You may have heard that the iPhone X is the greatest iPhone ever. It makes sense. Every new iPhone should be better than the one that came before. It would be rather embarrassing for Tim Cook to announce at the end of the Apple Keynote event, “One more thing… we tried, but it was just too hard to top last year’s phone.” Then follow up with, “Here’s the second best iPhone ever!”
To be fair, it’s not just Apple. Every tech company seems to do it. But no matter how many time I hear it, I can’t help but hear a little child declaring on their birthday, “This is the oldest I’ve ever been on a birthday!”
Sure, it is true, but this doesn’t negate the ridiculousness of pointing it out. I get why tech companies do it. They can’t objectively claim that their phone is better than all other phones, but they need to brag about it and get you hyped up. So they instead say the only thing they can, “This new phone is newer than all of our older phones!”
It’s absurd. And as a tech culture, we eat it up. Visit The Verge, Engadget, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, and countless others and you will see over and over. We like to declare the obvious newness of the new. It’s as if we are surprised every time a new product comes out. “Wow, they did it again. They made a phone newer than their old one!”
So instead, I urge everyone out there to find an objective way to review phones. Don’t measure it on its newness, but on its merit. Don’t declare a new phone as better until you know that for sure. Sure, the new iPhone is faster, but they removed a lot of desperately needed features to make that happen. Yes, they added wireless charging, but made they phone fragile and expensive to repair. The phone is missing a basic feature in a headphone jack. There’s a in screen protrusion that sticks out at the top of the screen and breaks an otherwise clean looking display. The camera bump is big enough to sink the titanic. They took away the fingerprint sensor and replaced it with facial recognition when they could have just as easily had both.
The worst part is that Face ID is just not good enough. It doesn’t work when the phone is on the table and you just want to unlock it without picking it up. You have to lean over it to unlock it. FaceID isn’t secure either. Your friends can just point it at your face, unlock your device and look through your private photos or disparage you through all of your social media apps. Relatives that share similar facial features can fool the phone and unlock it. I grew up with brothers and FaceID would have been seen as a God send to them. In their hands, Face ID would have cost me years of therapy. While a fingerprint sensor still isn’t as secure as a password, it’s significantly more secure than FaceID. This isn’t a problem with facial recognition tech, because the more advance Windows Hello has been tested with twins and it locked out the twin every time.
In the case of the new iPhone, newer isn’t better.
I’m not going to argue that facial recognition is a bad thing. It’s not. It’s really handy on Windows Hello! But when there is no reason to remove the fingerprint sensor when having both is just as easy.
So Apple, I get that your new phone in newer, but I’m on the fence as to whether or not it’s actually better.
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