iPhone X Facts for Cranky Old Farmers

(Originally published in the Badgingarra Sandpaper December 2017)

Apple’s new phone model is the iPhone X (pronounced “ten” if you want to keep credibility in fashionable cafes) and comes with a raft of fairly amazing specifications. Occasionally a cranky ol... um I mean, respected agriculturalist is foolish enough to ask a technogeek about these kinds of things.

The iPhone X has a brand new processor, promoted using impenetrable phrases such as “A11 Bionic Hexacore chip with 64-bit architecture, neural engine and M11 motion co-processor” and touted as being 20-30% faster than their previous models. For those of you that don’t work for Apple’s marketing department, these fancy words mean if you bought a new relatively high-end computer or laptop last year, it has similar computing power than the new phone. Or, in other words, the phone has more processing power than the computer used by the average Sandpaper correspondent. “Bionic” is mostly a marketing buzzword but is hinting at the facial recognition technology that the phone supports. It also has a dedicated processor to handle motion tracking, so the phone knows whether you have walked far enough to work off the extra serve of ice cream you had last night.

An obvious feature when looking at the new phone is that the screen covers almost the entire front of the phone - side-to-side and top-to-bottom. The only part that isn’t screen is the small notch in the middle of the top where the speaker, microphone, cameras and sensors live. Even the top corners are screen. What is not as obvious is that the screen uses OLED technology instead of more traditional LCD technology. “Oooh OLED”, you say “Great. What’s that?”. Traditional LCD screens have a backlight and the LCD display selectively lets through different coloured light in different places to trick you into seeing a photo of your grandkids. OLED screens are made of material that actually glows in different colours when electricity is passed through them. With no backlight required, you can save space and electricity (both at a premium in a phone) and the screen is much easier to view in bright light. Because the screen covers the whole phone there are no longer any physical buttons on the front of the phone, continuing Apple’s sleek design efforts.

The phone has dual 12 megapixel cameras on the front using one wide angle lens and one telephoto lens, both with optical image stabilisation, that combine with clever software to get impressive digital zoom, fantastic depth in photos and even manage to fix lighting and focus on both foreground and background of shots for the most ham-fisted photographer. The combination of visible light and infrared cameras on the front along with other sensors on the front allow the phone to recognise your face so you can unlock the phone just by looking at it. We were all getting tired fingers entering a passcode, weren’t we?

By this stage, the cranky old farmer is regretting asking and is trying to politely exit the conversation. But they will be interested in, if not impressed by, one of the most standout features - the eye-watering price. The top-end 256 GB model retails for AU$1,829! That is more than this correspondent paid for his first car and, in cranky old farmer units, about the current going rate of an early 1990s 2WD Toyota Hilux. The competition is on. Which is the better value?

For data carrying capacity the iPhone wins. If you load the Hilux up with some fairly dense books, say, 16 copies of the Oxford English dictionary 2^nd edition (about a tonne) it comes to about 8GB of data while the iPhone X can store about 500 copies of the OED. Very useful if you want to be absolutely sure what that word means. Of course, if you load the Hilux up with a tonne of iPhones it can probably carry about a Petabyte (10¹⁵ bytes) which is about 2 million OEDs, 1% of the printed matter in the world or the amount of data the world produces in 30 seconds.

The Hilux wins the combined weight carrying and durability competition. The iPhone X is water resistant is rated to survive in a metre of water for 30 minutes. If your Hilux is running, 1 metre of water could well reach the air intake and be fatal. Videos online show that dropping an iPhone X 1 metre to a hard surface will almost certainly break it whereas the Top Gear team would have us believe that a Hilux can handle this. The clincher is that if you put the 174g iPhone on the back of a Hilux all is fine. If you put a Hilux on top of the iPhone, you will need to fall back to using a two-way radio.

Any discussion involving farmers and technology would be incomplete without noting that the iPhone has 3GB (3 billion bytes) of RAM whereas you can only fit 10 decent sized rams on the back of a Hilux. Sorry, but the RAM joke is obligatory!

The iPhone booster camp will point out that the first iPhone was only released in 2007. This latest model has 10 times the computing power, 15 times the storage, and 20 times the screen resolution. If the Hilux developed as fast, this year’s model wouldn’t just have common rail fuel injection, it would be able to approach the speed of sound while comfortably carrying a modest sized truck. It would also inexplicably be mostly made from windscreen and battery while for some reason be completely unable to use roads more than 5 years old. Occasionally when driving it would suddenly screech to a halt and the driver would need to get out, unload and reload the tray before it would go again. Curiously, people would just accept this.

One thing that may finally tip the scales in the favour of the Hilux is that due to new traffic laws, picking up and talking on your mobile phone while driving your Hilux will get you three demerit points and a $400 fine. On the other hand, talking to your Hilux is merely seen as slightly eccentric and is usually socially acceptable, especially if you are a respected agriculturalist trying to carry a large load of dictionaries up a long hill into a sea breeze!

Keith Williams