How do you show off the most anticipated product in years? That was my dilemma with the iPhone X. Since my unit was one of the first few released into the wild, it naturally drew a lot of curiosity when I pulled it out of my pocket and gave it a dewy-eyed glance to wake it from slumber. Yes, this is the one—the iPhone that will hasten millions of upgrades, the one that’s made you ignore the hardly-knew-ye iPhone 8, announced on the same day as this one. After expressing proper admiration for its bright screen and svelte bezels, people would ask me, “What’s it do?” and I’d have to choose something that might indicate why Apple was charging $1000 for this baby.

Steven Levy is Backchannel's founder and Editor in Chief. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I could show them more of the dazzling high-resolution screen that covers just about the entire surface of the device. I could snap some photos, demonstrating how you could now use the artsy portrait mode in the selfie-friendly front camera. Or I could show how I was slowly mastering a new set of gestures that would reprogram my muscle memories previously optimized for a home button, an appurtenance strikingly missing from my glass-encased X. But what I ultimately chose was an animated piece of shit.

That’s right—Apple’s creepy update to the iconic poo emoji. The iPhone X (pronounced “ten,” not as in X-ray) includes this mildly naughty character as one of 12 possible “Animojis” in its iMessage app. When creating a text, you can choose one of these, recording your message with audio and video. The iPhone X picks up your facial expressions and voice and morphs them onto the Animoji, as if you were Ellen DeGeneres voice-tracking Dory. Though seemingly frivolous—and, at least until the novelty wears off, kind of fun—these Animojis actually draw on some of the most technologically sophisticated advances of the iPhone X, the traits that make it unique: facial recognition, exotic sensors, an advanced camera, and powerful chips that drive graphics and machine learning. (With typical bombast, Apple has bestowed pulse-quickening names on those inventions: TrueDepth camera, A11 Bionic chip, neural engine.) At the moment their apotheosis is to imbue one’s persona into the face of a robot, a chicken, an ET, a panda…or a fecal avatar. But that’s only the start.

The poo Animoji.

I’ve had this phone since last Tuesday. Apple had given me this early peek in part because I was one of the first pre-release reviewers of the original iPhone. Given that history, we all thought it would be interesting to get my impressions of what the company clearly believes is the next milestone in a journey that has pretty much altered our relationship with technology. Sure, with every single iteration of the iPhone, Apple has claimed that it’s the best one the company has ever made. But for this anniversary edition—coming at a time when critics are griping that the company had tumbled into an innovation trough— they’re pushing for something higher. Tim Cook calls the iPhone X “the future of the smartphone.”