This past week, I watched Tim Cook & Co. unveil all their new Apple toys. I’m a Mac user, so I was waiting for a new Mac Pro or anything on that front. I have low expectations from Apple, so I wasn’t disappointed: No news was offered on the computer front. Oh well.
Apple did announce that it was now the number one maker of watches in the world. Yeah. So they’re now a jewelry company. Hurray for them.
The annual phone-fest seems to be more about “here’s another thing” than any true innovation. Back in the Steve Jobs era, the entire tech industry would marvel at what Apple hath wrought. Today, meh.
The only wiz-bang thing Apple offered was the iPhone X. Like OS X, I must remember to pronounce the X as “ten” and not “ecks.”
Keep in mind that the standard iPhone introduced last week was the iPhone 8. So the iPhone X is kind-of a Windows 10 thing in that there may never be an iPhone 9. Confused? Oh, it gets better!
The iPhone X is a rapid departure from the existing iPhone line. Gone is the Home button. (Is it called a “home” button? I’ve no idea.) The screen fills the front of the device, which is a trick Android phone users are familiar with. And you unlock the device by using your face, which is another Android trick. At least with Android, however, they confess that the Face Unlock feature isn’t secure.
So imagine my bemusement when the fellow demonstrating the iPhone X failed to unlock the device with his face. No, he had to use the backup technique and type a PIN. That was the first lead balloon moment Apple has had at a presentation for years. I remember Steve Jobs trying to demo something ages ago and it didn’t work. He was ticked, but at least what he was trying to do was innovative.
Beyond the failed face recognition faux pas, the other down-note was the iPhone X’s price. It’s $1,000. That’s just $99 less than Apple’s low-end iMac computer. Holy cow! And I thought the first phone was over-priced.
The price is even higher in Europe. In fact, someone did the math and figured that you could fly from Europe to New York, stay for two nights, buy a US iPhone, fly home, and it would still be cheaper than buying an iPhone X in Europe.
We’ll see how the iPhone X does once it’s officially available. It will definitely be something to watch, especially from the safety of the Android universe, where I must say that Samsung has recovered nicely from its Galaxy Note 7 disaster: Not a single Galaxy Note 8 phone has blown up. Yet.
