In short order these chairs will be filled by @judgejohnhodgman and @therealadamsavage. Who shall claim the royal throne, and who the tube and teal?

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In short order these chairs will be filled by @judgejohnhodgman and @therealadamsavage. Who shall claim the royal throne, and who the tube and teal?
The $999, eyebrow-raising iPhone X: David Pogue's hands-on review
Ten years ago this month, the world got its hands on the very first iPhone.
On Tuesday, we got our hands on the 10th annual upgrade to that historic machine: the hotly awaited, gorgeous, shockingly expensive iPhone X. (You pronounce it “iPhone 10”—that’s a Roman numeral.)
The iPhone X is all screen; there’s no more empty slab of black or white above and below the screen. Better yet, it’s all OLED screen—the stunning colors and deep blacks (million-to-one contrast ratio!) of organic LED technology. You can charge this phone by setting it down on a charging pad instead of plugging in a cable. You can unlock it just by showing it your face.
And it will cost you $999.
The iPhone X packs more screen into less phone than any iPhone before it.
That’s so Apple (AAPL), right!? Charging a grand for a 64-gigabyte phone? Or $1,150 for a 256-gig one? (Actually, Samsung started it—with its $960 Galaxy Note S8.)
Fortunately, if you’ve been thinking it’s time for a new iPhone, the iPhone X is not your only option. Apple also released two other models Tuesday, the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. They offer better cameras and faster chips (than last year’s phones), and also permit pad charging. But they lack the OLED technology and the edge-to-edge screen—and cost the same as always ($650 and up).
Apple CEO Tim Cook’s grand unveiling took place at the new Apple campus in Cupertino—the enormous, still unfinished “spaceship” ring. It was the first event Apple has held in the mind-blowingly beautiful Steve Jobs theater.
The Steve Jobs Theater is a gigantic carbon-fiber disc (the roof), supported entirely by curved glass panes. The actual theater is underground.
Afterwards, Apple permitted the throngs of tech reporters into the annual “petting zoo”—a carefully monitored set of tables where we could try out the new models and ask questions about them. Here’s what I discovered.
The body
Apple’s iPhone X presentation kind of buried the headline: This phone gives you the jumbo screen size of a Plus model into the compact body size of the non-Plus iPhones. That’s a big, big deal for anyone who loves the features of the Plus models (a zoom camera lens, longer battery life, huge screen) but isn’t crazy about wielding a phone the size of a VHC cassette.
The band around the edges of the phone is mirror-finish stainless steel. The front and back are made of hardened glass—50% tougher than before, Apple says—in silver or black. It looks gorgeous.
The notch
The front isn’t entirely screen. At the top, there’s what Apple calls the Notch, which houses the front camera, the earpiece, and a depth camera (read on).
The status bar no longer reveals your carrier’s name.
The Notch interrupts what’s usually the status bar. You still see the time (to the left of the notch) and the battery, WiFi, and signal indicators (to the right). But your cell carrier’s name no longer appears, except on the Lock screen and on the Control Center screen.
The Home button
On an all-screen phone, where do you put the Home button?
You don’t. On the iPhone X, there is no Home button.
But that’s like saying, “On the new Toyota, there is no brake pedal.” We use the Home button for everything! One press to wake the phone. Touch to unlock. Long touch for Apple Pay. Two presses to switch apps. Press and hold for Siri. How can we get along without a Home button?
Lots of these functions have been assigned to the Sleep/Wake switch on the right side. You now hold it down to trigger Siri, for example, or triple-click it to fire up the Magnifier.
To return to the Home screen, you swipe up from the bottom of the screen. To open the app switcher, you swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pause with your finger in the center.
OK, fine. But what about the fingerprint reader? It’s gone. Instead, Apple says it’s come up with something better: Face ID.
Face ID
When you get your phone, you train it to recognize your face in Settings. It asks you to look into the camera and turn your head each way—twice.
After that, just looking at the phone unlocks it—so fast, you may not even realize what’s happened. You can’t fool Apple’s facial recognition with a photo, or a mask, or even a 3-D model of your head, says chief marketing officer Phil Schiller. Whereas the fingerprint reader had an accuracy-fail rate of 1 in 50,000, Face ID’s stat is 1 in a million.
You’ll use Face ID wherever you used to use your fingerprint: Triggering Apple Pay, for example, or logging into apps like Mint, OnePassword, and eTrade, which Apple says have already been updated to work with Face ID.
True Depth
So how does the front-facing camera recognize your face? Using a mass of sensors Apple calls True Depth.
When you lift the phone to wake it, an infrared lamp blasts invisible light forward to see if a face is in range. If so, a tiny projector blasts 30,000 pinpoints of infrared light onto your face, and a camera reads the distortion of their spacing and shape to find the contours of your face. (It even works in the dark, since it’s infrared.)
The iPhone X’s notch packs a sizeable array of gadgets, much of which constitutes the TrueDepth depth camera.
The status of your hairstyle, beard or mustache, makeup, and glasses doesn’t affect Face ID’s accuracy. Better yet, the software continues to fine-tune its mathematical model of your face every time you use it.
Of course, Samsung’s phones have offered facial recognition for some time. But after trying Face ID a couple of dozen times, I realized that it’s much faster and more reliable. In fact, it took a few tries for me even to notice that it was doing anything. Only the tiny opening of a padlock on the Lock screen signified that facial recognition had done its thing.
Apple plans to get a lot of mileage out of its depth-sensing front camera. For example, the iPhone X can take front-facing Portrait-mode photos. (On recent iPhone Plus models, two lenses on the back can tell the difference between the subject and the background—and to softly blur the background, as in professional photos. See my story here.)
This camera also permits the creation of Animoji—animated cartoon faces whose expressions follow and mimic your expressions in real time. (Apple says that it tracks 50 different muscles in your face.) Happy, sad, wink, frown, laugh, whatever—your little cartoon-animal avatar does the same. You can record yourself saying something and then send the resulting animation via the Messages app. Suddenly, you’re Warner Brothers.
Software companies are invited to write apps that exploit the depth camera, too. Apple even demoed an upcoming version of one of its own apps, a fun movie-making app called Clips, with a new feature that replaces your background, greenscreen style. You can shoot yourself with a new background of your choosing, like an enchanted forest or an artsy linescape, or side-by-side with a Pixar character.
Wireless charging
I hate when companies say “wireless charging,” when what they mean is “laying your phone on special charging pad.” Yes, OK, you’re no longer plugging in a power cord; it’s a little more convenient than a cable. But the phone isn’t charging through the air, in your pocket. You can’t really do much with the phone when it’s lying there.
Props to Apple, at least, for adopting the same charging standard that Samsung and other companies use, called Qi (pronounced “chee”). You don’t have to buy Apple’s charging pad; you can use any company’s. They’re about $12 each on Amazon.
In fact, Apple’s charging pad, called AirPower, won’t even be available until next year. Although when it does come out, it’ll offer a sweet perk: You can lay your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPod charging case (a special new one) on this pad simultaneously, and charge them all at once.
In 2018, Apple will offers its AirPower charging pad, capable of charging multiple Apple gadgets at once.
In the meantime, Apple intends to throw its weight behind the Qi charging standard. It’s talking to hotels, airports, and car makers, in hopes of both improving the Qi standard and making charging surfaces available everywhere you want to be.
The guts
Apple says that the iPhone X’s camera has a bigger, faster sensor, and that both of its lenses (wide-angle and zoom) now have optical image stabilization. (On the 7 Plus, only the wide-angle lens was stabilized.) That’ll make a big difference in videos and low-light stills, although couldn’t do much testing in the Steve Jobs Theater.
The processor is apparently better, too—“the most powerful and smartest chip ever in a smartphone, with a neural engine,” if that means anything. And “four efficiency cores.” (Don’t you hate when your phone doesn’t have enough efficiency cores?)
The battery lasts two hours longer than the iPhone 7.
And all of this runs on iOS 11, the software that’s coming September 19. You can read about it here.
The deal
You can probably predict what some people won’t like about the iPhone X. That it’s too expensive, and that it borrows a lot of ideas from Samsung and other Android phone makers. And, yes. That’s the game these days, folks: Apple and its rivals shamefully steal from each other year after year.
Even so, if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, the iPhone X is the most exciting leap in years. The cameras, the depth sensor, and the OLED screen are all executed with typical Apple polish—but the big one is getting that vast, stunning screen into a phone body whose far reaches don’t exceed your hand.
The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus will be available on September 22. The iPhone X, though, won’t be available to review until October, and won’t be shipping until November 3. Even then, it’ll be in short supply.
Those who are lucky and rich enough to get one, though, are likely to have some very merry holidays indeed.
More from David Pogue:
iOS11 is about to arrive — here’s what’s in it
MacOS High Sierra comes this fall—and brings these 23 features
T-Mobile COO: Why we make investments like free Netflix that ‘seem crazy’
How Apple’s iPhone has improved since its 2007 debut
Gulliver’s Gate is a $40 million world of miniatures in Times Square
The 5 best new features of this week’s YouTube redesign
Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant is ambitious, powerful, and half-baked
Is through-the-air charging a hoax?
David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, is the author of “iPhone: The Missing Manual.” He welcomes nontoxic comments in the comments section below. On the web, he’s davidpogue.com. On Twitter, he’s @pogue. On email, he’s [email protected]. You can read all his articles here, or you can sign up to get his columns by email.
I'm typically blasé about upgrading phones -- I'm doing fine on an iPhone 6 -- but the X is tempting. Not that I have a spare grand to spend.
The way they italicize and repeat Scandinavian makes it seem quite sinister…
Advertisement from The Book Review Digest, 1916.
Why Did They Come?
TOO FUCKIN’ phenomenal to NOT reblog!!!!
Anyone else reminded of Maus? Like, hello, Art Spiegelman, what have you been up to lately?
The National's "Sleep Well Beast," in limited edition blue vinyl. Sad and lovely, of course.
President Obama Responds to Trump’s Recission of DACA.
Immigration can be a controversial topic. We all want safe, secure borders and a dynamic economy, and people of goodwill can have legitimate disagreements about how to fix our immigration system so that everybody plays by the rules.
But that’s not what the action that the White House took today is about. This is about young people who grew up in America – kids who study in our schools, young adults who are starting careers, patriots who pledge allegiance to our flag. These Dreamers are Americans in their hearts, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper. They were brought to this country by their parents, sometimes even as infants. They may not know a country besides ours. They may not even know a language besides English. They often have no idea they’re undocumented until they apply for a job, or college, or a driver’s license.
Over the years, politicians of both parties have worked together to write legislation that would have told these young people – our young people – that if your parents brought you here as a child, if you’ve been here a certain number of years, and if you’re willing to go to college or serve in our military, then you’ll get a chance to stay and earn your citizenship. And for years while I was President, I asked Congress to send me such a bill.
That bill never came. And because it made no sense to expel talented, driven, patriotic young people from the only country they know solely because of the actions of their parents, my administration acted to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people, so that they could continue to contribute to our communities and our country. We did so based on the well-established legal principle of prosecutorial discretion, deployed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, because our immigration enforcement agencies have limited resources, and it makes sense to focus those resources on those who come illegally to this country to do us harm. Deportations of criminals went up. Some 800,000 young people stepped forward, met rigorous requirements, and went through background checks. And America grew stronger as a result.
But today, that shadow has been cast over some of our best and brightest young people once again. To target these young people is wrong – because they have done nothing wrong. It is self-defeating – because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love. And it is cruel. What if our kid’s science teacher, or our friendly neighbor turns out to be a Dreamer? Where are we supposed to send her? To a country she doesn’t know or remember, with a language she may not even speak?
Let’s be clear: the action taken today isn’t required legally. It’s a political decision, and a moral question. Whatever concerns or complaints Americans may have about immigration in general, we shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own, who pose no threat, who are not taking away anything from the rest of us. They are that pitcher on our kid’s softball team, that first responder who helps out his community after a disaster, that cadet in ROTC who wants nothing more than to wear the uniform of the country that gave him a chance. Kicking them out won’t lower the unemployment rate, or lighten anyone’s taxes, or raise anybody’s wages.
It is precisely because this action is contrary to our spirit, and to common sense, that business leaders, faith leaders, economists, and Americans of all political stripes called on the administration not to do what it did today. And now that the White House has shifted its responsibility for these young people to Congress, it’s up to Members of Congress to protect these young people and our future. I’m heartened by those who’ve suggested that they should. And I join my voice with the majority of Americans who hope they step up and do it with a sense of moral urgency that matches the urgency these young people feel.
Ultimately, this is about basic decency. This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated. It’s about who we are as a people – and who we want to be.
What makes us American is not a question of what we look like, or where our names come from, or the way we pray. What makes us American is our fidelity to a set of ideals – that all of us are created equal; that all of us deserve the chance to make of our lives what we will; that all of us share an obligation to stand up, speak out, and secure our most cherished values for the next generation. That’s how America has traveled this far. That’s how, if we keep at it, we will ultimately reach that more perfect union.
The sun over Wyoming. Just breathtaking.
Black hole sun, won't you come... #eclipse
A picture of a picture of the corona with a self-portrait included.
First contact. #eclipse
We are ready for the #Eclipse on Casper Mountain in Wyoming.
The history of racism and ethnic hate in America is long and deep. What are the cultural, economic, and political currents that led us here?
Our good friends @jstor made this handy syllabus for those looking to put this past weekend’s events into a historical context. Even if you’re not a subscriber, the syllabus is freely shared.
Eclipsefest in downtown Casper, Wyoming. Totality tomorrow.
We are sleeping in a yurt tonight, somewhere north of Cody, Wyoming.
Family spelunking.
Current status.
Awaiting MacBitch, where Heathers meets the Scottish Play at the Exit Stage Left.