The iPhones 7

&gt;I think the real performance story with the A10 Fusion is not what it scores on benchmarks, nor how fast it feels in use, but what it does for battery life with its truly innovative dual two-core design. When high performance is called for, the A10 Fusion uses two performance optimized cores. When it’s not, is uses two energy-efficiency-optimized cores. To my knowledge there has never been a system like this in a phone.<p>Well, that&#x27;s just wrong. Android phones had this years ago. The near ubiquitous Snapdragon 810 uses a Big.Little architecture.

First, I am not Gruber.<p>Second, the hate he gets on every comments thread is very fun and entertaining to read, but I think it is often misplaced, and always ad-hominem.<p>Yes, one third of the &#x27;review&#x27; is about the finish, and yes one third of the review is about home button usage patterns from Asia, but personally, that is why I read them, that is why they are <i>unique</i>, because they are not <i>cultural</i> reviews from The Verge, or <i>technical</i> reviews from Ars Technica, or <i>node process</i> reviews from Anandtech, which I also read. That is also why I don&#x27;t read Engadget&#x27;s review, or Gizmodo&#x27;s one (are they still online?); their reviews are a subset of the others.<p>This is clearly a case of niche focus, he writes stuff others won&#x27;t. And I&#x27;m glad I get to read his writing because, and this is the important part, <i>I get to make my own mind</i>, I don&#x27;t have to agree with him.

Why am I incapable of either discerning or caring about any of this? I can&#x27;t help but be impressed by his incredible attention to detail and his understanding of the design choices and their ramifications ... but I still feel like I&#x27;m reading about the mating habits of some alien species. Interesting yes. But also bizarre and faintly ridiculous.

This reminds me of people who I dealt with in retail.<p>People would buy beautiful laptops, with glossy finishes, interesting detail. Yet, people would never pull the original plastic off the surrounding covers or back cover. They would bring in their computers to be worked on and have this hideous, dirt crusted, half pulled up, sheet of plastic flapping in the breeze on their computer. I would ask them why they did this and they always said the same thing: &quot;Because I don&#x27;t want to scratch the laptop.&quot;<p>I would then go through my speal about how, if their entire purpose for keeping the plastic on was to keep it looking pristine, why did they put up with it looking like shit for years. By the time they get sick of dealing with said plastic, they will pull it off only to realize that the dirt and grime that has accumulated under that plastic causes tiny scratches in the surface of their laptop.<p>In summary: Laptops with plastic on them looked like shit to begin with, once removed the laptop still looked like shit from leaving the original plastic on. Take the plastic off, enjoy how beautiful your laptop is and try to take care of it to the best of your ability. Nothing lasts forever.

I find it fascinating that a review of an extremely complex piece of technology devotes 1,500 words to the <i>color</i> of the <i>back</i> of the thing. What a world.

I iPhone 6s+ owner here with iPhone 7+ on order. I wish some of the reviewers would cover the voice quality when using the iPhone as <i>a phone.</i> The iPhone 6s(+) added another microphone for noise cancellation and also it uses H.265 for FaceTime Video compression over cell networks (2x H.264 compression) and one is able to use VoLTE (I&#x27;m on Verizon). But I&#x27;m always looking for better cell phone quality.<p>I actually received a phone call while just to about to get on a NYC subway, 1 story below ground and the person couldn&#x27;t wait until I took my subway trip, so we chatted for awhile while several subways passed both uptown and downtown (they come every 3 - 5 minutes in each direction). She claimed she could here me speaking just fine even when the subway is arriving :-)<p>But sometimes, people have trouble hearing me on the iPhone and on the Apple $80 in-hear microphone.<p>I&#x27;m curious if there are any upgrade to the iPhone 7 that improves the voice quality and I wish at least one reviewer would test this out.<p>Also, as an aside, I&#x27;m disappointed that the iPhone 7 doesn&#x27;t cover band 66 (AWS-3) spectrum. I guess there aren&#x27;t any modem chips out yet (at least not from Qualcomm which is what the Verizon and Sprint CDMA phones use).<p>Still in dense markets like NYC, even though Verizon has far more spectrum than AT&amp;T, I expect that in the next year or two the existing spectrum will be filling up.<p>I&#x27;ve been using the iPhone leather case since the 5s (when it first came out) and I&#x27;ve only had one screen break.

I love the part about AssistiveTouch. I was just in China last week and also noticed this and couldn&#x27;t explain it. I thought it had something to do with Chinese writing&#x2F;characters. But this makes more sense: &quot;why don’t they click the home button? Because of a widespread misconception that the home button will wear out, thus reducing the resale value of the iPhone.&quot;

Say what you want about Gruber&#x27;s breathless&#x2F;obsessive style, but as an upgrading iOS user, I found two bits very useful that weren&#x27;t in the other 2 reviews I read:<p>-Jet black is the grippiest iPhone finish ever -no OIS on the telephoto lens, making it much less useful than the default lens for night photos and video

The jet black ones look fantastic to me as well and I had worried a bit about durability since I&#x27;ve dropped, scraped and generally abused every phone I&#x27;ve had and I don&#x27;t like cases.<p>I may be a bit unusual in this, but I actually want a <i>smaller</i> screen. Like everyone else, I want the phone to be thinner and lighter too, but I miss the days of being able to take my phone with my in my pocket when I go out running. a 4&quot; screen at current iPhone thicknesses would be amazing. I&#x27;m not going to watch movies or write long HN comments on a phone. I just need something <i>small</i> that works for checking email, texting and playing me music.<p>Also on the topic of size, as my screen resolution keeps increasing over the years it feels like John is writing in smaller and smaller text! By changing literally nothing, he&#x27;s been offering a worse and worse UX.

I think it&#x27;s really strange that the headphone jack wasn&#x27;t mentioned at all in the review. In the one instance he refers to it he says &quot;where the whatchamacalit jack used to be&quot;.

&gt; Second, both black finishes exemplify Apple’s obsession and mastery with materials engineering.<p>But first, the Jet Black one is going to scuff and nick like hell. But because of feelings Gruber thinks it&#x27;s both better and a demonstration of materials mastery and engineering.<p>Thanks Gruber, 12 paragraphs defining why a poor materials choice that requires a case (which counters the thinness of the phone which was the justification for why the headphone jack is gone) is a demonstration of mastery.<p>Here&#x27;s the tl;dr of any Gruber review of an Apple product, he loves it. All the issues are examples of courage, and all the real problems don&#x27;t get talked about (&quot;where the whatchamacallit jack used to go&quot;). He&#x27;ll point out a token &quot;problem&quot; but, just like in this example, he then goes on at length about why it&#x27;s actually some bold solution to a problem that&#x27;s not actually a problem but is really about how dumb some users are (so dumb that the thing they&#x27;re doing wrong even gets an entire paragraph of a footnote about how Apple is even helping them through the hopeless superstitious morass of their lives).<p>Even points that might be interesting to read about (the camera) can&#x27;t be trusted because he&#x27;s such a compromised reviewer.<p>A much better, and still favorable, review is the other one on the front page today by the Verge. There&#x27;s issues with that review as well, but at least the information in the review is well balanced and considered and not thousands of words of apologia and user blaming.

&gt; I wouldn’t be surprised if the news stories and pundit hot takes about jet black iPhone scratches and scuffs outnumber those about the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 literally exploding and hurting people.<p>Haha, probably so.

The Note 7 recall resulted in a $20B market cap drop for Samsung, about 15%. I&#x27;d bet good money at poor odds that &#x27;scuffgate&#x27; will not have anywhere close to the same impact.

tl;dr please?? It&#x27;s too much to read for me!