iPhone X was originally supposed to come out next year

According to Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio and other Apple executives, iPhone X was originally supposed to come out in 2018, but the Cupertino company was able to “deliver them this year.”

In an interview with Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff earlier this week, Riccio revealed that they had been considering a 2018 launch for iPhone X.

“It is one of those projects at Apple where you set up to do something that, at outset, you think, there’s no way we’re going to pull this off,” said Apple’s Craig Federighi. “We all knew where we were going,” he said, “but there were a dozen things we knew we had to solve, and any one of them could have failed to come together.”

An excerpt from the article:

“As Riccio described it, Apple had “the line of sight” for a 2018 iPhone X launch, “but with a lot of hard work, talent, grit and determination we were able to deliver them this year,” he told Mashable.

“That choice, one that in hindsight seems a little odd considering how the very existence of a better iPhone may have impacted iPhone 8’s fortunes, apparently put additional pressure on the teams.

“In a rare, albeit brief, moment of stunning transparency, Riccio revealed that the compressed timeline left little room to consider functional alternatives. Such changes are part of Apple’s iPhone lore.”

Mashable also sat down with Apple’s marketing honcho Phill Schiller, software engineering chief Craig Federighi user interface design head Alan Dye to talk how Apple built its most important phone in years.

The executives revealed that Apple spent “no time” looking at putting a fingerprint sensor on the back or through the glass or on the side of the phone.

“As far as last-minute design changes? Actually, we didn’t have time for it,” said Riccio. “Quite frankly, this program was on such a fast track to be offered and enabled this year. We had to lock the design very, very early.

According to Riccio, they actually locked the iPhone X design almost a year ago, back in November 2016. In other words, all the reports and silly rumors about how Apple was “scrambling” to make last-minute changes to the device this summer were plain inaccurate.

There’s too much to quote so be sure to give this informative article a read.