Finally Here’s the iPhone X: Apple’s AR Flagship

Image Copyright Apple Newsroom. Used under Fair Use

Can you believe that it’s been 10 years since since the first Apple iPhone launched? It still seems that the big fruit company crashed into the phone industry recently, but we’ve come a long way from that first smartphone which has been copied endlessly since.

It’s easy to forget that, when the first iPhone launched, we were still excited about BlackBerry keyboards and what Nokia was going to do next. The first iPhone was a true innovator with that multi-touch capacitive screen and slick touch-centric operating system. It’s easy to forget that it had a slow internet connection and no front-facing camera, among other features we consider standard today. iPhones have advanced so rapidly that if you switched on an iPhone 1G today you literally couldn’t get it to work with anything and now we’ve seen the release of both the iPhone 8 and the flagship iPhone X. It’s pronounced “iPhone 10”, but you know no one is going to call it that.

ARkit Arrives in Style

These new fruit phones arrive alongside a major iOS release. iOS 11 will bring it a small mountain of new features. Including a more traditional file system and serious productivity features that will turn devices like the iPad into viable laptop replacements.

Of course, it’s perfectly predictable that Apple would release a phone with better specifications and more features. What makes this hardware generation interesting to us is that it’s the first group of handsets designed with Apple’s ARKit in mind.

ARKit is a software developer’s kit created by Apple to make it easier for developers to make augmented-reality applications.

ARKit is an integral part of iOS 11 and it’s not exclusive to these new phones, but the iPhone X is the flagship of the Apple line and comes with hardware built to optimize it. The A11 Bionic SoC was designed at the hardware level for advanced augmented reality and even the iPhone 8 AR demos shown off by Apple were pretty amazing. (Video Credit: CNBC and Apple)

Supporting Act

There have been rumours of an Apple VR headset for years now, but the company has never really shown any real interest in either VR or AR. To throw such support into AR both at the hardware and software level shows that Apple is super-serious about bringing AR into the mainstream. They have never been a company to come up with unique concepts. They did not invent tablets, smartphones, graphical interfaces or personal computers. What they have done is perfect and mainstream those ideas so that they graduate from being geeky curiosities to a fact of everyday life.

The iPhone X may very well be the face of AR as we know it going forward.