iPhone 7 hands-on: looks similar to iPhone 6s, Jet Black color is surprisingly grippy, optical zoom camera makes huge difference, new home button is awful
Don't get hung up on the missing headphone jack … Justin Pot / The Next Web : Nintendo removed headphone jacks before it was cool Edward C. Baig / USA Today : First look at iPhone 7: Features to please the Apple faithful Chance Miller / 9to5Mac : Video roundup: Hands-on with the new iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, Apple Watch Series 2, and AirPods David Pierini / Cult of Mac : iPhone 7 Home button may not be love at first feel Tweets: Samuel Tombs / @samueltombs : The standard iPhone 7 will cost £60 more than its predecessor. The $ price didn't rise. Consumers now starting to feel adverse impact of ↓£ Sunny Dhillon / @sundhillon : Depth sensing #iphone7 cameras could be a step towards mobile AR/#VR environmental recognition http://techcrunch.com/... Mark Gurman / @markgurman : I think the new Home button will take time to get used to. It doesn't feel like a real click like the MacBook trackpad did on first use. Greg Koenig / @gak_pdx : Let's be a little honest, Jonny's design videos have a little bit of this going on with the copy:pic.twitter.com/60aFkDCGBr
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple launched the iPhone 7 and [[a:874340|7 Plus today with new camera systems, its best iPhone battery life to date, and water resistance]], but The Verge's hands-on is where the physical verdicts land: the body reads as an iPhone 6s refresh, Jet Black turns out surprisingly grippy, and the Plus's optical zoom is the standout. The sour notes are tactile — reviewers including Cult of Mac find the force-sensitive home button jarring, and the jack removal starts what Ars Technica's early review calls a rough transition to wireless audio.
Two quieter signals matter beyond feel. A currency-driven £60 UK increase with no US dollar change shows Apple testing regional price realization rather than a global hike. And the camera story — zoom plus dual lenses, which Sunny Dhillon flags as groundwork for mobile AR environmental recognition — points at where Apple intends the line's value to come from now that the silhouette has stopped moving.
First-order effects
- UK buyers pay £60 more than they did for the 6s while US prices hold, meaning Apple is absorbing or passing through currency shifts unevenly across markets starting today.
- Early adopters get a phone whose two most-touched interfaces changed at once: a static-feeling haptic home button reviewers say takes getting used to, and no headphone jack, pushing them toward bundled AirPods or dongles immediately.
Second-order effects
- The Plus's optical zoom sets the benchmark every rival flagship must match this cycle, accelerating the shift of R&D and component budgets toward multi-lens camera systems over industrial design.
- Removing the jack creates immediate demand for wireless earbuds and adapters, handing Apple and accessory makers a new attach-rate revenue stream on top of the handset itself.
Third-order effects
- If the haptic home button proves teachable, it clears the way for deleting it entirely — exactly what Apple does a year later when the iPhone X ships without a home button and replaces it with Face ID.
- With the exterior frozen and the camera carrying the upgrade story, phones begin converging on depth-sensing capture hardware, the substrate for the AR use cases investors like Dhillon are already projecting onto this generation.
The trend: Smartphone competition is migrating from external design to camera and sensor capability, with legacy inputs like buttons and jacks retired as soon as haptic and wireless substitutes can absorb the backlash.