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iPhone 7 First Impressions: Another Yearly iPhone Release, Another Set of Incremental Improvements

Something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about since the iPhone 7 reveal keynote is how difficult is it to write about these new hardware releases year over year, or get that excited for them anymore. I was one of the idiots standing in line for the original iPhone, and at the time, this (now infamous) quote from Steve Ballmer about it being “the most expensive phone in the world" was totally true-

Since then, like many folks around here I’d imagine, I’ve been biting the bullet year over year to grab the new iPhone every launch day. It was easy to get supremely excited for the iPhone 3G as the achilles heel of the original iPhone was how slow Edge data speeds were which made consuming any kind of streaming media via cellular data really difficult. I remember being really blown away by being able to go from low bitrate music and Shoutcast streams (Wow, anyone remmeber those?) to full bitrate, high quality Pandora feeds and it feeling like magic.

The jump to the 3GS also felt significant, as the iPhone 3G was a little on the slow side- Particularly when juggling between big games or other resource-intensive third party apps. The 3GS felt blisteringly fast comparatively. The retina display on the iPhone 4 was something that was hard to believe until you saw it with your own eyes, but much like the first retina display iPad, it wouldn’t be until the next revision that the super high-res screen would have a decent GPU matched to it, making the 4S feel significant.

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The wider screen of the iPhone 5 made a lot of sense, as did the eventual release of the iPhone 6 Plus, but I’d argue everything after the iPhone 5 has felt like annual borderline sidegrades as Apple struggles to find new ways to perfect a device that’s already felt pretty perfect for years now. Looking back at my first impressions of the iPhone 6S last year, the killer features were faster Touch ID and the addition of 3D Touch (which hasn’t really turned into a ‘killer’ feature at all, at least when it comes to third party apps and games). The device itself felt faster, but most of that seemed to come from Apple doubling the RAM which made multitasking work tons better.

This time around it feels even more difficult to fish for things to talk about. The iPhone 7 is effectively the same size and weight (OK, so it’s 5 grams lighter) of the iPhone 6S, and while we all saw Apple’s graphs showing how much faster the iPhone 7 is than the iPhone 6S, the difference is pretty difficult to discern in actual use. The iPhone 7 is faster, sure, but a part of me really misses how obvious the speed differences were from the jump between the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS. To notice any actually difference now you’ve either got to compare load times of big beefy games or run synthetic benchmarks.

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The camera is similar in that while I’m sure the iPhone 7 camera is a nice advancement over the 6S, for what I use it for (which seems to mostly be taking photos of my dog and dumb stuff at estate sales) I can’t tell much of a difference. The stabilization built into the camera on the non-Plus models this time around is probably the best addition, but if you’ve got a steady hand this might not make that big of a benefit to you. If you’re photography minded the increased color gamut might be a big deal, as well as iOS 10’s ability to shoot DNG RAW. Like most other things though, the vibe for everyone else is likely going to be “The iPhone 6S shot great photos, I guess the iPhone 7 shoots … greater photos?" Of course if you opted for the iPhone 7 Plus the dual camera thing seems pretty cool, but I’ve always preferred smaller iPhones. I had the iPhone 6 Plus and it felt like a huge mistake.

There’s also the elephant in the room of the missing headphone jack. The included Lightning ear buds work (and sound) effectively identically to last year’s ear buds- You just plug them into a different hole on the phone. My better, traditional 3.5mm headphones work fine with the included adapter dongle. I’m not super worked up over the “missing" headphone jack personally, as I’m just using this an excuse to not put off buying some good Bluetooth headphones any longer. In my use cases, the only time the inability to listen to traditional headphones and charge at the same time is when using sleep headphones to listen to podcasts at night… But, I’ve tossed and turned while sleeping which led to the cord getting totally wrapped around my neck, so buying a Bluetooth pair feels alright.

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It’s weird but I think the biggest feature of the iPhone 7, which people don’t even realize yet, is the solid state home button. This time around the iPhone uses similar tech to that inside of Apple’s laptops where they’re able to cleverly emulate a physical button using vibrations from the taptic engine and pressure sensitivity. The taptic engine of the iPhone 7 doesn’t feel quite as convincing as the emulated trackpad click on MacBooks, but it’s still pretty neat. This seems like a big deal because it should mean an end to broken home buttons. Of all the people I’ve known with hardware problems with iPhones (aside from inevitable cracked screens) the problem practically everyone seems to have eventually is a unresponsive home button. With no moving parts, that should be a thing of the past.

The new water resistance is really cool, but not something I’m going to be racing to test out. If nothing else, it’s going to be nice not to need to be so paranoid with my iPhone. I recently went to a beer festival in the rain, and it was a little absurd how many people (myself included) were checking beers into Untapped with their phones in ziplock sandwich bags. Trusting that the iPhone 7 is in fact water resistant is going to be another hurdle, as I’ve been doing the sandwich bag thing with my cell phone for… decades now?

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The onboard stereo speakers are another great improvement, but as someone whose iPhone is almost always on silent, it’s not going to get much use in my house. I still wouldn’t say the speakers are good enough that you’d want to listen to music on them (kind of like how you can now on the iPad Pro), but generally louder and clearer videos, podcasts, and other content is a welcome addition to how underpowered the onboard iPhone speakers have always been.

This all goes together to still feel like a supremely wish-washy conclusion of, yes, the iPhone 7 is obviously the best/most advanced/whatever iPhone yet, but explaining why that is feels like reaching. With the iPhone 4 it was really easy to be like, “All you need to do is look at the Retina Display and you’ll want one." With the iPhone 7 it’s more, “Well they say the camera is better and it’s faster, its water resistant, but the headphone jack thing is kind of a pain in the butt." It doesn’t sound like much of a ringing endorsement, but, consider the baseline here is the iPhone 6S which already is a pretty perfect phone, and this one is incrementally better.

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It makes me wonder if people who write about new iPhones year after year are getting to the same place that people who write about high-end sports cars year over year. If you don’t follow that scene, it’s a lot like the Apple circle in that the same people are desperately trying to come up with new ways as to why this year’s Corvette (or whatever car) is the best one yet. When, really, last year’s ‘vette was awesome, and, hell, I wouldn’t complain about owning the one before that either. I guess I’m just not as good at getting super stoked over incremental improvements anymore?

What a weird place to be.