iPhone 7 Review: Faster, Better, and Oooh That Camera | WIRED
Remember when the iPhone was exciting? When every new design and app was an event in itself? When copy-paste was a feature to line up for? Those days are gone. Now, each year’s unprecedented combination of incredible technology feels ordinary, even expected. That doesn’t mean the magic’s gone. It’s just harder to see when it’s everywhere.
The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are out this Friday, starting at $650 and $770 respectively. They’re the best, fastest, strongest iPhones yet. They also indicate, nine years into the iPhone experiment, that we’re nearing some platonic ideal of a smartphone, the device in its final minimalist form. This is happening everywhere, by the way, not just in Cupertino. All the wildest ideas about smartphones are actually wild ideas around smartphones: hardware and software that connect to us and each other through our phones. For the smartphones themselves, there’s forever thinner, faster, stronger, and maybe curved-screenier, but that’s about it. At least, until the next world-bending material sciences breakthrough.
The iPhone 7 may look like the iPhone has for years, but it works better. Differently, too. It’s more seamless, more open to third parties, and more connected to the rest of the Apple ecosystem. More than anything, this phone is Apple’s acknowledgement that how an iPhone looks is increasingly beside the point. What matters is what an iPhone can do.
More and Less
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As always, the new iPhone is a better iPhone. Its new A10 Fusion processor is ludicrously, outrageously fast, somehow even more so than last year’s (already crazy fast) A9. It’s a quad-core processor, with two cores dedicated to running simple tasks and two to more taxing ones. That means if you don’t really game or watch high-res video on your phone, your battery life is going to be extraordinary. When I used the iPhone 7 for only simple things, I got more than 24 hours of life from the 7, and nearly 48 from the 7 Plus. As soon as I fired up Riptide GP: Renegade and streamed Halt and Catch Fire, I had to charge once during the day or be left stranded by 9pm.
The 7’s screen is brighter than the 6S, but for the life of me I can’t imagine why you’d ever use your phone at full brightness. The earpiece now doubles as a speaker, so you get surprisingly decent stereo sound out of the phone itself. It’s not great, or even good, but it’s much better than the 6S. Really, the best news on the spec sheet is that the iPhone 7’s internal storage starts at 32GB and goes up to 256GB. No more “Storage Almost Full” messages while I’m trying to take pictures of my dog! Or at least, it’ll take a lot longer to get there.
The basic frame of the iPhone 7 hasn’t changed a bit from the slim, metal rectangle you already know. The 7 Plus still has a 5.5-inch screen, and 4.7 for the iPhone 7. There are a few subtle ways to tell the new model from the old, like the more subtle antenna lines and the sloping edges around the camera hump that now rises like a volcano rather than protruding like it was hole-punched. The two new colorways, jet black and black, are also a dead giveaway. Or, as I call them, I Already Scratched It Glossy Black and Awesome Secret Agent Matte Black.
Lupine Hammack for WIRED
Of course, the easiest way to figure out what phone you’re holding is to try and plug in headphones. If you can’t, congrats! You’ve found a new model. There’s really nothing to say about the absence of the headphone jack except that it’s not there, which really is annoying sometimes. Like when I’m on the train, and can’t charge from an external battery and listen to music at the same time.
Apple’s solution to these gripes is a pair of wireless, $159 AirPods, but your answer will probably be to buy yet another awkward dongle that lets you still plug your wired headphones in. That’s another gripe; any time I left the tiny white connector at work, I couldn’t use my preferred cans. I’m into the idea that wireless is the future, but getting there is going to be painful and adapter-filled.
After a week, I’ve stopped trying to plug things into my phone’s phantom headphone jack. But I cannot, for the life of me, get used to the iPhone 7’s new home button. It’s not a button anymore, just a capacitive surface that uses haptic buzzes and taps to provide feedback. That’s great for the longevity of your phone, since the home button tends to break before anything else. It’s even really cool in some places on the iPhone, lending a certain physicality to on-screen stuff by buzzing when you get to the end of a list or rattling like an actual machine gun when you fire upon the unsuspecting enemy. But when I press to unlock my phone, my thumb vibrates like it’s about to dent the glass. It’s not like it ruins the phone, but I miss the click.
Honestly, though, I’m happy to trade both headphone jack and home button to get a water-resistant phone. (Not that I should have to, as Samsung and everyone else have proven.) Being able to use my phone in the shower, or at least inside the Toothbrushing Splash Radius, is wonderful. Even more than that, knowing my IP67-rated iPhone 7 can handle a light rainstorm or splash of tequila brings a wonderful peace of mind. The iPhone 6S was already sort-of mostly waterproof, but the iPhone 7 is the real deal.
So far, unless you have a bad history with phones and toilets or an intense goth streak, there’s nothing about the iPhone that would make any 6S or even 6 owner jump at the upgrade. The thing Apple’s hoping will push you over the top is staring out the back of the iPhone 7 like a Wall-E robot: the new and improved camera.
