iPhone X Hands-On: The Biggest Change to the iPhone in 10 Years — and It Costs 8,388 Yuan

Face ID is surprisingly good. Apple has reinvented facial recognition.

Fifteen minutes from the end of the keynote, Apple’s CEO came back onstage. It was time to talk about price.

“A magical product, an astonishing breadth. What should we price it at? If you listened to the pundits, we’d price it at $999. But when we designed this product, we didn’t just go all out on the technology and the interface — we were just as aggressive on price. We want as many people as possible to use it.”

On the huge screen behind him, a giant “$999” was crushed by a “$499” dropping out of the sky. The room cheered.

That was the launch of the first iPad, in 2010. Today there was no such reversal. The iPhone is every bit as expensive as the rumors said.

In the early hours of September 13, Beijing time, at the Steve Jobs Theater beside Apple’s new headquarters in Silicon Valley, Apple announced three iPhones: the iPhone X, the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 8 Plus.

The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus cost a little more than the models they replace, starting at 5,888 yuan and 6,688 yuan.

The iPhone X, exactly as rumored, costs $999 before tax; add China’s value-added tax and that becomes 8,388 yuan. For that money you could buy an iPhone 8 and an iPad.

What the price buys is the iPhone that has changed most since 2007. The entire front of the iPhone X is almost all screen.

As usual, all three iPhones are faster, and the cameras are better

The spotlight was entirely on the iPhone X, but the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus share most of its specs and features, and they have changed considerably more than the iPhone 7 changed from the iPhone 6s.

Here is a quick comparison of the three phones.

1. More performance

All three iPhones run the same six-core A11 “Bionic” chip. Its four efficiency cores are up to 70% faster than the A10 Fusion’s, and its two performance cores up to 25% faster.

The odd name is there to stress that the chip is built for artificial intelligence. The “Neural Engine” inside it has a dual-core design and can recognize people, places and objects. It runs up to 600 billion operations a second, which lets the iPhone handle harder image-recognition work.

The A11 also has the image sensor built in, processing 30% faster than the A10 while drawing, Apple claims, only half the power. Apple’s own GPU is now on the chip too, replacing the PowerVR parts it used for years.

The list of chips Apple makes itself has grown again.

2. A better camera, again

Apple, which has sold the camera as the main draw for years running, has improved the iPhone 8’s again. A new motion sensor lets it shoot HD video at 60 fps and 1080p slow motion at 240 fps.

Apple says the iPhone 8’s sensor is better too, taking in 83% more light, so photos shot in the dark have less noise and look cleaner.

Apple has also added “Portrait Lighting” filters to “Portrait Mode,” which let you adjust the light on a face by itself. Apple says the effect is driven by the A11 Bionic chip. Photos could not be exported from the hands-on area, so here is how the camera performed:

3. Nearly the same body, now with a glass back

The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus look almost exactly like the iPhone 7 series, except that the back is now glass and the gold has been redone — somewhere between pink and rose gold.

The glass back feels as smooth as the jet black iPhone 7, and it makes wireless charging possible.

The new iPhones charge over the Qi standard, so the accessories already on sale — Samsung’s included — work with them.

Pre-orders for the iPhone 8 open at 3 p.m. on September 15, with shipping from September 23.

The iPhone 8 starts at 5,888 yuan, the Plus at 6,688 yuan.

The front of the iPhone X is nothing but screen — and a notch software makes no attempt to hide

The iPhone 8 has changed a good deal: materials, features, performance, camera.

But everyone in the room was watching the iPhone X.

“Our vision for the iPhone has always been to create something so powerful, so immersive, so magical that in the end the hardware disappears completely.” Tim Cook’s one-line introduction is the iPhone X’s biggest selling point.

All you can see on the front of the iPhone X is screen, apart from a narrow strip at the top that takes up half the screen’s width. Inside it, from left to right: an infrared camera, a flood illuminator, a proximity sensor, an ambient light sensor, the earpiece, a microphone, the front camera and a dot projector. Most of what is new about the iPhone X runs on these sensors.

The screen is not like any before it, but pick the iPhone X up and the rounded corners and the edge curve — identical to the last three generations of iPhone — still tell you at a glance that this is an Apple iPhone.

After a few generations of iPhones, the X feels a little thick in the hand. Because the back is glass again, it is 0.6 mm thicker than the iPhone 7. Apart from the thickness, the front and the back now feel the same, as they did on the jet black iPhone 7.

The new screen design let Apple fit a 5.8-inch display into a body only slightly bigger than the 4.7-inch iPhone.

The new screen is OLED, to which Apple has attached the thoroughly unimaginative name “Super Retina display.” It is brighter and sharper than the iPhone 7’s — 2436x1125 at 458 PPI, a pixel density 40% higher.

OLED renders full black darker than an ordinary LCD. But most designers avoid true black for interface elements and text, so you mainly notice the difference when watching video.

Apple’s handling of the notch is somewhat unexpected: in full-screen apps such as photos and video, it simply covers part of the picture.

One earlier guess was that Apple would put a black status bar on either side of the notch, so that you could not tell it was there. Someone even made mockups:

Instead Apple leaves the notch exposed in every interface. Inside apps that is fine; video, games and photos all lose a piece of the picture:

With the new screen, Apple has replaced the Home button with gestures

To let the screen cover the whole front of the phone, Apple took the Home button away.

Since the first iPhone in 2007, pressing Home from any screen has taken you back to the home screen.

In its place is a swipe up from the bottom of the screen. In any app, that swipe returns you to the home screen. The gesture also absorbs the multitasking gesture: stop halfway up and you land in iOS’s card-style multitasking view. It feels more natural, and makes more sense, than double-clicking the Home button did.

Control Center, which used to slide up from the bottom, has moved to the top-right corner. Swipe down from there and it appears, with all its settings.

But the iPhone X’s screen is long and narrow, and an ordinary person holding it in one hand has to strain to reach the top-right corner with a thumb.

The shortcut buttons in Control Center exist to be convenient. Where they are now, they are less so.

Face ID is as important a breakthrough as Touch ID was

The most argued-over detail in the iPhone X leaks was that Apple would drop Touch ID.

Since the 5s in 2013, Touch ID has been the standard way to unlock an iPhone. It is so convenient that it has become muscle memory.

You pull the phone out of your pocket and your finger presses the Home button without being told to. By the time the screen is up in front of you, it is already unlocked.

Now, for the sake of the big screen, the iPhone X has no room for a fingerprint button. Apple was reportedly working on a fingerprint sensor embedded under the screen but could not get it ready for mass production. Several independent companies, Qualcomm and the touchscreen firm Synaptics among them, are working on the same thing, and none of them can build it in volume yet.

Most manufacturers have decided to put the fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone. That is only convenient once you have picked the phone up and run your index finger around the back. You don’t always want to pick the phone up, and the position is less natural than pressing a sensor on the front.

Hold it the right way and the Xiaomi Mi MIX reads your finger well enough. As for Samsung’s peculiar decision to squeeze the sensor in beside the camera lens, all it guarantees is that you will keep smudging the lens.

With unlocking, a 10% higher failure rate, or half a second more per attempt, is a disaster.

The Samsung Galaxy S8 offers face scanning and iris scanning. In my experience, a moderate change in light is enough to make the face scan fail, and you then wait a few seconds for a line of text telling you it didn’t work. The iris scan is worse: you have to hold the phone at just the right distance, like being told in a middle-school computer class to sit up straight and keep your eyes so many centimeters from the screen.

Apple’s facial recognition, Face ID, sounds like Samsung’s on paper. It behaves very differently. It can more or less replace Touch ID.

Face ID, new to the iPhone X, starts with a dot projector that throws 30,000 dots, invisible to the eye, onto your face, drawing a three-dimensional map that only one face in a million would match.

An infrared camera reads the dot pattern and sends the infrared image to the secure enclave inside the A11 chip to check for a match.

In practice, enrolling your face takes under 10 seconds: turn your head from side to side until the ring on the screen goes green.

Once you are enrolled, unlocking starts as soon as the screen lights up. The iPhone does not, as Samsung’s iris recognition does, put up an interface asking you to line your eyes up with a dot.

In hands-on use, unlocking takes about half a second. Apple says glasses, beards, surrounding light and hats make no difference. I enrolled my face wearing glasses, and afterward it recognized me quickly with them on or off.

The demo area was too restricted for me to check how Face ID does in dim or harsh light — in principle it should be fine.

So that nobody can quietly unlock the phone while you are asleep or distracted, your eyes have to be on the phone when it unlocks.

Apple Pay can be authorized with Face ID too. Once you are recognized, it stays ready to pay; you don’t have to hold a finger down the way you do with a fingerprint.

Face ID also changes notifications on the iPhone X.

While the phone is locked, notifications — texts, email — show no details, only that something new has arrived. When the iPhone X sees that it is you looking at it, the details appear.

So you needn’t worry about someone else catching sight of a new message.

If you are used to pulling the phone from your pocket with a finger already on the Home button, Face ID is slower than a fingerprint: it has to wait until the phone is facing you.

But opening an encrypted app such as 1Password is faster than with a fingerprint, because you no longer have to move your finger anywhere.

Face ID is plainly a technology that will stay and spread.

After several manufacturers had shipped facial recognition that was painful to use, Apple has brought one that actually works.

The price of trying it is 8,388 yuan. Pre-orders open at 3 p.m. on October 27, and shipping does not begin until November 3.

Those two dates make it easy to see how rushed the iPhone X was.

Apple no longer seems used to making things that aren’t expensive

“The iPhone X has facial recognition. It’ll look at your face and tell you you can’t afford it.” Shridhar’s joke on Twitter doesn’t feel much like a joke.

Apple has been widening the gap with its high-end models for a while: the iPhone 7 Plus has not only a bigger screen but two cameras. The iPad keeps getting more Pro, and on the Mac side the cheap Mac mini and MacBook Air stopped being updated long ago.

The iPhone X carries that pricing strategy on.

The iPhone X pushes the price of a flagship iPhone straight past 8,000 yuan.

If you were going to replace your iPhone every three years anyway, it is hard to call that unimaginable. It works out at about 7.7 yuan a day, spent on the thing you use most.

That is also why, in the United States, Britain and Japan, the iPhone can cost this much and still have almost caught up with Android in market share.

iPhone sales have slipped since they peaked with the iPhone 6, and the iPhone 7 did not get back to the iPhone 6’s level either. Charging more per phone brings Apple more profit.

But the world is not only those few countries. In most markets Android is still overwhelmingly dominant, and the iPhone’s share is not rising. From emerging markets such as India, Southeast Asia and South America to China, Android is growing faster.

Chinese Android companies are now selling more and more cheap phones into emerging markets, and Google is joining them, working with Xiaomi and Lenovo (Motorola) to launch cheap phones in various markets.

iPhone owners may well think a five- or six-thousand-yuan phone every two or three years is worth it. But what about someone who has never used an iPhone because of the price?

Back in 2010, Steve Jobs’s iPad started at $499 — not only below what anyone expected of Apple, but cheaper than the tablets from Huawei, Motorola and Samsung. It took the whole tablet market in a few months.

An ever more expensive iPhone can wring more profit out of the users Apple already has. It is unlikely to win it many more.

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and the photographs in this article were taken by the author.

More worth reading about today’s iPhone event:

iOS 11 is almost here — 30 changes worth knowing about

The third-generation Apple Watch is out, and it can make calls