Exxy, the great Australian slang for expensive, is the iPhone X, mispronounced as ‘ex’, but even so it’s clearly a 10 out of ten.
Remember OS X? It was OS ten, but I had always thought of it and had called it OS ‘ex’, and had to train myself to say OS ten, although thankfully, macOS has solved that problem nicely.
While Apple may indeed revert to calling its 2018 iPhones something simpler like iPhone, iPhone Plus and iPhone Pro, just as it has done with the iPhone SE, the reality is that we are faced with the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, and the iPhone 10.
X is the Roman way of writing the number 10, but with people seeing an ‘ex’ with the letter instead of the number ten, it’s quite naturally for people to be saying ‘ex’ instead of the number.
{loadposition alex08}Look, perhaps if No 10 in London had been written with a big X on the door, saying 10 when seeing X might actually be more natural.
But if you hear people saying ex instead of ten, well, it should come as no surprise.
Neither should the fact that Apple’s most advanced iPhone yet, with its most expansive and extraordinary screen to grace an iPhone yet, should prove to be its most expensive iPhone model of all time.
It is an iPhone X-ten-ded into new dimensions, new directions, with a button courageously removed for good measure and few worrying about the 3.5mm port any more.
Who knows, perhaps next year’s will cost even more, due to featuring even better technologies and the likelihood of a 512GB storage option.
Still, that is then, and now is now, with the iPhone X due to become available for pre-order on 27 October, and then go on sale on 3 November. Despite its high price, it will probably become Apple’s most popular iPhone of all time.
We have yet to see how people will respond, but with the iPhone X set to be the absolute must-have iPhone this year, and plenty of people in the US, China, India, Australia, Europe, Russia and all over the world wanting it, and plenty of carrier plans to enable getting one, the only question is whether Apple can manufacture enough of them to meet demand.
I mean, it’s hard to become the most popular of all time if you’re only able to sell a small number because you can’t produce them fast enough to sell more.
That said, if they’re selling so fast they’re perennially on back order for weeks at a time — which was the case for Apple’s AirPods for most of this year — then we’ll know the iPhone X is the success Apple clearly planned it to be.
It does have that notch at the top of the screen housing all those cameras, which some in the media claim was botched, could have been better designed and supposedly would never have been released by Steve Jobs like that, but it sure has everyone talking, and aside from the Essential phone, which will Essentially sell like a drop in the bucket compared to global iPhone sales, no-one has ever seen a phone like it.
Its notch could be one of the greatest differentiating sales tools of all time, until some Chinese cloner decides they want a notch, too.
So, the iPhone X is the iPhone Ten. Whether this is the last year we’ll have to talk about new iPhones with a number behind them is yet to be seen, but we don’t have the MacBook 3 or MacBook Pro 179 – we just have the main product names, which are internally differentiated by the year they’re released, and even the period of the year: late 2016 MacBook. Early 2013 MacBook Pro, etc etc.
If the iPhone X appeals to you, I hope you are able to get one this year, and I hope supply constraints aren’t as tight as had been rumoured!
After all, if previous years are anything to go by, some people’s iPhone X 2017 orders simply might not arrive until closer to or even into 2018.
And if they really are as super popular as expected, the X will really mark the spot as the tenth anniversary iPhone to outdo the competition, and the first to truly usher in the next generation of iPhone.
It’s going to be one heck of a ride, and 2018 — which some will wait for rather than springing for anyone's new phones this time around — promises even more amazingness to come!