There’s really no getting around it: the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus look more or less exactly like the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus from 2014.
The iPhone 7’s new home button will elicit instant reaction from people; it’s much more different than you might think. The button no longer moves at all — it’s totally solid, just like newer MacBook trackpads. A linear vibration unit that Apple calls the Taptic Engine jolts when you apply pressure to the button, tricking your brain into feeling a click. It’s nothing like the clumsy haptic feedback on other phones, which I’ve always disliked — it really does feel like a click.
So there’s no headphone jack on the iPhone 7. Apple says it needed to take out the headphone jack so it could make space for better cameras, the Taptic Engine(even though the 6S also had a Taptic Engine), and perhaps most importantly, a bigger battery. It was also easier to make a phone with one less hole in it water resistant, but Apple tells me that it wasn’t a huge factor.
One of my favorite recurring bits at iPhone introductions is when Phil Schiller notes, correctly, that the iPhone camera is likely the best camera most people will ever own. He’s been saying it fairly regularly since the iPhone 4S came out in 2011, and he said it again last week when he introduced the iPhone 7 camera. This is an incredible fact, as is the fact that a huge number of people now quietly upgrade to a better camera on a fairly regular basis, and then use the hell out of that camera. The explosion in mobile photography is one of the most revolutionary aspects of the entire smartphone revolution, and the general excellence of the iPhone camera over time is a big reason why.
The iPhone 7 has the new A10 Fusion chip, another product from Apple’s industry-leading chip design team. It’s a new design with four cores: two high performance cores, and two low-power cores that use less battery power during everyday tasks.
Water resistance
Improved cameras
Better battery life
Great display
Taptic engine feedback is neat
Dual camera zoom on the 7 Plus is great