What was launched
And with that, we’re done. A recap, then I’m off:
- Three new iPhone 11s, in vanilla, pro and pro max flavour. They all have a new ultra-wide-angle camera, and night mode for those low-light shoots.
- The Apple Watch Series 5, with an always-on screen.
- A new basic iPad, with a larger screen and support for the Apple Pencil.
- Apple Arcade and Apple TV+ pricing – a fiver a month in euros, pounds and dollars. But free Apple TV+ for a year if you buy a phone, laptop, iPad or Apple TV.
More bad news for Brits: the $999 iPhone 11 Pro is £1049, and the $1099 Pro Max is £1149. Again, VAT means it’s not quite as simple, but those prices are going to sting. Thank the Brexit pound.
And that’s it! Tim says goodbye to the audience, goodbye to us at home, and signs off.
So the rumoured MacBook Pro update remains missing in action, but there was one surprise, for those keeping track: the free year of Apple TV+ that gets bundled with every new Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple TV. That could help the company gain a foothold in this market, but equally will raise some awkward questions in this new age of technology anti-trust enforcement.
Also there is a new (refurbished) Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York.
This has been your update on the Apple Retail Experience.
Now we get the boring stuff: Deirdre O’Brien, who took over from Angela Arendts, is on stage to talk about the Apple Retail Experience.
You can now choose your watch strap when you buy an Apple Watch.
And you can use your current iPhone as credit towards your new iPhone, she says.
The iPhone 11 Pro will start at $999 and $1099 for the Max.
Pre-order starts on Friday at 5am Pacific Time, and they’ll be on shelves from September 20th.
Also, the old iPhone 8 gets a price cut to $449.
Filmmakers can shoot from two lenses at once (with pro camera apps like Filmic, that is), which, some filmmakers assure me, is actually pretty cool.
Updated
There’s a new font in the camera app!
New buzzword alert! The iPhone 11 Pro has “Deep Fusion technology”, which lies behind the Night Mode, “pixel by pixel optimising for detail and low-noise”.
Schiller calls it “computational photography mad science”, Google will call it “what we did last year”.
Schiller walks through a few sample shots. Most interesting is the speed of the lenses – smartphones have got good at zooming over the years, but not at high-speed photography. That looks like it’ll change.
The camera(s)! Three lenses: 12MP wide, 12mp telephoto, and 12mp ultra-wide. So you’ll be able to go from 0.5x zoom to 2x zoom, and get all the same night shift stuff that you also get on the iPhone 11.
Apple is branding the iPhone 11 as “2x optical zoom out”, which is cheeky; I can’t imagine they’ll have the gall to call this a “4x zoom”, though.
The battery! It “lasts 4 hours more than iPhone XS” and, on the big one, “5 hours more” than the old big one. (Wow, that’s actually a huge increase.)
Someone is talking about the A13 bionic chip. It has 8.5 billion transistors. If you need the loo, now’s the time.
Phil Schiller comes up to talk about the phone. “The first phone we’ve called Pro”, he points out.
It comes in “midnight green”, “space grey” “silver” and “gold”, comes in two sizes, 5.8” and 6.5”, and has an “incredible new display” that is brighter and more colourful than ever before. So it’s been rebranded, from Super Retina to Super Retina XDR.
iPhone 11 Pro
“But what if I want to spend more than a thousand pounds on my phone?” Good news! Apple is here for you: Tim Cook introduces the iPhone 11 Pro.
It has three cameras.
Updated
Price! The iPhone 11 starts at $699. That’s $50 less than the starting price of the iPhone XR.
The iPhone 11 will have “an hour more battery than the iPhone XR”, apparently. Good improvement!
But it’s been years since Apple quoted these metrics in absolute numbers. The XR was “an hour and a half longer than the iPhone 8 Plus”; the 8 Plus was “about the same as iPhone 7 Plus”, which was “up to 1 hour longer than iPhone 6s Plus”.
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Someone is showing off a game to demonstrate how powerful the GPU is. The game looks bland but pretty.
In the meantime, we’ve started to get the UK pricing through, and friends, it is not pretty. The $329 iPad is going to be priced at £349 in the UK, while the Apple Watches are at parity – $399 becomes £399 and $499 becomes £499. Yes, the US prices are exclusive of tax while the UK ones include VAT at 20%, but, ouch.
Now we get a bit of talk about the silicon inside the phone. It’s called the A13 Bionic, is “the fastest CPU inside a smartphone” and also has “the fastest GPU inside a smartphone”, and until there are some independent benchmarks, we’ll basically have to take that on trust, but it’s probably true enough – Apple’s in-house chip design is market-leading.
Important new feature! The iPhone 11 can take front-facing portrait mode shots in landscape to fit more people in the frame.
You can also now take slow-mo videos with the front-facing camera for perfect hair-flicking video if you want hair-flicking video.
iPhone
The big one. “Customers love iPhone,” Cook says, stubbornly refusing to use the definite article because Apple’s branding doesn’t allow for it, before introducing another video.
Interestingly, Apple is starting with the iPhone 11 – the base model, an update to last year’s iPhone XR.
Kayann comes on to walk us through the iPhone. (Again, Apple is too cool to say who she is.)
It has an LCD screen – as in, not an OLED screen – and two cameras: a 12mp wide-angle camera, and a new 12mp ultra-wide-angle camera. The company’s branding it, in-app, as “0.5x zoom”, so you “can capture way more without moving,” Kayann says.
It’s cool, but I don’t know if many smartphone photographers have felt that the already-very-wide-angle cameras on their phones are too zoomed in.
More importantly, of course, the two cameras improve the portrait mode on the phone, adding stereoscopic depth of field. That’s why they exist in the first place, really.
And they enable another new feature: “night mode”. The company is using smart long exposures to get high clarity in low light, without (it says) blurring. The wide angle lenses will help there: broadly, the shorter the focal length, the more light can get to the sensor.
(Worth noting that Google’s Night Shift on its Pixel phones has existed for a year, and been one of the best features on that iPhone competitor for all that time)
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What wasn’t mentioned about the Series 5 Apple Watch? Anything about the silicon that powers it. Presumably, the internals are largely the same as the generation before, explaining how the always-on screen doesn’t hit battery life.
What else for the Watch?
- A built-in compass, which improves the mapping apps, and also allows for an actual compass app.
- International emergency calling for the cellular model.
- More straps, colours and cases. Look, the always-on screen was a big deal, they can’t all be like that. The audience is clapping for a black leather strap.
The new watches start at $399, or $499 for cellular models, and they’ll hit shelves on September 20.
The Series 3 watch – that’s 2017’s model – gets a price cut to $199. Almost cheap!
Updated
Stan Ng comes onstage to talk about the new Apple Watch.
The big difference about the Series 5? The display is always on, albeit dimmed most of the time. Apple says it’s managed to do that with new display technology that allows for it to maintain an 18-hour battery life.
Apple Watch
Cook introduces the Watch segment with a video of people talking about how the Apple Watch has changed their lives – focusing, largely, on the health benefits. It’s sweet, if sentimental, and gets to the point: this tech is saving lives, warning users of heart failure and calling ambulances following a bad fall.
Cook returns, and invites Sumbul Desai to talk about a more systemic change the Watch enables: mass-participant health research. The company is announcing new studies to follow-up on the widespread heart research they ran last year: one looking at hearing damage, using the watch’s microphones to assess noise levels; another looking at menstrual cycles, partnering with with the Harvard school of public health; and a third looking at “how metrics from Apple watch can serve as early warning signs to help improve overall health” relating to heart function.
The research is all opt-in for US residents, who can sign up using the new Apple Research app.
iPad
Cook turns to the iPad, and talks up iPadOS. The company, you may remember, is spinning the iPad version of iOS off into its own family. It means a few more iPad-specific software tweaks, but currently it’s largely branding.
More importantly, there’s an upgrade to the cheap, base-level iPad. The new, 7th generation iPad is getting a larger screen (10.2”, up from 9.7”), and support for the Apple Pencil and Smart Connector, which lets users attach Apple’s own keyboards to the device to turn it into a pseudo-laptop.
It’ll cost $329 for the base version, and’ll start shipping on September 30th.
More importantly, Apple TV+ is launching (in more than 100 countries) on November 1, with new shows launching every month. And it’ll cost $4.99 a month.
And! A year’s subscription comes free with any Apple product. Which feels like how the majority of people will get access to this service, to be honest.
The reviews are in: the trailer for See really is bad
this looks extremely expensive and bad
— Mike Murphy (@mcwm) September 10, 2019
This looks legitimately awful
— Mat Honan (@mat) September 10, 2019
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Apple TV+
Cook’s back, reintroducing Apple’s streaming service. The trailers for its shows have been viewed more than 100m times, he says, which, fine. He shows new trailer for See, a Jason Momoa-helmed sci-fi epic about a postapocalyptic world where everyone is blind.
It looks – I am sorry Jason – absolutely terrible.
Apple Arcade
“We have a huge morning for you, with some truly big announcements,” Cook says, mercifully dispensing with his “usual updates”, and launching straight into Apple Arcade, introducing Ann to introduce the service.
(Apple is too cool to use surnames and I don’t know who Ann is.)
Ann walks us through some of the features of Apple Arcade that we were already told about in March, before introducing a few developers to walk us through their new games.
- Konami introduces a remake of arcade classic Frogger, exclusive to Apple Arcade. The developer’s script is awful. “Whoa! What is that! Is it a giant baby with sunglasses?!” Yes, it is a giant baby is sunglasses, you made the game, you should know this.
- Capcom introduces Shin Sekai: Into the Depths, an underwater platformer, exclusive to Apple Arcade.
- Annapurna Interactive introduce Sayonara Wild Hearts, a fantastic rhythm action game the company describes as “a playable music video”. It’s not exclusive to Apple Arcade – it’s coming to Switch too – but it’s easily the best of the games shown (I played the Switch version at E3 in May).
But the real news: Apple Arcade launches on September 19, worldwide, with 100+ games for $4.99 a month. “For the whole family”, too – no password sharing, and a one month free trial.
“We hope you have a blast playing all the incredible games on Apple Arcade”, says Ann, handing back to Tim.
(Update: Ann is Ann Thai. Thanks Apple!)
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As ever, we open straight into a video made for the event, this time showing an impressionistic overview of, well, the history of Apple, from the Macintosh to the new Mac Pro, via clickwheels, trackpads and airpods. The message, if there is one: evolution, not revolution. “Give people wonderful tools, and they’ll do wonderful things”, a caption reads, and Tim Cook takes the stage.
there are two guys just circling the theater wiping the floor pic.twitter.com/eXTzrhlUN1
— nic nguyen (@itsnicolenguyen) September 10, 2019
How leaky is Apple? This leaky:
Steve Jobs didn't died for this incredibly ugly design #iPhone11 pic.twitter.com/PdTw8qRY0P
— Fani Baba (@Ex_Jedi666) September 10, 2019
What to expect
- New iPhones, plural. The XR, XS, and XS Max will all see updates, and rumoured new names too: the iPhones 11, Pro and Pro Max. What to expect? The mid-range iPhone 11 gets the twin-cameras of the XS, while the high-end iPhones Pro keep on top with three cameras. What for? Nobody knows! Or at least, nobody understands. More speculatively, some are suggesting an iPhone SE 3, with the low-end phone updated to resemble the iPhone 8.
- New Watches. The Apple Watch ticks onwards to Series 5. The software suggests it’ll support sleep tracking, though whether the hardware has the battery life to justify it is another question. If you’re rich, you’ll be able to buy a version in a ceramic shell. Oh! And Siri will be more capable, including being able to Shazam songs for you – we learned that in the same batch of documents that revealed Apple’s fear of the word ‘feminism’.
- New laptops? Rumours of a refresh to the MacBook Pro line have been around a while: Apple is clearly developing something which shrinks the bezels around the screen even further, fitting a 16 inch display in the same case as the current 15 inch model. Hopefully the disastrous Touch Bar is also being quietly sent off into the night. But will we see it launched today?
- Apple Arcade and TV+: The services announced in June will be launching soon, alongside iOS 11 and Mac OS Catalina. The big question? Price. $9.99 for TV+ is a steep ask for any service with as few shows as Apple has – and that’s if they were good. Early indication suggests that this slate… is not.
Updated
Hello and welcome to the Guardian’s liveblog of Apple’s autumn press conference. We’ll be kicking off at 10am Pacific Time – that’s 6pm UK time, and 3am in New South Wales if you’re staying up for all the latest news.
If you want to watch along live, Apple is streaming the event on its YouTube page for the first time, and you’ll find the video embedded above. If you want to kill time, you could watch some of the other videos on their page, including a bizarre series of “ASMR” clips of people working wood or going walking. Otherwise, stick around, and we’ll try and work out together how it takes two hours to launch some phones, watches and laptops.
