Even Apple doesn't care about the iPhone Xs...
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,874 words · ~14 min read
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you know i thought it might have been the only one who noticed at least until
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i read this comment on mac rumors from user roman empire but
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while i was watching the september 2018 keynote i was blown away that even
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apple's own executives who need i remind you managed to muster at least some
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excitement about the iphone 5c just didn't seem to care about their
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newest and shiniest flagships why didn't they care
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what could compel someone to upgrade their existing iphone x what are the
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selling points here what could compel someone to upgrade even an iphone 7 for
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that matter and why hasn't Linus segwayed into the
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sponsor for this video yet oh wait no that was it today's video is
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i actually almost bailed on this video entirely in favor of a totally different
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concept where i walked around like men on the street style and pretended to
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show people the latest new iphone except it was actually just going to be
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an iphone 10 because honestly even i a a
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tech nerd would need to install ida or
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check the model number or the storage capacity of one of the new 512 gig
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models to know that it's a 2018 model year unless it was gold that's that's
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the one new thing this year a gold color so the truth is i've actually spent the
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last couple of weeks using the iphone 10s max as my everyday phone and i've
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been struggling to find anything to say about this thing that
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isn't a list of petty complaints many of which i've given up any hope that apple
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will even fix and i'm just i'm having a
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really hard time so i guess all we can do is get into it almost immediately
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after opening the box i began missing my samsung galaxy note 9. it's got a bigger
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screen it's got a more subtle rounding of the corners meaning you get more
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usable screen real estate and oh right when i slid out the sim tray no
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expandable storage still and not even dual sim on this model now i talked
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about this in my note 9 review but the remarkable thing about that phone
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is the zero compromises nature of it it's big
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and it's expensive but other than a lackluster commitment
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to software support which is something samsung really does need to address it
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gives up nothing by contrast on my over thousand dollar
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new iphone i haven't even installed my first app and i find myself reaching for
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my stupid headphone dongle the one i already had mind you because they don't
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even include one in the box anymore and i'm staring at what well at first looked
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like a massive notch by late 2018 standards at least that is until google
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released the pixel 3 xl and the game
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changed somewhat that's neither here nor there while i'm whining
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i really really hate the name of the iphone 10s for those of you who
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are wondering the last time apple used roman numerals in its product naming
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scheme was 1994 and they never went
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higher than three why would that be well because it's
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confusing almost no one that i know in the
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mainstream refers to the iphone 10 as anything other than the iphone x and
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look apple if you're gonna do something stupid like this do it properly has
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anyone out there tried to type iphone 10s
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on their iphone this is a perfect example of apple's
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utter failure to keep pace with the auto correcting and predictive typing
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capabilities of microsoft swiftkey and google's g board
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as for dictation well i didn't have much more luck there either
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i mean siri can at least do basic things like turn on the flashlight for me now
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but alexa and google assistant as flawed as they are too are making
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siri look utterly incompetent these days i mean do you guys remember when apple
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was way ahead of the game in the ai assistant race because i remember
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making matters worse apple's design for the iphone 10s you know
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that thing that they are so far up their own butts about that they literally made
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a 300 book dedicated to their own greatness
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it's looking dated already the iphone 6
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look went basically unchanged for four generations or three and a half
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depending on how you count it and it didn't really look out of style until
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the third or the fourth when samsung launched the galaxy s8 and the s8 plus
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that is how far ahead apple was
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that recently the iphone 10s already looks
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unexceptional at best with how fast display technology is moving right now
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and a big part of that is the thicker bezels on the sides and the notch on the
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top the other alarming thing here is that
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apple is not only failing to lead in terms of design trends they're becoming
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a follower and a slow one at that when it comes to wider industry trends so
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think back first apple failed to take the lead on
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the trend of having two different sizes for each flagship generation
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then inexplicably even after fixing that
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problem with the six and the six plus
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they managed to miss participating in the large phablet-sized category for an
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entire generation of product last year
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how is it that there was no iphone 10 max
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with all of the resources and employees that apple has at their disposal to make
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at most three phones per year
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it really raises the question what were they doing
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was it a strategy thing was it not quite ready for the september
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keynote so just i don't know wait a year and
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get it on the next one there's a difference between attention to detail
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and striving for perfection and just being inflexible and obstinate
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on that subject it turns out that i still hate the lack of a back button on
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iOS the swipe right across gesture
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does work and it's better than the old way of reaching up to the very top left
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of the display but the issue is that much like when we were still reaching up
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to the top left and apple all of a sudden started making bigger screen
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phones apple's hardware is getting ahead of its software again so the back
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gesture requires a really clear swipe
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from the edge which is hard to execute with small hands on such a big phone now
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it's far less of an issue on the iphone 10s than it is on the max but this is
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the one i spent most of my time with primarily because it was less jarring
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moving to it from the note 9 and then also because i found the display notch
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far less distracting with the increase in overall screen real estate back to
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the notch though one good thing is that it still gives apple room for face id
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which faster face id by the way is one of the few headline features of this new
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phone but then it also serves as yet another
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example of something where apple is letting others take their feature their
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idea and innovate on it and even improve it
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so the oppo find x lets you swipe anywhere on the screen rather than only
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at the bottom to activate its face id copycat
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apple doesn't allow you to do this and instead it forces you to swipe from the
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bottom which is a little tougher ergonomically especially when you're
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holding such a large and heavy phone and often requires you to shift your hand
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down i guarantee you that someone has already dropped a 10s max because of
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this now i do need to derail the rant train a
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little bit here for an in fairness to apple segment
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Android fans have always loved pointing
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out how wrecked apple got by their favorite device du jour having that same
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feature or a better one while conveniently ignoring that there's
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typically been no single device on the Android side that brings it all together
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in the way that apple does so to be clear i am not recommending the
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findex over the iphone 10s or even the iphone 10 or even the iphone 8 for that
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matter but Android fans also never had the note 9
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to point to before now you're probably noticing by this point in the video that
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i've brought up the note 9 a lot normally i try to limit my galaxy note 9
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mentions to one to two per video as much as i love it and the reason for that is
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the price the galaxy note 9 is an unfair
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comparison for the vast majority of other devices on the market
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unfortunately for apple they give up any leeway that they might have had
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otherwise when they command the highest price of any mainstream smartphone
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though to be clear i'm glad that they're at least offering a 512 gig option even
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if it costs 1500 us dollars so then the iphone has traditionally set
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itself apart in the camera department how's that going honestly not too bad
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apple's color science continues to stand out from anyone but google but i still
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have some frustrations starting with apple's assumption that every power user
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will use a third party app i mean i get that the included one is supposed to be
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one touch dead simple any idiot can do it
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but then if that's the case why do you guys keep cluttering it up there are so
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many modes they don't even all fit on the screen anymore including the
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incredibly unnecessary square and if we're gonna have all these buttons why
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not add some of the customization that people are asking for most of the
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complaints i've seen about this phone are actually about the selfie camera and
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the uh the smoothing and processing that's being done by it that doesn't
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appear even now to be possible to turn off
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with that said though my worst experience was actually in portrait mode
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it managed to do everything from this astonishing background removal on a
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moving target down to this atrocity where it managed to add a couple of
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extra teeth to my daughter's smile now these kinds of heavy processing
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techniques have long been included on competitors devices with major ones like
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samsung even enabling them by default but one difference is that they tend to
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be more transparent and they tend to
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allow more configuration of the processing so why was the response to
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turn it to 11 and lock it there and why not record an unaltered version of the
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image for safety is this just the
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apple knows what's best for you mentality hopefully by the time i post this video
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apple will have patched themselves out of this mess overall the camera in the normal mode
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the one that i always use it in and ignoring dxomark and all that kind of
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stuff just using it day-to-day to capture the moments that mean something
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to me met my expectations let's move on
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to a couple more apple knows best frustrations
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if you capture a screenshot of something you can only share to apps that apple
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expects now this is better than locking you down to first party options but a notable
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omission that made my life more inconvenient for the last couple of weeks is the facebook pages manager
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now i'll work around the first time that i did this was for me to save the
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screenshot locally but then this was another apple knows best thing so what i
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realized is that there's no way to manually select your photos folder when
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you want to save a screenshot you actually just have to
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exit the screenshot and then confirm that you want to keep it and it'll
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automatically go to your photos folder like i mean i get that this is
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intuitive but why remove the option from the other
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way it's this kind of thing that always has and probably always will irk me about
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the iphone one thing that they did fix this time
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around is notification management though so huge gold star there it is super easy
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to access grouped messages and emails and you can dismiss your whole backlog
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in one fell swoop just oh beautiful awesome there you go and
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there's more good news mostly good news so i'm a lot more used to gesture-based
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navigation now from playing around with it on a couple of Android phones
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actually including the oneplus 6 and you know what gesture navigation is
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fine but it's not entirely without issue and
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not everyone will necessarily prefer it and actually this one is a criticism of
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both samsung and apple buttons or gestures you know what it's
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2018. they're both good i would like to have a choice and i think you guys can
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both do better which i guess brings us perfectly back to annoyances so uh this
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whole video is actually getting kind of exhausting maybe we won't go for much
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longer um all right here we go
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you still can't hard press your wi-fi icon in order to get to your wi-fi
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settings you have to do it the long way the upgrade still can't have gaps
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forcing you to make big piles of useless crap in the top of your screen to put
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your most frequently used stuff at the bottom where it all belongs there is
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still no t9 dialing
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i don't understand why that's so hard and
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a year freaking later a year after the
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launch of the iphone 10 the notch still gets in the way occasionally like right
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here in the twitter app where i actually had a heck of a time targeting the
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handful of pixels that i needed to hit in order to switch to my personal
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account what i can only hope for is that maybe this is an indication that this
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notch design language will be short-lived
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so i think that's pretty much it
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so let's close this video out with the craziest part
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almost everything that i just said for the last 12 or 13 minutes or whatever
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has been common knowledge to people who pay attention to the iphone for a year
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so the iphone 10s it's boring it risks
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nothing but people bought the crap out of the last one so
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i guess if it ain't broke don't fix it enjoy your iphones everyone
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and while you're at it maybe enjoy them even better with a skin from dbrand
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dbrand is your source for awesome vinyl skins they're available for laptops
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phones tablets consoles controllers and more they actually shipped over our
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iphone 10s and 10s plus with this sexy
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new one that i'm calling black golf ball anyway they're useful for all kinds of
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things they make your device stand out and they also make it actually more
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resilient to incidental bumps and scuffs i even dropped the 10s and i managed to
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dent the corner here without going all the way through the skin so i didn't end
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up with a dent on my phone i was super thrilled about that their customer
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service robots are easy to work with and their products are affordable and ship worldwide so go check out dbrand at the
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link in the video description so thanks for watching guys i hope that wasn't as
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tiring for you to listen to as it was for me to say um if you dislike this
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video you can hit that button hi mr cook if you liked it though hit like get
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subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description i
15:08
mean to be clear it's not bad if you like the iphone then i guess just buy
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one um while you're down there you can check out our merch store which has cool
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shirts like this one and our community forum which is totally worth joining
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you know i was really looking forward to going back to the note 9 but then like
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all these phones started showing up razer phone 2 the rog phone pixel 3.
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like i'm not going to get back to the note 9 for like two months