The shiny finish looks great! Until your fingers smudge it. Guess I'm just using it wrong.

Brownish? Pinkish? Light brown with a touch of pink? Whatever you call this color, that's what the back of the gold iPhone looks like.

Behold the notch. You've seen it before. On like, a billion other phones. Anyway, Face ID is on this phone, and it works.

If any nerds like me say "oh, that's an iPhone XS isn't it", this little antenna band at the top and bottom is how they know. (I feel like a magician giving away trade secrets right now.)

I'm not gonna lie, I have no idea how they made the phone stand upright for this photo. I could ask Thomas, but I'm just gonna chalk it up as a mystery of the cosmos.

I'm not a huge fan of the gold finish, but it also doesn't look nearly as bad as I thought it might. (I really don't like gold gadgets... except for my gold N64 controller, that's a treasure.)

Apple could make the UI black around the notch, but they really, really want you to notice that it's there.

The iPhone XS Max (right) is virtually identical to the iPhone XS (left)... just bigger.

Unlike past years, the smaller iPhone XS and bigger iPhone XS Max have the same camera system.

The massive OLED screen is bright with vibrant colours.

New to the iPhone XS line this year is this gold color. The edges have a bit of bronze about them, darker than the bright gold of the expensive Apple Watch Edition.

The notch is the same physical size on both phones, so there's more space on the sides of the XS Max screen. It's interesting, but hardly useful.

I'm not gonna lie, the lack of symmetry here (thanks to the extra antenna band added for the XS line) really bothers me.