Apple's "Wish We Could Say More" Event
Today Apple introduced the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, as well as the Apple Watch. Fast Company's Harry McCracken and Alice Truong covered the keynote presentation live, and are now inside the hands-on pavilion with the new products.
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- iPhone 6 starts at $199 with a two-year contract for the 16GB model, $299 for 64GB, and $399 for 128GB.
- iPhone 6 Plus starts at $299 with a two-year contract for the 16GB model, $399 for 64GB, and $499 for the 128GB.
Available September 19, pre-order begins on September 12.
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The hidden structure of the Apple keynote
QuartzOne of Apple’s most successful products is made not of aluminum and glass, but of words and pictures. -
Daring Fireball: Prelude to Tomorrow's Big-Ass iPhone Apple Event
John Gruber's traditional night-before-the-event predictions/expectations. -
Here's a report from Fast Company's Alice Truong, who will report live from Apple's event in California later today:Ahead of Apple's big product reveal Tuesday, Adobe on Monday published a report that suggests the Cupertino, California-based company would be wise to introduce an iPhone with a larger display. Overall, browsing on smartphone screens measuring 4 inches or less has declined 11% year over year, while larger screens continue to drive traffic, according to the Adobe Digital Index.
Contrary to analyst predictions, tablet use has flattened as people choose to browse on larger-screened phones, the report says. While some manufacturers, such as Samsung, have moved toward the trend of phablets, Apple has long held out on supersizing its phone, finally upgrading from its 3.5-inch display to 4 inches with the iPhone 5 (the iPhone 5S and 5C also have 5-inch displays). Murmurings suggest the higher-end model of the upcoming iPhone will sport a 5.5-inch screen (with some cases already available for preorder).That said, Apple still leads in mobile traffic, with the iPhone accounting for 54% of smartphone traffic and the iPad 80% of tablet traffic. Safari, which drives close to 60% of mobile traffic, saw a 2.6% decline in browser share from April, while Chrome gained 5.7%. Overall, about a third of all social-referred visits to retailers originated from a tablet or smartphone. For Pinterest, 64% of its referred traffic comes from mobile browsers, and 62% of Twitter's referrals come from smartphones and tablets.
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My colleague Alice Truong and I have arrived at the Flint Center in Cupertino. Here's the big white structure Apple built next to the venue.
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Photo: Harry McCracken for Fast Company
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Lotsa journalists already here. This is a college campus, so it's spacious and casual.
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And here's another throwback: Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone at MacWorld 2007.
Photo: Harry McCracken for Fast Companyby Miles Kohrman via YouTube edited by Anjali Mullany 9/9/2014 3:49:08 PM -
The pre-event eats (steak breakfast burritos!) are catered by Caffe Macs, Apple's on-campus cafeteria.
Photo: Harry McCracken for Fast Company -
The rumor about Apple inviting fashion journalists is true. Or at least there are a lot of folks here who are way too fashionable to be tech journalists.
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So what will the iWatch look like? We hear it has a sapphire glass band that's semi-felixble. And it will be loaded with health sensors. That's the long and short of what we know. Remarkably, Apple has proven they can still keep a secret. So how did they manage to? Well, the iWatch won't be released until 2015 by most reports. In other words, Apple kept the secret by keeping the iWatch out of factories.
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Apple's first attempt at an iWatch? It probably wouldn't work. Apple needs to balance chic and geek, the sporty and the casual. And frankly, Apple has never had to delve into real fashion before. Apple isn't alone in this sense, either. Google is facing the same problems with turning wearables into something you'll want to wear every day, with every outfit.
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Curious about what sapphire glass is? Well, don't be! Here's our handy explainer. In fact, Apple purchased a huge sapphire-production facility in Arizona last year.
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This is my view of Apple's livestream at the moment. -
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And CEO Tim Cook is on stage. "It is great to be back in the Flint Center," he says, "just down the road from Apple's birth place in Cupertino."
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"On this stage 30 years ago, Steve introduced the Macintosh to the world. On this stage, we introduced the iMac," Cook says. "Today, we have some amazing products to share with you and we think that at the end of the day that you will agree that this too will be a very key day for Apple."
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Cook says he's skipping the company updates since there's too much to cram--"other than to tell you that everything's great."
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No live stream? This is like covering an Apple event in 2013!
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"The original iPhone set the bar for which the category would forever be defined and for every iPhoen that followed we built on the vision of the original iPhone but pushed it further and enlarged what the iPhone could be.""Today we're launching the biggest ... advancement in the history of iPhones."
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Indeed there are two iPhone sizes: the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus.
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Live streaming @jason trying to "sportscast" the Apple event. www.youtube.comby David Lidsky via YouTube 9/9/2014 5:09:07 PM
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The new iPhone features an anodized aluminum back, curves, a new type of display called Retina HD.
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iPhone 6 Plus: 185% more pixels than the 5s -- 1920x1080, 401ppi, 7.1mm thin.The iPhone 6 is 6.9mm thin and has more than 1 million pixels."It is truly the most beautiful phone you have ever seen," says senior vice president of marketing Phill Schiller.As speculated, the new iPhones do hark back to the original with its curved edges.
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iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+
Photo: Harry McCracken for Fast Company -
The big iPhone getting an iPad-like horizontal view is cool--makes it more of a potential iPad substitute for some people.
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Bigger display allows for landscape mode in apps such as iMessage. Larger screen allows for more dedicated keys on keyboard--cut, copy, paste.
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Learn more about the new iPhones here.
Photo: Harry McCracken for Fast Company -
Schiller is explaining how bigger iPhones can still be one-handed phones. An important point given that Apple has been known to make fun of big phones for being unwieldy.
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Which four apps will graduate to your first screen with the additional row for apps?
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Learn more about the new iPhones here.
Photo: Harry McCracken for Fast Company -
Developers will be able to take advantage of larger display "with more density of content," says Schiller.
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In the past, most important apps have taken advantage of new iPhone screen resolutions/sizes pretty quickly. Hope that's true this time, too. But the upscaling looks like a decent stopgap.
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Live stream goes out just as Schiller tries to explain the ease of one-handed use. #conspiracytheory
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New-generation chip A8-- 2 billion transistors ("A7 had 1 million so it's a lot more") that is 13% smaller and delivers up to 25% faster CPU performance and 50% faster graphics performance.
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How far we've come: In graphics test, iPhone 6 is up to 85 times faster than the original iPhone.
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Thinnest iPhones ever.
Image via Apple. -
iOS has better tools to scale to various screensizes. But I suspect media intensive apps like games--rather than simpler webpages--will still need a lot of extra work to scale to many different screen sizes, along with extra debugging efforts.
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The home screen now changes orientation in landscape mode, taking advantage of that huge display.
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The big news a year ago was 64-bit iPhones, a technology that had some immediate benefit, but was mostly setting the stage for the future of mobile processors.
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Over the summer, Apple launched graphics library Metal to create 3-D apps and games. Traditionally, games have been built with OpenGL, but that comes with "performance penalty" (a lot of overhead, Schiller says). With Metal, there's a thinner layer to maximize performance. Already a number of developers plan to bring games using Metal, including EA, Disney, Epic Games, Ubisoft, Unity, Zynga, and Super Evil Megacorp (best name of the group).
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Apple likes to show off a game with amazing graphics pretty early in these events. It's one of the most tangibly impressive things you can do in front of a huge audience.
