iPhone Xs Max unboxing and first impressions By Neowin

Hey guys I'm rich from Neil win, and today we're unboxing the iPhone 10s max, so I've been using the iPhone 10 to the last year and I love it. But the thing is that this really isn't an exciting upgrade if you're coming from a 10 and that that's that's the big issue this year, because if you're coming from an 8, 8 plus anything before that, it's awesome, you know it's I, think that's a big feature this year. It's just that. You know it's. The iPhone 10 design, and you know I'm on the iPhone upgrade program as many people are, and many people have upgrade programs through their carrier and that's a reason to upgrade, so I mean it's there, so you can take it, but I mean if you're paying full price for a phone. You probably wouldn't want to do this if you have an iPhone 10 already, especially since an expensive phone.

So a couple of things I got the gold model, and one thing we're going to notice here is that this actually supports CDMA, and I'm activating it on T-Mobile. So this should be the the T-Mobile model that they sent me, although it says a 1921 and both the CDMA and the GSM models in North America are 1921 but yeah. Oddly enough, they sent me one that supports CDMA, so hopefully I would think this would work on Verizon and Sprint as well, which is awesome because you should get an unlocked phone with the iPhone upgrade program, and that was an issue previously because they did have separate models, for there was an AT&T T-Mobile model. There was a Verizon Sprint model. Now, if you go to apple.

com / iPhone / LTE, it tells you they're all on the same model, but then it just tells you there's one: that's GUN one! That's CDMA! Okay! So let's get this open alright. So this is a little package, a little oddly here. So we can just you can see that the rapping was a little loose on there. So we can just pull this open right here, alright, designed by Apple in California, that's a pretty standard stuff and there is the iPhone 10s max. So, let's take a look at what we have in here.

Okay, as you can see, place, iPhone was screen facing up on air power or QI certified wireless charger. So that's that's something you may want to air power doesn't exist. They announce air power at the iPhone 10 iPhone 8 event. Last year they said it was coming in 2018 and the latest rumors / leaks are just that. It's its dead.

They weren't able to pull it off because yours, it was full c1, wireless charger that you could use to charge your iPhone, your Apple Watch and just all of your Apple stuff. There was a full co wireless charging case for air pods, and apparently it was just too ambitious. It overheats and it didn't work out. So this is the iPhone 10s max and with gold, and so you can see it's its very nice. It's a light shade of gold on the butt on the back and the gold stainless steel border looks lovely inside the device.

This is kind of a joke. If you ask me, but well, we have. We have the lightning ear pods. We have a USB type, a two lightning adapter and a 5 watt, USB type an adapter. So the problem with this is that, ever since the iPhone 8 / 8 + / 10, all of all these new iPhones have supported fast charging.

The issue there is that this charger doesn't support fast charging. So what you need for fast charging? You need that the 29 watt USB adapter, and then you need a type C 2, ?, lightning cable. So you need to replace both of these to get fast charging and that'll cost you about 74 dollars from the Apple Store, and considering that this is this phone starts at your know, $1,100. You would think that they could throw that in. You could think that some companies would start throwing in Bluetooth headphones when they're when they're killing the headphone jack, but that's not what's happening.

So it's definitely worthwhile noting that this five watt charger, which charges phones, iPhones very slowly I should add, is still included with the packaging and if you get one of these I highly recommend investing in a fast charger because it's worth it. So you take a look at these two devices side-by-side before I, send back the iPhone 10 over here and the tenth. This is the same size as the iPhone Menace same dimensions. Everything, although I've heard the camera bump, is just a little taller. So you might have some issues with cases, but it's the same size.

So the iPhone 10s max it's really more the size of a plus model, and you feel it in your hand. But will you get with that as you get a huge battery which is even bigger than in the puss model? So that's that's kind of a big deal. You should get some nice battery life with this I, never really liked the form factor of the plus I, never liked the wide and flat back it just doesn't feel that comfortable to hold I always thought this was perfect. But what you get with this side, so you just get such great battery life, so we're going to boot this up, and hopefully it comes activated with the sim otherwise I'm going to put my old SIM card in there. Okay, so this guy just finished restoring from an iCloud backup, I almost forgot about the ridiculousness of setting up a device on T-Mobile when you not add a time T-Mobile store, because it actually comes up with an IMEI number and a sim number, and it says, call T-Mobile and give them these numbers to activate your new phone, so I mean I did what any sensible person should do.

I took the old sim out of my old phone and put it in the new phone and sure enough. It's set up. It comes with the SIM PIN as we saw before, and it's its that simple. Furthermore, it also comes with Apple stickers. These things have been coming with Apple devices, for you know, as well as long as I've been buying them, which is the first one I bought, was I.

Think the iPhone 4s, you know, and I mean these just come with it. I guess it's just a thing that they do, but you know you would think like they throw in that little extra. They can turn a better charger. You know, I, don't think it costs them $74 to make that fast charger. There's a couple of things I noticed about this device.

One I mean you do get that bigger, that bigger UI and you know that's a good and a bad thing. I like having a bigger UI on a bigger screen. You know bigger buttons and, and that sort of thing one, because I noticed that the keyboards bigger, but the issue with that now is that for the other half of people, it's not taking advantage of the extra space. So some people want bigger things. Some people want apps that take advantage of that extra space.

So really, right now, all you're getting is bigger things, but also I mean this is the first day that this phone exists with this aspect ratio in this size we did have the 5.5 inch plus model, obviously, and I mean some apps took advantage that some didn't obviously also um. So god this little one is still there. So this was an issue with my last phone, and it was super annoying because what I did was I upgraded, that phone to the iOS 8.1 beta, because you know it was on the iOS 8 beta and the thing is yeah that that one isn't going away, even though there's no update and what I did was I rolled it back, so I flip I flashed is 12 and I restored from my iCloud backup, but I didn't realize that it actually restored the beta profile as well. So what happened was that it tried to give me iOS 12.1 again and when I uninstalled, the beta profile, I rebooted, the phone, that little number one doesn't go away, and you know it's just there, I guess until iOS, whey 12.1 actually shows up, but the reason I rolled it back, and you're going to want to be aware of this. If you're buying this phone is that the iOS 12.1 beta image for this phone does not exist yet, and that might end up being a problem. It might roll out Oh TA.

If you install the profile. I don't know, but if you have your current phone on iOS 12.1 beta, and you can't put this phone on iOS 4.1, you won't be able to restore from an iCloud backup. So one thing that I was hoping for, and it doesn't look like it's gonna, be there, but we're gonna check where's our battery settings. Now you know what I was hoping um. One thing that we lost with the iPhone 10 is battery percentage.

Remember, like with the older phones used to be able to put the battery percentage right next to the battery up there. Now you got to open the control center there to see it, and I was hoping that, with the bigger screen, a little bigger real estate, bigger, not size, because I mean that the mean the not size did say: I mean bigger size around the notch. What more screen real estate over there, so I was hoping that they would allow us to bring back that battery percentage, but that does not seem to be the case. So this is all restoring I mean that this is all pretty much exactly what you would expect. One of the biggest complaints about getting your new iPhone is that just doesn't feel like her new phone and that's because yeah it does pretty much the same thing as your last phone.

The camera looks the same. There's going to be some new portrait mode features, it's going to be a lot faster due to the a12 Bionic processor and the camera was one of the things they boasted. But really. The truth is that, if you're coming from an iPhone 10, it's a little faster, the camera is a little better, the screens a little bigger. It's all.

It's all very iterative, there's no really cool new feature that I can show you on this. What's what's new is the size and, if you're, coming from that old, iPhone 6 design that they use for four years, that's new this year, so you know the size, the color, the design, that's all new, but as far as phone features, it's really nothing new and that's why I think during the event, they spent so much time talking about the 812 ionic, because that's really all they have, and it does have a dedicated neural, or they call a neural Engine. Why we did this first with the cure in 970, and they call it in rural processing unit. So it's its dedicated hardware for AI and machine learning tests, and that can be really useful while we use it for camera stuff. So it can actually tell what the device is.

Looking and you know, Apple didn't go that route. We see it LG did it with the g7 Thank You, Samsung did it with the Galaxy Note 10 without the dedicated hardware, and you could tell if you use a g7. Thank you that it's its a little slower a little clunkier to try and and and use that that feature. You know it's like if you, if you get a Huawei, P, 20 or P, 20, Pro or May 10, and you compare that feature to the g7, think you could definitely see the benefits of having that dedicated AI hardware in there, and you know I'm kind of curious to see where, where that, where that leads. As far as the iPhone goes and that's going to be interesting because they didn't do the thing with the camera, they did some stuff with the camera, not not a same type of thing where they did the smart HDR type of thing where it takes a bunch of pictures and kind of combines, the best view or finds the best shot.

And it's its kind of intelligent in that way. But um you know I'll have to test that out in the real world before you know, there's nothing. I could do to show that off here and there's nothing really else. I could show, because iOS is the same on pretty much any phone that you use it on so um. You know I mean obviously well.

Actually it's not the same pistes right so I need to get to multitasking. You have to go kind of halfway up from the bottom to go home from a nap. You would just swipe up. So if I go to Amazon Music swipe up goes your home multitask. By the way you originally you couldn't just swipe these away.

You had to hold them, but that's something that they fix in iOS 12 control center, swipe in from the top right corner, Notification Center, just swipe down from the top, and that's going to show you. You know all of your notifications. So it's its um, it's a different UI. If you're nervous about it, I was nervous about it. Last year, I actually warned people against it last year.

I think because I was very skeptical of face idea in the new UI, because you know it's: it's learning a new way of doing things. We had that kind of must memory of using that home button, and you get used to it very quickly. I can promise you that there's going to be a couple of times at the very beginning that you'll try to press the bottom of the screen, because you think it's going to take you home or something like that, and it's also a little clunky if you use an iPad regularly, because now you have to switch between the new UI and the old UI. Although iOS 12 does have some new features from this yeah on the iPad, so that's good anyway, guys. That's it! I'm going to be reviewing a few weeks.

We can put it through his paces. We're going to run some benchmarks, going to test the camera going to stare at this lovely gold color by the way the body is the same, I mean I. Apple doesn't really change that much volume rocker over here. The switch to mute. Your notifications, over here power button over here, lightning port on the bottom speaker, grille, nothing on the top.

No headphone jack nothing's really changed there, so yeah a beautiful phone, bigger phone, it's its! Basically the Plus model in the form of an iPhone 10 and what's perfect about the Mac's. Well, what's perfect about the 10s I should say not the max is that they didn't differentiate features this time. What they did with the Plus model is that you had to get the plus model to get that dual camera. Now you get the same camera you have to same everything except a bigger battery at a bigger screen. If you get the 10s feet, the feature set is the same and that's what's cool.

If you get the 10r, that's where you lose, that dual camera all I think the 10r it's going to be the popular one and that's going to be fascinating to see, because I think that when we see how popular the 10r is, I think we'll see how that valuable. The dual camera is not. You know I think this is something that in the long run really doesn't matter. The truth is I know a lot of people. Don't want to hear this if you use a lot of the phones on the market, if you, if you use all of them, you'll see that the iPhone camera is actually pretty mediocre, and you know it's fine on its own.

You know it's okay, and it has a lot of great features like it's really fast, which is great for a user, but truthfully, the pictures it takes pretty mediocre. So you know the portrait mode. I, don't know that a lot of people even use that I find it clunky that you have to use the 2x zoom. It tells you to stand a little further away, and then it's a little closer, and then it tells you there's not enough light, and it's really just a pain and I almost never use it. So I wonder if there's really going to be value in that dual camera in the long run, and if people just end up opting for that single camera, because you know it's, it's not worth the extra money for that and I.

Don't think. There's going to be a big difference between the LCD in the OLED because. Remember, um, you know, take a look at an iPhone 8 or an A+ like the LCD looks good, and the pixel density is the same as the iPhone 8 like pull out an iPhone 8. If the screen looks good I, don't think you're going to regret that so yeah, that's the iPhone 10s max, and it's a great phone. It's an expensive phone.

It starts at 1099, I paid 12 49 for the 256 gigabyte model, and then it's 1449 for the 512 gigabyte model, which is a hugely expensive phone. You should really be sure that that's what you want, but it is a lovely phone, it's a beautiful phone and that's it, and we'll have a review for it. In a few weeks, I'm Richard Neal Wynn have a great night.

Source : Neowin