Speaking at Apple’s September product showcase event, Tim Cook wasn’t exactly humble.
He says the “iPhone is the industry gold-standard.”
“It’s transformed the way we do things everyday and its become a cultural phenomenon”
Cook rattles off the famed 1 billion shipped devices milestone the company hit a few months ago.
He says they are about to launch their biggest update ever with iOS 10, with Apple’s Homekit being emphasized as a major new feature.
“This is a huge moment for home automation”
He says it’s the first time home integration has been integrated into a major platform, making it easy to manage your home devices
Cook says virtually every manufacturer and category is supported by the app.
He then jumped into the highly-anticipated iPhone 7.
“It’s the best iPhone we have ever created,” he says.
The company released a gorgeous showreel of the device’s production, which can be seen here.
Cook invited Phil Schiller to talk up the device, running the crowd through the handset’s 10-major features.
The phone is available in black, a glossier jet-black, gold, silver and rose-gold models.
Schiller confirms the rumored changes to the home button. The feature is now powered by a new haptic engine.
He says the company re-engineered the device to ensure both water and dust-resistance.
The iPhone 7’s camera will feature optical image stabilization, a wider f1.8 aperture six-element lens, Quad-LED true tone flash and a 12-megapixel sensor.
“For the first-time, it captures wide quality color” in both low and high-light environments.
Photographers will be able to pull RAW files off the device.
Schiller says that the image stabilization tech has been applied to the live photo function.
Meanwhile, the front-facing camera has been bumped from 5 to 7-megapixels.
The iPhone 7 Plus will feature a second more-powerful telephoto camera, which Apple say will allow them to push the boundaries of what smartphone cameras can do in terms of magnification.
There’s also a new picture style called portrait which adds a deep depth of field to pictures. It’ll be rolled out via iOS update later in the year.
Moving on, Schiller talked about the upgrades to the screen.
It’s 25% brighter and boasts that same wide color gamut as the camera.
The speaker built into the iPhone 7 are stereo-quality with one on either end.
Schiller says they offer twice the power and an increased dynamic range.
Finally, they came to removal of the headphone jack.
Schiller said “from the start we designed Lightning to be a great digital audio connection.”
New Lightning headphones will be included with iPhone 7, as will a Lightning to 3.5mm converter.
He ran through the many reasons the company have decided to leave the headphone jack behind, saying it required courage to do so.
Schiller says that the team at Apple have been hard to work and debuted the Apple AirPods.
They feature the rumored W1 chip capable of delivering superior quality and reliability over Bluetooth.
They tout five hours of battery life and also feature a directional microphone.
Like a lot of the other wireless headphones rolling out this year, the carry-case doubles as a charger.
They’re integrated with all Apple products via a simple one-touch connect system.
Schiller says the AirPods will sense which device you’re using and switch accordingly.
“There’s no buttons, there’s no switching, there’s no pairing – those things are of the past.”
AirPods will launch in late October at A$229.
Beats will be launching a new range using the same W1 chip functionality.
Schiller talks Apple Pay, he says the platform is set for Felica Support and will be coming to Japan.
The final dot-point on Schiller’s list is performance.
The iPhone 7 features an A10 Fusion four-core processor that combines the strength of two high-end cores and two low-power cores, with the process controlled by a new power controller.
He says the graphical performance of the handset will also come with major improvements, enabling console-quality gaming.
The A10 chip also comes with improvements for battery life.
Schiller says its the longest battery life ever in an iPhone, boasting two hours more on average than the iPhone 6s.
The device will hit the same pricepoints as the iPhone 6s, starting from A$1079for the 7 and A$1269.
Apple have doubled the storage configuration tiers, which means the iPhone 7 comes in at 32GB, 128GB and 256GB.
The Jet Black model of the iPhone 7 will only be available in 128 and 256GB variations.
They’ll also be bumping up the 6S and 6S Plus to 16GB and 64GB.
The phone launches September 16th, three days after iOS 10 launches.
The event closed out with a live performance by Sia, whose new song and music video debuted earlier in the week.
