iPhone XR guts reveal sizzle of the XS without the excessive price tag After years in the doldrums, the iPhone XR could boost Apple's phone shipments. iFixit's teardown revealed that the trusted, conventional iPhone design now incorporates a modular (removable) SIM card reader and single-deck motherboard. Intel provided the LTE modem – not surprising given Apple's ongoing legal dispute with …
The capitals in your post reveal the passion that rages through your hot blood, but please don't switch to Android. I beg you. We all beg you.
If you post your bank account details right here, I will deposit the money needed so you can remain a happy Apple user. If you post your home address, along with times and dates when you'll be around and where you keep the spare key, I'd be happy to come to your house and set up the new iPhone I bought you so when you got home, it will all be ready to go. If you post details of your daily itinerary here, them I'd be happy to follow you around at a discrete distance for a year or so (I'd be the one in the pink gimp suit screaming out your name every minute) in case you wanted any iPhone support.
Us Apple people are here for you. We love you.
Yep, 100%. Face ID is a gimmick that will just never be as straightforward to use as fingerprint recognition. Consider the Apple Pay use case - you literally hold your phone over the reader with your finger waiting in place - the RFID signal wakes the phone up into payment mode, reads your finger and makes the payment. With Face ID, you need to loom your face into shot of the cameras like an idiot.
I wouldn't rule them out reintroducing a fingerprint reader though - they'll just pretend it's an evolution of Face ID, not a backwards step. And as something that Apple invented.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/201805/apple-receives-patents-for-ultrasonic-fingerprint-sensors-and-in-display-fingerprint-system - May 2018
Of course you folk don't need reminding that an Apple patent is no guarantee of Apple implementing said patent in a shipped product.
> Shame Apple never managed to get this [ under the screen fingerprint reader] to work, and of course, they'll now never introduce it
Apple have researched ultrasonic fingerprint scanners for use under a display - as have Samsung. This approach is faster and more secure than the camera approach that OnePlus are using, but is more expensive.
Apple may or may not use such a sensor in future - guess it depends on what they learn from their user's Face ID experiences, as well as engineering challenges to bring an ultrasonic sensor at an acceptable cost and size. Reports suggest Samsung may use an under screen ultrasonic sensor on some models, whilst a cheaper version of the upcoming Galaxy S10 'Retro' (it doesn't have a 'Edhe' curved screen) having a side-mounted conventional fingerprint scanner, a la Sony.
My mum had started using the fingerprint reader on her iPad, but after a little while she said it had stopped working, so she was ignoring it.
I was round recently to do the seasonal family IT checkup, and applying some updates meant iTunes was asking for my mum's fingerprint again. I asked her to give it a go while I was there, in case I could find a way to fix it, so she reached out, and vary carefully placed her finger on the picture of a fingerprint that shows up when TouchID needs you.
Once I'd explained that the finger print reader was actually in the home button it worked fine, but I don't think I can blame my mum for this one, that picture of a fingerprint does look exactly like an instruction to put your finger there.
And had replaced it with Touch ID, we'd have people wanting Face ID back.
I doubt we will see them offering both, but it would be nice for the corner cases where Face ID doesn't work - like at a Halloween party last weekend. If had I thought of it at the time time it would have been interesting to see if I could have used the mask as my second face...
I note too that if you manage to break the fragile glass back the repair is only $400 instead of $450 as for the more expensive iPhones.
(That design is to me the most cynical thing I've ever seen in a consumer product. Though I do seem to remember a Volvo model in which damage to the sill resulted in a writeoff, I don't think they persisted with that into the next model generation.)
Funny you should mention Huawei... One of my colleagues is a serious Apple fanboy, and has been so for a *long* time.
He bought the original iPhone the month it came out (possibly the same week or day). He travelled to the nearest Apple store (c. 60 miles away) to queue overnight when the original iPad launched in 2010, and got in the local paper for being first in line (having arrived at midnight, four hours ahead of anyone else and eight hours before the store opened).
He's not exactly loaded, but he's always been fanatical enough about Apple to save up and afford them... until now.
Around the time the iPhone XS launched, he informed us- in an announcement akin to hell freezing over- that it was just too expensive, and that he planned on his next phone being a Huawei.
Truly, we are living in the strangest of times.
On the flip side, another of my colleagues spent £1500 of his student loan on an iPhone XS Max with all the trimmings. :-O
Even iVerge had to grudgingly admit that the IphoneXS is slightly worse that the 18 month old Pixel 2, and twice the price... It also turns out the iPhoneX camera sucked really badly, they just didn't tell people that the time...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878018/iphone-xs-x-pixel-2-galaxy-s9-camera-comparison
> Even iVerge had to grudgingly admit that the IphoneXS is slightly worse that the 18 month old Pixel 2
You're taking rubbish. That Verge article was by Vlad who places a lot of emphasis on cameras - and he's a big fan of the Pixel camera. He also reviews dedicated cameras for the Verge. In the past he's championed Android phones that were worthy of promotion, such as the Xperia Z3 Compact.
Apple blew it for me when it removed the finger print sensor and the audio jack. I still have my trusty iPhone 6s and just got the screen and battery refurbished. I also have another 6s in a box unopened for when my current one does eventually die or goes down the loo. I would like the XR for the IP67, but there is nothing else about it that makes me want it and the notch in general disrupts my sense of symmetry. I live in hope that a 6s like SE will appear as a budget option in the spring.
When the 7 came out (Sep 2015), missus and I got the 6, our first iPhone. (She liked the size more than the 5S but didn't want the 6 Plus.)
When the 8 (and X) came out (Sep 2017), we upgraded to the 7.
Next year (Sep 2019), I'm thinking the 8, since I like the fingerprint home button. I might even go for an 8 Plus. We've saved a fair bit of money going with year-old hardware; hopefully they'll still sell us two-year-old hardware come then.
XR seems really nice, but that FaceID / notch is a hard sell.
This is the Apple version of Ford's ST-line cars. For those of you who don't know Ford do ST cars and ST-line cars. The ST stands, for most other drivers, for Suicidal Twat, because they're over powered, crappy handling and tend to catch fire. The ST-line is more Sad Twat, because they're the poor man's third rate VW Gti, they're advertised as being for poor people, and because they're not powerful enough to kill their owners outright before breeding age but they are powerful enough to make them drive like deranged idiots (no, Timothy, you do not drive a double roundabout like it's the Senna S's with your foot nailed to the floorboards, trust me on this, dear).
The sort of person who'll end up with the XR will be the Arnold Rimmer of the iPhone collective - hated by the normal people for being a smug pretentious iPhone wielding git - and hated by the rest of the iPhone collective for not spending £1500. The only sad thing is iPhones don't tend to kill owners - but I'm sure that can be added - perhaps a small dart with blue ring octopus venom - fired when the owner forgets their password 3 times consecutively..
We can but hope.
Ah.. Memories. Like the school Atari ST music computer with the "tap on the top to reboot" function - whole lessons were wiled away doing that. And the lovable SPED kid who gave me the immense pleasure of Jane Appleby mysteriously sat on my lap (kind of fancied her) - it turned out he'd been playing the five knuckle shuffle for the *entire* music lesson - tackle out - and she'd slowly been inching to my end of the desk as her friend (sat next to retard boy) had been inching her way into Janes seat to get away from Captain Handjob..
Oddly enough no more "special needs" kids were ever taken.
That kid whacked off for almost an hour straight... One of the times I'm deeply glad humans aren't telepathic..
Must. not... bite...
<nasally voice> Ah but the STe blah blah blah...
Graphically yes I will now concede the Amiga was the superior machine but the Atari being clocked at 8MHz to the Amiga's 7.14MHz meant for 3D games like Elite it was the better machine.
At least the rivalry wasn't as intense as it was between C64 and Spectrum owners previously.
Didn't the Amiga's blitter (not included in the regular ST, IIRC) give it a slight advantage when drawing that offset the marginal difference in raw speed?
The STe? Nice idea on paper, but the two biggest (and most obvously Amiga-baiting) sales points- the improved palette and sampled sound- were hobbled by the retention of the existing 16-colour on screen limit in normal use (#), and by the restriction on playback rates which meant that- unlike the Amiga- you couldn't generate all the notes in an octave from a single sample.
I mentioned more about the STe here.
(#) Compared to 32 regular colours in normal use on the Amiga, plus 64 colour "extra half-brite" and 4096 colour HAM modes.
Good Grief! It's only a bloody phone!
OK, it's horribly overpriced - but then so are all the top-end smartphones. But while people keep paying those prices, that's where they'll stay. Companies only turn down fat profits when forced to. And tablet prices prove that top-end phones are way overpriced.
As for disliking someone because they use an iPhone. That's just sad. Now admittedly if they were a disgusting Amiga user - I could understand it.
...Says the man who had an Amstrad PCW9256...
@I ain't Spartacus; "Says the man who had an Amstrad PCW9256"
That's not worthy of contempt, just sympathy... ;-)
(Joking aside, as far as I'm aware, the PCWs were only ever intended- and sold as- specialised systems designed for word processing and light office work at the lowest possible price, so it's probably not fair nor meaningful to compare them against general-purpose computers like the Amiga. The fact that some people got them to play games- albeit in glorious green-screen- is more a bonus than anything).
The iPhone "Xcess" Max is even worse. It sounds like a cheesy attempt to revive 1990s "Xtreme" advertising a la this "classic" Pepsi Max advert.
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