Apple Announces iPhone X With Edge-To-Edge Display, Wireless Charging and No Home Button (theverge.com)

At its event in Cupertino, California today, Apple unveiled the iPhone X to mark the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. It brings several new features including an edge-to-edge screen, Qi wireless charging, and Face ID. The Verge reports: Because of its edge-to-edge display, the iPhone has no place for a conventional home button, relying instead on a complex facial recognition system to unlock the phone. Called FaceID, the new system will replace TouchID, the home button sensor that's enabled fingerprint logins since 2013's iPhone 5S. Users can wake the phone by swiping up from the button instead of hitting the button. The same gesture will open the control panel once the phone is awake. The updated iPhone 8 will continue unchanged, including both the home button and TouchID. Apple also unveiled the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, which are updated versions of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus released last year. These new devices feature glass backs with support for wireless charging. The Verge provides some additional specs and features in its report: Apple has improved the display on the iPhone 8 line, adding the same True Tone technology it offers on the 10.5-inch iPad Pro to automatically adjust the screen based on the ambient light in the room to offer more accurate colors. Internally, Apple has upgraded the processor from the A10 Fusion found in the 7 to the A11 Bionic. It's a six-core chip with two performance cores that are 25 percent faster than the A10, and four performance cores that the company says are 70 percent faster that the old model. There's also a new Apple-designed GPU that's 30 percent faster, with the same performance as the A10 at half the power. On the camera front, there's a new 12-megapixel sensor on the iPhone 8 that is larger, faster, and finally has optical image stabilization. The iPhone 8 Plus also has new sensors, and offers f/1.8 and f/2.8 apertures now. The dual cameras on the 8 Plus also have a new "Portrait Lighting" feature to adjust the lighting for portrait shots. And Apple says that the improvements apply to video, too, with Apple executive Phil Schiller claiming that the new devices have the "highest quality video capture ever in a smartphone," with support for 4K/60fps video. Slow motion videos now support up to 1080p resolution at 240fps, doubling the the iPhone 7's 120fps option. The iPhone 8 will start at $699 for a 64GB model, while the 8 Plus will start at $799 for 64GB of storage. You can preorder these devices starting Friday, September 15th, and they will be released a week later on September 22nd.

UPDATE 9/12/17: The iPhone X will be priced starting at $999 for the 64GB variant. Pre-order will be available October 27th with shipments starting November 3rd.

Comments

So along with the new sensors

[H3lldr0p]

they brought back the headphone jack, right? Because they were able to jam so much other new things why not also find the room for something that caused much consternation last time around? It's only right to confirm their commitment to the consumer and are willing to admit they made an error in removing it, right?

Right?

Re:So along with the new sensors

[JohnFen]

I definitely wouldn't sweat paying for a good set of Bluetooth headphones.

I have yet to see a set of Bluetooth headphones, at any price, that can adequately replace wired headphones for my use case. The battery doesn't last nearly long enough.

Re:So along with the new sensors

[jwhyche]

I have yet to see a set of Bluetooth headphones, at any price, that can adequately replace wired headphones for my use case. The battery doesn't last nearly long enough

If you are only worried about battery life then you haven't been looking at the right headphones. My BTS Pro 66 have continuous playback rated at 40 hours.

Is the facial recognition a cloud service?

[kaka.mala.vachva]

Will unlocking a phone require that photos are uploaded to Apple cloud, or is it something that will stay on the phone only? Just curious - I don't plan on buying an iPhone X and will probably move back to Android after my sole Apple purchase, an iPhone 6s, dies.

TrueDepth

[hackertourist]

Here's hoping the face scanning technology becomes user accessible as a general-purpose 3D scanner.

Re:Nope Not True Edge to Edge

[dgatwood]

If it were much smaller, you couldn't use it with a case, which most iPhone users do (87% according to one survey).

That said, I really don't get the appeal of bezel-less design on cell phones. It seems completely backwards to me. I hold a phone in my hand. The bezel provides a grip surface. Making that surface smaller is an undesirable feature. Yet if the technology is possible in a phone, it should also be possible in a laptop, which I don't hold in my hand, which therefore does not need a bezel. Why didn't the technology get used there first (or, for that matter, exclusively)?

Worse, when the menu bar is white or when watching videos, these bezel-less designs look ugly. That huge gap at the top where the camera goes means that you can't really watch videos on the entire screen, or else you lose part of the image and it looks ridiculous. So app developers will end up adding a zoom mode like they did for the 4:3 iPads so that the unusable area is avoided. And if they don't want it to look ridiculously lopsided, they'll probably trim the other end, too, and effectively we bring back the bezel, just without the convenience of an actual home button.

I just don't get it. What about this is supposed to be an improvement?