iPhone XS reviews are in: It's better, but not by much (The 3:59, Ep. 459)

Welcome to the 3:59, I'm Ben Fox Rubin. And I'm Scott Stein. So Scott has come with us today to show off the iPhone XS and XS Max, my mistake. 10S- 10S, 10S Max, XS, XS Max. It will be called XS. I'm gonna keep screwing up the names, but either way- So will everyone. Why don't you start us off with something easy. Give us your first impressions. What do you think of these phones? Are they interesting? Are they fun? What do you think of the design? Give us like kind of the elevator pitch. Sure, well so I think last year the iPhone X came out in November, it was expensive, it was not a phone everybody got. And it was an elevated part of the line. And clearly Apple is expanding that line out and I think [UNKNOWN] a lot more polish, they feel faster, there's a lot of tweaks [UNKNOWN] They don't introduce any one new thing, and I think that's the thing if you're looking for something new technologically It definitely has a faster processor, the camera is better in a couple of key ways, you know, faster LTE. But do all those things really add up to something that you need right now? Yeah, and it's $1,000 starting. And it's $1,000, $1,000 for the smaller one, or the normal one, And the Max is $1,100. So that is a lot of money, that's laptop money. And if you have a 10, just upgrade to IOS 12, because it speeds it up. And in fact, IOS 12 speeds up a lot of old phones, iPhones. So think about that. Think about whether you want to wait too. Because this isn't even the last iPhone this year. The 10 R is $250 less than the 10. And 749, it's coming out end of October. I do not have it to review yet. And it has the same processor, probably better battery life. It just doesn't have dual camera, but it has a lot of the same features. It has the Smart HDR, which ended up turning out, have a real impact on preventing things from overblown in photos And it also has the same processor. So it doesn't have the [UNKNOWN] display, but if you have an iPhone 8 or one of those models you're using LCD, it's a bigger display. It has face ID and it could be perfectly fine for you. All right, so I wanna take off a handful of important elements here. So features to me is an important thing to talk about for an [INAUDIBLE]. So we're discussing this a little bit. Before the podcast, one year for an S year there was touch ID, another year there was Siri. I think 3D touch was another one. 3D touch was another. But with this year, there wasn't like a feature for them to like really hang their hat on and say like, hey, here's the new thing that you can really Get if you buy this product. Right. And there wasn't a thing to really dive into in the review to say here I can show this off per say. And it makes it challenging. A lot of the potential here. It's totally potential. They talk about the 812 processor being used for AI and machine learning. And it benchmarked faster on benchmark test But that happens every year, and the AI gains, well, it's really impossible to tell what that means or how that's gonna play out. It's all conceptual, really, for the user. AR looked a lot better, but if you have to be really into AR. I don't I don't know a lot of people that do- Who's into AR, right, but you know, there's that. The camera games are I think modest, but did matter particularly, there are smart HDR claim, which I didn't think would matter as much, actually ended up producing It's a faster focus, more light gets into the lens, and it also prevented- Everyday shots like a lamp in the living room. It had more detail from the [UNKNOWN] being blown out cause I still felt I had some blurry Or slightly blown-out photos on the iPhone X. I didn't find them as much, but still there's a lot of other cameras out there. Pixel 2 is great and it's often considered the best camera. Yeah, and a new Pixel is expected to come out- Pixel 3, so we'll have to compare. So last question I wanted to get to, too, related to this is, if you have an iPhone X from last year, is it at all worth upgrading to one of these phones? No, I don't think it's worth it because I think you should update to iOS 12, which improves the performance But a lot of iPhones tried that out and already it's made a difference on the iPhone ten model that I've been playing with. Hm. And see what that's like. If you have a plan that's going to upgrade you year over year automatically and money doesn't matter to you somehow. Sure, update. But I think for any normal person who is spending money that they really care about just stick with your phone. Be happy you got the iPhone ten It's a really good solid model these are more incremental upgrades. Yeah. And I think we've been waiting for a phone like an iPhone7 is a really good time to upgrade, however. Because. That's. It's a little bit cheaper yeah. But as you'll you're away for that 10R that's the one so we're really call with one shoe dropping on this iPhone or these. So we've already had a time, but I do when I get one quick. Quick, other story we wanted to mention from CNBC. They reported yesterday that Amazon is planning to release at least eight new Alexa enabled devices this year, including a microwave. Exciting? I've always wanted an Alexa microwave. [LAUGH] To call across the room to cook my corn. I know, there's too many Alexa devices. I guess if you're looking for one smart assistant to Control your life like a Ray Bradbury novel. Yes you want everything Alexa. But I just think about ten years from now. Like, will that platform hold? Or will you be buying all new connected things? Who knows. Who knows. If you want to read more about these stories check us out on CNET. I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Scott Stein. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]