The iPhone X went on sale this past Friday, and by all accounts people showed up outside Apple Stores in the cold before dawn to get one. I did not join them. I'm typing this on my iPhone 7, the one with the headphone jack conveniently missing since 2016, and I think I'm going to keep using it for a while longer.
Here's the thing about the X that nobody seems to want to say out loud: it's $999 for the base 64GB model, and if you want the 256GB version you're looking at $1,149. That's more than I paid for my last two laptops combined. Phones have been creeping up in price for years now, sure, but there's a difference between "phones are expensive" and "a phone now costs more than six months of a decent used car payment."
The notch everyone's been arguing about since September doesn't actually bother me that much, for what it's worth. I saw one in person at the mall on Saturday (a friend already owns one, obviously) and within about ten minutes your eye just stops registering it. Face ID is the more interesting change to me, and also the one I'm most skeptical of. Watching my friend tilt his head at exactly the right angle in a dim food court to unlock his phone and show me an Animoji poop emoji felt like a preview of a slightly more annoying future, not a better one. Touch ID just worked. I could unlock my phone in my pocket without looking at it. I genuinely do not understand why that had to go away entirely instead of sticking around next to the new thing for a generation.
None of this is a knock on Apple exactly, more just me being the guy who waits a year on principle and then buys the thing anyway once the reviews and the price complaints have settled down. I did this with the 6 Plus. I'll probably do it here too, eventually, once there's whatever they end up calling the follow-up model.
Also, and this is barely related, but it's been sitting in the back of my head all weekend: that huge document leak, the Paradise Papers thing, dropped yesterday and it's something like 13.4 million files pulled out of an offshore law firm's records. I read through a few of the writeups on it this weekend and honestly the actual content (who's hiding money where) is less interesting to me than the fact that a law firm was sitting on that much sensitive material for years without, it seems, taking basic security seriously. Everyone in tech spent this year yelling about Equifax and Yahoo, and here's another one, just from an industry that doesn't usually get lumped in with "companies that get hacked." Makes you wonder how many law firms and accounting shops out there are sitting on file shares from 2009 that nobody's ever bothered to lock down or even look at again.
Back to the phone thing for a second, because I keep circling back to it: my actual prediction is that the notch becomes a total non-issue within a year and everyone forgets they ever complained, the same way nobody talks about the missing headphone jack anymore even though I still have to dig through a drawer for the little white dongle every time I want wired headphones in the car. That drawer, by the way, is a disaster. I own three of those dongles now because I keep losing them and buying replacements instead of just keeping track of the one I have.
I don't know. Maybe I'll cave by Christmas. My contract's not up until March, though, so there's at least a little financial reasoning behind the wait and not just stubbornness. Mostly stubbornness.