Apple debuts iPhone 16, Watch Series 10, assorted AirPods Apple just introduced its iPhone 16 line, Watch Series 10, and assorted AirPods, and also set formal release dates next week for its iOS 18 and watchOS 11 software. In a streamed event titled "Glowtime," Apple execs did the usual tag team presentation of products and superlatives. CEO Tim Cook opened the show with a promise …
A phone than can survive a fall onto concrete from average head height without extra armour would be a real step forward.
Apple and others put a great deal of effort into the design of the phone appearance but their efforts go unseen because phones are all encased.
You haven't noticed how there used to be drop tests from dozens of Youtubers the moment a new iPhone was released to them mostly not being a thing anymore? The problem isn't 100% solved, but the last drop test I watched (can't remember if it was the 12 or 13) required dropping from 10' in height before they could get the front glass to break. The back glass broke at head height since they weren't (probably still aren't) using the best Corning glass in the back. You will get scuffs etc. from a drop at that height onto concrete, but it is really hard to break the screen.
FWIW I've never used a case on my iPhones, and have never broken one. I'm less careful now knowing that they are more durable, and probably dropped this one a half dozen times from waist height to shoulder height, onto wood and concrete. No damage.
You used to see people walking around with phones with broken screens ALL THE TIME. Both iPhones and Androids. It is really rare now, I saw the first one I'd seen in like a year a few weeks ago. Even the cheap Androids are using high enough quality glass that this is much less of a problem for them than it used to be.
"In many phones this is harder to fix than the front screen."
Agree. Apple quoted me €699 to replace mine, basically because they don't replace the back; they give you a whole new phone. Because it's glued together, natch.
I was pretty sick at this until I needed a new battery, €99 including fitting, and they replaced the phone for that as well. Because (drumroll...) it's glued together. So got a new battery AND the back glass damage replaced for less than 100 euros. Result.
If that happened to mine then I'd use a case for the first time ever and I wouldn't have to look at (or more importantly risk cuts from) the broken glass on the back of my phone, and I'd get dinged a little on my trade-in value next time.
You can't use a case to cover up front glass breaking, the only alternative is to fix it (or live with it I suppose, but I wouldn't be willing to do that)
Nah. I’m still frequently amazed by new technology. Just not the 16th iteration of the same tech.
However, even then things can impress. My new 13” iPad Air, is lighter than my previous 10” one, from 2019. And has speakers that are actually loud enough to be used and sound that’s not too bad. Ten years ago, when we moved to flat screen TVs - they couldn’t manage anything even that good.
Plus the new HDR screens, that mean when a director decides to go all arty-farty and make the screen impossibly dark - I still have some idea of what’s going on.
Or that for £20 I can get an LED work light - powerful enough to light an entire room in a power cut, that also has a rechargeable battery that can top up my phone.
And that’s just the frivolous stuff. During the pandemic, the CEO of BioNTech was able to run the DNA sequence of coronavirus through the program he’d set up on his computer as he went to bed - and wake up to have the vaccine design on his PC by the time he woke up. Obviously it required a lot of testing and an absolute beast of a manufacturing process to turn that into actual doses to put into arms - but that’s some pretty amazing tech. By the Summer of 2020 the UK had re-designed it’s government laboratory service to be able to sequence the DNA of a large proportion of NHS covid tests - such that they were able to track the virus’ mutating in realtime. By July, the UK were doing something like 40% of the world’s DNA sequences of the virus.
And all that tech built for the pandemic, the BioNTech and Oxford vaccines actually pre-prepared for the SARS and MERS epidemics, is now being re-purposed for other diseases. The Oxford process having succeeded in getting a 60-70% effective malaria vaccine into production.
Meanwhile SpaceX are able to launch rockets and land them again, then re-use them after a couple of months.
Oh, and I’ve got a machine in my kitchen that cost less than £30 which you just put flour, water, yeast and a few other bits to taste in - and in 2-4 hours you get a beautiful fresh loaf of bread. How’s that not awesome?
On the other hand, many kitchens for the last few hundred years have had things in the kitchen to bake bread in (and while breadmaker bread can be good, I prefer an oven and a slow ferment bread).
I have on my wrist a small device using technologies a few hundred years old, which tells me the time. It has no need of batteries; it's powered by gravity. I can reasonably expect it to tell me the time for decades; potentially centuries if I were to be around to read it. It _and_ my mobile phone together cost less than the new Apple watches.
No reason why Apple shouldn't sell their toys to those who wish to buy them, but they're not for me.
I don’t understand what the change is, as the Apple Watches have had speakers for audio all along. Used for taking calls mostly, also to announce things in speech, useful for visually impaired. Music isn’t the only use for audio.
Maybe the Ultra didn’t have speakers and has just gained them in this revision but the ordinary Apple Watches have had audio speakers for years.
The Ultra (launched 2022) and Ultra 2 (2023) had speakers. It seems they're enabling the software of the Ultra 2 to use the hardware already there for playback. I had an Ultra on which I used speaker phone a la Dick Tracy. Perhaps the new design for the speaker in the Series 10 came from the Ultra 2 since there was no change to the Ultra 2 (except a new color coming later this month).
"I can't quite figure out why one of the new apple watches has speakers for music playback. It's going to sound really good from a tiny device strapped to your wrist....."
I would actually use that all the time; I don't like wearing earbuds when I'm jogging. But if they don't bring it to older versions when there's no (valid) reason for not doing so, I will hate them with a passion. Not buying a new one just for that when the one on my wrist has exactly the same tech but some marketing exec said nah.
Its been my experience that people, how even musically talented people, will tolerate crappy sounding music coming from cheap too small speakers. i.e., nothing below maybe 200hz.
I don't understand why when reasonably sounding speakers don't cost that much. Not to mention ear and head phones sound so much better. My own hearing falls off a cliff at 5000hz and I cringe if I hear the fidelity of what normal hearing people listen to from their TV's, laptops, and even desktop computers with cheap speakers.
For an Apple Watch, showing the current time is one of its minor functions as it is barely required and duplicated many times over around us in the modern world.
They are largely a communications device and a health and fitness tracker.
Your wristwatch that shows the current time is actually something that humans have had for tens of thousands of years, or longer. A piece of jewellery.
People often say that, but as they are really affordable if you don’t go for the newest. Mine are free hand me downs. In UK and US near ubiquitous and really no big deal.
And suggesting they are just jewellery ignores the multifunctional capabilities compared to the largely redundant single function of a mechanical watch.
Neil Barnes,
It's definitely a little bit nicer if you prove and rise your own bread slowly - then bake it with a small container of boiling water for a crunchy crust. Unless you've got a steam oven. But it's not a huge quality difference from just doing my usual wholemeal loaf in the breadmaker. And that just requires me to turn up after 4 hours to take the bread out and put it on a wire rack. Whereas the manual process means I've got to be around a lot more - I do find mixing and kneeding it by hand to be quite a nice process. For some reason it seems little more effort than weighing and fiddling to get the breadmaker just right.
I'm not into sourdough and guess breadmakers don't work well for that.
It's magic technology. Until the breadmaker starts walking itself across your kitchen work surface, with the action of the ball of dough moving round inside it, and then jumps off in a bid for freedom or death.
Is it only me, feeling that technology stopped surprising
Well, at Apple at least, but that's what you get when you lose the disruptive innovators and bring in a bookkeeper to run the place. To them, taking a risk only has downsides.
No disrespect to Cook as Jobs was a hard act to follow, but he ought to start thinking beyond incremental improvements of existing products.
I've never broken a phone screen. I understand that if you do, all sorts of shops will replace it for you for a reasonable price. I have, however, broken the screen on an Apple Watch - a drop of less than a metre onto a tiled floor while on holiday. No cheap and cheerful option here. Getting it fixed at an Apple Store would cost nearly the same as the watch cost three years before. I just bought a new one and a watch protector.
I've actually broken a screen protector twice now. First was during travel to a city that's now being bombed by Putin (Odessa, years ago because I'd simply never been to Ukraine), the second was more duh in that keys and screens should not be in the same pocket.
In both cases, the protective glass did its job, so 5 minutes later all was well again.
In addition, I find a phone much easier to hold with a decent protective case, at least when it's a rubberised one, so in general my phones are still quite OK when I swap them out for a newer model (which I do every other model or so, and that's more because I professionally need to stay current, not because there's a technical reason to do so (and Apple keeps sending security updates for quite some time, I had an iPhone 6 which 8 years later was still receiving security updates).
My son doesn't mind that, as he tends to be the happy recipient of the one I replace :).
At the price of these things it's borderline negligent if you don't protect it, but maybe that's just me. It's certainly not expensive to do so.
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"I thought most of these smart watches needed a recharge overnight - is that not do ?"
Most do, at least if you want to use them properly. The Apple Watch Ultra is a rare exception, and I believe there are one or two others on the market that will go for several days if you minimise feature use.
But it really depends what you call a 'smart' watch. I have a Casio G-Shock here with Bluetooth that does most of the things people use a smartwatch for - activity tracking, seeing messages onscreen, getting notifications and a couple of other things; it's been going for 2 years now on the first battery.
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Our hottest issue ever!
Oh, sorry, that's Cosmopolitan, not Apple. I'll see myself out.
On another note, I don't mind Apple that much, but who else thinks "Pro Max" is a bit over the top? Reminds me of that long ago ad (by Samsung?) making fun of people lined up for the new iPhone:
> I need the Pro model!
> You're a barrista, dude.
It's a consumer shiny. Nothing wrong with that per se, but let's keep perspective (and $$$ in our wallets too while we are at it). Sigh, a new iPhone SE2024 would have been nice :-|
Absolutely agree. The whole turbo pro max with bells on stuff it merely irritating.
That's also why I never watch the Apple events live, there's only so many times I can hear that people are "excited" before it starts irritating me. Instead I fast forward through it so I can see the bits I'm interested in.
And then I'm still not excited - this event could be summarised as 'new watch, new iPhone, incremental updates, look we have AI too'.
I'm quite happy with their products. Their marketing and hype, not so much.
As the first commentard said, these technology announcements have stopped feeling magical. It’s all meh, meh, meh and oh! Wait a moment… now that is interesting.
It’s all just technology for technology’s sake. The exception is if the technology being announced has particular value to you as an individual. And Apple hit that moment for me last night.
Have you seen the cost of hearing aids? One thousand, two thousand, three thousand pounds and more. And here (hear!?) comes Apple at less than £250 with an FDA certified hearing aid. I’m not interested in them as headphones - but as a hearing aid they have my attention and my wallet is open.
My wife often tells me that my opinions and views are somewhat esoteric and probably not representative of the wider population (apparently not everyone prefers to compute on an escapee from the 1980s, and not everyone’s fantasy garage contains a Pinarello Dogma F), but on this I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the new magical technology growth space that will excite people is health. I think that Apple is onto a winner here.
Given the number of people who need hearing aids I’d be surprised if the volumes they’re manufactured in is that low - I think the issue is more that they need to be tuned for the user, and (as far as I can tell) Apple is the only company to have fully automated that process.
As for being invisible, given the number of white wireless headphones from a multitude of manufacturers that I see when I’m out and about, I’d say that looking like AirPods is about as unobtrusive as you can get.
The number of people that wear hearing aids divided by the number of different hearing aid solutions available, will vary according to the needs of the individual. Not really going to be anywhere near airpod numbers. Not in the same league.
As for the popularity of airpods, not really the point. Conventional earpods are designed to be invisible, and are not invisible because they are popular.
"Have you seen the cost of hearing aids? One thousand, two thousand, three thousand pounds and more. And here (hear!?) comes Apple at less than £250 with an FDA certified hearing aid. I’m not interested in them as headphones - but as a hearing aid they have my attention and my wallet is open."
I wanted to fit a backup camera in my car as it's getting harder to twist around to see behind when reversing. Cost, $300. The cost to replace the entire head unit in a mid-2000's compact with a large screen Android based unit, $175. The new unit has a backing camera, two USB ports, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, internal storage, FM and with a Bluetooth OBD transmitter, I have all of the metering that comes with many of the latest model cars.
"Those are probably more gratifying than requests for support."
Ooh, get you. Claws are never attractive.
Unrelated sidenote, this was the first Apple event in years I was actually waiting for with interest. I'm in the market for a new phone and new headphones. Came away thoroughly underwhelmed; there's nothing compelling here except Apple Intelligence, and even that won't be available/will be crippled in Europe.
Once upon a time, there was a thriving third-party ecosystem in find-everything applets for the original Mac OS 8.
The best known of these was a program called "Watson"; purchasers loved it, because it made it super easy to find anything (apps, documents) on a Mac.
Then Apple themselves introduced similar functionality, and with great creativity, named it "Sherlock".
At a stroke, it destroyed the third-party market for such tools.
Hence the term "Sherlocking" - shorthand for, "other people are making a quiet living adding this functionality to Apple products, and now Apple see revenue that isn't theirs and want it."
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