"After two months using an iPhone X, I’m convinced Apple succeeded. The iPhone X is a triumph, a delightful conceptual modernization of a ten-year-old platform that, prior to using the iPhone X, I didn’t think needed a modernization."
There's the tldr. And for anyone accustomed to Gruber's writing, it was a predictable conclusion.
I would agree with this summary. I think Apple knocked it out of the park this time, confounding my expectations that everything would be generally terrible post-Steve.
They can reinvent something spectacularly well. But can they create something entirely new that is also wonderful? This is the real test they have yet to pass.
I know everyone is all poo poo on the iPhone x in here. But my prior phone was 3 years old (original 6+, the battery was already starting to... well have issues, was already at over 1k cycles), so I bought the X.
Have to say I like it, its just thinner enough width wise. And the one feature it has is brilliant in winter. I can unlock my phone without removing my gloves. And yes, these gloves are the ones that work with capacitive touch screens. Good luck getting gloves to work with a finger sensor, or to be able to type anything with them reliably in -20F weather.
So... basically it seems like a solid release overall. Of course I have gripes, the control center swipe is annoying to hit for example but overall its fine. Expensive sure, but if I upgrade every 2-3 years whatever.
ha, same upgrade here (6 Plus to X). The swipes are the one area where the notch is almost a feature: swipe down from left of notch - notifications; swipe down from right of notch - control center. Doing it in landscape is doable but sometimes I'm not 100% certain it is going to end up where I want it.
I'm very pleased so far. I was tired of having the larger phone yet wanted the better camera. Do I know if it is was worth the price premium? Not sure, but it seems I had a choice between two of three items in price, performance, and size. I chose performance and size.
> This is an incredibly fanboy-y article even by Gruber standards.
Agreed... this was the most Gruber-y he's ever Grubered: "Is the higher price of the iPhone X over the iPhones 8 justified? [...] But you also get something you can’t compare in a checkmark comparison — a sort of joie de vivre."
> I'm not sure he's physically capable of criticizing Apple, even if he wanted to.
That's definitely not true. While he generally likes their products, he's definitely critical of them when he thinks they mess up. If all you read of his are these posts shared on HN, you'll probably only read his glowing reviews. And if you don't like his writing, then sure, there's no point in seeking him out. But don't assume that because you don't read his criticisms, that he doesn't—can't!—write them, because he most assuredly does.
There was some stretch of time where I'd visit his blog once every week or so and catch up. He has a tendency to take Apple flaws and spin them as good things. Even when he does criticize Apple it's only half heartedly.
I'm not sure who wins the spin competition between him and Paul Thurrott
Definitely Gruber. I've seen Thurrot recommend products from more than one company. Gruber, never. If Apple has a product in the space, only the Apple product is worth buying, no matter how objectively bad it is.
> I've seen Thurrot recommend products from more than one company. Gruber, never.
That's also definitely not true. He's been a big supporter of Amazon's Echo line, he's mentioned a number of Android phones he likes—hell, on his front page right now he links glowingly to an article about how much better Google Maps is than Apple Maps.
Extracting the part of the GP post that matters: "If Apple has a product in the space, only the Apple product is worth buying, no matter how objectively bad it is."
You seem to have missed the part of your own post—the one you're commenting on a reply to—where you stated "I've seen Thurrot recommend products from more than one company. Gruber, never."
You seem to be more interested in pedantry than in understanding the point of the post, which you've conceded.
To be extra pedantic, none of your examples show Gruber recommending a non-Apple product at all. At most, Gruber concludes that they have some useful features. When he writes about the Echo, he writes about how Apple will do it better.
> Yes, I am interested in responding to what you actually said.
Then it's a wonder how you failed so spectacularly at it. What I actually said consists of multiple sentences that must be taken together, and even the portion you extracted contains the word "recommend," which is a word you don't seem to understand.
My take on Gruber is to not take him seriously. Don't take his recommendations, he'll flip on a dime. For example, when the Pebble was announced he was first in line on the Kickstarter. It shipped, he liked it. As soon as the Apple Watch came out, the Pebble was suddenly a piece of shit.
I'm also convinced that he recommends things that he's either never used, or took money to recommend. An outstanding example is a weather app he gushed about that I'm convinced he never used because it was horrible (as in, the forecasts weren't even close), and the visual design was something he'd typically tear into.
For me, Gruber is in the "Dvorak/Cringley" bucket: entertaining, sometimes on point, but for $DEITY's sake don't take it for gospel. But despite all that, I read every post.
I like Apple Watch, but only as one of several watches I own. The others are mechanical, not digital.
I don't know which weather app you're talking about, but I've never recommended anything I haven't used, and the only posts I get paid for are the once-a-week sponsorships, which are always clearly noted as being sponsored.
I will say first that as it concerns the Pebble: I react my statement. (Can’t edit now, sorry.) Ugh, I made a decent effort to find what I was talking about, but you sure wrote a lot of mentions about Pebble. :-) All I have to go on is an increasingly faulty middle-aged memory, despite your giving me a handy list of posts, so I’ll leave it be.
As for the weather app, it might very well have been sponsored. But here’s the thing: despite my critical comments above, I still take you as a person of integrity even for sponsorships. Now maybe that’s just naive of me (I grew up on Paul Harvey, I should know better), but even if you’re paid I just assume you tried the product and said, “yeah, I can sincerely praise that.” Naive or not, I just know that when I downloaded it, my first thought was “no way Gruber’s seen this running, it’s horrible and I’m not nearly the font and design nut he is. That, and the forecast looks like it’s for Florida, not Seattle.” Again, maybe that’s on me: it was an ad, clearly labeled as an ad, caveat emptor. Made a good faith effort to find my purchases in the App Store to back this up, but Apple apparently isn’t going to make that easy on me.
Finally, had I even suspected you might see this I probably would have not used a Dvorak comparison. I meant it to mean “can go on a rant, but a rant that’ll be worth consideration; whether you agree or not”, but that was Dvorak 30 years ago. I truly do enjoy reading what you write, and do read every post, and that comparison was unfair.
It shipped, he liked it. As soon as the Apple Watch came out, the Pebble was suddenly a piece of shit.
Isn't that how it works? My 15" GTX 1070 laptop used to be the bees knees. So amazing and compact for a laptop that could support VR. Now, in comparison to some stunning Max-Q designs, it's now pretty meh.
I don't see any real contradiction here. The original pebble was very cool for the time, and the price was reasonable. But the design was a bit cheap/silly and it had serious limitations. The apple watch was one of the first actual full featured ones that continued to be built upon, and is still very usable today having improved with software the entire time. Pebble's were dying within the first year and people got increasingly unhappy. They always had weird bluetooth issues and other thorn-in-side small glitches
I owned both, and i think those are completely congruent takes in their time periods.
I don't have anything against him, I think in the iPhone X case he might deservedly be lauding Apple, their phone genuinely seems good. But more to your point, concerning watches I remember that for months on his podcast he was dismissive of the then rumored/speculated Apple Watch form factor altogether, he thought that if anything it would be more like a fitness tracker, and obviously once it became reality he unconditionaly praised the watch and now every new year with equal praise he is saying that the new model should have been the first one... Time passing, more than being biased I think his real issue is that he has become incredibly lazy with his work.
I think I missed the mark in several ways with my review of the original Apple Watch, but I complained strenuously about the fact that the display doesn't always show the time -- something I'm used to because I've worn a traditional watch since I was in middle school. I think I complained about not being able to read the display in sunlight too. The gist of my review -- and I still think this today -- is that Apple Watch is good at doing several new things (notifications and fitness tracking) but isn't as good as a traditional watch at traditional watch things (showing the time and date continuously).
That heartbeat part of your review, though... cute&sweet&naive, as a teenage girl. Still makes my day every time I read your watch reviews and remember it :D
When I first read Gruber he spent quite a bit of his time attacking Apple for abandoning lots of the good stuff from OS9 in favor of the promise offered by the (relatively) clean but at-the-time untested underpinnings of OSX.
Which products do you think I should recommend a competing product over Apple's? On phones, tablets, and computers, I personally much prefer Apple's OSes, and I usually prefer their hardware as well. But even when I don't prefer Apple's hardware, the OS wins out.
Photos seems like a good example of a product that is in such a mess that you should be discussing what a general user should use instead at this point. You even confess in the recent post about Marzipan about what a debacle drag and drop not working for a year in Photos is. But you've never written a piece about "why is Photos in such a mess"? Because it is. Basics of the platform still don't work, more than a year later (export original files and watch it hang, with no progress indicator! Drag and drop between applications is a joke!). Why not turn some light on that, why not discuss alternatives than general users should be looking at instead?
And why haven't you written anything about which WiFi base station you recommend? Because it isn't an Apple device? Everybody has a WiFi base station, while relatively few people have a smart watch or a programmable TV set top box, so noteworthiness is definitely not the reason.
On phones, tablets, and computers; your opinions are laughably one-sided, pooh-poohing all the things that Apple gets wrong, while making up issues with competitor products out of whole cloth. Your writing on Apple's long-delayed deployment of third party multitasking and its eventual copying of Android's Activity model, having worse battery life than the competition this the entire time, was especially cringeworthy.
He likes Eero like the radio DJ likes Comcast and Sleep Train. There is no attempt to justify his recommendation, certainly not the massive effort and contortions he puts into recommending every Apple product.
The way I read that is that you're a shill as soon as you say something (even slightly) positive about Apple..
I guess for an Android fan it's not a tough call to be cleared of the 'shill' label, because there's plenty of fucking up going on in that world that even the diehard fans have to admit to it.. If only Apple would do us Apple fans the favor of royally fucking up from time to time so that we can stop being accused of being shills.. But alas they never do.. What a pity..
Waaaay over the top with glowing, hyperbolic language about how the X truly, truly this time “reinvents” the iPhone in a way unlike any device has ever been reinvented.
The iPhone X hardware is great but they dropped the ball big time on software quality/reliability. I still encounter major home/swipe related glitches that require a reboot a couple of times per week. It seems like the point releases are causing more problems than they fix which is concerning. iOS seems to be in a nasty downward spiral of reliability.
I hear people saying this a ton, aside from the slow face unlock, I haven't experienced many glitches. What am I not doing wrong? Is there a specific gesture to trigger one of these bugs (genuine question)?
The home/swipe related bugs seem to be related to accidental touch detection and/or swiping before animations fully complete. For example this morning I had to reboot my phone because I couldn't swipe to unlock from the lock screen. It was stuck in 'notification mode' so it thought my swipes were to view my notifications instead of unlocking. Immediately before this happened I had cleared all my notifications which resulted in a very choppy animation. My previous reboot before this was caused by getting stuck in Music after trying to swipe down in Music to get off the 'now playing' screen. For some reason this always requires multiple tries so I probably set off some accidental touch detection lockout.
It's a death by a thousand paper cuts thing. There is no one bug that can be easily fixed. It's dozens (maybe hundreds) of small annoyances like the keyboard absolutely refusing to register a keypress that goes against it's prediction of what I want to type. Another fun one is I get floods of old notifications randomly usually from phone/messages -- like a voicemail notification from a month ago. I don't even care if Siri doesn't work well or if I have to enter my PIN slightly more often because of FaceID. I just want the fundamentals to work reliably.
Did you select set up as a new phone or restore from a backup
I had all kinds of problems like this until i just bit the bullet and did it clean slate, and i haven't had a single performance issue since. Not a single reboot, nothing. The regular iOS11 gripes are still there but nothing truly awful like this
It's a bit like doing a clean install when you order a new laptop right after you take it out of the box. It's usually a good call, even if it's a bit of a hassle
Same here. Not seeing any of these issues. Face ID is slower to unlock if you compare to an iPhone 7 or 8, but coming from a 6 it still seems faster to me.
I thought Face ID was slow until I realized I didn't have to wait for the recognition to finish before swiping up. So now I just swipe up immediately and it almost feels like there's not even a lock.
I think it's worth noting that even for someone like Gruber who often defends things about apple others attack, he still craps on the notch in landscape mode.
I have an X, and i have very few complaints about it. It's an awesome device pretty much all around, and i wouldn't trade it in for an 8 or any other phone. They did a bang up job on performance, display quality, battery life, and i think the updates to the interface are spot-on.
But holy shit is the notch annoying in landscape, and so many apps that are "updated" for the X still handle it HORRIBLY. Especially games.
They really screwed this one up, and they need to be way harsher on developers who want to use the "ears" in-game to actually take the shape into account. I find myself actually wishing i could force thing into the "letterbox" non-updated app mode sometimes.
Fortunately this is something that could be fixed later, because it's software, but right now it's so bad. It doesn't even bother me in videos, just when i need to actually interact with crappily thought through games and apps treating that area like usable display
In short, with the iPhone X Apple took a platform with two primary means of interacting with the apps — a touchscreen and a home button — removed one of them, and created a better, more integrated, more organic experience. [...] Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with...
That's pretty funny considering the iPhone X is the most Android-like phone so far, what with a) getting rid of the home button b) AMOLED screen (welcome to 2009) c) wireless charging. Finally an iPhone with some decent hardware features.
Getting rid of a physical button is hardly a decent hardware feature. I would've been massively disappointed if apple had gone the android route and just slapped a virtual button i can tap onto the screen.
If you want to say apple ripped some one off with removing the home button, it wasn't android. It was Palm. Welcome back 2009 indeed.
Admit? Like it's a secret he's trying to cover up?
Apple people simply don't care. They know Apple's "late." (Inasmuch as someone else has done a similar thing, or used a similar piece of tech "first".) Because Apple is almost always late.
Late to touch. Late to smartphones. Late to fingerprint readers. Late to face identification. Late to attention detection. Late to wireless charging. Late to big screens. Late to music streaming. Late to video services. Late to the TV. Late to the wrist. Late to the wireless headphones. etc.
I agree, but he attempts to shame other firms when they decide to copy something from Apple. He comes across as a hypocrite.
Personally I find many of Apples "innovations" abhorrent and it frustrates me that they have been universally copied. They have popularised disposable, unrepairable, slippery, ultra-fragile phones!
Apple is almost never early to a market, so why call it out specifically that “business as usual on timing”. We can debate if they are successful or not (I waffle myself), but they’ve not prided on being first, but rather being better.
People do copy Apple, but that doesn’t mean Apple was first. The (misguided I feel) argument by Apple wasn’t that someone copied the concept of what they did (which again, they usually weren’t first to anyway), but rather copied their implementation which made them better over whoever was first.
Also, Steve Jobs even has a famous quote that’s relevant [0], “good artists copy, great artists steal”.
How was Apple late to the game with edge to edge displays? They only started appearing on flagships in 2017, this is their first phone release since then. Not to mention most of the "edge-to-edge" android phones are not edge to edge. The S8/Note 8, Pixel 2/2XL, LG V30, and OnePlus 5t all have significantly larger chins and foreheads than the iPhone X. The only thing I think that comes close(and I'd say beats it) is the essential phone.
Samsung have been shipping OLED wrap-around-screens under the "Edge" branding since at least early 2015. Phones without front physical hardware buttons have been around even longer (e.g. Google Nexus).
What does that have to do with liking the product? If an Android phone ships with a FaceID like feature, it's OK to just like it and not be sad that it wasn't the first phone with it.
So if you were to write a review of a product you really liked, you would...throw in extra paragraphs about when other phones adopted some of the product's features?
I guess given the niche market of Daring Fireball, in a somewhat indirect way it is sponsored content. Gruber will make more money when Apple is more popular.
"And for reasons I’ve never been able to understand, Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with... but none have copied the iPhone’s mute switch, despite the fact that it’s a brilliant idea."
OnePlus 5 and onwards? Although I think it may be the only Android phone to have one.
I could do without that switch - I use Tasker to toggle silent mode based on location rules, and I prefer to e.g. use a timer to turn on no-disturb for a movie, rather than needing to remember to re-enable sounds.
The probability that I'm e.g. at a meeting and don't want to be disturbed is far less likely than simply keeping the phone on silent for the whole work day. It just doesn't fit a use case for me.
This is a beautiful way of looking at the X from a very zoomed out perspective. To an extent, I agree with much of what’s said and felt the same way when starting to use my X.
But, and this is the important but here, we’re existing users. I saw iPhones develop over time, so for me this is evolution and I put up with it. But what about new users, that are new to the platform.
Apple made some interactions so unintuitive that even I was confused. One example is purchasing an app. Pre-X, you’d tap the “get” button and place your finger on the home button or enter your password. With the X you have to tap the button, look at your device, and then follow the most unintuitive animation to actually press the physical side button.
That’s where I think we start to see the difference between evolution and compromise.
I've had the X for a few days now. The animation to press the physical button totally had me stumped the first few times! Overall I'm a fan (such as great camera and great screen) but some of the new interactions are taking some getting used to.
Weird, on both my phone and one i gifted to my mother for the first week or so it greyed out the screen(like, windows UAC style) and had big bold text at the bottom saying "double press to purchase" while showing the side button animation. It doesn't show up on mine now, but the little tutorial showed the first few times
I loved that gesture, but I was shocked how many of my friends/coworkers didn't know about it. I think the iPhone X up and over arc is more reliable to trigger(once you figure out not to do up and hold).
How did the move of the sleep/wake button from the top to side EVER get approved ...? I’ve been ranting about this since the iPhone 6... I can’t count the number of times I’ve:
- inadvertently activated Siri while reaching blindly for my phone
- put the phone to sleep when trying to use the hardware shutter button while taking a picture
I don’t understand how this flaw has escaped widespread criticism...
The true face-palmer here is the new screenshot shortcut on the X, wherein you press volume up + side button to take a screenshot
i seriously take probably 5-10 screenshots a day just trying to lock my damn phone. I've taken to crooking my finger on the other side so it's far from the volume buttons just to avoid this.
My acclimation to the iPhone X has made using an iPad feel anachronistic — I want to swipe up from the bottom to go home there too.
With Touch ID, after you tap a particular notification in the middle of the display, you then must move your finger down to the home button to authenticate. I always found that annoying. Now that I’m used to the iPhone X, I find it to be intolerable.
Whereas the first bumps, on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, were like blemishes. If you’re going to have a bump, have a fucking bump.
But if I pick up or glance at an iPhone without it, I’m skeeved out.
Things I notice instantly: the display looks very small, the colors look too cool at night (because of the aforementioned lack of True Tone), and the perfectly square corners of the display seem downright crude.
It’s unique in Apple history — if not all of consumer computing history — for the same version of the OS to present two distinct interfaces that are so markedly different.
The extra step to kill processes on the X is bad enough that I would call it a serious bug (i.e. it is harder to view processes in the first place, you can’t swipe them out, and you can’t even see the kill buttons without a delicate push-and-wait). This has to be easy to do because there are just too many apps that can enter weird states, e.g. bank apps that will never accept log-ins again once they encounter their first server blip.
Also, whether it is software or the X itself, sound is atrocious: it is very easy to generate nasty and loud pops/glitches/stutters on a regular basis.
I'm with you on the killing processes part. There are a lot of things I like about the X, but that one is annoying and (as far as I can tell) pointless. It seems like Apple intentionally made it harder in order to discourage people from habitually killing apps.
I like Gruber, but this article has so many words for so little content.
As far as I understood it, he basically said, in many words, that iPhone X (and, by extension, removing the home button) is the beginning of a new age for the iPhone. That's well and good, but I don't agree with him.
The competitive gap between iPhone and everything else is WAY smaller than it was in 2007, and with Google in the mix and actually-good cameras being available on Android now, that gap is becoming smaller by the day. Face ID is all well and good, but I don't think it's a major differentiator like multi-touch was in 2007.
I think that this can be a fundamental shift for the iPhone and iOS without being a paradigm shift that puts apple years ahead of the competition. I also didn't pick up an implication that this puts iOS years ahead of android while reading the article.
All in all, I'm pleased with the phone. There are some things that are pretty rough, though, and that compensating for the removal of the home button has caused a glaring problem. Shutdown being the biggest one so far for me. The Konami code that you have to enter in order to initiate getting the slider to appear is nothing short of amazing. I'm hoping at some point a button to activate the slider ends up in Control Center.
Honestly i find the screenshot shortcut way worse. I would happily take control center screenshots only(like recording a video screenshot) to turn this godawful shortcut off.
What about holding volume down + lock button simultaneously?
Basically you only have to squeeze two buttons at either side for a couple of seconds..
I do not find this very hard to do at all..
With the added benefit that you disable faceid at the same time.. Useful in some situations..
didn't know about that one, thanks. Seems there are different ways to go about it with this being less steps than the tap up, tap down, hold lock I've been using and doesn't interfere with screenshot.
situational. This morning I had to power it off because even cycling airplane mode wouldn't get Music to download music from iTunes Match. Powered off, powered on and it was working again.
That’s where we are now. We integrated sponsored content so much, that we don’t even get angry when some bloggers, writing under his own personal name, seems to have been paid to write a piece of ad, in what is supposed to be a personnal opinion.
This whole culture needs to go down the sh_tter. We tolerate youtubers lying about things they like, bloggers lying about their own opinions, companies hidding abusive conditions in their terms of usage, reselling private data, and we consider it all fine because it’s made for the purpose of gaining money.
Man, capitalism isn’t about moral, but even capitalistic societies need some kind of ethic...
This isn't about being paid. Gruber has too much integrity to do such a thing and a serious journalist would never risk their reputation. What Gruber isn't above is heavily criticizing Apple for fear of getting blacklisted because, for a pro Apple blogger, that would be a death sentence.
There's so much to hate about the iPhone X - I'm glad it's failing because I never want to see another phone like it again.
My biggest gripes are that I like buttons (even the fake iPhone 7 home button is better than swiping) and I like rectangular screens without notches in them. I also think Face ID is a terrible idea with no future. I predicted (and got downvoted here on HN) that it would fail miserably - and it did. Haha!
I like things to be simple and always work. The iPhone X with all of its anti-features fails to do that. I will never use a phone with any kind of gimmicky Face or Touch ID system.
There's the tldr. And for anyone accustomed to Gruber's writing, it was a predictable conclusion.