Apple iPhone X announced with edge-to-edge screen, Face ID at $999

Today, Apple has introduced the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. But in true Apple fashion, Tim Cook promised us “one more thing.”

Today, ten years later, Apple is introducing the iPhone X. And, by the way, it’s pronounced “Ten.”

So what does a decade of iPhone innovation look like?

“iPhone X is the future of the smartphone. It is packed with incredible new technologies, like the innovative TrueDepth camera system, beautiful Super Retina display and super fast A11 Bionic chip with neural engine,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iPhone X enables fluid new user experiences — from unlocking your iPhone with Face ID to playing immersive AR games to sharing Animoji in Messages — it is the beginning of the next ten years for iPhone.”

Gorgeous All-Screen Design

iPhone X introduces a revolutionary design with a stunning all-screen display that precisely follows the curve of the device, clear to the elegantly rounded corners. The all-glass front and back feature the most durable glass ever in a smartphone in silver or space gray, while a highly polished, surgical-grade stainless steel band seamlessly wraps around and reinforces iPhone X.

A seven-layer color process allows for precise color hues and opacity on the glass finish, and a reflective optical layer enhances the rich colors, making the design as elegant as it is durable while maintaining water and dust resistance.

Remarkable Super Retina Display

Following the current trend in smartphones, Apple has done away with the bezels on the iPhone X, offering an edge-to-edge 5.8-inch display. In fact, Apple is upgrading quite a bit in that department, offering an OLED display for the very first time, calling it the Super Retina Display. This brings with it all the standard benefits of OLED, including more accurate colors, better image uniformity across the screen, etc.

The iPhone X Super Retina display supports 2046×1125 resolution, with 455 PPI, and HDR in both Dolby Vision and HDR. The company is reportedly paying around $125 per panel, which is part of the reason for the reports of a more expensive iPhone.

Face ID, a Powerful and Secure Authentication System

Reinvented Front and Back Cameras Featuring Portrait Lighting

As far as cameras are concerned, the iPhone X is about as locked and loaded as one can get. The rear camera features a 12-megapixel sensor, with dual-lenses at f1.8 and f2.8 apertures (which is brighter than the 7 Plus telephoto). It comes with dual-image OIS quad-LED TrueTone flash.

Because of the combination of the new A11 Bionic and the enhanced camera, Apple is introducing a new Portrait Lighting, letting users select their lighting effects. These aren’t filters, but rather a real-time analysis of the light hitting the subject’s face, and these lighting effects can be added before and after the photo is taken.

The new camera also delivers the highest quality video capture ever in a smartphone, with better video stabilization, 4K video up to 60fps and 1080p slo-mo up to 240fps. The Apple-designed video encoder provides real-time image and motion analysis for optimal quality video.

Portrait mode with Portrait Lighting on both the front and rear cameras brings dramatic studio lighting effects to iPhone and allows customers to capture stunning portraits with a shallow depth-of-field effect in five different lighting styles.

The front-facing camera is powered by that True Depth camera system that supports FaceID. But the big news here is that Portrait mode and Portrait lighting is now available on the front-camera.

The cameras on iPhone X are custom tuned for the ultimate AR experience. Each camera is individually calibrated, with new gyroscopes and accelerometers for accurate motion tracking. The A11 Bionic CPU handles world tracking, scene recognition, and the GPU enables incredible graphics at 60fps, while the image signal processor does real-time lighting estimation. With ARKit, iOS developers can take advantage of the TrueDepth camera and the rear cameras to create games and apps offering fantastically immersive and fluid experiences that go far beyond the screen.

With iOS 11, iPhone X supports HEIF and HEVC for up to two times compression and storage for twice the photos and videos.

Animoji Brings Emoji to Life

The TrueDepth camera brings emoji to life in a fun new way with Animoji. Working with A11 Bionic, the TrueDepth camera captures and analyzes over 50 different facial muscle movements, then animates those expressions in a dozen different Animoji, including a panda, unicorn, and robot. Available as an iMessage app pre-installed on iPhone X, customers can record and send Animoji messages with their voice that can smile, frown and more.

 

Introducing A11 Bionic

A11 Bionic, the most powerful and smartest chip ever in a smartphone, features a six-core CPU design with two performance cores that are 25 percent faster and four efficiency cores that are 70 percent faster than the A10 Fusion, offering industry-leading performance and energy efficiency.

A new, second-generation performance controller can harness all six cores simultaneously, delivering up to 70 percent greater performance for multi-threaded workloads, giving customers more power while lasting two hours longer than iPhone 7. A11 Bionic also integrates an Apple-designed GPU with a three-core design that delivers up to 30 percent faster graphics performance than the previous generation. All this power enables incredible new machine learning, AR apps and immersive 3D games.

The new A11 Bionic neural engine is a dual-core design and performs up to 600 billion operations per second for real-time processing. A11 Bionic neural engine is designed for specific machine learning algorithms and enables Face ID, Animoji and other features.

Specs

The iPhone X, as well as the other new iPhones announced today, comes with wireless charging capabilities, thanks to that new glass back. Wireless charging is supported by Qi, which is considered as the standard in the wireless charging industry.

Plus, battery life is two hours longer than the iPhone 7, with most of the improvement coming by way of software enhancements. But because Apple likes to take things to the next level, the wireless charging on the new iPhones is coming with a new accessory called AirPower. It’s a larger mat that lets users charge their iPhones, Apple Watch and AirPods all at the same time.

The iPhone X is packed with the new A11 Bionic processor: 64-bit design, six cores, two high-performance processors that are 25 percent faster than the A10 and 4-high efficiency cores (two more than the A10) that are 70 percent faster. The GPU is 30 percent faster.

Part of the bigger news here is improved photographs. As Panzarino noted in the live blog, “The Apple ISP is one of its secret weapons in photography. If you’ve loved an iPhone picture you’ve ever taken then thank the image processor inside the phone for that result.”