First things first, to many, the new iPhone 7 looks very familiar to the old iPhone 6. If you agree with this, in a sense you are completely right. Apple didn’t really do much in terms of the aesthetic design of the phone, but once you break it out and really start to play around with it, you will come to find that it is one of the most powerful smart phones on the market right now.

One of the biggest changes that many people were worried about is the exclusion of the headphone jack. Apple wanted to add more features to the new rendition of their phone. In order to achieve this they needed to somehow find more space in their phone to use. As a result, Apple switched over to lightning port headphones which honestly isn’t as big of a deal as people are making it out to be. The phone comes with a pair of lightning port headphones and just in case you lose them or prefer using other headphones such as beats, it conveniently comes with a lightning-to-headphone jack adapter. This allows users to use normal headphones without losing any sound quality.

By ditching the old headphone jack it allowed Apple to add two new features on the 7. One being an improved taptic engine for the 3D touch. Another being a new and improved home button, which is actually no longer a button at all, but a touch sensitive keypad. This new addition eliminates the faulty home buttons that were sometimes problematic in the older versions of the phone. Another new feature they brought to this phone is water resistance, which is probably one of the most attractive features to returning apple users due to the fact that it is long overdue. The phone has a rating of IP67 (which is very similar to the apple watch series 1 which had a rating of IPX7), which means the phone can be submerged in up to 1 meter of water for a maximum of 30 minutes.

Another big upgrade apple brought to the table was the enhanced front and back camera. From the 6s to the 7 they added optical image stabilization, a six element lens rather than the previous five element one, wide color capture for photos and live photos, body detection to go along with the face detection and the quad-LED True Tone flash which are all big upgrades from the previous phone making it one of the better camera phones on the market. The increase on battery life surely does not compromise the phones lightning fast capabilities which should be expected from the new A10 chip. As a matter of fact the single-core and multi-core performance tops the competition right now with a score of 3489 for the single and 5650 for the double. It still features a 4.7 inch display with it being 1334 x 750p with a 326 pixel per inch ratio making the truly beautiful screen that we have come to expect from Apple each year. One thing actually did change with the display though, it now has two front facing speakers finally giving apple users the stereo speakers they have been wanting. Even though the aesthetic design was not changed much, it is still a pretty big upgrade form the iPhone 6 and 6s and it just leaves them with more options to improve the design when they come out with the 10th anniversary iPhone 8 hopefully coming out next year.