Embargoed
Matt had a great writeup over at one37.net about the whole YouTubers and early iPhone X access debacle:
The consensus, from what I can tell, is that more established and traditional voices in the tech community are rather upset that younger and lesser-known reviewers and YouTubers were given access to the phone and able to publish their reviews on Monday. The more established, mainstream crowd was able to publish on Tuesday, with most outlets having had the phone for anywhere from a week to as little as 24 hours.
The upset, although I’ve not seen it written explicitly, seems to be that the traditional crowd feel better equipped to provide a critical analysis of Apple’s new flagship, product-line altering product.
And, although that’s true, it’s worth bearing in mind that Apple’s goal isn’t for you to produce a multi-thousand word treatise about the Face ID mechanism for your audience of people who are statistically most likely to have already pre-ordered the product.
Yes, Apple going after new audiences and giving younger YouTubers (like Sara Dietschy) a chance at 1: Exclusive press and 2: Getting the message out about a new iPhone is different, but it's done for a reason. Some reviewers can really just get repetitive (see The Verge literally just saying the iPhone 8 "...is an iPhone!". Quality writing there.), and others focus on things that the majority of the market simply do not care about.
Literally no one cares about your hexacore snappy lizard processor.
no one.
For the most part, I'm glad that reviewers are reasonable and can see that this is a marketing strategy. It's targeting a different audience, and going after a different crowd than weirdos like us with personal blogs and RSS readers.
But I do not get the amount of saltiness from some bloggers, and tech fans, about this. It's not hurting you. Your fireball isn't going to just go out, and your bloggers aren't going to suddenly become nonexistent. The reviewers we all watch/listen to/read all got review units still.
Don't get mad that Apple is marketing properly.
If you somehow are reading this and haven't read iPhone X reviews, Nicole Nguyen at Buzzfeed, Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch, and Sara Dietschy all had great reviews.
And you know what?
NONE of them mentioned the arrangement of pixels on the iPhone X