Apple Healthcare Studies update!

Apple has released its Research app today, making it easier for users to contribute to three studies related to: heart and movement, women’s health, and hearing.

If you do want to participate, you can download the free Research app from the App Store and enroll in the multi-year studies starting today. After enrolling, and using an iPhone or Apple Watch, you can contribute movement, heart rate, and noise level data captured during everyday activities.

The three studies are as follows:
– Apple Women’s Health Study. In partnership with Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the NIH’s National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), this is the first long-term study of this scale focused on menstrual cycles and gynecological conditions.

– Apple Heart and Movement Study. In partnership with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the American Heart Association, this is a comprehensive study of how heart rate and mobility signals relate to hospitalizations, falls, heart health and quality of life.

– Apple Hearing Study. With the University of Michigan, this study is the first of its kind to collect data over time in order to understand how everyday sound exposure can impact hearing.

From the Source,  Apple COO Jeff Williams:
“Today marks an important moment as we embark on research initiatives that may offer incredible learnings in areas long sought after by the medical community. Participants on the Research app have the opportunity to make a tremendous impact that could lead to new discoveries and help millions lead healthier lives.”

For those understandably concerned about privacy, an enrollment screen explains how data will be used and allows a user to control the type of data shared with each study, and Apple says the data collected will never be sold to third parties.

In other health study news, Stanford Medicine has today published results from the Apple Heart Study that kicked off in 2017, marking the third time data from the study has been shared.

Stanford & Apple wanted to determine whether the Apple Watch is able to detect atrial fibrillation, which can be an indicator of serious heart health problems.

A total of 419,297 people in the United States participated in the study, and according to researchers, the low number of warnings in the study indicates that the device does not cause an excess of false notifications in healthy people who wear the watch. Additionally, it ultimately determined that the ‌Apple Watch‌ can detect atrial fibrillation.

The full Apple Heart Study published by Stanford Medicine can be read in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Happy Birthday Apple Watch!

Happy Birthday Apple Watch! After a reveal in September 2014,  the original Apple Watch launched in nine countries on April 24, 2015!

Four years later, we’re on to the Apple Watch Series 4 – complete with a better and bigger display, water resistance, important health and fitness features, and more bands than we can poke a stick at.

The Apple Watch has also impressively grown to become the global smartwatch leader, holding 51 percent of the global smartwatch marketshare last year, albeit down from 67 percent in 2017.

And, as per usual for Apple, they’re not done. The Apple Watch Series 5 will most likely launch in September of this year, and it and further iterations of the device could have features such as blood glucose monitoring, a microLED screen, a sleep tracking app, better battery, and many more.

Go on, Apple Watch, have that cake. You deserve it.

Apple to donate 1000 Apple Watches

Apple is donating 1,000 Apple Watches to a study conducted by The University of North Carolina’s medical school which aims to track biological changes in people with eating disorders.

The new study is called BEGIN (AKA Binge Eating Genetics Initiative), and the goal is to better understand overeating disorders. The study will engage 1,000 participants of ages 18 or older who have experience with either binge eating disorder or bulimia nervosa.

Each participant will get a free Apple Watch which will collect data that the researchers will use to monitor their heart rate to see if there are any spikes prior to binge eating episodes.

Participants will receive tests to analyze their genetics and bodily bacteria and also have access to a mobile app called Recovery Record, which they can use to log their thoughts and feelings, which would be shared with a healthcare professional.

From the Sauce, Cynthia Bulik, founding director of the Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders and author of Binge Control: A Compact Recovery Guide:

“We need to collect data from a whole lot of people to see what it looks like,” said . “We want to know if it has a biological and behavioral signature.”

Researchers hope the collected data will help them to predict binge eating episodes before they happen. If this was to happen, a follow up study could be put in place whereby participants received some kind of alert when they were at risk of binge eating.

Skiiers and snowboard rejoice!

Apple has announced that starting TODAY, skiers and snowboarders can now use Apple Watch Series 3 to track their activities.

Apple Watch apps Snoww, Slopes, Snocru, and Ski Tracks have each been updated to take advantage of custom workout APIs released in watchOS 4.2 that enable tracking of the following specialized snowy metrics:
Total vertical descent and horizontal distance
Number of runs
Average and maximum speeds
Total time spent
Calories burned

The ski and snowboard tracking is limited to Apple Watch Series 3 models, which are the only ones with a built-in altimeter to track elevation.

God speed good skibum sirs!

Apple Special Media event!!

Welcome address by Tim Cook at Steve Jobs Theater at its new Apple Park headquarters. P.S. did you hear that Apple didn’t receive approval to host the event until the 4th of September? Apple was given a Temporary Certificate of Occupancy for Steve Jobs Theater on September 1, indicating that the theater has passed various fire and safety checks. The final signature was September 4.

Yikes!

Anyway, on to the good stuff. CEO, Mr Cook, starts the morning off by talking about Steve Jobs, and how, after much time, and in this special place, they are now able to reflect on him and his life with joy instead of sadness.

He talks about how just amazingly amazing the new Apple Park Headquarters are in Cupertino, California, with lots of nature and marvelous architecture, a visitors center with AR experience, Retail store, and, uh, parking for 14,000?! Well he didn’t say that, but it’s a pretty impressive stat nonetheless.

Next, Angela comes up to talk about ‘town squares’ (otherwise known as retail stores), and how there are new store designs coming into play, with a plaza, board rooms, forum’s, new genius bars, and new products featured on ‘the avenues’. There are also going to be more and more ‘Today at Apple’ in store experiences with lessons on coding, photography, music, and, one of our personal favorites, ‘Teachers Tuesdays’, helping local educators learn about latest tech & Apps.

Tim Cook then comes back on stage to talk about Apple Watch.  Last quarter the device grew over 50% compared to previous year, and, get this, because this is pretty crazy, Apple Watch is now the number one watch in the world, beating Rolex.

We see a snazzy little video of people reading actual letters to Apple, thanking them for the health benefits they’ve experienced from using Apple Watch, and then Jeff comes on stage to talk about the future of the device.

Watch OS 4 will have Smart activity coaching, redesigned workout track with HIIT, new features for swimmers and Gym machine syncing capabilities. It will also have an updated heart rate system with new features that track resting heart rate and recovery heart rate, and that will notify you if you have an elevated heart rate and you don’t appear to be active, as well as ‘Apple Heart Study’  which will help with arrhythmia like A-Fib, in conjunction with Stanford Medicine.

Watch OS 4 will also have redesigned music, and intelligent Siri face, and will be available Sepember 19th.

Apple Watch Series 3 itself will be Swim proof, with a barometric accelerometer, all day battery, and, drumroll please, it will come with cellular built in. Which means you can use it by itself for certain periods of time. Which is rad. 

Which means you can use Apple Music with Airpods while you’re out and about, streaming music while you exercise or whatnot. The watch also comes with a new dual core processor with up to 70% more performance, a custom wireless chip W2 which gives 85% faster wifi and makes it 50% more power efficient…. AND Siri can talk now! Yay Siri!

The Apple Watch Series 3 has a bunch more bands as well as a new gray ceramic finish.

It’ll cost you $399, or $349 for the non-cellular version.  Pre-order September 15th, available to buy September 22nd.

Next up, we have the Apple TV 4K

The revamped fifth-generation set-top box will be 4k, and HDR 10. 4k is about more pixels, HDR is about better pixels, so it’s going to look real pretty, you guys. It has a A10X fusion chip, same as in the iPad Pro and the CPU performance is twice as fast. Apple is bringing Apple TV App to  7 other countries with a bunch of new local content AND Live Sports, Live news, and HomeKit linked.

Now, what most of you came here for. The iPhone.

Tim’s back on stage, talking about how much power the iPhone puts into people’s hands, how the 1st iPhone transformed how we use technology, how the App store changed how we played games, communicated, and learnt. How the Retina display changed our viewing experience, how iMessage and FaceTime changed communication, and how Siri changed how we thought about AI.

Introducing, iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus.

With a glass front and back (the most durable glass ever), Aerospace grade aluminum, the new iPhones will come in  silver, space grey, rose gold. It’ll be microscopically sealed for water resistance.

The iPhone 8 will be 4.7 inch with a Retina Display and the iPhone 8 Plus will be5.5 inch with a Retina Display. They’ll both have a True tone display, Stereo speakers which will be 25% louder and have deeper base then the iPhone 7. They both have a brand new chip A11 Bionic chip, which is 25 % faster than A10 chip.

They’ll both have a 12MP camera with deeper pixels and a new color filter, and the iPhone 8 Plus has 2 new sensors, f1.8 and f2.8 aperture as well as a new feature called portrait lighting.

iPhone 8 has the highest quality video capture ever in a smartphone and the cameras are calibrated for Augmented Reality. Which we love. Duh.

Both new iPhones support Qi wireless charging.

The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus storage starts at 64gb, with the option for 256gb. The iPhone 8 starts at $699 while the iPone 8 Plus starts at $799. You can preorder either iPhone on September 15th, and they’ll be available September 22nd.

iOS 11 will be released to the public on September 19th.

And now for the One More Thing we were all waiting for, the Holy Moly iPhone X! 

Or, as Tim Cook likes to call it, The product that will set the path for technology for the next decade. Dun Dun Duuuuuuuuuun!

And here’s Phil to tell us all about it! So what do we have here? We have edge to edge, top to bottom glass, surgical grade steel, water and dust resistant, and space grey and silver finishes.

We have a Super Retina display, which is 5.8 inches on the diagonal, at 458 ppi, it has the highest resolution in pixel density on an iPhone. So, what we’re hearing is that Super Retina is better than both Retina and OLED. (Obviously, that’s why it’s super.)

It supports HDR, has a million to one contrast ratio, and true tone display.

There is NO MORE HOME BUTTON GUYS! But we kind of knew that already. Raise the phone to wake, or tap on screen, swipe up to access the home screen, or to access multitask. To access Siri, say ‘Her Siri’ or press on the larger side button.

Unlocking will now rely on facial recognition, or  ‘Face ID’. This actually looks really cool, and like it’ll actually work, and fancy and futuristic and protect-y and all the good things. We like this. Face data is protected, and not sent to a server, and user attention is needed in order for it to work.

We have Animoji! As gimmicky as we believe others will call this, we think this is so fun and the tech in it is kinda crazy. Basically, you have a dozen Emoji (including poop, obviously) that you can send as stickers or video’s within iMessage, and you can make the Emoji react to your facial expressions, and speak as if it’s you speaking. Craig Feredihi does a live demo and it’s kind of hilarious.

The camera on the iPhone X is 12MP, with larger and faster sensors, a new color filter and  f1.8 aperture- f2.8 on wide angle. We have Duel optical image stabilization, better low light zoom, better Quad LED flash, better front facing camera with Portrait mode with portrait lighting for selfies.

The Battery life lasts 2 hours more than iPhone 7 and it is of course compatible with Qi Wireless Chargers.

Speaking of Wireless charging, we get a ‘Sneak peek’  at Airpower – a charging mart for all your mobile Apple Products, that will be available next year. 

The iPhone X (did we mention it’s pretty sexy looking? Because it is…)  will be sold at 64GB and 256GB, starting at $999. You can preorder Oct 27th, and they’ll start to ship November 3rd.

So there we have it. What do you guys think? We particularly rate the new Apple Watch for having Cellular, and think that’s the beginning of something game changing. And the iPhone X will, likely, set the path for technology for the next ten years. There’s no line of site teleportation (YET) or anything super flashy that we weren’t expecting, but there’s a lot of really smart, really useful tech in that sexy little box.

Kevin Hart + Nike + Apple = TeeHee?

Kevin Hart is: “The Man Who Kept Running.”

Literally, as the star of a set of new crossover ads between Apple and Nike, Kevin loves his Nike+ Apple Watch that he just can’t quit running.

There’s 7 ads in all, which can be viewed on Nike’s YouTube Channel here. 

The Apple Watch Nike+ is a Nike-branded (duh) version of the Apple Watch Series 2 with an aluminum casing and a special perforated band. It includes exclusive Nike watch faces and it works with the Nike+ Run Club app, designed to motivate users to run each day.

Watch the 1st three ads here:

…Did they convince you to get one yet?

New year, new Apple Watch

Apple is expected to release the 3rd Gen  in the 3rd quarter of this year, however most of the upgrades will apparently be to the interior workings of the device, such as increasing battery life and speed, rather than physical hardware changes.

Earlier today, the Chinese-language Economic Daily News claimed that this upgrade will be manufactured by Taiwan-based Quanta, which is not all that surprising, considering they were also responsible for the 1st and 2nd generation Apple Watch.

Other rumors swirling around the wearable include further reaching health sensors, adding cellular connectivity, the ability to identify a user by their heart rate, and a super rad teleportation feature.

One of those is probably not true…

If the 3rd Gen does come out in the 3rd quarter,  it would be at around the same time that the (rumored) iPhone 8 – the 10th anniversary iPhone – is expected to come out. Exciting times.

Apple Watch 2 details

According to the rumors doing the tech rounds, the Apple Watch 2 will begin an earlier than expected trial production round by the end of January. Qanta, the Chinese based manufacturers responsible for the original Apple Watch, is said to be the main source (if not only source) of production for the 2nd Gen Apple Watch.

Other manufacturers, however, such as Foxconn,  may be sourced to help supply the 2nd generation after Qanta apparently experienced less than stellar profit returns on the original.

So what can we expect?

Expect the 2nd generation Apple Watch to have a thinner case, a FaceTim camera (yay!) and an upgraded Wi-Fi chip, so you can do more without being attached to your iPhone.

Expect health technologies to shine on this device. Although CEO Tim Cook recently said that he didn’t want the Apple Watch itself to go through the whole FDA APPROVAL rigmarole, Apps and other side by side tech would probably be moved in that direction.

Recent additions to Apple seem to cement that idea, with hires like Anne Shelchuk, who has a doctorate in biomedical engineering, system design engineer Nathan Clark, who has a doctorate in biomedical engineering and a patent for a device that separates cells, and Craig Slyfield, a mechanical engineer who’s co-authored several papers related to measuring and visualizing human bones in 3D.

So, we can conclude that the Apple Watch 2 will have a FaceTime camera, x-ray vision capabilities, and a cell separator. Neato.

Deal of the day! Apple Watch Edition! HELLA CHEAP!

Remember yesterday when we told you that you can get an Apple Watch from Target and they’ll give you a free $100 gift card to go with it? Today’s deal beats that! Take that Target!

Best Buy has come out swinging, offering any Apple Watch $100 off. Same deal essentially, but they just straight up take that $100 off that sucka!

What are you waiting for? Wednesday is Apple Watch buying day SON!

Deal of the Day!

Who wants an Apple Watch for christmas? Yeah? Do you want a good deal on it too? Merry Christmas!

Target is currently offering the Apple Watch starting at $349 PLUS you get a free $100 gift card! That way, you get what you want for christmas, and you get to shop for everyone else’s Christmas present, all for the price of an Apple Watch. Which you want. Win!

The $100 gift card applies to all Apple Watch Sport purchases and you can use your Target Redcard to save an additional 5%. This deal is only available online while stocks last. The gift card will be added to your cart automatically.

Get on it!

Check out the deal here.