Apple

Ever since the iPhone X rollout, I’ve been struggling to put into words that feeling the iPhone X brought to the table, something that’s been missing from iPhone rollouts for some time.

When iPhone X release day hit, lots of other people felt that thing. Suddenly, there were lines again. The iPhone X display at the Apple Store was mobbed. That magic thing was back.

Ben Thompson, Stratechery:

I’m spoiled, I know: gifted with the rationalization of being a technology analyst, I buy an iPhone every year. Even so, I thought the iPhone 7 was a solid upgrade: it was noticeably faster, had an excellent screen, and the camera was great; small wonder it sold in record number everywhere but China.

What it lacked, though — and I didn’t fully appreciate this until I got an iPhone X — was delight.

Yup. That’s the word. Delight.

Face ID isn’t perfect: there are a lot of edge cases where having Touch ID would be preferable. By its fourth iteration in the iPhone 7, Touch ID was utterly dependable and, like the best sort of technology, barely noticeable.

FaceID takes this a step further: while it takes a bit of time to change engrained habits, I’m already at the point where I simply pick up the phone and swipe up without much thought; authenticating in apps like 1Password is even more of a revelation — you don’t have to actually do anything.

And:

The trick Apple pulled, though, was going beyond that: the first time I saw notifications be hidden and then revealed (as in the GIF above) through simply a glance produced the sort of surprise-and-delight that has traditionally characterized Apple’s best products.

Apple has found its inner delight. And that, as Ben so rightly puts it, is Apple at its best.

DisplayMate:

Switching from LCDs to OLEDs is a major engineering and manufacturing challenge, so I was eager to test and evaluate the new OLED iPhone X.

The result: Apple has produced an impressive Smartphone display with excellent performance and accuracy, which we cover in extensive detail below. What makes the iPhone X the Best Smartphone Display is the impressive Precision Display Calibration Apple developed, which transforms the OLED hardware into a superbly accurate, high performance, and gorgeous display, with close to Text Book Perfect Calibration and Performance!

There is a huge amount of detail here, a terrific take on OLED and on the iPhone X display in particular. No small feat for Apple that DisplayMate named the iPhone X as Best Smartphone Display.

[H/T John Kordyback]

Lots of interesting tidbits in the linked TechCrunch article. Here are a few highlights:

As we’ve covered off in detail before Apple does not have access to the depth-mapped facial blueprints that users enroll when they register for Face ID. A mathematical model of the iPhone X user’s face is encrypted and stored locally on the device in a Secure Enclave.

Face ID also learns over time and some additional mathematical representations of the user’s face may also be created and stored in the Secure Enclave during day to day use

And:

The key point here is that Face ID data never leaves the user’s phone (or indeed the Secure Enclave). And any iOS app developers wanting to incorporate Face ID authentication into their apps do not gain access to it either. Rather authentication happens via a dedicated authentication API that only returns a positive or negative response after comparing the input signal with the Face ID data stored in the Secure Enclave.

Some people have pointed to the detailed face mapping accessed via ARKit and expressed concerns about privacy with 3rd party developers access to that data:

With the iPhone X developers can access ARKit for face-tracking to power their own face-augmenting experiences — such as the already showcased face-masks in the Snap app.

“This new ability enables robust face detection and positional tracking in six degrees of freedom. Facial expressions are also tracked in real-time, and your apps provided with a fitted triangle mesh and weighted parameters representing over 50 specific muscle movements of the detected face,” writes Apple.

And:

Now it’s worth emphasizing that developers using this API are not getting access to every datapoint the TrueDepth camera system can capture. This is also not literally recreating the Face ID model that’s locked up in the Secure Enclave — and which Apple touts as being accurate enough to have a failure rate as small as one in one million times.

The data being shared via ARKit is a small sample of what’s used for Face ID, and it is missing key details, like attention detection data.

The linked article goes into a lot more detail and is an interesting read.

As to how Face ID works, take a look at the video embedded in this tweet from The Verge’s Nilay Patel. Before you click, note that there are flashing lights that might trigger a reaction in some people. The embedded video really gives a sense of the dot projector at work. Fascinating stuff.

From this Apple support document:

OLED technology delivers an incredibly high contrast ratio and high resolution. And with no backlight, OLED emits light through each pixel, allowing for a thinner display. The Super Retina display overcomes challenges with traditional OLED displays with its high brightness, wide color support, and has the best color accuracy in the industry.

If you look at an OLED display off-angle, you might notice slight shifts in color and hue. This is a characteristic of OLED and is normal behavior. With extended long-term use, OLED displays can also show slight visual changes. This is also expected behavior and can include “image persistence” or “burn-in,” where the display shows a faint remnant of an image even after a new image appears on the screen. This can occur in more extreme cases such as when the same high contrast image is continuously displayed for prolonged periods of time. We’ve engineered the Super Retina display to be the best in the industry in reducing the effects of OLED “burn-in.”

The post offers some best practices for the so-called Super Retina display (incredibly gorgeous, by the way). If there’s an iPhone X in your future, take a look.

[Via MacRumors]

Tripp Mickle, Wall Street Journal:

Long lines outside of Apple stores around the world showed strong initial demand for the new iPhone X, but analysts said the real test would be the company’s ability to sustain that level of interest over the coming months as it works through supply bottlenecks.

This really puzzles me. That word “but” in the middle of that paragraph. This good news followed by doomsaying seems so unnecessary.

Tim Cook said this on yesterday’s results call:

There’s always doubting Thomases out there and I’ve been hearing those for the 20 years I’ve been here and suspect I’ll hear about them until I retire. (laughs) I don’t really listen to that too much.

But I digress.

Sales of the iPhone X began Friday, and hundreds of customers lined up in Australia and Singapore, aiming to be among the first in the world to get their hands on the most expensive iPhone ever, with a starting price of $999 and features including an edge-to-edge display and a facial-recognition system.

And:

At an Apple store in central Sydney, lines snaked around the corner midmorning local time, despite the store opening at 8 a.m., an hour earlier than usual, to cope with expected demand.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen these lines, and these are not isolated cases. At the very least, this shows a deep level of excitement for the iPhone X.

My take on the iPhone X is that it is not the latest iPhone, but the first in a brand new line of iPhones. So much new technology, wrapped in a new form factor, with its own uniquely tweaked interface. The return of these lines shows how excited people are to watch their beloved iPhones evolve into something new.

The fact that people are so motivated to get up, go to an Apple Store, and be part of the line-waiting social experience is a harbinger, not of doom, but of rebirth. Numbers, shmumbers. The iPhone X is already a huge win for Apple.

Nice gallery from Apple showing people buying the newest shiny in Apple Stores in Dubai, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, and Sydney.

A lot of happy faces.

CNET:

Three “husky” men in hoodies driving a white Dodge van broke into a UPS truck Wednesday while it was parked outside a San Francisco Apple Store.

It was delivering 313 of Apple’s new iPhone X devices, according to a police report. The theft happened between 11:15 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. PT.

The total value of the stolen merchandise was estimated to be more than $370,000. The iPhone X, which becomes available in stores Friday, starts at $999 apiece. The suspects haven’t yet been caught.

More importantly:

People who planned to pick up their preordered iPhones at the Stonestown store will still get their devices on time, a person familiar with the matter said.

313 iPhones is a cube about 8 x 8 x 5 iPhone boxes. That’s ballpark, 25″ x 30″ x 30″. And that cube is worth more than $370K. That’s IF the thieves can sell the phones for anywhere near their value, if at all.

And a quick thinking janitor snapped a picture of the thieves unloading the UPS truck. If they catch the thieves, hope Apple gives that janitor an iPhone X.

This is a long review, chock full of detail. Definitely worth your time.

A few pieces on Face ID, just to give you a taste:

Here’s where there’s a difference between Touch ID and Face ID: Touch ID throws away the original enrollment images of your fingerprints almost immediately. Face ID keeps the original enrollment images of your face (but crops them as tightly as possible so as not to store background information). That’s for convenience. Apple wants to be able to update the neural networks for Face ID without you having to re-register your face each time.

And:

The True Depth camera reads the data and captures a randomized sequence of 2D images and depth maps which are then digitally signed and send to the Secure Enclave for comparison. (Randomization also protects against spoofing attacks.)

The portion of the Neural Engine inside the Secure Enclave converts the captured data into math and the secure Face ID neural networks compare it with the math from the registered face. If the math matches, a “yes” token is released and you’re on your way. If it doesn’t, you need to try again, fall back to passcode, or stay locked out of the device.

And:

None of the neural networks have yet been trained to distinguish multiple registered faces. They can tell you or not you, but not you, someone else, and not either of you. That’s a level of complexity beyond the first iteration of the system. Right now, very few people reportedly register multiple fingers for Touch ID, but Apple could add that functionality to a future implementation of Face ID, if there’s significant demand.

Yesterday, we posted an op-ed from Ben Lovejoy saying:

My guess is that doing all these checks for more than one person would make face-recognition noticeably slower than Touch ID, and Apple was concerned that reviewers and consumers alike wouldn’t respond well to that. That, I think, is the real reason Apple limits Face ID to a single face.

Rene’s take is that the system was not yet designed to handle more than a single face, that it’s not an issue of CPU performance, but of neural network design. All interesting.

One last excerpt, that connects to something we posted earlier this morning, about the ACLU and privacy concerns:

What developers can’t do is get your face data. Just like apps never got access to your fingerprints with Touch ID, they never get access to your face data with Face ID.

Once the app asks for authentication, it hands off to the system, and all it ever gets back is that authentication or rejection. Apple has a separate system, built into ARKit, the company’s augmented reality framework, that provides basic face tracking for Animoji or any apps that want to provide similar functionality, but it only gets rudimentary mesh and depth data, and never gets anywhere near Face ID data or the Face ID process.

This is just a tiny taste of Rene’s review. A fascinating read. One smart cookie.

The video in the linked post shows a mass of people chaotically queueing up to buy an iPhone X at the Orchard Road Apple Store in Singapore.

This did take me back to the early days, when every iPhone release was met by mobs like this. I’m told that much of this crowd is scalpers, many from other countries, trying to get their piece of the pie.

Keep an eye out for the Apple employee who tries to provide order by restarting the line, only to have the chaos recreate itself.

[H/T Mr E]

Lance Ulanoff, Mashable:

Mashable recently sat down with Schiller and other senior members of Apple’s executive team including SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi, SVP hardware engineering Dan Riccio, and VP of user interface design Alan Dye for a wide-ranging discussion about how they built what is perhaps the most eagerly-anticipated smartphone since Apple’s founder Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone more than a decade ago.

Too much to quote, but a very enjoyable, informative read, all the way through. Well worth your time.

Ben Lovejoy, 9to5Mac, pulled a quote from this Mashable iPhone X review:

One important limitation of Face ID: It only lets you register one face. That may strike many as unnecessarily limiting since Touch ID lets users register up to 10 [sic] fingerprints, but Apple says it found the number of people who register more than one person’s fingerprints is miniscule.

Ben continues:

The idea that hardly anyone registers more than one person’s fingerprint didn’t ring true to me, and our poll shows that it’s not true for 9to5Mac users at least.

At the time of writing, the majority of our readers have more than person’s fingerprints registered for one or more of their iOS devices. Almost half (48.98%) have one other person registered, and a further 6.85% have more than two people.

I would certainly agree with this. I have my entire family “fingered” on my iPhone 6s, and the Touch ID performance is still very fast.

Ben’s take on adding a second face to the Face ID registry:

My guess is that doing all these checks for more than one person would make face-recognition noticeably slower than Touch ID, and Apple was concerned that reviewers and consumers alike wouldn’t respond well to that. That, I think, is the real reason Apple limits Face ID to a single face.

Interesting perspective.

First things first, this is not news. Apple has been very up front about the Face ID edge cases.

That said, I did find this interesting, was wondering how long it would take before someone verified this theory.

From the linked Mashable article:

With both sets of twins, the other twin unlocked the iPhone X, even though neither one had registered his face with Face ID on the iPhone X. With the Franklin twins, we had both brothers remove their glasses and had the other brother register. Again, Face ID failed to tell the difference.

Look, Apple never claimed Face ID was perfect and, in my tests, it could not be fooled by photos or videos of my registered face.

But also interesting is the claim that Windows 10’s facial recognition tech was able to distinguish between twins.

Not much of an issue. Unless you are a twin. Especially an evil twin.

UPDATE: I’m told that the Windows facial recognition tech is iris scanning, not true facial recognition. Requires facing the camera with head aligned, just so. Does pick up the difference between twins, but clearly loses in convenience to Face ID.

Before you read on, spend a few minutes reading Jim Dalrymple’s iPhone X first take.

With that as a foundation, read Matt Panzarino’s Disneyland-based iPhone X review. It’s fun, informed, and interesting.

Too much to excerpt the whole thing, but here’s a bit on Face ID:

Going in to this review, my threshold for “success” was whether Face ID worked as well or better than first-generation Touch ID. I didn’t expect it to nail the speed of the second-gen sensor, which is incredibly fast. As long as it landed between the two I would be happy.

Face ID works really well. First, it’s incredibly easy to set up. You choose to enable it and then rotate your nose around the points of a clock twice. That’s it. Second, it worked the vast majority of times I tried it, it never once unlocked using a picture of myself or another person’s face and the failure rate seemed to be about the same as Touch ID — aka almost never. As hoped, it’s definitely faster than the first generation of Touch ID, though perhaps slightly slower than the second gen.

The “slightly slower than second gen” comment is interesting. I wonder if that will improve as users develop the swipe up timing muscle memory. Certainly, the timing should improve with next generation processors.

I experience failure with Touch ID at least once a day or so, almost always due to sweaty fingers from a workout or, perhaps, dirt of some kind on my fingers. Face ID eliminates that issue (my only complaint about Touch ID).

At several points, the unlock procedure worked so well in pitch black or at weird angles that I laughed out loud. You get over the amazement pretty quickly, but it feels wild the first few dozen times you do it.

So important. Really glad to read these reviews, hear the positives on Face ID in the wild.

Jason Snell, Six Colors, on the iPhone 8:

This is the fate of the iPhone 8. It will be ignored by many of Apple’s most committed followers, who see it as a speed bump on the road to the release of the iPhone X in early November.

The iPhone X is stealing the iPhone 8 thunder, no doubt. But there’s a lot to appreciate here, especially if you have an older phone:

Instead, it will soldier on, doing its job as the latest iteration of the existing iPhone line, providing a substantial upgrade to people who haven’t bought an iPhone in two or three years and aren’t interested in paying $999 for the very first generation of a new iPhone, if they could even find one in stores. These people are ready for a better version of their existing phone, and the iPhone 8 will deliver that to them.

If you are considering an update, but stuck on the fence between an iPhone 8 and iPhone X, spend some time digging through Jason’s detailed iPhone 8 review. It just might change your thinking.

Steven Levy, Wired:

I’ve had this phone since last Tuesday. Apple had given me this early peek in part because I was one of the first pre-release reviewers of the original iPhone. Given that history, we all thought it would be interesting to get my impressions of what the company clearly believes is the next milestone in a journey that has pretty much altered our relationship with technology. Sure, with every single iteration of the iPhone, Apple has claimed that it’s the best one the company has ever made. But for this anniversary edition—coming at a time when critics are griping that the company had tumbled into an innovation trough— they’re pushing for something higher. Tim Cook calls the iPhone X “the future of the smartphone.”

This is a great read, all the way through. I love the open, with Steven choosing what feature to show people who see his phone, ask what it can do. Lovely writing, makes me want an iPhone X, which is exactly what this pitch is supposed to accomplish.

Remember, as cool as the original iPhone was, it didn’t really begin changing the world until Apple let third-party software developers take advantage of its innards—stuff like the camera, GPS, and other sensors. Maybe something similar, albeit not on such a grand scale, will happen with the iPhone X. Those who shell out the cash for this device will enjoy their screen and battery life today. But the real payoff of the iPhone X might come when we figure out what it can do tomorrow.

I see the iPhone X as the very beginning of a brand new product line. I think the payoff will come as those future iPhones X evolve.

Getting (or dreaming of getting) an iPhone X? This is a terrific summary of the various gestures built into the phone.

Only thing that would make this better would be a video of same. Nice job, Jonny.