Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

Low-end

I was waiting to see if the iPhone SE would get tweaked, because my 5s is on the way out. Nope. Ah well. An SE will do me. It's a *phone*, FFS. It fits in my pocket. The screen is big enough to see Waze when I'm driving. My contacts and calendars live on it, and are usable. What else are these things for?

Surprisingly Quiet Crowd

Previous launches have been stuffed full of professional whoopers - even by American standards of explicit enthusiasm for things, they've been noisy. I recall the one where they changed the Game Center UI from the baize card table themed thing, and the crowd literally went wild... over a frigging skin.

This one was notably subdued though. True, Tim 'John Major' Cook doesn't evoke the rabid cultist like ol' PhoneJesus did, but did I sense disappointment in the assembled hackage?

As for the mobe itself, usual Apple form of trying to combine all the best bits from other manufacturers into an aesthetically pleasing slice, and charging the earth for it; A grand for a telephone is somewhat pricey, even if the stainless bit round the edge does polish to a beautiful shine. (On that note, I was under the impression that stainless steel was, by default, polished to a high shine?)

Did you expect anything else from Apple?

Fools and their money are soon parted ... how very true, even in this day and age.

I'll be sticking with my old-skool Nokia 3310. It does exactly what I need a mobile phone to do, make and receive calls.

Look into the light

I thought this was quite a striking image from Anandtech's coverage:

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/11833/ssp_618_575px.jpg

My caption would be:

iPhone X: "You've made a very good decision."

Girl: "I've made a very good decision."

face-scan in non-voluntary situations?

I wonder how the face-scanning will play out in "police demand you unlock your phone for them" situations.

In legal terms it's likely to fall in the same category as fingerprint-unlock (not eligible for US 5th Amendment protections as it's not something-you-know), but I wonder how it will play out technically.

Also, will it unlock on a sleeping / unconscious face?

Overpriced? Perhaps... But we'll soon see what the market will bear.

So when the govt. steps in to regulate pricing you guys are all like boo hiss govt.intervention etc... "let the free market speak."

And when a company sets an arbitrary price for something you're like "it's overpriced culttards."

How would you know if it overpriced? It's not even on sale yet. If you were a successful billionaire yourself, I'd be inclined to think you had some handle on the situation, but as you're writing an article for an online publication, I'll assume (perhaps wrongly) that you're not and you don't.

If you like the free market so much, let it speak and it will tell you whether the phone was overpriced or not. If it massively undersells and they end up marking it down after 6 months then, yeah, perhaps.

Apple Town Square

Is it just me , or have Apple found a way to brand open space?

a Town square by the 1950's definition that apple seem to live and die by, would be open space

And no I don't fancy rocking up the the 'genius grove' with my android phone, I thought I was going to be dragged screaming from the Apple store the last time I took my phone out there.

Animoji

I'll stick with Olde Fashioned Texte Moji.

Face ID

will it work in near total darkness first thing in the morning, when your head is half buried in the pillow, and you are struggling to wake up?

will it work when you are bundled up against the elements and have most of your face covered?

but seriously, an ID system that only works if you have your face uncovered and are looking at the phone?

seems like the wet dream of some NSA analyst.

and wireless charging? how many years late to the party? are we supposed to be impressed that they finally caught up?

Come on people get with the programme.

Apple needs to sell lots of these little suckers so they can afford to buy the warp drive engines Area 51 got from the aliens. Then they can strap them on to their shiny new building (secret spaceship) and take off for Alpha whatever.

Please Please tell me some where on t'interweb there is a photoshopped picture of the 'campus' with a construction board saying "B Ark due for completion soon"

Baah-Baah

If people are stupid enough to pay so much for any new shiny hardware with an apple on it, why should Apple stop to take their money?

Am I the only one who couldn't give a fuck about this or are there others out there ?

iPhone IX

So the IX is probably going to look like the X?

What is the advantage of a glass back supposed to be?

Overpriced?

Years back, I paid that much for a Nokia 8810 and was happy with it before it broke. The iPhone X certainly has much more to offer than Nokia 8810 ever did, so what if you can buy a cheaper phone, even from Apple?

It's like saying a Bugatti is just overprice, because you can get a cheap Kia that drives you around in comfort. What sort of argument is this?

This is supposedly a tech rag, yet the neural network in silicon means nothing to the author, a $200 premium is all they are willing to discuss. This is like reading the advertising rag slipped under my door by the local supermarket.

Get real.

Keats: A thing of beauty is a joy forever--no, wait, what?

If you've just dropped $1000 on a phone, you'll probably be quite keen on not breaking it. Which means that pretty glass thing is going to be shrouded in a case almost immediately, no? At which point, what was the point?

I commend Apple for making good looking objects, but in this case, I'd wager that well north of 99.9% of iPhone Xs will be wearing a plastic burqa in no time.

I'm also curious if it is possible to steal an unlocked iPhone X by grabbing it, punching the victim, and then quickly showing them the phone so that their face unlocks it. Hmm, must try it out sometime...

Apple stores always remind me of pebble dashed council houses. Ugly, Grey and full of cheap furniture and overpriced Tech. So does this mean that the new town centre will be like their shared gardens? Overgrown and full off weeds, a knackers sofa and some car parts?

I Can Wait ....

I think I will wait for next years XS

:-)

I'm just glad to see that Apple hasn't lost touch with it's customers in these austere times.

It's a phone, with a PDA function and if it wasn't for Android being the satanic love child of Google, we'd all be using [them] instead.

Some marketing plonker must have done too much coke methinks.

The Apple Galaxy X?

Samsung's marketing department is going to have lots of fun with this.

Disappointed with the BS

Come on, "deep" pixels? WTF? I like the idea of local facial recognition capabilities because that has at least not the issue with leaving the biometrics where you can get them (on the shiny case with TouchID) - until someone finds a way to record enough data. I'm betting Hamburg's CCC will be about the first to try, and possibly succeed :).

I hope it's accurate enough that it won't work after US Customs has been working you over to get you to unlock the phone, but in any case Id' switch it off for those occasions and revert back to a password or PIN as that is legally protected. Just in case you make the mistake of crossing the US border with confidential information..

In general it was interesting, although as always I had to wrestle with a profound allergy for their overuse of stock phrases like "amazing", "fantastic" et al, as the nation I hail from shares with UK Northerners a profound distaste for this kind of self-preening. I presume the US needs this, but it sure as hell would create the wrong impression in a boardroom meeting with our company.

Was there anything *new*? Umm, apart from the facial recognition thingie and VR that seems to work well and hopefully precise enough to support medical applications (imagine an MRI projected prior to surgery) not so much, it was all more a progression, like the upcoming 18 core iMac. So, lots of evolution, not so much revolution.

BTW, I don't WANT phones to have better and louder speakers - there are already enough idiots playing songs on handsfree and ignoring years of sound engineering by holding the phone at a 45º angle and talking into its edge whilst on handsfree. Killing that off via angle detection and a mandatory 2 hour video lesson on the progress made in dual mic echo and environment cancellation techniques before it could be used again would have been more beneficial, but that's just me before coffee.