All About the 10s

Last week, Apple did their annual “town hall” style product launch. I like watching these because (as a massive Mac person) I get the chance to see all the fresh new products that will be coming out. Frankly, it’s more like being able to see all the cool new toys and drooling a little over the cool things that they have done and will do. I did a post last year Reviewing the Keynote, and I figured I could do another.

 

I have to say; I do like the fact that they have a dedicated theatre for this. While it makes no difference to the average viewer at home (myself included)  but for the people who are there, I would imagine that it would be a very cool experience where they can go and watch the Keynote live.  Speaking of which it was cool at the beginning how they were able to do a fly in from the outside so that you could see not only the theatre but the outside area as well. This area is also cool because, as they mentioned in the Keynote, it was a demo area for their products after.

 

I liked their opening video. The ones that I have seen before have been cool, but this was a different kind of cool. For one thing, it wasn’t the usual “various shots of good-looking people intermixed with cool music and Apple products” clip. It was a Mission Impossible themed clip where an Apple employee needed to get from Apple’s new headquarters to the Steve Jobs Theatre in time for the Keynote with a metal briefcase which, one assumed, carried “something new and very important.” I’ll be honest I was expecting the thing to be a joke and what would be inside the briefcase would be an older iPhone or something they wouldn’t need, The fact that it was the clicker that they use to move the presentations along was funny just the same.

 

They started, once Tim Cook got on stage, with the typical fan fair talking about all their accomplishments and what they’d done. While usually, this doesn’t interest me the one fact that they did put out was that they were within striking distance of shipping their 2 billionth iOS device. That, to me, is an astonishing number. If there was one iPhone and iPad for every person (and for sure it’s not) That would mean that a third of the world’s population will have touched an iOS device.

 

Most of the time they break up the Keynote into the four or five things that are shiny and new, but this time they spent the bulk of their time on only two new things the new set of iPhones and the Series 4 Watch.

 

 

It was not surprising to me to see Apple Watch had risen to the #1 Digital watch in the world. With the number of things that it can do it’s a seriously useful device. What I thought was cool was that the Apple Watch had gone to the #1 watch overall in the world. This was up from last year when it was #2 (still an incredible thing considering the number of watch companies out there. Last year when they brought out the series three they made a big deal out of the fact that the watch was now waterproof. In fairness that is a big deal. Speaking as a guy who goes swimming regularly at my cottage, having to take your watch off every time is a pain. This was a pain that was solved last year. So what could they do this year to make it better? The same thing Apple usually does, they made it bigger.

 

The watch face before this was either 38mm or 42mm depending on what size you selected. This year they have upped their watch sizes to 40mm and 44mm respectively. This may not seem like a drastic change, but there are more things that you can see on the watch with more space on the screen. Not only that but they also made it so that the watch face itself goes bigger and goes around the edges. This provides for more you can put on the screen.

 

A cool feature that they have sorted out as apart of Apple watch is a fall detection monitor. They mapped the difference between a fall, a slip, and a trip. If you were to fall the watch automatically activates a feature which gives you the ability to contact emergency services. If you don’t move for more than a minute once the thing has been activated, then Emergency services are contacted automatically. This is great because if you have a heart attack or something where you fall and are unable to contact emergency services, then it will do it for you.

 

The Apple Watch has always been about health, and this one is upping the game significantly. It has been loaded with a better heart monitor that detects your heart rate and tells you when your heart rate is not only high but also now notifies you when you have a low heart rate. This is good for people at risk of a heart arrhythmia. They also revealed the serious upgrade with is the apple watch’s ability to do an echocardiogram. This allows the user to not only get a complete picture of their heart health, but they also can send that information to their doctors so that they have a whole picture of their health. This will cut down the time that heart patients need to explain all the times that they felt like their heart wasn’t working right. The Doctor doesn’t need to ask; they will have the information already! the ECG on the Apple watch is FDA approved which is also seriously cool.

 

The last bit that I will talk about for the watch is the size. I know I just talked about the size change but bear with me here. With the size change, I assume that I wouldn’t be able to get a new watch because I would have to buy all new watch straps. This is what they do with their phones., you get a  new phone, you have to buy a new case for it because the dimensions have changed. Interestingly with the new watch, they have made it so that the straps you had with your previous watch will still work with the new watch, which is a nice departure from what they usually do.

 

 

As long as I’ve been watching these Keynotes, the one thing that is a feature piece is the newest line on iPhones. This year the range of iPhones were updated models of the iPhone X from last year. It would seem that Apple is done with the home button entirely. Typically whenever Apple releases a phone the next year, the “S” model comes out. This time there was that, plus a few more.

 

There were three models put out. The XS (called TenS) the XS Max (TenS Max) and the XR (Ten R). The XS and the XSMax are the next generations of iPhones. They are now 5.8” diagonally across and 6.5” diagonally respectively. It’s cool because the smaller phone has the same screen size as the 8 Plus did. The difference is that there is far more screen and far less area around the screen. With more screen size and less border, they can achieve more screen size in less space. It’s how they can maintain the size of the phones while increasing the screen size.

 

The screens themselves are OLED for the XS and the XS Max, and the XR screen is LCD. Both will give an excellent picture for movies and games, which in itself is awesome, but the new cameras are equally as awesome. The AR feature of it is particularly cool. They have set it up so that things that you get on Amazon can be seen through your iPhone in regular life. Think about it like this, Say there’s a new set of Bluetooth speakers, but you want to know how big they are. With the new iPhone, you can use the AR camera to show you how big it is on your counter.

 

But this camera does so much more. It has Red Eye auto correction built in to avoid those times when that could be a problem. The pictures that you can take with the new iPhone are also going to be so much clearer. The reason for this is because of the way that the images that the new iPhone take photographs. What it does is when you click the button it takes multiple pictures in multiple different frequencies and vectors which allows the iPhone to work with the subject as well as the light and shadows to get the clearest picture possible. They have installed something they are calling “Smart HDR” which allows for zero shutter lag, but the neat trick is what you will be able to do is in portrait mode. In portrait mode when you take a picture of a person, you can adjust the picture to make the background a bit sharper. Being able to change the image in that way is super cool.

 

The last thing about the iPhone that I will rant and rave about with this series of iPhones is the new dual SIM technology. With the Apple watch what they do is they have woven SIM technology into the watch, which is why you can use one phone number to run both your iPhone and your watch. With the dual SIM ability in the new phones, you can have two separate numbers in one phone. TGhis comes particularly in handy for people who spend time in different parts of the world on a regular basis. If you needed a number for England and a number for Canada, using this phone would make it easy to switch in between two different local numbers.

 

The new tech that’s coming out is super cool, and I certainly thought that this was a very successful Townhall. What I found interesting about this one was that they spent most of their time talking about the new Apple Watch and iPhones. Where typically they take a relatively equal time to talk about their iPhones, iPads, and computers, this time they didn’t. This time they spend half the time talking about the iPhone, the other half went to the new Watch. They did spend about five minutes at the end talking briefly about how the Homepod is awesome and that there is a new OS coming out later this month, but that was about it.

 

All in all, I thought that the tech that came out was deeply relaxed, but the tech was only half of it. The other half was the corporate culture that they were demonstrating, but that I will save for the next posting.

 

Did you watch the Keynote? Did you see any tech that you liked?