Shut The Front Door, iPhone X and Apple Watch Series 3 Just Dropped - OLED Super Retina Displays, Cellular & More

We’re here today at Apple HQ just outside of sunny San Francisco at the tech giant’s new headquarters in Cupertino.

Dubbed the Infinity Loop, this new campus will be the home of a big press event in the Steve Jobs Theatre. It’s reminiscent of a UFO that’s landed on a levelled city block.

What’s great about this new campus is Apple have rebuilt the land as it would have originally been with fruit trees, lakes and meadows.

Of course it’s fully sustainable and powered by 100% renewable energy.

Whilst not complete it’s still thoroughly impressive how far Steve Job’s vision has come. If you want to know more, Wired did a special feature on it recently.

Now onto the important business.

Now onto the important business. You’ve heard the rumours, now here’s what dropping next from Apple.

Apple CEO, Tim Cook begins by telling us ‘we’re here today to talk about some incredible products’. We’re hopeful.

First up…

Apple Watch Series 3

Cellular is now built in! Tim says this has been their vision from the beginning. You can now go for a run with just your watch and your iPhone no longer needs to come with you. Woo! This is a game changer. And you don’t need a new number or second sim card. Double woo!

Apple Watch Series 3 will let you stream over 40 million songs from Apple Music (or any music) on your Bluetooth headphones. Hell you can even ask Siri to find your perfect running song.

Inside there’s now a new 70% faster dual core processor. Siri can now talk thanks to this new processor too. For Bluetooth and wireless there’s a new W2 chip and new components for measuring altitude more effectively. You can now go anywhere, anytime.

Apple says the biggest challenge was adding the cellular feature to the device. The designers managed to get around this issue and not make the Apple Watch Series 3 look like a house arrest bracelet. The screen is the antenna, the sim is electronic and permanently housed inside. The best news though is that the case is the same size as previous models.

The Apple Watch Series 3 will come with new bands and continued collaborations with Hermés and Nike for those who like to customise their piece for style or sporting purposes.

We’re very excited.

Specifications & Price (Australia)

Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS & Cellular) from: AUD$559
Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS) from: AUD$459

Pre orders from Friday 15 Sept
Available Friday 22 September

Apple Watch OS4

Surprisingly, Apple Watch has overtaken Rolex and is now the highest selling watch brand in the world. Whoever said smartwatches were a flash in the pan (me) is eating their words now (yum).

Tim Cook says customer satisfaction for the Apple Watch is at 97% and follows on to discuss how many people around the world have benefited from the health attributes of the watch. Saving lives and telling the time. What a combination (and time to be alive).

With the new Watch OS4 you’ll get:

Smart active coaching
A new workout app
A new feature for swimmers
Gym equipment syncing
Enhancements to heart rate and it will be on the watch face. It will monitor resting heart rate, recovering heart rate and have better picture throughout the day.

With OS4 it will notify you when it senses an elevated heart rate when you’re not active. It will also measure heart rhythm by tracking Atrial fibrillation that’s often undiagnosed. The Apple Heart Study will be conducted in partnership with Stanford University and will be available on the app later this year – all designed to help save more lives.

Apple Watch OS4 Will Be Available September 19

Apple TV 4K

What’s new:

Supports industry standard HDR 10
Delivers the highest picture quality ever
New screen savers to take advantage of 4K HDR
UI as been redesigned for 4K HDR

At the heart of the Apple TV is the new A10X chip. CPU performance is 2 times faster and graphics are now 4 times faster too.

Apple has been working with the movie studios to ensure they have a huge selection of 4K HDR and will upgrade existing purchases to 4K HDR for free. They’re also playing nice with Netflix and Amazon Prime to have those shows in 4K HDR too.

Live sports will be added to Apple TV as well as live news. You can see which sport games are currently live. Don’t want to know the score? You can turn that off. As the seasons change, the menu will too, only showing what’s playing.

Oh and you can now show your photos from your iPhone via the Apple TV 4K HDR.

Apple TV 4K is available September 22

Specifications & Price (Australia)

Apple TV 4K (32GB): AUD $249
Apple TV 4K (64GB): AUD $279
Apple TV 4th Gen: AUD $209

Pre orders from Friday 15 Sept
Available Friday 22 September

iPhone 8 / iPhone 8 Plus

The iPhone 8 has three new colours to choose from: silver, space grey and gold.

It’s made from aerospace aluminium, has a 7 layer colour process, is 50% stronger and the glass is the most durable ever in a smart phone.

There’s a new retina display in both the iPhone 8 and Plus models. It uses the True Tone colour technology which adapts the colour to the lighting around you.

In brief:

On the inside they have A11 Bionic chip which has 6 cores and is up to 70% faster
There’s an Apple designed ISP
Faster low light focus
12 MP camera with all-new sensors

The photo quality is superb. Quality and colour continues to get sharper and richer. Now there’s no reason to take bad photos on your next holiday. We’ve been given a hands on demo here and it’s the best we’ve seen.

Portrait lighting is the new feature that will enable you to make your portraits even better thanks to special lighting filters. You can now create dramatic portraits that are studio quality. We get the feeling this will be a winner as people get used to the feature. Perhaps we’ll shoot the next cover of Shut Up & Take My Money using this.

Video is now encoded faster as well. There’s higher frame rates in 4K. Like slow-mo? You bet. You can now shoot 240fps slow motion footage.

Now let’s talk about wireless…

iPhone 8 finally enables wireless charging thanks to the glass back. Apple will work with a number of companies to develop wireless chargers across restaurants, airlines, cars and more. Starbucks being one of those I’m sure.

Specifications & Price (Australia)
iPhone 8 (64GB): AUD $1079
iPhone 8 (256GB): AUD $1329
Cases from AUD $55

Pre-orders from Friday 15 Sept
Available on Friday 22 Sept

iPhone 8 Plus (64GB): AUD $1229
iPhone 8 Plus (256GB): AUD $1479
Cases from AUD $59

Pre-orders from Friday 15 Sept
Available on Friday 22 Sept

iPhone X

The iPhone has changed the world and for its 10th anniversary it’s going to evolve even further. For a decade they have pushed innovation to the limits so this is the big one, people. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for.

What’s In the X:

There’s a new Super Retina Display that uses OLED technology. Apple have managed to overcome the deficiencies of OLED and deliver incredible colour, the highest resolution ever in an iPhone.

Let’s talk about the entirely new user experience – a big screen experience and there’s no home button anywhere (as we expected).

To wake your iPhone X, just tap the screen. Want to go to home screen? Just swipe up from the bottom. Want to multitask? Swipe up from the button and it will show all your active applications.

The side button has been made larger which can be activated to talk to Siri or to lock the device.

But wait there’s more…Face ID. Yes, Face ID!!!

This is the new true depth camera system that detects your ugly face. There’s 8 elements in this camera system to recognise your face. It detects over 30,000 visible dots and creates a mathematical equation to detect that you is really you.

The A11 Bionic has a built in neural engine that processes face recognition and the machine learns the more you use it. At over 600 billion operations per second this is an engineering feat that happens all onboard the device.

This is freaking big. Even if you’re having an ugly day, a bad hair day, wearing glasses, no glasses, it will know you.

What about security? Apple say there’s a 1 in 1,000,000 chance someone could hack your device or mimic your face. The original Touch lock was 1 in 50,000, so this is a big step ahead.

How does it work? Raise your phone, look at it, swipe and away you go. It’s that easy.

Even with all this new hardware Apple have delivered another 2 hours of battery life for the new iPhone X.

Oh and the ‘Animoji’ is the best part of iPhone X with many ‘LOLs’ to be had there. It maps 50 facial muscles at one time to stitch your personality on a monkey face or the infamous pile of poop.

Specifications & Prices (Australia)
iPhone X (64GB): AUD $1579
iPhone X (256GB): AUD $1829
Cases from AUD $59

Pre orders from Friday 27 October
Available from Friday 3 November

Final Thoughts

Apple have over delivered this time.

We think the iPhone X will meet both shareholder and consumer expectations providing consumers are willing to spend the hefty price tag on the latest generation smartphone. In other words, this is not the kind of phone you want to lose.

40/41

iPhone X

41/41