Everything That Was Announced At The Apple Event

Our week started off with the biggest day of the gadget year – and what a day it was. At Apple’s HQ in Cupertino, California, the leadership team announced the 2024 models of its biggest products: The iPhone, iPhone Plus, iPhone Pro, iPhone Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 10, Apple Watch Ultra 2, AirPods 4 and AirPods Max. That’s quite the line-up, and that’s not even bringing into play improvements of its previous models – and most importantly, the long-awaited launch of Apple Intelligence.

The AI system is set to give Siri a real makeover. It will also let users do incredible stuff like advanced searching of photos via keywords, and a generative emoji feature where it will create an emoji based on your instructions.

Most products announced will be available for pre-order from Friday 13 September and to buy from Friday 20 September, while the AI will come into play in a beta version via a free software update next month.

In the meantime, let’s see how the hardware is improving to be ready for this mini-revolution.

iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus

The biggest news of the event was the newest model of the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus. Built to handle and deliver Apple Intelligence, it’s a slick, speedy phone with a fast chipset, the A18, optimised for large language models and up to 30 per cent better performance for gaming. It also has a bigger display: 6.1” for the iPhone 16 and 6.7” for the Plus model.

The camera has had a serious upgrade for 2024: the main fusion camera is an impressive 48MP – four times the resolution of the iPhone 14. It’s a similar spec to the recently-released Google Pixel 9, though with the tech that goes with it, the iPhone’s photos usually outshine its competitors. Plus there’s other upgrades like a new ultrawide camera that handles low light better and ‘camera control’ function on the side that lets you intuitively put pressure on the camera to do different things – like a light press will track focus, a hard press with take a photo, and a long press will take a video.

iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max

If the specs on the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus just aren’t high enough as it is, you’ve got Apple’s premium models to consider. The main visual difference is that the Pros are larger. This time around, the 16 Pro has a 6.3” display and the Pro Max has a 6.9” display – so they’ve both increased 0.2” from the 15 Pros. They also have the thinnest borders on any Apple product. But there are plenty of upgrades that you can’t see – like “the best iPhone battery life ever” (we await more details from Apple).

Camera-wise, it’s certainly a step up from the standard iPhone 16s. There’s a 48MP main camera, a 48MP ultra-wide camera, and a 5x optical zoom to give precision to far-away objects. Its video captures 4k and 120 frames per second, and these phones are said to have studio quality microphones with reduced noise and spatial audio capture, so owners really will be carrying around a studio in their pocket.

Apple Watch Series 10

The Apple Watch turns a decade old with this event, and to mark the occasion, they’ve given it a nice redesign. It’s 10 per cent thinner and up to 20 per cent lighter than the Series 9, plus the fastest-charging Apple Watch to date (with an impressive 18 hour battery). Yet it boasts its biggest display yet with 30 per cent more screen area. That’s enough to give an additional line of text for on-screen messages. Further improvements mean that you can now see the screen better at angles.

The features are nifty too – phone calls will be improved by an ability to suppress background noise, and there’s better tracking for fitness fans. Apple Watches are top-class devices for health and safety, and the Watch 10 is no different: it will be able to alert wearers if they have sleep apnea. Affecting one billion people worldwide but under-diagnosed, this feature is likely to have real impact.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2

Going a step further, the Apple Watch Ultra 2’s features make it a great choice for those who love the outdoors. It claims to have “the most accurate GPS in a sports watch”, as well as a helpful depth gauge for scuba diving, automatic stroke detection and lap counts for swimmers, and features to help you pace. The compass app is advanced too: it includes latitude, longitude, waypoints and backtrack options, and can give you offline maps that can direct you turn by turn, even without an iPhone nearby. Handy, eh?

AirPods 4 and AirPods Max

Coming on leaps and bounds, the AirPods 4 and AirPods Max really show off what cutting-edge tech is capable of these days. Apple used 3D modeling and laser topography to shape its “most comfortable AirPods ever”. Turn it on and you get what’s purported to be the best-quality sound on AirPods yet, with spatial audio to help reduce background noise.

While there won’t be a new model of the AirPods Pro this year, there are even major improvements to the AirPods Pro 2. For example, hearing protection will be turned on by default, and they will come with a clinical hearing test to gauge any hearing loss. They can then act as a personalised hearing aid, changing the levels across all Apple devices so owners get an equitable listening experience.

 

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