I don't get it. What do you mean with innovation? The smartphone itself is literally an innovation by Apple. I don't care for some technical features and gimmicks that are considered modern, like pop up selfie cams or in display fingerprint readers.

Well the etched glass back is a nice improvement, and the camera setup ended up looking much better than the renders, none of which expected the hump to be the same color as the rest of the body, which actually works out instead of black which would be an epic fail.

The camera could be a significant improvement with the 2x armed with a half a stop faster lens than everybody else (not compared to the Note10 but I saw the samples of Note10's 2x and the coma is monstrous, while the thickness of the lens gives a little confidence that Apple's fast 2x won't be as bad) and their night mode of halfway between "hold still" and ZSL also looks innovative and promising. XS' daylight performance almost reached Pixel 3's anyway and since they added more frames it's entirely possible they'd catch up. Google used more frames to begin with so they can't keep adding frames indefinitely.

Last generation XR's A12 was running at a lower frequency, don't know about this generation.