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Apple Product Event Highlights
samzenpus writes: The Apple product event just finished, read below for the highlights.
- Apple Watch:
- Adding Facebook Messenger.
- iTranslate — speak into the mic and hear translations in over 90 languages.
- Physician app AirStrip can monitor vitals.
- New band options, two new finishes gold and rose gold.
- Watch OS 2 comes out September 16.
- iPad:
- iPad Pro announced: Screen is 12.9 inches, 5.6m pixels, A9X chip, with 2x memory bandwidth, storage and graphics performance, 10-hour battery life, 8MP camera, 802.11ac with MIMO, 150Mbps LTE modem, TouchID, 6.9mm thick and 1.57 pounds.
- Smart Keyboard connects magnetically.
- The Apple Pencil stylus: "Highly responsive sensors built into the tip of Apple Pencil sensor pressure, tilt, and stroke."
- Corporate VP from MS Office, Kirk Koenigsbauer talks Microsoft Office for iPad.
- New suite of Adobe apps.
- Apple Pencil is $99 and Smart Keyboard is $169, all available in November.
- New iPad mini 4 $399.
- Apple TV:
- New remote with glass touch surface. 10mm tall, A8 chip, Bluetooth 4.0. Built-in accelerometer and gyroscope, 3 months per charge, charges over lightning. 32GB for $149, 64GB for $199.
- iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Showtime are searchable.
- New cleaner looking UI with Siri integration.
- New OS: TV OS.
- new games and game collections for the family, using your iPhone or iPod Touch as a controller.
- MLB app, NHL Game Center live in 2016.
- tvOS developer beta available today, available to consumers in late October.
- iPhone:
- iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, Silver, gold, space grey, and new Rose Gold. 4.7-inch 6S and 5.5-inch 6S+.
- 3rd-generation A9 chip 70% faster CPU than A8, 90% faster GPU than A8.
- New pressure-sensitive 3D Touch.
- New Taptic Engine
- New Siri feature allows you to speak to your iPhone whether you're powered on or not.
- New 12 megapixel iSight camera. 50% more pixels and 50% more focus pixels for faster autofocus.
- 4K video
- 5MP FaceTime HD Camera.
- Retina Flash, display can light up 3X brighter than usual to be a flash for the front-facing camera.
- Live Photos: Press with 3D Touch and pictures will move.
- iPhone 6 $199-$399, iPhone 6 Plus $299-$499 all on two-year contracts.
- New iPhone Upgrade Program for a new iPhone every year, choose your carrier, unlocked phones, 24-month installment plan starting at $32/month.
- preorder Saturday, Sept 12. Available September 25th.
- iOS 9 available September 16th.
- New iCloud storage pricing: 50GB for 99 cents a month, 200GB for $2.99/mo, 1TB for $9.99/mo.
None of this seems "revolutionary" or "magical". Some of it looks like a rip off of Amazon TV, Google Translate, and the same look as last year's model which was nothing more than a larger look of the year before that's model. What happened to Apple supposedly "leading" the way? Did the sheep cause the shepard to fall behind?
Hence apple introduced new thing called "Pencil" for $99. They had to bring in MS to demonstrate how to use that thing.
I don't see how a bigger screen and better performance suddenly make this oversized phone a professional tool.
I have to say the only thing I was waiting for from this announcement was whether the iPad Pro would have OS X or iOS. As I think Windows RT showed us, the primary difference between a consumer tablet and a productivity device is whether it uses a desktop OS.
Can I run the full versions of Photoshop and XCode on the iPad Pro? Can I use the desktop verson of Microsoft Office on the iPad Pro? How easy is it to dock the iPad Pro to my Thunderbolt screen to have multiple monitor support? These are the important questions to answer. Everyone knew Apple could create a device that looks like the Surface Pro, we just needed to know if it could be a true laptop replacement in quasi-tablet form.
I'm sure it will still sell like hotcakes though, since iOS still has a much better app ecosystem than Windows RT did. And if the Apple watch can sell, anything Apple creates (for a while at least) will sell.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
What about the NSA-approved always-on spy mode?
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
I'm an Apple fan and I'm concerned they are falling into the trap of customer confusion. For example, when I bought my iPad (which I love) I went to the Apple Store and picked up the iPad. It was done quickly and I was a happy customer. Now, there are *5* different iPads.
Which one do I pick? Christ, I have to research this now? What's my use case? How important is screen size, battery life, cost, etc etc etc.. This is why I hated buying anything from Dell.
On a related note, which Apple laptop should you buy? MacBook, Air, Pro? What's the difference? Customer confusion leads to customer paralysis.
Apple's been down this road before. In the mid 90s there were so many different Apple models, Performa, Centris, Quada, God knows what else, that I had no idea what to get. You know which one I got? None of them. That's when I finally went to PC.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs' genius when he returned to Apple was to make it EASY to buy a Mac. Just get an iMac. Pick the color and you're done. Want an iPod or an iPhone? You didn't need to research and weigh the pros and cons of 5 different models. Now you do. I strongly believe a good part of why Apple revived was a clean product line with minimal choices.
I fear Apple is making a mistake that may come back to bite them.
OK, the Roku won't mirror my iPhone, but that's a pretty minor thing.
I use AirPlay fairly frequently - so what qualifies as minor for you is of more importance to some others.
Different strokes for different folks.
#DeleteChrome
I find the idea of an iPad "pro" stupid enough as it is, but the joke used to be about how predictably Microsoft copied Apple's moves.
So much product fragmentation that is feels a lot like the John Scully years before Jobs came back... ah well they did some good things i guess.
yawn, if i really wanted to waste money i'd throw it into the East River.
But if you wanted to spend it on something worthwhile, you'd buy an Apple device.
The only other way to increase resolution is to have a bigger sensor
Sensor size is independent of resolution.
There is a physical limit as to what a lens can resolve
Yes, but as long as the lens can resolve well down to individual photosites, it need do no more. The existing iPhone 6 Plus lens is fine in that regard, it does not lose sharpness at the edges.
There's no way (appart from rewriting the laws of optics) to attach a humongous telephoto lens to a phone camera and expect to have the same resolution as in a full frame DSLR
But you don't NEED more resolution for most uses, especially when the sensor has really good separation of data values captured (that improves effective resolution beyond what mere specs would indicate, when compared to other sensors that supposedly have the same MP rating). MegaPixels as a term are really a huge lie, because they hide a lot of possible quality differences in the output which determines effective resolution.
Attaching a teleconverter won't give you more resolution, no, but it will give you a great effective zoom that yields the full 12MP of resolution the camera can capture. There are already companies like Schneider Optics producing very high quality lens adaptors for the iPhone that do not drop significantly in quality.
Sure some software tricks will give an image clean enough for Joe Public to print some 8x10"
More like 11x14, but if you think about the fact that *every* image captures a few seconds of data (a technique some programs already you to get more resolution from still cameras today), and the fact that it's so easy to make panos, with even more processing 16x20's should be easily had from the phone.
It's a gimmick already available on Nokia Lumia phones since 2012 with the Cinemagraph app
I don't think you are properly appreciating the distinction here, at both the technical and user levels. It's not a gimmick, it's extra data on *every photo* by default, from a little before the capture was started to a little after - but furthermore the data is not just supported by one app, but also across iPhone and OS X, and shortly many apps across both systems. It's data easily accessed by any app for further processing or refinement...
The thing that makes it not a gimmick is (beyond the fact it's in a phone that will be used by hundreds of millions more people) the fundamental and always on by default nature of the thing, combined with widespread support for different viewing and image integration.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Motion coprocessor is always-on now so using that feature heavily comes with no battery penalty.
That's a pretty funny way of saying that if you don't use the motion co-processor you're now going to have extra battery drain anyway. You sound like you paid attention in marketing school. Framing a negative as a feature, well done.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black