https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5g8eb/iphone-x-machina

Brian Merchant is the editor of Terraform and the author of 'The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.'

Make no mistake, the iPhone X is, as Tim Cook put it on Tuesday, "the future of the smartphone." So was the iPhone 6. And the 4, and the 3G, and the original model, which debuted in 2007. Hence the Roman 'X'. Cook said Apple had been working towards the X for a decade, which, again, is true enough, in that the iPhone product line is now almost exactly 10 years old. Some are arguing that the X is not the future of the smartphone, just another iteration in its ongoing incremental improvement—but what could be a more accurate description of its (or our) future than that?