Off Brand

Apple Still Hasn’t Fixed the iPhone’s Fatal Flaw

With the new iPhone 11, Apple proves it has no business being a paragon of great design

Rob Walker
Marker
Published in
6 min readSep 11, 2019

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Illustration: Tom Guilmard

ToTo the surprise of no one, the centerpiece of the latest Apple Special Event — as the company’s annual product launch announcements are branded — was the new iPhone. Sure, CEO Tim Cook and various minions touted news of Apple TV, an update to the company’s watch, a game subscription service linked to its app store, and so on. But the hyping of the new iPhone 11 (priced at $699) and iPhone 11 Pro (available in two sizes, priced $999 or $1,099) took up pretty close to half the hour-and-forty-five-minute affair.

Also as expected, the new batch of phones looks terrific. I’m referring specifically to looks: As ever, the latest iPhones are beautiful, sleek, slim, simple, clean, elegant — hot. The iPhone 11, finished in anodized aluminum, comes in six colors, including lavender, teal, and bright red. The Pro versions, made of “surgical-grade stainless steel,” per the official pitch, comes in “midnight green” and “space gray,” as well as a gold color that is “new” in some unspecified way.

In the promotional videos they all look positively lust-worthy. Throw in the impressive new specs — which I’ll get to — and suffice it to say that…

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