iPhone X first look: nice big screen in compact form factor and improved battery life, but Face ID didn't always work
How do you show off the most anticipated product in years? That was my dilemma with the iPhone X. Since my unit was one of the first few released into the wild …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Wired first look lands between Apple's September unveiling of the edge-to-edge OLED, home-button-free design and the wave of full reviews now hitting. The through-line across coverage is Face ID: the September hands-on called it quicker than rival face unlock, but this unit — one of the first few released into the wild — didn't always work, and The Verge's 24-hour review likewise found it spotty in some lighting.
That tension matters because the stakes are unusually high for a first-generation biometric replacing Touch ID on a flagship priced at the top of the line. Later coverage rounds out the picture: BuzzFeed's one-week review reports Face ID settling down as fast and easy to learn, while Mashable notes it can't distinguish some twins.
First-order effects
- Early adopters buying at launch get a genuinely new interaction model — gestures instead of a home button, Face ID instead of Touch ID — with real-world reliability that varies by lighting, per Wired and The Verge's first days of testing.
- Apple's TrueDepth camera system is now under public scrutiny before scale shipments, since every reviewer's flaky unlock becomes a headline risk for the holiday quarter.
Second-order effects
- Despite the mixed Face ID press, demand held: CIRP put the iPhone X at roughly 30% of US iPhone sales in its first 30 days, and Canalys ranked it the top-shipping model over the holidays — so the reliability critiques did not dent the launch.
- Rival phone makers watching the reviews got a template: face unlock had to be fast enough to feel natural (as the September hands-on noted) or it reads as a gimmick, raising the bar for Android biometric implementations.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the notch-plus-face-unlock package becomes the industry's default flagship layout, with the home button and rear fingerprint sensor fading from premium devices — a structural bet Apple made in hardware that reviewers' quibbles never reversed.
- Counterpoint's figure that the iPhone X alone generated 35% of worldwide smartphone profits in Q4 2017 points to a market where one vendor's single model captures a third of industry profit, concentrating pricing power around exactly these first-generation component bets like TrueDepth and the L-shaped dual-cell battery teardowns revealed.
The trend: Flagship smartphones are consolidating around Apple's all-screen, face-unlock form factor, with first-year biometric reliability complaints absorbed by demand strong enough to reshape what premium phones look like.