Of course this phone is not as revolutionary as the first iPhone was—starting a new chapter is never going to be as big a deal as opening a new book. And there are reservations around battery life, durability, and first-generation Face ID usability. As always, the second iteration of a new design will surely be more refined, and cautious buyers who wait for year two will probably be rewarded for their patience. But the iPhone X is nevertheless easy to recommend if you want a glimpse at what's going to be exciting in the next 10 years.
Today Apple released “A Guided Tour” for the iPhone X, a video that clocks in at around 4 and a half minutes. In it, the company goes over all the basic gestures that buyers of the phone will perform daily such as swiping up to go home, swiping up and holding to launch the app switcher, quickly jumping between apps by swiping across the home indicator, and setting up Face ID.
A month ago, almost immediately after Apple announced Face ID, WIRED began scheming to spoof Apple's facial recognition system. We'd eventually enlist an experienced biometric hacker, a Hollywood face-caster and makeup artist, and our lead gadget reviewer David Pierce to serve as our would-be victim. We ultimately spent thousands of dollars on every material we could imagine to replicate Pierce's face, down to every dimple and eyebrow hair.
For any reader with face-hacking ambitions, let us now save you some time and cash: We failed. Did we come close to cracking Face ID? We don't know. Face ID offers no hints or scores when it reads a face, only a silently unlocked padlock icon or a merciless buzz of rejection. All we learned from our rather expensive experiment is that Face ID is, at the very least, far from trivial to spoof.
According to Apple, when you look at an OLED display from a side angle, you may see shifts in color and hue, something that's a "characteristic of OLED" and "normal behavior."
"If we could do anything we wanted to, we would have obviously shipped 8, 8 Plus and X on the same day," Cook said Thursday evening in an off-camera interview. "But we felt like the most important thing for us to do was to announce them on the same day so we wouldn't have customers buy an 8 and then we announce the X and ship it and they go, 'Oh, you hosed me, I would've bought a X.'"
"That's the reason that we did the stagger," Cook said. "It wasn't a marketing thing. It was we weren't ready to ship; we were still working on [the X]. We accelerated the date at which we were initially planning to do iPhone X. And that's how we got here and we're going to learn a lot."
For developers, the iPhone X "is by far the single most shocking change in iPhone UI," explains Sebastian de With, a former Apple designer and one-half of the team behind camera app Halide. Even though he, and many other developers were anticipating many of the changes due to the flood of leaks leading up to its launch, it's not a small task to make the required adjustments, particularly for independent developers who may be balancing multiple projects.
A partially-deaf mum hopes to be able to hear her daughter’s voice properly for the first time after being given a specialist hearing aid linked to her mobile phone.
Diane Matthews, who is also keen to hear her husband perform in his brass band, has been unable to hear properly for 20 years. She also suffers with tinnitus.
Ten years ago, Apple introduced the very first iPhone, and changed the world. Today, we're taking apart Apple's 18th iteration—the iPhone X. With its rounded edges and edge-to-edge display, we're sure this is the iPhone Steve imagined all of those years ago—but now that his dream is realized, will it be as influential as the first? Time will tell, but for now we'll be doing our part to help you decide. Join us as we open Apple's crown jewel to see what makes it shine.
iFixit didn't invent the teardown, but the company has become by far the most popular and well-respected group of teardown artists in the world. The company, based in a two-story reclaimed auto repair shop in San Luis Obispo, California, treats its iPhone teardown like a space launch. The "home team" camps out at its headquarters, while a teardown engineer, a photographer, and a coordinator are dispatched to far-flung locales like Tokyo, Sydney, or, in earlier years, London. The away team—this year made up of Wiens, teardown engineer Jeff Suovanen, and photographer Adam O'Comb—methodically works through the iPhone and sends photos of it back to headquarters, where engineers and analysts try to identify what, exactly, is going on in it.
Because the iPhone X is released at 8 AM local time all around the world, flying to Sydney buys the team 16 "extra" hours to tear down the iPhone before the East Coast launch. The goal is to be completely done with the teardown by the time the iPhone is for sale in New York. The team, I'll learn, needs just about every minute of that head start.
One of the very first impression I've gotten when I started using my iPhone X less than 24 hours ago: this phone is heavy.
Of course, for the past one year, I've had been using the iPhone 6 without a case. And I am now using the iPhone X with the Apple's leather case. The difference in weight is significant for me.
I've never wanted the Plus model because of the size. But I really didn't consider the weight.
So, dear Apple, please do continue to make the iPhone X thinner and lighter.
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Face ID is great. Really.
When I was first setting up Face ID, I've had a question that I didn't see anybody answering yet. In order to achieve good results, should I only set up Face ID in the morning after a good night's sleep and that I'm all relax? If I set up Face ID at the end of the day after a stressful day at the office, will my tired face cause problems later down the road?
Oh, and should I comb my hair first?
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I've had a quite a few failure with Face ID initially. So I started to stare intensely at the notch to get Face ID to recognize me. And that seemed to work.
But then, after a few hours of using, I've forgotten to stare intensely at the notch, and Face ID continued to work.
The other thing that I've had to learn: initially, I waited for Face ID to do its thing before I start really using the phone. Only after quite a while did I learn to not wait for Face ID and started swipping up even before the phone was unlocked.
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One side-effect of jumping directly from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone X: I've had to learn the difference in doing a long press versus a 3D touch.
And I was disappointed to discover that many of my day-to-day apps do not implement any 3D Touch shortcuts.
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How much battery life am I saving by using an all-black wallpaper for the X?
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Thanks for reading.