The iPhone X
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
There's the tldr. And for anyone accustomed to Gruber's writing, it was a predictable conclusion.
They can reinvent something spectacularly well. But can they create something entirely new that is also wonderful? This is the real test they have yet to pass.
Have to say I like it, its just thinner enough width wise. And the one feature it has is brilliant in winter. I can unlock my phone without removing my gloves. And yes, these gloves are the ones that work with capacitive touch screens. Good luck getting gloves to work with a finger sensor, or to be able to type anything with them reliably in -20F weather.
So... basically it seems like a solid release overall. Of course I have gripes, the control center swipe is annoying to hit for example but overall its fine. Expensive sure, but if I upgrade every 2-3 years whatever.
I'm very pleased so far. I was tired of having the larger phone yet wanted the better camera. Do I know if it is was worth the price premium? Not sure, but it seems I had a choice between two of three items in price, performance, and size. I chose performance and size.
I don't recommend Apple's wi-fi base stations: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1370753
On phones, tablets, and computers; your opinions are laughably one-sided, pooh-poohing all the things that Apple gets wrong, while making up issues with competitor products out of whole cloth. Your writing on Apple's long-delayed deployment of third party multitasking and its eventual copying of Android's Activity model, having worse battery life than the competition this the entire time, was especially cringeworthy.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/10/eero-wifi-syste...
I guess for an Android fan it's not a tough call to be cleared of the 'shill' label, because there's plenty of fucking up going on in that world that even the diehard fans have to admit to it.. If only Apple would do us Apple fans the favor of royally fucking up from time to time so that we can stop being accused of being shills.. But alas they never do.. What a pity..
Agreed... this was the most Gruber-y he's ever Grubered: "Is the higher price of the iPhone X over the iPhones 8 justified? [...] But you also get something you can’t compare in a checkmark comparison — a sort of joie de vivre."
> I'm not sure he's physically capable of criticizing Apple, even if he wanted to.
That's definitely not true. While he generally likes their products, he's definitely critical of them when he thinks they mess up. If all you read of his are these posts shared on HN, you'll probably only read his glowing reviews. And if you don't like his writing, then sure, there's no point in seeking him out. But don't assume that because you don't read his criticisms, that he doesn't—can't!—write them, because he most assuredly does.
I'm not sure who wins the spin competition between him and Paul Thurrott
That's also definitely not true. He's been a big supporter of Amazon's Echo line, he's mentioned a number of Android phones he likes—hell, on his front page right now he links glowingly to an article about how much better Google Maps is than Apple Maps.
Apple doesn't have a competing product. Please read the rest of the GP post.
> he's mentioned a number of Android phones he likes
Yet he prefers the Apple phones to all of them. Again, read the remainder of the GP post.
> on his front page right now he links glowingly to an article about how much better Google Maps is than Apple Maps.
Yet he himself still prefers Apple Maps. Again, read the remainder of the GP post.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/09/30/apple-maps-goog...
Extracting the part of the GP post that matters: "If Apple has a product in the space, only the Apple product is worth buying, no matter how objectively bad it is."
To be extra pedantic, none of your examples show Gruber recommending a non-Apple product at all. At most, Gruber concludes that they have some useful features. When he writes about the Echo, he writes about how Apple will do it better.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/26/wynn-echo
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/11/06/amazon-echo
And peak MacGruber: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/04/27/amazon-echo-loo...
Yes, I am interested in responding to what you actually said. Sorry if you can't handle that. I'm going to ignore you from now on.
Then it's a wonder how you failed so spectacularly at it. What I actually said consists of multiple sentences that must be taken together, and even the portion you extracted contains the word "recommend," which is a word you don't seem to understand.
I'm also convinced that he recommends things that he's either never used, or took money to recommend. An outstanding example is a weather app he gushed about that I'm convinced he never used because it was horrible (as in, the forecasts weren't even close), and the visual design was something he'd typically tear into.
For me, Gruber is in the "Dvorak/Cringley" bucket: entertaining, sometimes on point, but for $DEITY's sake don't take it for gospel. But despite all that, I read every post.
Isn't that how it works? My 15" GTX 1070 laptop used to be the bees knees. So amazing and compact for a laptop that could support VR. Now, in comparison to some stunning Max-Q designs, it's now pretty meh.
I owned both, and i think those are completely congruent takes in their time periods.
https://daringfireball.net/search/pebble
I really only wore mine for about a week, finding it more annoying than useful. As I stated here: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/02/24/pebble-time
I like Apple Watch, but only as one of several watches I own. The others are mechanical, not digital.
I don't know which weather app you're talking about, but I've never recommended anything I haven't used, and the only posts I get paid for are the once-a-week sponsorships, which are always clearly noted as being sponsored.
As for the weather app, it might very well have been sponsored. But here’s the thing: despite my critical comments above, I still take you as a person of integrity even for sponsorships. Now maybe that’s just naive of me (I grew up on Paul Harvey, I should know better), but even if you’re paid I just assume you tried the product and said, “yeah, I can sincerely praise that.” Naive or not, I just know that when I downloaded it, my first thought was “no way Gruber’s seen this running, it’s horrible and I’m not nearly the font and design nut he is. That, and the forecast looks like it’s for Florida, not Seattle.” Again, maybe that’s on me: it was an ad, clearly labeled as an ad, caveat emptor. Made a good faith effort to find my purchases in the App Store to back this up, but Apple apparently isn’t going to make that easy on me.
Finally, had I even suspected you might see this I probably would have not used a Dvorak comparison. I meant it to mean “can go on a rant, but a rant that’ll be worth consideration; whether you agree or not”, but that was Dvorak 30 years ago. I truly do enjoy reading what you write, and do read every post, and that comparison was unfair.
It's a death by a thousand paper cuts thing. There is no one bug that can be easily fixed. It's dozens (maybe hundreds) of small annoyances like the keyboard absolutely refusing to register a keypress that goes against it's prediction of what I want to type. Another fun one is I get floods of old notifications randomly usually from phone/messages -- like a voicemail notification from a month ago. I don't even care if Siri doesn't work well or if I have to enter my PIN slightly more often because of FaceID. I just want the fundamentals to work reliably.
I had all kinds of problems like this until i just bit the bullet and did it clean slate, and i haven't had a single performance issue since. Not a single reboot, nothing. The regular iOS11 gripes are still there but nothing truly awful like this
It's a bit like doing a clean install when you order a new laptop right after you take it out of the box. It's usually a good call, even if it's a bit of a hassle
I have an X, and i have very few complaints about it. It's an awesome device pretty much all around, and i wouldn't trade it in for an 8 or any other phone. They did a bang up job on performance, display quality, battery life, and i think the updates to the interface are spot-on.
But holy shit is the notch annoying in landscape, and so many apps that are "updated" for the X still handle it HORRIBLY. Especially games.
They really screwed this one up, and they need to be way harsher on developers who want to use the "ears" in-game to actually take the shape into account. I find myself actually wishing i could force thing into the "letterbox" non-updated app mode sometimes.
Fortunately this is something that could be fixed later, because it's software, but right now it's so bad. It doesn't even bother me in videos, just when i need to actually interact with crappily thought through games and apps treating that area like usable display
If you want to say apple ripped some one off with removing the home button, it wasn't android. It was Palm. Welcome back 2009 indeed.
Apple people simply don't care. They know Apple's "late." (Inasmuch as someone else has done a similar thing, or used a similar piece of tech "first".) Because Apple is almost always late.
Late to touch. Late to smartphones. Late to fingerprint readers. Late to face identification. Late to attention detection. Late to wireless charging. Late to big screens. Late to music streaming. Late to video services. Late to the TV. Late to the wrist. Late to the wireless headphones. etc.
Personally I find many of Apples "innovations" abhorrent and it frustrates me that they have been universally copied. They have popularised disposable, unrepairable, slippery, ultra-fragile phones!
Example: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/photo...
Also, Steve Jobs even has a famous quote that’s relevant [0], “good artists copy, great artists steal”.
The probability that I'm e.g. at a meeting and don't want to be disturbed is far less likely than simply keeping the phone on silent for the whole work day. It just doesn't fit a use case for me.
But, and this is the important but here, we’re existing users. I saw iPhones develop over time, so for me this is evolution and I put up with it. But what about new users, that are new to the platform.
Apple made some interactions so unintuitive that even I was confused. One example is purchasing an app. Pre-X, you’d tap the “get” button and place your finger on the home button or enter your password. With the X you have to tap the button, look at your device, and then follow the most unintuitive animation to actually press the physical side button.
That’s where I think we start to see the difference between evolution and compromise.
"In iOS 11 X, almost every role of the home button has been subsumed by the display, with the remainder reassigned to the side button:
- Wake the device: tap the display.
- Go to the home screen: short swipe up from the bottom of display.
- Go to the multitasking switcher: longer swipe up from the bottom.
- Even better way to multitask: just swipe sideways on the home indicator.
- Accessibility shortcut: triple-click the side button.
- Authenticate: just look at the display.
- Reachability: swipe down on the bottom edge of display.
- Siri: press-and-hold side button."
5 out of 8 of those things are already achieved without the home button since the 6S.
- Go to the home screen: 3D touch app switcher, tap any whitespace. It used to be even easier when your home screen had its own entry in there.
- Go to the multitasking switcher: 3D touch side
- Even better way to multitask: 3D touch swipe
- Siri: Hey Siri
- inadvertently activated Siri while reaching blindly for my phone
- put the phone to sleep when trying to use the hardware shutter button while taking a picture
I don’t understand how this flaw has escaped widespread criticism...
i seriously take probably 5-10 screenshots a day just trying to lock my damn phone. I've taken to crooking my finger on the other side so it's far from the volume buttons just to avoid this.
Seriously my only major UI complaint
My acclimation to the iPhone X has made using an iPad feel anachronistic — I want to swipe up from the bottom to go home there too.
With Touch ID, after you tap a particular notification in the middle of the display, you then must move your finger down to the home button to authenticate. I always found that annoying. Now that I’m used to the iPhone X, I find it to be intolerable.
Whereas the first bumps, on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, were like blemishes. If you’re going to have a bump, have a fucking bump.
But if I pick up or glance at an iPhone without it, I’m skeeved out.
Things I notice instantly: the display looks very small, the colors look too cool at night (because of the aforementioned lack of True Tone), and the perfectly square corners of the display seem downright crude.
It’s unique in Apple history — if not all of consumer computing history — for the same version of the OS to present two distinct interfaces that are so markedly different.
Also, whether it is software or the X itself, sound is atrocious: it is very easy to generate nasty and loud pops/glitches/stutters on a regular basis.
As far as I understood it, he basically said, in many words, that iPhone X (and, by extension, removing the home button) is the beginning of a new age for the iPhone. That's well and good, but I don't agree with him.
The competitive gap between iPhone and everything else is WAY smaller than it was in 2007, and with Google in the mix and actually-good cameras being available on Android now, that gap is becoming smaller by the day. Face ID is all well and good, but I don't think it's a major differentiator like multi-touch was in 2007.
I mean I understand it is hard-er, but I wouldn't call it hard.
This whole culture needs to go down the sh_tter. We tolerate youtubers lying about things they like, bloggers lying about their own opinions, companies hidding abusive conditions in their terms of usage, reselling private data, and we consider it all fine because it’s made for the purpose of gaining money.
Man, capitalism isn’t about moral, but even capitalistic societies need some kind of ethic...
My biggest gripes are that I like buttons (even the fake iPhone 7 home button is better than swiping) and I like rectangular screens without notches in them. I also think Face ID is a terrible idea with no future. I predicted (and got downvoted here on HN) that it would fail miserably - and it did. Haha!
I like things to be simple and always work. The iPhone X with all of its anti-features fails to do that. I will never use a phone with any kind of gimmicky Face or Touch ID system.