It’s no secret that smartphones have tended to get sleeker and less obtrusive over time. Screens are growing, but bezels are shrinking. In a very real way, the boundaries between us and our information — our apps, our contacts, our very desires reproduced in pixels — are melting away. Apple has sensed the industry shifting around it, and it made the iPhone X in response to that. But, in a bid to make the transition less jarring, Apple also made the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.
They’re familiar-looking phones that mostly operate the way people expect them to. They’re conventional. But that doesn’t mean they’re inherently lacking — far from it, in fact. While I suspect all iPhones will look like the iPhone X soon enough, the 8 and 8 Plus are expertly built, high-performance devices for people who want to ease into Apple’s vision of the future. And who knows? These just might be the last conventional iPhones Apple makes.