All the news, rumors, and tips you missed last week.
Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.Read between the lines
Today’s the day! At 10am PT Apple will commence its famous annual September press event, centered around the iPhone update for 2024. The company’s announcements will attract millions of eyeballs and acres of press coverage, and most of it will focus on the wrong thing.
Because the iPhone 16, realistically, is going to be pretty dull. On the Pro side, we expect slightly bigger screens and slightly better cameras (including a more powerful zoom on the non-Max Pro specifically), while all four models should get new processors, new colors, and a new Capture button for instant camera use.
How much will any of this affect customers’ experience with the device? Hardly at all.
The screens are only 0.2 inches bigger along the diagonal, which is barely noticeable; the cameras are already easily good enough for 99 percent of shooting scenarios, just as current processors are easily fast enough for available apps; and the Capture button sounds suspiciously like a control that will get in the way for little palpable benefit (although I may be wrong and look forward to trying it out). If you’re buying one of these handsets to replace a three-year-old phone, then of course the cumulative upgrades will add up to a noticeable improvement, and an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with Apple Intelligence. But regarded in isolation as a one-off launch, the 16-series iPhones can only be a damp squib: something of interest principally to shareholders.
My advice, however, would be to persevere with the event, because there should be some gems on the undercard. Not everything will be mind-blowing, of course: while in some ways it would count as memorable for the iPad mini to get any kind of upgrade at all, we don’t think Apple will celebrate the occasion with anything more than a processor and RAM bump to ready the petite tablet for Apple Intelligence.
