XR user here that switched from Android after leaving the iPhone 4. The battery life is amazing. With my minimal use, it's lasting me 3 days with about 20% before I plug it in again. Great app ecosystem too. It's the little things like LastPass just being so much better on iOS. Widgets and notifications have come a long way but I still wish I could have widgets for email instead of having to manually open email. The screen often feels a bit large but gestures make it usable.
Oh man, I'm having a much harder time with LastPass on iOS than on Android.
What's an easy way to generate a new complex password when a dumb old site forces you to set a new password? It was very easy for me on Android, but feels quite difficult on iOS.
I second this, after 4 years with Android, I found system-level adware and analytics components in my Xiaomi and switched to iPhone XR the same day. Couldn't be happier. Everything is just nicer
I recently went from a 6S to an XS (non Max). I am not a heavy phone user and have been disappointed with battery performance in comparison to the 6S. It doesn't seem to hold up as well, nor does it charge as quickly. From what I've read, the XS Max and XR do better.
I went from an 8 to an Xr. The resolution in terms of dpi is the same on both. In terms of overall pixels it is higher on the Xr, due to bigger display size. Both displays are excellent.
I thought I might miss 3d touch, but with the iOS 12.1.1 update the biggest issue had been fixed: Accessing the context menu for notifications on the home screen. That one now actually feels nicer than on the 8, since the feedback is stronger with haptic touch. Scrolling in notifications with long press on spacebar is slightly worse, since it doesn't allow to mark things via light-release-and-press and doesn't react in some situations. But it's still very bearable. Don't miss the peek&pop functions of 3d touch at all.
The biggest advantage and disadvantage of the Xr: It has a lot bigger screen, is bigger, and feels heavier. It's a tradeoff. I still find it more inconvenient to carry around, and to swipe in from the left side of the screen in order to go back. But the large screen also has it's advantages.
That is not amazing battery life, that is "low end smartphone with a decent battery" battery life. My moto g6 plus delivers that kind of battery life. So did my previous phone. Granted, it is not the iOs experience, and the performance is not that of a phone for 3x as much, but I am over all very satisfied.
Not only that, Motorola has pledged to provide official parts when the devices become older.
You are saying it gets the same battery life as a low-end smartphone, with 1/10th the performance and 1/50th the experience (numbers mine). If it's better at all those things, and still has that battery life, then it's much much better than that other thing...
Low end? the iPhone Xr is using the fastest Apple SoC available for Smartphones, which is probably the fastest Mobile Phone SoC available out there. Same as the iPhone Xs. That's not low-end in my book.
No, I meant that that is comparabable to a low end phone with a decent battery. Of course, performance sucks, but I don't really do anything processor intensive.
Another XR fan here. I went from 6s to XR. It’s much faster, the camera is amazing and the battery life is exceptional. It lasts 1.5 days of heavy use no problems at all.
The only compliant is sometimes I pull it out of my pocket and try and use it upside down. And the torch comes on in my pocket about once a week.
All new phones replacing a several year old model exhibit the same characteristics you say here.
Of course going from 6s->XR is faster (several generations of newer cpu), has a better camera, and that brand new battery lasts a long time. Your old phone was about 3.5 years old.
You could have gotten a new 6s and it probably would have had most of the characteristics you say, because it wouldn't be throttled due to an old battery. Or just replace the battery. It would hold a charge a lot longer. The only thing that wouldn't really be different is the camera.
I just upgraded from a 6s plus to an XR. For me it’s slightly faster, though I would never have done it if it weren’t subsidized by my company. My 6s was plenty fast for me.
Me too. I think media has generally been unfair about XR not selling well. It is easily the best iPhone I have used. I actually enjoy reading on it; just finished a 1000 page fiction novel on it. And yeah, hacker news loads fasssst. Faster than my MacPro :)
Odd, I just finished a night shift in which I used my Galaxy S9 quite a lot, after a day of using it quite a lot (including wifi hotspot, camera, video, maps & navigation) and it's showing 65% battery. This is after 23 hours of constant usage. I think this may be due to both better and larger batteries in all flagship phones, as well as better power management in both Android and iOS. Or maybe I just got lucky?
I have an S8 and generally have to charge it half way through the day. Going on a 1 1/2 walk while just listening to spotify will drain the battery between 18-24%. Been trying to decide between the Pixel, XR, or S9 since its been so bad recently. If the S9 really has that amount of improvement I wouldn't mind doing the straight upgrade since video/picture quality isn't a big deal for me.
Sounds like I got lucky. I've noticed this with Li-Ion batteries; some are awesome and provide days of charge, and some are terrible and require half-daily top-ups. I'm not sure if the manufacturers do testing to determine which ones are better.
Spotify seems to be a real battery hog, but are you in a low-signal area? (especially on LTE). I've noticed a big difference in battery life on the S8+ (and to some extent, the Note 9) based on whether I'm in a "1 bar" area or "4 bar" area.
That might be it. I'll give it a check later today but I am walking out to the trail. I'd have hoped since I have the playlists downloaded that it wouldn't matter.
How so? An OLED will always have better blacks than an LCD screen, which leads to better contrast, which leads to better picture quality (perceived at least).
Black levels are one attribute of a screen. However the Xr also has a few upsides: A higher brightness, and no display flickering due to PWM. I personally thought the Xr also exposed less yellow screen tint than the Xs and scrolled with less blur and distortion, but that might have been subjective.
The other thing that is often advertised as pro for the Xs is a higher resolution. However that is not entirely true, since the Oled displays use a pentile matrix, where there is not a full sub-pixel available for each pixel. Which means in other words the difference in actual resolution is not as high as the pure numbers might want one make to believe.
I think both displays are excellent, and won't disappoint.
I did not expect OLED to be this much better than LCD before I got the X. It makes an absolutely enormous difference when you use the phone in a dark environment, say to check the time if you wake up at night.
Honest question, because I’m a bit confused: the 40% is good or bad? It seems comparable to my old iPhone SE, is battery life so much worse on the newer generations?
I've never really looked at it like that, but I guess we should take the least generous values from both:
Pure Capacity:
iPhone XR: 2,942 mAh
iPhone SE: 1,624 mAh
Draw:
iPhone XR: "Up to 15 hours", so 196,134 mAh of draw if we take the best case for the iPhone XR.
iPhone SE: 12-13 Hrs on Internet (so, LTE, according to apple) that's roughly 129,92 mAh
; while the capacities are wildly different I don't see the SE being so far behind.
If you can get real power draw numbers you can make your own conclusion. I suspect Apple expects a certain about of idle time (which has been optimised for on the later generations).
Using those numbers, when an SE hit 0% after 9.27 hours of usage, the XR would be at 28.5% (12.97-9.27)/12.97. That seems reasonable and makes my original claim that an XR would be at 40% was a hit high, but in the same ballpark. There’s certainly no doubt that the SE’s battery size and power management doesn’t compare to the current phones’.
Though it's worth pointing out that the SE did beat out its contemporary iPhone 6s, with which it shares most of its innards. Differences are the smaller display, slightly smaller battery, 1st vs 2nd gen TouchID, and a lower res front-facing camera.
24% longer on wifi web browsing. Worse on the graphics benchmark, but only because the framerate is higher (smaller screen resolution) which keeps the CPU from idling as much.
Makes you wonder what the performance of a modern small iPhone could be like.
It is worth pointing out the test were using WiFI and assume best connection. In real usage the XR would get better LTE performance and hence even better battery life than what was tested.
Good. Ugh... I have XS Max and without charging it I usually have around 20% at the end of the day. I use it heavily for commute into NYC on the bus so that might contribute.
The lack of 3D Touch is such an oddity, product lineup wise. Every touch device (watches, iPhones) since the SE support 3D Touch. I understand that there might be technical issues behind this decision, but I'm not sure Apple would've released the XR in this state a couple of years ago (even post Jobs).
> The lack of 3D Touch is such an oddity, product lineup wise.
I’d be surprised if most users use it. I’m not sure that most are even aware it exists. It’s possibly the least ‘discoverable’ feature ever introduced in a user interface.
I find this method is more accurate for me than 3D Touch, so I actually do this instead on my iPhone 7 Plus. Basically, it takes a split second to trigger 3D Touch, and in that period of time I could have long-pressed the spacebar. The latter is very reliable for me, but the former doesn’t trigger as reliably.
I tried it on my old iPhone 8. But it doesn't work that great there, since the spacebar is at the very bottom of the square screen, and therefore there is no further space for scrolling down from there.
On my new iPhone XR it's far more convenient to use, since the spacebar is not at the bottom, and scrolling down (e.g. in order to edit a message) works more reliable.
It still doesn't feel as good as 3d touch on the old thing, e.g. it sometimes doesn't go into touchpad mode when pressed directly after a word and doesn't feel as precise. But it's good enough that I don't terrible miss it.
Earlier poster is correct about not being intuitive. Now that I know about it, that's awesome. Sadly, it's not supported by the Google keyboard (long press kicks off voice search).
It is the natural and best way to do so. You press hard and the cursor moves freely like a mouse pointer, put it where it should be and release. Along with haptic feedback, it's a must have once you start using it. Really beats the magnifying glass method.
An interesting fact is that it's actually a Post 3D touch feature. It should have been possible to do it all the years. But the feature only had been introduced with iOS 12, after the first phone without 3d touch (iPhone Xr) after some years had been released.
I would have been useful for devices like the iPhone SE too.
After the XR and XS were announced I bought a used SE, and I don't regret my choice. I really hope we see an XR Mini or something like that in the future, but I don't hold out much hope.
That would be great. I'm a heavy user, about two to three hours of screen-on time per day and six to eight hours of Spotify on the background. I have bad cellphone reception so it is constantly searching for signal and trying to reconnect the VPN. I have to recharge at around 17:00 on a normal day. Device is a couple months old and at 96% battery capacity.
I ended up getting an 8. I love the size and after trading in a 6s was on $399. I don't game, and as fast as this thing is, it should last quite a while.
I'm still using the SE because I don't want a big phone. Kudos to Apple for making a quality technical device that's around 4 years old now but still quite capable. However, shame on them for not making a flagship 'mini' phone.
I really like my XS. After getting used to the big screen on my 7+ and 8+ i find the XS a really nice tradeoff of having almost as much useful screen area while not having the formfactor of a Hershey bar.
Seconding some other users: the battery life on the XR is phenomenal. I upgraded from an iPhone 6, which even with the $29 battery replacement couldn't last till the afternoon with heavy use. Now, with the XR, I've stopped feeling the need to carry a backup battery with me, and I rarely even use my charger at work.
It's quite possibly the only product Apple makes today that Steve Jobs might approve of. Maybe that, and the AirPods.
Switched from a Google Pixel (the original one) to the XR. Supper happy about the phone's quality and specially its battery.
At night I noticed that the screen is not OLED or AMOLED or whatevs, the blacks are quite bright, but I don't watch movies or series on it so I can really live with that.
All in all I'm very happy with the phone and it'll last me for years.
Just FWIW, Anandtech didn't use "affordable" they used "lower-cost alternative" which is quite true.
But more to the point, the market is going to need some way to internalize business models here. Fundamentally, Apple's only guaranteed source of revenue right now for any given phone is the price of the phone itself. Maybe users get some apps too, maybe they get services, but at this stage in lifecycle of the devices a lot of people are happy with the apps they have and paid updates are infrequent, and it's an important point that the iPhone doesn't depend on subscriptions nor is Apple dependent on selling you. So the sticker price must to some extent encompass most of the life cycle of the phone, including 5-6+ years worth of OS updates (iOS 12 supports the iPhone 5S, released in 2014).
How much is it worth to have a cutting edge device where retail embodies 100% of the required costs, and the manufacturers financial incentives are reasonably well aligned with that of the owner? Can the market actually handle this vs devices where many of the costs are hidden/externalized? It's going to be an interesting question over the next few years. There has been a certain amount of pushback on the XS/XS Max pricing, but at the same time a lot of people at least claim to care about incentive alignment. It's hard to say exactly how that will play out if Apple finds upfront pricing is too hard for many to swallow even if per-month or similar personal info selling would be.
Adjusted to inflation, the iPhone 4S was 722$. XR is 749$(not 800 by the way). 27$ difference, not too bad considering the technology is superior in every way to the 4S.
Adjusted to inflation, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was over $9000. XR is $749(not 800 by the way). $8251 difference, not too bad considering the technology is superior in every way to the DynaTAC 8000X.
As someone who used to like getting the latest and greatest by Apple their current prices baffle me. Or perhaps I'm the oddball that doesn't use my phone enough to warrant spending that much money.
As a price-conscious Corolla purchaser, I don't really care if Bugatti's latest highest-end car costs $2 or $3 million dollars. It's not what I'm buying.
There are also many more additional services that someone in the Apple ecosystem has access to vs. when the 4S came out, which can account for a portion of that $27 marginal difference.
Example (that I serendipitously learned about recently): free (!!!) workshops in Apple stores that you can learn advanced techniques for things like video editing on iPad, among other things.
If you add AppleCare, aggregate that cost over 24 months and sell the handset at the end it’s a good investment. I don’t sell at the end but give my wife’s and my used handsets to the kids and they get two more years out of them.
Total expenditure is less than $100/month for 4 good spec iPhones that run our personal and business lives entirely is a damn good deal.
SIM contracts are approx $90 + broadband is $70 a month as a comparison.
Don’t Americans have home insurance that covers devices?
My home insurance has both ‘all risk’ and ‘out-and-about’ optional coverage. Turning them both on raises my home insurance from ~€6 to ~€13, but it means all my stuff is insured everywhere, for every incident.
The only downsides are a €100 deductible and a per-incident cap of €2000 for electronic devices, which means that if I drop into the canal with my phone and my laptop I might not get completely made whole. Still great though, and beats the hell out of insuring all my expensive stuff separately.
I'm not aware of homeowners insurance that has a separate deductible for personal electronic devices. People typically have a deductible of $1000 or more for their homeowners claims. Also, if you ever make a claim, your rates will go up and you will be unable to switch carriers for about 5 years as no one will insure you if you had a recent claim.
I have the card and did the repair. I took it to the Apple store, got a repair quote, and then uploaded it to the benefits website. They sent me a check without me even repairing it yet.
It's about 4x what I'd ever consider spending on a phone. But so what? Apple has decided not to pursue buyers like me. They will sell their $800+ phones, and make money, and employ a lot of people.
It's a loan with no interest (meaning you actually keep the interest). It's a better deal than buying one cash since you can invest the money you are not using.
AFAICT, the most common installment plan is carrier-based and usually not a loan, the payments total up to the same as buying it outright at the beginning.
Some people are still using the old analogy of Phone. When it has replaced your Camera, Internet Communicator, Gaming, etc.
Every single bit of tech inside the phone were more expensive, partly so because of rising wages in tech industry. Which I suppose most people on HN are benefiting from.
Props for sticking to the 5s for this long! I'm still rocking mine as well. Although, I just picked up a $200 Moto G6 (first android device ever) for development, but might just use it as my daily driver since even that budget android phone is an upgrade to the 5s at this point!
Gotta say though, I've been so impressed with how the 5s has held up over the years, that the investment in a higher priced iPhone might just be the way to go.
Thanks! I’m hoping that the XR lasts for the next five years (at least!) too. I get some smart remarks from others, but the end goal is to minimize the amount of rare metals consumed in my lifetime. I’ve been really pleased that the 5S continuously got updates for so long.
For those comparing battery life with Android phones, I've noticed that location services is what always drains my battery the fastest (on Nexus/Pixel) branded phones. Turning it off or using Low power location services easily doubled battery life.
Updated to the XR from a 6 (replaced battery) and the battery life is amazing.
My biggest complaint is how fragile the phone is. The shell already has scratches and is wildly expensive to repair. I want a premium plastic body like the Lumia phones so badly on this tier of device.
I don't know what polymer Lumia uses, but I wonder why Apple doesn't use ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) for their budget phone cases.
This material is used among other things on artificial joints such as knees and hips, as well as the bottoms of snowboards. It's very tough and scratch resistant.
Is there an effective mnemonic for the model designations? I've heard the lineup several times and it's just not sticking. Because of this, I tend to forcibly _not_ think about the iPhone to save mental CPU cycles.
It’s messy right now. -S still means an improved version of a previous form factor (X->XS, just like 6-6S a few years ago.) X- seems to mean a curved corner screen and no home buttons (X/XS, XS Max, XR.) Max And Plus both mean a larger version of another phone (XS/XS Max, but it’s confusing because the XR also has a bigger screen.)
I agree it’s not worth thinking about unless you’re really into Apple news.
XS and XS Max have two cameras on the back (two lenses, two sensors, one telephoto, one wide angle)
XR only has one (wide angle)
All three do Portrait mode, although XR uses its wide angle lens and computational photography for that, whereas both XSs use their two lenses (and the subtle shift between the two) with computational photography to make a bigger resolution depth map
I have a XS Max, but I'd say the XR is excellent (camera wise) and good enough for almost everyone. Let that not be your deciding factor
XR is the cheapest smart phone people can buy, you have to consider cost of OS upgrades, free apps that Apple spends $ on (Screentime for parents is worth $5/month by itself). It amazes me how these professional reviewers ignore the fact that most android devices are lucky to get 2 OS upgrades, and have to wait several months after OS is released.
iPhone will easily last twice as long and will get all the feature updates the hardware can support.
My Nokia 7.1 has monthly updates guaranteed for two years, is fast with a decent camera and has all the apps I need. Battery life and build quality are fantastic. All for about a quarter of the price of an iPhone XR. Not sure I agree with you there.
I'm considering a Nokia 6.1 or 7.1 as my next phone, but I'm concerned that it's allegedly killing background processes so that IMs don't get delivered. Can you comment on that?
My sister is non tech savvy and thus loves to complain about things not working on her phone or computer. She has a 6.1 and no complaints on that regard.
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I can buy a Moto G6 Plus at around $260, something around the same price after 2 years, and once again something at around the same price 2 years after that. That amounts up the the price of a single XR. How is $750 considered cheap, even accounting for OS upgrades and free apps?
I got the XR. I would prefer a smaller phone, but none of the extra features on the XS justified paying 33% more for them. (In fact, I didn't feel that 64 GB was enough, so if you compare the cheapest models with more than that, you're looking at closer to a 50% premium for the XS).
I had a 5S, and I considered the SE, but I had already started to see apps and websites that don't support the smaller screen size very well, and I didn't want to get a phone that I intend to use for 4 or 5 years that was already several years closer to obsolescence.
The XR is a good phone, but it shows evidence of value engineering that you don't usually see on apple products. The larger bezels, the lightning port not being centered on the bottom of the phone, the fact that is thicker and almost heavier than the XS Max.
My biggest disappointment with getting the XR was that general day-to-day tasks that felt sluggish on my 5S since the iOS 11 update . . . are still slow and sluggish. I have watched the phone take over 15 seconds to respond in any way to a tap inside Apple's pre-installed apps. I thought that iOS 11 was just too resource-intensive for my old phone, and I guess its just that Apple has forgotten how to write solid and responsive software -- which used to be one of the key differentiators between Apple and Android phones.
