It’s true that Apple doesn’t always backport newer software features to older models, sometimes I’m sure to encourage upgrades by making newer models more desirable. Of course they also use price segmentation to encourage customers to move up to more expensive model(s) to get certain features that aren’t available on a cheaper model.I wish the original iPhone X could do this. I understand why Apple does it but as far as I can tell there is no physical hardware limitation that would prevent the iPhone X from having the background Bokeh blur slider also. Your only option is to downgrade to the XR (sure a bigger screen but it’s not OLED). It just irks me that they’re getting so desperate to get people to upgrade their phone every year that they feel the need to lock out new features on a 1 year old phone. Sorry, just felt like ranting about this
But though it’s been speculated Apple could easily add the Depth Control feature to the X if they so desired, there’s been no proof of this that I’m aware of. Three factors that might affect Apple’s willingness/ability to do so (other than to encourage upgrades) occur to me right off the bat.
1) We don’t know to what extent the 5 trillion ops/sec capability of the A12’s neural engine vs. the 600 billion ops/sec of the A11 comes into play. It might negatively affect the real-time nature of the slider, for instance. The A12 NPU is more than 7 times faster, so it’s possible that slider response that seems real-time (or nearly so) on the XS could be annoyingly laggy on the X. For example, a 150ms response time could become over a second.
2) The image signal processor is likely different between the A11 and A12. This could affect edge detection, for instance, leading to poorer results on the X vs. the XS.
3) It could be that Apple would have to do additional software development to implement Depth Control on the X. The difficulty of the backport could range from trivial to time consuming/resource intensive.
So does the ISP or NPU have any effect on the quality of the Depth Control results? Unknown—we don’t know one way or the other. We also don’t know amount of effort it would take for development/testing to do the backport.
I know some (especially the Apple-hate crowd) claim Depth Control is being deliberately withheld simply to encourage X owners to upgrade to a 2018 model, but it’s not possible afaik to make that assumption. Maybe that’s the only reason, but Depth Control as implemented on the XR/XS/XS Max may very well rely on capabilities of the A12 that aren’t aren’t available on the A11. (That’s not to say that Apple couldn’t offer a similar feature on the X, but it may not be possible to have the same quality of experience for the customer without the A12.)
