Which iPhone X for you?

It’s too bad Apple doesn’t ever embrace the low-end. Their strategy seems to be “keep selling our 3 year old devices” which is perfect performance wise, just sucks on the camera front.

As an aside, Gruber’s reaction over YouTuber’s getting access to the iPhone X before him was classic.

I haven’t been following it closely, because I think Gruber is kind of an ass, but some people on Reddit were saying he never said he didn’t get one, he just doesn’t like that crappy YouTubers are getting Xs.

I’m not sure, the timing is a little suspect. He said he got one yesterday and posted on Twitter a pic of Sanders on the Subway in NYC. I think he was upset they got the special hands-on before “established” bloggers. There was a little extra vile to his posts.

Which I sort of find ironic: the guy that has preached about disrupting business getting upset when his is.

Ahh ok, thanks

It makes sense, most people who read Daring Fireball are Apple nerds who know about the X and know if they are getting one or not. Apple is going for a different market with the YouTubers.

I am really curious of the sales breakdown of the 8 vs X. I wonder if they will ever tell us.

They have never broken down individual unit sales. Other than “iPhone X sold off the charts.”

Just read Horace Dedieu’s blog after the Apple earnings. He’s able to do some amazing inferences based on changes in average selling price (ASP) to guesstimate the sales breakdowns of different models.

Apple used to reveal first weekend sales (iPhone 6s was 13 million units sold), but stopped doing that with the iPhone 7.

Yeah, since they argued that it was not an accurate picture of demand, rather was an indication of supply constraints. They basically sold every new model phone they could make.

Until the 8, yeah.

What are we talking about, his tweets somewhere or something? I must have missed them. I don’t understand how you could read this from his site and call it “vile” or where we’re getting the idea he’s mad at the people who got the X earlier. He’s not questioning why they got it early, he’s questioning why it was limited for other reporters. And that seems like a reasonable question, why would Apple restrict some established reviewers to 24 hours?

I’m sure Apple has some reason, but it’s not obvious to me.

Before that post he had a bunch of posts where he comes across as rather… bitter. He basically insulted the reviewers from “High Snobiety”, Fashion magazine, and Axios.

Whether or not he had a point, I leave it to you… (well, all those but the Axios one. That was pretty idiotic. The guy gave it to his nephew?!)

The 8 sold out as well didn’t it? I went to get one 2 weeks ago, and it was on back order for 2-3 weeks.

From Monday:

  • Thank god Apple seeded Mike Allen with an iPhone X review unit. Such great insight from his fucking nephew, the emoji expert.

  • FASHION MAGAZINE REVIEWS THE IPHONE X ★
    Thank god Apple seeded Fashion with a review unit.

  • HIGHSNOBIETY’S IPHONE X REVIEW ★
    Thank god Apple seeded these insightful critics with a review unit

It really came across a little extra vitriolous. Even the post you mentioned had an element of: look, giving these kids the new iPhone is good and all, but what about us? Where is the love?

Huh, even with a swollen eye (due to a bad luck mosquito bite) she was able to use iPhone X FaceID flawlessly the whole time. That’s … kind of impressive.

image

Plus this idea of attention is right on, way more than “is my finger on the button”:

With the default setting, if you don’t have sunglasses on, your eyeballs need to be facing the screen for Face ID to work. (You can also turn off this requirement in Accessibility settings if you can’t physically look at the screen, but requiring attention provides another layer of security, according to Apple.) If you’re looking off to the side or both of your eyes are shut, the screen won’t unlock (possibly good to note if you ever get mugged or arrested and someone’s trying to force-unlock the phone). It also doesn’t work while you’re yawning (me every morning).

The phone uses this “Attention” feature in other ways as well. If your alarm goes off or someone calls and it senses you looking at the screen, the volume will turn down. If it can tell you’re looking at the phone but there’s no touch activity (maybe you’re reading an article intently), the display won’t go to sleep.

I am warming up to faces > fingerprints as a form of basic biometric id.

Also hmm

In a research note with KGI Securities, obtained by MacRumors, Kuo said the iPhone X’s 3D sensing capabilities are already at least one year ahead of Android smartphones. For that reason, he thinks Apple’s focus with next year’s iPhone models will be ensuring an on-time launch with adequate supply.

Kuo’s latest prediction is that Apple will remove Touch ID on all iPhones launched in 2018 in favor of Face ID. He thinks the TrueDepth camera and 3D facial recognition system won’t be significantly upgraded next year.

and from Apple chief engineer Dan Riccio

“I heard some rumor [that] we couldn’t get Touch ID to work through the glass so we had to remove that,” Riccio says, answering a question about whether there were late design changes. “When we hit early line of sight on getting Face ID to be [as] good as it was, we knew that if we could be successful we could enable the product that we wanted to go off and do and if that’s true it could be something that we could burn the bridges and be all in with. This is assuming it was a better solution. And that’s what we did. So we spent no time looking at fingerprints on the back or through the glass or on the side because if we did those things, which would be a last-minute change, they would be a distraction relative to enabling the more important thing that we were trying to achieve, which was Face ID done in a high-quality way.”

Yeah going all-in on this makes sense, so I concur: 2018 will be the year of no home button, (almost) edge to edge screen with no chins or foreheads, on all iPhones.

Is 8 still water-proof? Apple marketing says water-resistance. That’s totally different, right? Will 8 work if I drop them into the bathtub?

Yes, they didn’t regress and take away features as they went. Except for the headphone jack, but it’s like the floppy drive of smartphones, that old ass thing needed to go.

It really didn’t. There was plenty of room for a headphone jack in the 7 and 8.

“Water-proof” is not really a thing, they have different ratings. I tend to say water-resistant to mean it will withstand a quick splash and water-proof as surviving immersion, but that’s not how it’s really measured. The iPhones 7, 8, and X are all IP67 water-resistant, meaning they’re tested immersed in 1 meter of water for 30 minutes.

The iPhone 6s wasn’t marketed as being water-resistant at all, and was not certified as such, but youtube videos and such showed it surviving immersion.

How exactly? Cheaper, superior performance, universal and ubiquitous. While some people may prefer wireless, it’s rather silly to argue that that is some sort of core feature of headphones, Headphones are first and foremost about audio quality and that is something that bluetooth falls down on.

You can still use wired headphones with the new iPhones.