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The headphone jack conversation overshadows some really useful changes.
Andrew Cunningham-
The iPhone 6S is on top, it's pretty easy to tell.
Andrew Cunningham -
The iPhone 7 (left) next to an iPhone 6S (right).
Andrew Cunningham -
iPhone 7 on the left, 6S on the right. The less-visible antenna lines, larger camera lens and bump, and the lack of a headphone jack give the 7 away.
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iPhone 6 on top, 7 underneath. The silver, gold, and rose gold finishes really look quite similar.
Andrew Cunningham -
iPhone 6S on top, 7 on bottom.
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The larger, two-lens camera on the iPhone 7 Plus.
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The jet black finish is quite a bit glossier, and makes the 7 look distinctive from the 6S.
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The standard black finish is matte and not unlike the iPhone 5's black finish.
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An Apple employee serves up a fresh tray of AirPods.
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The iPhone 7 and a pair of AirPods. Note the battery indicators for both the pods themselves and the charging case.
Andrew Cunningham
The rumors
got a lot right about the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. Its design isn't too far
off from the 6S and 6S Plus, it has an immovable Home button, the Plus
has a dual-camera setup to simulate optical zoom, and (crucially) that
headphone jack is gone.
But aside from that sticking point, the new
iPhones offer a lot of the solid technological improvements that we've
come to expect. The battery life is a little better. The camera is a
little better. It's faster by a significant margin. We were able to take
a look at some of these things in our brief hands-on time with the
phone today. Some details will have to wait for the full review, but
until then, here's everything you can find out about the phone after
holding it for 15 or 20 minutes.
Key comparisons to the iPhone 6S
Apple didn’t talk about things like screen
size and resolution or measurements and weight onstage today and I’ve
received a lot of questions about it, so let’s lay those facts out up
front.
The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus have the same 4.7 and
5.5 inch screen sizes as the 6 and 6S series, and the resolution and
density of both screens is the same. The 7 has a 326 PPI 1334×750
screen, and the 7 Plus has a 401 PPI 1080p display. Android phone makers
have surpassed these resolutions and densities at this point, but those
improvements are mostly academic and reduce battery life (super
high-res screens are useful for VR, though that’s still a tiny niche in
the wider consumer market). Higher brightness and support for the wider
DCI-P3 color gamut are the main display improvements, but superficially
they’ll look mostly like the 6 and 6S screens.
The 7 and 7 Plus are also identical to the 6S and 6S Plus in height, width, and thickness. The 7 and 7 Plus are a
bit lighter, though, despite the continued use of 7000-series aluminum:
the 7 is 4.87 ounces/138g (down from 5.04 ounces/143g) and the 7 Plus
is 6.63 ounces/188g (down from 6.77 ounces/192g). The 6S and 6S Plus
were actually subtly but noticeably heavier than the 6 and 6 Plus they
replaced, so the weight reduction is welcome news.
Wireless specs remain mostly the same: 867Mbps
802.11ac with Bluetooth 4.2. The 450Mbps LTE, up from 300Mbps, is the
main difference there. And the iPhone 7 has optical image stabilization
in its 12MP camera, something that was previously confined to the larger
iPhone 6 Plus and 6S Plus.
Apple’s product comparison page is a great place to look if you just want to see how all the numbers stack up, and our post on the announcement has other key facts about the camera and other improvements.
Design
If you buy the silver, gold, or rose gold
finishes, the iPhone 7 looks a lot like the 6S—it’s no accident that
Apple focused mainly on the much different-looking glossy Jet Black
finish in its presentation. The giveaways are the missing headphone
jack, the larger camera lens and bump, and the streamlined antenna
cutouts—the latter is still more noticeable on the lighter finishes
because Apple doesn’t try to match the color of the aluminum as it does
with the black and jet black finishes.
Coming from the 6S, I noticed the reduction in
weight as I held and played with both phones. It’s not a night-and-day
difference, but you’ll feel it in your hand and in your pocket.
Otherwise, the screen bezels are the same size and touching the screen
and using the camera is going to feel pretty familiar to 6 and 6S users.
The black and jet black finishes are nice—I
never minded “space grey,” really, but Apple never did settle on one
consistent shade that it used across all of its products or even
different generations of the same product. The black color, which most
closely resembles the black finish on the iPhone 5, should hopefully be
easier to make consistent.
The jet black finish is the most striking and
visually distinctive of the four. The curved edges and curved glass of
the 6, 6S, and 7 were always meant to seem as though they blended
together, but the jet black finish actually accomplishes that visually. I
didn’t feel like the phone was going to slip out of my hands (at least,
not any more than I normally do with the slippery-ish iPhone 6-era
design), but just like the front of the screen that glossy black is
going to be a fingerprint magnet. Apple employees were constantly wiping
the front and back of the display phones to keep them looking pristine
for press pictures, but that’s not how a real one will look for long.
Taptic TouchID
The solid Home button was actually the most jarring change about using the iPhone 7.
Apple’s Taptic Engine does provide feedback
when you touch the button, but it’s now much more like the haptic
feedback you’d get from a capacitive or software button on an Android
phone. The Force Touch trackpad feels pretty close to a regular trackpad
because the haptic feedback is localized, creating the illusion that
just the trackpad is moving.
The iPhone 7’s Taptic Engine is less precise,
so the entire phone vibrates slightly as you press down on the Home
button. You can adjust the force of that feedback in the settings (and
an Apple representative said it would be added to iOS’ increasingly
lengthy first-time setup process, too), but it still feels like pushing a
solid thing that makes the phone vibrate instead of pressing a button.
It will also take some time to get used to the amount of force needed to
register as a “click,” something that was far more obvious with the old
clicky button.
My gut reaction is that I don't quite like the
taptic Home button as much as the physical one—the simulated version of
the button feedback isn’t as satisfying as the actual physical version.
But like the Force Touch trackpad, I expect it’s a good enough
simulation of the real thing that you’ll get used to it and then forget
about it.
AirPods
Apple’s wireless AirPods aren’t going to make
everyone happy, but I can at least say that Apple seems to be delivering
on the promises it made about ease-of-use and sound quality.
Apple was constantly cycling out new pairs of
AirPods to give to journalists in the demo room so that people wouldn’t
need to stick things in their ears that had just been stuck in someone
else’s ears. This meant pairing many different sets to the limited
number of demo phones multiple times, and it only took a couple of
seconds for the iPhone 7 to see a new pair of AirPods once they were
nearby. Battery indicators for the pods themselves and the charging case
are available in software.
The AirPods also did all of the stuff that
Apple said they would despite the crowded room. Pulling one out while
music was playing paused the music, and double-tapping one of them
turned on Siri. And even though the room was jam packed with thirsty
journalists trying to capture pictures and videos of the new hardware,
the beam-forming mics captured everything I said without any apparent
trouble.
The problem is that AirPods are shaped like
all other Apple earbuds and not everyone cares for Apple’s earbuds. For
some, that’s a preference (I like them fine, many in the Ars Slack
don’t). For others, like my wife, the buds physically won’t stay in her
ears. There are already Beats headphones with some of the same basic
features available; hopefully Apple’s W1 wireless chip will become
generally available for other accessory makers to use, too.
A quick note on the W1: it’s used to make
pairing and battery status checking and the Siri features work quickly
and seamlessly, but the actual audio is still being streamed over
good-old Bluetooth, and the AirPods can be paired the standard way with
anything that will do Bluetooth audio. So even if you do buy W1-equipped
headphones to give yourself a better Apple experience, they’ll still be
broadly compatible with other devices.
The case of the disappearing headphone jack
The AirPods are entwined with the other iPhone
7 issue that’s made it into most coverage about the phone: the missing
headphone jack.
I’ll say that, as long as you accept as a
given that Apple was going to make the headphone jack disappear, it
handled the PR end of things well. On paper, it seems like Apple has
done its best to give people some new stuff in exchange for the
headphone jack, particularly water resistance and extra battery life.
Removing the jack and using it to make the phone thinner, as some had
feared, would have been frivolous. To its credit, Apple used the removal
of the jack to address real problems that real people have.
Also to its credit, Apple is providing both a
replacement set of headphones and the expected dongle in the box with
the iPhone 7, defusing criticism that it was killing he jack purely to
nickel-and-dime its customers with dongles. That doesn’t cover the cost
of dongles that inevitably disappear or break, and the smaller 3.5mm
dongle will be easier to lose than things like USB port and display
adapters. But it wasn’t as bad as people worried it would be.
But the real-world implications will only
become clear after some actual use. Will the iPhone 7 work OK with the
weird aux jack setup in my car? Will the extra battery life make it so
that I never need to walk around with headphones and an external battery
plugged into my phone at the same time? Will accessory makers be able
to skirt the issue in creative ways, adding headphone jacks to cases or
creating dongles that allow simultaneous listening and charging?
Will the iPhone 7 be successful enough to push everyone in consumer electronics—not just other phone makers, but everyone
who makes headphones and things that headphones plug into—to embrace
the promised wireless future instead of defaulting to the 3.5mm jack?
Apple is probably the only company on earth that is big enough and
influential enough to force the issue and it has navigated these
technological transitions successfully in the past, but that doesn’t
guarantee success. And if Apple does
succeed, how long will it take the 3.5mm jack to fade away? You can
still run into older 30-pin accessories in hotels and cars of a certain
age; will we still be searching for dongles a decade from now?
I have lots of questions in this vein and
they’re not questions I can answer after 15 minutes of hands-on time. It
will take weeks and months and years of real-world usage to find all
the points of friction and address them. I do
think that Apple has added enough new stuff to the iPhone 7 to make it
worth considering despite the headphone thing, something I wasn’t sure
about based on the rumors we were seeing before. But it’s still going to
define the phone in a lot of ways, and we’ll need to wait for sales
figures and the response of third-party accessory makers to tell us
which way the winds are blowing.
Our full review will be posted later this
month—we’ll have more on performance, the camera, and the audio and
headphone jack issues then.
Listing image by Andrew Cunningham
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