No, no, it won’t really cost as much as a car until Trump starts that trade war with China that he’s so hot for. Although how much do those tiny Smart cars run for? Put it this way: You can have a car that everyone will laugh at you for driving or you can have a tricked-out $999 iPhone and a bus pass. The phone will help you pass those long hours while you’re waiting at your stop.

Besides, it’s worth paying extra money to let a major tech company build a database of faces that Russian and Chinese intelligence will inevitably hack. How could technology like this go wrong?

Even if you change your hair, glasses, etc. – Face ID learns your face and adapts to your face over time.

— AppleInsider (@appleinsider) September 12, 2017

The new facial-recognition feature can also be used with your bank and credit cards stored in Apple Pay, just to make you feel extra insecure. Half of all American adults are already included in facial-recognition databases, it might surprise you to know; if you’re worried that Apple’s advance is going to make it easy for authorities to track us in public in real time, comfort yourself with the thought that they were already well on their way to doing that. The iPhone X will just mop up the holdouts.

The lower-end iPhone models introduced today, the 8 and 8+, will retail for $699 and $799, respectively. They have most of the same features as the X — dual cameras, advanced processor, higher-resolution screen, augmented reality features, wireless charging, etc — but, crucially, not the facial-recognition tech. The X accommodates the facial sensors by shedding the home button. The front of the device is now all screen, as you’ll see below, with the sensors embedded up top. I wonder why they even bothered introducing an 8+ model if the most gee-whiz feature introduced today is available exclusively on a model that runs only $200 more. Who’s shelling out eight bills for a phone and refusing to pay two more for the most advanced gimmick Apple has? Maybe it’s not a price thing, though: Apple might have concluded that a segment of the population will be so uncomfortable with the facial-recognition tech that they’re apt to switch to Android unless they offer them a new model without it. That is to say, the fact that the 8+ doesn’t have the company’s slickest new technology may, ironically, be its chief selling point.

Or maybe it’s just an old-fashioned status-symbol thing. The 8 and 8+ are there to make you feel like you’re getting something *really* good when you shell out for the X. Let the poors settle for the 8!

Oh, the other thing you can do with the X that you can’t do on the 8? “Animojis.” Some American adults are going to pay $1,000 for a phone for their kids mainly because it lets them appear as a talking horse or chicken or literal pile of sh*t to their friends when they’re chatting. And of course some American adults will pay $1,000 for the X because they want to appear as a talking pile of sh*t when they’re chatting with their own friends. I wonder how much overlap there is between that group and the shockingly large “wut?” contingent in this post.