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“Most recently, Qualcomm won two key rulings in China and Germany, where courts issued a sales ban on certain iPhone models for infringing on Qualcomm patents”

In Germany, there was an initial hearing during which Qualcomm’s lawyers blocked Apple from presenting evidence. (Apple’s defense must present to the court evidence about how Apple’s chip technology actually works, this involves trade secrets and Qualcomm’s lawyers refused to sign agreements not to share proprietary Apple technology with Qualcomm engineers. Apple were therefore prevented from presenting evidence in their defense).

Qualcomm purchased the injunction by issuing a bond to the court of more than a billion dollars. The matter will now go through further legal trial. Due process will ensure that Apple can present evidence and then a real judgement can be made. If Qualcomm lose, they may also lose much of the huge bond they had to issue to secure the provisional sales ban.

Qualcomn are playing very high stakes poker. They apparently thought that a sales ban would force Apple to come to them for settlement. They were wrong. By fighting like this, they are only going to do themselves more harm.

I’m really enjoying my XR.

Battery still at 90% at the end of my work day! Better battery life than all the current flagships and best of any iPhone ever.

Less bezel than on any other LCD on the market. Only LCD to have no chin.

Display has higher and denser sub-pixels than the OLEDs in the XS & XSMax. Different technology, but basically identical to the OLED in terms of how difficult it is to see pixels with the naked eye.

The display is the same point size as the XS Max. So shows the same amount of content but does so in a smaller, more one-hand-friendly package.

Processor matches or even slightly outperforms the XS in some benchmark metrics, where having fewer pixels to push makes the XR a touch faster.

FaceID, Memoji and Animoji where exclusive to >$1,000 iPhones. XR makes these features a little more affordable.

XR has a 128GB option for an extra $50. This effectively makes it $350 cheaper than a XS for many people.

So quite a few positives.

For me, it’s a little big - I would really prefer an iPhone 6 sized phone that is all screen. The XR is also a little too heavy and a little too thick.

The extra thickness facilitates the thicker battery - this is exactly what many Apple pundits were demanding for years! Yet this fact seems to be given little attention.

Really enjoying HomePod. We recently moved and have a very echoey main room because it is almost empty, has tiled (hard) floor and high vaulted ceiling. Voices echo a lot! It is simply amazing that HomePod is able to play with zero echo!

The XR has taken heat for not having a high resolution display. Yet these are the facts:

XR has 4,451,328 sub pixels

XS has 4,111,968

This is because the OLEDs are pentile and define pixels differently. 

Each pixel on the XR can independently display any color. That’s not true for the XS.

XR shows same number of points as the XS MAX in a smaller package.

The only data is shipping delays. These suggest depleted inventory or constrained logistics.

It flawgic to use this to estimate demand because we don’t know how much supply there is.

Many people think the delayed launch of this product is tactical from a marketing perspective. For all we know, Apple could have been stock piling these for several weeks.

lines at Apple Stores are another flawgic indicator. Pre-orders, launch day delivery and in-store pickup mean that no one needs to go get in line. These days people can drop into the Apple Store late in the afternoon of launch day and pick up the reserved phone they purchased a week earlier or just sit at home and wait for a knock at the door.

The other relevant considerations are that 1) XS only saw short delays for the highest capacity models and this took many hours (the sales mix of higher capacity models seems skewed with pre-order day adopters) 2) many of the XS delivery dates were pulled in, so they delivered sooner than initially stated 3) When I checked after about 16 hours almost all of the XRs on T-Mobile were delayed, even lower capacity models 4) Apple have been getting much better at improving iPhone launches - we have not seen significant delays for phone availability in years (think iPhone 6). 5) The likely buyers of the XR likely fit a different profile to buyers of the XS and may tend to be less likely to be ‘pre-order day’ type people. 6) Now that the product line is split and launches staggered, launch day delays are less of a good indication of anything.