Apple’s new iPhone X is special. It has flashy upgrades, facial recognition and animated emoji, all in celebration of the iPhone’s 10-year anniversary. And its price tag is appropriately special: $999 and up.
But not everyone will find those extra features necessary. On Sept. 12, Apple hosted its event of the year: a two-hour long panel in which they announced all of their up and coming gadgets, which will be in the hands of people all over the world by the end of November. Among these gadgets was the iPhone X. This new release was long-awaited thanks to the public’s expectations for a big reveal in honor of Apple’s 10-year anniversary. Unfortunately, the common saying about assuming things applies to the new iPhone as well. Apple released three new phones: the iPhone Eight, Eight Plus, and X, pronounced ten. As the first two iPhones are exactly the same as the iPhone Seven, they’re not even worth mentioning, but the iPhone X deserves a few remarks.
The X has a new shiny design with an OLED screen that wraps all the way around the edges of the phone. Apple describes the new iPhone X to be a “physical object that disappears into the experience.” The screen and the glass on the backside of the phone are both much more durable and less likely to scratch and crack, which is a development that was needed years ago. The new true depth camera has advanced to another level that has more options in portrait mode that can define the light in a scene and has an even better ability to find a focal point. There’s no home button, it’s even touchier than before, the phone can charge wirelessly, and it uses face ID to unlock. Apple somehow always manages to amaze me. This year, they amazed me with how they’ve succeeded to put so many bells and whistles on a phone and failed to do so many basic things that all other competing phone companies have done years ago.
To begin, a large part of me was hoping that Apple would realize the mistake that they had made and would put the headphone jack back where it belonged. That whole Bluetooth is the future and the future is now idea was just plain inconvenient. Using any pair of headphones that’s not Apple branded has never been more difficult. Considering that Beats – a very popular headphone company – is a partner with Apple, the technology company should have at least accommodated these extremely expensive headphones into their futuristic vision.
But of course, Apple was too proud and the headphone jack did not return. Instead, we got something much worse: wireless charging! I don’t know about you, but when it’s midnight and I’m watching cat videos on my phone, I like to have it plugged in so it doesn’t die, but that plan doesn’t work when you have to put it down for the phone to charge. And Apple users need every last battery percentage that they can get.
It’s been 10 years since the first iPhone came out and in all that time the battery hasn’t improved too significantly. Every new iPhone gets an extra hour or two on the old one if we’re lucky, but that’s still not enough to compete with other brands. For this new model, they don’t even bother to mention the battery life, and that can only mean to me that they’ve made little to no headway on the incessant problem with this new fancy phone.
One of the coolest things about the new iPhone is the capability to unlock your phone with -your face, but the second I heard about this feature I couldn’t help but let out a groan. We all know that that new iPhone is not going to be able to recognize me in the morning before I’ve taken a shower and brushed my hair, which means that there’s going to be no way to text my friends and tell them I’m going to be late, which is going to bring up many issues in my day to day life.
The idea of the phone itself is very cool, but it’s almost too far ahead of its time. Of course, every single new phone or technological advancement is going to have its beginner’s kinks that they’ll have to work out through multiple models and years but, for Apple, now is not the time to be experiencing those glitches.
People are slowly beginning to turn on the brand they’ve been loyal to for ten years and switch to Samsungs and Androids, so now is not the time for Apple to be messing up and now is definitely not the time to be putting their phones into the quadruple digit price range. The price of an iPhone X is only 200 dollars away from the price of an extremely nice Apple laptop. Apple needs their newest phone to succeed, and the way to do this is not to make it extremely expensive and very glitchy. The electronic company that has been number one since I was born is slowly losing its title, and it only begs the question of: who will take its place on the top?