Posts tagged: iPhone 8

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.

 

Apple Event media Invites go out!

Apple has sent out media invites for it’s upcoming iPhone event! We think that means it’s actually happening!? Here are the most important details:

 

The event will happen on Tuesday, September 12 at 10:00 a.m. at the Steve Jobs Theater at the company’s new Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California.

 

The media invites offer a first look at what we can look forward to ( kinda) and feature the tagline: “Let’s meet at our place.” (via The Loop)

 

 

 

This event is reported to be the biggest Fall event in years, mostly because the 10 year anniversary of the iPhone is expected to bring with it a fairly different redesign of the iPhone we all know and love. Think a glass body with an edge-to-edge display, a vertical rear camera, facial recognition capabilities, a much improved processor, and wireless inductive charging functionality. We can also likely expect two other, more-like-what-we-know iPhones  (4.7 inch and 5.5 inch) to be released as well.

 

 

Rumors are also building around a third-generation Apple Watch with an LTE chip that allows it to be decoupled from the iPhone (Yes!), and the possibility of a new 4K Apple TV.

 

Following the event, we should see the release of iOS 11, macOS High Sierra, tvOS 11, and watchOS 4.

 

In case you guys want to watch all the fun and Appley -excitement, Apple will be streaming the event live on its website and on the Apple TV.

 

Bring it on.

 

 

Everything we know (so far) about the 2017 iPhone

Here’s what we know about the next iteration of the iPhone. As always, lots of grains of salt all over this post – Mysterious Apple flavored grains of salt.

 

1. This will be the 11th release of an iPhone, but the 10 year anniversary of the original iPhone.

 

2. It’s predicted that Apple will be releasing 3 new iPhones. Two will be the iPhone 7S and the iPhone 7S Plus, and the third will be either the iPhone Edition, or the iPhone 8. We’re voting iPhone Edition.

 

3.The iPhone will probably be announced in September, and released 2-3 weeks later. There is a small possibility that Apple will announce the iPhone Edition/8 at WWDC in June, but this is pretty unlikely. There are also predictions that the ‘special’ iPhone will be released much closer to Christmas.

 

4.The iPhone Edition will have an edge to edge 5.8″ OLED screen, Faster A11 processor, and glass body. There will likely be no home button and yay for getting rid of wires because it’s said to have wireless charging. Sweet.

 

5. There have been rumors that the Touch ID will be integrated into the display, which is likely, however there have also been rumors that it will be on the back, about where the Apple logo is currently.

 

6.The iPhone 7S and iPhone 7S Plus will both be upgraded from the iPhone 7, but much more along the lines of the incremental hardware upgrades that we’ve seen in the last couple of years, combined with the fresh new software goodness of  iOS 11 (which will be announced for sure at WWDC).

 

7. All three iPhones will be water resistant, the same as the iPhone 7, but their resistance level will be improved.

 

8. The front facing camera may include 3D sensing capabilities perhaps enabling facial and iris recognition. Rumors also suggest that Apple is exploring both a vertical rear camera for improved pictures and a dual-camera setup for the front-facing FaceTime camera.

 

9. The iPhone 8/Edition will be a little more expensive, possibly coming in at just under $1000 clams.

 

10. Supply will probably be pretty constrained at first, because, you know, it’s Apple n stuff. Also, OLED production might be a little harder to come by.

 

Are you excited about the new iPhones? Do you think there’ll be any surprises? C’moooooooon time travel?

 

 

Cinema Mode in iOS 10.3

According to reports, Apple will shortly release iOS 10.3 on iPads and iPhones around the globe. Features of the update are supposed to include ‘Cinema Mode’ or possibly ‘Theater mode’ which will appear on the control center.

 

It’l be shaped like popcorn and will allow users to put their phone into a dimmed mode, whilst also muting sound and preventing notifications.

 

Let’s hope there’s a little more to this update, huh?

 

Can’t save all the good bits for the iPhone 8, Apple. We have a whole year of iPhoning before that guy comes along (with his wacky flip-body and rad teleportation features).

 

You read that right. Predictions 101, yo.

 

 

 

 

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.