First Look at iPhone XS, XS Max

Apple's replacement for its $1,000 "notch phone" is a bump, non a reinvention. Its bigger, $1,100 sibling on the other hand, is probably going to sell some units just because its screen is so gloriously big.

I'm not saying this to put down the iPhone XS, whose performance I found to be impressive when I tried it in Apple'due south demo room Midweek afternoon. Simply information technology's an established grade factor at present, and a room full of notched phones with super-bright OLED screens doesn't shock the style it did last year.

The XS Max does shock a footling bit, though. The XS is about the same size as the iPhone Ten at 5.65 by ii.79 by 0.3 inches and half dozen.24 ounces. Information technology's a decent one-handed telephone; a little wider than the Samsung Galaxy S9, sure, but but below the ii.8-inch width where a lot of people's hands have bug.

The XS Max is well-nigh the size of the iPhone 8 Plus, at half dozen.2 by iii.05 by 0.3 inches and seven.34 ounces. It's definitely a two-handed phone, at to the lowest degree for me, and it'south nice to see that big confront finally total of screen rather than full of bezel. At 458ppi, the highly saturated, HDR screen is denser than the 326ppi iPhone XR screen, but that's hard to tell at first glance; I think I'll demand to look at them adjacent.

iPhone Xs Max and iPhone Xs

The phones come in "gold," silver, and infinite gray. I was disappointed in the look of the aureate, which has a nice gold finish around the edges but has a beige or brown dorsum. Especially when held side by side to the punchy iPhone XR colors, it looked drab. Silver and space gray, traditional Apple colors, expect as expected. The phones are waterproof and take wireless charging.

The phones come in 64, 256, and 512GB models, all packing the new Apple A12 Bionic processor. The A12 looks to be especially impressive from GPU and car learning perspectives. Apple says the new processor dramatically improves Confront ID recognition speed. Augmented reality apps are going to become much smoother. And the company showed off some amazing new apps, similar one that gauges your basketball shots in existent time. But the XR also has the A12 processor at a lower toll, which means it will probably run the same advanced apps.

Gold Apple iPhone Xs Max

On the forepart, there's a 7-megapixel, f/ii.2 photographic camera. On the back, at that place are two 12-megapixel cameras, f/1.viii and f/two.iv, that, at to the lowest degree superficially, perform a lot like the iPhone Ten's regular and "2x zoom: cameras. Apple says information technology's improved low-light performance and that image processing with the new A12 processor lets them solve common prototype bug, like when someone is backlit by the sun. In the demo room, of class, we couldn't test any of that; all I could do was accept a portrait mode photo and play with the new feature that lets you lot modify the focus blur after the fact.

The XS Max'southward new speaker system is securely impressive. Apple says it has enhanced the stereo separation on the telephone's dual speakers, and when I tried it with the XS Max, it sounded like music was coming out of a place a pes to the left and to the correct of the phone. Information technology was really neat, and amend than the stereo I heard on the XR.

The XS and XS Max are the offset gigabit LTE phones from Apple, and whatever model bought in the United states will work on all four carriers. (There are various different international versions with different frequency band back up, so don't import them across oceans.) They utilise Apple tree's unusual dual-SIM system, which combines i physical SIM with 1 embedded SIM; that makes them, as far as I know, the first dual-SIM phones to be sold officially by US carriers. The dual-SIM system lets you use Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile as your main carrier, and then add any second SIM for a 2nd subscription. While the phones work with Sprint, I'g non sure how the dual-SIM situation works there because Sprint doesn't support the embedded SIM.

The iPhone XS Max is definitely going to attract the large-phone iPhone crowd. That's a lot of screen, and it promises rich, widescreen multimedia experiences. But I suspect the XR is going to steal the XS's thunder. I'm willing to withhold judgement on that until nosotros get our review units, though, to run into if the XS's saturated OLED screen and dual cameras make a real deviation in the iPhone experience.