As Apple events go, yesterday’s Gather Round event was extremely focused: only two key product lines, iPhone and Apple Watch, with a sprinkling of other announcements. There shouldn’t have been much to miss — but as always, there was.
As Apple events go, yesterday’s Gather Round event was extremely focused: only two key product lines, iPhone and Apple Watch, with a sprinkling of other announcements. There shouldn’t have been much to miss — but as always, there was.
Here are 10 important details that Apple either skipped or glossed over during its presentation.
Last year, Apple switched to a deliberately fuzzy way of marketing battery life for new iPhones, spotlighting how each new model compared to an old model. It played the same game this year, briefly noting that the iPhone Xs would get 30 minutes more battery life than the X, versus a 90 minute gain for the Xs Max over the X.
Digging on Apple’s web page reveals that the numbers aren’t so simple or positive for the iPhone Xs. While iPhone X claims “up to 21 hours” of talk time, 12 hours of internet use, and 13 hours of wireless video playback time, the Xs promises “up to 20 hours” of talk time, 12 hours of internet use, and 14 hours of video playback time. Better for video, worse for talk time — that’s more of a wash than an improvement.
The Xs Max promises 25 hours of talk time, 13 hours of internet use, and 15 hours of video playback time, all clear but not profound gains over the smaller model. There’s probably some formula for that works out to 90 minutes of better run time, but as a measure of performance, “better than some old model” isn’t really helpful.
Apple made a fairly big deal on stage about the iPhone Xs having “Gigabit LTE,” which is to say support for a maximum of 1Gbps speeds when connected to the right LTE towers. As we approach the rollout of 5G, that’s a great feature to have. But it didn’t explain that the iPhone XR lacks Gigabit LTE — fine print on Apple’s web site describes XR as having only LTE Advanced support. Right now, that won’t matter much in the U. S., but as carriers light up their 5G and “road to 5G” towers, it might.
On related notes, both the Xs and XR models add support for obscure radio bands that promise to wring better cellular coverage out of existing radio spectrum. Both models are confirmed to support T-Mobile’s 600MHz band 71, which promises to distribute LTE across wider distances in over 1,500 locations in the U. S. and Puerto Rico. The Xs models — and possibly the XR — also support Sprint’s HPUE (High-Powered User Equipment) band 41, a solution to improve indoor signal penetration, capacity, and speeds using the company’s existing 2.5GHz towers.
But despite a reported shift by Apple this year from a mix of Qualcomm and Intel modems to purely Intel parts, there are still separate GSM and CDMA versions of each of the phones. It’s unclear whether one version (historically, the CDMA model) will be a smarter purchase. (And there are even more international models than before, now compounded by separate eSIM and physical SIM models, but that was underscored during the event.)
Everyone’s been waiting for an Apple Watch that lasts for more than a day, for sleep tracking if nothing else. Samsung just debuted the Galaxy Watch with multi-day battery life, and Qualcomm has announced a new Snapdragon 3100 chip to give Google Wear OS watches plenty of runtime. For the Apple Watch Series 4, Apple announced the S4 chip — and once again promised 18-hour battery life, highlighting only one improvement: an hour more of workout tracking.
Rather than appearing on the marketing pages for the Watch, the battery specs for this year’s model are buried here. Apple probably buried them because the Watch’s talk time for phone calls (over Bluetooth) has nosedived from 3 hours in last year’s model down to 2 hours, while LTE calling time is stuck at a meager 1 hour.
The full Series 4 battery specs are:
Apple notably doesn’t split the specs between 40mm and 44mm models, which have different batteries and screens. But the larger model tends to outperform the smaller one.
Apple spent a fair bit of time showing off some super cool new watch faces for the Series 4 Apple Watch — but didn’t say that many of them are also coming to older models. The analog watch video faces Breathe, Fire and Water, Liquid Metal, and Vapor are all available for Series 1 through Series 3 watches running watchOS 5, and each is customizable with a few complications.
Breathe uses the animation from the Apple Watch’s standalone Breathe feature as a watch face. It has “classic,” “calm,” and “focus” versions, the latter two brand new so you can pick between an expanding flower, floating flower petals, or concentric circles.
Fire and Water fills an analog watch dial with animated “fire,” “water,” or “fire and water” choices. The badass fire version was used early in the Series 4 demo video, and regrettably looks sort of small on older Apple Watches.
Liquid Metal fills a circle with swirling metal in your choice of “silver,” “gold,” “black,” or “all” options. It’s perhaps the least impressive of the bunch, but something to reflect the color of the Apple Watch body.
Vapor recalls the powder explosion effects used in iPhone, iPad, and Mac wallpapers some time ago, but with clouds rather than powder. You choose between “all,” “pink/orange,” “black/white,” or “blue/green” vapors as you prefer.
Apple is continuing to keep at least two (analog/digital) Nike+ faces exclusive to the Nike+ version of the Apple Watch Series 4. It will notably arrive later than the mid-September launch dates of the other Apple Watches, hitting shelves in the first week of October.
Remember Apple’s “smart speaker” HomePod? No? Well, it’s coming to Mexico and Spain on October 26, and will be adding the abilities to make and receive telephone calls from a connected iPhone, lyric-search Apple Music, and answer nutrition questions. There’s a full article with all the new HomePod details here.
Heart rate monitoring is a bigger deal than people realize. If you haven’t seen a video or heard a story about someone suddenly collapsing and dying with no apparent warning — including otherwise seemingly healthy kids and adults — you mightn’t appreciate this. But many people have no idea they’re walking around with latent heart conditions that could kill them without notice. Prior Apple Watches have become capable of hinting at a couple of early warning signs, but lacked the electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG) hardware to do more.
The ECG feature places one electrode on your wrist, and the other in the Digital Crown — just touch your finger to the crown for 30 seconds to take a reading. This is a brilliantly simple way to keep a medical-grade heart monitor with you at all times, the impact of which you may only realize after you try it.
Until now, if you wanted to add true ECG functionality to an iPhone, the price was $99 for a perfectly functional but awkward little accessory from Kardia/AliveCor. An Apple Watch band called KardiaBand with similar functionality sold for $199. Apple’s new implementation puts an ECG within anyone’s reach, and is unquestionably going to save lives.
Apple used to have a pretty simple structure for its iPhone storage tiers: each new tier doubled or quadrupled storage for the same $50 or $100 premium.
