 This is the iPhone X. And look, I know every year we say the new iPhone is the best iPhone, but this really is the best iPhone ever made. Now, we've been waiting for this phone for a long time now. Apple says it's a complete reimagining of what the iPhone can be, and there's a lot of major changes here. Apple's gotten rid of the home button, there's no more fingerprint sensor, there's an OLED screen, the first on an Apple phone. You unlock it just by looking at it. There's all kinds of new gestures for navigating. There are some big bets here on the future of the iPhone, and a lot of unanswered questions. Earlier this week, we published a video, said send us your questions, you sent us a ton of those questions, and I think we can answer them all in this review. We got a lot of questions about the design and the display, so let's start there. First, there's the notch. There it is. There's no getting around it, there's no point in pretending it's not there, but I'm gonna tell you that after a few days, it's fine. It's not great, but especially in portrait, you just learn to ignore it. It's definitely annoying in landscape though, especially when you're watching video. If you zoom, the notch will definitely cut into the side of what you're watching. And I don't love browsing the web in landscape either, the notch is just right there. This is a phone designed to be used in portrait. You'll also notice the large black border around the display, which is pretty polarizing. A lot of people I showed the phone to hated it, but I actually think it makes the bright colors of the display pop. It's a very different design decision than Samsung curving the screen to eliminate the bezel. Apple's highlighting what little bezels remain. Apple gave us the white and silver model of the iPhone X to review, and although Apple says the band on the outside is better than surgical grade stainless steel, mine already has scratches and dings. And all we've really done with it is take photos and videos of it. So I wouldn't expect this phone to remain flawless if you don't have a case. Aside from the removal of the home button and the larger screen, the rest of the iPhone X looks a lot like the iPhone 8. There's the mute switch and volume buttons on the left, the sleep wake button on the right, and a glass back with a camera bump. The camera bump is huge. It's actually bigger than the bump on the 8 Plus on a smaller body, so there's just no getting around it. Apple leaned into it and tried to make it a design element, which you will either love or hate. It's kinda grown on me though. And of course, there's no headphone jack, which sucks on every single phone that omits it. So notch aside, the screen is great. Apple's using a 5.8 inch Samsung manufactured OLED display, which it says custom designed for the iPhone X. It's a bigger number than the iPhone 8 Plus' 5.5 inch display, but it's a taller, thinner aspect ratio, so it's actually not as big. And there's no tabs in Safari or other plus iPhone features here. It's definitely more of a bigger iPhone 8 than a smaller 8 Plus, and that's exactly what it feels like in your hand. It's like when Apple moved from the iPhone 4 to the 5. The display basically just got taller. In fact, when you run apps that aren't optimized for the iPhone X, they run with huge software bezels, and the whole thing just looks exactly like an iPhone 8. To answer this question about differences between Samsung's AMOLED and LG's PLLED and Apple's OLED, these are actually just marketing terms. The fundamental construction of OLED screens is basically the same, although there are clear quality differences between them. And I have to say that the iPhone X is at the top of the class when it comes to quality. I keep saying the iPhone LCD is the best and most accurate phone screen out there, and the iPhone X looks just as good, if not better. It's way brighter, it's super vibrant, and it basically looks like pixels directly under your fingers. It does have the crazy neon colors of Samsung phones. iOS just does better color management than Android, which is just starting to do it, and I think you can see it here. The display uses a diamond pentile pixel layout, which means every pixel on the screen shares red, green, and blue subpixels with the other pixels around it. That's different than the iPhone LCD, which has dedicated RGB subpixels for every pixel on the screen. Now, a lot of people don't like pentile screens, and to be honest, I have not liked them in the past either, but you can't really tell with the iPhone X unless you're using a really tight macro lens, which, of course, we did. Apple says it's doing a bunch of custom anti-aliasing and subpixel rendering to make this display work better than other Samsung pentile OLEDs, and honestly, it shows. This screen really does just look great. Looking at the iPhone X side by side with the iPhone 8, I think the X is noticeably cooler, and it's a little bit softer, which I think it makes it slightly easier to read text, especially for a long time. Check this out, though. Turning on Apple's True Tone color calibration on both phones doesn't make them look the same, which it should. I asked Apple about this, and they told me the X has a 10-channel light sensor, and the 8 only has a four-channel sensor, so the X is more accurate. I still think it's pretty strange how different they are, though. The screen isn't perfect. Every OLED screen shifts colors off axis, and the iPhone X is no exception. It definitely gets bluer if you tilt the phone back and forth along either axis, but it's nothing like the Pixel 2 XL, which goes blue if you just shift the phone in your hand a little bit. It's one of those things that doesn't leap out at you, but you'll notice it if you're looking for it. A lot of you asked us about burn-in, and I haven't seen any yet, but it's early, so I asked Apple about it, and they told me that they've also done a ton of work with the screen and the operating system to limit burn-in. Every OLED screen eventually does suffer burn-in, though, so we're just gonna have to wait and see if the iPhone X really is better than the competition. By far the most questions we got were about face ID, and I'm just gonna answer this one up front. You don't have to use it. You can just leave it off and enter a passcode, but I think you're gonna want to use it, because most of the time, it works great. It really does just work. You look at your phone, it unlocks. There are a couple of times when it doesn't work just great, and you're gonna have to adjust to make it work better, but I don't think it's actually that big of a deal. You just have to get used to the change. You can point a cheap camcorder with night vision at face ID to see it working, and it's pretty awesome when you do. The iPhone X has an IR light, a dot projector, and an IR camera all tucked into that notch at the top of the screen. When you wake up the phone, the IR light goes off, and if the IR camera sees a face, the dot projector flashes a pattern of 30,000 dots. The camera then takes a 2D photo, which gets turned into a mathematical depth model, which is sent to the secure enclave on the A11 chip and matched against the stored value. And if it matches, you're in. This all happens really fast. All of this means that face ID works just fine in the dark. It's shining its own little IR flashlight on you. That little flashlight is the blinking light a lot of you asked about in our previous videos, which you actually can't see. Our camera sensors just pick it up. When you're using the phone, face ID checks to see if you're paying attention every so often, which is what blinks that IR light. If you're not paying attention, the phone aggressively dims the screen and eventually goes to sleep to save the battery. It's a neat trick. Now, there are some situations where it doesn't unlock, in our preview video, I had some problems walking around in bright sunlight and under some fluorescent lights. And a lot of you pointed out that I was holding my phone kind of far away from myself as I walk around, which is how I normally hold my phone. And it turns out you might be right. I asked Apple about it and they said the optimal distance for face ID to work is 25 to 50 centimeters or about 10 to 20 inches. And that's a little bit closer than I normally hold my phone. Here, I actually have a measuring tape here, which is great. And we can just take a look. So here's that, here's 20 inches. And this is definitely a little bit closer than where I normally hold the phone. And when I'm lying down in bed or on the couch, I actually hold my phone a little bit closer than 10 inches normally and face ID struggles. So you have to adjust how you're gonna hold the phone, where you're holding the phone to make it work better. You also have to look at it pretty directly, which means unlocking while the phone is sitting on a table is out unless you look over the phone. We got a bunch of questions about face ID privacy, but I don't think there's much to be worried about there. Face ID never really takes or stores a photo of your face. The regular front camera is only used during setup so you can see yourself. The IR photo is just used to generate the depth map that's compared to the stored value and nothing ever gets sent to Apple. It's just a bunch of numbers stored in the secure part of the processor. Now, obviously every system can be hacked, but you shouldn't worry about a bunch of photos of your face being sent to iCloud or whatever. It's just not how it's designed. If you weren't worried about touch ID, you probably shouldn't worry about face ID. A lot of you also asked about how fast face ID is, and the answer is that it varies. Most of the time in normal lighting conditions, it's so fast that it's almost like not having a passcode on your phone. You pick up the phone, swipe up, and you're in, just like the old swipe to unlock days. But other times, it takes a second. Again, I think that's mostly under different lighting conditions. It's basically the same amount of irritation as a fingerprint scanner. Sometimes your fingers are wet and you have to enter the passcode, and sometimes the light's weird and you have to move the phone closer to your face and wait a second. It's fine. The one thing I will add about face ID is that it makes it way harder to discreetly check the phone when you're talking to someone. I pulled out my iPhone 8 and just put my thumb on the sensor all the time to check a notification. With face ID, you have to really look at the phone, which makes it obvious you're not looking at the person. We're all just gonna have to get used to this. You can also use face ID for Apple Pay, and it's pretty easy. You just double click the side button, authenticate, and then hold the phone to the reader. To me, it actually makes more sense than touch ID because you're actively turning Apple Pay on instead of just waving your phone at the card reader and hoping it works. I think it's pretty nice. Once you look at that new screen and unlock the iPhone X with your face, well, you're using iOS. Apple told me they didn't wanna make any drastic changes to the main iOS experience because they thought the removal of the home button was enough. You're gonna have to learn a whole bunch of new gestures just to navigate this phone. We got a lot of questions about those gestures too, and once you get used to swiping up to unlock the phone, it's easy to get used to swiping up to go back to the home screen. You have to swipe from the bottom, so if you're playing Temple Run or something and you swipe from the middle, you're gonna be fine. I haven't accidentally swiped to go home yet. If you want to switch apps, you either swipe along the bottom of the screen or swipe up and hold. You'll get a little haptic bump and the app switcher will show up. It took me a minute to figure out how to do that move consistently and a little bit longer to figure out how to consistently use reachability. Actually, lots of you asked about reachability, which is the feature on iPhones that brings the top of the screen down to make one-handed usage easier. I use it all of the time on my 8 Plus and it's still here, only now you swipe down about halfway up the icon dock from the home indicator. I couldn't get this to work at all and then something finally clicked and I sort of figured it out, but I'm definitely still not perfect at it. I think it's just gonna take some time to learn. Once you've brought the UI down, you can swipe on either top corner to open Notification Center or the Control Center, which is nice. I asked Apple why Notification Center is a sheet and Control Center is an overlay, and they told me that it's philosophical. Control Center is supposed to be an always there widget and Notification Center is supposed to be another screen that slides down. Whatever it is, I think it looks really messy to have two different interface patterns for the same action at the top of the screen, and I really hope Apple just cleans it up. Since there's no home button, you open Siri by holding the side button. Siri is still Siri, which means it's still not great, but there it is. You take a screenshot by holding the top volume button and the side button together, and you turn the phone off by holding either volume button and the side button and swiping the power off. It sounds complicated, but it's pretty easy to figure out. Screenshots don't have the notch, just a big blank space where the notch is on the phone, and that's a pretty good metaphor for the screen in general. There's a lot of extra space at the top and generally a lot of extra space at the bottom, which means the usable area of apps is way closer to the iPhone 8 than you'd expect. In fact, apps that aren't optimized for the iPhone X run with giant software bezels that basically make the phone look like an iPhone 8. You'll run into a lot of unoptimized apps if you buy this thing right away. Gmail, Google Calendar, Spotify, and more all run with software bezels. Apple says it's helping app developers update, and the tools make updating for the X a lot easier than the previous cycle for the iPhone 6-size screens, but we'll just see how it goes. I think a lot of big apps will update quickly, more will trickle out over the next year, and then there's just gonna be lots to take forever. Delta took like two years to update for the iPhone 6. Let's hurry that up, people. You won't find a lot of big new ideas about iOS here, and if you spend a lot of time in unoptimized apps for work like Google Docs and Trello like I do, it's a lot like using an iPhone 8. I really want Apple to make notifications more powerful. I would love to see some more customizability on the home screen, and I would love, love to be able to set new default apps for mail and web browsing. I'd also love for the overall design to be more fun. Years after iOS 7, everything still feels pretty stark and brutal compared to the increasingly whimsical version of Android that Google's putting on the Pixel. You know what is fun, though? Animoji. We got a lot of questions and comments about this, too, and I completely stand by saying they're the best feature of the iPhone X in the preview video. They are a joy. They work great, and everyone I showed them to loves them. Animoji work by lighting up the TrueDepth IR camera and dot projector, but it's not nearly as hardcore as Face ID. There's no depth map or security stuff. It's just motion tracking 50 muscle groups on whatever face it sees. The only time it doesn't work great is when you try to wink, and Apple told me they know about this and suggested it might get better over time. Whatever. I love Animoji, and I'm not afraid to say it in the form of this talking monkey. Now that we have the iPhone X and the Google Pixel 2, we're gonna do a super in-depth camera comparison video, but here's what I can tell you right now. The iPhone X has basically the same cameras as the iPhone 8, and the photos look almost exactly the same, and I tend to prefer the photos from the Pixel 2. The back of the iPhone X has two optically stabilized 12 megapixel cameras, one with an F1.8 wide angle lens and the other with an F2.4 telephoto. That's an upgrade from the 8 Plus, which has an F2.8 non-stabilized telephoto lens. That stabilized tele lens is great. These are probably the best zoom photos I've ever taken on a phone. The two rear cameras allow for portrait mode, which works as well as portrait mode on the 8 Plus, and also supports portrait lighting. The front camera supports portrait mode and portrait lighting, but I don't think it's very good. Regular photos from the iPhone X are fine, and some of them are even great, but I think the Pixel 2 takes more evocative photos with better contrast. The iPhone's dual rear cameras definitely produce better portrait mode photos in the Pixel, and the Pixel definitely produces better portrait photos from the front camera. And I don't think the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 holds a candle to either the iPhone X or the Pixel 2. All in all, these are both excellent cameras, and it really comes down to personal preference and how much you value that zoom lens. I think I prefer the Pixel 2's cameras, which just seem to produce absolute winners more often, but like I said, we'll be doing a deep dive video with these cameras soon. Apple says the iPhone X should get two hours more battery life than the iPhone 7, and while it's been pretty hard to test this week while we've been running the screen in camera's full tilt for this video, I've been pretty impressed. OLED screens generally draw less power than LCDs, and I got great battery life with the iPhone 8, which shares most of the same components as the X. So just based on what I've seen this week and based on what I know from the iPhone 8, I would expect to go about a full day with the iPhone X. Just like the iPhone 8, the iPhone X supports Qi wireless charging, which means if you have a car like this BMW M550, you can just drop it on the pad and it'll charge up while you go. This car also supports wireless carplay. It's one of the first on the market to support the new feature in iOS 11, which lets you connect to carplay without plugging in a cable. So all you gotta do, turn on the car, you can drop it on the pad down here, the wireless charging light is up, in just a second, carplay shows up. That is the dream. I have been wanting that to happen in a car since the first day I ever got a phone. It is so awesome when it works. It works great in this car. I will say, getting it out of this spot sucks. And BMW should definitely work on that, but I will take it. So that's the iPhone X. It's a great phone. It's probably the best iPhone ever made. It's thin, it's powerful, it's beautiful. It's full of really interesting ideas what all these cameras on a phone are supposed to do. I think the OLED display looks great, but it's still an iPhone. It runs iOS 11 pretty much the same as an iPhone 8 or even an iPhone 7. Siri is still Siri, notifications are still pretty basic, iMessage is still a beautiful prison. If you know what you're getting into with iOS 11 and you like it, you're probably gonna love the iPhone X. So the most important question we got was whether the iPhone X is worth $1,000. It's the most expensive iPhone ever made. And I don't think there's an easy answer to that question. If you love iPhones and you've got the money, you should buy this phone. I think you're gonna be really, really happy. But if you're on the fence at all, it might be worth waiting with the iPhone 8 or the 8 Plus. You'll still get most of all the same features, you just won't get Animoji, and you'll get to wait out app developers optimizing all their software for these screens, which is gonna take a while. In a couple of years, every iPhone is gonna look like the iPhone X and you'll be able to jump right in. In the meantime, the rest of us will be using Animoji. Okay, we have a bunch more questions, I'm gonna try to get to them all. Is Force Touch still on the iPhone X? Called 3D Touch, and yes. Can you use two Bluetooth speakers at the same time? Samsung lets you do it, it's part of Bluetooth 5. Apple doesn't seem to support it. Does keeping apps over the home screen make the OLED display burn in faster? Why is your home screen open all the time? Lastly, how's the X? iOS 11 has been pretty janky in the past few years. iOS 11 is still kinda janky.