iPhone X tech was originally meant to show up in 2018, Apple's Riccio says
Apple was originally expecting to ship the technologies in the iPhone X in 2018, hardware engineering head Dan Riccio revealed in an interview published this week.
The product's upcoming Nov. 3 launch was managed "with a lot of hard work, talent, grit, and determination," Riccio explained to Mashable. The executive admitted however that the desire to accelerate changes like an edge-to-edge screen left little time for alternatives if something didn't work out.
The company went "all in" when it decided to swap a home button and Touch ID for Face ID, Riccio noted, dismissing rumors that the iPhone X's exclusive use of Face ID was because it couldn't make an embedded touch sensor work.
"We spent no time looking at [putting] fingerprints on the back or through the glass or on the side," he remarked, adding that while schedules prevented that anyway, Apple executives also believed in the quality of Face ID.
"Quite frankly, this program was on such a fast track to be offered [and] enabled this year. We had to lock [the design] very, very early. We actually locked the design, to let you know, in November. We had to lock it early."
The decision to implement a neural engine in the phone's A11 Bionic processor reportedly traces back to 2014, when the earliest work on the chip began. The company didn't know what it would be used for, Riccio said, but realized the decision had to be made ahead of time.
Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller sugested that the idea of an edge-to-edge display dates back to the first-generation iPhone.
"We've had a dream since Day One to make it all screen, edge to edge," he claimed.
The OLED screen on the iPhone X is being produced by Samsung, Apple confirmed, but a custom component with additional software work to deal with issues like color accuracy. The company also noted that the phone's attention detection system simply checks whether anyone is looking, rather than automatically scanning for the registered Face ID user. Attention scans take place roughly every 30 seconds, and are used to decide whether or not to keep the screen on.
The product's upcoming Nov. 3 launch was managed "with a lot of hard work, talent, grit, and determination," Riccio explained to Mashable. The executive admitted however that the desire to accelerate changes like an edge-to-edge screen left little time for alternatives if something didn't work out.
The company went "all in" when it decided to swap a home button and Touch ID for Face ID, Riccio noted, dismissing rumors that the iPhone X's exclusive use of Face ID was because it couldn't make an embedded touch sensor work.
"We spent no time looking at [putting] fingerprints on the back or through the glass or on the side," he remarked, adding that while schedules prevented that anyway, Apple executives also believed in the quality of Face ID.
"Quite frankly, this program was on such a fast track to be offered [and] enabled this year. We had to lock [the design] very, very early. We actually locked the design, to let you know, in November. We had to lock it early."
The decision to implement a neural engine in the phone's A11 Bionic processor reportedly traces back to 2014, when the earliest work on the chip began. The company didn't know what it would be used for, Riccio said, but realized the decision had to be made ahead of time.
Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller sugested that the idea of an edge-to-edge display dates back to the first-generation iPhone.
"We've had a dream since Day One to make it all screen, edge to edge," he claimed.
The OLED screen on the iPhone X is being produced by Samsung, Apple confirmed, but a custom component with additional software work to deal with issues like color accuracy. The company also noted that the phone's attention detection system simply checks whether anyone is looking, rather than automatically scanning for the registered Face ID user. Attention scans take place roughly every 30 seconds, and are used to decide whether or not to keep the screen on.
Comments
schedule only leaves 2018, or later, as the original target before things were sped up.
Course, Schiller also dreamed of it having a physical keyboard ...
My takeaway from this is Apple was forced to bring their expected tech forward a year because they didn't have anything interesting in the pipeline for this year. Their plan was for the iPhone 7s to be the flagship and it simply wasn't standing up design wise with what was coming out of other manufacturers. The Galaxy S series, Huawei Mate, Essential Phone, LG G6, Pixel 2 XL, etc. were miles ahead of Apple's 2014 design that debuted with the iPhone 6. Apple had to do something to stem the continued slump in sales of their bread-and-butter product, so they ratcheted the version number up a full notch to 8 to give the impression of a new phone and threw in the luxury priced X as well for those that were waiting for a new design.
Impossible.
In order to manufacture at this scale you must have the design locked down many months before. In this case 11-12 months.
Only very minor changes can be made late or in some situations decisions to leave a part out if it does not effect other parts.
Really, the media and analysts were foolish to give those reports any credence. They were not based on any facts or current information.
1) Ah yes, the “But Apple should have done this years ago!” trope. Uh huh. Cool, buddy.
2) The X design was locked in a year ago, before those devices you mentioned ever hit the market, so no, they didn’t recently change course to compete with them.
But nice attempt at pushing the Apple Failure Narrative (tm).
I personally don't have any issues with bezels but in such a fast moving market, if your competitors begin pushing some design trait and it gets the thumbs up from consumers, you could find yourself looking old hat, irrespective of what's on the inside.
Huwiae claimed they surpassed Apple already. By copying yes they sure did that... :-))
Apple are certainly looking to move cameras away from a visible position: Rewind to when AppleInsider published information relating to Apple's "camera hidden behind display" patent. Even though that was in 2009, it was still yet another take on a similar idea from Apple published in 2004.
I'm being facetious.
are 10-12 years in the making in the form of an idea like a “bezel-less all glass iphone”.
In a practical sense, any advanced iphone can only be worked 2 to 3 years in advance. This is because of the fact that anything imagined beyond this mentioned timeframe is banking on yet undeveloped and immature technologies which may not be realized in time or factoring in current technologies that can go outdated by the time of the release. Not to mention the difficulty of running and controlling multiple parallel programs. The longer the development cycle, more parallel programs Apple would have to run, considering it is absolutely normal to release new iPhone models each and every year.
Apple never had any intentions to be the first introducing new technology (which is exactly most Android makers do), they'd rather keep it in the lab as long as possible to ensure it works flawlessly when they release it. The problem with that it would be tainted with half-baked gimmicky efforts from competitors.
Sounds like Apple made this happen, not competitors.