Apple iPhone XS and XS Max: Welcoming the incremental update

Nothing much about the new iPhones were kept a secret so Apple’s event earlier just felt like a confirmation of rumours that have swirled around for the past few months. They’re here. They’re official! We welcome the new iPhone Xs and Xs Max, the upgrades from last year’s iPhone X.

There isn’t much that’s changed design-wise, except for a new gold finish. It looks similar to last year’s flagship. But it gets some specification bump that owners of older generation iPhones might appreciate. That or if you’ve been waiting for a bigger screen on an iPhone paired with better camera and battery life.

The new iPhone Xs and Xs Max get a performance bump courtesy of the new A12 Bionic chip, the company’s first 7-nanometer chip. Apple beats its competition to the punch in this respect as the 7nm processors from the likes of Qualcomm and Huawei haven’t reached the market yet. But with the iPhone Xs and Xs Max coming out in the next couple of weeks, Apple becomes the first to bring this technology to market. It features a 6-core CPU, 4-core GPU, and 8-core dedicated machine learning engine, making this chip faster and more energy efficient than what came before it. Apple boasts it can handle a whopping five trillion operations per second and boost the capabilities of the new smartphones’ cameras.

There isn’t much differentiating the two phones from each other. Both sport Super Retina displays we’ve seen in last year’s iPhone X, a new gold finish (or you can get it in silver or space gray), and carry an IP68 rating. Both also have 64GB/256GB/512GB storage options, dual SIM support (one nano and one eSIM), run on iOS 12, and support Apple’s True Tone display, Dolby Vision, and HDR10. Both offer stereo sound with wider stereo field of range over the iPhone X.

Camera setup is the same, too. You get dual 12-megapixel sensors at the back (one is a telephoto one and the other a wide-angle one) and a 7-megapixel front-facing camera. With the dedicated image signal processor and neural engine, Apple promises these cameras perform a trillion operations on each photo you take with it. Also, you don’t have to worry about shutter lag here. Apple introduces what it calls Smart HDR, too, which during the demo looks like the camera taking a series of buffer shots and combining these to make sure you get the best possible photo out of your iPhone. The company also now lets you adjust depth of field or create/reduce that “bokeh” effect after the fact. The iPhones can now stereo record audio, too.

Battery life is one of the things that differentiate the two. You get up to 30 minutes more from the iPhone Xs, while you get an hour and a half from the Xs Max, when you compare it to previous generation. Screen sizes are different, too. The Xs has a 5.8-inch display, while the Xs Max gets a gigantic 6.5-inch display. But thanks to the almost bezel-less design the latter is going to be roughly the same size as the iPhone 8 Plus.

Pre-orders for the iPhone Xs and Xs Max start this Friday, September 14 and units will be ready by the following Friday, September 21. The Xs’s pricing starts at $1,379, while the Xs Max starts at $1,519.