Just a few weeks into the launch of the latest flagships from Apple, the iPhone XS and the iPhone XS Max and already there are reports of a couple of issues with these phones which are rightfully considered the most expensive, at least in the context of the Indian market, with the iPhone XS Max costing as much as Rs.1.44 lakhs.
Users who have taken to the forums to post the issues are miffed that the Cupertino giant has not even acknowledged that these issues exist. Users of the new iPhones and bloggers have even found names for these issues; Charging-gate and Beauty-gate.
With the iPhone XS Max, the issue described goes like this: if you leave the phone unused for a while and then plug it to the charger, it does not indicate that the charging is on. If you remove it from the plug and re-insert for charging, it does the job. This means if you were busy and just routinely plugged the phone and left it thinking it is charging and came back after a while, you will be disappointed that the phone has not been charged at all. The user who has posted this issue in the forum says he has tried this with the 5W charger that is supplied with the phone and the 10W charger Apple sells officially and done it several times before making the issue public and says more than 100 people have raised the same charging-gate issue. The report goes on to mention that people who have updated the OS to iOS 12.1 do not face this issue. Obviously, it is a shortcoming in the software and Apple will correct it, but a word in acknowledgement would have satisfied a lot of Apple customers.
The other issue is a bit more technical and relates to the camera feature where pictures clicked with the front selfie camera on the iPhone XS Max seemed to deliver images that have skin smoothening and there is a clear difference between pictures taken in low light conditions and the ones in daylight. The difference can also be seen when the same images are captured with an iPhone X, which was last year’s release.
The report carrying these issues has quoted an expert associated with developing the camera app Halide for Apple as explaining that the skin smoothening might happen due to the Smart HDR feature which tends to be engaged in noise reduction in the imaged captured by the iPhone cameras in the latest versions. Faster shutter speeds lead to higher noise levels and in the process of applying computational photography, the Smart HDR ends up delivering smoothened textures on images and this is not just limited to skin alone; any fine object clicked will have this happening.
Again, those in the know feel the users of these brand new devices would want Apple to just issue a statement acknowledging that these indeed are glitches in their devices and the patches will be coming out soon.