
No Cutting Corners on the iPhone X - tambourine_man
https://medium.com/tall-west/no-cutting-corners-on-the-iphone-x-97a9413b94e
======
btilly
Adding 2 little corners at the top was a horrible idea.

I upgraded at Christmas. I'm sure that they put a lot of effort into it. But
now my phone no longer displays battery percentage, and I keep finding myself
noticing the missing chunk. Even after a month I notice it.

Squeezing the last square inch is emphatically not worth it. Not even a little
bit.

~~~
nostromo
Since we're sharing anecdotes, I'll share mine.

I was very skeptical about the notches. But after a month of use, I find that
I don't notice the missing space at all.

Most often, it really does feel like the entire screen is being used. It's
almost an optical illusion.

My two minor issues with the X are: 1) the glass back makes it very slippery!
(It slides off the arm rests on my couch no matter how well I place it.) 2)
The protruding camera on the back is very noticable. I wish Apple would make a
flat-backed phone again. When I set my phone on a flat surface, it shouldn't
wobble.

Overall I was very skeptical of the X for a lot of reasons... but it's by far
the best phone I've ever used. (And it better be at this price!)

~~~
tmd83
This is one thing I absolutely don't understand. Phone makers should be sued
to oblivion (and I'm saying this someone who is not fond of the litigation
culture of US in general) for making a portable device that is essentially
designed for failure .. a fall. A phone that is meant to be held for hours, to
be placed in all sorts of surface, giving it a slippery back is willful
negligence for me.

But it's no nice looking they would say while buying a cover to promptly cover
it the moment they unbox it. The idiocy of modern day smartphone culture
boggles my mind. Ironic that it reminds me of apple's 1984 commercial in a bad
way.

~~~
powvans
What's so infuriating about this is that it seems like they go out of their
way to make the back of the phone slippery. The metal back of the iPhone 6 and
6s is like teflon and the glass on the X is almost as slippery. Why? I have an
old iPhone 4 sitting on the shelf that I occasionally pickup just to marvel at
how it _sticks_ in your hand. They proved it could be done years ago.

~~~
dpark
I don't find the glass back on the X to be very slippery at all in hand. My
fingers stick to it quite well. It does slide on furniture, but in hand it
feels pretty secure, especially relative to older iPhones. The 4 was easier to
hold because it was just so small.

------
vortico
A beautiful solution to a completely arbitrary problem that they created. Much
like needing a dongle to solve their created problem of removing the headphone
port. Or needing updates to their operating systems to solve the problem they
created with batteries. Are they still able to solve real problems now,
instead of those created by themselves?

~~~
eanzenberg
If you're talking about the notch vs. touchid, then no, I vastly prefer the
notch/faceid and can't wait for all my apple products to have it.

Why? Simple user experience. I don't want to rest my thumb (or any finger) to
unlock my phone before I select where I want to go. Screen turns on,
notifications are present, phone is unlocked and my finger's first gesture is
to select which notification to goto. That whole same user experience with 1
less motion is gold to me.

~~~
discreditable
If they had a fingerprint reader on the back of the device it would be even
better.

~~~
saagarjha
My question to you is: have you used Face ID? What makes you prefer a
fingerprint reader on the back to it?

~~~
discreditable
I can unlock the phone as I take it out of my pocket. It's unlocked before I
even look at it. I have not used Face ID.

------
DanCarvajal
No one is saying that they don't expertly engineer things, it's just that
their design "solutions" look less like actual solutions with every successive
product launch.

~~~
newman8r
I appreciate their industrial design, but refuse to use their operating
systems. I run linux on all my macs and I'll never go back.

~~~
buildbuildbuild
I anxiously anticipate the day that Adobe products are Linux native.

~~~
AceJohnny2
Or even work on case-sensitive macOS partitions. As far as I know, they are
the only major mac software to explicitly hold that back.

~~~
mitchty
Steam doesn't work on case sensitive hfs or apfs.

Ask me how I know. >.<

~~~
Zombieball
How do you know? :P

~~~
mitchty
Heh, no more games! Though I suppose thats a good thing for getting stuff
done.

~~~
newman8r
you can install mame/gnome arcade on linux and definitely create a dangerous
distraction. I've wasted some time on centipede, burger time and even snacks'n
jaxson

------
whywhywhywhy
The author mentions the "Squircle" but doesn't mention the actual reason this
has made an appearance in iOS. Apples Industrial Designers use this shape for
corners on their laptops because the reflection is creates is a smooth
gradient across the entire curve of the laptop, if you use a basic bevel it
creates an ugly hard shine.

So the reason this has moved to iOS is because the ID team and Ive have much
more influence there than they did in the early iOS days.

As for the notch and the screen edges my personal belief is this is all down
to industrial designer bravado. The brief for the iPhone X is "Equal margins
on all edges at any cost" this is why Touch ID had to go and they justify the
notch because to the left and right of it there is a margin to the device edge
that is equal to the bottom and the sides of the device so in the Industrial
Designers eyes they have achieved the perfect symmetrical device (Look at
Apples recent laptops to see how much emphasis the current put on symmetry
above all else).

My theory is the ID team at Apple would look at the "edgeless" Galaxy S8
screen and scoff that it's not truly edgeless because the margins are uneven.

~~~
fiatpandas
More reading on surfacing at Apple: [https://hackernoon.com/apples-icons-have-
that-shape-for-a-ve...](https://hackernoon.com/apples-icons-have-that-shape-
for-a-very-good-reason-720d4e7c8a14)

Apparently they use Autodesk Alias. Same techniques are used for surfacing in
the auto industry.

------
delhanty
>Apple has been doing this to the corners of laptops and iMacs for years, but
this type of rounding didn’t penetrate iOS until version 7. This shape has
classically been difficult to achieve, _because it wasn’t available in 2D
design editors_ , though that’s starting to change.

(My emphasis)

However, bizarrely, it _has_ been available in full 3D in parametric
mechanical CAD for at least 20 years thanks to the advanced 3D blending
functionality in the underlying modeling kernels: Parasolid, ACIS,
ShapeManager etc.

Meanwhile, the 2D sketching environment in those programs has lagged w.r.t.
curvature continuous fillets.

Witness this Solidworks 2012 tutorial on GrabCAD by Leandro Fernandes[0].

Because of the relative weakness of the 2D sketcher compared to 3D with
respect to filleting, Leandro does (roughly) the following strange hack:

1\. creates the profile of the wheel rim in the 2D sketcher

2\. rotates the profile to form the 3D rim

3\. fillets the profile in 3D

4\. merges all the faces into one face

5\. intersects the filleted 3D profile with a section plane to get back into
2D

[0] [https://grabcad.com/tutorials/tutorial-how-to-model-a-bbs-
lm...](https://grabcad.com/tutorials/tutorial-how-to-model-a-bbs-lm-wheel-in-
solidworks-and-show-design-intent--1)

~~~
andybak
Funnily enough I wrote an Illustrator script to draw superellipses decades
ago.

It sat on the Adobe website for a long time until Adobe decided that they
wanted to scrap years of useful add ons and content in one of their pointless
reorganisations.

A lot of good code died that day...

------
pelmeni
That was an interesting article! Now I'm curious about the machinery needed to
fabricate such a screen, and how it differs from standard square screen
producing machines.

~~~
phonon
[http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/atclen/news_en/15mk/011801852/](http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/atclen/news_en/15mk/011801852/)
gives a few details.

------
staunch
Apple did a good job of executing on a bad idea with the iPhone X notches. But
I don't believe Steve Jobs would've let the iPhone X (or Touchbar) out the
door because they're so clearly half-measures.

Apple is implementing temporary workarounds (that won't exist in future
devices) in their top of the line products. This is the kind of short-term
thinking that they're so famous for avoiding.

They're still doing quite good overall but this is clearly something they're
struggling with.

~~~
djrogers
> I don't believe Steve Jobs would've let the iPhone X (or Touchbar) out the
> door

This is a ridiculous trope that needs to die. Among the many ‘half-measures’
people whined about during Steve Jobs’ tenure are things such as the original
iPhone not having 3G, the iPhone 4 antennagate, the infamously scratch prone
iPod Nano, the crack prone poly MacBooks, etc etc.

Apple was never a company that produced only flawless, non-controversial
products, and Steve was perhaps the most controversial and opinionated product
person to have ever lived.

~~~
bahram_banisadr
Apple's biggest asset has always been design. On a tehnical basis Apple
products sometimes beat the competition and sometimes are outdone by the likes
of Samsung, Thinkpad, etc. They have dominated the American consumer market
because of fit and finish, attention to detail, and overall functional beauty
in design. The flaws you're speaking of are a different sort from the, frankly
weird looking, notch. While executed as well as possible, its a design
compromise.

~~~
stouset
The notch is a literal non-issue that only people who don’t actually _use_
this damn device seem to complain about or even notice. I for one am happy
that an entire strip of nearly-useless status icons has been shifted upward
into the extra area afforded by the notch. The number of times I notice it in
a given month easily rounds to zero.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
>The notch is a literal non-issue that only people who don’t actually use this
damn device seem to complain about or even notice.

Do you suppose it's possible that it's no coincidence that people who dislike
the notch don't use the phone?

~~~
stouset
It’s the same story every time Apple releases a new product. People who
overwhelmingly don’t buy Apple products in the first place lose their minds
over some nit, while the overwhelming majority of their actual customers never
seem to understand what the big deal is.

I’m not surprised at all: these people knee-jerk so hard and often, they
probably can’t afford Apple products after the paying for orthopedic surgeons.

And the “ignorant Apple fanboy” narrative that seems to be the counterargument
to this falls laughably short when you realize that the number of Apple’s
customers has been increasing exponentially for the last fifteen years, all
while they continue to enjoy the top spot in consumer satisfaction surveys
across virtually their entire product line.

------
dingo_bat
Is this supposed to be impressive? If I remember correctly, Samsung and LG
already had rounded corners. And no ugly notch either.

~~~
briandear
> And no ugly notch either.

And no Face ID camera. The "notch" was because of the Face ID components.

You're comparing apples and oranges.

~~~
chimeracoder
> And no Face ID camera. The "notch" was because of the Face ID components.

Facial unlocking was introduced in Android phones back in 2011.

~~~
hypervis0r
You're comparing apples and oranges, too. OP was talking about _functional_
facial unlocking

~~~
CaptSpify
Yeah, like we had back in 2011

~~~
lorenzhs
You mean the one that could be tricked with a simple photo and a pen that you
swipe over the eyes to fool the "blink detection"? The one that only worked in
good lighting? I tried to use it at the time, it was awful.

------
nofunsir
I thought the official math on the curves was a proprietary secret, no? I
recall early iPhone/iPod official case dimension documents never calling out
the radius because it didn't exist.

EDIT: Maybe it's somewhere in here:
[https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-
Gui...](https://developer.apple.com/accessories/Accessory-Design-
Guidelines.pdf)

~~~
EpicEng
I feel like that would be pretty trivial to reverse engineer if anyone cared
to.

~~~
wll
On iOS 11, CALayer has a `continuousCorners` private property [0].

I did a spartan reverse engineering by recreating the UIBezierPath equivalent
of the two types of radii found in the Apple Design Resources [1], then adding
a convenience initializer on UIBezierPath that recreates the shape with
arbitrary radius of the chosen kind (either UISwitch-like, or App Icon-like).

Earlier attempts include the fascinating Unleashing Genetic Algorithms on the
iOS 7 Icon [2].

[0]
[https://mobile.twitter.com/argentumko/status/955773459463790...](https://mobile.twitter.com/argentumko/status/955773459463790592)

[1]
[https://developer.apple.com/design/resources/](https://developer.apple.com/design/resources/)

[2] [http://blog.mikeswanson.com/post/62341902567/unleashing-
gene...](http://blog.mikeswanson.com/post/62341902567/unleashing-genetic-
algorithms-on-the-ios-7-icon)

------
stesch
I always thought the cut corners in "Battlestar Galactica" were stupid. And
then Apple came along with the iPhone X.

------
iamleppert
Why didn’t they just make the front part of the OLEDs transparent, and then
turn them off when using those sensors? Surely it couldn’t be that much more
difficult considering it’s already possible to make optically clear OLEDs.

~~~
kgabis
Transparent OLEDs are not 100% transparent (especially for IR) and it would
impact camera quality and face detection used in faceID.

------
EugeneOZ
Best phone. I tried Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and it was disgusting even to hold
in hands. Absolutely personal opinion.

Also it's so annoying when people say "iPhone buyers buy it just for elitism"
\- hell no, I just love Apple's attention to details, to small things.

------
curiousgal
I wish the same could be said about iOS11...

------
jasonlotito
> Sweating thousands of minor details is what separates Apple from other
> companies. Their ability to do that is hard-won, but damn it’s pretty to
> watch.

Wish they would sweat the minor details on their other products that aren't
flagship products a swell. Take a look at their USB-C Digital dongle as an
prime example. 2-star rating for a $70 dongle, almost universally because of
the same fundamental problem.

No, the iPhone X is not a minor detail.

