hi everyone Aaron here for ZolloTech and iPhone X has been out for quite some
time in fact it was released in 2017 and it was only available for one year when
the iPhone XS and XS Max came out Apple stopped selling it new on their
website you could still buy it refurbished from their website and you
can still buy it today refurbished so I wanted to help you decide whether
or not you should pick one up in 2020 or upgrade from your iPhone X to something
else in 2020 so the first thing is like I said you can no longer buy new from
Apple directly but you can find it refurbished for $5.99 to $6.99 for 256
gigabytes now that doesn't seem like such a great deal but you can find this
used for as low as around $300 on sites like Craigslist if you want to trust
that or if you get one from a friend or reputable websites are selling them
around 400 to 500 dollars so it just depends where you're getting them but
they're still available in many different ways today just not new now
the design has held up really well in fact this was a major shift from Apple
to a new design we lost the home button we gained a little bit of a notch at the
top which you can't see because of this this wallpaper that's hiding it and I'll
link this wallpaper in the description as I normally do but we gained this face
ID sensor and quite a few advances with this phone we still have this
gesture-based system that I like quite a bit but took a little bit of getting
used to and it's held up really well and still looks modern
in fact if I show you the front of this next to say one of the modern iPhone 11
pros or 11 Pro Mac's you would think it's just the baby brother of the 11pro
Macs for example so they look the same in almost every way except for the back
where the cameras a little bit different now the construction of the X is
stainless steel and that's what they're using on the high end
iPhones today so stainless steel around the outside edge and then glass front
and back and there are some advantages to the iPhone X over some of the newer
models as well I'll talk about in a moment but the first major change was
face ID and you may love it or you may not like it but this was the first phone
with it and it works pretty well so let me turn the screen on I'll swipe up and
it's a little bit slower than the current version of face ID
but it does work fine you can pick it up swipe up in unlock and it's still fairly
fast the new phones maybe a half a second faster in some cases one second
faster overall though it's great this was also Apple's first OLED display
and it's held up pretty well it's HDR 10 compatible it's 5.8 inches
1125 by 24 36 with 458 pixels per inch it also has true tones so if you like
true tone you can turn that on I tend to turn it off for these videos as I want
the whites of the display to look white and not be tinted based on what Apple
thinks why it should look like so I leave that off most of the time but it
does have that and one feature that the iPhone X has that the newest phones
don't have is 3d touch so that makes it feel sort of more modern even though the
new phones removed it and they're newer you still have a pressure-sensitive
layer under the display so that you can do 3d touch pop things open quicker and
in fact if I go to the iPhone 11 Pro max for example and I press on settings at
the same time you'll see it's much faster on the iPhone X I'll do the same
with music and let me try it again there we go so sometimes you have to try it a
couple times on the newer phones because it's haptic touch and pressure sensitive
it's much better on the pressure based system so unfortunately Apple remove
that to make room probably for newer display technology maybe micro LED in
the future but 3d touches here and works better even though it doesn't have the
exact same feel that it did with iOS 12 and earlier now battery life of the
iPhone X maybe its biggest downfall as compared to the newest phones where
Apple really went all out on the battery and increased the battery size
significantly so on the iPhone 11 11 pro 11 Pro Mac so the batteries are much
bigger and much better than even the XS and XS Max so you're still going to
get probably 5 to 6 hours of screen on time you're going to get about the same
or more than an iPhone 8 plus but it's still not as good as the latest iPhones
where Apple really increase the battery size and the efficiency of the processor
inside to help deal with battery drain and they're just so much better
to get 12 hours of screen on time with the newest phones so it's almost double
the battery life in many instances but that doesn't mean the iPhone X doesn't
hold up well today in fact the speed of it's quite good it has the same
processor in the same RAM that you get with an iPhone 8 plus it was released
the same year and so tasks in general feel fast now using apps is going to
give you the same experience that you would get on something such as an 11 pro
max you're barely going to be able to notice the difference and occasionally
you might get a little bit of a framerate drop or stutter but it's very
rare you'll see things look very smooth overall and so using applications in
general should be no problem on this phone if you're heavy on games those
could take a little bit I just installed Monument Valley to again but it just
opened for the first time and you see how fast it loads so we can resume and
we're right into a game that looks beautiful and works really well and
while it's not the most intensive game for your iPhone most games are going to
run very similar to the current iPhones they're designed to run very smoothly
and you'll have basically the same experience on all iPhones so you'll see
the animations are fast no issues here and if we want to move the character
around you're not going to have any issues in any game you can play because
this will play every game available for iPhone you'll still have the AR
capability using the cameras on the back and speaking of the cameras the cameras
are quite good and in fact some people say they're better than the XS or XS
Max they like the color of them a little bit better so if I just snap a quick
picture here of the back of the phone on the 11pro max the picture comes out nice
it's nice and clear and most people unless they're into photography are not
going to be able to distinguish between the 11pro Max and the iPhone X camera
unless you blow it up onto a huge screen now the forward facing camera is quite
good but you're not going to get the same experience that you do on the
newest phones that's where the big difference is you have a 1080p camera on
the forward facing camera when it comes to videos so selfies and things will
look pretty similar but it's a 7 megapixel camera as opposed to a 12
megapixel camera on the were phones so it holds up just as well
as many of the others if you get an iPhone XR for example you're going
to have the same forward facing camera but any of the latest phones from 2019
or that are available in early 2020 you're going to have a worse camera on
the iPhone X so not a huge difference but it is something to note when it
comes to the iPhone X now one big advantage that the iPhone X has over
some of the older phones if you get the Verizon variant is that it will have a
Qualcomm mote a minute and what that means is you're probably going to have
better connectivity you're not going to have as many issues with with cellular
loss or drops or connection issues so if you can find a verizon variant that's
unlocked it will work with any GSM carrier including AT&T and t-mobile if
you can find a he Nam GSM variant the worldwide CDMA variant that worked with
Verizon or Sprint that is the version that you want with your iPhone if you
get the X and that will give you much better reception better reliability
because Apple switch to Intel modems in the newer phones and they're just not as
good as the X so yes the X is definitely workable in 2020
there's only one consideration to talk about and that's PWM now the iPhone X
has an OLED display which uses PWM or pulse width modulation to control
brightness I've talked about this at length in separate videos and I mention
in any phone that has an OLED display because the iPhone controls brightness
on the display by flickering the display faster or slower the quicker it's
flickering the brighter it seems so as I turn the display brightness up it's
going to flicker faster as I turn it down it's going to flicker slower and
this may or may not be a consideration for you
but on the iPhone X the actual rate of PWM or speed at which it's flickering is
low enough that it could cause you to feel very nauseated you could get dizzy
or you could even get headaches and I've seen this at length with a lot of people
with the iPhone 10 10s and 10's max the iPhone 11 they seemingly fixed it some
and they've sped up that rate so it doesn't bother as many people myself
included one in 10 people is affected by this so if you're sensitive to light or
sensitive to flickering or anything like that you may wanna want
to actually consider a newer iPhone or an LCD display because those don't work
that way now as far as screen burnin or the phone actually leaving ghosted
images on the display even though the displays on something different that's
not really an issue for iPhones that I've seen too much on the iPhone X you
can see here's a white background if I swipe to the left here's a gray
background there's no ghosted images anywhere
around the display and you're not going to see that in most of Apple's displays
because they do a really good job of managing screen burnin so it's not
really an issue for most people and that's really it for the iPhone X so
does it make sense to buy one I would say yes if you can get one at a
reasonable price and PWM doesn't bother you if you can only find it refurbished
for $700 I would go with a newer phone I would go for an iPhone 11 or even spend
an extra few hundred dollars once you're up that high and get an iPhone 11 Pro if
you can find this or you're getting it as a hand hand-me-down for 500 or less
it's a good buy it will be supported for years to come when it comes to software
updates I would expect at least two to three more years with no issues maybe
even longer we don't really know because Apple doesn't give us a time for a time
frame or a table of one they're going to discontinue support but based on the
past you have about five years total so we at least have a couple more years but
they seem to be extending that even further now so it really shouldn't be an
expense but let me know what you think of iPhone
10 if you have one if you've upgraded if you're considering one I'd love to hear
what you have to say about it in the comments below if you haven't subscribed
already though please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video please give it a
like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you next time