iPhone X, One Week In: The Biggest iPhone Upgrade in Seven Years

It's the future, and it's the most expensive

If you don't go out of your way to show it off, Apple's most expensive iPhone doesn't stand out.

I picked up a silver iPhone X test unit last Monday, put in my own SIM card, restored my backup, and used it every day.

In eight days, through two airports, two hotels, and a dozen or so restaurants, bars, and cafes, hardly anyone recognized Apple's new phone, which hasn't even shipped yet.

With the screen off, it's hard to see anything different about it: the rounded-corner design carried over from a decade of iPhones, an outline close to the 4.7-inch iPhone, the same all-black face.

In the iPhone's tenth year, the silver iPhone X that Apple is pushing hardest looks oddly retro: a black screen framed in shiny stainless steel, much like the first three iPhones, from 2007 to 2009.

The resemblance ends there.

The way you use it has changed too. We shot a video to explain it.

Turn on the iPhone X and all you see is a screen.

The side bezels are 3mm, the same as every iPhone since the 6. With the Home button gone, the black bands at the top and bottom that used to take the most space have vanished, and those edges are now as narrow as the sides. The one oddity is the black block at the top, packed with sensors.

Before you get to use this screen and the new system behind it, the first thing you run into is Face ID.

Face ID Is Smooth Enough That You Sometimes Forget It's There

Unlocking is the most-used function on a phone. Whatever apps you favor, none of them gets opened as many times a day as the lock screen.

Since the 5s I've had the muscle memory: lift the phone, thumb on the Home button, iPhone unlocked. It was hard to imagine anything more natural or convenient than Touch ID.

Face ID is exactly that kind of thing.

When we talk to Siri, we slow down and use simpler words, worried it won't understand. It often doesn't.

You don't need to be that careful with Face ID. You don't have to hold a straight face — you can talk, brush your teeth, laugh, even run until you're spent and your face is contorted. Only an exaggerated grimace makes it fail.

Face ID doesn't need to see your whole face either. Chewing food, lifting a glass of water, holding a burger up to your mouth — none of it gets in the way.

It sees by infrared, so it needs no light and doesn't care about day or night, indoors or out. In theory, strong enough sunlight could interfere with its infrared imaging. But under Beijing's none-too-generous sun, I haven't run into the problem. (Update: The Verge reports it runs into trouble in New York sunlight.)

Ordinary changes in appearance — glasses or no glasses, makeup or none, a new haircut, a hat covering your hair — don't affect recognition.

If you're wearing a sheet face mask, you have to wait a moment, until it settles flat against your face.

Apple says sunglasses that block certain infrared wavelengths may interfere with eye recognition. We tried 11 pairs of sunglasses of varying darkness at a LensCrafters store, including mirrored lenses, and never found one that got in the way. If you do own such a pair, you can turn off eye recognition in Settings.

Beyond a palm's distance, within about 30 degrees, is roughly the limit of what it will recognize, and you rarely fall outside that range. If you want to unlock discreetly in a meeting or a class, a quick glance with your head slightly lowered will do.

Face ID is an AI feature that feels far more human than Siri. Like a person, it recognizes you in a fraction of a second, then hands over every secret on the iPhone.

Failures do happen — roughly once every ten to twenty times for me, almost always because I picked up the phone, the screen lit up, and recognition had already started before I'd looked at it.

When that happens, the body of the iPhone X and the small lock icon at the top of the screen give a light shake to tell you the unlock failed. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen and it tries again; a second failure is very rare.

If there's still a problem, the iPhone X doesn't ask you to move your head or adjust your posture. It asks for your PIN instead.

The design is presumably meant to get you into your phone as fast as possible, rather than stopping to study Face ID.

According to the information Apple gave us, every scan is not just a check on your identity but also a lesson. A slowly growing beard, or the changes that come from going to the gym more often or less, all register. When recognition fails and you type the right passcode, it uses the failed scan to learn too.

So far only two situations make me miss Touch ID.

One is lying in bed — waking up in the morning, say, and reading on your side to catch up on the news you missed overnight. In that position it's easy to get too close to the phone, and Face ID wants your face at least a palm's distance away. Once I'm out of bed, I've never had an unlock fail because of distance.

The other is wearing a mask. Last Wednesday the haze rolled into Beijing and I put on an ordinary 3M respirator; the iPhone X couldn't recognize me at all, and I had to type the passcode.

Haze isn't the only reason people wear masks. Doctors and nurses, anyone with a cold or a cough, hikers out under a scorching sun — none of them can unlock with Face ID.

It's oddly reassuring: artificial intelligence plus all those sensors still can't match our low-power brains and eyes.

To Make Face ID Smoother, You Need New Muscle Memory

Going by the demo Apple executives gave at the launch event, unlocking with Face ID takes three steps: wake the screen, look at it to unlock, then swipe up from the bottom to push the lock screen away.

The small lock icon at the top of the iPhone X's lock screen also hints that you should wait for it to open.

In practice the whole thing collapses into one step: pick up the phone and, without waiting for the Face ID prompt, swipe your thumb straight up from the bottom of the screen. You're in.

Whether you pull the iPhone X out of your pocket or lift it off a table, the screen lights up on its own by the time you're looking at it.

You don't need to wait for the lock animation to change, either. Swipe straight up from the bottom and it completes the unlock and drops you on the home screen. If you're quick, the Face ID animation flashes by; if you're a little slower, you won't see it at all.

After a notification arrives, Face ID feels even more natural.

By default the iPhone X hides the contents of a new notification (if it doesn't, you can set this per app in the notification settings) — WeChat, for instance, will only say "1 notification," without showing who sent it.

Look at the screen to unlock and it reveals the full message.

Lock-screen notifications, which had become nearly pointless because Touch ID unlocked too fast, are useful again.

Wake the screen just to glance at a push notification and Face ID quietly unlocks in the background. When I tap a notification to open the app, I often don't notice that facial recognition happened at all.

Face ID's learning curve is a bit steeper than Touch ID's, but once you're used to it, it feels natural.

That's most obvious when you use it after the phone is already unlocked — confirming your identity for a payment, or pulling up a credit card or password Safari has saved for a web page. With Touch ID you had to move your finger from the screen down to the Home button.

If you're staring at a photo on the screen, lost in thought, it notices your gaze and keeps the screen from turning off.

Buying an app in the App Store, or paying with Apple Pay, Face ID doesn't recognize you on its own: it asks you to double-click the side button on the right edge, the power button on earlier iPhones.

Paying with Alipay or WeChat Pay skips that confirmation step.

The Odd Curve at the Top of the Screen Is Here to Stay

Both are ultra-high-resolution displays built by Samsung, but the iPhone X's colors are less vivid and more accurate. In the opening of Wonder Woman, with Diana outside the Louvre, the ground reads bluish-green on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and a slightly yellowish gray on the iPhone X. Reality is closer to the latter.

The pixels that make up the iPhone X's screen are denser too — the first time Apple has changed iPhone pixel density since the iPhone 4 in 2010.

But the first thing anyone notices about this screen is not its color, its length, or its fineness. Your eye stops on that black area at the top.

That is a choice Apple made.

In our interviews, every Apple executive called it a "notch" — a dent cut into the screen, not a bulge in the bezel. The goal was to let the screen fill as much of the phone's face as possible.

Face ID let Apple drop the Home button and chase that goal, but it demanded a strip of space 34 by 5mm. In the end Apple chose the largest possible screen over a narrow bezel at the top that would have preserved convention.

The decision echoes the camera bump that has stuck out of the back of iPhones since the 6. Apple took the largest possible lens and the thinnest possible body rather than sacrificing either for a smooth, conventional back.

Like the camera bump, the notched top edge of the screen breaks with convention — especially once Apple made clear it would not tidy up the screen's shape with a digital black bar.

Alan Dye, the Apple vice president in charge of user-interface design, told me that during the design phase Apple tried filling the areas on either side of the notch with black, so you would see one complete rounded rectangle. In the end they decided to let screen content occupy everything outside the sensors, because that is the only way to truly make the screen cover the whole face of the phone.

This is a design born of function, not of convention or of cheaper production.

Everyone will have an opinion about it. It's a bit like the CCTV headquarters Rem Koolhaas left Beijing: some will find it beautiful, others ugly. What's certain is that it isn't boring.

Having settled on the bold version, Apple embraces the notch instead of hiding it — in the software, in outdoor advertising, even in the line drawings tucked away inside the system.

This will become a new signature of iPhones for generations to come, the way rounded corners and the circular Home button once were. In our interview, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said flatly that Apple will stick with the design for a long time.

To accommodate the notch, Apple changed nearly every interface in iOS 11: titles and search boxes that used to sit flush against the top edge have all moved down, away from it.

The space on either side of the notch is put to work, and it changes. The left side normally shows carrier information, switching to a red or blue indicator when you're recording audio or on a call; the right side shows cellular signal, Wi-Fi, and battery, and when a VPN connection is established the familiar boxed VPN icon appears there for a few seconds, then disappears.

After two days of use, I got quite used to the notch.

With one exception: video.

Many videos play at 16:9, which leaves black bars on either side of the iPhone X's screen.

But plenty of films are shot in the ultra-wide 2.35:1 cinema ratio — Wonder Woman, Apple's favorite film for showing off the iPhone X's screen detail, is in that ratio on Tencent Video. Then a chunk of the picture goes missing on the iPhone X's left side.

I don't think you get used to losing part of the picture when you watch a movie.

Face ID also pushed the rear cameras around: they had to go vertical to make room.

And when I set the phone flat on a table and tap the middle of the screen, the whole body rocks. It's quite noticeable when you leave it on the table to scroll through social media or news while eating.

Against that, the larger screen wins.

Most of the time we read on our phones in portrait. A display taller than 2:1 lets the iPhone X show several more lines of text than the 4.7-inch iPhone, and at default text size it shows more than the physically larger Plus models most of the time.

A smartphone is a canvas for apps and games; everything else is surplus. The iPhone X gives you a large canvas on a relatively small phone.

With the Home Button Gone, iOS Just Got Its Biggest Redesign Ever

The Home button has been there since the original iPhone. Wherever you are, whatever trouble you run into, press the one button on the front and you're back at the home screen, starting over.

Anyone can use it.

Replacing it was a big deal for Apple. What replaces it is a set of gestures.

The Home button's main job was returning to the home screen; that job now belongs to a short swipe up from the bottom of the screen. In any app, in any interface, that swipe takes you home. No exceptions.

To ease the transition, Apple left a thin bar at the bottom of the screen to remind you to swipe up. On the lock screen it even gives a little bounce and shows a text hint.

On the iPhone X this gesture outranks everything. Over the past week a swipe up never triggered some other function inside a third-party app; the only trouble was the bar covering buttons in apps that hadn't been updated for it.

The bar outranks any third-party app. Developers can't adjust it in any way; it hides itself only during full-screen landscape video. Its color shifts with the background so that changes in brightness don't make it hard to see. Details like that are everywhere in iOS 11.1 on the iPhone X.

When you swipe the screen, you can feel that the iPhone X is smoother than earlier iPhones. Apple confirmed that the refresh rate of the touch layer on the iPhone X's screen has doubled to 120Hz, so it responds to touch 120 times a second instead of 60.

The screen's own refresh rate is still a conventional 60Hz, though — it doesn't shift among refresh rates from 24 to 120 the way the new iPad Pro does.

The bigger change is in multitasking. Two gestures switch between apps. One: swipe up from the bottom and pause with your finger around the middle of the screen, and a card-based multitasking view appears, much like the one on other iPhones.

On other iPhones you can only swipe a card left and right, or flick it up to close the app. The iPhone X drops that split between up-down and left-right: you can drag a card in any direction, and pushing it far enough up before you let go takes you back to the home screen. The whole thing feels more natural.

Across two generations of system updates, every interface element in iOS 11 has been turned into a card. Every app is a card, and multitasking on the iPhone X is card management.

It's more trouble to describe than to do — you can watch the video below:

It's the same video from the top of this article; if you skipped it, click through now.

Anyone who used a Palm webOS or BlackBerry BB10 phone will find this familiar. Apple's design goes a step further and does away with anything outside the screen: no gesture area, and no strip of screen set aside for virtual buttons.

The other way to switch is to swipe left or right along the bottom edge of the screen. Swiping left to right takes you to the previous app, in the same order as the cards.

That is especially handy for going back one app. Since iOS 10, when you jump from one app to another, the name of the previous app appears in the top-left corner and tapping it takes you back. But the text is tiny and easy to miss. Now you just swipe left to right along the bottom.

The new quick switch is very useful if you work on your phone — when you need to copy several pieces of information out of WeChat or a web page into an email you're writing, for instance.

One problem you may hit here is the order of the apps. After switching back through several of them, touching any one makes it the most recently used app, and the order changes.

Control Center, which you used to pull up from the bottom, has moved to the top-right corner, which is hard to reach one-handed with your left hand when you want to toggle Wi-Fi. Combined with the fact that the phone is nearly a third heavier than the iPhone 6, using the iPhone X one-handed takes some adjustment.

If you're like me and compulsive about knowing your exact battery level, you'll be opening Control Center often. Short of space at the top, the battery percentage now shows only in Control Center, not in the top-right corner.

With the Home button gone, Apple made the side button on the right larger and changed some of the button combinations. Most of them have a touch alternative.

• Single-click the side button: wake or sleep the screen (when it's asleep, tapping the screen wakes it too)
• Double-click the side button: open Apple Pay (you can also put Apple Wallet right on the home screen)
• Hold Volume Up and the side button together: take a screenshot
• Hold Volume Down and the side button together for more than two seconds: power off

A few more you have to set up yourself:

• Triple-click the side button: Accessibility shortcut. You turn it on and choose which feature it triggers; I use it to put the screen into grayscale
• Click the side button five times: SOS, which can dial local emergency and rescue numbers

And one for emergencies:

• Press Volume Up once, then Volume Down once, release, then hold the side button: force-restart the phone. I needed this once, when a third-party app, Maishenghuo, got stuck on a bad push-notification request and only a restart fixed it.

Most Third-Party Apps Aren't Ready

Third-party apps decide how a phone feels to use, and they have always been where the iPhone has the edge.

The iPhone X changed the screen's proportions, and the new design means buttons at the top and bottom of an app can't sit flush against the edge; the visuals need rethinking. That takes work from developers.

As of October 30, most of them weren't ready.

The worst are banking apps: China Merchants Bank's online-banking app (not CMB Life) and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank's credit-card app crash on launch.

Apps from internet companies rarely crash — among big-company products, the only launch crash I've found so far is iQiyi. That doesn't mean they're ready.

Most apps leave black bars at the top and bottom, including Baidu Maps, Amap, Amazon Kindle, Dianping, Meituan, and nearly every game.

Those apps create a second problem: when you type, Apple shows the previous generation's keyboard, but the new keyboard's bottom row has changed, and the globe icon for switching input methods isn't where it used to be. If you often switch between Chinese and English, or between the full keyboard and the number pad, it's a miserable experience.

Plenty of apps without black bars have problems too. Some haven't moved their buttons yet — WeChat's bottom buttons sit flush against the bottom edge and get covered by the system's swipe bar. Tencent Video looks fine at a glance, but the bar doesn't hide during full-screen playback, which gets in the way of dragging the progress bar.

Among the apps that otherwise look fine, quite a few stretch full-screen images from 16:9 to 19.5:9.

These are third-party problems. But when the first buyers get their iPhone X on November 3, these apps are what they will be using.

Apple didn't leave developers much time. The beta simulator released after the September event was incomplete: no Control Center, no home-screen wallpaper, and badly laggy drag-and-drop on a Mac. That alone shows how tight the iPhone X's schedule was.

The Camera Gains Are Mainly in Portrait Mode and at Night

Like the iPhone 7 Plus and iPhone 8 Plus, the iPhone X has two 12-megapixel cameras on the back. The hardware change is in the second lens, the one used for optical zoom: its aperture is larger, going from ƒ/2.8 to ƒ/2.4.

More light reaches that camera, which improves photos in dim settings.

From our shooting, the improvement is concentrated in Portrait mode.

Start with night shots. Outside Portrait mode, the change from the iPhone 8 Plus to the iPhone X isn't obvious. Zoom in and the iPhone X shows a little less noise, which makes the image slightly finer overall.

Thanks to a larger sensor, the iPhone 8 Plus is visibly better than the iPhone 7 Plus, though not stunningly so.

Put the three photos side by side and few people would call the difference huge.

Switch on Portrait mode and the difference is obvious. The iPhone X has sharper edges and more natural color and, more important, much less noise. Next to it, the iPhone 7 Plus even shows a significant color cast. For night portraits, the iPhone X is the best of the three.

The same difference shows in daylight — the iPhone X's Portrait mode gives somewhat more natural skin tones in the sun. But the gap is smaller than at night. Without a close comparison, the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 Plus look nearly identical.

In the daytime samples, the other differences are smaller still: 2x optical zoom, color, scenes with strong contrast. The iPhone X stays at the iPhone 8 Plus's level.

The more interesting part is the front camera. It's still 7 megapixels, but with a depth sensor added, it can now produce Portrait-mode photos too.

In our experience, front-camera Portrait mode is clearly cruder than the rear camera's, with flaws in edge handling — about the level of Portrait mode on the iPhone 7 Plus.

The iPhone X Shows Apple Can Still Build the Best Product. Can It Build the Second-Best?

The iPhone X is, at minimum, the biggest leap for an iPhone since the iPhone 4.

Beyond the big changes, some details are better. The iPhone X's stainless-steel frame uses a different alloy than the Apple Watch's: less magnesium, harder. It still picks up scratches after a week, but not as easily as the first Apple Watch did.

Battery life has jumped from 4.7-inch-iPhone territory to near the 5.5-inch level, although wireless charging adds only about 1% in two minutes.

At launch, the iPhone X's most eye-catching selling point was probably Face ID. After a while with the phone, the more compelling thing is plainly the new way of using it, full of life: a complete experience in which the chip, the sensors, the body, the apps, and the system interface are all tuned for an edge-to-edge screen.

Apple wasn't the first company to ship an edge-to-edge screen, and it wasn't the first to launch facial recognition. But it has never been first before: Touch ID came a decade after HP's fingerprint readers, and the iPhone came four years after Microsoft's touchscreen phones. Being the first to do it well enough matters more.

This is probably something only Apple could do. Over the years, among phone makers, only Apple has used the iPhone's fat margins to build up nearly unlimited capital and slowly develop these underlying technologies.

The PrimeSense team, whose infrared sensor technology went into Face ID, once supplied the tech behind Microsoft's Kinect; Apple bought the company for $360 million in 2013. Apple shipped no Kinect-like product in the years that followed. It waited until the technology could go inside an iPhone. Kinect was discontinued last week; its total lifetime sales won't add up to a single quarter of iPhone X sales.

The A11 chip that drives the iPhone X traces back to Apple's purchase of the chipmaker P.A. Semi, and it is already the eighth generation of that line.

This kind of investment began under Steve Jobs and has continued under Tim Cook. More and more of the technology inside the iPhone is Apple's own. Apple now makes its own graphics processors and the chips inside its wireless earbuds. A year after AirPods launched, no other company has built a competing product that small.

How a phone feels to use isn't decided by hardware or software alone. Samsung can build the iPhone X's screen; it erased the side bezels on the Galaxy S line two years ago. But it has to wait for Google to refine Android enough to tell whether a palm touching the edge of the screen is just how you're holding the phone or an actual swipe. To this day Google hasn't solved accidental edge touches, which still happen when you use the phone lying down.

Controlling every part of that experience means Apple doesn't have to wait for Google to redesign an operating system, doesn't have to wait for Qualcomm to ship an AI chip, doesn't have to wait for the whole industry to set new requirements for app developers, and doesn't have to wait for a "design house" to tell it what the next phone could look like.

Among the world's tech giants, only Apple, backed by a market cap above $800 billion and more than $200 billion in cash, throws the weight of the entire company behind a handful of products each year.

And among those same giants, only Apple's market value rests on one product line — effectively, on one model.

For people who don't intend to spend 8,388 yuan on a phone, the company also made the iPhone 8. But it is obvious that all of Apple's attention isn't enough for two phones.

Apple never gave anyone a reason to buy the iPhone 8, not even at the launch event. The product says the same thing: every big change in iOS 11 was made for the iPhone X.

With last generation's interactions and a system that wasn't given its full effort, the iPhone 8 isn't a mid-range product from the same generation as the iPhone X. Barely a month apart, the iPhone 8 is already the X's predecessor.

And if it's already the old model, why not buy an even cheaper old model? Multiple data points show that after the iPhone 8 launched, more buyers in the Chinese market chose earlier models instead.

Then there's Android. Over the past year, Android's share of the Chinese smartphone market above 3,999 yuan grew from 23% to 32%. Within that, Chinese manufacturers' share more than quadrupled.

Today the iPhone X sets itself apart with technology that's ahead of the field and expensive to build, and it sells for more because of it.

Judging by Apple's recent stock surge, Wall Street, which cares about profit and dividends, isn't bothered by the iPhone 8's failure either.

Once everyone gets used to the new price the iPhone X has set, will Apple still be willing to invest seriously in a mid-range product that might cut into its margins?

If it isn't, 8,388 yuan is probably the new starting point. Piling the price up year after year won't end well.

Photos, video, and the camera testing in this review are by Zhou Shaohong and Ma Ruofei.