I’ve recently become the owner of the brand new iPhone 7 by Apple. With every new product, especially one this advertised, raved and complained about, I knew that I would like certain aspects more than others. Here’s my up close and personal dissection of the iPhone 7:
Price
The first thing that cannot go unnoticed is the price of the iPhone 7. I was at the Apple Store a couple weeks after the 7 was released and after being charmed by the genius bar workers, I decided to use my summer-job money to buy one brand spanking new. The phone doesn’t come with a cheap price tag, coming in at around $680 with tax for a 32GB, the smallest storage option. Once you get past the shock of the price, you better hope it’s worth it!
Overall appearance
I have to admit, this is definitely the best looking iPhone to date. There are the classic options: Silver, Rose Gold and Gold, but they also introduced Black and Jet Black. Compared to the matte-like Black, Jet Black is shiny, which makes it look even darker. Honestly, I thought the Jet Black looked a little cheap (which is ironic because of the price), so I stuck with the classic-looking Black.
Screen
The regular iPhone 7 has a 4.7-inch display, and it that’s not big enough for you, the iPhone 7 Plus boasts 5.5 inches of bright, HD screen. Apple advertises the 7 to have to the brightest, most colorful Retina HD display yet. Personally, I’m no techie, but I think it looks nice!
Home button
The home button grew on me. At first I didn’t like that the 7’s “button” isn’t an actual button. The circle is still there, but instead of it clicking in like a button, it vibrates. Honestly, the first time I pushed the home button on my 7 I thought it was broken. Now that I’ve had it for about a month, when I feel someone’s 6 or 5 theirs feels like the strange one.
Camera
This is actually a very noticeable upgrade. I don’t know how they did it, but the 7 camera picks up the tiniest little details! I took a selfie and had to delete it because a blemish was so HD. Apple says that the reengineered camera on the back of the phone has added “optical image stabilization, a ƒ/1.8 aperture, and a six-element lens to make it even better for shooting photos and videos in low light. With advanced new features like wide color capture, your photos and Live Photos will look even more vibrant. In layman’s terms (or you know, words we can even understand?), the camera is really good. I also noticed the front camera is much improved, and makes things like Snapchatting even better!
Speakers
This is another noticeable upgrade that I really like. According to Apple, the 7 is 2x louder than the 6, and now not only does sound come out of the bottom of the phone, it also comes out by where the front camera is. It seems like a better speaker near where you ear actually goes during a call, is a little overdue, but maybe that’s just me…
Headphone jack/charger
Yes, we all know the travesty that is the iPhone 7 losing it’s earphone jack. I didn’t think this was going to be a huge deal, but trust me it’s a huge inconvenience (such a privileged problem, I know). On commercials for the phone, you see people wearing the new bluetooth earbuds that look exactly like the old ones, but wireless and 1000x easier to lose, so when I bought the phone I figured they were included. I was wrong. Instead, you get the normal earbuds, and a two-inch adapter, called a “dongle.” The name might be funny, but the price to replace it with the Bluetooth buds isn’t, coming in at $40. The dongle plugs the earbuds in on one side, and then plugs into the charging hole. It’s not terrible, except you have to bring the adapter everywhere you go if you want to listen to music, and you can’t listen to earbuds and charge your phone at the same time, unless you go buy an additional adapter with another plug-in hole.
In all, I do love my new iPhone 7. Although there are some aspects that I think Apple could have kept from earlier models, I love having the best, new products, and the shock of spending that much money out of pocket is finally starting to go down…