“It’s too damn big. In every particular, it conveys SIZE like a Texas pickup with horns in the hood. I know intellectually it’s thinner than the Moto X, but it’s definitely taller and I suspect wider, with a top bevel that really doesn’t need to be that size…”
It’s too big. The bezels are gone, but they just stretched the screen awkwardly into them. And yes, there are UI conventions to try to work around it, but the swipe-down-on-the-bottom is far less reliable or responsive than the double-tap-the-home-button was to bring the top of the screen down, and having different swipe-down-from-top is incredibly awkward, and having the keyboard scooch itself to one side or the other is problematic even if the keyboard were reliably responsive and not the dog’s breakfast it’s been for several releases now.
No, my complaints of three years ago about the iPhone 6 are even more valid for a slightly larger device. The iPhone X is just too large to be anything but a two-handed phone. In that respect, Apple has clearly capitulated to our computing future: everyone is stuck with a two-handed phone at all times and you’d better have a jacket or a purse. I don’t like it, I don’t appreciate it, but then, it wasn’t my money and I still have the iPhone SE in a pinch. So get over that. What else?
Well, iOS 11 hasn’t shook the uncomfortable sense that Apple’s QA department all died in a tragic blimp accident. While it doesn’t have the gargantuan security nightmares of its Mac counterpart, iOS 11 is downright rickety in its UI choices (I still don’t get why the control center can’t just fucking turn off the Wi-Fi if I said so) and it’s still frequently easier to just turn Wi-Fi off altogether in favor of one bar of LTE, because it clings to bad Wi-Fi like a Demigorgon to a peripheral character’s face. FaceID works most of the time, except when the phone is laying on the table and you have to pick it up to look at it to unlock it or else tap in the whole code, neither of which was necessary with TouchID.
I alluded earlier to the fact that Beleagued Apple Computer presented itself as something like Mercedes or BMW, and that by the time they became Apple Inc they had become Volkswagen, and that now they’re aiming to be Tesla. And I think this exemplifies how they have done so. This new phone finally adopts a bunch of other tech other folks had, but does it in a sleek and sexy way, with superlative integration and flashy design and an absurd price tag and if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it. Meanwhile, Nokia and Motorola are over there grinding out perfectly serviceable devices for less than half the money (hell, Nokia just dropped a bare-Android smartphone for a hundred dollars at Best Buy. It’s practically an Android burner) if you’re willing to…
That’s the real trick, isn’t it? You either give your ecosystem over to the Beast of North Bayshore, or you pay through the nose to stay with Apple. The privacy of your personal data is now a luxury good. Sure, you can still get the iPhone SE for $350 and have a phone that doesn’t make you put your coffee down to use, but for how much longer (given its innards are two generations behind current now)? And with Tim Cook over there making nice to a Chinese government that has the kind of control over the Internet the FCC would love to give Comcast and the Baby Bell Twins, you have to ask if having your personal data vivisected for profit is just The Way We Live Now.
Anyway.
The other experiment is: if the phone is so damn big and unwieldy, can it actually be used in place of a Kindle or iPad? Well, I haven’t pulled the iPad out of its case since I got the iPhone X set up, and I can’t remember the last time I drew on the Kindle. The actual Kindle app for iPhone could use an update because it can’t take advantage of the whole screen, but even the iPhone 6-equivalent is slightly larger than what was available on the Moto X, and the combination of AMOLED and white text on black screen means I can read for an hour and only burn 5% of battery with no other remediative power solutions in play. So that’s nice, for what it’s worth. Only one device to carry. The downside is, when you’re down the pub and trying to read yourself out of the world for a while, your primary phone – with all its apps, and all its notifications, and all its empty promises – is not the best tool for the job.
Of which more later.