iPhone XS: Just another £300 for a better cam- Wait, come back!

the improved camera is one of the best in class

If you ignore everything else out there...

The XS is WORSE than the 18 month old Pixel2 that can now be picked up for £450... Ouch...

Even iVerge are forced to admit it.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/19/17878018/iphone-xs-x-pixel-2-galaxy-s9-camera-comparison

£999 is enough to pay for my entire year's broadband (over a 4G wifi box), phone and tv, Netflix, Amazon Prime, a trip to the cinema once a month, and still have enough left over to buy the 4G box, a PC and a TV to do that all on. Not to mention, buy a mobile phone. Hell, if I skimped in the right places, it would also pay most of my household electricity usage too (not just that of the above).

And that's BEFORE you even connect the damn thing to a cellular provider.

Honestly, I've paid less than a quarter of that for CARS before now, that worked just fine for years afterwards, and then scrapped them when they needed HALF of that cost in works to pass the MOT for something else.

How the hell do people justify iPhones to themselves?

Famously???

"Famously, the XS and XS Max (be sure to call them "Ten S" or an Apple representative will sidle up and correct you) share the same A12 Bionic chip as the XR."

What's famous about that? I'm not normally one to pick up on such grammatical superlativisms - but it seems a bit of a stretch to say anything of the sort. Fish and chips are famous. The Saturn V rocket boosters are famous too; as is the Titanic, and Alexander the Great. There is nothing famous about the iPhone whatsoever as far as I can tell.

That said, if Apple had wanted it to be called a "Ten S" then they should have called it a "Ten S". As is stands, it is an 'X' as in the 24th letter of the alphabet, an 8 point tile in Scrabble, or "10" written as a Roman numeral. And yes, I'll happily correct any Apple representatives that dare challenge me on it lol!!!

the XS and XS Max (be sure to call them "Ten S" or an Apple representative will sidle up and correct you)

Thats the Extra Small and the Extra Small Max. I don't care what apple tries to say.

Note 3 size for web/email and iPhone 4s for calls and shirt pocket

I have my contract sim in the Note 3 but calls are diverted to the iPhone 4s which fits nicely in shirt or trouser pocket and has a PAYG sim.

Now about that Nokia 6310i I still have - it is so big compared to the iPhone 4s.

Can we all start referring to "Windows Ten P", just to piss off Apple?

Hawww much (sharp intake of breath) ?

Your havin' a girarf !

License the OS

Apple was doing poorly in computers because they refused to license the OS to other manufacturers. This misstep would have been fatal had they not brought out the iPhone. But it's becoming increasingly apparent that it only bought them time. If Apple does not want to be constrained to an ever-decreasing high end niche, they need to begin licensing both iOS and MacOS to third party hardware manufacturers. Sorry Apple, you can't keep the ecosystem closed and expensive forever.

No mention of Idiot Tax?

Come on, what happened? It used to be a constant, whatever iProduct made its way to the Register's print, there had to the "idiot tax" mentioned somewhere.

Has someone in the Reg Headquarters finally realized that of the two remaining players in the smartphone game, it's actually the customers users volunteering subjects enslaved drones of Apple who end up paying less for a smart phone than those of Google, who inevitably started leaking both data and their don't be evil agenda to show that money isn't the sole currency to pay with?

I guess the tax is here to stay in one way or another, and the sooner everyone of us smartphone addicts realize after all those flamewars everyone had waged that the biggest idiot is the one we look at every morning in the mirror, the better.

Finally a reference to network connectivity

Thanks for the review- there is only.this one I have found that actually comments on the phones ability to connect to networks.

This is apparently not a prime function of a phone any more, but it matters to me - journeys are the prime time when I read, catch up on news and even connect up to sneak.in some work to free up time for me.

Could do with remote on that though- seems like the XS holds a signal better than the XR- didn't expect That.

Anyone know a good reference for mobiles, networks, frequency bands, and data&call quality?

And the best mobile phone camera...

Is still the Nokia 1020.

It's not just the resolution (41 megapixels), it has tremendous dynamic range, very low noise which also had a nice quality to it and produced RAW files something other phones didn't catch up with until years later.

(Go ahead, mock Windows Phone as I am sure every iPhone fanboi and Android droid will but it still the best user interface. The only thing wrong with it is that Microsoft is working very hard to degrade the user experience to the point where people just give up in frustration.)

"Short dip in the deep end of a pool"

Why is there so much confusion around IP6x ratings? It is pretty simple, IP67 is defined as being able to survive immersion in a half meter of water for up to 30 minutes. IP68 is defined as being able to survive immersion in a meter of water for up to 30 minutes. No, I don't know why such a small difference needed a different rating (I guess maybe the difference between a drop in the sink versus a drop in the bathtub?)

There are no phones rated to survive a drop in the pool - even in the shallow end. Not just because they are over a meter deep, but because the IP ratings are for fresh water only. Now obviously just because the rating doesn't tell us it can survive a drop in a pool doesn't mean it won't - pretty sure all phones rated IP6x would if you fished it out right away. Apple even said they'd tested with chlorinated water, salt water etc. which is isn't part of the IP6x regimen.

I just find it amusing that people think the difference between IP67 and IP68 matters. It does not.

Naming confusion

I've read both the reviews and yet, mere seconds later, I couldn't tell you whether the XS or the XR is supposed to be the high end one. Yet I'm one of the very few people on this planet sad enough to actually give a shit. Apple may annoy the living crap out of a lot of people but marketing is something they have always done brilliantly. Their new ads are awful and even somebody with a general enthusiasm for this nonsense can't make head or tail of their naming.

Something is wrong.

Breaking point is coming

Apple have always been about making quality products at expensive prices but the gap between the quality of the product and the price seems to be getting wider every year. Can't see how this is sustainable as a strategy.

When will people reach breaking point and jump ship?

Maybe in two years time when the lowest priced handset will be 1.5K for a phone with 64gb, the next jump being 1TB for 3K.

Just curious, how are you filling more that 64 GB of storage in this day and age of streaming and cloud storage? Sure, it's nicer to have a copy of one's music collection locally, but it's not that bad to stream it from cloud storage or from a music service.

What is the value proposition of an iPhone these days?

Back when the iPhone 3 was the new hotness and Android was just finding its feet I could see a value to Apple's capability and app ecosystem but now that Android is a mature product, other than sunk costs and personal inertia, why spend so much money just to play in a walled garden? For that matter why spend so much on a phone at all, other than to signal you have the money?

For my needs the only justification for an iPhone is to run the Dexcom glucose monitor software, everything else can be handled with a $200 Motorola, especially after Motorola started selling DIY repair parts and kits.

It's the iPhone eXceSs.

The future of the SE

I managed to bag an iPhone SE from GiffGaff for only £199 a week before Apple culled them from their line up. Given the large discounts from retailers everywhere, I suspected that was coming.

As someone with relatively small hands I don't want a bigger phone so I was little disappointed by the fact its gone away but not particularly surprised. And here's my personal theory...

The iPhone SE was too cheap for Apple to upgrade and still make the margins they like to make, so they've taken it away from the market, leaving the iPhone 7 as the 'budget' phone at £450.

They leave the small phone off the market for long enough, about a year, that everyone gets used to the fact the £450 is the entry level iPhone price. Then they bring out a new SE , same size but with no home button and a notch with faceID on the top not at the old £350 but at the new 'low' entry price of £450 or maybe 500. Apple keep their margins and we get a small phone again.

12 months. I'm telling you. I've read the tea leaves.