New iPhone X Rules Expose Arrogant Apple.

Apple’s iPhone X is many things to many people, but the key identifying feature of the notch for the FaceID sensors is something unique from Apple. It’s something that doesn’t put the user first.

If there’s one thing that Tim Cook and his team like to do, it is to go on about how it provides technology “in a way that only Apple can.” The ubiquity of wireless charging in the high-end Android space has been going on for years, but only now has Apple jumped on board. While it does use the Qi standard, it is using an older and slower version. You want faster charging? That will come with Apple’s proprietary system that will come out in 2018. Which is, in a way, technology delivering in a way that only Apple can.

But it’s not ‘new’ technology, so the iPhone X has to lean on another gimmick, that of facial recognition. While there are moments where FaceID will be a better choice than TouchID, I still feel there are far more situations where you would rather use TouchID. But Apple has decided that FaceID is the future, and this problem is the answer to a question.

I’m not sure that the question being answered was one set by the public. The implementation and draconian protection of the notch that holds the sensors feels like an edict from the marketing and design departments, rather than the team working on the human computer interface.

Take the shape of the iPhone X. This was something picked up by theVerg not long after the announcement of the latest smartphone from Cupertino. Up until that model, every iPhone had the circular home key and bezels in roughly similar proportions. That meant that a black outline of the bezels and a white circle under a white screen creates an iconic look. Marketing materials, website images, and in-app iconography could clearly identify that ‘this is an iPhone’.

With the move to ‘all screen’ smartphones and minimal bezels showing in the front-on profile, that iconography is lost in a sea of smartphones with the same design shape. From Samsung and Xiaomi, to Huawei and LG, and beyond, the smartphone is losing distinctiveness.

Not with the notch. Now the iPhone has something that makes it both ‘all screen’ and ‘all iPhone’. The notch is the identifier, and who cares how awkward and MacGyvered it looks.

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