 So it's the fall, and the fall is usually when we at the Verge do a huge fancy iPhone review video. And we're going to do one of those, for the iPhone X. But this video is about the iPhone 8 and the 8 Plus. And that's actually the phone that millions of people are going to get on their upgrade plans. And it might be the phone that you get because you don't want to pay $1000 for the iPhone X, or you just don't want to wait for what seems like pretty limited availability. And there's actually a lot to talk about with the iPhone 8. It's basically the same internals as the iPhone X. The 8 and the 8 Plus have the same processor as the iPhone X. The Plus has really similar dual cameras with portrait lighting mode. They've all got wireless charging. And look, I know Android fans are going to be in the comments saying, Android phones have had these features for years. And that's true. Feature for feature, Android has out-innovated the iPhone over the past few years. But when Apple ships features on the iPhone, so many people get those features and actually use them. But the world around us tends to change. So something like wireless charging has been around since the Windows days. But now that the iPhone has it, you're going to see wireless charging pads everywhere, actually in use. Look, let's not dance around it. The iPhone X looms over this review like a shadow. It looms over the entire industry. It's Apple's complete redesign of what the iPhone is. It's got a huge edge-to-edge screen. It's got the Face ID authentication system. There's a huge amount of changes to how iOS works. But that's not this phone. This phone is the fourth generation of the design that we've been seeing since 2014. It's basically the iPhone 6 with a glass back. I don't think it's the nicest design Apple's ever made. I think that's the iPhone 4. This is just the nicest version of this design. And for most people, that's fine. So little has changed besides the glass back that the 8 even fits into iPhone 7 cases perfectly. The glass back makes the 8 noticeably heavier than the 7, but I like it. The glass is way less slippery than aluminum, and that, combined with the increase in weight, just makes the whole thing seem more solid and less likely to fly out of your hand like the 6 and the 7. Apple says it's reformulated the glass in the back to be stronger than ever, but I've already slightly scratched the 8+. We'll see what happens when millions of people around the world start dropping these things. Apple gave me the gold and silver phones, and the silver is pretty familiar. But the gold is definitely a matter of personal taste. The back isn't white. It's a very 70s-looking cream color that I'm not really into, but it's apparently very trendy, and several people in my office really liked it. And you'll notice that it doesn't say, Designed by Apple in California in the back anymore, just iPhone. All the small print has been moved into software or onto the paperwork in a box, which Apple said it had to get approval by regulatory agencies around the world to do. It's very Apple. Okay, but let's be real here. The iPhone 8 is fundamentally the fourth generation of the iPhone 6, and the iPhone 6 is far from the most beautiful iPhone Apple has ever made. We've been calling out the basic clunkiness of the 6 design since the 6 came out in 2014. This might be the first iPhone that's better in a case, actually. I think it's fair to say that they're not the world's most beautiful phones. From a visual design perspective, Samsung's definitely pulled ahead this generation. There's no question that the 8 is by far the most polished and refined iteration of this design. But compared to the Galaxy S8, the Note 8, and other Android flagships like the LG V30, it's all just starting to feel extremely dated. Yes, there's the iPhone X, but Apple says the 8 is also a flagship phone. And by those standards, these huge bezels just don't cut it anymore. The S8 is just a tiny bit bigger than the regular iPhone 8, but it has a bigger screen than the iPhone 8 Plus, it doesn't have a camera bump, and it generally feels much nicer to hold in your hand. Now, I'm not in love with Samsung's software, but there's no question that the S8 is a nicer piece of hardware than the iPhone 8. Even startup shops like Essential are pushing beyond Apple here. All the other edge-to-edge phones on the market, including the iPhone X, use OLED displays, but the Essential phone has an edge-to-edge LCD, the same tech the iPhone 8 uses. And yeah, it has a big, silly notch. But my point is that Apple's put all of its design energy into the iPhone X, and that means the 8 suffers in comparison. Now, none of this matters if you have no intention of switching away from iOS, or you're just locked into iMessage, like me. Those other phones might as well not even exist for you. The thing to know is that spending money on an iPhone 8 doesn't get you the cutting edge of phone design. For that, you'll have to get an iPhone X. As far as that LCD screen itself goes, there's a couple new things. The first is True Tone, which uses sensors on the front of the phone to measure the ambient light and calibrate the display to show accurate colors. You shouldn't notice it working when it's on, since it adjusts the screen in real time, but if you click the buttons in Settings, you'll generally see things warm up a bit. It's nice. I think the iPhone LCD has long been the best phone display out there, and True Tone just makes it better. We'll see if Apple can beat it with the OLED on the iPhone X. The other thing to note about the hardware is that the new stereo speakers are actually great. It's the same trick as on the iPhone 7. The earpiece just gets really loud to act as the other speaker, but on the iPhone 8, it all gets up to 25% louder, and it really makes a difference. I cannot believe I'm saying this about speakers on a phone, but I think it sounds terrific. You can hear stereo separation. It's pretty impressive. And because it's me, I'm just going to point out, there's no headphone jack, which I think is a little more annoying than people are willing to admit. Did you know Apple's own headphone dongle is one of the lowest rated products in the Apple Store? 1.5 stars. I think that says something. Apple's all-in on wireless, so the upgrade to Bluetooth 5 is nice. It's lower power, and it'll enable smarter devices. But there's not a ton of Bluetooth 5 devices out yet, so we'll have to just test it out in the future. I will say the Bluetooth settings screen on iOS 11 is still a mess. Managing all these wireless devices with an iPhone is no fun. The glass back enables wireless charging, which is based on the Qi standard. Apple gave me one of the Mophie charging pads that'll be selling in stores, and we tried it out with Qi pads from Samsung as well, and it all just worked. As with all wireless charging systems so far, you have to be careful to line up the phone just right before it charges. I didn't have any problems, especially with the bigger iPhone 8 Plus, but some of our video crew noticed that they had to be a little bit more careful than they thought. Wireless charging is still pretty slow, though. In my tests, I saw the battery go up about 15% every 30 minutes, which is especially slow when you consider that the phone has to be sitting on the pad and not in your hand the whole time, and that the iPhone 8 also supports fast charging for quick top-offs. It'll be nice at night on a bedstand and all. I think wireless charging will be especially useful in cars, where you can just put the phone on the charger, connect wirelessly to Bluetooth, and be on your way without any cables at all. We tried it in this Prius with a Qi charger, and it worked fine, although I will say I only got about 15% more charge in an hour, and the phone got pretty warm. But don't get too excited, especially if you use CarPlay. Right now, the only car in the market that supports both wireless charging and wireless CarPlay is the BMW 7 Series. Every other CarPlay user is going to be plugging in until they get a new car. Apple's made some big changes to how the camera works in the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, and it's hard not to see them as responses to the Galaxy S8 and Pixel pulling ahead of the iPhone 7. Like Samsung, images are more saturated by default, although Apple says they're still aiming for realism instead of the extreme pop of the S8. And HDR is just on all the time, like the Pixel. You actually can't turn it on. In a quick head-to-head test where we just took all the phones out and shot in auto without messing with the settings, I think the iPhone 8 seemed to produce the best overall images on average, with less smoothing and better color. But we'll do a much deeper comparison test in the future after the Pixel 2 comes out. The big new feature is something called Portrait Lighting on the iPhone 8 Plus, which lets you mimic the complexity of all of this professional lighting in software. There's a few modes. There's one called Studio, another one called Contour, and a very dramatic effect called Stage, which you can also do in black and white. I asked The Verge's creative director to explain what's going on here, and here's his take on it. Real studio lighting creates shape and definition by balancing the output of different lights in different positions around your subject. Apple's using its software to try to do the same thing. Studio mode fills in the shadows, Contour mode crunches those shadows and adds contrast, and Stage mode dramatically darkens the background to emphasize the face. All of which is pretty clever. Portrait lighting isn't perfect. The system seems to just cut faces out of the background and apply filters to them, and it's pretty easy to get some wacky results. But portrait lighting is also in beta, and it's not like most people have studios like this available to play around in. So it's a lot of fun, and you should expect to see it on your Instagram a whole bunch. Just don't expect it to be perfect. Inside the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, there's the new A11 Bionic processor, which is the same chip in the iPhone X. Why is it called Bionic? Apple told me it realized it was losing a branding battle by having boring chip names like A7 and A8, and when it added the word Fusion to the A10 last year, people started talking about it more. So, A11 Bionic. Sure. Marketing-speak aside, it should be no surprise the A11 is lightning fast. Apple is at the forefront of chip design and performance, and the A11 has a new performance controller that manages six active cores, two high-performance cores, and four high-efficiency cores. Early benchmarks suggest the iPhone 8 is faster than the A10 Fusion and the iPad Pro, and even the Intel Core i7-powered 13-inch MacBook Pros. But really, it's what you do with all that power that matters, and honestly, I didn't notice some huge performance boost from the iPhone 7 when I did basic things like browsing the web, watching videos, and taking photos. I played a few games, everything seemed fast and fluid. My opinion is that Apple sells iPhones for years after they're released. The iPhone 6S is still in the lineup, for example. So, all this extra power just feels like headroom for the future, not something you immediately sense going from year to year. Where you do get a sense of the extra performance is when you try new apps that use Apple's AR kit and iOS 11. There aren't many out there yet, but I got to try some early versions of a measuring app, an app that teaches you about the human heart, a stargazing app, and of course, an app that puts Thomas the Tank Engine in the room with you. These early AR demos are really cool and they're fun to play with, but the novelty wears off fast, especially since you're holding your phone out in front of you the whole time. Apple's not making a huge deal about AR just yet, but it's clearly in the lead right now, and it's exciting to think about what happens when AR goes beyond these early experiments and turns into just another tool developers can use to make their apps work better. Speaking of iOS 11, it's a pretty big update. We'll do another video that dives deep into all the features, but part of the fun of a new iPhone is using an updated version of iOS, and iOS 11 is no different. You'll notice chunkier fonts everywhere and redesigns of most major apps. The App Store is much nicer now, with big cards and even some blog-like write-ups of interesting apps and games. The new Control Center makes a ton more sense and offers a lot of customization options. My favorite thing is that airplane mode is now sticky, so you can have it leave Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on and just turn the cell radio off, which is perfect for flights where you're wearing Bluetooth headphones and connected to the Wi-Fi. Notifications have also been redesigned slightly, although Apple doesn't think you should actively manage them, so you still kind of can't do that. And screenshots are really cool now. They slide to the bottom of the screen and you can tap on them to annotate them instantly, which I love. And there's a new Files app which lets you finally work with files and services like iCloud and Dropbox directly, although you're still not getting real access to the actual file system of the phone. Siri sounds a lot nicer as well. My name is Siri. Although Siri is still Siri. I don't understand. I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that. But overall, iOS 11 is a really solid update, and if you have an iPhone 7, you might not miss any of the iPhone 8's features once you have it. Oddly, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus have slightly smaller batteries than the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Apple says both phones should last about the same on a charge as the older models, though, partially because the A11 chip is more efficient than the A10. Both my iPhone 6S and iPhone 7 dropped battery life pretty quickly, though, so I'll have to see how the 8's do over time. But in these first few days of testing, everything seemed just about the same as before, with just under a day of standard use on a charge. The battery drained far more quickly when we ran AR apps nonstop, which makes sense. And you can add the switch for low power mode to Control Center now, which is very convenient if you routinely need to save power. I said at the beginning of this video that the iPhone X looms over this review like a shadow, and I think that's really true, especially because the iPhone 8 is kind of expensive. It's $50 more than the iPhone 7 was this time last year. The regular iPhone 8 starts at $699, the iPhone 8 Plus with 256 gigs of storage is all the way up at $949. That's just $50 less than an iPhone X. So, big question, who is this phone for? And I think the answer is that it's for waves of upgraders. If you have an iPhone 6 or 6S, you're on an upgrade plan with your carrier, or you're on Apple's upgrade plan, you're just going to get this phone, you've been paying for it up front this whole time, and you're going to be really happy. It's a major upgrade to what you have today. But if you have an iPhone 7 Plus and you're thinking about spending $950 on an iPhone 8 Plus, don't do that. Wait for the iPhone X, it's a much bigger upgrade than what you have now. I think all of this means the iPhone is just kind of a commodity now. This is the default phone for a lot of people, and a default phone this good is actually pretty great. But if you're the kind of person who wants the latest and greatest, you should wait for an iPhone X. I need to say, you'll be plugging it in until you get a new car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jesus Christ, man.