iPhone X: A New Frontier

For a radically redesigned iPhone launching on the tenth anniversary of the first model, it seems reasonable to lead a review of the device with a retrospective on the original iPhone and how, over the course of a decade, its vision matured into the iPhone X. But today, I want to begin with the iPhone 4.

In many ways, it was 2010’s redesigned iPhone 4 that turned the iPhone into the social, cultural, and economical phenomenon we all recognize in 2017. It was the first iPhone to be publicly leaked several weeks in advance, kicking off the modern era of Apple rumors and speculation on unreleased hardware. The iPhone 4 brought a substantial rear camera upgrade and, for the first time, a front-facing camera – features that would become instrumental to the redefinition of mobile photography for self expression, communication, and sharing through the rise of selfies, FaceTime video calling, and Instagram.

Perhaps most importantly, the iPhone 4, with its Retina display and bold new look, was a piece of modern industrial design that demanded to be held, used, and studied to be fully appreciated. Unlike its predecessor – the faster and forever endeared iPhone 3GS – the iPhone 4 felt like a marvel of pocket computing that couldn’t be possible a mere 12 months after the 3GS’ plastic body and low-resolution display. The iPhone 4 was an instant classic that leaped beyond anything we’d seen before at the time.

I understand why the original iPhone makes for an ideal starting point to discuss the iPhone X. The device’s anniversary and (debatable) nomenclature beg for a reflection on the past decade and how our lives have changed thanks to smartphones. But it’s not how I feel about the iPhone X.

Like the iPhone 4 did in 2010, the iPhone X follows a highly successful iPhone model and diverts from its established formula with a new design and features that will cause our habits to evolve. The iPhone X doesn’t just add to an existing model – it remixes and changes our expectations of what an iPhone should be altogether. I see more parallels between the iPhone 4 and iPhone X than, say, the original iPhone and the X: selfies becoming portraits, the advent of Retina and now OLED, and, yes, even being left in a bar and “being left” inside an unreleased firmware.

The iPhone X, like the iPhone 4, inaugurates a new direction, with effects that will inevitably ripple through the entire iPhone line. But beyond its striking, sensor-laden display and glass body, the iPhone X is a collection of major themes that will reshape the Apple ecosystem over the next decade.

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The Truly Personal Computer

When rumors of Apple abandoning Touch ID in favor of facial recognition appeared earlier this year, I was skeptical. I couldn’t believe the company would already move beyond the technology they had been perfecting over the past four years. But not only has Apple been able to smoothly transition from Touch ID to Face ID in core system features and apps, with the iPhone’s improved biometric framework, they have set a new standard for what “personal computing” ultimately entails.

Face ID

I’ve always used and loved Touch ID, even when the first-generation sensor made the original iPad Pro slower to unlock than the iPhone 6s with a second-gen Touch ID. Setting aside the concerns regarding 3D masks and genetic resemblance being able to spoof Face ID1, I believe Face ID is better than Touch ID for two reasons: it’s a secure biometric feature that doesn’t require physical contact with the iPhone, and it’s also software that improves itself over time.

Since the iPhone 5S, I’ve probably used Touch ID several thousands of times, but the sensor never taught itself to recognize my fingerprint after I got out of the shower, washed dishes, or played with my dogs at the beach. In those situations, Touch ID predictably and consistently failed. I was okay with it because I knew what was happening: the sensor’s lead advantage over the passcode (“just put your finger on the Home button”) was also its liability in imperfect reading conditions. Touch ID was (and still is) great at recognizing fingerprints, but, by design, it can’t infer a correct fingerprint unless it can read your skin just right.

With Face ID, these physical limitations are removed from the experience. Your hair may be wet because you just took a shower, and Face ID will still log you into the iPhone X. You may be shopping and holding your iPhone with one hand in a precarious way, and Face ID won’t care. The mechanical act of holding your finger over a sensor is completely gone, and I can’t stress enough how nice (and futuristic) this feels when you just want to use your iPhone without worrying that biometric authentication might fail. What your hands have touched is no longer a variable to account for when unlocking an iPhone. It only takes a couple of days to get used to Face ID and look at other Touch ID devices (like iPads) and wish they also did away with the physical sensor.

There are trade-offs involved with scanning your face as a means of authentication, of course. But here’s the unique, and potentially game-changing, part of the iPhone X experience: Face ID’s downsides turn into an advantage thanks to machine learning.

Just like our fingerprints, our faces are also subject to changes that may impact the sensor’s ability to recognize us. In the iPhone X’s case, they are visual changes related to our appearance or position in a physical space – glasses, beards, hats, facial expressions, head movements and orientation, and so forth. There isn’t much a fingerprint sensor can do when it can’t come in contact with the skin on your finger, but a face? For years, iOS has proven to be more than apt at recognizing people’s faces; Face ID takes it to the next level with the ability to do it in milliseconds, in real-time, and gradually improve its understanding of your face.

Face ID builds upon the more capable face recognitions APIs introduced in iOS 11 2 through a dedicated, self-contained, self-learning process that uses errors as data points for improvement. According to Apple, when Face ID fails and you have to enter your passcode manually, if the data recognized by Face ID hits a certain threshold of familiarity with the user, the passcode is used as confirmation to add the unrecognized scan to Face ID’s data pool and, hopefully, teach it to recognize a similar scan in the future.

This is a powerful idea for a core system functionality: it isn’t so much designed in a hardware lab or programmed beforehand as it is an adaptive feature that constantly evolves, discards data, and ingests new scans to learn and grow more accurate. I‘ve already started seeing the benefits of this approach after a few weeks with the iPhone X: Face ID recognizes me just fine when my eyes are squinting after I’ve just woken up in the morning, and it authenticates me when my hand is partially covering my right cheek.3

With Face ID, the iPhone’s ability to recognize you isn’t affected by what you just did before picking it up; Face ID dynamically adapts to any situation where you might be looking at the screen. Therefore, Face ID’s potential struggles lay in hardware (how wide an angle the TrueDepth camera can see) but mostly in software; Apple’s algorithms to train Face ID via machine learning will be the definitive test for this new technology.

Machine learning isn’t new to iOS, but Face ID is the most prominent example of a major new iPhone feature that depends on it to train itself. It’s fascinating to consider how future changes to iOS hardware and software may be imbued with the same principles. For now though, I can only judge the adaptivity of Face ID and its quality over weeks of intense usage. And from that perspective, I’m impressed. In my experience, Face ID has been more reliable than Touch ID (in all kinds of situations in and outside of the house); when Face ID fails, at least I know I’m helping it become smarter by entering my passcode. More than a chore, it almost feels like a lesson I’m imparting to my iPhone.

More importantly, Face ID is nicer than Touch ID. There’s something utterly pleasant about simply looking at an iPhone to securely unlock it that is hard to convey without experiencing it. A month later, its novelty effect hasn’t worn off for me yet.

I don’t perceive Face ID as slower than Touch ID; while it may be technically true that it takes longer for iOS 11 to recognize a face than scan a fingerprint, the integration of Face ID on the Lock screen makes it superior to Touch ID. It comes down to detaching user authentication from a physical point of contact: your hand isn’t busy clicking the Home button, so authentication and the vertical swipe gesture required to leave the Lock screen can happen simultaneously. Face ID will scan your face as you’re swiping up to go to the Home screen; this parallel operation helps make Face ID feel faster than it is because it coexists with touch input. It’s a subtle difference, but more than a user action, Face ID is a layer embedded within the Lock screen.

Speaking of the Lock screen, it’s evident now that Apple was playing the long game with Raise to Wake, introduced in iOS 10 and finally finding its true purpose with the iPhone X. A device that turns on as soon as it’s picked up plays into the idea of absolving users of the need to tap or click to unlock an iPhone. Combined with Face ID, Raise to Wake yields the ideal iPhone unlocking behavior: a smooth, uninterrupted flow that switches from screen turned off to the Home screen with little user intervention in between.4

Apple has spent the past couple of years adjusting our Lock screen behaviors, and the goal is clear with Face ID on the iPhone X. Suddenly, the Lock screen raising instead of fading to reveal the Home screen makes sense: the animation was hinting at the iPhone X’s swipe gesture on the Home indicator all along. Same with iOS 11’s Cover Sheet: ditching Notification Center in favor of a quasi-Lock screen environment seemed like an odd choice on older hardware; on the iPhone X, it acts as a positive reinforcement for the vertical swipe gesture. Both features are a good example of how Apple prepares for upcoming hardware changes through software tested at scale several months in advance.

Most of all though, Apple’s effort to turn the Lock screen into a system area where users can spend time interacting with notifications and widgets is paying off with Face ID. Instead of awkwardly placing your finger on the Touch ID sensor without clicking so you can authenticate and stay on the Lock screen, Raise to Wake‘s natural activation and Face ID’s invisible authentication make the Lock screen more personal, private, and easier to use.

Locked notifications (left) are expanded with Face ID.

Notification previews are hidden by default on the iPhone X; you have to authenticate with Face ID while actively looking at the screen to expand them. While this option was available on older iOS devices under Settings ⇾ Notifications ⇾ Show Previews ⇾ When Unlocked, unlocking an iPhone has never been as seamless as on the iPhone X; making this option the default now is, I believe, the right move. I love the idea of an always-private Lock screen that fully reveals itself only if I’m looking straight at it. Before Face ID, I had to look at the screen and use my thumb if I wanted to show hidden notifications; now, authentication happens as I look at the display.5

Tap to Wake

Tap to Wake, another iPhone X-only feature, is a solid addition to the Lock screen environment, but its impact can be somewhat muted by the TrueDepth camera’s limited viewing angle depending on where you want to use it.

The ability to tap the screen to wake it up is most welcome when the iPhone X is laying flat on a desk, or resting on a wireless charger; however, those are the very instances when Face ID would likely fail as it can’t perform a complete scan of your face. If you want to keep notification privacy enabled and take advantage of Tap to Wake while your iPhone is next to you on a desk, you’re going to have to hover over the device for Face ID to work. It can be a…strange experience, particularly in front of other people.

That said, Tap to Wake can also be great when your iPhone is already in your hand, or perhaps placed on a nearby surface while you’re doing something else. And, of course, it’s useful when Raise to Wake doesn’t work. I find myself using Tap to Wake constantly when I’m washing dishes, doing laundry, or playing with the Switch in my bedroom. Tap to Wake doesn’t play nice with Face ID on a desk, but it’s a terrific Lock screen companion in other contexts.

The hands-free nature of Face ID has other benefits too. As part of the iPhone X’s Face ID & Passcode settings, you can disable Lock screen features such as Control Center, HomeKit controls, Siri, and widgets while the iPhone is locked. If you enable these privacy features and try to swipe to open the Today view or Control Center, nothing will happen. A stolen iPhone X cannot be quickly put in AirPlane mode if Control Center’s availability is controlled by authentication, which is fantastic. These options were available for Touch ID devices as well, but they seamlessly blend with the Lock screen thanks to Face ID.6

My bigger point here is that the convenience of Face ID implicitly makes the iPhone X more secure because you’re more inclined to leave its privacy settings turned on. With Touch ID, having to relocate your finger from somewhere onscreen to the Home button was, even if a small one, still a chore; higher privacy came at the expense of ease of use as authentication was physically tied to an offscreen button. Face ID has no such limitations. It’s integrated with the experience so that you don’t think of it as an action that depends on you; there are (almost) no waiting times and no buttons to reach for. And if there’s no “catch” involved with enabling as many privacy features as possible, why not leave them turned on at all times?

My doubts about Face ID disappeared within my first few minutes of iPhone X usage. Millisecond-by-millisecond comparisons with Touch ID miss the point. Even if the recognition process might be technically slower than second-gen Touch ID, it’s not the only step of authentication as a whole; Face ID’s authentication flow often feels faster than Touch ID because it’s easier.

I went from being highly skeptical of facial recognition to a believer.

Face ID’s real test will happen over the next several months as its machine learning algorithms adapt to different seasons and associated headwear, facial features, and other variables. We can’t tell now if Face ID’s performance will improve or degrade over a long period of time. So far, I’ve found Face ID to be more convenient and accurate than Touch ID, and also just as fast thanks to the design of the vertical unlock gesture.

With Face ID, I went from being highly skeptical of facial recognition to a believer. I’m also convinced, though, that the system behind Face ID has deeper implications than authentication alone.

Attention Awareness

One such ramifications stemming from Face ID is the idea of attention awareness – iOS being able to dynamically adapt certain features whether the user is looking at the screen or not. This wasn’t possible with Touch ID, as pressing a button didn’t necessarily indicate attention; but with persistent face detection, Apple can start dipping their toes in ambient computing, which I believe is the overarching theme around face recognition.

The iPhone X shows the first signs of iOS becoming truly personal through tweaks that adapt to the user based on context and presence. First off, unlocking via Face ID can be done with or without attention – essentially, you can either glance at the iPhone while unlocking it, or let Face ID authenticate without having to confirm you’re looking at the device. The ‘Require Attention for Face ID’ setting makes for an impressive demo in front of other people (I’ve had fun demonstrating how notifications expand on the Lock screen only when I turn my head and look at them), and Apple says that it provides an additional layer of security. I left it enabled on my iPhone X.

Furthermore, the volume of timer alerts is automatically lowered if the user is looking at the iPhone X’s screen; if the iPhone X is on a table and a timer goes off, picking it up and looking at it will instantly reduce the alert’s sound. Similarly, the TrueDepth camera checks for attention before dimming the display. The latter is perhaps one of my favorite smaller changes in iOS for the iPhone X: for years I never enabled display auto-lock because I didn’t want to tap the screen every few minutes to make it stay active; with attention awareness, I can leave auto-lock set to 1 minute and the iPhone will never lock itself as it knows I’m looking at it.7

These features show how, besides authentication and security, the TrueDepth camera’s support for attention awareness lets iOS adapt to us. After trying timer alerts on the iPhone X, I want all notification sounds to work this way. Whenever an old iPhone would blast a loud timer alert as I was holding the device and using it I almost wanted to yell “Why won’t you realize I am using you right now?” – finally, the iPhone X makes that small frustration obsolete. I hope Apple will expand this sound and notification behavior to all apps on the system.

I’ve been asking myself which parts of iOS and the iPhone experience could be influenced by attention awareness and redesigned to intelligently fit our context and needs. I don’t think this idea will be limited to Face ID, timers, and auto-lock in the future. What happens, for example, if we take attention awareness farther and imagine how an iPhone X could capture user emotions and reactions? TrueDepth could turn into an attention and context layer that might be able to suggest certain emoji if we’re smiling or shaking our heads, or perhaps automatically zoom into parts of a game if we’re squinting and getting closer to the screen. A future, more sophisticated TrueDepth camera system might even be able to guess which region of the display we’re focusing on, and display contextual controls around it. Siri might decide in a fraction of a second to talk more or less if we’re looking at the screen or not. Lyrics might automatically appear in the Music app if we keep staring at the Now Playing view while listening to a song.

There’s immense potential around what Apple has built with Face ID and TrueDepth in the iPhone X. I think we’re on the cusp of seeing how devices aware of our presence and state will gain the ability to alter their functionality and anticipate our inputs. Apple is facing multiple challenges here: attention-based features will also have to be powered by machine learning and processed privately and securely on-device; at the same time, the company shouldn’t push too hard on the idea of “face control” for the OS – these features have to be seamlessly integrated in the background of the experience, not become the primary interaction methods of iOS.

I take Apple’s comments on the iPhone X evolving over time at face value.8 The TrueDepth stack is a perfect example of how the iPhone X might learn to perform tasks we can only imagine today. And the best part is – Face ID and attention awareness may already feel like the future, but they’re only a 1.0.

The Camera as a 3D Lens

While I regarded the Depth API as one of iOS 11’s most exciting developments, it’s TrueDepth that takes the idea of 3D mapping performed by the iPhone’s camera to the next level. Apple is entering the field of real-world 3D visualizations on multiple fronts: Depth API, ARKit, and, on the iPhone X, Animoji. These frameworks are all connected and part of the broader narrative of the iPhone camera growing into an augmented lens through an interplay of hardware and software.

For portrait photography, the depth map generated by the front-facing TrueDepth camera (this includes the dot projector and IR camera) is often superior to the depth estimate calculated by the dual-camera system. Thanks to face-mapping optimizations, this results in Portrait selfies that have more accurate or more pleasing blurred backgrounds than Portrait photos taken with the “better” camera on the back.

For this reason, I’m not surprised that Portrait selfies have been, by far, the best demo of the iPhone X among my friends and family. The jump in quality from FaceTime HD camera selfies to TrueDepth camera portraits is astounding, and, while not perfect by any professional photography standards, they tend to look great both in normal and low-light situations.

Despite the hiccups of Portrait Lighting effects9, TrueDepth’s mapping of a 3D space for Portrait selfies is remarkable. To understand what the iPhone X’s front-facing camera is able to reconstruct in 3D, I’ve been playing around with Focos, a third-party app that uses iOS 11’s Depth API. Focos’ standout feature is the ability to visualize a photo’s depth map in 3D and rotate a 3D representation of your face to see how multiple layers are stacked to form the final image. This isn’t sci-fi: it’s what the iPhone X’s TrueDepth camera sees today, in its first iteration.

Animoji are an extension of the same idea – using TrueDepth to capture more accurate 3D information – only applied to turn your expressions into fun and cute characters.

Like Portrait selfies, Animoji are one of the first iPhone X features people usually want to try, and for good reason: it’s not just that they’re adorable emoji characters – it’s impressive how well a portable device can track your facial movements in real-time without requiring any “special mode” or additional calibration. Thanks to integrated face tracking, Animoji no longer constrain you to “emotion presets” as designed in static emoji beforehand; you can make your own animated emoji and share them.

Some characters in the initial roster are more expressive than others (I don’t understand why the rather dull robot and alien made the cut for launch), but I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with Animoji and sending them as video messages to Silvia and my friends.

The chicken is my spirit animal.

There’s room for improvement in Animoji, both in terms of performance and execution. From a technical standpoint, Animoji don’t work well in low light – characters are jittery when I try to record an Animoji video in my bedroom at night, which makes them look either scared or overly caffeinated. Also, Animoji currently don’t recognize nose movements and, more importantly, a tongue sticking out – both missing features that have been mentioned by my non-geek friends who tried Animoji.

Last, I hope Apple doesn’t limit Animoji to Messages because they want to drive usage of iMessage among iPhone users. I would love to have a standalone Animoji app10 to record videos longer than 10 seconds, or perhaps a custom keyboard to attach Animoji videos to Twitter and Instagram, or a special Animoji mode in Clips. I’m sure the fun and unexpected uses of Animoji we’ve seen since the iPhone X’s launch will push Apple to consider more ideas for their new animated characters.

It’s intriguing to imagine how Animoji could grow into something bigger than 12 characters in iMessage animated by recognition of 50 different face muscles.11 I expect Apple to add more characters over time (perhaps turning Animoji updates into another reason to update your iPhone?), but I’m also curious about the possibility of Animoji being available in other iOS apps, as well as avatars (think Mii-like 3D characters) built on the same tech of Animoji and used to represent your profile/activity in social apps, games, and real-time communication.12

Third-party developers can also work with the TrueDepth camera system by integrating with the iPhone X-only ARKit face-tracking mode. This API is an addition to the ARKit framework launched with iOS 11 and it uses the TrueDepth camera to provide developers with a face mesh – effectively, a map of face muscle movements tracked in real-time that has higher performance and accuracy than similar technologies seen before the iPhone X.

MeasureKit’s latest update is an impressive demonstration of this technology – the app can now show you the face mesh captured by the TrueDepth camera in real-time. Once MeasureKit recognizes your face via TrueDepth, you can make different expressions (such as smiling, frowning, shaking your head, laughing) and see how the geometric shapes that make up the face mesh contract and expand to form a 3D representation visualized by ARKit. It’s a bit freaky, but quite the technical feat.

An example of how the TrueDepth camera works with partially occluded faces. This isn’t unsettling at all.

We’re soon going to see some of the more practical implementations of ARKit face tracking that go beyond fun effects and filters (which Apple itself showcased with Snapchat in September). Warby Parker is using the more precise data returned by TrueDepth and ARKit to suggest glasses that might fit you well, for instance. It’s easy to imagine how eyewear companies, the makeup industry, tattoo artists, and other apparel makers might take advantage of TrueDepth’s ARKit mode just like IKEA and other furniture companies are leveraging standard ARKit to facilitate online shopping.

Another impressive application of depth as captured by the iPhone X’s TrueDepth camera is immersion in virtual scenes rendered by software in real-time within the camera view. This is a powerful idea as it turns augmented reality into something closer to virtual reality, where the object (or, in this case, the person) is blended with 360-degree 3D environments without any additional hardware.

Apple’s updated Clips app is a first example of this concept built specifically for the TrueDepth camera. Clips 2.0 offers a new Selfie Scenes mode that puts you in different 3D environments such as a city at night, outer space, Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon, and a room filled with emoji stickers on the wall. Think of it as a modern day Photo Booth, but fully rendered in 3D, animated, much more accurate thanks to TrueDepth and, most importantly, presented in 360 degrees.

A TrueDepth camera scene animated by Clips on iOS 11.

You can walk and pan around in Clips’ Selfie Scenes and the iPhone X’s camera won’t lose your position; just looking at the screen will give you the illusion that slightly moving behind you are, in fact, Japanese cherry blossoms.

As with portrait photography or ARKit, Clips’ live Selfie Scenes are in the early stages and exhibit clear shortcomings. Some filters may cut off parts of your head when applying a live background, while others have a less convincing blending between the person in focus and what’s behind them.

However, the fact that a smartphone’s front-facing camera can now put you in animated 360-degree scenes and work well in most cases is astonishing. The results in Clips may be somewhat crude for now, but, in just a couple of years, educational software, 3D photography, games, and other creative apps could vastly benefit from similar techniques. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Selfie Scenes-like TrueDepth filters as third-party extensions for the Camera app in iOS 12.

It’s been a long road since the iPhone 4’s front-facing VGA camera. With TrueDepth on the iPhone X, Apple is going beyond selfies and FaceTime: from authentication and attention awareness to 3D effects and live scenes, the iPhone’s camera is maturing into a lens that brings us into apps and rich virtual experiences.

To discard TrueDepth as a mere enabler of Face ID would be shortsighted; the iPhone X’s camera system feels like one of Apple’s most important innovations in years.

Fast Charging and the Demotion of Wires

There’s a fascinating dichotomy when it comes to charging the iPhone X. On one hand, it supports fast charging via USB-C Power Delivery (or USB-C PD), which considerably speeds up charging times compared to Apple’s default 5W adapter; on the other, the iPhone X embodies a vision of leaving cables behind thanks to the adoption of wireless charging through the Qi standard. The two aren’t mutually exclusive; rather, they show how charging an iPhone is becoming a less restrictive task that can fit in multiple scenarios on a typical day.

While I was working on this story, I was able to test a variety of options for fast and wireless charging, and I was equally impressed with both for different reasons. I’ve put together detailed charts to show the differences between standard charging, USB-C PD, and wireless charging, but before I get into it, there are a few points I want to highlight.

I lauded support for fast charging when it was first added to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro; the iPhone X further confirms my belief that, ideally, Apple should include the 29W USB-C charger with every iPhone and iPad in the near future. Apple may be thinking that only a minority of iPhone users would “need” fast charging, and that there’s money to be made by upselling faster charging for those who want it with a standalone adapter. By the same argument though, we didn’t “need” a Retina display with the iPhone 4, we didn’t need wide color support with last year’s iPhone 7, and we didn’t need ProMotion with this year’s iPads.

Beyond industrial design and the software experience, iOS devices are characterized by the delight brought by new technologies we didn’t think we needed. Fast charging is one of them. A technology that, in the same amount of time, doubles the charge received by an iPhone is objectively superior, better for the customer, and nicer to have – especially for people who are buying a high-end iPhone X and expect the best and nicest Apple product experience. The decision to include a 5W charger with the iPhone X is user-hostile and cheap, just like 16 GB of base storage was in the past. The 29W fast-charging adapter should become the new default for the iPad Pro and iPhone X; at the very least, the iPhone X should include a 12W USB power adapter in the box.

But back to my tests. Over the past month, I bought all of Apple’s USB-C adapters – 29W, 61W (included with the 13-inch MacBook Pro), and 87W (included with the 15-inch MacBook Pro). I also tested Belkin’s latest USB-C car charger and Mophie’s USB-C battery pack, both available from the Apple online store. Because all of these adapters adopt the Power Delivery spec, results are consistent across the board. In terms of power adapters, unless you already own the 61W and 87W bricks, you won’t need them to fast-charge your iPhone X; the smaller and cheaper 29W one performs just as well.

I was positively impressed by the build quality of Mophie’s powerstation USB-C XXL. It’s covered by a smooth, fabric-like texture that doesn’t make it nearly as intimidating as any large Anker battery pack.

Speaking of Anker: I own a 26800 PowerCore+ with USB-C PD, and have used it for months to recharge my iPad Pro and Nintendo Switch on the go. However, its USB-C connector now frequently disconnects from Apple’s USB-C-to-Lightning cables and stops charging my iPhone and iPad. I’m not sure if this issue is my fault, or if I got a flaky unit that stopped working after a few months, but I haven’t been able to test the PowerCore+ for USB-C fast charging. Conversely, if you would like to have fast charging while driving, I can’t recommend Belkin’s latest adapter enough. At $30, it doesn’t come cheap, but it’s well worth the investment if you commute a lot or use navigation apps intensively.

Here’s what you need to know about fast-charging an iPhone X: it only takes 60 minutes to reach 80% – the threshold after which, in theory, the iPhone’s lithium-ion battery switches to slower trickle charging. In just an hour, fast charging gives your iPhone X 80% of battery life; the default 5W charger barely reaches 40% in the same amount of time.

These numbers are consistent with all the USB-C PD hardware I tested. Ironically, when I was running multiple tests every day, my main problem became needing to deplete the iPhone X’s battery over and over again until I reached 1%. I set brightness to the maximum level, played loud music through the speakers, ran benchmarks in Safari and games like The Witness and Pokémon GO. I always struggled to drain the iPhone X’s battery in less than 90 minutes – a remarkable outcome for an unrealistic test aimed at drawing as much power as possible.

I filled my kitchen with stuff using a calculator in AR mode so the iPhone’s battery would drain faster. Yes, this sentence is absurd.

Now that I’m back to a normal iPhone charging routine, the iPhone X’s battery lasts indeed longer than the 7 Plus’ on an average day. I wake up between 9:30 and 10 AM, and the 7 Plus used to show me the “20% of battery left” dialog around 10 PM; the iPhone X tends to bring up the same message around 11 PM. Thanks to fast charging, if I want to keep watching YouTube or play a game until later in the night, I only have to keep it plugged in for 30 minutes to be well over 50% again.

As for wireless charging: I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I am. Yes, it’s probably not accurate to call it “wireless” when there’s still a wire running into the charging pad to provide power, but it’s close enough and, as with many aspects of the iPhone X, it’s just nice to use.

Typical setup on my nightstand.

I’ve always despised clutter, particularly cables and adapters getting in the way when I’m working or need to pick something up from my nightstand. It may sound strange, but the sight of a computer connected to a hub with a dozen cables going into it irritates me to a degree I find hard to explain. I want to avoid wires as much as possible. This is one of the reasons I like working on the iPad so much: I unplug it from the charger in the morning, place it on my desk, and all I see is the iPad, my keyboard, and the iPhone next to it. This is also why I love the portability of the Nintendo Switch, my AirPods, and Bluetooth headphones: there are never cables around me.

The Glass Back

To enable wireless charging, Apple had to switch the iPhone’s enclosure from aluminum to glass. And while the company says that the iPhone X features “the most durable glass ever in a smartphone”, the reality is that glass has a high chance of shattering if dropped. Unfortunately, because of how the iPhone X is built, a damaged back means a full unit replacement, not a repair.

I know from experience. Two weeks after I got the iPhone X, one of my dogs bumped into my nightstand in the morning; the iPhone X was not inside a case, and it was not connected to a Lightning cable, or placed on the charging stand. As a result, it just slid across the nightstand, fell onto our hardwood floor, and its glass back shattered.

Thankfully, I had purchased AppleCare+ for the iPhone X, so Apple gave me a new one as soon as I went to the Genius Bar, which cost €99 (instead of €599 without AppleCare). I learned my lesson: Apple may think it’s the most durable glass they ever made, but there’s no tricking physics when glass meets the floor. I’m keeping my iPhone X in a black Apple silicone case now. I liked the better grip of glass in the hand compared to the slippery aluminum of the iPhone 6-7 line, and putting a case on the iPhone X diminishes its beautiful edge-to-edge design, but I don’t want to end up with another shattered iPhone anytime soon. Wireless charging works fine with the Apple case, which doesn’t conflict with the Home indicator gestures either.

The iPhone X’s current implementation of Qi wireless charging isn’t fast13, but it’s elegant, convenient, and feels like the future. If I’m cooking and want to top-up my iPhone’s battery a little bit, I can just place it on a pad in the kitchen. I don’t need to worry about my dogs yanking a Lightning cable attached to my iPhone on a nightstand; before I go to sleep, I place the iPhone X on Samsung’s Qi charging stand, and I’m done. The stand even props up the iPhone at a 50-degree angle, so I can tap on the screen in the morning to check the time. And, unlike a dock, I don’t have to precisely match the Lightning connector with the port on my iPhone – I can simply put the iPhone on top of the stand without paying much attention to the process.

My favorite Qi device I’ve tested so far, though, isn’t a charging pad or stand – it’s Mophie’s charge force powerstation, a portable Qi battery. I discovered the existence of this product a couple of weeks ago, and it’s quickly become a fixture of my working setup as it fulfills the dream of true wireless charging with no cables involved. The charge force powerstation is a standard battery pack with two USB-A ports, but the top doubles as a Qi surface for compatible smartphones, including the iPhone X.

A true wireless charger.

Now, whenever I’m working, I can put the iPhone X on top of the battery (which is just as small as the iPhone itself) and let it charge, slowly. When I need my iPhone to check something, I pick it up, use it for a couple of minutes, then place it down on the battery again, where it continues to charge. There are no cables strewn all over my desk and, unlike a traditional dock, I’m not forced to keep it in one location; I can carry the battery with me around the house and have my iPhone always at 100% when it’s time to leave.

I’m surprised I haven’t seen more mentions of Mophie’s Qi battery. To me, it represents the essence of wireless charging: it’s not a replacement for standard or fast charging – it brings a series of small conveniences that remove the friction of cables, the clutter of wired chargers, and the stress of having an iPhone’s battery run low during the day.

Wireless and Fast Charging Tests

It’s tough to compare fast charging via USB-C Power Delivery and wireless charging based on Qi: one is meant to fill your devices’ batteries as quickly as possible, but requires a cable; the other is more convenient, but much slower, often requiring more than twice the time of fast charging. In terms of performance alone, any chart is going to be skewed in favor of USB-C PD and fast charging. Still, I wanted to run my own tests to answer a simple question: if I only have an hour of free time, how do all the compatible iPhone X chargers I have compare to each other?

The 60-minute charging test, in addition to being a relatable situation that often occurs in everyday life, happens to avoid the inconsistencies caused by slower trickle charging, which Apple adopts for all of their batteries. Here’s what I settled on: I drained the iPhone to 1%, then left it charging in Airplane mode, with the screen off, and measured its battery percentage every 5 minutes over the course of an hour (12 times). As I detailed in Issue 105 of MacStories Weekly, I used a workflow on my iPad Pro to help me with the reporting process.

Of course, it’s impossible to test every single iPhone-compatible charger. Still, I tried to assemble a good mix of different options – wireless chargers, Apple’s official chargers, battery packs, and USB-C PD chargers.

Here’s the complete list of all the chargers I tested:

Apple 5W

Apple 10W

Apple 12W

Apple 29W (fast charging)

Apple 61W (fast charging)

Apple 87W (fast charging)

Belkin USB-C car charger (fast charging)

Mophie powerstation USB-C XXL (fast charging)

Mophie powerstation USB-C XXL (USB-A mode)

Anker PowerCore+ 26800 (USB-A mode)

Mophie charge force powerstation (Qi)

Belkin Boost Up (Qi, supports 7.5W on iOS 11.2)

Samsung docking station (Qi)

And here’s a visualization of the results (you can open the full-res version of the image here):

Chargers are grouped by category: Qi, USB-A, and USB-C.

There are a few conclusions to be drawn from these tests. First and most notably, the difference in performance between the default 5W charger and any USB-C PD accessory is massive; in the same 1-hour window, the 5W charger barely gets the iPhone X at 40%, while fast charging puts it over 80%. In my experience, the 5W brick charges an iPhone X by 3-4% every 5 minutes; fast charging averages 8-9% before it slows down. At thirty minutes, fast charging is already above 50%, while the iPhone’s default 5W charger may have not even reached the 20% necessary to dismiss the low power alert. For such a premium device, the 5W charger is a cheap disgrace.

As expected, the numbers from Qi chargers aren’t great – they actually fare worse than Apple’s 5W brick. iOS 11.2 has enabled faster wireless charging at 7.5W for compatible devices – still far from the Qi spec’s supported 15W, but better than the initial 5W limit on iOS 11.1 nonetheless. Of all the Qi chargers mentioned in this story, only Belkin’s Boost Up mat officially supports 7.5W charging on iOS 11.2; even at the faster charging rate though, it’s not as fast as Apple’s stock USB charger, and minor performance gains over 5W wireless charging can only be seen after an hour.

For now, it is abundantly clear that you should only buy a wireless charger for the convenience and the freedom of it; hopefully, once wireless charging has been tested at scale on millions of iPhone 8 and X units, Apple will add support for the superior Qi 1.2 spec. Once that happens, wireless charging might become both convenient and powerful enough to compete with USB-C fast charging.

Speaking of which: you may have noticed that the numbers reported by the USB-C PD devices I tested are noticeably consistent in the chart – most of the lines overlap with each other and are difficult to identify. This is due to the strict requirements of the USB-C PD spec, which, thankfully, Apple, Mophie, and Belkin all follow. What’s also apparent – although I haven’t been able to clarify this through official Apple documentation – is that fast charging slows down after the battery hits 70% (instead of Apple’s claimed 80%), jumping from 8-9% of charge every 5 minutes to 3-4%. I assume that the iPhone X, because of its dual-battery configuration, has introduced changes to the threshold for trickle charging. I’d be interested to hear more from Apple on this.

If you want the absolute fastest charging experience on the iPhone X regardless of price, fast charging with compatible USB-C PD devices is the winner. But I wouldn’t call it the “best” option if you consider the cost of Apple’s USB-C adapters, which brings me to the 12W USB power adapter. In 60 minutes, Apple’s 12W brick will recharge an iPhone X by nearly 70% – arguably a minor difference from the 80% reached by Apple’s 29W USB-C adapter which, however, costs $30 more than the 12W one.14

Unless you truly care about reaching a full battery in the shortest amount of time possible, Apple’s 12W adapter is the best deal for most iPhone X owners who want something better than the 5W charger in the box without spending $50. But then again, USB-C adapters have the added convenience of supporting high-wattage charging for multiple devices: an Apple 61W brick, for instance, will charge your iPhone X, Nintendo Switch, or 13-inch MacBook Pro, negotiating the optimal fast/normal charging rate for each thanks to Power Delivery.

For now, fast charging remains more impressive on the largest iPad Pro than on the iPhone X, but the increased versatility of USB-C is an aspect I’m starting to value more as several of my most important devices support the standard.

I’m convinced that Apple’s end goal with the iPhone and its wearable accessories is a future without wires or concerns about battery life: after using your iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch normally throughout the day, you’ll just place them on an AirPower mat and forget about cables, adapters, and battery packs. After testing third-party wireless chargers and witnessing the impressive battery life of the iPhone X on an average day, I’m excited about the prospect of a single AirPower mat to rule them all. However, AirPower isn’t here yet and, realistically, it’ll take a few iterations to achieve the dream of every device fully charged in under an hour.

Until we get there, Apple has opted for flexibility – giving users multiple options to charge their iPhones with varying degrees of efficiency, convenience, and price. I would have liked Apple to include a better charger with the iPhone X, but, on the other hand, I’m happy the iPhone X is ushering in a new era of USB-C PD, wireless charging, and longer battery life.

The Gestural iOS

iOS on iPhone X is the epitome of a generation that has lived with multitouch for over a decade. Gone is the last abstraction of the user’s input: with the removal of the Home button, iPhone X reaches the zenith of direct manipulation, finally achieving the vision set forth in 2007. The training wheels are off; the iPhone is a gesture-only device now.

The consequences of this decision are profound as they not only affect the iPhone’s physical shape and feel, but the accessibility of iOS, the concept of wayfinding that was core to iOS 11, and our relationship with apps. In a way, the iPhone X has produced a fork of iOS unlike any version running on other iPhones and iPads.

And as with all major software transitions, the exciting discoveries are just as commonplace as the many questions that linger over the future of iOS for iPhone.

A Full-Screen Experience

Before receiving my iPhone X in early November, I was going through levels of excitement I hadn’t felt since at least the iPhone 6 Plus. Arguably, the 6 Plus was the last iPhone model to deliver both a new form factor and new industrial design in an overall experience that challenged our preconceptions. I assumed the iPhone X was going to require a similar period of adjustment and a learning phase of a couple of weeks.

I wasn’t prepared for that initial “new iPhone design” phase to continue to this day. Nearly a month into using the iPhone X, the device still feels impossibly futuristic – when I glance at it with the screen turned on, I keep thinking it looks like a render. The iPhone X isn’t just “new” or “different” like an iPhone 5 or 6 Plus might have been – it’s almost impossible in a way that a concept video shouldn’t suddenly materialize on your desk and actually work.

It all comes down to the screen. When I turned it on and was greeted with the familiar “Hello” message at setup, I thought the screen looked fake. I mean that as a compliment in the best possible way – it just doesn’t seem plausible that we can jump from the sharp-angled, bezel-heavy iPhone 7 Plus to a display that almost escapes the physical boundaries of the device on all four corners in the span of 12 months. The fact that Apple was able to pull this off – a smartphone unlike anything else on the market in late 2017 – is just as remarkable as the hardware itself.

I love how the iPhone X’s display extends in all directions – not just to the sides, but toward every corner, leaving almost no bezel in sight. Apps that embrace the iPhone X’s Super Retina display appear to be breaking out of the device’s frame. The physical curvature of the edges harmonizes with the rounded shape of the dock, which is also consistent with app icons on the Home screen and other roundrects throughout the OS. In taking a holistic approach to designing a pocket computer that is intrinsically tied to its software – where both the screen and the OS complete each other – Apple created a beautiful object that is a pleasure to look at and use.

One of my concerns ahead of getting the iPhone X revolved around adjusting my usage habits for a physically smaller device. For the past three years, I’ve been using Plus-sized iPhones – the Plus was the model for me because it allowed me to use the best iPhone hardware with the highest amount of content displayed on screen. I liked experimenting with an iPhone 7 last year, but, as I expected, I bought an iPhone 7 Plus as soon as I could. My fear was that the iPhone X was going to be either uncomfortable to hold or too cramped for the amount of text I was used to seeing on screen without scrolling.

Much to my surprise, switching from the iPhone Plus to the iPhone X has been mostly fine thanks to the taller screen and iOS’ Dynamic Type. The combination of the edge-to-edge display and the ability to make text smaller system-wide lets me see just as many tweets, email messages, or paragraphs of text on the X as on the Plus. Everything is more compact as the X is narrower than the Plus, but the amount of vertical content that can fit in one screen is more important to me, and the X delivers on that front.

In my daily usage, I’ve noticed two trade-offs with the iPhone X: I have to zoom more frequently into webpages or photos to look at smaller details, and I preferred the way my hands wrapped around the wider body of the iPhone 7 Plus. Neither of these should sound like “problems” for those who have been using 4.7-inch iPhones, but, as a converted Plus user, they are the two aspects of the transition that stand out the most to me.

From a general usability perspective, moving from the Plus to the X hasn’t been a detriment to the experience. The trade-offs mentioned above aren’t enough to make me consider getting an iPhone 8 Plus because of its bigger physical footprint; I don’t want to give up all the changes I appreciate in the iPhone X. However, I also know that if Apple ever releases a Plus version of the iPhone X in the future, I’ll want to upgrade to it. My reasoning will always be the same: I want the best and biggest iPhone I can buy. Right now, the iPhone X isn’t, physically speaking, the largest model, but because of its unique full-screen experience, iOS doesn’t feel constrained on it. As a former iPhone Plus user, I hope Apple makes a bigger iPhone X, but if they don’t, I’ll be okay with the current size.

There have been other side effects to the iPhone X’s full-screen approach. Like others have argued over the past month, the notch – the sensor housing that has turned into the iPhone X’s most distinctive trait – is a non-issue in practice. I don’t pay attention to the notch, I don’t care about it when I’m using apps optimized for the iPhone X, and, if anything, I think it adds some character to the shape of the device. But, I also don’t notice the notch when the screen is turned off, which is actually more problematic as I pick up the iPhone X upside down constantly.

If the iPhone X is somewhere in my living room, or in my bag, and I pick it up without paying close attention to it, I often end up having to rotate it in my hands because it’s in the wrong orientation and Face ID won’t let me in.15 Because the black notch blends into the display and given the lack of a Home button anchoring the correct orientation of the device, I sometimes struggle to tell which side is up when I grab the iPhone X. It’s not a major concern16 and I’m getting used to it, but the edge-to-edge display makes me wonder if we’ll ever see an iPhone that can be rotated in all directions, like an iPad.

The Wandering Control Center

I hoped the relocated Control Center on the iPhone X would grow on me over time, but the more I use it, the more I have to agree with Stephen: Control Center is in the wrong place on the iPhone X, and Apple should figure out a way to integrate it with the app switcher.

I can see why Apple might have thought that relegating Control Center to the top-right corner of the display was the best compromise of all. The swipe-up-from-the-bottom gesture is now assigned to multitasking, so flicking upwards to quickly reveal Control Center is out; Control Center now also doubles as an extension of the status bar to show more icons (such as Do Not Disturb) that can’t be displayed alongside the main ones, so it’s reasonable to tie them together with a transition; and, Apple probably assumed that adding Control Center to the app switcher was going to overwhelm users who have to learn a new gesture vocabulary to open and close apps on the iPhone X.

However, I can’t see these potential downsides as convincing arguments for tucking Control Center up and away in the top-right corner of the status bar. The current design is worse than what the alternative might have been: Control Center – a dashboard of shortcuts that should be fast and easy to invoke – now requires more dexterity and precision than ever; it’s unclear if it’s best to put frequently used shortcuts at the top, close to the activation point of Control Center, or keep them at the bottom, where our fingers naturally rest. The animation of Control Center itself is inconsistent with the rest of iOS 11 for iPhone X: while other gestures on the system are mapped 1:1 to our fingers, Control Center is simply programmed to fade in once you reach a certain threshold in swiping down. The animation is clunky and out of our control.

Control Center on the iPhone X is unergonomic, slow, and difficult to activate. It’s against everything Control Center stands for. It’s too bad Apple didn’t realize this in testing.

Here’s my proposal: Control Center should be integrated with the app picker – a design that, apparently, Apple also explored months ago. Users should have the ability to swipe up and to the left to open Control Center immediately without further scrolling involved. On the Lock screen, Control Center could be accessed with a dedicated 3D Touch shortcut, or also by swiping up and to the left.

Mockup courtesy of Marshall Bock.

Whatever Apple decides, I hope they remove Control Center from the status bar and free up that corner of the display to activate something else. I would love the ability to swipe on the left corner to quickly open widgets from any app, and use the right corner to view Cover Sheet. Before they add more customization options to Control Center, I hope Apple finds a new home for it on the iPhone X.

The status bar is another longstanding iOS feature that’s been impacted by the iPhone X’s display. For the most part, I haven’t had any issues with the status bar’s new split design; as I mentioned above, assigning two different gestures to it is a clever decision with potential for future changes. It only takes a few days to get used to having the clock on the left and wireless radio information on the right; as someone who disabled battery percentage a long time ago and despises status bars cluttered with icons, the cleaner look works well for me. The iPhone X’s status bar is clearly a byproduct of having a sensor cutout in the middle of the screen, but at least Apple turned the limitation in their favor by giving the status bar a much needed makeover.

The new colored indicators for GPS, tethering, microphone recording – features that used to bring up the gaudy double-height status bar on older iPhones – are much more elegant on the iPhone X without giving up their role as shortcuts to open associated background apps. They’re one of my favorite design touches in the new status bar.

The iPhone X briefly displays icons for GPS and microphone access before highlighting the system clock in blue and red, respectively.

I only have two minor gripes with the iPhone X’s status bar. I miss being able to see at a glance whether Do Not Disturb is active or not. I can swipe down to see the icon in Control Center’s full status bar, but that’s not ideal for all the reasons noted above. This could be remedied by Control Center gaining more personalization and letting you define which system icons show up in the primary status bar (the two “ears”) and which ones can be revealed by swiping. I’d gladly swap the ‘4G’ icon for Do Not Disturb’s moon.

In addition, to accommodate other icons in the new status bar, Apple removed the network activity indicator – the little spinning circle that used to be displayed when apps were refreshing content from the Internet. I remember seeing a new design for it circulating on Twitter a while back, but it never shipped. As a result, there’s no consistent way to tell if an app is loading data on the iPhone X. It was useful to have the indicator when an app was “stuck” due to a bug – you could tell it wasn’t refreshing anything because the indicator wasn’t spinning. Also, the indicator adjusted its rotation depending on the speed of your Internet connection, which was a great design detail that has sadly been removed. I hope Apple brings it back.

On the other end of the screen, the iPhone X adopts a miniaturized version of the iOS 11 dock for iPad, albeit without the same drag and drop interactions for multitasking or recently used apps. I’ve already argued in favor of bringing iPad-like inter-app drag and drop to the iPhone, but there’s something else that strikes me as odd about the iPhone X’s dock. Unlike on the iPad, it hasn’t been integrated with the app switcher.

The lower end of the iPhone X’s multitasking UI seems like the ideal spot to host a dock containing your favorite apps, sitting underneath recently used ones. Essentially, I believe the same iPad design would work even better on the gesture-driven iPhone X: app cards on the left, Control Center on the right, the dock below everything else.17 The dock was one of the best additions to iOS 11 on the iPad; the iPhone X’s fluid multitasking could also use a faster way to open frequently used apps.

Speaking of apps, it was painfully obvious a couple of days into using the iPhone X that developers who decided not to embrace the notch were going to end up with apps that didn’t feel like part of the system. Apple’s designers were adamant about this in the iPhone X’s HIG: apps that don’t fully extend to the four corners of the display feel constrained and “wrong” – almost as if they haven’t been optimized for the iPhone X at all.

Apps that intentionally block out the status bar with a black background either feel like Android apps or legacy software running in compatibility mode. I know that some designers prefer the black status bar that harkens back to the days of iOS 5, but, in practice, the result isn’t as elegant as they think. Those who tried to hide the notch have changed their mind after using an iPhone X for a while, which doesn’t surprise me. In my opinion, a black status bar that attempts to blend in with the notch draws more attention to it than apps that fill the screen and embrace the notch.18

I’ve also seen some interesting uses of the iPhone X’s full-screen and status bar. Halide, an advanced camera app, puts manual shooting controls and details in the two corners of the status bar. The Reddit client Apollo (one of the best app debuts of the year) displays a custom volume slider in the top left corner of the display, temporarily overriding the system clock when you’re clicking the volume buttons. I love this idea, and I could see it become as popular as Tweetie’s original pull to refresh.

From left to right: DEVONthink’s sync status; Apollo’s volume indicator; Halide’s advanced controls.

DEVONthink, on the other hand, puts the extra space at the bottom of the screen to good use: to display sync status and information, the latest version of the app shows a temporary message in between the tab bar and the Home indicator.

The iPhone X’s OLED display is also pushing developers to reconsider dark themes they designed for their apps. As I noted a few weeks ago, dark grays don’t look nearly as good as pure black does on OLED: because black pixels aren’t actually turned on, a true black theme – particularly in low light – creates a seamless transition from status bar to notch. It looks really black.19 I compared apps with true black backgrounds (Grocery and Overcast) between the iPhone 7 and iPhone X, and the LCD version of black on the iPhone 7 looked like an illuminated dark gray.

I understand why friends with Android smartphones have long praised OLED displays: colors look incredibly vivid and more true to life; the effect on the iPhone X’s edge-to-edge display is striking. I couldn’t go back to an LCD iPhone after trying OLED, and I hope we’ll eventually see it on the iPad Pro line as well. From now on, developers of all iPhone apps should offer at least three theme options: light, dark, and true black.20

The iPhone X’s full-screen nature is a dramatic departure from the past ten years of iPhone. Even though it runs the same version of iOS, with the same apps, and is rooted in the same interface conventions, the iPhone X’s display makes everything look fresh and futuristic. It’s a marvel to look at and a bigger leap than Retina was in 2010.

There are trade-offs involved with removing bezels and extending the display around sensors, but, aside from a couple of missteps, Apple handled the transition to an all-screen, button-free iPhone thoughtfully. The full-screen iPhone is, unquestionably, the only way forward.

Fluid Multitasking

Because it lacks a Home button, how the iPhone X’s screen feels during actual usage is now just as important as how it looks. And after a few weeks, I can say that the iPhone X makes using iOS more pleasant than any other device. Every small interaction, every swipe – everything is so smooth, there’s a sense of delight that permeates the entire iPhone X experience that is hard to describe.

But I’ll try: removing the Home button makes iOS feel less mechanical, less tied to a physical input method. Instead, iOS on the iPhone X is software as a natural extension of our touch. The iPhone X breaks the final barrier between our fingers and the screen, creating a positive feedback loop that is reinforced every time our fingers glide across apps. Using iOS on the iPhone X is so rewarding and remarkably efficient, it makes me want to use the iPhone more than my iPad.

iPhone X makes using iOS more pleasant than any other device.

The feature largely responsible for all of this is the animation framework. There’s no delay in interactions, no latency between input and animations displayed on screen. The iPhone X is powered by an exceptionally fluid gestural interface that makes the old push-Home-button-for-multitasking iOS feel like the resistive touchscreens we had before multitouch. By removing the intermediary between the user and apps, multitasking on the iPhone X quickly becomes second nature and makes you wonder why we had to push a physical button in the first place.

The initial shock caused by the removal of the Home button quickly subsides once you start swiping the Home indicator to close apps and switch between them. The app you’re currently using stays glued to your finger if you swipe up slowly, but it rapidly lands on the Home screen, morphing back into its icon21, if you just flick it upwards. The system never forces you to sit back and wait for animations to finish, not even for a fraction of a second. After you fling an app back to the Home screen, you can immediately tap another app icon, scroll to another page, or swipe down to reveal Spotlight search.

The iPhone X’s gestural engine doesn’t make you feel like a spectator, watching transitions happen without your direct control; you’re an active participant of its real-time interface. iOS has never felt as fast as it is on the iPhone X – it’s quite simply a joy to use.

I didn’t struggle to learn the basics of the iPhone X’s gesture-based navigation, but some of the new interactions take some time to be fully mastered and appreciated.

In the first few days, there was some debate among early adopters on Twitter as to which method is the best one to reveal the app switcher. Apple’s recommendation is to swipe up vertically and briefly pause so that recently used apps can swoop in from the left side of the screen. However, I thought that requiring a pause seemed to contradict the iPhone X’s fluid and nimble nature. I found swiping up then quickly to the side faster and more connected to the UI itself – I am physically moving an app’s card towards the other ones in the switcher, my thinking was.

The truth is, it doesn’t really matter how you prefer to bring up the app switcher because all methods work. Swiping up in a semicircle gesture has a slightly lower threshold of activation for the switcher (you can feel it by the haptic tap played when the switcher appears), but following Apple’s suggestion is also fine and perhaps more ergonomic for one-handed usage. Even Apple itself doesn’t seem to know which way they prefer. And I believe this is a good thing: it shows that the iPhone X’s interaction scheme is flexible and realistic enough to accommodate multiple paths – multiple ways of swiping or holding a phone – to trigger the same feature.

The other gesture that only started turning into muscle memory well into my second week of usage is the horizontal swipe on the Home indicator to instantly switch between apps without going through the app picker.

At first, I couldn’t understand what order apps were presented in when I was swiping left and right. But since I got the hang of it22, the horizontal swipe has become my favorite way to quickly navigate between apps without opening the switcher or the Home screen. The gesture is like flicking through a stack of cards in your hand, and it feels great in use. It even obviates the need for the back button to return to the previous app in the top-left corner of the status bar; I’m not sure if there’s still a need for that tiny indicator now that you can instantly swipe back through app history.

Another nice (and possibly hidden) perk: both the app switcher and the horizontal swipe can be activated from the Home screen by performing the same gesture on the dock, where the Home indicator isn’t displayed.

There are other consequences to the removal of the Home button worth noting. First, Apple appears to be compensating for the absence of a physical button press with the Taptic Engine, which plays a tap when the app switcher comes up despite not being invoked via 3D Touch. I wonder if, in the future, Accessibility options could offer more types of taps and light thuds when the Home indicator does something.

In addition, assigning key controls to software means they can be updated or customized without shipping new hardware. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple will explore the possibility of personalizing the Home indicator – does it need to be persistently displayed after several months of usage? Or to paraphrase Steve Jobs, does it have to be there whether you need it or not? The beauty of software buttons is that they can always be changed; I wonder if the Home indicator area could become user-configurable in iOS 12.

Finally, using the iPhone X is a quiet experience that produces nearly no sounds. The iPhone 7’s “fake” Home button already was noticeably quieter than, say, the clicky buttons on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 6, but I could still hear its sound in complete silence – especially if the iPhone was laying on a table or nightstand. The iPhone X, because it’s entirely unlocked and navigated through swipes, is always silent. At this point, I wouldn’t mind if Apple removed the physical volume buttons as well, though I assume that would be a problem for all other system features that depend on them.23

With new gestures, full-screen interfaces, and incredibly fluid animations, the iPhone X represents a reset of our interactions with iOS. In hindsight, no other Apple device ever treated the user’s input with the same degree of respect and high performance as the iPhone X. From fantastic color reproduction on OLED to a new breed of one-handed multitasking, the iPhone X undoubtedly accomplishes what Apple wanted for this device: tracing a path for all future iPhones to follow.

The entire iOS ecosystem is going to be affected by the iPhone X’s innovations over the next few years, though it’s unclear when, or to what extent. But one thing’s for certain: by removing its signature button, Apple has liberated the iPhone from its past. Where we’re going, we don’t need Home buttons – just screens. May the iPad be next.

The Impossible iPhone

After using the iPhone X for a month, it’s obvious that it embodies the future of the iPhone today. The iPhone X makes every other Apple device feel old, although not because they’re suddenly flawed. The sheer nature of advancements in the iPhone X elevates it to a different category – thus explaining Apple’s decision to (temporarily?) bifurcate the line. They’re both current iPhones, but the iPhone 8 and iPhone X might as well be years apart.

I’m confident that, a decade from now, the iPhone X will be remembered as the iPhone that changed the course again for the most popular consumer electronics product of our generation. From an entirely gesture-driven interface with no physical affordances to an OS that adapts its features to our attention, the iPhone X is the purest expression of the union of hardware and software – a spectrum where we can’t discern two ends, but only one all-encompassing idea. The iPhone X is a triumph of design and a new beginning for iOS.

Even a month later, there’s a thought I keep coming back to whenever I pick up my iPhone X and look at its screen. It feels like I’m holding an impossible iPhone. In the same year of the iPhone 8 and smartphones that are almost edge-to-edge, the iPhone X leaps so far ahead, it doesn’t seem like a device we should have now.

But Apple can still wish impossible things into existence. And every once in a while, they’re crazy enough to mold the future into the shape of a pocket computer. A seemingly distant concept, redefining what an iPhone can be today.

If you’re concerned about other people using masks to unlock your iPhone X, I have the perfect xkcd for you. ↩

Which added support for recognizing partially occluded faces and profiles with a higher degree of accuracy and performance. ↩

Apparently, this is my “focused” pose when I’m working on a story. I'm doing it right now as I'm editing this footnote. ↩

An equivalent of Touch ID’s ‘Rest Finger to Open’ option is the only missing piece: if you don’t care about interacting with notifications on the Lock screen, the iPhone X should offer a setting to instantly open the Home screen after a successful Face ID scan. ↩

Hidden notification previews are only a problem when I'm driving and ask my girlfriend to read my missed notifications. I thought about disabling the setting, but I like it so much, I'm asking my girlfriend to check my notifications less often; if she has to because I received an important message, she can just unlock my iPhone with the passcode and open Cover Sheet. ↩

Enabling Control Center on the Lock screen only when you authenticate hasn't been an issue for me when it comes to toggling commonly accessed controls. The iPhone X has flashlight and camera buttons at the bottom of the Lock screen, and the Now Playing widget is always displayed above notifications. ↩

Both these options are managed by a single setting dubbed 'Attention Aware Features' which is available in Settings ⇾ Face ID & Passcode as well as Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Accessibility ⇾ Face ID & Attention. I’m not sure why Apple replicated the same settings in two places. ↩

No pun intended. ↩

iOS 11’s Portrait Lighting effects (currently in beta for the iPhone 8 Plus and X) still need a lot of work; the Stage Light ones are particularly prone to artifacts right now, and even though you can make them look good if you know what you’re doing, I feel like Stage Light effects are more an alpha than a beta. ↩

An official one, that is. I've been using AnimojiStudio to make my own longer Animoji and #AnimojiKaraoke videos outside of Messages. ↩

In the short term – perhaps by iOS 12 next year – I’d like Apple to revamp Animoji with new characters and animation of more face features. ↩

An idea already being explored, for example, by Facebook and Oculus with Spaces. ↩

But it has gotten faster with iOS 11.2 at 7.5W instead of 5W, which is still far from the 15W supported by the Qi 1.2 spec. ↩

This might be due to the iPhone X often requesting 12W instead of 27W for Power Delivery. You can read an in-depth technical analysis here. ↩

Nor does the iPhone X support being used in any orientation, but this has always been a problem for every iPhone. Speaking of which, I like Shahid's idea of using facial recognition to automatically correct rotation using the TrueDepth camera. ↩

Unlike, say, the Siri Remote, which I consider the worst product Apple designed in at least a decade. ↩

Handoff, currently displayed below recent apps, could be integrated with the dock, just like on the iPad. ↩

I have mixed feelings about Apple's design of the Camera app on the iPhone X. Because of the format size Apple is using for photos shot on the iPhone, the app has to put large black bars around the viewfinder in Photo mode. These make the app feel small – almost letterboxed. Video mode fares slightly better – because videos are recorded in 16:9, the camera view can extend to the bottom of the screen and there's only one (narrower) black bar on the other side. I'm not sure if changing the picture size would be the best solution to fill the screen while in Photo mode – perhaps the top bar could be used for additional settings and toggles though? Right now, it just feels empty. ↩

And it also brings considerable battery life savings. ↩

The latest version of Overcast gets this right. ↩

I wish Apple would change the animation for this, though. ↩

Here's how it works: when you swipe to the right to move from the current app to the one before it, the first app stays on the right side of the switcher for about 5 seconds. This means you can swipe to go from App A to App B, then immediately swipe again to move from App B (left) to App A (right). However, if more than 5 seconds pass, or if an interaction occurs in App B (i.e. you tap something or scroll a view), it becomes the currently active app, and App A moves before it because you're not "currently using" it anymore. It's confusing to describe, but it makes sense given that the app switcher isn't a fixed carousel of apps, but a dynamic list of recently used ones. ↩

Such as bringing up the shutdown and Emergency SOS UIs, force-rebooting an unresponsive device, or taking pictures with the Camera app. ↩