Adding 2 little corners at the top was a horrible idea.
I upgraded at Christmas. I'm sure that they put a lot of effort into it. But now my phone no longer displays battery percentage, and I keep finding myself noticing the missing chunk. Even after a month I notice it.
Squeezing the last square inch is emphatically not worth it. Not even a little bit.
I was very skeptical about the notches. But after a month of use, I find that I don't notice the missing space at all.
Most often, it really does feel like the entire screen is being used. It's almost an optical illusion.
My two minor issues with the X are: 1) the glass back makes it very slippery! (It slides off the arm rests on my couch no matter how well I place it.) 2) The protruding camera on the back is very noticable. I wish Apple would make a flat-backed phone again. When I set my phone on a flat surface, it shouldn't wobble.
Overall I was very skeptical of the X for a lot of reasons... but it's by far the best phone I've ever used. (And it better be at this price!)
I can't stand the silicone cases. They are grippy (good) but are very difficult to get in/out of my pants pocket (bad). My wife likes hers, but it goes in a purse so she doesn't experience the drawback frequently.
I've been using the Apple leather cases for my last two phones (including the X). They aren't as grippy as the silicone cases, and they cost more, but I find they feel better in the hand and don't have the "stuck to my pocket" problem.
I used to be a "no case" person as well. I dropped my 3GS a half dozen times and it just got dinged up corners. Same with a Lumia after that. I dropped my Nexus 6 about 5 inches and the screen shattered. Started using cases after that.
I too prefer the leather cases, but mine started breaking and the plastic to which the leather is bonded made for a very sharp edge. I cut my hand a couple of times just trying to get the phone out of my pocket. Too expensive to easily justify a replacement.
The leather cases don't stand up well to sweat, especially if you have heavy salt content in your sweat (I've had both style cases, the leather ones look pretty bad quickly)
Personally I’m a fan of the Otterbox cases, especially Symmetry. They don’t suffer from the pure silicone case resistance to sliding into pockets but they do subtly improve grip and would seem to offer pretty solid protection.
Apple expects you to use a case, preferably their silicone or leather ones.
Put them on and you'll see how the back suddenly becomes perfectly flat and non slippery. The notch helps in securing the case. The changing shape of the notch also means that cases don't transfer between iPhone models.
If it requires a case to not be a nuisance why isn't the case included? Why is the phone made of glass if nobody is ever going to see it? Why go to the lengths to make it thinner than the camera just to add a case? It's just really sloppy and antithetical to what I appreciate(d?) about Apple's devices.
I still wish there was a smaller iPhone that I could operate one-handed without the hacky home button tap to reach the top of the screen. How does that work on the X without the home button?
Same as with the wireless charger and wireless earbuds, they are advertised as part of the iphone innovative features but sold separately, so that they can advertise the whole line as "starting from $699"; meanwhile the whole iphone experience actually starts just shy of a thousand dollars.
> I still wish there was a smaller iPhone
me too, me too. holding tight to the 5s for now, I'm not gonna get a pouch for these non-pocketable monstrosities.
Reachability on an x is done by swiping down the bottom edge of the screen, and it really does feel a lot more natural than the double-tap of the older iPhones.
I don't choose Apple for options. I choose Apple for devices that work and get out of my way. Customization is not always a feature. This is a similar philosophy to sane defaults in software.
From my perspective the aftermarket cell phone case fixes a flaw in the design.
> Why is the phone made of glass if nobody is ever going to see it?
Highly likely unrelated, but it reminds me of Steve Jobs's biography where he talks about the important lesson from his dad about making sure every aspect of your work is done with care throughout. Even the parts people won't see.
I upgraded to an X from a 5. The screen real estate really allowed me to not to turn on my computer at some nights, which I consider as a plus. I just read what I want to read, and reply a bunch of e-mails, then put it off.
Apple does not expect you to use a case, though they will certainly sell you one. Virtually no Apple promotional media features people using iPhones in cases (they are always au naturale), and Jony Ive certainly does not use one.
The cases Apple sells you feel like they're part of the phone after you put them on. My phone feels naked without it. And I was a hardcore case hater for the longest time. Now I've seen the light, Apple engineered their cases with every bit as much care as they did the phone. I can see why they wouldn't put one on in the marketing materials, but trust me they really do go together.
Check out the left edge of your iPhone X. Look at the ugly cutout for the mute toggle, right above the plastic buttons they added to pad out the phone's volume buttons so that they're actually usable in a case. If "in case" was the design spec for the iPhone, I think Apple could do better here.
I have a 7 Plus, but mine has a cutout as well for the mute toggle that makes it more difficult to use. I consider this a feature, when I went without a case, one of my main gripes was that I could never control the state of the mute toggle. Now it never switches on or off accidentally while the phone is in my toggle.
Just because they decided "if you insist on using a case, we built you the best case" (and I agree, and I use the case; but I also used cases from InCase before Apple started making cases), that doesn't mean they intend you to use a case.
"The notch" usually refers to the screen cutout for sensors at the top of the iPhone X screen, which has no relevance to the case. Do you mean the camera bump?
The iPhone cases from Apple would grip the same without the camera bump and corresponding case cutout. The sides of the apple cases wrap around all four edges of the phone, with only a partial cutout for speakers, microphone, and lightning port at the bottom. The edges of the case hold it very securely. It's hard to get the phone out because the edges grip so tightly.
> The changing shape of the notch also means that cases don't transfer between iPhone models.
The rest of the dimensions also change. If the iPhone 7 and 8 had the camera in the exact same spot, the cases still wouldn't be interchangeable. Not with a good fit on each phone at least.
> I guarantee Jony uses a case.
I bet he doesn't. People use cases to protect their phones. Ive could break a hundred phones and not feel any pain from replacing them.
This hasn’t been my experience, I’ve only spent the money for a leather case once (always used to go caseless) but I’ve had this case for more than a year and It’s held up beautifully.
I’ve noticed that their silicone cases peel as you’ve described, but I’ve had great luck with the leather case even after years of abuse, drops, and getting it damp.
Both of your issues can be solved with a case. I don’t like cases either, but most people use them, and if the camera was flush with the back of the phone, then all of those peoples’ cameras would be recessed into a hole, which is probably a bad thing.
I don't really buy that recessed into a hole argument. I bet that case manufacturers would have no trouble modifying their designs to accommodate it. Like a gradient of thickness leading to the area around the camera, for example.
That’s not what happened though. With the older iPhones (with flat cameras), the flash would actually reflect off cases. It happened to me often enough. you can find examples of this in a web search.
>I wish Apple would make a flat-backed phone again. When I set my phone on a flat surface, it shouldn't wobble.
Well, the main issue is the wobble, but a flatness isn't necessarily the only solution. I wonder if they could use a less-conventional design, perhaps a contoured back with a "fatter" top and bottom that would allow it to rest horizontally, while improving balance and hand-feel. That's a pretty serious camera in the phone, they're doing plenty with the space they're using, and I bet they could cram some more fun components with a fatter bottom.
The people suggesting to buy a case are probably the same people defending the audio jack removal. Imagine how much more battery they could fit in if the phone was a bit thicker.
The other way to look at it is that the phones need to be thinner to make them a reasonable size with a case on them. Cases are a consumable--mine has a ton of dings in it that otherwise the iPhone itself would've absorbed.
Or you could just not build the whole damn thing out of glass. Steel or carbon fiber can be light and thin, without the propensity to shatter into smithereens.
Most phones are a lot more durable than people seem to think, or maybe they're too lazy to take care of their expensive devices. Sure, my Moto X has a couple of battle scars, but nothing is broken.
Because I'm so scared of getting cracked screens from accidentally dropping my phone, I'll usually get a heavy-duty case (I like the tech21 cases) to protect my phone. This pretty much nullifies anything about the aesthetics of the phone. But having a phone I don't need to worry about is more important to me than how it looks. I'm curious why others are willing to risk it after spending so much money on their phones.
My iPhone X screen cracked falling out of my car door onto concrete. 80 days of ownership in. AppleCare FTW. I’ve never had an iPhone display crack so easily.
I really would prefer not to pay extra hundreds of dollars just so that I don't need to choose the cheap option for repair in order to keep my warranty. But it is what it is.
I certainly understand. As a counter point and a bit of the (probably faulty) logic for why i choose no case + AppleCare: I’ve managed to break screens in cases in prior iphones. I’ve used local screen replacement shops and have been totally unimpressed with the quality of replacement i.e. I’m convinced i did not receive a remotely comparable screen to Apple’s OEM. I use my phone all day every day for work. I keep my phone in my jeans pocket and really prefer the no-case slim fit. Cheap cases tend to last me 6 months a pop before getting ratty looking, so i can either spend $50 on a nice Otterbox or other quality case or $15*4 for a new cheap case every so often.
Apple care, expensive though it may be, gets me a few mulligans while also providing broader coverage against other unknown damage or warranty issues, something even the nicest Otterbox style cases won’t afford me. It’s all a trade off. My preference is expensive but I historically break a screen every year, why not plan accordingly.
I'm curious about the situations that cause you to drop your phone. When does it happen?
I don't want to be rude, I simply have a hard time understanding how careless people can be with their expensive devices. I'm not specifically accusing you of being careless, but I don't understand how people can drop their phones all the time.
My Moto X has been dropped one time, because I accidentally put it behind a stupid strap on my pants, rather than in the pocket. I cut that strap off afterwards, because that's just a really shitty idea to put a strap right on front of a pocket.
I would expect someone with your train of thought to especially want to buy a case. I'm curious why you take the risk? There are circumstances beyond your control and ability to predict sometimes. Ever mind your own business on the street, and then people in a rush violently crash into you? In order to break your fall, you have to let go of your phone and it falls, and those who made you fall are long gone? Yeah, it hasn't happened to me either. The point is that there are situations you can't predict, and besides that, you can't always be perfect either. I'm certainly not claiming to be perfect, hence the case.
To be blunt, I have functional fingers and situational awareness. I actually hold on to my phone, and if I need to look at it, I don't stand around randomly in the middle of a path where people need to move through. If I don't think I can use my phone safely, I wait.
That probably sounds a little bit sanctimonious, but it's the truth.
I have broken exactly one phone in my entire phone-owning life (since 2002), I've had 6 phones during this time, 4 feature phones and 2 smartphones. So one accident in 16 years, and that was a Sony Ericsson Elm. It was actually what pushed me to finally get a smartphone, so maybe it was a net positive :-)
I've had zero accidents in my entire phone-owning life since 2004, including 3 smartphones. I still prefer the safety of cases. To me, you don't sound sanctimonious, you sound arrogant and risk-seeking. To each their own, I guess. I think cases are worth it and don't care about any of the alleged negatives. Others think differently.
That's weird cause I actually find the X the grippiest iPhone I've had yet. My biggest complaint about the iPhone 6-7 was that it would slip out of my hand all the time. But with the X, I can even hold it at an angle with three fingers and it grips to my fingers. I don't know how, or why my experience is so different, but it's one of my favourite things about it.
It's not like I love the notch, but I'd rather have it than a smaller screen or no sensors, which are the two only other options. It's not a piece of missing screen, it's two bonus bits of screen (and I like the approach of just simplifying the status bar and jamming it in there).
This is one thing I absolutely don't understand. Phone makers should be sued to oblivion (and I'm saying this someone who is not fond of the litigation culture of US in general) for making a portable device that is essentially designed for failure .. a fall. A phone that is meant to be held for hours, to be placed in all sorts of surface, giving it a slippery back is willful negligence for me.
But it's no nice looking they would say while buying a cover to promptly cover it the moment they unbox it. The idiocy of modern day smartphone culture boggles my mind. Ironic that it reminds me of apple's 1984 commercial in a bad way.
If they design a thin phone that requires a case, anyone can choose any case they wish to make the phone look any way they wish, and to make it as resistant to falls as they wish.
If they make the phone thicker (a "built in" case, if you will) a consumer's choice is actually restricted. Then there is of course that 10% of people who won't actually use a case served also.
Why would you sue someone for offering a breakable product? If people don't want it, they don't have to buy it. Seems like a pretty bad precedent to set.
In England the sale of goods act specifies that products should be “sufficiently durable”. Personally I feel that dropping a phone from a few feet and having to replace the glass screen fails that test
I don't use a case for mine and have had it slide out of my pocket while driving, had to fish it out of the crack between my seat and the center console. This was with normal pants too. To be fair my old iPhone7 had the same problem, but it still amazes me they could design it to be _that_ slick.
Phones are of course more slippery than ever as they've grown and slimmed and've developed a whole touch screen on one side.
But I also wonder what material you'd manufacture right onto a phone that doesn't just cheapen it to most people, like the lame helmet they give you when you rent a motorcycle. A cool brushed metal feel vs the cracking rubber and yellowing rubber on my girlfriend's cheap android.
Either way I'm not sure why one wouldn't put it in a case. It's like 10 years too late for anyone to be marveling at it.
What's so infuriating about this is that it seems like they go out of their way to make the back of the phone slippery. The metal back of the iPhone 6 and 6s is like teflon and the glass on the X is almost as slippery. Why? I have an old iPhone 4 sitting on the shelf that I occasionally pickup just to marvel at how it sticks in your hand. They proved it could be done years ago.
I don't find the glass back on the X to be very slippery at all in hand. My fingers stick to it quite well. It does slide on furniture, but in hand it feels pretty secure, especially relative to older iPhones. The 4 was easier to hold because it was just so small.
With the notch, status space is at a premium and they finally get rid of that completely unnecessary advertising for AT&T, etc. (shows up on lock screen, that’s it). Also, when I’m in the background and using Google Maps for directions or something, it’s actually easier to have the location button in the top-left corner because I don’t hit it by accident.
I really don’t notice the notch after a month or so but I also set a wallpaper with a black top (thanks to the OLED, that part of the screen is so dark that it really does hide the notch completely).
One thing that’s really stupid is web pages. So many of them have floating bars at the top and buttons at the bottom; then there’s browser UI, and then the notch has the illusion that it’s taking up even more space (when in a way it’s not). In the end each site feels like it’s crapping all over my screen space on the X. Mobile browsing needs to be seriously redesigned from the ground up; anything less than a full screen experience needs to go.
> they finally get rid of that completely unnecessary advertising for AT&T
Which makes me think, is it easy to know what operator you are connected to? I live on a border, and it's important to know whether I'm on a French antenna or a Belgian one.
I know it's an edge case and most people don't need that, but I'm curious and I can't really find screenshots of it. Actually on the screenshots I find you can't even know if you're connected on 4G or not, which matters as some operators here only allow unlimited data on 4G.
Living in a border region nearly everyone here uses "manual carrier search" (I don't know the proper English term for this). Otherwise it can get pretty costly.
But isn't it tedious to have to manually change your carrier every time you cross the border? Especially when driving, I really wouldn't want to navigate these menus while on the highway.
Well - if I am staying in "my country" I leave my manual selected carrier on. When I'm travelling into the other countries I change it to automatic carrier search. Works fine for me.
I guess you have to pick your battles. Either do it manually and not worry about a big bill or do it automatically and accept you might get a big bill. How much is the convenience worth?
All the website top/bottom fixed position junk is one more reason I appreciate the iPhone X - the extra tall screen leaves more room for content than my old 7plus.
OTOH, if it gets too bad I use a kill sticky bookmarklet.
I keep missing calls because I forget that I have the do not disturb mode on. Maybe the next iteration will have narrower notch so that we can upgrade to get the two extra icons
Do Not Disturb has a great option to allow calls but ignore everything else. You can also set it to ignore calls unless there are two in a row from the same person.
I keep DND on all hours of the day, every day, but never feel like I'm missing anything by just allowing phone calls. When I really need focus, and at night, I'll turn on the more restrictive setting, but at the end of the day if somebody really needs to get in touch with me the option is there.
(An aside, it would be nice to be able to have a separate schedule for the "only allow double calls through" option so it could be on during sleeping hours)
Agreed, this has been my biggest frustration with the notch. I missed calls the first few weeks I had my iPhone X, and finally changed Do Not Disturb to be on a schedule rather than manually set.
I wish they had provided the option to customize the status bar to always include this icon. Or better yet, create a mode where Do Not Disturb automatically turns on and off when I'm sleeping and awake based on signals like alarms, charging, and motion.
I agree. The alternative to not having the notch is having a smaller screen AND still having the top status bar. So we've ended up with a good half-inch of extra main app space with the app.
To me this is like saying that the fuel gauge on your new car is only accessible if you hit a button on your steering column, and then only for a few seconds. I use the battery gauge constantly as part of my peripheral vision :/.
Why? Obsessing over your battery gauge is not helpful and should only be done if you're doing something that you know is tremendously power-draining.
For that matter, I only occasionally glance at my fuel gauge in my car too. If it as at 3/4ths 10 minutes ago I don't need to double-check to make sure it hasn't suddenly hit empty.
A beautiful solution to a completely arbitrary problem that they created. Much like needing a dongle to solve their created problem of removing the headphone port. Or needing updates to their operating systems to solve the problem they created with batteries. Are they still able to solve real problems now, instead of those created by themselves?
If you're talking about the notch vs. touchid, then no, I vastly prefer the notch/faceid and can't wait for all my apple products to have it.
Why? Simple user experience. I don't want to rest my thumb (or any finger) to unlock my phone before I select where I want to go. Screen turns on, notifications are present, phone is unlocked and my finger's first gesture is to select which notification to goto. That whole same user experience with 1 less motion is gold to me.
I'm curious, do you wear baggy pants or not keep your phone in your pocket? I use android phones, but anything much over a 5" screen is too large for me to get in or out of my pocket while sitting down.
Also I know my hands are on the small side, but various phones/phablets the size of the 7+ are uncomfortable for me to hold, and obviously impossible for me to use with one hand.
Though it's not wide, the effective screen size of the X is very tall and you have to reach down quite low to do the gestures, compared to home button taps. I found it quite unergonomic. I returned mine for an 8.
(Writing this made me realize I always taps the very uppermost area of the home button)
I have a phone with the reader on the back. Seemed like a good idea til I realized I couldn't unlock it anymore while pinching it out of my pocket much less when it's flat against a table.
This may be my ignorance, having an iPhone 7, but doesn't Face ID "unlock" to what everyone previously called the Lock Screen? So not only do you need to point your phone at your face (which, I'm more conscious than ever, I rarely do) but you still have to perform some gesture to get to your home screen where with Touch ID it's one gesture to do both.
If you wake up a 7 and swipe on a notification you will get the touchid dialog. On an X it will bring you directly to the app because the phone is already unlocked.
No one is saying that they don't expertly engineer things, it's just that their design "solutions" look less like actual solutions with every successive product launch.
Won't happen, but a number of alternatives have finally been springing up which beat the features of Adobe products. DaVinci Resolve instead of Premier Pro and After Effects to a lesser extent, Unity Web instead of Flash, Darktable instead of Lightroom. And on the Mac OS side, Affinity Designer instead of Illustrator, Pixelmator instead of Photoshop.
Wow, did not realize that DaVinci Resolve runs on Linux. Blackmagic continues to dominate in broadcast innovation, especially at their price points. Thanks.
They've finally fixed it after 20 years because APFS is case sensitive. But it's been a lovely way for them to force upgrades to the pay monthly creative cloud if you want to ever move off HFS+.
This is not actually the case. APFS can continue to behave as a case-INsensitive partition (check the options when creating a new APFS volume), and remains so for the system partition, I guess specifically to avoid any hard-to-debug compatibility issues.
you can install mame/gnome arcade on linux and definitely create a dangerous distraction. I've wasted some time on centipede, burger time and even snacks'n jaxson
I really think if Adobe did that and then released an Adobe-branded desktop Linux distribution they could take over the desktop OS segment for "creative professionals".
Does linux support the hardware well, with regard to tricky-yet-important things like the trackpad, external displays, and power management?
I'd much rather run linux on my iPhone, but we're lacking the ecosystem of apps, let alone the mobile development library. I'm hugely biased, but I'd love to have better React Native support on linux for this very reason.
I have had no issues with my hardware - although it does take a little bit of extra time to get things working (i.e. nonfree firmware required for the wifi).
It is possible but requires a lot of manual tuning. It's somewhat surprising how badly it is supported, for example the backlight needs an out of tree module.
I just bought a System76 and let the Mac languish on my desk. I lost years of my life trying to adjust to that terrible, terrible operating system. It hamstrings everything. Want to install X, well on linux you just apt-get or yum or whatever. Mac has HomeBrew and the other one. Unfortunately the documentation on how to best install that software installer changes, which leads to odd instabilities. Nothings as community supported as a result. Shortcuts are terrible because you have to constantly flex the hands in to hit Mac Key + whatever. Successive releases are buggy. I get betas being unstable, but whole releases have issues for about a month. All this for only an extra $600 per laptop with less ram.
Oh, speaking of RAM, OSX sucks at allocating it. Yes, yes, "unused RAM is wasted RAM". So is used swap on a SSD that's soldered to the frickin' frame of the laptop. Nothing says great use of time and resources like replacing the entire upper of the laptop. It's not an AR-15. These parts should be easily removed.
Nope it should be under your pinkie to get the span of your hand. Otherwise you're constantly crossing the fingers into an ok for which atrophies the muscles. You're wearing the joint and nerve of the thumb. "Cut" should be left hand pinky on Ctrl and left hand index finger on C. Similiar for paste. Most shortcuts cross the keyboard. Often left hand ctrl and right hand key in such a way as to extend both hands out.
As to brew there was some argument back when I first installed it that it should run as sudo. Then that was found to be terrible, but unless one really gets into brew and all that, figuring out how to undo the mess is neigh on impossible. So my answer was screw it. I do most of my server work in Linux VMs. Anything I need I'll just work in those too.
Then there's the terrible productivity from loosing shortcuts. You see, in the non-Apple world, the Alt key brings up the menu. Now if one pays attention, they can find that hitting Alt + Lettered Key can pick the menu that opens. Further, a bit more sleuthing shows that (while holding Alt, often) letters within the menu items get little bars under them. By pressing that letter while the menu opens, the software reacts as if the mouse manually scurried across the screen to the menu, then down to the sub item and then clicked it. The benefit is that more shortcuts opened up. IDE became even more powerful by allowing chording (like a piano). Unlike Emacs, the chords are often dual handed so the hands span more than contract. Interestingly, while the precise keyboard strokes are different, the general idea transfer across most windowed environments in Linux and Windows. Apple eschewed this for reason I don't know, and won't deign the idea they did it solely out of hubris back in the Lisa era.
> As to brew there was some argument back when I first installed it that it should run as sudo.
I've been using brew for nearly as long as it has existed. AFAIK, the point of the tool was to make it so that sudo would be unnecessary for installing individual packages. Are you suggesting there was a debate over whether installing homebrew itself should require sudo? I don't see how that would have been recommended, given that sudo itself is executed in the install script and is needed, among other things, to create `/usr/local`.
That is true, but I never understand why mix and match uppers and lowers? Why use a DPMS lower with a Sig upper? Makes no sense. Best I can figure is that in a war situation with a gun of questionable stability, swapping parts might give you an advantage in survivability.
The US Army has interchangeability requirements for different rifles based around the AR-15. Different rifles use different barrels, gas systems, and ammunition requiring or eliminating the need for certain features.
Civilians will also often have requirements that are unusual such as left side porting and assists.
Not all manufacturers are going to make all of these variations thus you might choose to mix and match based on your needs. It's also quite common for civilians to make their own lowers to circumvent federal regulations around owning fully automatic weapons.
The M4 has a shorter barrel and thus short and higher pressure gas system. This results in a higher bolt velocity and rate of fire. Because of this and the fact that you typically use M855s in the M4, you can run into feed issues since the bullet tip is more pointed. Because of this they altered the angle of the feed-ramp however that modification caused issue when machined into the upper and so it's preferred for your barrel to have the feed-ramp. Thus your upper and barrel have to be closely paired and are also M4 specific. None of this however affects any compatibility with the lower.
The forward-assist and chrome-lined bores were introduced due to extraction issues experienced during Vietnam with the M16. These were attributed to improper maintenance of the rifle and quality issues with the ammunition. Since neither of those are really issues in civilian rifles and add complexity and expense, they not explicitly needed. So there exist options for uppers without.
Left port and assist uppers are also relatively uncommon but sought after in civilian rifles.
I believe one of the biggest reasons is that nonsensical gun control laws make it difficult to purchase entire rifles in some states, while you can relatively easily buy the components and do the trivial assembly yourself.
It is illegal to sell guns with certain characteristics (e.g. fully automatic fire, select fire) without possessing a Federal Firearms License which carries certain onerous requirements of the seller.
It is not however illegal to own or make such guns.
Because the AR15 is so modular in nature and parts like the stock and barrel don't dictate if the firearm is automatic, federal laws dictate that the lower receiver is what is actually considered the firearm.
Since regulated and unregulated AR15 lowers are mostly identical, and the point at which they diverge is a nonfunctional state, manufacturers can make incomplete or 80% complete AR15 lowers that aren't considered firearms. You can then take these lowers and complete them yourself at home to have an unregistered firearm that you could not otherwise posses without registration.
I don't follow the argument. Both are competing to be a development machine. I contend that Linux is superior when operating the memory subsystem, machine maintenance (like removing the drive or battery), and general ergonomic usability. OS X beats Linux on the laptop for battery power, keyboard layout (I know people don't like th chicklet keys, but every Linux laptop has an integrated number pad which cramps things to the left), and chassis. System76's plastic does feel cheap.
My personal choice is that the benefits of Linux outweigh the benefits of Apple. Apple is expensive by half (my laptop has a slightly slower CPU than my old Mac but 32 GB of RAM vs 16 and new SSD with a replaceable battery. The Mac would be $2600 vs the Linux $1500). For example, my wife's laptop is my old i7. Not the best i7 any more, but it still runs quick, has 16 GB of RAM, a new battery and a new SSD. To get that same capability, I would have had to pay $2400.
That is the problem. I don’t know why you think that the only criteria valuable for comparison is your definition of development. Different people have different needs. For you a mac is clearly not the answer; for you.
Personally, my hands are very uncomfortable every time I have to hold ctrl-a to select all.
I'd argue that they don't really fit most needs. To your issue with ctrl-a, fair concern, but you could just as easily use pinkie + ring finger. It's less movement than mac + a. Again, your hand remains open. Mac closes the hand, which increase nerve and joint issues.
Even if I grant the keyboard, at least in Linux you can easily layout a new keyboard. OSX makes that a pain. You end up having to purchase a tool that jimmies with the system internals to get the mapping to work more than 75%.
Ultimately I agree with the idea that it's people's own money. They should be free do with it as they please (though ironically many of the most ardent OSX users are near authoritarians like AntiFa that want to tax people to support pet ideas and the general removal of freedom). My point above was to commiserating with the OP that Apple produces overrated products when it comes to utility. If one prefers form over function, Apple is the way to go. If one prefers function/price over form, anyone else is better.
You do realize people run multimillion dollar companies using something like ruby, or python, or even java on their macs without any problems right? Not everyone's definition of function is having a perfectly supported and easily installable port of X11.
And at the risk of talking to myself, again, different people have different needs. Function is not only what's useful to you.
By the way, System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys. 3 clicks to remap the keyboard.
how much weaker is the glass thanks to these curves. what's the factor of safety?
where are they intending the glass to break? how did they use that to minimize the damage to the rest of the device when that happens? is it easier to remove the screen there?
The author mentions the "Squircle" but doesn't mention the actual reason this has made an appearance in iOS. Apples Industrial Designers use this shape for corners on their laptops because the reflection is creates is a smooth gradient across the entire curve of the laptop, if you use a basic bevel it creates an ugly hard shine.
So the reason this has moved to iOS is because the ID team and Ive have much more influence there than they did in the early iOS days.
As for the notch and the screen edges my personal belief is this is all down to industrial designer bravado. The brief for the iPhone X is "Equal margins on all edges at any cost" this is why Touch ID had to go and they justify the notch because to the left and right of it there is a margin to the device edge that is equal to the bottom and the sides of the device so in the Industrial Designers eyes they have achieved the perfect symmetrical device (Look at Apples recent laptops to see how much emphasis the current put on symmetry above all else).
My theory is the ID team at Apple would look at the "edgeless" Galaxy S8 screen and scoff that it's not truly edgeless because the margins are uneven.
For those interested in a deeper dive in the geometry, curvature continuity is the underlying concept. There's plenty of programming work to be done to improve how CAD software build surfaces that follow those rules.
>Apple has been doing this to the corners of laptops and iMacs for years, but this type of rounding didn’t penetrate iOS until version 7. This shape has classically been difficult to achieve, because it wasn’t available in 2D design editors, though that’s starting to change.
(My emphasis)
However, bizarrely, it has been available in full 3D in parametric mechanical CAD for at least 20 years thanks to the advanced 3D blending functionality in the underlying modeling kernels: Parasolid, ACIS, ShapeManager etc.
Meanwhile, the 2D sketching environment in those programs has lagged w.r.t. curvature continuous fillets.
Witness this Solidworks 2012 tutorial on GrabCAD by Leandro Fernandes[0].
Because of the relative weakness of the 2D sketcher compared to 3D with respect to filleting, Leandro does (roughly) the following strange hack:
1. creates the profile of the wheel rim in the 2D sketcher
2. rotates the profile to form the 3D rim
3. fillets the profile in 3D
4. merges all the faces into one face
5. intersects the filleted 3D profile with a section plane to get back into 2D
Funnily enough I wrote an Illustrator script to draw superellipses decades ago.
It sat on the Adobe website for a long time until Adobe decided that they wanted to scrap years of useful add ons and content in one of their pointless reorganisations.
That was an interesting article! Now I'm curious about the machinery needed to fabricate such a screen, and how it differs from standard square screen producing machines.
Apple did a good job of executing on a bad idea with the iPhone X notches. But I don't believe Steve Jobs would've let the iPhone X (or Touchbar) out the door because they're so clearly half-measures.
Apple is implementing temporary workarounds (that won't exist in future devices) in their top of the line products. This is the kind of short-term thinking that they're so famous for avoiding.
They're still doing quite good overall but this is clearly something they're struggling with.
> I don't believe Steve Jobs would've let the iPhone X (or Touchbar) out the door
This is a ridiculous trope that needs to die. Among the many ‘half-measures’ people whined about during Steve Jobs’ tenure are things such as the original iPhone not having 3G, the iPhone 4 antennagate, the infamously scratch prone iPod Nano, the crack prone poly MacBooks, etc etc.
Apple was never a company that produced only flawless, non-controversial products, and Steve was perhaps the most controversial and opinionated product person to have ever lived.
Another really obvious half-measure was that the original iPhone didn't have an app store. "HTML5 is your SDK", basically, and adding sites to your homescreen was all you could do. Steve Jobs tried to pretend this was a good thing:
> And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.
One might argue that it was merely to early for that, since web standards around it didn't exist and weren't provided by Apple either. Not having the required focus on the App Store could have been great!
Apple store is primarily a distribution/discovery channel, I would not be surprised if it started as - hey let's build a catalogue of all the websites that work well on iPhones.
Apple's biggest asset has always been design. On a tehnical basis Apple products sometimes beat the competition and sometimes are outdone by the likes of Samsung, Thinkpad, etc. They have dominated the American consumer market because of fit and finish, attention to detail, and overall functional beauty in design. The flaws you're speaking of are a different sort from the, frankly weird looking, notch. While executed as well as possible, its a design compromise.
The notch is a literal non-issue that only people who don’t actually use this damn device seem to complain about or even notice. I for one am happy that an entire strip of nearly-useless status icons has been shifted upward into the extra area afforded by the notch. The number of times I notice it in a given month easily rounds to zero.
It’s the same story every time Apple releases a new product. People who overwhelmingly don’t buy Apple products in the first place lose their minds over some nit, while the overwhelming majority of their actual customers never seem to understand what the big deal is.
I’m not surprised at all: these people knee-jerk so hard and often, they probably can’t afford Apple products after the paying for orthopedic surgeons.
And the “ignorant Apple fanboy” narrative that seems to be the counterargument to this falls laughably short when you realize that the number of Apple’s customers has been increasing exponentially for the last fifteen years, all while they continue to enjoy the top spot in consumer satisfaction surveys across virtually their entire product line.
It's "weird looking" at the moment because Apple was the first[1] with the <cough> "courage" to do this in order to integrate what's basically a Kinect into the front of a phone. But phones are already showing up that copy this solution.
[1] Well, Essential did it, but didn't commit to the degree that Apple did.
ALL design is compromise. The options available for this design are a) stop the entire screen below the sensors b) extend the screen around the sensors or c) remove the sensors.
A gives you less overall screen space, and leads to other problems like an imbalance between the ‘chin’ and ‘forehead’ areas. Of course you could remove even more screen sapce to balance that out, but...
C means you have no Face ID, which is closer to giving up than compromising.
B is obviously the option they went with, and having used the phone for several months, I’d have to say I agree with this compromise. I get some extra screen space by moving the status stuff up in to the ‘ears’ and I still get faceID.
Except your list of misfeatures is actually a missing feature and a list of bugs. No one would claim Steve Jobs or Apple was ever perfect, just that he wouldn't have released these blatantly obvious misfeatures.
Can you think of anything similar to these weird misfeatures? I'm genuinely curious.
If you look at iPhone iconography -- it's always been basically a rounded rectangle with a circle and square for the home button. Easily identifiable as an iPhone with just 3 shapes. With the home button gone, the notch is used to distinctively represent an iPhone.
Perhaps the whole thing is purposely form over function.
Form over function? I think you nailed it.
Would it be less expensive to manufacture using circles? Would sales decrease if they had? Would anyone really notice?
I wonder how many man-hours were spent debating the shape of the corners.
In addition to the attention to design detail it speaks to the brand strength of Apple that if any of their competitors released a phone with a similarly unconventional screen shape it would have been a weakness that would drastically affect the acceptance of the phone, even if it was engineered in the exact same way. The notch is truly a feature only Apple would be able to have success with.
What is wrong with the touchbar? What is wrong with the notch?
I've been on a touchbar mac and it's just as usable as having keys, with the added flexibility of changing them around (adding a lock button, etc.). It's mostly a non issue and does everything the prior bar did.
The notch essentially houses the 1 feature most people love on their X's, it becomes a non-issue once you use it. Or, if you're like me, you recognize that instead of losing a notch, you gained 2 ears of information.
I find the Touch Bar frustrating. It's probably because of the way use my MacBook Pro on my lap a lot. I find that I often accidentally press buttons on the Touch Bar because my hands naturally rest in that area.
My real problem with that model is the sticky keyboard, though. My space bar and several other keys are intermittently unresponsive, which irritates me no end.
I don't know, I have one and I genuinely love the notch (and the other rounded corners). The device feels organic and sci-fi in a way that strictly rectangular screens do not. (But I haven't seen an all-screen phone yet, so maybe I'd change my tune if I did.)
In Apples industrial design team's eyes these phones have uneven margins so are failed designs.
Even though the margins on the X are sleight of hand because of the notch, they still believe this is a truly edgeless phone and by looking at the object it's pretty obvious the brief was equal margins on all sides at any cost.
No. They could have made it a simple bezel. You can say this about anything. For example, note8 has an IR iris camera. Still they didn't make the phone look ugly.
You mean the one that could be tricked with a simple photo and a pen that you swipe over the eyes to fool the "blink detection"? The one that only worked in good lighting? I tried to use it at the time, it was awful.
I thought the official math on the curves was a proprietary secret, no? I recall early iPhone/iPod official case dimension documents never calling out the radius because it didn't exist.
On iOS 11, CALayer has a `continuousCorners` private property [0].
I did a spartan reverse engineering by recreating the UIBezierPath equivalent of the two types of radii found in the Apple Design Resources [1], then adding a convenience initializer on UIBezierPath that recreates the shape with arbitrary radius of the chosen kind (either UISwitch-like, or App Icon-like).
Earlier attempts include the fascinating Unleashing Genetic Algorithms on the iOS 7 Icon [2].
Why didn’t they just make the front part of the OLEDs transparent, and then turn them off when using those sensors? Surely it couldn’t be that much more difficult considering it’s already possible to make optically clear OLEDs.
> Sweating thousands of minor details is what separates Apple from other companies. Their ability to do that is hard-won, but damn it’s pretty to watch.
Wish they would sweat the minor details on their other products that aren't flagship products a swell. Take a look at their USB-C Digital dongle as an prime example. 2-star rating for a $70 dongle, almost universally because of the same fundamental problem.
I upgraded at Christmas. I'm sure that they put a lot of effort into it. But now my phone no longer displays battery percentage, and I keep finding myself noticing the missing chunk. Even after a month I notice it.
Squeezing the last square inch is emphatically not worth it. Not even a little bit.