Apple officially announced its 2018 iPhone lineup at a press event in Cupertino, Calif., on Wednesday. The company is replacing last year’s iPhone X with a new model dubbed the iPhone Xs, which comes with a bigger-sized Xs Max variant. In addition, Apple also unveiled a more affordable iPhone Xr, which effectively replaces last year’s iPhone 8, and comes in a range of new colors.
The iPhone Xs looks very similar to last year’s iPhone X, and features a 5.8-inch edge-to-edge OLED screen with a resolution of 2436 by 1125 pixels. The display consists of a total of 2.7 million pixels, features a pixel density of 458 pixels per inch, and has a notch cut-out for the front-facing camera. The phone will be available in three color options: silver, gold, and space gray. Storage options for the phone include 64 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB.
The iPhone Xr will be available in white, black, blue, coral, yellow, and red, and come with 64GB, 128GB, or 256GB of storage, with pricing starting at $749.
The iPhone Xs, meanwhile, will be priced $999 and up, and the Xs Max will sell for $1,099 and up. Consumers will be able to pre-order the new devices starting this Friday, and shipping will start on Sept. 21.
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Just like last year’s model, the iPhone Xs once again makes use of Face ID for unlock and authentication, which is why there is no fingerprint reader included on the device. Also once again missing, just like on many other phones these days: a headphone jack.
The phone includes a dual camera with a 12 megapixel wide-angle lens as well as a 12 megapixel telephoto lens. On the front side, it features a 7 megapixel RGB camera as a well as an infrared camera used for Face ID.
The cameras are being powered by smart algorithms working under the hood, which also enable a new smart HDR feature as well as the ability to adjust the depth-of-field of a photo after the fact. Essentially, all that computational power makes it possible to blur the background of a portrait photo, HDR-style, with a simple slider.
The iPhone Xs Max is virtually identical to the iPhone Xs, safe for the screen size: The super-sized premium iPhone features a OLED screen with a vertical screen size of 6.5 inches with a resolution of 2688 by 1242 pixels, and a pixel density of 458 ppi. Color and other features are otherwise the same as those available with the iPhone Xs, aside from one key detail: Apple promised that the iPhone Xs Max will offer up to 90 minutes of additional battery life when compared to the iPhone X. The iPhone Xs will only offer up to 30 minutes of additional battery life.
Apple’s new iPhones Xs are being powered by a new chip dubbed the A12 Bionic, which includes a 6-core CPU, a 4-core GPU, and a dedicated neural engine. The latter is essentially chip hardware optimized for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, as well as augmented reality (AR). Apple first added dedicated on-device machine learning to last year’s chipsets, but this new generation is supposed to be around nine times faster than last year’s model while using less energy.
The iPhone Xr is perhaps the biggest change in the company’s lineup: The device is meant to replace the iPhone 8 as an option for more budget-conscious buyers, but borrows its looks from the iPhone X. It features a 6.1-inch edge-to-edge LED screen with a resolution of 1792 by 828 pixels and a pixel density of 326 ppi.
There is a notch for the front-facing camera, and just like the iPhone Xs, and the X before it, the Xr also uses Face ID for unlock and authentication. The phone has a 12 megapixel camera and offers much of the same photo features as the Xs, including smart HDR.
Many of the details announced Wednesday had already leaked before the event. Ironically, a lot of this leaking wasn’t done by insiders with malicious intent, but by Apple’s own website. First photos of the iPhone Xs were obtained by a blogger who guessed the correct URLs. And on Wednesday morning, another blogger found a confirmation for the phone’s model numbers in the sitemap of Apple’s website.
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