12 ms·

The iPhone X

91 points by nnx 9y ago

endorphone 9y ago
"After two months using an iPhone X, I’m convinced Apple succeeded. The iPhone X is a triumph, a delightful conceptual modernization of a ten-year-old platform that, prior to using the iPhone X, I didn’t think needed a modernization." There's the tldr. And for anyone accustomed to Gruber's writing, it was a predictable conclusion.
- NetOpWibby 9y ago
  Thank you, I assumed as much.
- randomsearch 9y ago
  I would agree with this summary. I think Apple knocked it out of the park this time, confounding my expectations that everything would be generally terrible post-Steve. They can reinvent something spectacularly well. But can they create something entirely new that is also wonderful? This is the real test they have yet to pass.
  - mitchty 9y ago
    I know everyone is all poo poo on the iPhone x in here. But my prior phone was 3 years old (original 6+, the battery was already starting to... well have issues, was already at over 1k cycles), so I bought the X. Have to say I like it, its just thinner enough width wise. And the one feature it has is brilliant in winter. I can unlock my phone without removing my gloves. And yes, these gloves are the ones that work with capacitive touch screens. Good luck getting gloves to work with a finger sensor, or to be able to type anything with them reliably in -20F weather. So... basically it seems like a solid release overall. Of course I have gripes, the control center swipe is annoying to hit for example but overall its fine. Expensive sure, but if I upgrade every 2-3 years whatever.
    - jsgo 9y ago
      ha, same upgrade here (6 Plus to X). The swipes are the one area where the notch is almost a feature: swipe down from left of notch - notifications; swipe down from right of notch - control center. Doing it in landscape is doable but sometimes I'm not 100% certain it is going to end up where I want it. I'm very pleased so far. I was tired of having the larger phone yet wanted the better camera. Do I know if it is was worth the price premium? Not sure, but it seems I had a choice between two of three items in price, performance, and size. I chose performance and size.
  - tewha 9y ago
    I've got an Apple Watch and AirPods. They're both delightful products, if non-interesting for a software developer like me.
- TwoNineA 9y ago
  TL;DR; should be something like: Apple fanboy likes iPhone X! News at 11.
brian-armstrong 9y ago
This is an incredibly fanboy-y article even by Gruber standards. I'm not sure he's physically capable of criticizing Apple, even if he wanted to.
- dpcx 9y ago
  While it does read as a fanboy article, Gruber has criticized Apple at least a few times in the past. Here's one example, in particular. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/04/08/snell-3d-touch https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/04/08/snell-3d-touch
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    When I first read Gruber he spent quite a bit of his time attacking Apple for abandoning lots of the good stuff from OS9 in favor of the promise offered by the (relatively) clean but at-the-time untested underpinnings of OSX.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    Until he says Apple screwed up so bad that he recommends another company's product, he can only be called a shill.
    - jgruber 9y ago
      Which products do you think I should recommend a competing product over Apple's? On phones, tablets, and computers, I personally much prefer Apple's OSes, and I usually prefer their hardware as well. But even when I don't prefer Apple's hardware, the OS wins out. I don't recommend Apple's wi-fi base stations: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1370753 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1370753
      - lern_too_spel 9y ago
        And why haven't you written anything about which WiFi base station you recommend? Because it isn't an Apple device? Everybody has a WiFi base station, while relatively few people have a smart watch or a programmable TV set top box, so noteworthiness is definitely not the reason. On phones, tablets, and computers; your opinions are laughably one-sided, pooh-poohing all the things that Apple gets wrong, while making up issues with competitor products out of whole cloth. Your writing on Apple's long-delayed deployment of third party multitasking and its eventual copying of Android's Activity model, having worse battery life than the competition this the entire time, was especially cringeworthy.
juandazapata 9y ago
This reads a lot like sponsored content.
- balladeer 9y ago
  Well, I hope it was sponsored.
- danpalmer 9y ago
  I guess given the niche market of Daring Fireball, in a somewhat indirect way it is sponsored content. Gruber will make more money when Apple is more popular.
- ComputerGuru 9y ago
  Not directly. It’s more like, “Daring Fireball, brought to you by John Gruber, brought to you by Apple.”
- Brendinooo 9y ago
  If you were to write a review of a product you really liked, how would you do it differently?
  - willtim 9y ago
    Perhaps one might admit that Apple are late to the game with OLED and edge-to-edge displays?
    - roc 9y ago
      Admit? Like it's a secret he's trying to cover up? Apple people simply don't care. They know Apple's "late." (Inasmuch as someone else has done a similar thing, or used a similar piece of tech "first".) Because Apple is almost always late. Late to touch. Late to smartphones. Late to fingerprint readers. Late to face identification. Late to attention detection. Late to wireless charging. Late to big screens. Late to music streaming. Late to video services. Late to the TV. Late to the wrist. Late to the wireless headphones. etc.
arielm 9y ago
This is a beautiful way of looking at the X from a very zoomed out perspective. To an extent, I agree with much of what’s said and felt the same way when starting to use my X. But, and this is the important but here, we’re existing users. I saw iPhones develop over time, so for me this is evolution and I put up with it. But what about new users, that are new to the platform. Apple made some interactions so unintuitive that even I was confused. One example is purchasing an app. Pre-X, you’d tap the “get” button and place your finger on the home button or enter your password. With the X you have to tap the button, look at your device, and then follow the most unintuitive animation to actually press the physical side button. That’s where I think we start to see the difference between evolution and compromise.
- nkristoffersen 9y ago
  I've had the X for a few days now. The animation to press the physical button totally had me stumped the first few times! Overall I'm a fan (such as great camera and great screen) but some of the new interactions are taking some getting used to.
  - breatheoften 9y ago
    Yeah the explanation for the side button tap should be considered a straight up bug — I had to google what to do.
- thinkythought 9y ago
  Weird, on both my phone and one i gifted to my mother for the first week or so it greyed out the screen(like, windows UAC style) and had big bold text at the bottom saying "double press to purchase" while showing the side button animation. It doesn't show up on mine now, but the little tutorial showed the first few times
jsz0 9y ago
The iPhone X hardware is great but they dropped the ball big time on software quality/reliability. I still encounter major home/swipe related glitches that require a reboot a couple of times per week. It seems like the point releases are causing more problems than they fix which is concerning. iOS seems to be in a nasty downward spiral of reliability.
- shizzleberry 9y ago
  I hear people saying this a ton, aside from the slow face unlock, I haven't experienced many glitches. What am I not doing wrong? Is there a specific gesture to trigger one of these bugs (genuine question)?
  - orev 9y ago
    Same here. Not seeing any of these issues. Face ID is slower to unlock if you compare to an iPhone 7 or 8, but coming from a 6 it still seems faster to me.
    - Paradise_Pete 9y ago
      I thought Face ID was slow until I realized I didn't have to wait for the recognition to finish before swiping up. So now I just swipe up immediately and it almost feels like there's not even a lock.
  - jsz0 9y ago
    The home/swipe related bugs seem to be related to accidental touch detection and/or swiping before animations fully complete. For example this morning I had to reboot my phone because I couldn't swipe to unlock from the lock screen. It was stuck in 'notification mode' so it thought my swipes were to view my notifications instead of unlocking. Immediately before this happened I had cleared all my notifications which resulted in a very choppy animation. My previous reboot before this was caused by getting stuck in Music after trying to swipe down in Music to get off the 'now playing' screen. For some reason this always requires multiple tries so I probably set off some accidental touch detection lockout. It's a death by a thousand paper cuts thing. There is no one bug that can be easily fixed. It's dozens (maybe hundreds) of small annoyances like the keyboard absolutely refusing to register a keypress that goes against it's prediction of what I want to type. Another fun one is I get floods of old notifications randomly usually from phone/messages -- like a voicemail notification from a month ago. I don't even care if Siri doesn't work well or if I have to enter my PIN slightly more often because of FaceID. I just want the fundamentals to work reliably.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
Cut Gruber some slack. He needs to stay in Apple's graces.
- bsaul 9y ago
  That’s where we are now. We integrated sponsored content so much, that we don’t even get angry when some bloggers, writing under his own personal name, seems to have been paid to write a piece of ad, in what is supposed to be a personnal opinion. This whole culture needs to go down the sh_tter. We tolerate youtubers lying about things they like, bloggers lying about their own opinions, companies hidding abusive conditions in their terms of usage, reselling private data, and we consider it all fine because it’s made for the purpose of gaining money. Man, capitalism isn’t about moral, but even capitalistic societies need some kind of ethic...
  - bitmapbrother 9y ago
    This isn't about being paid. Gruber has too much integrity to do such a thing and a serious journalist would never risk their reputation. What Gruber isn't above is heavily criticizing Apple for fear of getting blacklisted because, for a pro Apple blogger, that would be a death sentence.
    - bsaul 9y ago
      The crux of the matter is : does he say what he thinks is the truth, or not. And if not, is it for any reason other than money ?
      - Paradise_Pete 9y ago
        I am pretty certain that Gruber says what he thinks. Some of it may be biased thinking, but I believe it's genuine.
bla2 9y ago
In short, with the iPhone X Apple took a platform with two primary means of interacting with the apps — a touchscreen and a home button — removed one of them, and created a better, more integrated, more organic experience. [...] Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with...
- moogly 9y ago
  That's pretty funny considering the iPhone X is the most Android-like phone so far, what with a) getting rid of the home button b) AMOLED screen (welcome to 2009) c) wireless charging. Finally an iPhone with some decent hardware features.
  - calibration263 9y ago
    Getting rid of a physical button is hardly a decent hardware feature. I would've been massively disappointed if apple had gone the android route and just slapped a virtual button i can tap onto the screen. If you want to say apple ripped some one off with removing the home button, it wasn't android. It was Palm. Welcome back 2009 indeed.
hungerstrike 9y ago
There's so much to hate about the iPhone X - I'm glad it's failing because I never want to see another phone like it again. My biggest gripes are that I like buttons (even the fake iPhone 7 home button is better than swiping) and I like rectangular screens without notches in them. I also think Face ID is a terrible idea with no future. I predicted (and got downvoted here on HN) that it would fail miserably - and it did. Haha! I like things to be simple and always work. The iPhone X with all of its anti-features fails to do that. I will never use a phone with any kind of gimmicky Face or Touch ID system.
- lnx01 9y ago
  It's not failing though, it's selling more than its stable brethren combined: https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/26/iphone-x-outperformed-by-8-and-8-plus/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/26/iphone-x-outperformed-by-8-an...
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    Yeah - during the first month. And then people figured out how bad it actually was.
    - dbbk 9y ago
      What metric are you basing that on?
ryandvm 9y ago
John Gruber loves the iPhone. Film at 11...
tobix 9y ago
"And for reasons I’ve never been able to understand, Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with... but none have copied the iPhone’s mute switch, despite the fact that it’s a brilliant idea." OnePlus 5 and onwards? Although I think it may be the only Android phone to have one.
- barrkel 9y ago
  I could do without that switch - I use Tasker to toggle silent mode based on location rules, and I prefer to e.g. use a timer to turn on no-disturb for a movie, rather than needing to remember to re-enable sounds. The probability that I'm e.g. at a meeting and don't want to be disturbed is far less likely than simply keeping the phone on silent for the whole work day. It just doesn't fit a use case for me.
- eyko 9y ago
  In fact, OnePlus 2 and onwards!
mikewhy 9y ago
This bit especially irked me: "In iOS 11 X, almost every role of the home button has been subsumed by the display, with the remainder reassigned to the side button: - Wake the device: tap the display. - Go to the home screen: short swipe up from the bottom of display. - Go to the multitasking switcher: longer swipe up from the bottom. - Even better way to multitask: just swipe sideways on the home indicator. - Accessibility shortcut: triple-click the side button. - Authenticate: just look at the display. - Reachability: swipe down on the bottom edge of display. - Siri: press-and-hold side button." 5 out of 8 of those things are already achieved without the home button since the 6S.
- Redoubts 9y ago
  Yeah, I was really surprised the long-press-left-edge wasn’t a gesture that made it to the X, among other things.
  - calibration263 9y ago
    I loved that gesture, but I was shocked how many of my friends/coworkers didn't know about it. I think the iPhone X up and over arc is more reliable to trigger(once you figure out not to do up and hold).
    - jolux 9y ago
      it doesn't have to be up and over, you just swipe left and right on it
- Paradise_Pete 9y ago
  Which five? I count two, but no doubt I'm missing some.
  - mikewhy 9y ago
    - Wake the device: Raise to wake - Go to the home screen: 3D touch app switcher, tap any whitespace. It used to be even easier when your home screen had its own entry in there. - Go to the multitasking switcher: 3D touch side - Even better way to multitask: 3D touch swipe - Siri: Hey Siri
breatheoften 9y ago
How did the move of the sleep/wake button from the top to side EVER get approved ...? I’ve been ranting about this since the iPhone 6... I can’t count the number of times I’ve: - inadvertently activated Siri while reaching blindly for my phone - put the phone to sleep when trying to use the hardware shutter button while taking a picture I don’t understand how this flaw has escaped widespread criticism...
- thinkythought 9y ago
  The true face-palmer here is the new screenshot shortcut on the X, wherein you press volume up + side button to take a screenshot i seriously take probably 5-10 screenshots a day just trying to lock my damn phone. I've taken to crooking my finger on the other side so it's far from the volume buttons just to avoid this. Seriously my only major UI complaint
jsgo 9y ago
All in all, I'm pleased with the phone. There are some things that are pretty rough, though, and that compensating for the removal of the home button has caused a glaring problem. Shutdown being the biggest one so far for me. The Konami code that you have to enter in order to initiate getting the slider to appear is nothing short of amazing. I'm hoping at some point a button to activate the slider ends up in Control Center.
- jonknee 9y ago
  I agree Control Center would be a good place to put it, but how often do you turn off your phone?
  - jsgo 9y ago
    situational. This morning I had to power it off because even cycling airplane mode wouldn't get Music to download music from iTunes Match. Powered off, powered on and it was working again.
- pvinis 9y ago
  By "Konami code", do you mean lock button + volume up button? I mean I understand it is hard-er, but I wouldn't call it hard.
  - jsgo 9y ago
    for me, volume up + lock button typically fires off a screenshot even if unintended. I use tap volume up -> tap volume down -> hold lock button.
    - charlesgres 9y ago
      What about holding volume down + lock button simultaneously? Basically you only have to squeeze two buttons at either side for a couple of seconds.. I do not find this very hard to do at all.. With the added benefit that you disable faceid at the same time.. Useful in some situations..
makecheck 9y ago
The extra step to kill processes on the X is bad enough that I would call it a serious bug (i.e. it is harder to view processes in the first place, you can’t swipe them out, and you can’t even see the kill buttons without a delicate push-and-wait). This has to be easy to do because there are just too many apps that can enter weird states, e.g. bank apps that will never accept log-ins again once they encounter their first server blip. Also, whether it is software or the X itself, sound is atrocious: it is very easy to generate nasty and loud pops/glitches/stutters on a regular basis.
- Paradise_Pete 9y ago
  I'm with you on the killing processes part. There are a lot of things I like about the X, but that one is annoying and (as far as I can tell) pointless. It seems like Apple intentionally made it harder in order to discourage people from habitually killing apps.
- calibration263 9y ago
  Have you tried taking your phone to the Apple Store? I haven't noticed issues like that with mine.
thinkythought 9y ago
I think it's worth noting that even for someone like Gruber who often defends things about apple others attack, he still craps on the notch in landscape mode. I have an X, and i have very few complaints about it. It's an awesome device pretty much all around, and i wouldn't trade it in for an 8 or any other phone. They did a bang up job on performance, display quality, battery life, and i think the updates to the interface are spot-on. But holy shit is the notch annoying in landscape, and so many apps that are "updated" for the X still handle it HORRIBLY. Especially games. They really screwed this one up, and they need to be way harsher on developers who want to use the "ears" in-game to actually take the shape into account. I find myself actually wishing i could force thing into the "letterbox" non-updated app mode sometimes. Fortunately this is something that could be fixed later, because it's software, but right now it's so bad. It doesn't even bother me in videos, just when i need to actually interact with crappily thought through games and apps treating that area like usable display
nunez 9y ago
I like Gruber, but this article has so many words for so little content. As far as I understood it, he basically said, in many words, that iPhone X (and, by extension, removing the home button) is the beginning of a new age for the iPhone. That's well and good, but I don't agree with him. The competitive gap between iPhone and everything else is WAY smaller than it was in 2007, and with Google in the mix and actually-good cameras being available on Android now, that gap is becoming smaller by the day. Face ID is all well and good, but I don't think it's a major differentiator like multi-touch was in 2007.
- calibration263 9y ago
  I think that this can be a fundamental shift for the iPhone and iOS without being a paradigm shift that puts apple years ahead of the competition. I also didn't pick up an implication that this puts iOS years ahead of android while reading the article.
ec109685 9y ago
Some of the descriptions are so overwrought: My acclimation to the iPhone X has made using an iPad feel anachronistic — I want to swipe up from the bottom to go home there too. With Touch ID, after you tap a particular notification in the middle of the display, you then must move your finger down to the home button to authenticate. I always found that annoying. Now that I’m used to the iPhone X, I find it to be intolerable. Whereas the first bumps, on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, were like blemishes. If you’re going to have a bump, have a fucking bump. But if I pick up or glance at an iPhone without it, I’m skeeved out. Things I notice instantly: the display looks very small, the colors look too cool at night (because of the aforementioned lack of True Tone), and the perfectly square corners of the display seem downright crude. It’s unique in Apple history — if not all of consumer computing history — for the same version of the OS to present two distinct interfaces that are so markedly different.
- parasubvert 9y ago
  It’s called good writing. He has a unique voice.
  - ec109685 9y ago
    There is too much Bill Walton in that review. We have an X and it isn’t life changing.
milkmilklemon 9y ago
He's never really struck me as a shill so much as a lazy writer with nothing interesting to say. Every time somebody sends me a link to his site I know that by going there I can generally expect to see something along the lines of "marketshare doesn't matter and just to prove it I'm going to write another 5000 words about marketshare which say something altogether very different than the last 5000 words about marketshare I wrote three months ago when it also did not matter," "BBEdit is the best web development environment for people who do absolutely no web development, like me," "Somebody's using Markdown wrong and this matters (unlike marketshare, which does NOT matter)," "I'm bored so I figured I'd namedrop some pseudo-famous indie Mac developer with whom I occasionally exchange tweets to remind myself how cool of an old timey software greybeard I think I am even though I have produced nothing of even marginal value since Perl had lots of marketshare (which does not matter)," "Acorn is better than Photoshop at everything and I can say this comfortably as a tasteless dilettante who has absolutely no idea how to use Photoshop in any meaningful way let alone do so professionally," "every journalist in the world should be writing the way I do even though it would make them just as unemployable as I am," "somebody at Apple told me a secret and I can't tell you what it was but it's really amazing knowing somebody at Apple because I like to imagine myself having a job again," or "boy am I lucky to mysteriously be able to pay for all these Epi-Pens without doing any actual work ever James Bond Stanley Kubrick Trump sucks marketshare." When that's all you have going through your head, lots of incredibly uninteresting things probably look like "triumphs" and you're probably going to annoy everyone in earshot about them over and over and over. I'm glad I never worked with anyone in any department he had ties to because I imagine he'd be quite the annoyingly needy third wheel when grown folks was talking. Marketshare.

91 points by nnx 9y ago

"After two months using an iPhone X, I’m convinced Apple succeeded. The iPhone X is a triumph, a delightful conceptual modernization of a ten-year-old platform that, prior to using the iPhone X, I didn’t think needed a modernization." There's the tldr. And for anyone accustomed to Gruber's writing, it was a predictable conclusion.

NetOpWibby 9y ago
Thank you, I assumed as much.
randomsearch 9y ago
I would agree with this summary. I think Apple knocked it out of the park this time, confounding my expectations that everything would be generally terrible post-Steve. They can reinvent something spectacularly well. But can they create something entirely new that is also wonderful? This is the real test they have yet to pass.
- mitchty 9y ago
  I know everyone is all poo poo on the iPhone x in here. But my prior phone was 3 years old (original 6+, the battery was already starting to... well have issues, was already at over 1k cycles), so I bought the X. Have to say I like it, its just thinner enough width wise. And the one feature it has is brilliant in winter. I can unlock my phone without removing my gloves. And yes, these gloves are the ones that work with capacitive touch screens. Good luck getting gloves to work with a finger sensor, or to be able to type anything with them reliably in -20F weather. So... basically it seems like a solid release overall. Of course I have gripes, the control center swipe is annoying to hit for example but overall its fine. Expensive sure, but if I upgrade every 2-3 years whatever.
  - jsgo 9y ago
    ha, same upgrade here (6 Plus to X). The swipes are the one area where the notch is almost a feature: swipe down from left of notch - notifications; swipe down from right of notch - control center. Doing it in landscape is doable but sometimes I'm not 100% certain it is going to end up where I want it. I'm very pleased so far. I was tired of having the larger phone yet wanted the better camera. Do I know if it is was worth the price premium? Not sure, but it seems I had a choice between two of three items in price, performance, and size. I chose performance and size.
- tewha 9y ago
  I've got an Apple Watch and AirPods. They're both delightful products, if non-interesting for a software developer like me.
TwoNineA 9y ago
TL;DR; should be something like: Apple fanboy likes iPhone X! News at 11.

brian-armstrong 9y ago

This is an incredibly fanboy-y article even by Gruber standards. I'm not sure he's physically capable of criticizing Apple, even if he wanted to.

dpcx 9y ago
While it does read as a fanboy article, Gruber has criticized Apple at least a few times in the past. Here's one example, in particular. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/04/08/snell-3d-touch https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/04/08/snell-3d-touch
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  When I first read Gruber he spent quite a bit of his time attacking Apple for abandoning lots of the good stuff from OS9 in favor of the promise offered by the (relatively) clean but at-the-time untested underpinnings of OSX.
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  Until he says Apple screwed up so bad that he recommends another company's product, he can only be called a shill.
  - jgruber 9y ago
    Which products do you think I should recommend a competing product over Apple's? On phones, tablets, and computers, I personally much prefer Apple's OSes, and I usually prefer their hardware as well. But even when I don't prefer Apple's hardware, the OS wins out. I don't recommend Apple's wi-fi base stations: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1370753 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1370753
    - lern_too_spel 9y ago
      And why haven't you written anything about which WiFi base station you recommend? Because it isn't an Apple device? Everybody has a WiFi base station, while relatively few people have a smart watch or a programmable TV set top box, so noteworthiness is definitely not the reason. On phones, tablets, and computers; your opinions are laughably one-sided, pooh-poohing all the things that Apple gets wrong, while making up issues with competitor products out of whole cloth. Your writing on Apple's long-delayed deployment of third party multitasking and its eventual copying of Android's Activity model, having worse battery life than the competition this the entire time, was especially cringeworthy.

juandazapata 9y ago

This reads a lot like sponsored content.

balladeer 9y ago
Well, I hope it was sponsored.
danpalmer 9y ago
I guess given the niche market of Daring Fireball, in a somewhat indirect way it is sponsored content. Gruber will make more money when Apple is more popular.
ComputerGuru 9y ago
Not directly. It’s more like, “Daring Fireball, brought to you by John Gruber, brought to you by Apple.”
Brendinooo 9y ago
If you were to write a review of a product you really liked, how would you do it differently?
- willtim 9y ago
  Perhaps one might admit that Apple are late to the game with OLED and edge-to-edge displays?
  - roc 9y ago
    Admit? Like it's a secret he's trying to cover up? Apple people simply don't care. They know Apple's "late." (Inasmuch as someone else has done a similar thing, or used a similar piece of tech "first".) Because Apple is almost always late. Late to touch. Late to smartphones. Late to fingerprint readers. Late to face identification. Late to attention detection. Late to wireless charging. Late to big screens. Late to music streaming. Late to video services. Late to the TV. Late to the wrist. Late to the wireless headphones. etc.

arielm 9y ago

This is a beautiful way of looking at the X from a very zoomed out perspective. To an extent, I agree with much of what’s said and felt the same way when starting to use my X. But, and this is the important but here, we’re existing users. I saw iPhones develop over time, so for me this is evolution and I put up with it. But what about new users, that are new to the platform. Apple made some interactions so unintuitive that even I was confused. One example is purchasing an app. Pre-X, you’d tap the “get” button and place your finger on the home button or enter your password. With the X you have to tap the button, look at your device, and then follow the most unintuitive animation to actually press the physical side button. That’s where I think we start to see the difference between evolution and compromise.

nkristoffersen 9y ago
I've had the X for a few days now. The animation to press the physical button totally had me stumped the first few times! Overall I'm a fan (such as great camera and great screen) but some of the new interactions are taking some getting used to.
- breatheoften 9y ago
  Yeah the explanation for the side button tap should be considered a straight up bug — I had to google what to do.
thinkythought 9y ago
Weird, on both my phone and one i gifted to my mother for the first week or so it greyed out the screen(like, windows UAC style) and had big bold text at the bottom saying "double press to purchase" while showing the side button animation. It doesn't show up on mine now, but the little tutorial showed the first few times

jsz0 9y ago

The iPhone X hardware is great but they dropped the ball big time on software quality/reliability. I still encounter major home/swipe related glitches that require a reboot a couple of times per week. It seems like the point releases are causing more problems than they fix which is concerning. iOS seems to be in a nasty downward spiral of reliability.

shizzleberry 9y ago
I hear people saying this a ton, aside from the slow face unlock, I haven't experienced many glitches. What am I not doing wrong? Is there a specific gesture to trigger one of these bugs (genuine question)?
- orev 9y ago
  Same here. Not seeing any of these issues. Face ID is slower to unlock if you compare to an iPhone 7 or 8, but coming from a 6 it still seems faster to me.
  - Paradise_Pete 9y ago
    I thought Face ID was slow until I realized I didn't have to wait for the recognition to finish before swiping up. So now I just swipe up immediately and it almost feels like there's not even a lock.
- jsz0 9y ago
  The home/swipe related bugs seem to be related to accidental touch detection and/or swiping before animations fully complete. For example this morning I had to reboot my phone because I couldn't swipe to unlock from the lock screen. It was stuck in 'notification mode' so it thought my swipes were to view my notifications instead of unlocking. Immediately before this happened I had cleared all my notifications which resulted in a very choppy animation. My previous reboot before this was caused by getting stuck in Music after trying to swipe down in Music to get off the 'now playing' screen. For some reason this always requires multiple tries so I probably set off some accidental touch detection lockout. It's a death by a thousand paper cuts thing. There is no one bug that can be easily fixed. It's dozens (maybe hundreds) of small annoyances like the keyboard absolutely refusing to register a keypress that goes against it's prediction of what I want to type. Another fun one is I get floods of old notifications randomly usually from phone/messages -- like a voicemail notification from a month ago. I don't even care if Siri doesn't work well or if I have to enter my PIN slightly more often because of FaceID. I just want the fundamentals to work reliably.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

Cut Gruber some slack. He needs to stay in Apple's graces.

bsaul 9y ago
That’s where we are now. We integrated sponsored content so much, that we don’t even get angry when some bloggers, writing under his own personal name, seems to have been paid to write a piece of ad, in what is supposed to be a personnal opinion. This whole culture needs to go down the sh_tter. We tolerate youtubers lying about things they like, bloggers lying about their own opinions, companies hidding abusive conditions in their terms of usage, reselling private data, and we consider it all fine because it’s made for the purpose of gaining money. Man, capitalism isn’t about moral, but even capitalistic societies need some kind of ethic...
- bitmapbrother 9y ago
  This isn't about being paid. Gruber has too much integrity to do such a thing and a serious journalist would never risk their reputation. What Gruber isn't above is heavily criticizing Apple for fear of getting blacklisted because, for a pro Apple blogger, that would be a death sentence.
  - bsaul 9y ago
    The crux of the matter is : does he say what he thinks is the truth, or not. And if not, is it for any reason other than money ?
    - Paradise_Pete 9y ago
      I am pretty certain that Gruber says what he thinks. Some of it may be biased thinking, but I believe it's genuine.

bla2 9y ago

In short, with the iPhone X Apple took a platform with two primary means of interacting with the apps — a touchscreen and a home button — removed one of them, and created a better, more integrated, more organic experience. [...] Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with...

moogly 9y ago
That's pretty funny considering the iPhone X is the most Android-like phone so far, what with a) getting rid of the home button b) AMOLED screen (welcome to 2009) c) wireless charging. Finally an iPhone with some decent hardware features.
- calibration263 9y ago
  Getting rid of a physical button is hardly a decent hardware feature. I would've been massively disappointed if apple had gone the android route and just slapped a virtual button i can tap onto the screen. If you want to say apple ripped some one off with removing the home button, it wasn't android. It was Palm. Welcome back 2009 indeed.

hungerstrike 9y ago

There's so much to hate about the iPhone X - I'm glad it's failing because I never want to see another phone like it again. My biggest gripes are that I like buttons (even the fake iPhone 7 home button is better than swiping) and I like rectangular screens without notches in them. I also think Face ID is a terrible idea with no future. I predicted (and got downvoted here on HN) that it would fail miserably - and it did. Haha! I like things to be simple and always work. The iPhone X with all of its anti-features fails to do that. I will never use a phone with any kind of gimmicky Face or Touch ID system.

lnx01 9y ago
It's not failing though, it's selling more than its stable brethren combined: https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/26/iphone-x-outperformed-by-8-and-8-plus/ https://9to5mac.com/2017/12/26/iphone-x-outperformed-by-8-an...
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  Yeah - during the first month. And then people figured out how bad it actually was.
  - dbbk 9y ago
    What metric are you basing that on?

ryandvm 9y ago

John Gruber loves the iPhone. Film at 11...

tobix 9y ago

"And for reasons I’ve never been able to understand, Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with... but none have copied the iPhone’s mute switch, despite the fact that it’s a brilliant idea." OnePlus 5 and onwards? Although I think it may be the only Android phone to have one.

barrkel 9y ago
I could do without that switch - I use Tasker to toggle silent mode based on location rules, and I prefer to e.g. use a timer to turn on no-disturb for a movie, rather than needing to remember to re-enable sounds. The probability that I'm e.g. at a meeting and don't want to be disturbed is far less likely than simply keeping the phone on silent for the whole work day. It just doesn't fit a use case for me.
eyko 9y ago
In fact, OnePlus 2 and onwards!

mikewhy 9y ago

This bit especially irked me: "In iOS 11 X, almost every role of the home button has been subsumed by the display, with the remainder reassigned to the side button: - Wake the device: tap the display. - Go to the home screen: short swipe up from the bottom of display. - Go to the multitasking switcher: longer swipe up from the bottom. - Even better way to multitask: just swipe sideways on the home indicator. - Accessibility shortcut: triple-click the side button. - Authenticate: just look at the display. - Reachability: swipe down on the bottom edge of display. - Siri: press-and-hold side button." 5 out of 8 of those things are already achieved without the home button since the 6S.

Redoubts 9y ago
Yeah, I was really surprised the long-press-left-edge wasn’t a gesture that made it to the X, among other things.
- calibration263 9y ago
  I loved that gesture, but I was shocked how many of my friends/coworkers didn't know about it. I think the iPhone X up and over arc is more reliable to trigger(once you figure out not to do up and hold).
  - jolux 9y ago
    it doesn't have to be up and over, you just swipe left and right on it
Paradise_Pete 9y ago
Which five? I count two, but no doubt I'm missing some.
- mikewhy 9y ago
  - Wake the device: Raise to wake - Go to the home screen: 3D touch app switcher, tap any whitespace. It used to be even easier when your home screen had its own entry in there. - Go to the multitasking switcher: 3D touch side - Even better way to multitask: 3D touch swipe - Siri: Hey Siri

breatheoften 9y ago

How did the move of the sleep/wake button from the top to side EVER get approved ...? I’ve been ranting about this since the iPhone 6... I can’t count the number of times I’ve: - inadvertently activated Siri while reaching blindly for my phone - put the phone to sleep when trying to use the hardware shutter button while taking a picture I don’t understand how this flaw has escaped widespread criticism...

thinkythought 9y ago
The true face-palmer here is the new screenshot shortcut on the X, wherein you press volume up + side button to take a screenshot i seriously take probably 5-10 screenshots a day just trying to lock my damn phone. I've taken to crooking my finger on the other side so it's far from the volume buttons just to avoid this. Seriously my only major UI complaint

jsgo 9y ago

All in all, I'm pleased with the phone. There are some things that are pretty rough, though, and that compensating for the removal of the home button has caused a glaring problem. Shutdown being the biggest one so far for me. The Konami code that you have to enter in order to initiate getting the slider to appear is nothing short of amazing. I'm hoping at some point a button to activate the slider ends up in Control Center.

jonknee 9y ago
I agree Control Center would be a good place to put it, but how often do you turn off your phone?
- jsgo 9y ago
  situational. This morning I had to power it off because even cycling airplane mode wouldn't get Music to download music from iTunes Match. Powered off, powered on and it was working again.
pvinis 9y ago
By "Konami code", do you mean lock button + volume up button? I mean I understand it is hard-er, but I wouldn't call it hard.
- jsgo 9y ago
  for me, volume up + lock button typically fires off a screenshot even if unintended. I use tap volume up -> tap volume down -> hold lock button.
  - charlesgres 9y ago
    What about holding volume down + lock button simultaneously? Basically you only have to squeeze two buttons at either side for a couple of seconds.. I do not find this very hard to do at all.. With the added benefit that you disable faceid at the same time.. Useful in some situations..

makecheck 9y ago

The extra step to kill processes on the X is bad enough that I would call it a serious bug (i.e. it is harder to view processes in the first place, you can’t swipe them out, and you can’t even see the kill buttons without a delicate push-and-wait). This has to be easy to do because there are just too many apps that can enter weird states, e.g. bank apps that will never accept log-ins again once they encounter their first server blip. Also, whether it is software or the X itself, sound is atrocious: it is very easy to generate nasty and loud pops/glitches/stutters on a regular basis.

Paradise_Pete 9y ago
I'm with you on the killing processes part. There are a lot of things I like about the X, but that one is annoying and (as far as I can tell) pointless. It seems like Apple intentionally made it harder in order to discourage people from habitually killing apps.
calibration263 9y ago
Have you tried taking your phone to the Apple Store? I haven't noticed issues like that with mine.

thinkythought 9y ago

I think it's worth noting that even for someone like Gruber who often defends things about apple others attack, he still craps on the notch in landscape mode. I have an X, and i have very few complaints about it. It's an awesome device pretty much all around, and i wouldn't trade it in for an 8 or any other phone. They did a bang up job on performance, display quality, battery life, and i think the updates to the interface are spot-on. But holy shit is the notch annoying in landscape, and so many apps that are "updated" for the X still handle it HORRIBLY. Especially games. They really screwed this one up, and they need to be way harsher on developers who want to use the "ears" in-game to actually take the shape into account. I find myself actually wishing i could force thing into the "letterbox" non-updated app mode sometimes. Fortunately this is something that could be fixed later, because it's software, but right now it's so bad. It doesn't even bother me in videos, just when i need to actually interact with crappily thought through games and apps treating that area like usable display

nunez 9y ago

I like Gruber, but this article has so many words for so little content. As far as I understood it, he basically said, in many words, that iPhone X (and, by extension, removing the home button) is the beginning of a new age for the iPhone. That's well and good, but I don't agree with him. The competitive gap between iPhone and everything else is WAY smaller than it was in 2007, and with Google in the mix and actually-good cameras being available on Android now, that gap is becoming smaller by the day. Face ID is all well and good, but I don't think it's a major differentiator like multi-touch was in 2007.

calibration263 9y ago
I think that this can be a fundamental shift for the iPhone and iOS without being a paradigm shift that puts apple years ahead of the competition. I also didn't pick up an implication that this puts iOS years ahead of android while reading the article.

ec109685 9y ago

Some of the descriptions are so overwrought: My acclimation to the iPhone X has made using an iPad feel anachronistic — I want to swipe up from the bottom to go home there too. With Touch ID, after you tap a particular notification in the middle of the display, you then must move your finger down to the home button to authenticate. I always found that annoying. Now that I’m used to the iPhone X, I find it to be intolerable. Whereas the first bumps, on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, were like blemishes. If you’re going to have a bump, have a fucking bump. But if I pick up or glance at an iPhone without it, I’m skeeved out. Things I notice instantly: the display looks very small, the colors look too cool at night (because of the aforementioned lack of True Tone), and the perfectly square corners of the display seem downright crude. It’s unique in Apple history — if not all of consumer computing history — for the same version of the OS to present two distinct interfaces that are so markedly different.

parasubvert 9y ago
It’s called good writing. He has a unique voice.
- ec109685 9y ago
  There is too much Bill Walton in that review. We have an X and it isn’t life changing.

milkmilklemon 9y ago

He's never really struck me as a shill so much as a lazy writer with nothing interesting to say. Every time somebody sends me a link to his site I know that by going there I can generally expect to see something along the lines of "marketshare doesn't matter and just to prove it I'm going to write another 5000 words about marketshare which say something altogether very different than the last 5000 words about marketshare I wrote three months ago when it also did not matter," "BBEdit is the best web development environment for people who do absolutely no web development, like me," "Somebody's using Markdown wrong and this matters (unlike marketshare, which does NOT matter)," "I'm bored so I figured I'd namedrop some pseudo-famous indie Mac developer with whom I occasionally exchange tweets to remind myself how cool of an old timey software greybeard I think I am even though I have produced nothing of even marginal value since Perl had lots of marketshare (which does not matter)," "Acorn is better than Photoshop at everything and I can say this comfortably as a tasteless dilettante who has absolutely no idea how to use Photoshop in any meaningful way let alone do so professionally," "every journalist in the world should be writing the way I do even though it would make them just as unemployable as I am," "somebody at Apple told me a secret and I can't tell you what it was but it's really amazing knowing somebody at Apple because I like to imagine myself having a job again," or "boy am I lucky to mysteriously be able to pay for all these Epi-Pens without doing any actual work ever James Bond Stanley Kubrick Trump sucks marketshare." When that's all you have going through your head, lots of incredibly uninteresting things probably look like "triumphs" and you're probably going to annoy everyone in earshot about them over and over and over. I'm glad I never worked with anyone in any department he had ties to because I imagine he'd be quite the annoyingly needy third wheel when grown folks was talking. Marketshare.