The Apple iPhone XR Review
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
I also wonder why it would be iPad specific given that the phones are so damn big, but that's what the rumors say.
Preach. They killed it. So very pleasant to use.
What's an easy way to generate a new complex password when a dumb old site forces you to set a new password? It was very easy for me on Android, but feels quite difficult on iOS.
Which one is worth buying iPhone X or iPhone XS Vs iPhone 8?
- Writing this with an android phone attached to a powerbank in park.
I thought I might miss 3d touch, but with the iOS 12.1.1 update the biggest issue had been fixed: Accessing the context menu for notifications on the home screen. That one now actually feels nicer than on the 8, since the feedback is stronger with haptic touch. Scrolling in notifications with long press on spacebar is slightly worse, since it doesn't allow to mark things via light-release-and-press and doesn't react in some situations. But it's still very bearable. Don't miss the peek&pop functions of 3d touch at all.
The biggest advantage and disadvantage of the Xr: It has a lot bigger screen, is bigger, and feels heavier. It's a tradeoff. I still find it more inconvenient to carry around, and to swipe in from the left side of the screen in order to go back. But the large screen also has it's advantages.
Not only that, Motorola has pledged to provide official parts when the devices become older.
You are saying it gets the same battery life as a low-end smartphone, with 1/10th the performance and 1/50th the experience (numbers mine). If it's better at all those things, and still has that battery life, then it's much much better than that other thing...
It lags slightly in the app tunable,but other than that a phone for 9k SEK would be waste of money.
>(numbers mine)
Yeah right, they better be.
For a car analogy, you're saying that a supersized SUV getting 25MPG is "amazing mileage".
It's not.
Put side-by-side with a XS, i'm hard pressed to find a visual difference between screens, quality-wise.
* Spotify is inefficient (wonder how much is DRM?)
* Low signal causes your phone to increase transmit power.
Power draw in usage vs battery capacity?
I've never really looked at it like that, but I guess we should take the least generous values from both:
Pure Capacity:
iPhone XR: 2,942 mAh
iPhone SE: 1,624 mAh
Draw:
iPhone XR: "Up to 15 hours", so 196,134 mAh of draw if we take the best case for the iPhone XR.
iPhone SE: 12-13 Hrs on Internet (so, LTE, according to apple) that's roughly 129,92 mAh
; while the capacities are wildly different I don't see the SE being so far behind.
If you can get real power draw numbers you can make your own conclusion. I suspect Apple expects a certain about of idle time (which has been optimised for on the later generations).
So I would guess around 28% of its battery when an XR is at 40%.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10285/the-iphone-se-review/3
24% longer on wifi web browsing. Worse on the graphics benchmark, but only because the framerate is higher (smaller screen resolution) which keeps the CPU from idling as much.
Makes you wonder what the performance of a modern small iPhone could be like.
The only compliant is sometimes I pull it out of my pocket and try and use it upside down. And the torch comes on in my pocket about once a week.
Of course going from 6s->XR is faster (several generations of newer cpu), has a better camera, and that brand new battery lasts a long time. Your old phone was about 3.5 years old.
You could have gotten a new 6s and it probably would have had most of the characteristics you say, because it wouldn't be throttled due to an old battery. Or just replace the battery. It would hold a charge a lot longer. The only thing that wouldn't really be different is the camera.
It is the natural and best way to do so. You press hard and the cursor moves freely like a mouse pointer, put it where it should be and release. Along with haptic feedback, it's a must have once you start using it. Really beats the magnifying glass method.
I would have been useful for devices like the iPhone SE too.
But you have to press-and-hold, since there's no force press.
On my new iPhone XR it's far more convenient to use, since the spacebar is not at the bottom, and scrolling down (e.g. in order to edit a message) works more reliable.
It still doesn't feel as good as 3d touch on the old thing, e.g. it sometimes doesn't go into touchpad mode when pressed directly after a word and doesn't feel as precise. But it's good enough that I don't terrible miss it.
I’d be surprised if most users use it. I’m not sure that most are even aware it exists. It’s possibly the least ‘discoverable’ feature ever introduced in a user interface.
The other thing that is often advertised as pro for the Xs is a higher resolution. However that is not entirely true, since the Oled displays use a pentile matrix, where there is not a full sub-pixel available for each pixel. Which means in other words the difference in actual resolution is not as high as the pure numbers might want one make to believe.
I think both displays are excellent, and won't disappoint.
I’d prefer a 4.5” phone, but ended up with an iPhone X as a kind of cheaper, smaller, currentish iOS device.
It's quite possibly the only product Apple makes today that Steve Jobs might approve of. Maybe that, and the AirPods.
At night I noticed that the screen is not OLED or AMOLED or whatevs, the blacks are quite bright, but I don't watch movies or series on it so I can really live with that.
All in all I'm very happy with the phone and it'll last me for years.
In what world is $800 an affordable price point?
As a price-conscious Corolla purchaser, I don't really care if Bugatti's latest highest-end car costs $2 or $3 million dollars. It's not what I'm buying.
Example (that I serendipitously learned about recently): free (!!!) workshops in Apple stores that you can learn advanced techniques for things like video editing on iPad, among other things.
I’m pretty sure those were around before the iPhone, certainly when the 4S was new.
As someone who used to like getting the latest and greatest by Apple their current prices baffle me. Or perhaps I'm the oddball that doesn't use my phone enough to warrant spending that much money.
In the U.S., financing through Apple is 0% and gets you free AppleCare for the life of the loan.
Put the cash you would have spent on AppleCare and the phone in the bank, and buying an iPhone actually makes you money.
- Get a new iPhone every year
- AppleCare+ coverage included
- Low payments from $37.41/month
- Works with your carrier
> The full cost of your iPhone and selected AppleCare+ coverage is spread out over 24 months with 0% interest.
:-)
Yes. Margins are low on low cost phones. It's a pretty common decision for OEMs. No reason to make the phones that make no profit.
Every single bit of tech inside the phone were more expensive, partly so because of rising wages in tech industry. Which I suppose most people on HN are benefiting from.
Total expenditure is less than $100/month for 4 good spec iPhones that run our personal and business lives entirely is a damn good deal.
SIM contracts are approx $90 + broadband is $70 a month as a comparison.
Pricing adjusted to USD from GBP
But more to the point, the market is going to need some way to internalize business models here. Fundamentally, Apple's only guaranteed source of revenue right now for any given phone is the price of the phone itself. Maybe users get some apps too, maybe they get services, but at this stage in lifecycle of the devices a lot of people are happy with the apps they have and paid updates are infrequent, and it's an important point that the iPhone doesn't depend on subscriptions nor is Apple dependent on selling you. So the sticker price must to some extent encompass most of the life cycle of the phone, including 5-6+ years worth of OS updates (iOS 12 supports the iPhone 5S, released in 2014).
How much is it worth to have a cutting edge device where retail embodies 100% of the required costs, and the manufacturers financial incentives are reasonably well aligned with that of the owner? Can the market actually handle this vs devices where many of the costs are hidden/externalized? It's going to be an interesting question over the next few years. There has been a certain amount of pushback on the XS/XS Max pricing, but at the same time a lot of people at least claim to care about incentive alignment. It's hard to say exactly how that will play out if Apple finds upfront pricing is too hard for many to swallow even if per-month or similar personal info selling would be.
As a fan of OLED, it's hard to swallow this simple fact that LCD is superior in power consumption
Gotta say though, I've been so impressed with how the 5s has held up over the years, that the investment in a higher priced iPhone might just be the way to go.
My biggest complaint is how fragile the phone is. The shell already has scratches and is wildly expensive to repair. I want a premium plastic body like the Lumia phones so badly on this tier of device.
This material is used among other things on artificial joints such as knees and hips, as well as the bottoms of snowboards. It's very tough and scratch resistant.
It has great battery life, much better than most other phones. That battery needs to be somewhere. You can't have it both ways.
The 8 was last year’s LCD phone and the X was last year’s OLED phone (the first year it was offered.)
They also sell the 7, which was the phone from two years ago.
All three do Portrait mode, although XR uses its wide angle lens and computational photography for that, whereas both XSs use their two lenses (and the subtle shift between the two) with computational photography to make a bigger resolution depth map
I have a XS Max, but I'd say the XR is excellent (camera wise) and good enough for almost everyone. Let that not be your deciding factor
I agree it’s not worth thinking about unless you’re really into Apple news.
iPhone will easily last twice as long and will get all the feature updates the hardware can support.
I had a 5S, and I considered the SE, but I had already started to see apps and websites that don't support the smaller screen size very well, and I didn't want to get a phone that I intend to use for 4 or 5 years that was already several years closer to obsolescence.
The XR is a good phone, but it shows evidence of value engineering that you don't usually see on apple products. The larger bezels, the lightning port not being centered on the bottom of the phone, the fact that is thicker and almost heavier than the XS Max.
My biggest disappointment with getting the XR was that general day-to-day tasks that felt sluggish on my 5S since the iOS 11 update . . . are still slow and sluggish. I have watched the phone take over 15 seconds to respond in any way to a tap inside Apple's pre-installed apps. I thought that iOS 11 was just too resource-intensive for my old phone, and I guess its just that Apple has forgotten how to write solid and responsive software -- which used to be one of the key differentiators between Apple and Android phones.
If you restored from a backup, try setting up the phone fresh instead. If that doesn't help, just go back to the backup.