Apple September 2024 Event

They finally ran out of Apple Park buildings to film so now the video team is burning through San Francisco landmarks

Impressions:

Apple Watch Series 10

• Bigger brighter display – 30% more screen area, bigger than the Ultra
• Thinner, more rounded design
• New polished aluminum jet black color alongside the rose gold and silver in the old aluminum treatment
• Faster charging – 30 min to 80%
• Introducing polished titanium (natural, gold, and dark) to replace stainless steel as the midrange model. It’s also carbon neutral now
• Sleep Apnea Detection – now you can tell your partner they snore and have the data to prove it
• Swim – Tides app, depth app, water temperature, custom swim workouts

Apple Watch Ultra

• New satin black finish – 95% recycled titanium
• Updated black bands including new titanium Milanese Loop

AirPods 4

• 2 models – with and without ANC/transparency mode/Adaptive Audio
• Slightly refined shape
• H2 chip – New acoustic architecture
• $179 with ANC, $129 without

AirPods Max

• New colors (blue, purple, orange, gold)
• $549
• USB-C – finally! I actually didnt catch this the first 5 times they said it for some reason. Thanks to the commenters who saved me from myself

Other AirPods News

• Stuff for both Pro and Max
  • Hearing protection to reduce volume while retaining range
  • Hearing Test feature
• AirPods Pro 2 is getting a hearing Aid feature – This feels like a big deal, there are a lot of people who are unwilling to get a hearing aid who may be persuaded if it’s AirPods

iPhone 16

• 85% recycled aluminum
• new colors (ultramarine, teal, pink, white, black)
• 50% tougher display class – 3x tougher than any other smartphone class
• Screen can go down to 1 nit for those of you who like to ruin your health by staring at your phone in bed at night
• Action Button from the Pros is here
• New camera button
  • Click for photo, hold for video
  • 2 stage shutter and touch sensitive to automatically lock focus and exposure and also enable gestures like double click & slide to change tools
• A18 Chip
  • 2nd Gen 3nm – for those not in the know, this is the 3nm process the nerds have been waiting for
  • 16 core neural engine
  • 17% more memory bandwidth
  • 6-core CPU- 30% less power
  • 5 core GPU – 35% less power
• Cameras
  • 48MP “Fusion Camera” with 2x telephoto portrait – 4k60 video in Dolby HDR
  • 12MP Ultrawide – x2.6 more light and macrophotography
  • Spacial capture from the new camera design for those of you who shell out for Vision Pro but not for iPhone Pro
  • Don’t think they talked about this but you can pause video recording now, the future is now, folks
• Redesigned interior
  • New thermal 30% higher sustained performance
  • Hardware Ray tracing
• Random game ad for Tencent
• $799 ($100 more for Plus) – Starts at 128gb

Apple Intelligence

• Unsurprisingly coming to all phones this generation
• Can send a pic to Apple Intelligence to ask about things like restaurant hours and “whats this plant” type queries – Of course they found a way to make the camera button an AI button
• Mostly a rehash of things like Private Cloud compute and on device models
• Available next month in English and December in localized English, next year for other languages (Chinese, French, Japanese and Spanish)

iPhone 16 Pro Max

• Design
  • Larger 6.3in and 6.9in screen
  • Thinnest borders on any Apple Product
  • “Grade 5 Titanium” in a micro blasted texture (Black, white, natural, desert)
  • Max has the best battery life ever
• A18 Pro Chip
  • 16 core neural engine – 35T ops
  • 6 core GPU – 2x faster ray tracing
  • 2 Performance cores, 4 efficiency cores – 20% less power
  • Display engine, faster USB 3 Speeds, video encoder, ISP for 2x faster video processing
• Cameras
  • 48MP Fusion Camera with 0 shutter lag
  • 48MP Ultrawide
  • Tetraprism for the zoom camera on both models now
  • 4k120fps Video – Pretty sure they brought back the same actors from the Cinematic Mode ad they ran 2 years ago to introduce this. We doing sequels to ads now
  • Audio mix feature to segment different parts of audio
• Voice Memos can allow for layering another track on top of the recording for musicians
• $999 ($200 more for the Max)

Other iPhone

• New Cases with a sapphire crystal camera button
• New MagSafe Charger with longer cable and faster charging
• 100% fiber based packaging

Not bad upgrades overall if a bit iterative. Can’t beleive we brought back the camera button from early Android days. Seems like enough stuff left over for an ecosystem focused October event.