multitouch which made the iPad what it is.

by jack6e 9y ago

mratzloff 9y ago

I keep my entire music collection on my phone, and my 128 GB 6S is tapped out (almost entirely music). That requires me to do some storage juggling every time I want to update. So I'll probably buy one for the bump to 256 GB alone. Double the storage should last me for quite awhile. The other features are largely irrelevant (except perhaps the inductive charging), but I'll get the X instead of the 8 because it will be 3-4 years before I update again. For what it's worth, the 6S's 128 GB and bump to 2 GB RAM (making Safari usable again on JavaScript-clogged sites) were what motivated me to buy that one. The X, incidentally, bumps that again to 3 GB. The 8 remains at 2.

craftyguy 9y ago

Apple could literally release a phone with zero changes to it over the previous "generation" and billions would still want it.

tobystore 9y ago
>Apple could literally release a phone with zero changes to it over the previous "generation" and billions would still want it. Yes, but not because of the mindless sheep angle you seem to want it to be. Lots of people are comfortable using iPhones and like how they work. They don't want to to switch to something else. The End.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- craftyguy 9y ago
  > Yes, but not because of the mindless sheep angle you seem to want it to be How do you explain the iphone x? > Lots of people are comfortable using iPhones and like how they work. They don't want to to switch to something else ok? That's not at all what I was talking about. > The End. Oh please, get over yourself.
  - yladiz 9y ago
    > How do you explain the iphone x? Is this related to the "zero changes to a phone and billions would want it" or "mindless sheep angle"?
  - criddell 9y ago
    What is there to explain about the iPhone X? It's the best new phone from Apple. If you keep a phone for two years and use it daily, then the hardware costs around $2 / day so it's affordable. If that's the ecosystem you are in and want a new phone, then that's a pretty reasonable choice.
    - mitchty 9y ago
      I'm upgrading from my iPhone 6+, so in my case 3 years. And it works out to about $1 a day. Which is in the whatever category. Expensive, sure, but at this point skipping every other generation or every every third generation is fine. The main reason for upgrading is the battery is starting to ghost. Its max charge is 1900mah from its original 2800(ish? i forget exactly)mah. Call me a sheep if you want but I've tried my friends android phones and even have a nexus tablet. It just doesn't do it for me. Plus getting rid of all my high scores in games is no bueno. I've spent many years in lines perfecting them.

conception 9y ago

The X is Apple playing catch up feature wise, but they seem to be catching up the way they always do; being a leader in the pack. Fastest phone by far, arguably the best camera (really comes down to preference vs Pixel), but what I'm excited about is for stuff I've dreamed of from Apple - OLED (dark themes matter now!), thicker phone for more battery life and Plus features without the ShoePhone size from a company that is actively trying to protect my privacy. If they complete the whole package and make it all work great, then like the iPod, it doesn't need to be first to market to be revolutionary. Just be better than all the other implementations and UX thus far. Though iOS 11 doesn't seem like that's all coming together super great but their pros still seem to outweigh all their competitors cons for what I want from a device. And of course, marketing is marketing.

themihai 9y ago
Apparently the OLED display is a 1st generation(older) OLED from Samsung...It really felt to me they made a big deal just like they did with 4K on Apple TV.... same technology like the competition, one year later. The camera on Samsung seems to be better too. The only thing that keeps me on Apple ecosystem is iOS and MacOS...
- dpark 9y ago
  Citation? I cannot imagine that my years old Nexus 6 has a more recent display than the new iPhone X.
  - themihai 9y ago
    Check the specs. It's AMOLED vs OLED. Also check the ppi, brightness etc. It was so embarrassing to watch the keynote when Phil was explaining that it took longer to upgrade to OLED because they had to perfect the technology. I guess that's why they haven't upgrade Mac Pro line for so long either...same with Mac Mini and 4K on Apple TV..they are perfecting it... The truth is that the old LCD was cheaper and now after they upgraded to OLED they bumped the price as well.

dntrkv 9y ago

What was so revolutionary about the original iPhone? I don't think anyone could point at any single feature throughout the whole smartphone revolution and claim it was "revolutionary." It was always a combination of features and design decisions that made the phones so easy and pleasant to use. There were many phones before the iPhone that were way more capable, yet nobody talked about them. Siri, TouchID, FaceID, capacitive touch screen, great cameras, app store, full fledged browser, LTE, etc... Any of these features by themselves aren't "revolutionary" until you combine it all into a cohesive experience where you look at your phone to unlock it, take a photo that until very recently could only be produced by a DSLR, upload it nearly instantly to a social network within 5 taps, and then receive real time notifications when other people comment on it, all on a device you can hold in one hand. Sure, you could say this is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but again, I don't believe there was this time where it was revolutionary to the extent you claim. It's always been a slow iterative process.

ggg9990 9y ago
I've always upgraded my iPhone only for the camera and I've never regretted that. There are so many photos I have from a long time ago that I wish were higher quality, so I'm always willing to spend $ to make sure that today's photos are as good as they can be. 90% of the time I don't have my proper camera with me, so the phone is what it is. Tangentially, after seeing some NFL replay highlights this weekend, I really wish HD high-frame rate cameras had been invented when Barry Sanders (perhaps the most electrifying football player of all time) played.
- photojosh 9y ago
  Yep, I'm more excited about the 56mm-e camera getting a wider aperture and image stabilisation than I am FaceID in the immediate sense. But I am interested in what app developers will be able to do with a miniature 3D scanner!
jack6e 9y ago
I am not saying the phone is revolutionary, I am saying that Apple and some supporters/reviewers call it revolutionary. See Apple's own page for the X[1]. The use the slogan, "Say hello to the future", and for the FaceID section, literally call it "A revolution in recognition" (emphasis mine). The point that I was drawing out from the review was that all the hoped-for fulfillment of Apple's marketing seems to rely on 3rd-party developers making this new hardware useful, but Apple itself has not really delivered to the hype. It is as if the English colonists in America had written the Declaration and then the Constitution and said, "Hopefully in the future some nations out there will know what to do with democracy and can make it successful, but we'll stick with being slightly more-autonomous subjects of King George for now." Some "revolution" that would have been. [1] https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/ https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/

ggg9990 9y ago

FaceID is extremely uninteresting but the hardware used for it could be game-changing. A depth camera on 100m devices in the world is pretty novel. I can imagine pretty cool gaming and communications apps that project a user's face into the virtual world, and held backwards you could use the depth camera to scan a room.

jpalomaki 9y ago

There's no room for revolution in smartphone space anymore. The market is too competitive and everybody is tracking it too closely. Revolution can take place in overlooked product categories (think tablets when iPad was introduced - I'd claim that was true revolution since it took significant time for the competitors to really catch up with Apple). On one hand this is pretty sad. There's no wow factor, no truly exciting product releases. On the other hand the frequent releases mean that you can upgrade whenever and you always get pretty much latest available technology thanks to the yearly incremental updates vendors are releasing. I'm getting suspicious if anything revolutionary can happen in the consumer electronics space. Companies are too eager to release early instead of keeping the stuff under wraps until it is amazing. Take wearable augmented reality devices as an example. We saw Google Glass years ago and then Microsoft Hololens. Now if somebody actually delivers a reasonably good mass market device in 2019 it hardly feels revolutionary after these prototypes. Same thing with VR headsets and smart watches.

maxxxxx 9y ago
Have there ever been any truly revolutionary products on the market that came out of nowhere? Before the iPad there were quite a few attempts at tablets (e.g. Apple Newton) that tested out certain features and got market feedback. The main thing Apple did was to learn from other failures and create an appealing package. I bet at some point someone will learn from all the attempts at wearable devices and develop something users actually will like. Or maybe we will decide that something like Google Glass simply doesn't work and move on to something else.
stcredzero 9y ago
There's no room for revolution in smartphone space anymore. The market is too competitive and everybody is tracking it too closely. Revolution can take place in overlooked product categories What about in overlooked user interface technologies? I think FaceID would be great for unlocking the a MacBook laptop. Also, the face that Apple can now get ahold of those sensors for cheap and at scale probably opens up the opportunity for user interface innovation. People like to use touch for certain operations on current laptops with a touch screen, but some of those might be better done with a gesture away from the screen the doesn't cover up the view of the screen. (Or require the user to lift their hands up from the palm rest to avoid gorilla arm.) Tablets existed before multitouch and the first iPad. It was a thinner form factor enabled by better battery and more frugal processors combined with multitouch which made the iPad what it is.