Daily Report: The iPhone 7 Verdict Is In

Apple’s new phone may be the same size, but it is shrinking down lots of unexpected things. How far you are from your music, for example, or the time between you and your apps. Additionally, the width of your wallet can shrink quite a bit from the removal of money.

Brian X. Chen reviews Apple’s 10th generation iPhone in Tuesday’s New York Times. The phone made its premiere to much ballyhoo last week, and goes on sale Friday.

Like its predecessor, the iPhone 7 will cost about $650. The most talked-about accessory is a pair of wireless headphones that will cost $160 more. Not cheap, in other words, to buy the full experience.

An editor told Brian the little wireless tubes coming out of the buds looked like he had tiny cigarettes in his ears (to me, they are more like drain pipes.) But the sound, Brian says, is quite good, and the engineering is clever.

I borrowed them and realized something else: It’s a very different feeling to listen to music from earbuds without wires leading back to the phone. It’s more intimate than using either standard earbuds or wireless headphones, a direct and full relationship to your music.

Immediacy does seem to be a design goal. The faster processor means getting the camera on or moving among apps is closer to instantaneous. The battery lasts longer, too, so there is less time away from the phone while it is charging.

That may not seem like a lot of time saving, but it adds up, maybe even creating enough space to fill by yet more software. And, as Natasha Singer reports, more is certainly on the way: Apple has also released free software that teaches schoolchildren how to write programs.

Free, that is, to any child or school that buys an Apple iPad