iPhone

Daniel Bader, Android Central:

Apple calls iPhone X the future of the smartphone, but after using it for a week — and coming from months of Android use — I can comfortably say that it’s a really great phone. In fact, it is the best iPhone to date, and I’ve had a tremendous time with it, but it doesn’t drastically change my opinion of the iPhone as a product, nor of iOS as an ecosystem.

That’s not to say Google and its hardware partners can’t stand to learn a few things from the iPhone X.

Let’s cut to the chase.

As you make your way through this review, keep in mind that this is written by the Managing Editor of Android Central. I found it to be objective, but clearly told from the view of an Android user. Keep that in mind, but do read the review.

The Verge article is worth a quick read, good to know about. And you might also want to check out Apple’s official AssistiveTouch support page.

Apple:

Apple today announced a major update to Clips, the free app for iOS that makes it easy to create and share fun videos using iPhone or iPad. Clips introduces Selfie Scenes and adds artistic style transfer effects and a redesigned interface that makes it easier than ever to create great videos on the go.

Selfie Scenes is an exciting new feature that places users into animated, 360-degree scenes when recording selfies. Using the sophisticated TrueDepth camera system on iPhone X, Selfie Scenes transports users into bustling cities, serene landscapes, abstract paintings and even the Millennium Falcon and Mega-Destroyer from “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

And:

New artistic effects use advanced machine learning and style transfer technology to turn any photo or video into a moody oil painting, vibrant watercolor or elegant pencil sketch — in real time while recording.

Follow the headline link and watch the video, check out the samples. The fact that that last bit is done in real time, while recording, is amazing to me.

Follow the headline link, take a look at the chart. Note the market share rankings. Samsung steadily falling, Apple makes a big gain in that last quarter.

From the TrendForce report:

Samsung is expected to slightly scale back the production of its high-end models in the fourth quarter as the brand is seeing the sales of its smartphones being squeezed by the strong demand for Apple’s latest iPhone devices.

And:

As for highly anticipated iPhone X, the yield rates of its key components (e.g. Wi-Fi modules and 3D sensing modules) have been lower than expected, thus delaying production of the device. With the limited support from iPhone X, Apple was not able to significantly raise its total volume.

On the other hand, TrendForce estimates that the iPhone production volume for this fourth quarter will reach 81 million units with iPhone X accounting for 33% of the total. TrendForce expects a surge of iPhone X production that will last through the first half of 2018.

If the limited component yield rates comment is true, Apple was able to make this leap while a bit hamstrung, which would mean this surge in production (and in demand) will last longer.

Good news for Apple all the way around.

Yesterday, a Reddit user named Darus 214 started a thread complaining about his iPhone X screen becoming unresponsive in cold weather. Here’s the original thread, some thoughts on it, and Apple’s official response. […]

Here’s what one of the images looks like in place:

You can pick them up here (they’re free). Click to the page, then click on an image to get to the high res version.

Nice chunk from T3’s iPhone X review:

It suddenly dawns on your that your face has indeed unlocked the phone. It’s a strange moment. We hadn’t had to make any effort to unlock it. And that’s what Face ID is supposed to be like.

Just so.

Also, this was interesting:

It isn’t the barrier that you imagine it could be, though we did find it a little weird to have to make sure our face was available when using Apple Pay! Now, Samsung’s facial recognition (to unlock the Note 8 and S8) is close to Face ID. We were impressed at the ease at which it unlocks the Note 8 recently. But it doesn’t do anything else. Because Face ID is so baked into iOS it means that you rarely need your passcode. And it’s not just about unlocking your phone with the iPhone X, it’s about Apple Pay, App Store payments and more.

Face ID is baked into the OS, in just the same way as Touch ID is on earlier models.

Jason Snell:

My Apple review unit is silver; on Friday the Space Gray iPhone X I bought with my own money arrived. With both of them here, I have to admit that I may have made the wrong choice.

My 2 cents? Though I’ve always preferred Space Gray, I think the silver iPhone X is stunning.

Look at the picture Jason took at a football game, about 20 rows back. That’s amazing detail, especially considering how far away he was from the field.

And this comment, on using the iPhone X laying flat on a table:

I’m loving iPhone X in almost all the places I use it. The gestures are becoming second nature to me. But there’s one use case where it doesn’t really work: laying on a table. And it doesn’t work there for several reasons. The sizable camera bump makes the whole thing unstable. Facing straight up, the Face ID camera can’t see me, so I can’t unlock my phone without leaning way over the table or picking the phone up. And attention detection can’t detect me, so after 30 seconds the screen dims.

Worth noting. I’m wondering if there’s a fix for this. If not, perhaps Apple could add a mode that detects laying flat on the table, or a gesture to temporarily disengage attention detection.

Great review from Jason, per usual.

[VIDEO] That’s some bling. This for you? Video and link to the site that does the gold plating in the main Loop post.

There are four models each for the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and iPhone X. The models correspond to carriers and bands available for each phone.

Now that Apple no longer puts the model information on the back of the phone, you’ll need to dig into Settings or look in the SIM slot. Rene Ritchie lays out all the details.

Harry McCracken invented Animoji Karaoke about a week ago:

As I used a pre-release iPhone X this week, it suddenly occurred to me that it might be fun to lip-sync a song to an Animoji and have it mimic my performance. I dubbed the idea “Animoji Karaoke” and have been filling my Twitter feed with it. Judging from my likes, retweets, and comments, I haven’t just been entertaining myself; some people said that it redeemed Animoji or justifed buying a thousand-dollar phone. Even cynics have taken notice of my breakthrough.

Harry’s efforts have spawned a tidal wave of similar efforts. If you’ve never seen one before, here’s a great example:

https://www.twitter.com/manxomemia/status/926660732162154496

A few more worth checking out:

• Here’s a music video from Airplane Mode, done as an Animoji.
• A unicorn sings Always by Erasure.
• Here’s Luke finding out who his father is (might need to bump the volume on this one).
• And one of my favorites, the Star Wars theme, as sung by a crowd of Animoji.

Good stuff.

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.