I had to reckon with an iPad mini 2 recently – the first retina-display Mini, the one that shares its chipset with the iPhone 5s, one bought less than two months before my now virtually unusable Moto X. And the unfortunate fact of the matter is…the iPad isn’t too much better off. It’s sluggish on iOS 11, occasionally unresponsive and difficult to get working on anything particularly complicated. With a little work, you can get it going on VPN to bootleg a BBC iPlayer stream of the Olympic closing ceremonies and output over HDMI to your television, in theory (for legal reasons), but trying to multitask is a bit of a challenge. It’s also fine as a Kindle replacement, except that I have a Kindle Paperwhite that does that job splendidly. And if I’m honest, so does this iPhone X.
It’s looking increasingly like there isn’t going to be any iPhone SE2, and on balance it doesn’t looks like an X-Minus is on the cards either. If you believe the Great Mentioner, the fall lineup appears to be a tweaked iPhone X (5.8” display), a new iPhone X Plus (6.5” display) and something else (the heretofore skipped iPhone 9?) with a 6.1” LCD display rather than AMOLED and a price point lower than the X (generally assumed to be $700-800 in most quarters). One can only assume that the iPhone 8/Plus will stick around as the last-but-one discount models, and that the 7/Plus will remain in the “free with contract” slot.
This is hugely problematic. Yes, the entry level iPhone has always bumped around $650 or so, but in the last couple of years, there was that iPhone SE, with either the current chipset or only one year behind, first at $400 and then $350. Now, the cheapest current-chipset phone will be this notional iPhone 9, so-called. Which could conceivably cost $800, double the launch price of the SE – without taking into account that the iPhone X will be the smallest and most compact current iPhone. The iPhone 6/s/7/8 was just a hair too big, and now a phone a hair bigger than that will be “the small one.”
It’s really getting hard to shake the sense that Apple has lost their way, and is content to lean into being the new Tesla, churning out mildly reliable produce at premium price. Don’t @ me. iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 have both been shit on toast from a bugs-and-security standpoint, the very worst of the OS X era, and to have the baseline “current” phone jump to a thousand dollars besides is just insult to injury. Meanwhile, for those willing to take their chances with the Beast of Shoreline Boulevard, there are Android devices out there with last year’s OS for $100. You can get a smartphone – not a great one, maybe not a long-term useful one, but a smartphone nonetheless – at burner phone prices now. And Apple’s setting the flagship baseline ever higher.
Thing is, I have the iPhone X through work. I would love a notional SE2 or X-Minus to replace the two-year-old SE as a likely travel phone, but that looks increasingly unlikely. I’m not buying a 6-inch phone, ever, full stop. And it’s hardly worth it for me to buy an iPhone X just for the sake of owning it myself. Maybe if my job changed and my hand was forced, but not until my employer demands this one back. Especially if I’m not leaving the country before December at the earliest and can have this one unlocked by then.
And the iPhone X, annoying as it is, keeps growing on me. It’s easy to keep it charged. The screen is big enough that it can substitute for a Kindle. The lack of a headphone jack has been less of an issue than I expected, thanks largely to the Beats X headphones. I can’t deny the power of Animoji to entertain toddlers. And yes, frivolity of justification notwithstanding, I can actually do some work from it and deal with technician requests from a barstool.
But it’s still too big to easily use one-handed. It’s still too big to be comfortable in a front pants pocket. FaceID isn’t as reliable as they claim, especially when you’re lying in bed or sitting at the desk and have to crane the phone around in ways that weren’t necessary when TouchID could just let your finger rest for a second. It’s just a hair too big to be a hair too big – and meanwhile, Sony has picked up the torch and make the Xperia XZ2 Compact, which is ever so slightly taller than the perfect-sized first-gen Moto X and tapers the back to fit the hand in similar fashion. And a 2870 mAh battery is on par with…the iPhone X.
Just because Apple doesn’t do it, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Which should send a terrified shiver through every AAPL stockholder.