Opinion: Here Are 3 Things that are NOT Innovative About the iPhone X

Every year, Apple comes up with a new iPhone, calls it their best iPhone ever, makes a few incremental changes and still manages to sell millions and millions of them. Regardless of how good or how “innovative” the new Apple phone is, people will still flock to the nearest Apple store and line up to be one of the first to get their hands on it.

This year though, they decided to be innovative, or as close to innovation as Apple has gotten in the recent years. They actually released its best iPhone ever! It brings an all-new design along with a bunch of all-new changes that make the iPhone X a marvel of innovation and forward-thinking, or so the company claims.

If you haven’t been living under a rock and are not blinded by the sheer presence of the logo of a half-bitten Apple, it is not hard to see how false that claim is. In simple words, Apple is finally making use of a set of technologies and innovations that have already been tried, implemented, and perfected by the rest of the industry.

Here are 3 things about the iPhone X that are not that innovative:

1. Edge-to-Edge Screen

Apple’s past iPhones have had notoriously huge bezels, taking up most of the phone’s front. This year, the iPhone X features an edge-to-edge screen that looks simply gorgeous and has a screen-to-body ratio (how much screen covers up the front of a phone) of 82.9%.

However, it does remind me of how Sharp released its first attempt at an edge-to-edge display over three years ago and the whole host of bezel-less phones that have come out in the past couple of year. But most importantly, it reminds me of Samsung’s attempts at creating a truly bezel-less phone, since the very first Edge came out.

TheSamsung Galaxy S8 and S8+, both of which came out earlier this year, have stunning displays that truly are edge-to-edge, thanks to the how the screen curves at the sides. Here are some screen-to-body ratios for phones that came out before the iPhone X,

• Essential PH-1: 84.9%
• Samsung Galaxy S8+: 84.0%
• Xiaomi Mi Mix: 83.6%
• Samsung Galaxy S8: 83.6%

2. Face Unlock with Face ID

The iPhone X ditches the home button in favor of a bigger screen. As a result, Apple has also decided to give up Touch ID in favor of Face ID, a face-unlock system.

Google first introduced facial recognition in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich in 2011. While Apple’s system may use a complex infrared system to detect a person’s face, the option of unlocking a phone with your face has been available in almost every Android phone released in the past 6 years.

Admittedly, Apple’s system sounds a bit better (though we won’t know for sure until the phone is released). But, coming from the company whose founder wanted to wage a “thermonuclear war on Google” for copying their ideas, isn’t that a bit ironic?

You copy my ideas — thief.
I copy yours — innovation!

3. No Home Button

The home button that has always been a signature part of any iPhone, and also the part the breakable part, is gone on the iPhone X. After replacing the physical button with a capacitive one, Apple has finally done away with the home button altogether.

Almost all the other manufacturers, HTC, LG, Motorola, and even Samsung (with the S8), have figured out the disadvantages of having a physical home button. Android has had the option of using on-screen buttons since Honeycomb in 2011.

There are a number of other things, like wireless charging and water resistance, that also made their debut on an Apple device with the iPhone X. The point of this article is not to say that Apple is wrong in following along the lines of other manufacturers, but just to make clear that Apple is in no way as innovative as it portrays itself to be, not anymore.

They dispatch small incremental updates, waiting it out as other companies experiment and perfect new innovative technologies. After all that is done, they jump in with their own version. Intelligent? Yes! Innovative? Not really.

Image Credits — TrustedReviews, bgr, DroidLife