The iPhone X Is The Most Important iPhone Since The Original

Apple finally unveiled their long-awaited tenth anniversary iPhone during a special event on September 12th. The iPhone X features an edge-to-edge display, and features that even an Android user would blush at. The iPhone X is a three-year project from Apple that culminates in their most important device ever. This is the phone that could help them finally the “Android vs iPhone” argument to rest.

So what makes this phone so great? Well for starters, this phone represents the very thing people have been asking of Apple for the last 6 years. The iPhone X is Apple taking a risk, and completely changing the design of the iPhone. Ever since the iPhone 5, Apple users have been begging Apple to switch the design up, and do something different. Apple would respond with upgrades in almost every department, but those upgrades felt incremental in comparison to the riskier, more futuristic designs that Android manufacturers were starting to roll out. Bigger screens, more internal storage, better wireless features, were slowly becoming the norm, but Apple did something that no other manufacturer was willing to do. They stayed the course, while quietly building their next big masterpiece behind the scenes.

As more and more Android devices sprinted towards embracing the future, Apple jogged towards it. Carefully selecting and integrating crucially important technology one piece at a time, until it was time to finally build their grandest device yet. Make no mistake about it, the iPhone X is the most important device since the very first iPhone.

With the iPhone X, Apple is (figuratively speaking) reinventing the wheel. At least for this release, the “play it safe” Apple is gone, and in their place lies a very sharp, risk taking company with a lot riding on a radical new device. The design of the iPhone X is very ambitious and extremely paradoxical compared to previous Apple releases. This is not a very gorgeous phone at all. In fact, some would say this could be the ugliest iPhone that Apple has ever produced. There’s a giant notch at the top of the display that houses the new “True Depth” camera system. The camera on the back of the device has a hump large enough to send Steve Jobs into a posthumous fit of design rage. But looks aren’t what’s going to see the iPhone X alone. The true beauty of this device, as with all things in life, lies on the inside.

Apple is introducing the world to their first ever in-house produced chipset, the A11 Bionic processor. With it, comes a whole host of new capabilities and possibilities from the iPhone X. If you watched the keynote, you’d of noticed Apple making a very big deal about something they called the ‘neural engine.’ This is a fancy phrase for machine learning, but also a clever new twist on it. The neural engine not only learns people, places and things, but it also learn how you use your device. It takes the things you do most and learns to intelligently assign specific tasks to a specific core within the chipset to maximize battery life. Theoretically, Apple says the iPhone X will last a full two hours longer than the iPhone 7 despite having a larger display. There’s also a new focus on bringing more realistic AR experiences to the iPhone X. Apple will use their Metal 2 and Core ML languages to empower developers to create games with console level graphics and physics, while also benefitting from machine learning.

In a nutshell, Apple is in a really precarious position right now. The iPhone X is the biggest risk that Apple has taken in a very long time. This feels like the very first anti-iPhone, except it’s made by Apple. This is the exact antithesis of what we’ve come to love about the iPhone, and as an Android enthusiast, I’m actually excited to see how this phone helps shape the future of smartphones as a whole.