iPhone XR Review Roundup

Friday, 26 October 2018

The bottom-line conclusion in my iPhone XR review:

It sounds too good to be true, but the XR is almost as good as the XS models at a far lower price. Dollar for dollar, the XR is almost certainly the best iPhone Apple has ever made.

I’ve read over a dozen other reviews of the XR this week, and that’s been the bottom line of every single one of them. It’s a remarkable consensus. There are some interesting differences though.

Matthew Panzarino thinks the biggest compromise is the lack of a telephoto second camera:

However, I found myself missing the zoom lens a lot. This is absolutely a your mileage may vary scenario, but I take the vast majority of my pictures with the telephoto lens. Looking back at my year with the iPhone X I’d say north of 80% of my pictures were shot with the telephoto, even if they were close ups. I simply prefer the “52mm” equivalent with its nice compression and tight crop. It’s just a better way to shoot than a wide angle — as any photographer or camera company will tell you because that’s the standard (equivalent) lens that all cameras have shipped with for decades.

Wide angle lenses were always a kludge in smartphones and it’s only in recent years that we’ve started getting decent telephotos. If I had my choice, I’d default to the tele and have a button to zoom out to the wide angle, that would be much nicer.

But with the iPhone XR you’re stuck with the wide — and it’s a single lens at that, without the two different perspectives Apple normally uses to gather its depth data to apply the portrait effect.

Nilay Patel, on the other hand, doesn’t miss the telephoto second camera much but instead thinks the LCD display is the biggest compromise compared to the XS iPhones:

Those differences are interesting and worth pulling apart, but really, the simplest way to think about the iPhone XR is that it offers virtually the same experience as the iPhone XS for $250 less, but you’ll be looking at a slightly worse display.

So, how much do you care about the display on your phone?

Look. The display on the iPhone XR is… fine. It’s fine! It has a lower-resolution and pixel density than the OLEDs in new flagship phones like the iPhone XS, Galaxy S9, and Pixel 3, but it’s the same 326 pixels per inch as Apple’s previous non-Plus LCD iPhones. Anyone coming to this phone from any iPhone, save the iPhone X, will not notice a huge discrepancy in resolution. I suspect most people will find it totally acceptable.

That’s not to say it matches the quality of previous iPhone LCDs. The iPhone XR LCD definitely shifts a little pink and drops brightness quickly when you look at it off-axis, which often leads to a bit of a shimmery effect when you move the phone around. I noticed that shimmer right away, but I had to point it out to other people for them to see it. (It’s one of those things you might not notice at first, but you can’t un-see it.) Apple told me the XR display should match previous iPhone LCDs in terms of performance, but side by side with an iPhone 8 Plus, the off-axis shifts are definitely more pronounced.

Neither Panzarino nor Patel are wrong. It’s obvious that the display and lack of a second camera are the two biggest compromises on the XR that allow it to be priced so much lower than the XS models. Which one matters more to you is purely subjective. Panzarino says “If I had my choice, I’d default to the tele and have a button to zoom out to the wide angle”; Patel says “I rarely take zoom photos, so I didn’t miss the telephoto lens from the iPhone XS at all”.

Count me on Panzarino’s side, though. If I could have a next-gen iPhone XR that either (a) keeps the same LCD display but adds the XS’s second camera, or (b) switches to the XS’s OLED display (including smaller bezel) but still lacks the second camera, I would choose (a) in a heartbeat. After a day with the iPhone XR I stopped seeing anything wrong with the display or wider bezel. I miss the telephoto camera every day.

Another tidbit from Patel, regarding the amazing work Apple put into making the XR display as nice as they could:

Apple’s also done some extremely detailed work to make the rounded corners of the LCD perfectly match the corners of the phone itself, which is work I desperately wish other companies would do. (Most other phones with rounded corners have mismatched radii, and the Pixel 3 XL has different corner radii at the top and bottom, which, to me, looks far worse than any chunky bezel.)

It’s somewhat easier to round the corners of an OLED panel: each pixel is its own light source, so you can turn them off individually around the curve to smooth it out. You can’t do that with an LCD panel because there’s just one single backlight for the entire display, which will shine through the black pixels along the edge. So Apple built little apertures for the pixels around the corners of the XR display to mask some of the light coming through, on top of antialiasing the curve in software. It’s a neat example of Apple’s attention to detail.

The sub-head from Panzarino’s review made me laugh:

The iPhone XR is Apple’s best knockoff yet of its groundbreaking iPhone X.

I think it could have worked to write an entire iPhone XR review using the conceit that it’s an amazing knockoff of the iPhone X.

Speaking of design details, Rene Ritchie, in an otherwise glowing review, points out some small industrial design niggles:

Less fine is the sudden loss of Z-axis asymmetry thanks to the shoved down Lightning port on iPhone XR. Again, yes, this is only something I.D. nerds like myself care about, but after iPhone XS broke X-axis symmetry to fit a 4 × 4 MiMo antenna on the bottom, iPhone XR has gone and broken the Z by top aligning instead of middle aligning Lightning to the screws and grills, probably to make room for the not-as-thin-as-self-illuminating-OLED edge-to-edge LCD.

I still haven’t gotten used to the steel screws and ports not always being vapor coated to match the aluminum anodization, now this?

I know it bugs the designers and engineers even more than it does me. And while it’s still not as rando as some other companies seem to be by tossing elements into the casing like drunken darts at a board, and as nit-picky (and I’m sure eye-rolling) as I’m sure it is for some of you, I’ve given Samsung shit about it for years, so I’m not going to stop just because, this time, my eyes are bleeding courtesy of Apple.

I hate to admit it, but I didn’t mention the Lightning port not being centered with the screws or speaker grills because I didn’t notice it until I read Rene’s review. (Nilay Patel mentions it too.) But now I can’t unsee it:

Bottom view of the iPhone XR, showing how the Lightning port is not center-aligned with the screws or speaker grills.

It’s not perfectly aligned but it is perfectly excusable. It’s simply really, really hard to make an LCD phone with no chin or forehead to mask the display controller. It’s hard to make an OLED phone with no chin or forehead — just ask Google. But LCD is a different ballgame. To my knowledge, iPhone XR is the only LCD phone ever made, by anyone, with no chin or forehead. With the display controller underneath the display, the Lightning port had to be pushed down. It is absolutely a compromise, but well worth it for the overall look of the device. Everyone would notice if the XR had a chin; almost no one is going to notice the Lightning port is top-aligned rather than centered with the screws and speakers.

Joanna Stern, as usual, has the best video. She got the Product Red variant, and her video really shows how great it looks. She also illustrates well the sort of scenarios where you’ll miss having a telephoto lens.

Lastly, a point on pricing and the notion that today’s phones are “just” phones. Here’s Lauren Goode at Wired:

Apple wants to make it clear that it’s not trying to gouge you. Sure, when the iPhone X launched last year, Apple priced it at nearly $1,000. And yes, this year’s iPhone XS sells for the same amount. And of course, Apple killed off its smallest and most affordable handset, the iPhone SE, right as it was introducing the most expensive iPhone yet.

But Apple wants you to know you have a choice. You get to pick from a very small pool of potential devices, but hey, at least you have options! Never mind that certain choices, like color, were predetermined for you by a room full of powerful tastemakers who decided to make coral or cerulean happen. Never mind that whatever you pay, it’s still a crazy amount of money for a phone. You are making the call. You, sir or madam, have your choice of new iPhones.

I think the rest of Goode’s review contradicts the notion that $750 (or better, $800 for the 128 GB version) is a “crazy amount of money for a phone”.

Phones are the most important computer in most people’s lives. They’re the only computer in many people’s lives. Nobody says it’s crazy to spend up to $1,500 on a laptop — but most people use and care about their phone more than they do their laptop. That’s why phone displays are getting bigger. We’ve been corrupted by thinking of them as “phones” in the pre-2007 sense of the word.

A cell phone used to be just a wireless telephone. No longer. They are our ever-present personal computers. They are also our most important cameras (and often our only cameras). A decade ago, point-and-shoot cameras ran $200-400, easily. It’s your watch, it’s your alarm clock, it’s your Walkman, it’s your map and GPS. It’s your wallet full of photos of your family and friends. It’s also, increasingly, your actual wallet.

If you took an iPhone XR back to 2006 people would be amazed. If you told them they could buy one for $750 they’d think you were lying.

On a related note, I would argue that iPhone prices aren’t really going up. Last year’s X and this year’s XS models are a new premium tier. The iPhone XR is the phone at the previous “regular” top-of-the-line tier. New top-tier iPhones used to cost $600-650, yes, and the iPhone XR starts at $750. But when you account for inflation that starting price is about the same. The iPhone 4 was introduced in June 2010 starting at $600. $600 in June 2010 dollars is about $700 today. That $600 got you a 16 GB iPhone in 2010. The 32 GB model cost $700. That’s about $810 in today’s dollars — $10 more than the price of a 128 GB iPhone XR, which I think is the sweet spot in the lineup for most people. Inflation adjusted, the iPhone XR is right in line with the iPhone 4 prices from 2010.

Considering how much more capable an iPhone XR is compared to an iPhone 4, I’d say $750 is an amazing bargain. ★

Friday, 26 October 2018

Thursday, 25 October 2018

Wednesday, 24 October 2018

The iPhone XR

Tuesday, 23 October 2018

There’s got to be a catch.

That’s what everyone has been thinking ever since Apple announced the iPhone XR alongside the XS and XS Max on September 12. Right? The iPhone XR seemingly offers too much of what the XS provides at a significantly lower price.

Well, there is no catch.

The iPhone XR is everything Apple says it is, and it’s the new iPhone most people should buy. I’ve been using one as my primary phone for the last week, and it’s a lovely, exciting device. Even some of the things I thought were compromises don’t feel like compromises at all in practice. Overall, yes, the XS and XS Max are better devices, but in a few regards the XR is actually better.

Let’s start with the price. For the equivalent amount of storage, the iPhone XR costs $250 less than an iPhone XS, and $350 less than an XS Max.

	64 GB	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB
iPhone XS Max	$1,100	—	$1,250	$1,450
iPhone XS	1,000	—	1,150	1,350
iPhone XR	750	800	900	—

Δ from 64 GB		$50	$150	$350

But in practical terms, the difference is even more striking than that. 64 GB of storage is a credible baseline — a far cry from just a few years ago when storage started at a criminally meager 16 GB for the iPhones 6S in 2015, and 32 GB for the iPhones 7 in 2016. But the sweet spot for most people in 2018, in my opinion, is one tier above 64 GB.

I think my wife is a fairly typical iPhone user. Music, photos, podcasts, games. I just checked and her iPhone is using right around 64 GB of storage. She could actually save about 12 GB if she enabled the Offload Unused Apps feature in iOS. So she could get by with 64 GB, but she’d need at least 128 GB to be comfortable. I think a lot of iPhone users have similar storage needs.

But only the iPhone XR offers a 128 GB storage tier, and it’s just $50 more. If you want more than 64 GB with an iPhone XS, you’ve got to pay $150 more than the base price and jump all the way to 256 GB. So in terms of what I would actually recommend for most people — getting the storage tier one level above entry level — the 128 GB iPhone XR costs $350 less than the 256 GB XS and $450 less than the XS Max.

People who are looking for some way that iPhone XR purchasers are getting screwed have it backwards. If anyone is getting screwed on pricing, it’s XS and XS Max purchasers, who don’t have the option of buying a 128 GB device for just $50 more than the baseline 64 GB models. You can buy a 256 GB iPhone XR for $100 less than the price of a 64 GB iPhone XS — 4x the storage for $100 less.

In terms of what most people actually need and will use, storage-wise, the iPhone XR is $350-450 less than an iPhone XS or XS Max. That pricing difference is far more remarkable than any of the technical differences between the XR and XS iPhones.

So what actually is different? There’s the lack of a second rear-facing camera, the different display technology (LCD instead of OLED, without 3D Touch), the different materials (aluminum instead of stainless steel) and sizes, and a few other relatively minor trade-offs.

Camera

The entire front-facing camera array on the XR is the same as on the XS models. Same camera, same depth sensor, same improved Face ID performance.¹ The iPhone XR’s lone rear-facing camera is exactly the same as the wide-angle camera on the XS — same lens, same sensor, and in my side-by-side testing, the exact same image and video quality.

For regular stills and video, the effect of not having a telephoto second camera is obvious: if you want to zoom in, image quality is noticeably worse on a zoomed image taken with the iPhone XR than with the XS, because the XR can only zoom digitally, not optically.

The difference is more complicated with Portrait Mode. The iPhone XS and XS Max shoot portraits using the f/2.4 telephoto lens. (They use the wide-angle lens in Portrait Mode, but only for computational help, not for primary image capture.) The iPhone XR does Portrait Mode using the f/1.8 wide-angle lens. An f/1.8 lens is about one full stop faster than f/2.4. And, as I covered in detail in my iPhone XS review, the wide-angle camera shared by the XR and XS also has a significantly larger sensor, which can gather up to 50 percent more light. By using the camera with the faster lens and bigger sensor, Portrait Mode on the iPhone XR works significantly better than on the XS in very low light scenarios.

Here are two shots of my son in a dark room at night, lit only by a nearby TV.

iPhone XS (original image file):

Low-light Portrait Mode on iPhone XS.

iPhone XR (original image file):

Low-light Portrait Mode on iPhone XR.

I have done no post-processing on these images other than to scale them to a smaller size, and I shot both with the iOS 12 Camera app. The original images, untouched other than converting from HEIF to JPEG when exporting from Photos, are about 2.2 MB in size.

Here are the same two images with a bit of editing in the iOS Photos app. For the XS shot, I turned up the “Light” significantly and applied the “Dramatic” filter. For the XR shot, all I did was apply the “Dramatic” filter. (I find “Dramatic” — along with its “Dramatic Warm” and “Dramatic Cool” variants — a good way to very quickly improve noisy low-light images.)

iPhone XS (full-size image file):

Low-light Portrait Mode on iPhone XS, after a bit of editing in the Photos app.

iPhone XR (full-size image file):

Low-light Portrait mode on iPhone XR, after a bit of editing in the Photos app.

In short, Portrait Mode is usable on the XR in some low light situations where it’s unusable on the XS.

With plenty of light, Portrait Mode is much better on the XS than the XR, simply because the XS telephoto lens is a much more appropriate focal length for portraits. And most of the time, Portrait Mode is useful when there’s plenty of light. I don’t want to make too much hay over the XR’s ability to shoot portraits in low light, because the XS models can just shoot regular still photos in low light and in a lot of cases that’s probably the way to go.

Portrait Mode on the XR has a few other limitations. For one, it only works with human faces. The subject’s face does not have to be directly facing the camera — the subject can even be in profile — but there must be a human face for the camera to recognize. It won’t work with dogs, and it won’t work with faceless mannequins. Portrait Mode on the iPhone XS, on the other hand, although optimized for human faces, will work with inanimate subjects, whether human-like or not.

Lastly, Portrait Mode on the iPhone XR does not offer the Stage Lighting or Stage Lighting Mono lighting effects. No big loss, in my opinion — I’ve never once shot a Portrait Mode photo that looked good with either of these effects. To be honest, I’ve shot over 300 Portrait Mode keepers in the last year, using the iPhone X and now XS, and I almost never use any of the lighting effects. I see the potential with them, but for now they all still look more gimmicky than good, especially the Stage ones.

Now what’s interesting about the differences in Portrait Mode between the XR and XS is that while the XR simply cannot do what the XS does (because it doesn’t have the telephoto second lens), the iPhone XS could, in theory, offer the XR’s Portrait Mode using the wide-angle lens. I believe Apple doesn’t allow this in the interest of simplifying the user experience. It’s easy to explain that Portrait Mode only works with human subjects with the iPhone XR. It would be confusing for most people to explain why Portrait Mode sometimes only works with human subjects but sometimes works with any subject, depending upon focal distance, if Apple were to enable wide-angle Portrait Mode on the XS — using the XR algorithm — today. Apple made the decision to keep XS’s Portrait Mode less fiddly — by always using the telephoto lens for image capture, at a fixed focal length — even though that means it doesn’t work as well as the XR in low light.

The most important bottom line comparing the iPhone XR to the XS is this: if you want to use the telephoto lens, the iPhone XS may well be worth a few hundred extra dollars for that reason alone. If you don’t care about the telephoto lens, on the other hand, you should almost certainly consider buying an iPhone XR instead of a XS.

Display and Battery Life

After the camera, the second biggest difference between the XR and the XS models is the display. The XS models use OLED; the XR display is LCD. OLED is generally “better” than LCD — much higher contrast ratio with deeper blacks, and for technical reasons OLED displays can get closer to the edges of the device, reducing bezels. But LCD has advantages — most noticeably energy consumption. Apple goes out of its way to disguise this in its iPhone tech spec comparisons, but the iPhone XR has the longest battery life of any iPhone ever made. The primary reason is that the XS and XS Max’s OLED displays use more power. All three new iPhones get good battery life, but it’s really interesting that the lower-priced XR gets the best.

Another difference is that the XR display is 2x retina and the XS displays are 3x retina. That’s 326 pixels per inch for the XR and 458 pixels per inch for the XS displays. More pixels per inch is better — but again, in general. The higher resolution of the XS displays contributes to their consuming more energy.

Yes, 326 pixels per inch is the same pixel density as the first retina iPhone, the iPhone 4 all the way back in 2010. But pixel density is not the only measure of display quality. The XR display is the brightest iPhone LCD display Apple has ever made. It looks terrific. To my eyes, the biggest difference between the XR and XS displays is the slightly larger bezel around the XR display — not the displays themselves. People who use an iPhone case — which is to say the vast majority of iPhone owners — may not even notice the larger bezel. And even without a case it’s not a problem, per se, and is really only evident when compared side-by-side.

I’m not aware of any other phone in the world with an LCD display with no chin or forehead. Getting an LCD display to extend from corner to corner is a legitimate technical breakthrough on Apple’s part. Also getting tap-to-wake working with an LCD — once you get used to tap-to-wake you simply cannot go back. The XR display is certainly a less expensive component than the XS’s, but in no way does it look like Apple has cheaped out. It’s an excellent, beautiful display.

The other notable display difference between XR and XS has nothing to do with what they look like, but what they feel like. The XR does not offer 3D Touch. This situation is a mess, in my opinion. Some iPhones have 3D Touch, some don’t, and no iPad (to date at least) has it. This means no iOS software can depend upon 3D Touch.

In its place, the iPhone XR offers “haptic touch”, but only in a few places where 3D Touch is used. For example, the Flashlight and Camera shortcuts on the lock screen. As far as I can tell, the heuristic for triggering haptic touch is just a long press. I don’t think it’s doing anything fancy like checking the surface area of the skin touching the screen to sort of fake the detection of a harder press. Whereas on the iPhone X and XS you press harder on the Flashlight or Camera lock screen shortcuts to trigger them, on the XR, you just press and hold for a short moment. I notice the delay, but it’s not bothersome.

But anywhere where a long press already has meaning, haptic touch can’t work. Most obviously, the home screen shortcut menus for apps. A long press on a home screen app icon already has meaning — it puts you in the jiggly-icon mode where you can rearrange and delete apps. iOS can’t use a long press on an icon both to enter jiggly mode and to open the 3D Touch shortcut menu, so the iPhone XR doesn’t offer these menus.

Where I miss 3D Touch the most is while editing text. A little-known but powerful feature in iOS is that while editing text you can 3D Touch on the keyboard to turn it into a trackpad for moving the insertion point around. iOS 12 introduced a feature where you can get into this mode without 3D Touch by tapping and holding on the space bar. That’s almost as good, but I’ve developed a strong muscle memory that I can get into this mode by pressing anywhere on the keyboard. With 3D Touch you can also force press again once you’re in trackpad mode to select text. ~~There’s no way to do this on the iPhone XR.~~ Update: Actually, you can select text — once in trackpad mode, tap on the keyboard with a second finger to enter text selection mode. Good to know, but more cumbersome than 3D Touch.

I don’t think the absence of 3D Touch is a dealbreaker for anyone, but it’s just weird that the iPhone XR is the first new iPhone since 3D Touch was introduced not to have it. (The iPhone SE doesn’t have 3D Touch either, but the SE was sort of only half new.)

Physical Attributes

Size-wise, the iPhone XR falls between the iPhone XS and XS Max. But because the XR has a somewhat thicker bezel surrounding the display, its relative proportions are a bit different. As a physical object, it’s a bit closer in size to the XS Max than it is to the XS. But its display is closer in size to that of the XS.²

What’s interesting, though, is how this size difference manifests in software. The XS and XS Max displays have way more pixels than the XR, but from a developer standpoint, the XR is not a new size. Developers (mostly) deal in points, not pixels. In the old pre-retina days, points and pixels were interchangeable — there was one on-screen pixel for each virtual point in the user interface. With a 2x retina display, like the iPhone XR, there are 2 display pixels in each dimension for every point, so a point, on screen, is represented by a 2 × 2 matrix of 4 pixels. On a 3x retina display, like the XS and XS Max, each point is a 3 × 3 matrix of 9 pixels. But the points are what correspond to the physical real-world size of on-screen buttons and text. In terms of points, the iPhone XR offers two display modes: standard and zoomed. You choose between these modes during initial setup, and you can subsequently switch between them in the Settings app. Standard mode is 896 × 414 points; zoomed is 812 × 375 points. These are the exact same as the standard and zoomed display modes on the XS Max. The iPhone XS only has one display mode: 812 × 375 points.

Effectively, this means that the iPhone XR is more like a smaller XS Max than it is a larger iPhone XS. And the difference between standard and zoomed modes on the iPhone XR is far more subtle than it is on the XS Max, because in both cases, zoomed is using the virtual screen of the iPhone XS (812 × 375 points). On the XR’s 6.06-inch display, that’s only a little bit scaled up from the iPhone XS’s 5.85-inch display. On the XS Max’s 6.46-inch display, that’s scaled up quite a bit.

The XR is also less dense — about 9 percent less dense than the XS and 7.5 percent less dense than the XS Max. There could be internal components that contribute to this, but the obvious explanation is that aluminum weighs less than stainless steel. I think this lower density works in the XR’s favor — it feels better, weight-wise.

The most visually striking difference, of course, is that the XR is available in a variety of cheerful colors. The black XR (which admittedly isn’t cheerful) looks a lot like the black XS and XS Max — it’s hard to tell them apart at a glance. The white XR (which is the color I’ve been using for the past week) is a much brighter white than the XS. The aluminum XR can’t compete with the premium look of the XS’s polished steel frame, but I think the white glass back of the XR looks better than that of the white XS models. It’s really nice — and a bit Stormtrooper-y. The coral, yellow, blue, and Product Red models all look great. I got another look at all of them last week when I picked up my review unit in New York, and to me, the Product Red phone in particular is striking.

Given that most people keep their phones in cases, do these colors matter? I don’t know. Maybe these colors will lead to a lot of people buying clear cases. Speaking of which, it’s a bit strange that Apple isn’t offering any first-party cases for the XR — at least not yet. To my recollection, the iPhone XR is the first iPhone since the 3GS to debut without first-party cases or bumpers from Apple.

Misc

The iPhone XS models support high-speed gigabit LTE; the XR does not. But this gigabit LTE support is the reason the XS models have asymmetric antenna lines, and thus asymmetric speaker grills on the bottom. The XR is nicely symmetric in both regards.
The iPhone XR uses the same glass on the front as the XS models — glass that Apple is describing as their “most durable glass ever”. But only the XS models use that same glass on the back. The XR uses some lesser quality glass on the back. Still supposedly scratch- and crack-resistant, but not as durable as the glass on the front.
Apple, for whatever reasons, has never advertised how much RAM is in iOS devices. But third-party utilities such as GeekBench can report on it. The iPhone XS and XS Max both sport 4 GB of RAM; the XR only has 3 GB. Ah-hah, I can hear you thinking, there’s another catch. I’m not so sure about that. 4 GB of RAM is, of course, more expensive than 3 GB of RAM, but in terms of making your device run faster or the user experience better, I’m not sure the extra gigabyte of RAM in the XS models will make a difference. The XS models might need more RAM because they have more than twice as many pixels to push around on screen. Memory is shared between the GPU and CPU on iOS devices, which is what allows some things, like image filters, to run faster than they can on desktop computers. I don’t think the XR has been shortchanged on RAM — I just think it makes sense that it needs less RAM to offer comparable performance because it has fewer physical pixels in its display. Also: RAM consumes power, so having less RAM also contributes to the XR’s longer battery life.

Look for some dopes on YouTube to make a stink about this RAM difference, though.

The Bottom Line

I’ve focused mostly on the differences between the XR and XS models because, well, I covered everything else in my XS/XS Max review. But really, what matters most is everything they share — the same great A12 chip, the same great rear-facing wide-angle camera and front-facing camera system, vastly improved stereo speakers, and more.

The difference here isn’t about the XS models being A-team phones and the XR being a B-team phone. It’s more like the XS models are a bit luxurious — an extra camera, stainless steel frames instead of aluminum, OLED instead of LCD — and the XR is a bit more practical. But they’re all on the A-team in terms of quality and performance. The XR is actually better in some ways, notably battery life and low-light Portrait Mode photography.

Last year’s iPhone 8 and 8 Plus were great new phones, but the differences between them and the all-new iPhone X were vast. They simply looked hundreds of dollars different. Not so with the differences between the XR and XS models this year.

It sounds too good to be true, but the XR is almost as good as the XS models at a far lower price. Dollar for dollar, the XR is almost certainly the best iPhone Apple has ever made. ★

One small thing that’s nice about Face ID versus Touch ID is how much faster it is to set up with a new iPhone — especially if you set up more than one finger with Touch ID. Most people only go through this process once, when their phones are brand-new, but after testing three new iPhone review units and setting up my personal iPhone XS all during the last 6 weeks, it’s something I really noticed. I know there are people out there hoping that Apple will bring back Touch ID with an under-the-glass fingerprint sensor in the future, but I just don’t see that happening. ↩︎
Apple advertises the XS, XR, and XS Max display sizes as 5.8, 6.1, and 6.5 inches respectively. But look at the exact numbers in footnote 1 on their tech spec page: “The display has rounded corners that follow a beautiful curved design, and these corners are within a standard rectangle. When measured as a standard rectangular shape, the screen is 5.85 inches (iPhone XS), 6.46 inches (iPhone XS Max), 6.06 inches (iPhone XR), or 5.85 inches (iPhone X) diagonally.” Apple has rounded 5.85 down to “5.8 inches” rather than up to “5.9 inches”, I presume to make it look like the XS and XR displays are more evenly spread apart. (By the Pythagorean Theorem, I think the iPhone XS display is actually closer to 5.86 inches.) And the iPhone XR display, at 6.06 inches, is only just big enough to justify rounding up to “6.1 inches”.

Diagonal Delta

iPhone XS Max 6.46″

0.40″ (10.16mm)

iPhone XR 6.06″

0.21″ (5.33mm)

iPhone XS 5.85″

Apple’s marketing numbers — 5.8, 6.1, and 6.5 inches — make it sound like the XR display is 0.3 inches bigger than the XS when in fact it is only 0.2 inches bigger. The XS Max display is a full 0.4 inches larger diagonally than that of the XR — twice the difference between the XS and XR. ↩︎︎

Monday, 22 October 2018

Sunday, 21 October 2018

Saturday, 20 October 2018

Friday, 19 October 2018

Thursday, 18 October 2018

	Diagonal	Delta
iPhone XS Max	6.46″
		0.40″ (10.16mm)
iPhone XR	6.06″
		0.21″ (5.33mm)
iPhone XS	5.85″

Sometimes It’s Better to Just Start Over With iCloud Photo Library Syncing

Friday, 12 October 2018

Early this week I noticed that I wasn’t able to use the Instant Hotspot feature with my iPhone XS. That’s the feature where you can leave the cellular hotspot turned off in Settings, but enable it on-the-fly from a Mac when you connect via the Wi-Fi menu. These “Personal Hotspots” show up at the top of the list of available Wi-Fi networks, in their own special section of the menu. My Wi-Fi menu no longer listed my iPhone, only my iPad. If I went into the iPhone’s Settings app and enabled the Personal Hotspot manually — i.e. turned it on and left it on — my iPhone’s hotspot was listed as a regular Wi-Fi network on my Mac, and when I connected, it worked just fine. So the hotspot worked, but the magic Instant Hotspot feature wasn’t working.

I tried rebooting the Mac and iPhone, of course. No dice. I reset network settings on the phone. No dice. I then noticed that my iPhone’s name (Settings → General → About → Name) had been changed to “iPhone”. Not even “John’s iPhone”, which is the default when you set up a new iPhone. Just plain “iPhone”. I changed it back to my custom name. Rebooted the phone again. Still no Instant Hotspot. And then eventually the device name was changed back to “iPhone” again. Weird, right? This was all on the release version of iOS 12.0.1, by the way.

I had a trip to New York coming up, and wanted to fix this. I did some searching on the web and eventually stumbled on a thread that suggested signing out of iCloud and then signing back in. This makes some sense, because all of these Continuity features go through iCloud. So I did that on the iPhone, and, long story short, that seemed to fix the issue. After one more reboot of the phone, Instant Hotspot was working perfectly.

A side effect of signing out of and back into iCloud is that it seemed to reset my iPhone’s photo library sync state. It didn’t delete my photos, but once I was signed back in to iCloud, the Photos app was trying to re-upload my entire library (over 28,000 photos and 1,100 videos) back to iCloud. I don’t think it was actually uploading them — I think that’s just the word Photos uses to indicate what it’s doing — but rather checking each of the photos on the phone against each of the photos in my iCloud library.

It got through most of them fairly quickly, but the last 4,500 or so were effectively stuck. This process was proceeding really slowly. Profoundly slowly. I kept the phone plugged in last night and checked every hour, and it was only processing about 15 or 16 items per hour. I let it run overnight and it only moved from 4,183 remaining items to just over 4,000.

Effectively, I think what happens is that when you turn off iCloud Photo Library, it leaves all the photos and videos on your phone in your local library. When you turn iCloud Photo Library back on, it has no idea which of the items in your local iPhone library are duplicates of items in your iCloud library, and so it has to check them one by one. Whatever algorithm it’s using for this is slow as molasses.

Adam Engst wrote about a similar problem on the Mac earlier this year:

I was seeing some strange problems on my 27-inch iMac running macOS 10.13.3 High Sierra. Messages wasn’t getting or sending messages, Wi-Fi calling wasn’t working, and after upgrading to 10.13.3, I was unable to enable auto-unlock with my Apple Watch. To solve these problems, I turned iCloud off and back on. Despite the iCloud preference pane throwing an ominous error, the problems did indeed disappear.

However, there’s a nasty side effect of turning iCloud off and back on: iCloud Photo Library needs to re-upload all your photos. It does this in order to compare the library’s contents to the synchronization “truth” at iCloud. Fair enough, except that this process can take days, depending on the size of your Photos library and the speed of your Internet connection. Bad Apple! We don’t see that sort of poor performance with Dropbox or Google Drive, and this behavior is both unnecessary and driving people away from iCloud Photo Library.

That’s pretty much exactly what I was seeing on my iPhone.

What surprised me about this isn’t just that it’s so dreadfully slow, but that iCloud Photo Library has gotten amazingly good in the last few years. It’s not just very reliable, but very fast. I took a lot of photos using three different iPhones (my old iPhone X, and my review unit iPhones XS and XS Max) while writing my XS review last month. And I worked on the review on two different Macs. Every photo and video I took on every iPhone synced to all the other devices in a matter of seconds every single time. iCloud Photo Library made the whole process ridiculously easy.

Wiping and restoring my entire iPhone seemed like overkill when the only issue I was having was photo syncing. So my next idea was to delete all the photos from my phone and start over from scratch with iCloud Photo Library.

So here’s what I did, and it seems to have worked. First, I eyeballed all the recent photos and videos I’d shot using my iPhone and double-checked that they had all already been synced to iCloud. They were — I could see all my recent shots on my other devices.

Next, I disabled iCloud Photo Library on my iPhone again. You do that by going into the Apple ID section of Settings (where your name is shown at the very top of the root level) → iCloud → Photos and turned off everything. When it asked if I wanted to download a copy of the photos and videos from my iCloud library I declined.

Next, I wanted to delete every single photo and video from my iPhone. To my knowledge there is no easy way to do this on the iPhone itself. (There are a lot of tasks like this that are easy on the Mac thanks to Edit → Select All that are painfully tedious on iOS. Update: Here’s a clever way to use iOS 12’s Shortcuts app to delete all photos and videos from your Library.) I connected the iPhone to my Mac with a Lightning cable and used Image Capture to delete all photos and videos from my phone. Image Capture just treats the iPhone like a regular camera. Image Capture crashed three times during this process (I’m still running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6, for what it’s worth), but after the fourth run the iPhone had no photos or videos left.

Then I re-enabled iCloud Photo Library on the phone, and about 20 minutes later, everything was back to normal. My iPhone reported exactly the same number of photos and videos in my library as on all my other devices. Most of those items are still just placeholders, even as I write this, but they’re filling in steadily — which is exactly how iCloud Photo Library works when you start syncing a large library to a new device.

So if you temporarily turn off iCloud Photo Library and turn it back on, it might be easier to just delete all your photos from your iPhone first, and let them all sync back from iCloud. ★

Friday, 2 November 2018

Thursday, 1 November 2018

Wednesday, 31 October 2018

Tuesday, 30 October 2018

Monday, 29 October 2018

Sunday, 28 October 2018

iPhone XR Review Roundup

Friday, 26 October 2018

Friday, 26 October 2018

Thursday, 25 October 2018

Wednesday, 24 October 2018

The iPhone XR

Tuesday, 23 October 2018

Camera

Display and Battery Life

Physical Attributes

Misc

The Bottom Line

Monday, 22 October 2018

Sunday, 21 October 2018

Saturday, 20 October 2018

Friday, 19 October 2018

Thursday, 18 October 2018

Sometimes It’s Better to Just Start Over With iCloud Photo Library Syncing

Friday, 12 October 2018