iPhone X review after 24 hours: gorgeous design and display, notch is ugly but tends to fade away, but it's expensive and Face ID can be spotty in some lighting
Works in progress can still be great — After months of hype, endless speculation, and a wave of last-minute rumors about production delays …
Context & Ripple Effects
This day-one Verge verdict lands at the end of a hype cycle defined by production-delay rumors, and it closes a question the September coverage opened: with the iPhone 8 judged not worth upgrading to from an iPhone 7, the X is carrying the entire upgrade case on its own. The two known liabilities were already on record before launch — the notch's UI quirks in photos, video, and games and Wired's first look finding Face ID didn't always work.
What the 24-hour review adds is a split decision: the design-and-display bet pays off, while Face ID remains conditionally unreliable. BuzzFeed's one-week reviews published the same window converge the other way on Face ID — fast in practice — so the lighting sensitivity reads as an edge case rather than a dealbreaker, and the notch 'fading away' confirms Apple's bet that users acclimate.
First-order effects
- Upgrade-eligible iPhone 7 owners now have a clear but costly answer: the X is the only current iPhone worth moving to, pushing the buying decision toward its $999-tier price rather than the cheaper 8.
- Early adopters inherit Face ID as their sole biometric unlock, with some lighting conditions degrading reliability on day one — a real friction point for a feature with no Touch ID fallback.
Second-order effects
- Review consensus forming around a fast-in-practice Face ID pressures Android rivals to accelerate their own face-unlock implementations, since Apple has made camera-based authentication the flagship default.
- The notch fading from 'ugly' to ignorable within days gives every competitor cover to copy the all-screen cutout design without paying a reputational cost for the compromise.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds through the XS generation's similarly expensive reception, Apple has established a durable premium price floor above $999 that the rest of the market prices against.
- The notch-plus-face-ID package hardens into the industry's default full-screen template, with authentication shifting structurally from fingerprint sensors to depth-camera face scanning.
The trend: Flagship smartphones are consolidating around all-screen, notched hardware with face-based authentication replacing touch, at price points that reset the market's ceiling.