The Short Story
If you are thinking about purchasing iPhone X and want reliable NFC performance you should not buy an iPhone X manufactured before April 2018, it’s a flawed product. For reliable, robust NFC performance buy iPhone 8 or Apple Watch Series 3 instead.
The Long Story
If you are coming to the iPhone X Suica Problem for the first time back up and read:
The iPhone X Suica Problem
iPhone X Suica Problem a Design Flaw?
Testing the Revision B iPhone X Theory
What follows is based on those posts.
There are only a few data points to test the Revision B iPhone X theory but it looks like my theory is a bust. That’s OK, theories are made to be tested, often fail, move on to the next theory. Or not, time will tell.
I do have some observations based on the few data points that have come in, especially the production week 15 2018 revelation, along with shared reader experiences and my own from these past few months. They are not good.
- Apple has a Big QA Problem: the iPhone X production tally indicates that Apple could not manufacture good iPhone X units until April 2018 and QA has no way of knowing what units are good or which are bad. This is bad. Nothing about the iPhone X Suica problem has been easy, from discovering it to troubleshooting it, but this is hard to take. For me this kind of QA failure of a fundamental feature so far into production is like Steve Jobs dying all over again.
- iPhone X users with Suica problem units have no reliable way to obtain a good unit because Apple Support has no method to identify bad units or supply good units for exchange
On the plus side we do know 2 things now:
- Good ‘Revision B iPhone X’ units perform reliably regardless of the iOS version with NFC performance speed and reliability on par with iPhone 8
- Bad ‘Day 1’ iPhone X units perform unreliably regardless of the iOS version with poor NFC performance compared to iPhone 8
Some readers have suggested that iPhone X NFC issues can be addressed with software/firmware updates that tweak digital signal processing. Perhaps so, but my take is that bad units are bad units and software tweaks will never raise the NFC performance level to match a good iPhone X unit, or iPhone 8.
I’ll continue to update iPhone X manufacture data points as new ones come in but for now my quick conclusion is: iPhone X manufacturing issues and QA problems may never have taken far too long to be ironed out. iPhone X is a flawed product that can’t can only be fixed with a replacement Rev-B iPhone X. I wish I had bought an iPhone 8.
Update
iPhone X has a NFC hardware problem, for more information see:
iPhone X Suica Problem Q&A Exchange Guide (English Version)
iPhone X Suica問題Q&A交換ガイド（日本語版）