iPHONE XR REVIEW: WHY THIS iPHONE MIGHT BE THE BEST APPLE HAS EVER MADE
We may never know what the R in the iPhone XR actually means—Apple VP Phil Schiller himself said that the R doesn’t really mean much to Apple. But I have my own guess: reboot.
Before the release of the iPhone X last year, the iPhone 8 was in need of a redesign. It had been some three years since Apple first unveiled its large-screen iPhones, but nothing about them changed much since the iPhone 6. The iPhone 8 brought wireless charging and a better camera, but it didn’t look or feel like a 2017 phone, let alone a 2018 one.
But rather than scrap the idea of the iPhone 8 and go all in on the higher-priced and margined X, Apple went back to the drawing board to create a seemingly impossible iPhone that had the specs of a proverbial iPhone 9, the look of an iPhone X, and the price of an iPhone 8.
Like any reboot of a classic, the iPhone XR could have gone spectacularly wrong. But with the iPhone XR, Apple nailed it. The chip, battery, and storage are all best in class. The price slides nicely in between the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone XS. And the design is close enough to the iPhone X and XS that from a reasonable distance the phones look identical—maybe you even expected some serious compromises that push people to the upper models in a bait-and-switch move. That’s not the case.
When you take everything into consideration—price, design, storage, camera, battery life, and performance—the iPhone XR might be the best iPhone
