About Apple's iPhone X
At its keynote event last week, Apple took the stage at the company's just-unveiled Steve Jobs Theater inside its mammoth Apple Park campus to reveal a new Apple Watch with built-in cellular modem, a new Apple TV with 4K HDR video, and not to mention, a trio of iPhones - the successors to last year's iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus christened iPhone 8 and 8 Plus (thereby skipping the 7s generation) and a radically redesigned tenth anniversary iPhone X. (So will the next year's iPhone be called iPhone 9 or 8s, or has 7 8 9?) But you know what else was noteworthy? (Or cringeworthy, depending on how you see it.) Its plans to rebrand Apple Stores as "town squares." While Apple has never been the one to be shy about self-promotion, this perhaps is a sign that it has taken things a little too far.
But let's come back to the iPhone, shall we? Apple set the gold standard for handheld devices a decade ago, but now, the Essentials, the Galaxies, the Mixes and the Pixels have all but leapfrogged the iPhone in terms of design. That isn't to say that the current iPhone designs are bad. They aren't, which is why Apple has stood by them for the past four years since 2014. After all why fix something that isn't broken.
Except they could have been much better. Like the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 4 that came before it. Instead Apple chose something that's utilitarian. Functional. But neither eye-catching nor head-turning. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus is the result of a continuous refinement of this rather unremarkable design by going for an all glass back, but the overall look is the same. And it is dated in a market crowded with near-bezel-less smartphones that have become the de-facto trend in 2017.
And sort of obsolete too. For minutes after announcing these near-perfect iterative models, the company showcased a new smartphone that looks nothing like the other iPhones. Called the iPhone X, it not only gets rid of the big bezels (aside from the ugly notch at the top that houses a thicket of cutting-edge sensors and a front facing camera), but also does away with a perfectly functioning Touch ID in favour of a new facial authentication method (called Face ID), that while possibly secure, is not the most exciting feature in a smartphone. Hence its attempts to justify the inclusion of motion capture and depth sensing technology with animoji (aka animated emoji) that's less about creative, cross-platform communication and more about locking users into its iMessage ecosystem. The iPhone X, taken in that sense, in not totally vow-worthy, but a necessary change nonetheless.
That also brings us to another important question: what's even the point of the iPhone 8? Why release it when something relatively exciting is right around the corner? Is it the price? Or is it because Apple is catering to a specific user base who have entrenched themselves so deep in the iOS/macOS universe that they have no intention of switching to Android, but at the same time, don't want to spend their hard-earned money on an ultra-pricey iPhone? Or is it because they are due for an upgrade? Whatever be the case, the 8 and 8 Plus seems like the iPhone Apple made to sell, while the iPhone X is its 'fashionably late' answer to many vocal critics who've spent the last few years clamouring for a design refresh. But is the answer fitting enough? That remains to be seen.
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| The iPhone X |
Except they could have been much better. Like the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 4 that came before it. Instead Apple chose something that's utilitarian. Functional. But neither eye-catching nor head-turning. The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus is the result of a continuous refinement of this rather unremarkable design by going for an all glass back, but the overall look is the same. And it is dated in a market crowded with near-bezel-less smartphones that have become the de-facto trend in 2017.
And sort of obsolete too. For minutes after announcing these near-perfect iterative models, the company showcased a new smartphone that looks nothing like the other iPhones. Called the iPhone X, it not only gets rid of the big bezels (aside from the ugly notch at the top that houses a thicket of cutting-edge sensors and a front facing camera), but also does away with a perfectly functioning Touch ID in favour of a new facial authentication method (called Face ID), that while possibly secure, is not the most exciting feature in a smartphone. Hence its attempts to justify the inclusion of motion capture and depth sensing technology with animoji (aka animated emoji) that's less about creative, cross-platform communication and more about locking users into its iMessage ecosystem. The iPhone X, taken in that sense, in not totally vow-worthy, but a necessary change nonetheless.
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| Apple stock performance during the keynote |
That also brings us to another important question: what's even the point of the iPhone 8? Why release it when something relatively exciting is right around the corner? Is it the price? Or is it because Apple is catering to a specific user base who have entrenched themselves so deep in the iOS/macOS universe that they have no intention of switching to Android, but at the same time, don't want to spend their hard-earned money on an ultra-pricey iPhone? Or is it because they are due for an upgrade? Whatever be the case, the 8 and 8 Plus seems like the iPhone Apple made to sell, while the iPhone X is its 'fashionably late' answer to many vocal critics who've spent the last few years clamouring for a design refresh. But is the answer fitting enough? That remains to be seen.
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