- Hey guys, this is Austin.
Today, Apple announced three brand new iPhones
and they range from kind of expensive
to very expensive to, "Are you serious?"
The main announcement today was the iPhone XS.
And yes, even though it is spelled XS,
it is pronounced iPhone ten S
because Apple likes confusing names.
Although to be fair, the S model has been around forever.
What you're getting here is a phone that is
very, very similar to the current iPhone X.
Besides a new gold color option,
the actual physical dimensions
and the look of the phone are almost identical.
There are some physical differences,
including the most durable glass ever on a smartphone,
because we've heard that one every time
anyone launches a phone.
And on top of that, there's also going to be some
slightly better water resistance.
It's now going to be IP68 rated,
which basically means it can be
underwater for slightly longer.
Actually, I think specifically IP68 is
two meters instead of one meter, right?
- [Male Voice] 2 meters, 30 minutes.
- Two meters, 30 minutes; not a massive difference.
Other minor updates include a little bit more
dynamic range with the display
and better stereo separation with the speakers.
One thing that a lot of people brought up
during the keynote, although I think they slightly
misunderstood it, was the 120Hz touch sensitivity.
It's not going to be like the iPad Pro,
a 120Hz display.
What it is going to do is look for your
actual touches 120 times a second.
Surprising no one, TouchID is nowhere to be found.
Instead, we do have a slightly tweaked version of
Face ID on the new phone.
What you're getting here is going to be
basically the same hardware of the old Face ID,
but it does have a better algorithm,
as well as faster secure enclave processing
to be able to supposedly get you a little bit of
a quicker scan of your face and to be
a little bit more accurate when doing so.
One of the biggest upgrades is with the processor.
I will absolutely give credit where credit is due.
Apple completely kills it when it comes to
developing their own custom processors,
and the A12 Bionic is no exception.
First of all, this is going to be the very first chip
shipping on a seven-nanometer process.
It is assumed that's going to be the TSMC process,
which means that not only is this going to be
cutting edge, it's going to give you better performance,
better battery life, all that kind of fun stuff.
But importantly, it's going to allow them to put
a lot of really high-tech stuff on a single chip.
It's got 6.9 billion transistors.
That might not really mean anything to you,
but that's a lot, especially for a phone.
The general layout of the chip is very similar
to the last generation.
We still do have a six-core CPU design,
so two of those cores are going to be high performance
and they're going to be a little bit faster,
but most importantly, more efficient.
The four low-power cores that back them up
are going to be about the same performance,
but consume around 50% less power.
On top of that, Apple is also introducing their new GPU.
Last year was the very first time that
Apple had completely developed their own
GPU in-house, and now there's going to be
a second-generation version of that,
which supposedly, again, all these numbers are
with a grain of salt, going to be about
50% faster than the previous generation.
A specific part of the chip called
the neural engine was introduced last year
with the A11 Bionic, and here on the A12,
it is a lot faster.
Previously, it was able to do somewhere
in the neighborhood of around 600 billion
operations per second, but now it can do almost
an order of magnitude faster at 5 trillion.
Camera-wise, the XS does have a slightly updated sensor,
so the main wide-angle camera is
"slightly larger" as far as sensor size goes.
That is a good thing; that's actually one of
the main advantages of a lot of
the Samsung Galaxy phones, is that for a while,
they've actually had bigger sensors than
pretty much anyone else in the smartphone space.
So having a little bit of a bigger sensor
and hopefully better glass to cover it is a good thing.
It's still going to be 12 megapixels,
and the telephoto camera from the sound of it
actually hasn't been updated.
But with that A12 Bionic chip onboard,
the processing is all going to be a lot better
and there are some legitimately new features there.
One of the new features is Smart HDR.
HDR's been around on iPhones for quite a while.
What it traditionally will do is take
multiple photos and then take a higher exposure,
low exposure, and just merge it in to be able to
get as much dynamic range as possible.
But Smart HDR takes a page out of
the Pixel 2's playbook by taking individual frames
in between the HDR shots.
Speaking of other features that are brand new,
even though they've been on other Android phones
for quite a while, we have an updated portrait mode.
Right now, if you take a portrait photo on, say,
an iPhone X, essentially what you see is what you get.
There's not really going to be any adjustment
beyond being able to have the original photo
and then the portrait version.
But with the XS, you can now adjust the level of
simulated depth of field.
This is almost identical to what you were able to get
on quite a few other phones in the past.
Specifically the Note 8 last year did a really good
implementation of being able to really allow you to
tweak how that portrait photo looks.
I will completely admit that the iPhone
does a really good job of cutting people
out of the background, and I'm sure the XS is
going to be better, but it just bothers me
when they're bragging about, "Oh look,
this is revolutionary and brand new,"
when phones have been doing this for years.
But I guess it's glad that they caught up.
And continuing on the train of this should've
happened a long time ago, you now do have
dual-SIM support on the XS and the XS Max.
Yeah, I'll get to the Max in a second.
The XS is actually going to do it
in a slightly different way.
As opposed to having two individual SIM cards,
instead you put a standard SIM card in
and you can also take advantage of an e-SIM,
which is cool if you're on one of the very few
carriers around the world that actually supports this.
Funnily enough, they actually acknowledged this onstage.
If you actually wanna pick up the phone with
dual-SIM capability in China,
it straight-up just supports two full-size SIMs.
So yeah.
Actually no, it's not full-size SIMs,
it's the nano-SIMs.
It would be great though if it actually fit
the full-size SIM, like the old-school one. (laughs)
So the main difference here with the XS Max
is just going to be the screen size,
so if you want a plus-size version of the iPhone X,
this is going to be your option.
Where this is not going to be a great option,
and one of my big problems with the phone,
besides the fact that it's a kind of boring update,
is the price; these are expensive.
Like really, really expensive.
You may have caught a little video I did the other day
talking about why I'm not a huge fan
of the Galaxy Note 9.
A big reason why I'm not excited about it
is because I think the value proposition
is kind of sketchy.
But when you take a look at the XS and the XS Max,
oh man, it's a bit of a mess.
To start with, the iPhone XS,
so again, this is replacing the standard-size
iPhone X, it is going to be the same price.
$1,000 for the 64-gig version of the phone
and $1,150 for the 256-gig version.
They don't actually sell a 128 anymore,
although they haven't done that for a couple years.
If you really wanna go all out, you can pick up
the 512GB version of the iPhone XS.
It's going to cost you $1,350.
- [Male Voice] 1,350?
- 1,350, and that's not even the Max.
If you step up to the iPhone XS Max,
add $100 to all these prices.
It starts at $1,100, and a fully-loaded
iPhone XS Max is going to cost you $1,450.
Look, okay, I get that more expensive phones
are becoming common, but I feel like
just over a year ago, the most expensive phone
you could get was maybe $1,000,
and that's if you load up all the storage
and go completely crazy.
But now we've got a mainstream flagship
that's costing you nearly $1,500.
Excluding special edition phones,
which are encrusted with diamonds or something,
the iPhone XS, even in the base model,
is going to be the most expensive flagship
that you can buy in 2018.
Man, I hope we keep that title for a while
because the days of $1,000 flagships only lasted
for so long, and now we're spending
11, 12, $1,400 on them.
To put this in perspective, you could buy
an entire Pocophone F1 for less than the price of
just upgrading your storage on the iPhone XS.
It's $350 to go from the base to 512.
That's so ... (sighs)
I'm gonna stop getting fired up about this
for one second because there actually is
one more iPhone to talk about.
The iPhone XR, because that's a name, I guess.
What does the R stand for?
They didn't say anything about it, right?
- [Male Voice] Really cool.
- iPhone X really cool. (laughs)
The XR actually slots in size between the XS
and the XR, so it's rocking a 6.1-inch display,
which unfortunately has a very low resolution of
1792x828, or somewhere in the neighborhood of
like 80% of a 1080p display.
I think the reason they did this is because
it is going to be that same pixel density
as the standard iPhone 8, and it's going to be
a lot cheaper because they've gone from
an OLED panel to an LCD.
But the screen is probably gonna be fine.
That's just not a very high resolution
for a six-inch display.
One of the disadvantages of using an LCD display,
on top of the fact that it's not going to be
as sharp or have the same kind of contrast,
is that it looks like the iPhone XR might have
a slightly larger bezel.
Of course it does have the same notch,
it does have the same Face ID system,
but from the pictures, it's kind of hard to tell.
I really wanna get my hands on a XR to be able to
see exactly how much bigger that bezel is.
It doesn't look massive to be fair,
but it does look a little bit bigger than on the XS.
So in order, you can get it in white,
black, blue, coral, yellow, and project red.
I gotta say that the yellow actually
kind of has my name on it, so I appreciate that
they're doing some different colors.
Besides a slight downgrade in the IP rating,
it's going to be IP67 as opposed to 68 on
the iPhone XS, the rest of the hardware is
going to be very similar.
You're going to be getting that same
Apple A12 Bionic chip and you're going to be
getting the same main camera.
You don't get the telephoto option of the XS
and the XS Max, but you are going to be getting
that same main wide-angle camera
with the upgraded sensor.
And on top of that, you are going to be getting
portrait mode on a single camera.
We've seen this on the Pixel 2.
It absolutely blew away almost all portrait modes
even with a single camera last year,
so it makes sense that Apple's going to be able to
include this in the XR.
The main thing going for the XR is price.
As opposed to starting at $1,000 like the iPhone X
and the XS, it's going to start at 750 bucks,
pretty much exactly what the iPhone 8 did before.
On top of that, we didn't see any updates
for any of the other iPhones,
most specifically the iPhone SE.
I would've really liked to see an updated version
of the iPhone SE, as because now,
the smallest iPhone that you can buy that's
actually updated with the 2018 specs
is going to have a 5.8-inch display.
If you want a smaller phone, well,
buy something old because Apple's not gonna
hook you up with anything else besides that.
So I'm very curious, what do you guys think
about the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR?
As always, we'll definitely be getting them
in the office for a full video very soon.
The XS actually is going to be coming out next week,
but let me know.
Meanwhile, I'm just going to go be an Apple sheep,
or whatever it is that I'm supposed to be today.
(ambient music)