I’m really tempted to move from my 7 plus to XR. If I was a professional photographer I might want the XS camera...but I’m not.
This is my current plan. We'll see if that changes once I see the phones in person but that's what I'm thinking right now.
I do want to see how well the single-lens Portrait Mode works though on the XR.
I feel like the XR takes a big hit to its rear camera. You lose 2x optical zoom and the 10x digital zoom goes down to 5x. Portrait lighting effects Stage and Stage Mono are not available for the rear camera.
However, the XR gets advanced bokeh, Depth Control, and Smart HDR. For video recording, the XR gains extended dynamic range up to 30 fps as well as stereo recording.
The XR also gets a front-facing (selfie) camera that is on par with the X/Xs. So, you can do Face ID, Animoji and Memoji.
If you're a fan of 3D Touch, the XR doesn't have it.
So, if you use your front-facing (selfie) camera more than the rear-facing camera, the XR is probably right up your alley.
1. I hate 3D Touch with a passion. I wish it would get removed from all iPhones eventually, since its presence just causes confusion for the developers, including Apple itself, in terms of the UI.
2. I too will miss the telephoto lens*, but I use it less on my 7 Plus than I originally expected. The main reason is the quality is just that much worse than the quality of the wide lens on that iPhone. If the XS is similar, with the quality of the wide being way better than the telephoto, then it's not as big of a loss.
If the telephoto's quality were as good as the wide, I'd probably have to man up and spend the extra cash on the XS Max.
BTW, the XR has the longest battery life of all three models, although it seems the Max is relatively close. The XS is by far the worst.
*It should be noted that when you choose the 2X zoom on a dual-lens iPhone, the iPhone will sometimes present a digitally zoomed image from the wide lens instead of using the actual telephoto lens, because sometimes the digitally zoomed image will be better quality.
It's true the X's telephoto is much better than the 7 Plus' telephoto, but it's still way worse than the X's wide angle, and thus the iPhone X still exhibits the same behaviour of sometimes choosing a digitally zoomed wide angle over the telephoto.