Apple pushes iPhone to limit
APPLE did not plan to launch the iPhone X until next year but fast-tracked its development and new face-scanner technology to meet the iPhone’s 10th anniversary.
The world’s richest technology company revealed the punishing deadline pushed designers to the limit and that any number of hurdles could have scuttled the plan.
The revelations come just two days before the iPhone X is due in Australian stores and after a splurge of pre-orders resulted in supplies selling out and delaying new iPhone X deliveries until mid-December.
Apple hardware engineering senior vice-president Dan Riccio said the technology giant had envisioned delivering a smartphone with a screen covering its entire face “since iPhone one,” but that smartphone’s creation was not due until 2018.
The iPhone X, revealed in September, features an edgeto-edge screen with no ‘home’ button and the addition of a face-scanner to replace the fingerprint sensor.
“Those technologies, we had line of sight to go out and deliver them next year, but through a lot of hard work and talent and grit and determination we were able to actually deliver them this year,” he said.
Mr Riccio said the phone’s design, with a 5.8-inch screen and narrow body, was locked in last November.
Delivering the first iPhone with no home button required software changes to allow users to unlock and navigate the handset in a new way.
Apple software engineering senior vice-president Craig Federighi said care was needed in the development.
“It’s one of those projects where at the outset you all think there’s no way we’re going to pull this off,” he said.
“There were a dozen things we knew we had to solve and, honestly, one of them could have failed to come together.”
Mr Federighi said both hardware and software engineers working on the device knew “where we were going with the industrial design,” but it wasn’t until the final prototypes arrived that they could truly assess what worked and what did not and finalised the redesigned smartphone.
The iPhone X will be Apple’s first premium smartphone and the most expensive on the market at up to $1829 when it’s released in Australia on Friday.
The smartphone will go head-to-head with Google’s Pixel 2 smartphones, released in Australian stores yesterday.
Apple’s share price rose to an all-time high this week following last week’s iPhone X pre-order rush.