Even though the overall tone of this review was upbeat and positive, it seemed that the baseline conclusion was: "hopefully we find a use for the minor iterative improvements that will make this more than just the next release in a series of underwhelming releases." For one of the first, selectively-chosen reviews of what is supposed to be a ground-breaking product, the article essentially told us 1) the pictures look better; 2) Apple finally imitated Samsung's Infinity Display; 3) my fingers learned new motions that were useless with other Apple products; 4) FaceID became familiar and even worked sometimes; 5) I could put my face on a pile of poo, which required some cool technology.
Not that those features or the article suggest the iPhone X is a bad product, or bug-ridden, non-usable, or anything else. But how in the world are people--is Apple--still not embarrassed pretending that this is a revolutionary device? Even if FaceID is intensely innovative and unparalleled new technology - that is just the feature that people use to get to the features they actually want to use. No one is going to buy a phone to play around with the unlocking mechanism, they buy it for what that phone can do for them once it's unlocked. Hyping on FaceID is like saying, "We are revolutionizing mobile computing by entirely overhauling the millisecond process by which you gain access to a slightly improved version of the product you already have."
Not that those features or the article suggest the iPhone X is a bad product, or bug-ridden, non-usable, or anything else. But how in the world are people--is Apple--still not embarrassed pretending that this is a revolutionary device? Even if FaceID is intensely innovative and unparalleled new technology - that is just the feature that people use to get to the features they actually want to use. No one is going to buy a phone to play around with the unlocking mechanism, they buy it for what that phone can do for them once it's unlocked. Hyping on FaceID is like saying, "We are revolutionizing mobile computing by entirely overhauling the millisecond process by which you gain access to a slightly improved version of the product you already have."