[jack6e]

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."

[jpalomaki]

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]

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.

[rz2k]

The next revolution could be in software that is only possible with the power available in the iPhone X, that will be mainstream for other phones in a couple years.

I had an app called Vindigo on a Handspring Visor and later a Kyocera 6035 in the early 2000s that gave the location and mapped pretty much every restaurant, bar, and museum in New York long before maps were an obvious part of your phone.

I think the possibilities of AR are amazing, even though I don't think whatever the killer will be has been released yet.

[beamatronic]

I loved Vindigo! People forget how useful and powerful the Palm devices were. All they really needed was an always-on network connection.

[stcredzero]

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.

[untog]

> I think FaceID would be great for unlocking the a MacBook laptop.

This is in absolutely no way revolutionary. Not least because some Windows laptops have been able to do it for some time (HP? I forget who did it, but it was awful)

[prewett]

I'm not sure that "been able to do it for some time, but it is awful" counts as being able to do it. Imagine if your MacBook recognized faces correctly 100% of the time, and would automatically login to your account, your wife's account, or your kid's limited accounts depending on who it was that opened the lid. I don't know if that's revolutionary, but it sure would be easy to use.

[chokolad]

> I don't know if that's revolutionary, but it sure would be easy to use.

You can do this already for a few years now. Surface Pro 4, Surface book, Surface Laptop all have it. Works flawlessly.

[ASalazarMX]

I don't think so. The iPhone was revolutionary because suddenly you had a lot of sensors and the power to use them in creative ways. There are still sensors that could be added to devices of this price range that, coupled with new apps, would make them cool again: infrared vision, range finder, molecular scanner, etc.

Imagine pointing your camera to find an A/C leak inside the wall, or scanning fruit for their ripeness, or measuring furniture at the store to see if it fits in your house/door. Hell, it could even alert you if you have bad breath.

[Erwin]

The tomato thing has been done by SCIO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_5Al294Nak

which apparently is now available as an extra sensor small enough to build into ordinary phones, with just one obscure Chinese manufacturer showing a prototype (at $299 for the handheld, it's probably too expensive for now).

[hbosch]

The yearly upgrade cycle has truly made cynics of us all. Those of us who will go from a iPhone 6 to an iPhone X will be amazed. Those of us who take every iteration every year will be annoyed.

[dntrkv]

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]

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]

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!

[jochung]

It's as simple as it is overlooked: by building off of OSX, Apple delivered a phone that could actually work with all the files and protocols that people used on desktop. PDF, HTML, MP3/AAC, MP4/H264, ... Not to mention frameworks and APIs that were battle hardened.

It took competitors years to catch up, everyone's forgotten how much of a joke Android was until v4, and how Black Berry only caught up just as they were about to die. Things like low latency audio, large image support, GL, crypto, battery life, ...

[dingoonline]

Very very notable comment.

One of the first remarks from Blackberry's CEO when he first saw an iPhone was; “They’ve put a Mac in this thing,”. https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/excerpt-...

[ASalazarMX]

Before the iPhone, the best smartphones were Symbian or Blackberries. The iPhone was ridiculously better in every aspect.

The market was ripe as people realized they wanted to trade battery life for more powerful devices, after the success of the iPod and the iPaq (not a typo, the PDAs from Compaq/HP).

It was a revolution then, and it happened so fast Nokia and RIM were left in the dust.

[irrational]

The original iPhone? You know, it's been so long I can't really remember. What I do remember is before the iPhone my boss had been trying to get me to get a mobile phone (on the company dime), but I wasn't interested. Then the iPhone was announced. I don't remember what the competition was at that time (probably Blackberry, I don't recall hearing about Android until sometime after the original iPhone came out), but I do recall being excited by a phone for the first time. Mainly it was that it came across as not just a phone, but an actual pocket computer. I did end up letting the company buy me one, and I did feel like it lived up to the hype. For the first time a browser actually worked, and worked well, on a mobile device (the first time I tried zooming in and out on a web page - this was in the days before mobile/responsive websites - blew my mind). Apps started coming out that were actually useful. Google maps actually worked the way I would expect it to work. And so on. I still feel like there was nothing else like it at the time (I'd looked around at other phones at the time, but was very underwhelmed - they mainly seemed to target business/sales/manager type people).

[rhino369]

iPhone was revolutionary because it went full touch screen and went full browser.

The phone as a mini-tablet changed smartphones significantly.

[philsnow]

it wasn't just that it was full touch screen. palm pilots were full "touch" screen (or stylus) long before. it was that the things on the screen behaved fluidly when you manipulated them, without lag, allowing you to use the interface _while forgetting that there was an interface there in the first place_.

all you have to do to remember what interacting with a device before apple provided a good example is to find a fairly shitty, poorly-specced android device [0] and interact with it and get frustrated at the ever-present-and-yet-inconsistent lag.

[0] tablets are a good place to look, partly because they usually have more pixels to push than phones

[ASalazarMX]

"it was that the things on the screen behaved fluidly when you manipulated them, without lag, allowing you to use the interface _while forgetting that there was an interface there in the first place_."

This. Playing solitaire by easily flicking the cards away was magic back then.

[jack6e]

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/

[samfisher83]

It had multi-touch. Pinch to zoom was pretty awesome the first time I tried it. When you compared the original iphone to Win-Mobile it was night and day. You didn't need a stylus. It was pretty fluid. Its web browser was a full browser. The whole feel was pretty revolutionary compared to the windows ce.

[conception]

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]

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]

Citation? I cannot imagine that my years old Nexus 6 has a more recent display than the new iPhone X.

[themihai]

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.

[s4vi0r]

The issue is/was that Samsung effectively is the only company that makes OLED phone displays, so they'd charge out the ass for one and could always just sell last gen displays to make their new phone more attractive.

Iirc Apple and some other companies threw a bunch of money at LG so they can get in the game as well, which will be nice in the future but atm obviously screen quality is worse and costs are higher due to R&D cost.

[dpark]

Your citation is that Apple’s marketing group thinks OLED is a better term than AMOLED?

PPI is not a fixed number determined by generation and isn’t relevant. Brightness is an interesting point but my Nexus 6 was AMOLED (oh my) and <400 nits so significantly dimmer than the iPhone X.

It’s very possible, even likely, that Samsung’s latest flagship phones use newer display tech than the iPhone X. It is exceedingly unlikely that the iPhone X is using first generation tech.

[astrodust]

The camera "seems" better in your subjective opinion, or is better as measured by professionals?

In the tests I've seen the iPhone comes out on top in almost all situations vs. the Pixel, as a representative example here of a very good Android camera, with the notable exception of extreme low light conditions.

[themihai]

Well, I don't take photos very often but recently at a campfire I took few shoots(with my Iphone 6s) and for some reasons my photos were rubbish while Samsung (note 7)'s were awesome. There was no question that my beloved iPhone's camera was inferior and I think Samsung's display was better too(i.e. OLED). Now I'm convinced Apple is selling inferior hardware at inflated prices. It's OK though but I don't upgrade that often anymore as I used to do. When they launched the 4K Apple TV and made such a big deal that it supports 4K it was clear to me they have no shame in pushing old stuff or on par with the competition(1 year later) as it's a revolutionary technology.

[astrodust]

Sounds like the very low-light problem I was talking about. That's a very specific situation, and you must admit 99.9% of the time most people aren't next to campfires so you're testing with an edge-case here.

[ggg9990]

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.

[mratzloff]

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]

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

[tobystore]

>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.

[craftyguy]

> 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]

> 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]

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.

[valuearb]

Less than $2 a day with resale value. And service costs more than $2 a day. So if you are given a free phone, you are still spending more than half as much as an iPhone X. If you get a "cheap" $500 phone you are spending at least 80% as much as an iPhone X.

[mitchty]

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.