iPhone XS review: the XS and XS Max are solid updates of a winning formula

Last year, Apple did something special: it introduced the usual update of the iPhone, the iPhone 8, while simultaneously introducing the iPhone X with a wave hype. The iPhone X was a complete redesign of the iPhone, with a new system of gestures, FaceID unlocking and an edge-to-edge screen that caused a wave of redesign of apps.

The iPhone X was intended to usher in the future of phones, and it succeeded – its influence (and its number) are everywhere in the industry. And Apple, an iPhone company, has become an "iPhone X" company. This year, the iPhone X comes in two versions: the updated iPhone XS upscale and the iPhone XR mid-range, which will not be available until next month.

There are two models of iPhone XS: the 5.8-inch XS and the new iPhone XS Max, featuring a much larger 6.5-inch display and a frankly ridiculous name.

In reality, the two models of the iPhone XS are basically iPhone X-specific updates, with a new main sensor, a new processor and a bunch of small updates. notch, the arrival of the iPhone XS means that we can watch all the changes introduced by the iPhone X and see how they went, while then watching where Apple pushes the high-end phones .

XS MAXIMUM

Let's start with the XS Max. Besides the size, the XS and XS Max are identical: same A12 Bionic processor, same cameras, same OLED display technology with 458 pixels per inch. The Max also has a bigger battery, which is good. After a week of use as the main phone, the XS Max feels both bigger and smaller than expected. Physically, it is the same size as the iPhone 8 Plus and the Pixel 2 XL, and it definitely shares the same surfboard quality as Apple's previous larger-sized phones – at least when you watch it from the back.

But the edge-to-edge screen makes it a lot more reasonable to face. The XS has the same OLED screen as the X of last year and the XS Max looks exactly like this screen, just bigger. And since the screen fills the entire front of the phone, the XS Max does not seem as big as the Plus phones. It's absolutely great for watching videos or playing games – a huge, beautiful screen. I like that.

At the same time, the size of Max is moving away from it. The large dials of older Plus phones mean that the top of the screen is lower on the phone, making it easier to reach. To retrieve a notification or control center on the XS Max, you must reach the top of the device. I have big hands and, basically, I can not do it without returning the phone in my hand – I've ended up having to use both hands most of the time. You can use Apple's accessibility feature to display the user interface and then drag it, but it's just two shots, and it makes me a little sad.

The Max does not really make a lot of software to take advantage of this big screen: no extra row of home screen icons, or image in the image for the video. Some apps that have not been updated seem a little broken right now, especially Instagram. Everything else is usually bigger; Apps such as Slack and Gmail and Twitter display exactly the same amount of information as smaller Xs. If you think big things are fun (they are), check the size of the status bar when you remove the control center. AT & T WIFI, it bells you. THE TIME IS 16H12 AND YOU HAVE 68% OF THE BATTERY. I laugh every time, as I did with the Plus phones.

Some big screen software changes are familiar to Plus: in landscape mode, some apps can switch to a side view and you'll see tabs (with favicons if you turn them on!) In Safari. But that's really it. Apple did not want to surpass the screen because it does not want the interface elements to be too small and most people just want a larger interface on a big phone, which makes sense. I just wish to have the opportunity to increase the information density on the Max just a little bit.

So yes, if you want a giant screen, get a Max. It's a beautiful and gigantic screen, and I loved watching it. But nothing is easier than older phones Plus, and in some cases, more difficult.

Display and FaceID

The iPhone XS has the same OLED screen as the X, with curved corners and notch. After a year of reviewing this screen, I am convinced that it is one of the best screens available, with excellent color reproduction and excellent brightness. And the Apple TrueTone and Night Shift features are excellent. it's easy to watch this screen all the time. (I also think Apple's claim that this screen supports HDR10 and Dolby Vision is a bit silly – certainly, it's getting brighter, but it's not at all HDR on a real TV.)

Last year, we wondered how Apple could handle burn-in on this new OLED display, and this year we know: There is virtually no burning problems on the screen of the iPhone X. I would expect the XS to continue.

We also learned that the iPhone X scratches much more easily than expected. The glass on the front and back of the XS is supposed to be more durable. So we'll see – my review units look pretty good so far, but it's only after a week of use.

It's also been a year since Apple introduced FaceID, and we know it works pretty well most of the time. FaceID on the XS is still a little faster than the X – just a faster pace. It is visible side by side, but it's not so much faster that you will not end up looking at the phone from time to time to unlock it. iOS 12 allows you to add a "secondary appearance", which allows you to set up a second person if you wish, which is fine.

Apart from the minor speed increase and support of the secondary appearance, FaceID is always FaceID: it does not work in landscape or upside down mode. If you wear glasses like me, you will still need to enter your code every morning when you wake up because you are holding the phone too close to your face for it to work. And sunglasses that block infrared light will still prevent it from working – Apple says it works with sunglass manufacturers to ship new types of FaceID-compatible sunglasses. (Only Apple can make sure that another totally different sector fits its phone, not the other way around.)

A year later, it is clear that FaceID is easier to install and forget than TouchID, which means more people secure their phones. It's a good thing.

Cameras

Camera upgrades on the XS above the X are significant – the XS makes the X camera terrible most of the time. But we say that the best camera on the market is Google's Pixel 2 for a year now. And … I think the Pixel 2 still has a better camera than the iPhone XS. Do not get me wrong – most people will love the pictures they take out of the iPhone XS. It has a solid camera, and I prefer it to the Galaxy S9. But compared to Pixel 2, the XS does not really do it for me.

The camera before the iPhone XS is identical to the iPhone X: a 7-megapixel sensor with a f / 2.2 lens that takes into account the depth information of the TrueDepth system to support portrait mode. The rear telephoto lens is also the same as the iPhone X: an optically stabilized f / 2.4 lens with the same 12-megapixel sensor.

But the rear wide-angle camera (which you will use most often) has been updated: it's still an optically stabilized f / 1.8 lens with a 12-megapixel sensor, but each of those 12 megapixels is physically bigger which means more light. They are larger at 1.4 μm pixels instead of 1.22 μm and deeper at 3.5 μm instead of 3.1 μm. There are also twice as many "focus pixels", what Apple calls its phase-detection autofocus system.

Apple has also reorganized its image processing into a new system, called Smart HDR, which runs the photos via the A12's new integrated image processing subsystem and the Neural Engine. The basic idea is very similar to Google's on Pixel 2: the iPhone XS takes a series of images at different exposures and combines them into a final photo. Like the Pixel 2, the iPhone XS launches a rotating buffer of four frames per second when you open the photo application, allowing for a zero-shutter delay. Image has already been captured as soon as you press the shutter button.

But while Pixel 2 combines several belowexposed frames, the iPhone XS also captures another more thanExposed image for each shot in the stamp, which captures additional details in the shadows of your image. Then, it looks at the other images in the buffer to see if they can add additional details before merging multiple images to create the final photo. He also detects faces and movements, so he knows what he's looking at and adjusts treatment accordingly.

This concept is called "computational photography", and it takes a lot of computational power: no DSLRs or no mirrored cameras can get out of things like these now, especially not in real time. A12 Bionic do all this work of capture and overlay when you need to take a picture.

The new Smart HDR feature allows the iPhone XS to take much better pictures than the iPhone X. Brighter, clearer, they are more detailed, you named it. During the past year, I have been less and less impressed by the iPhone X camera, and the iPhone XS represents a clear improvement.

But Smart HDR is extremely aggressive – too much, in my opinion. It flattens the contrast of the images and systematically smooths the details of the photos. You can see it clearly when you zoom in on 100% of the same picture taken on the Pixel 2 and the iPhone XS: the Pixel just captures more detail, while the iPhone tends to flatten it. What bothers me the most about the iPhone X is the loss of details, and even if the iPhone XS is better, the smoothing always disappoints me every time I see it.

Apple used to talk about Samsung with a more accurate camera than Samsung's, which has been doing aggressive smoothing and saturation stuff for years, but iPhone XS camera images look like more to Samsung's cameras than ever before. And that might be right for most people: most of these photos will only be visible on mobile screens and XS photos will be perfect on smartphone screens. But I do not think they resist the scrutiny of how Pixel 2 photos do it.

The loss of details is one thing, but there are also some subjective things that I prefer about the Pixel 2: the XS takes extremely hot pictures, while the Pixel is more realistic, even if it's a bit more muddy in the reds. The Pixel 2 photos are extremely contrasted and somewhat desaturated, which I like, but some people find it difficult. It's all part of a centuries-old battle between what's right and what people like to watch, and there's really no good answer.

I would never try to tell you which photos you should like better, but it seems obvious that Apple and Samsung are looking for a different overall look than Google. And I can certainly tell you that more details in the photos are better than less.

Apple has also updated the XS Portrait Mode, which blurs the background and adjusts the lighting of your face so that your phone photos look more like pictures taken with big cameras and lenses. The iPhone XS has a new tip: it allows you to adjust the blur after taking the picture. Samsung phones have allowed you to change the blur for a while, but the portraits of Apple seem much better, because the phone does a lot more work. But that does not mean that they are always beautiful.

The XS does a lot of things very quickly when you take a picture in portrait mode: it identifies the faces of the scene and separates the background and the foreground. Then he creates a depth map of the entire scene, especially in the foreground subject. Then, he gradually applies the blur to this depth map, in order to model how a real lens on a real full-frame camera could easily get the blur from the foreground to the background.

It's really nice to adjust the blur afterwards and see the different parts of the image become blurred at different rates – it's definitely more than just cutting the background and blurring it. It's better than phones like Pixel 2 and S9 can do it, even if it's still difficult to cut glasses.

Apple says it modeled the blur of portrait mode versus the main lenses on full-frame cameras, so we tested it against a 50mm lens on a Canon 5D Mark IV. As you can imagine, the Canon seized the leak – Apple's software is not there yet. But most people do not have big cameras and expensive lenses, and portrait mode will be very useful for them. But it's still a little odd: I took almost 5000 photos with my iPhone X over the past year, and only 207 of them were in portrait mode. I do not think the new portrait mode on the XS will allow me to use it much more.

In terms of video, there are new software stabilization algorithms on the rear cameras and an entirely new stabilization for the front camera, as well as the ability to record stereo audio. I did not take too much video with the XS in my tests, but for me, it's as good as the X, which has been great over the past year.

Apple is not wrong to say that the iPhone is the most popular camera in the world and that every improvement brought by the company is welcome – it means that more people are taking better pictures. But I do not think it's the best smartphone camera on the market, even before Pixel 3 is launched in a few weeks.

CPU and battery life

Last year's iPhone X had a Bionic A11 chip and this year's iPhone XS has a Bionic A12 chip. In terms of processor performance, the A12 is really not much faster: Apple cites only a 15% improvement in performance, and I have not really seen any noticeable acceleration on my iPhone X.

The GPU of the A12 is 50% faster, but as usual, it seems to have room for maneuver for the future, because these devices tend to stay for so long. Last year, the A11 GPU was 30% faster than the A10, and it's not as if the developers had managed to do it after a year. Apple is performing well across the entire smartphone industry, and I think it's great to use that advantage to keep your devices running for as long as possible, instead of using them at the cutting edge of power and performance. All the time.

The big change to the A12 is the new neural engine, which speeds up machine learning. Apple says the A11's neural engine could perform 600 million operations per second, while the A12 could do 5 trillion. That's a huge increase – especially since the system consumes a lot less energy – but in practice, applications are not really there yet. Basically, you only watch a few AR demos and the new features of the camera.

The A12 is also the first 7nm chip on the market to be sold on a large scale, which is very important for a variety of reasons, especially battery life. I've mostly tested the XS Max, and it's been awesome – better than Apple's claim of 90 minutes longer than the X. In fact, I've had 12 hours of work. autonomy with the XS Max without low power mode, and it's even under my daily heavy use of the constant use of Slack and emails, video, taking pictures and of navigation. The smallest XS is estimated 30 minutes longer than the X, which lasted about 8 hours last year. It's solid.

Everything else

Apple made a big deal with the "wide stereo" speakers on the XS during the conference, which was a little silly, but the speakers of the iPhone XS are definitely stronger and sharper than the speakers of the X. As the X, the XS increases the volume of the speaker of the headset to serve as stereo channel, but this year the speaker of the headset and the lower speaker are closely linked, allowing Apple to process audio for better stereo separation. I do not think it's noticeable, but any improvement to the phone's speakers is a good thing.

The internal wireless charging coil of the iPhone XS has also been improved, making positioning easier, and Apple says it will be charged 30 minutes faster using the same charging pads as before. AirPower, the wireless charging system from Apple announced last year, seems to be dead for now; Apple did not talk about it when I asked.

Yes, the iPhone XS still has 3D Touch. Tap this screen while you can still. And not having a headphone jack or USB-C is still very sad, especially because the Lightning ecosystem fully controlled by Apple is extremely small: there are very few Lightning headphones, zero third dongles and exactly an iPhone X certified battery case … which is not yet certified for the XS. Apple wants you to buy AirPods, so you will buy AirPods.

The resistance to dust and water has been improved up to IP68 of IP67 on the X and the XR. This means that you can keep the XS at a depth of 1.5 meters of water for 30 minutes at a time, which seems a lot. Apple recommends letting it dry for five hours before plugging it in to charge. (There is still no guarantee against water damage.)

The XS is also compatible with the dual SIM card, but we have not yet been able to test it – it comes with a software update this fall. We will report at that time.

So, it's the iPhone XS. Should you get one?

Well, these are still expensive phones: the iPhone XS starts at $ 999, and the high-end iPhone XS Max with 512GB of storage will cost you $ 1449. It is a lot of money. I'm sure some people will find that ridiculous, while others will already have pre-ordered.

I would not rush to spend $ 999 more on the XS if you have an X, but if you're already in full control, do not worry: you'll love the iPhone XS. This is much more iPhone, and it will probably take years. I definitely prefer the Pixel 2 camera, but the iPhone XS is not far behind, and it's still a significant improvement over previous iPhones.

For everyone, I think it's worth waiting to see how the iPhone XR presents itself before rushing: it has the same processor and the same main camera for $ 750. The only major issue is the quality of its 6.1-inch LCD screen compared to the XS OLED. But for that, we will just have to wait until next month.

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