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

Posted by BeauHD on from the latest-and-greatest dept.

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.

26 of 570 comments (clear)

  1. Not want by XXongo · · Score: 3, Insightful
    No, I'm sorry, I don't really want a phone that starts up when it thinks it recognizes my face.

    I'd like a plain "on" button, thank you.

    1. Re:Not want by that+this+is+not+und · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But a phone that unlocks when it sees your face is one that the police can confiscate and unlock by simply aiming it at your face.

      Why wouldn't you want that convenience?

    2. Re:Not want by HornWumpus · · Score: 4, Funny

      Point it at your junk when it wants the reference picture. Duh.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    3. Re:Not want by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 4, Funny

      Time not important. Only life important.

      --
      #DeleteFacebook
    4. Re:Not want by sexconker · · Score: 4, Funny

      Big badda boom.

    5. Re:Not want by Anubis+IV · · Score: 5, Informative

      I get the point you're making, but it's worth pointing out for others that it doesn't just unlock when it thinks it sees you. Rather, it waits for you to focus your attention on it first. It's also worth mentioning that the false positive rate on Touch ID was 1 in 50,000, which was fine for the vast majority of their customers, whereas Face ID is 1 in 1,000,000. If you were already okay with Touch ID's level of accuracy, or else were on the fence before and just wanted it to be a bit better, Face ID may be the leap forward in accuracy that you wanted, even if it seems weirdly different at first glance.

    6. Re:Not want by Farmer+Tim · · Score: 5, Funny

      But they could just send an instant message to it and let Pavlovian conditioning do the rest.

      --
      Blank until /. makes another boneheaded UI decision.
    7. Re:Not want by MachineShedFred · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Because I'm sure they don't have the tried-and-true PIN entry available still, just like OMG WHAT IF I'M WEARING GLOVES AND IT CAN'T READ MY FINGERPRINT?!

      It's not like it takes a room full of PhDs to figure that one out...

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    8. Re:Not want by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Informative

      So, a few things:
      1) Their demonstration suggests it relies on accelerometer readings to know when to activate the sensor, since they had to raise the device before it started looking for faces. You can probably also click the power button to activate it, but either way, it doesn't appear to be always-on.

      2) From what we understand, it isn't using the camera to detect faces. Rather, it's using something more akin to the Kinect, since it's projecting 30,000 IR dots and then sensing them via a basic IR sensor to create a 3D mesh.

      3) Even if raising it isn't necessary to trigger the sensors, if the accelerometer is telling it it's stationary, it can stay off 99.9% of the time and just do a quick IR pulse every fraction of a second to see if anything's moved. Likewise, if the proximity sensor is telling it it's in a pocket or pressed to your ear it can stay off 100% of the time.

      4) Even if it is always-on (which, again, it doesn't appear to be), they're claiming it gets 2 hours better battery life than the iPhone 7, so they must have figured out some way to optimize things.

  2. It's official by JohnFen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The smartphone market is officially mature, as indicated by the fact that even Apple can't come up with anything other than incremental improvements and gimmicks.

  3. It's only $999 by known_coward_69 · · Score: 5, Funny

    WTF?

    Why is it so cheap? Hoping it was at least $3000 so the peons couldn't afford one

  4. FaceID FAILURE!!! by HannethCom · · Score: 5, Funny

    The funniest thing was them trying to show it off working on stage, and it failed asking him to use his PIN instead because face recognition failed.

    --
    Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
    1. Re:FaceID FAILURE!!! by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 3, Informative

      Face recognition didn't fail, they didn't unlock the phone when it woke up, just like with Touch ID. You have to provide a passcode after the phone has been turned off and on.

  5. Re:Dual Product Launch by wed128 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My mom would. A person who wants a reasonably new phone, doesn't want to show off, wants a couple of years worth of software updates, and doesn't want to spend $300 for the fancy display.

  6. Nope Not True Edge to Edge by HannethCom · · Score: 4, Informative

    I have seen the Samsung edge to edge technology, and it is truly edge to edge. I just saw the iPhone X, and there is a definite bezel. It is a wrapping around piece of glass, but there is black between the screen and the side of the glass, so not a true edge to edge, even though they are using a Samsung display.

    --
    Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
    1. Re:Nope Not True Edge to Edge by dgatwood · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  7. Re:Is the facial recognition a cloud service? by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 4, Informative

    Facial recognition doesn't take any photos, just like Touch ID didn't take an imprint of your finger. It converts it to a mathematical representation and does a comparison inside the Secure Enclave. The analysis it does is non-transferable.

  8. Re:FaceID + ApplePay = Problems? by the_skywise · · Score: 3, Informative

    You've got the double press the power (now the "selector"?) button to enable ApplePay now and they've probably disabled the auto-detection. If anything your scenario is more likely now with TouchID. My main issue with it is that it's not as seamless as using ApplePay with TouchID. Pull the phone out of my pocket, move the iPhone to the reader, wait for the iPhone to detect the reader and the card to appear and press the home button to confirm Now i've got to pull the phone out of my pocket, hold the phone to my face, double click the button and move the phone to the reader and then wait for the iPhone to detect the reader and hope that it detects my reader and not the one next to it as I move it over.

  9. Re:So along with the new sensors by dreamchaser · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dude, nobody cares about the headphone jack except slashdot whiners.

    Or people who actually use their phones.

  10. TrueDepth by hackertourist · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  11. Re:So along with the new sensors by JohnFen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  12. Re:Cut and paste by pauljlucas · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yet can't even cut and paste.

    Copy & paste has been in iOS since 3.0 which was back in 2009. But don't let reality ruin your out-of-date rant.

    --
    If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
  13. Re:So along with the new sensors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    the new Mac Pro

  14. Edge by fluffernutter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    With all these edge to edge displays, I hope they have technology that can prevent my phone from doing totally unpredictable things when I pick it up. Is that too much to ask for? This is a problem with my regular bezel edge phone, can't imagine what it will be like with an edge to edge phone.

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
  15. Is that really a display with a bite out of it? by istartedi · · Score: 3, Funny

    Is that really display surface with a bite out of it on the X? What are you supposed to do with the two little devil-horns at the top? Ads I guess. Yeah, nevermind. Devil-horn advertising will be the hot new trend.

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  16. ComeFace by seoras · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Set your Apple Face ID to your comeface, so that if someone mugs you for your phone they at least have to wank you off first" - Frankie Boyle.