To begin with, Apple has sourced its OLED panels from Samsung Display, which offers the best and most mature phone solution currently on the market. (Pixel 2 XL was sourced from LG Display.)
That does mean the iPhone X is stuck with a diamond pixel arrangement, which has oval green pixels with square red and blue pixels arranged around them, rather than the RGB stripe traditionally used for LCD displays. It’s a way to mitigate against the significantly lower lifespan of blue pixels in OLED, and it’s what can currently be supplied at scale.
Read the rest of Rene’s review for more detail, but bottom line, you end up with more green than red and blue.
There have been a number of pictures showing the overall look of this arrangement (including the images in Rene’s review), but I found this tweet from Steve Troughton-Smith really brought a sense of what the diamond matrix arrangement meant in real life:
So what does PenTile mean in practice on iPhone X? Only green is 'true 3X' You need exceedingly tiny text to notice the effect, just about the limits of decent human vision. (full-res test PNG: https://t.co/iuR0SQzXoz) pic.twitter.com/XFr2cawtV0
Tap the image and notice how much sharper the green text is than the red or blue text on either side.
With that image in mind, go back to Rene’s review and read what he has to say about the iPhone X display and how Apple gets the most out of it. Great stuff.
About six months before the iPhone hit store shelves in 2007, Steve Jobs called Corning’s CEO, Wendell Weeks, and asked him if he could create a glass cover for a new Apple product that would resist scratches and breakage.
And:
The original iPhone spec called for a plastic cover over the touchscreen display. The story goes that Jobs, after using a prototype iPhone for a few weeks, became very worried that the device’s display would get scratched when jumbled around in user’s pockets with keys and coins. So he gathered his engineers and demanded a new glass covering be used for the iPhone. Hence Jobs’s phone call to Weeks.
And:
While many other smartphone makers have crowed about using Gorilla Glass, Apple has rarely (if ever) publicly acknowledged Corning as the maker of the iPhone’s glass cover.
Corning is a critical part of the iPhone’s success and the iPhone a critical part of Corning’s growth as well. If you ever find yourself in the finger lakes region of New York, take some time to stop by the Corning Museum of Glass.
And spend a few minutes with Tim Bajarin’s article, as well as this fantastic New York Times article which details the iPhone’s move, under Steve Jobs’ urgent direction, from a plastic to a Gorilla Glass screen.
Reinhard Görner is a German photographer specializing in architecture and the fine arts. For the photographic series “Libraries”, he travels across Europe to capture the solemnity of the libraries of the Old Continent. From Madrid to Stuttgart, passing through Turin, he immortalises modern immaculate white interiors, monumental frescoes and the old woodwork of these places dedicated to knowledge.
This map helps you find the antipodes (the other side of the world) of any place on Earth.
Drag the left map, by clicking and holding as you move it, and when you will find the desired location, just click on it, and our “man” will dig a tunnel from selected location, right through the center of the Earth, up to the other side of the world which will be represented on Right Map.
This is pretty cool but, for the majority of us, our opposite point will be in an ocean.
Depending on the camera you have, the typical life of a shutter can vary from anything as low as 50,000 shutter actuations right up to 350,000. Some photographers may get unlucky and find themselves on the lower side of those numbers while others may find their cameras are still going strong after 500,000 shots.
For this reason, it’s crucial you keep an eye on how many pictures your current camera has made and how many frames your particular model will be at when it reaches the end of its life cycle. Knowing these numbers is equally as important to be aware of when looking to purchase a camera secondhand. If something you find on eBay has already taken a lot of pictures it may not last as long as you hope or be as much of a bargain as you think.
No, this won’t tell you definitively when your camera’s shutter will fail but it might help to know how many actuations your DSLR has done. It’s also helpful for those who buy used bodies to find out how much wear and tear there may be on the shutter mechanism.
It’s better than any advertisement, social campaign, or press write-up. Appearing onstage at an Apple press event is the dream of every iOS developer. It can almost instantly lift a tiny bootstrapped company from obscurity to name-brand status. It can also be the beginning of a long-lasting and lucrative relationship with Apple.
But as the folks at Scrollmotion, a New York-based iOS app developer, can tell you, getting there is a long, careful dance that can be full of heady highs, heartbreaking lows, and sudden death. The company marshaled a laborious campaign to present its app onstage at an Apple event last spring, and while the campaign was unsuccessful, the company says it would do it again in a heartbeat.
I know developers are of two minds – it is a Darwinian pressure cooker attempting to satisfy all of Apple’s demands and to be better than a dozen other developers, some of them your friends, who are all trying to do the same thing. But, on the other hand, it’s the kind of jumpstart a small company craves.
For years, Canadians have been able to watch episodes of iconic American classics such as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Batman” or “I Love Lucy.” But where was Canada’s TV heritage? Why was our homegrown fare always, after its initial run, locked away in a vault?
Well, “The Littlest Hobo” has finally been let out of his kennel. After years of development, the Canada Media Fund and Google Canada have teamed to launch encore+, a new YouTube channel giving viewers here and around the world access to decades of Canadian film and TV gold.
My weekend just might be spent watching “The Littlest Hobo” reruns.
Disney has kept a tight lid on details about all the new “Star Wars” movies — but its strategy has been breached by Google Maps.
The service shows the street views of addresses all across the world via satellite images, which are typically one to three years old.
But Kevin Beaumont found something interesting at Longcross Studios, a film and TV production facility near London, on Google Maps: The Millennium Falcon is on site, or at least near a golf course close by. And it’s surrounded by shipping containers, seemingly in an attempt to hide it.
On November 10, 1975, two ships made their way in tandem across the stormy waters of Lake Superior. One was the Arthur M. Anderson, led by Captain Jesse Cooper. The other, captained by Ernest McSorley, was the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.
The ship was last seen on radar around 7:15 p.m. All 29 men on board were lost with it, and today, 40 years after the most famous shipwreck in Great Lakes history, the cause is still a mystery.
Here’s what we do know about the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, and what happened to it that fateful day.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a beautifully tragic song from Canadian songwriting legend Gordon Lightfoot. I’m probably not wrong in saying that all Canadians, at least those over the age of 40, know every word to that song.
Put simply, Face ID is the most compelling advancement in security I have seen in a very long time. It’s game changing not merely due to the technology, but due to Apple’s design and implementation.
And:
I believe Face ID is slower at actual recognition than Touch ID, but it’s nearly impossible to notice due to the implementation. In the time it takes to move your finger to the Touch ID sensor, Face ID could have already unlocked your iPhone.
That’s the real Face ID revolution. Since you’re almost always looking at your phone while you’re using it, Face ID enables what I call “continuous authentication.”
This is a fascinating article, worth the read. But even better, if you’ve not yet seen it, is the video embedded in Rich’s piece, which I’ve embedded below.
In it, Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern tries her best to defeat Face ID using siblings, triplets, and a well crafted theatrical mask.
With the latest version of iTunes, Apple buried the interface for making ringtones on the Mac. It’s still possible but a lot more cumbersome to manage.
A little-known secret is that you can actually make custom alert an ringtones for iOS on your iPhone itself, using GarageBand. Here’s how.
If you like playing with sound, this is a fun, achievable project to take on.
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.
Yesterday, a Reddit user named Darus 214 started a thread complaining about his iPhone X screen becoming unresponsive in cold weather. From the thread:
I’ve noticed that my iPhone X screen becomes very unresponsive as soon as I step outside. It literally takes 2 seconds from going inside to the cold outdoors and my screen stops being very responsive. I try swiping on websites and it doesn’t register my finger. It’s very noticeable. Is anyone else having this problem?
Edit: possible other explanation might be the drastic changes in light that are causing problems.
Edit2: looks like some people are having issues while others are not. Might be different colors/sizes of iPhones that were affected. Can we get Apple to investigate?
First things first, this thread caused a number of people to go outside and try their iPhones in relatively cold weather. Every result I saw (small sample size, so take with grain of salt) was that the phone worked fine.
Use iOS devices where the ambient temperature is between 0º and 35º C (32º to 95º F). Low- or high-temperature conditions might cause the device to change its behavior to regulate its temperature. Using an iOS device in very cold conditions outside of its operating range might temporarily shorten battery life and could cause the device to turn off. Battery life will return to normal when you bring the device back to higher ambient temperatures.
This guidance goes back quite a ways, and is in line with typical guidance on these sorts of devices.
We asked Apple about this situation and they sent us this response:
“We are aware of instances where the iPhone X screen will become temporarily unresponsive to touch after a rapid change to a cold environment. After several seconds the screen will become fully responsive again. This will be addressed in an upcoming software update.”
Interesting situation. Sounds like Apple is on top of it.
When you get a scam email, forward it to [email protected] and a bot will keep the scammer busy emailing back and forth with it, giving the scammer less time to rob gullible humans.
This certainly won’t stop scammers and will take more time than simply deleting the email but it might give you a small measure of satisfaction.
“It’s not just a game, it’s a quest to help scientists fight dementia!”
It sounds too good to be true but this really is a game, where simply by having loads of fun chasing creatures around magical seas and swamps, you can help to fight a disease that currently affects 45 million people worldwide.
In fact playing SEA HERO QUEST for just 2 minutes will generate the equivalent of 5 hours of lab-based research data.
I’ve played the first couple of levels of the game and it seems pretty simplistic. If it weren’t for the research goals behind it, I don’t think I’d actually play it through to the end but it’s for a great cause so I’ll definitely play a few rounds each day.
And thanks to the Apple person who added this "floor crosshair" feature to iOS 11 for perfect face-down junk food shots!! That was the goal pic.twitter.com/fA5oobTdcN
First things first, this is a great new feature. To see it for yourself, go to Settings > Camera, and make sure that Grid is enabled.
Now, when you tilt your camera flat and facing the floor (or, interestingly, the ceiling), a crosshair will appear.
But what really struck me was reading the replies to the thread, where the Apple developer who created the feature as an intern chimes in. For all its faults, this is the gold heart of Twitter.
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.
When Pandora Media launched on the NYSE in June 2011, it started trading at $16 a share – with a $2.6bn valuation.
Optimism was rife for music’s big digital play on the stock market. The expectation was that the firm’s valuation, and global presence, would soar.
Today, over six years on, Pandora is worth less than a third of what it was that day, at under $5 per share.
And, according to MBW’s calculations, there’s even sorrier news for the firm’s new regime to contemplate: Pandora has now lost over a billion dollars in less than four years.
I hate the math, but it is the math. To me, Pandora hasn’t lost value as a music service. They still serve the same purpose, offer the same set of services. The loss is financial. But that’s what counts in this situation.
It gets worse: as recently as summer 2016, SiriusXM reportedly made a bid to acquire Pandora for $3.4bn, or $15 per share.
That’s more than three times what Pandora’s worth now.
Apple today is making it easier for users to view purchase history directly from their iOS devices. The company revealed in an updated support document today that you can now view your App Store and iTunes purchase history in the Settings app on iOS.
Previously, as the support document notes, this functionality was only available through iTunes on Mac and PC. While you could view purchase history via the App Store and iTunes Store on iOS, it was purely for re-downloading purposes and didn’t show detailed pricing information.
The Visitor Center at Apple’s new Apple Park campus will open to the public on Friday, November 17, according to an internal email that Apple sent out to employees today.
According to our source, the Apple Park Visitor Center features a gift shop with Apple-branded items available for purchase, much like the store at One Infinite Loop, but it does not have a full Apple Store and will not stock devices like the iPhone X.
One of the highlights of going to Macworld Expo each year in San Francisco was our drive to Cupertino to the Apple Employee Store to see what kind of cool swag we could score. I hope the new Visitor Center is just as exciting.
I mentioned when I wrote my iPhone X first look last week that I would follow-up with some more thoughts once I’ve had a chance to use the phone for a little while. Well, here it is.
The first thing I’d like to address is that some people are saying you have to relearn how to use the iPhone if you buy an iPhone X. That’s simply not true.
The interface on the iPhone X is almost exactly the same as all other iPhones. Granted, there are a few gestures that are new, like swiping down to get to Control Center instead of swiping up from the bottom, but that’s hardly learning the iPhone interface all over again.
Of course, the hardest thing to get used to was not having a Home Button, but not even that took too long. It was more breaking a longstanding habit than anything else. A week into using the iPhone X and I don’t reach for the Home Button anymore—I lift the phone for Face ID, swipe up and I’m in.
Speaking of Face ID, it’s brilliant.
I mentioned last week that it worked for me about 99 percent of the time, but there were instances when it wouldn’t unlock for me on the first try. I think I’ve found the problem and no big surprise, it was me.
Here’s what I think was happening. Actually, there are two things I think were happening.
First, I wear my glasses most of the time when I use my iPhone. I also wear my glasses on the end of my nose, not all the way up on my face. My habit is to put on my glasses and then reach for my phone.
I believe that Face ID was unable to see my eyes properly because the rim of my glasses was blocking them. In order for Face ID to work properly, it needs to see your eyes, nose, and mouth—by blocking my eyes, Face ID couldn’t recognize me.
When I put my glasses all the way up on my face, Face ID worked every time. I figured then that I had partially explained my problem.
The second thing that caused a problem for me was simply the angle I was holding the phone. When I started to track what was causing the iPhone X to not unlock, I noticed that I wasn’t actually pointing the phone at my face. In fact sometimes I held that phone almost flat, which meant Face ID was looking at the sky and not my face.
A possible third reason could have been that I wasn’t always looking at the phone when I tried to unlock it. I have Attention Aware enabled, so it needs to know I’m focused on the phone before it unlocks.
To be honest, I think the first two are more likely causes in my case.
The good news is that after a week, I don’t experience much of this any more. It’s not because I’m hyper-aware to do all the right things when I unlock the phone—in fact, I’m less aware now—it’s more because my habits have changed.
I can pick up the iPhone X, swipe up and be at the home screen very quickly now. I hold the phone in the right place, at the right angle, even with my glasses on—my habits have changed.
If there’s one thing I’m surprised with after using the iPhone X for a week, it’s how much I like the size. I loved the iPhone Plus models—they were big and had lots of real estate.
What I realized is that what I really loved was the screen real estate, not necessarily the larger physical size of the phone itself. I have an iPhone now that is basically all screen, but a smaller form factor than the Plus models.
I think this is something that will appeal to all of Apple’s customers. I find the size of the iPhone X closer to the iPhone 8, but the screen is closer to that of the 8 Plus. iPhone X is like having the best of both worlds.
I don’t really have a lot more to say about the gestures on iPhone X than I said in my first look last week. There are a couple of things you need to learn like pressing the side button to invoke Siri (if you don’t use “Hey Siri”), swiping down to get to Control Center, and swiping up instead of using the Home Button.
After a few days of use, these things weren’t much of an issue. Like I said before, this was mainly about changing habits.
The battery life on iPhone X is fine for me. I charge my iPhone overnight and unplug it in the morning. I use the device all day for whatever I happen to be doing that day and the battery lasts until I go to bed that night. That’s all I need from the battery.
I didn’t do any weird battery tests because the best test for me is to just use it like I normally would. That’s what I did and it lasted just fine.
The notch is still not a big deal to me. Since posting my initial thoughts, I’ve watch some videos and looked at photos and the notch still doesn’t bother me.
I’m still focused on what’s on the content on the screen, not how the notch looks with that content. I think that’s how most people will look at the iPhone X.
I’ve even talked to a couple of people that were vehemently opposed to the notch when the iPhone was first introduced and even they admitted that it didn’t bother them in every day use.
There is nothing about the iPhone X that would cause me to not recommend it as your next iPhone purchase. However, there are a mountain of reasons for me to recommend it.
Simply put: Face ID, power, speed, screen, camera and everything else that makes up iPhone X is just better than anything else that I’ve seen.
Following a multiple-outlet bidding war, Apple has emerged as the victor for a morning show drama starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.
The Aniston-Witherspoon drama becomes Apple’s second straight-to-series order and joins Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories as the first projects the tech giant has picked up under programming heads Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht.
Not generally a fan of hour-long dramas but I love Aniston and will watch just to see her back on TV.
FStoppers ran a long, side-by-side comparison test, shooting various video modes (including 4K/60fps) on both an iPhone X and a professional video camera.
The video is worth watching, all the way through. In a nutshell, for most use cases, the iPhone X looks every bit as good, if not better, than its bigger, bulkier, more expensive counterpart.
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.
