Apple Wednesday came back to physical launches with its flagship annual event at the Apple Park, the first since the pandemic, launching four new iPhones and a new Apple Watch Ultra.
Replacing the iPhone mini, there is a new iPhone 14 Plus with 6.7 inch screen, along with the 6.1-inch regular iPhone model. The Plus model brings a larger screen and a bigger battery to the iPhone model and will be powered by the A15 Bionic processor. The new processor is reserved for the Pro Models this time, offering a differentiator now that the larger size is available with regular iPhones too.
Apple also launched the new Apple Watch Series 8, Apple Watch SE and the brand new Apple Watch Ultra model for extreme users, especially in the outdoors. It also launched the new AirPods Pro 2 with personalised spatial audio. The Pro models had not been showcased till then time of going to press.
Earlier, CEO Tim Cook said he was happy physical events were back, while acknowledging that the streamed events over the past couple of years had opened up access to millions of people across the world. Minutes into the event at Steve Jobs Theatre, Cook stepped off stage as a pre-recorded version of himself took over the screen behind. Hybrid is clearly the new normal.
The Apple Watch Ultra is very different from earlier watches and takes everything to the extreme from durability, connectivity and battery life which can extend up to 60 hours. The watch featured a dual-frequency GPS which gets accurate locations even in dense urban environments. Apple is clearly going to take on Garmin in this segment.
Apple started with the new Apple Watch Series 8 which gets a lot of incremental updates including temperature sensor which helps women keep tabs on ovulation as part of their cycle tracking. Dr Sumbul Desai, VP Health, explained that the new Series 8 has a temperature sensor on the back crystal near the skin, and another, just under the display. The data will be fully encrypted and available to even health care providers only with explicit permission.
The watch will also come with Crash Detection to alert emergency services of car accidents you could be involved in. This is powered by two new motion sensors in the watch which works along with Machine Learning which matches it against 1 million hours of real world driving and crash data.
The watch also comes with a low power mode that gives up to 36 hours of battery life with limited features. This will be available for all models from the Apple Watch Series 4. International roaming is also being rolled out for the watch in some countries.
The author is in California on the invitation of Apple.
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