Apple just announced the latest iPhone and Apple Watch and these are the first promo videos for the devices. As usual, Jony Ive, Apple’s Chief Design Officer, narrates the videos as the camera pans over the different features and aspects of the new products.
Apple announced its latest and greatest Apple Watch in Cupertino today — The Apple Watch Series 4.
Fitbit (NYSE: FIT) stock sank as a result. Right now it’s down more than 6 percent and continuing to tank. The company sells a competing wearable health and fitness device.
Apple’s newest watch, starting at $399, can now perform an ECG, detect atrial fibrillation and detect when a person’s heart rate is too low. The watch is even FDA certified. Apple Watch Series 3 devices will now retail at $299.
Pre-orders will begin this Friday; the device will be available for purchase on September 21st.
MacOS Mojave, the next major update to Apple’s desktop operating system, will officially launch on September 24, the company announced today.
Unsurprisingly, Apple’s September event today was all about the new iPhone and iOS. But the company also found time to talk a bit about its desktop operating system, too.
Mojave, which has been in beta for a while now, features a new dark mode, something users have been requesting for a very long time, stacks for keeping your desktop uncluttered, an updated Finder that lets you perform more actions without having to open another app, a new screenshot app and support for FaceTime calls with up to 32 people.
Mojave will also launch with a couple of new apps that were previously only available on iOS. These include Apple News and the Stocks app, as well as a voice memo app and the Home app for managing HomeKit-enabled gadgets from your laptop. As usual, there are plenty of other updates here as well, including a refreshed Safari browser, emoji support in Mail and more.
The public beta of Mojave has been available since late June, so there are no major surprises here. Virtually every Mac that has shipped since mid-2012 will support the new operating system. It does drop support for older machines, though, but that’s the price of progress.
WeWork, the eight-year-old, 800-pound gorilla in the co-working space, hasn’t been known for being terribly acquisitive, despite the billions of dollars it has raised and its valuation, which one of its biggest investors, SoftBank, apparently believes to be approaching $35 billion. To wit, it made just one small acquisition in 2015 (Case), and one other in 2016 (Welkio).
Yet the company is clearly beefing up its efforts to, well, beef up.
Last year, it acquired five companies, including Meetup, a site for organizing group trips and events for which WeWork paid a reported $200 million. It meanwhile acquired three companies earlier this year, including the Chinese co-working startup Naked Hub, for which it paid $400 million.
Now, WeWork is announcing its fourth acquisition of 2018 — and its third-biggest purchase to date — with Teem, a maker of office management software for which a source says WeWork paid $100 million in cash.
The six-year-old, Salt Lake City, Utah-based outfit had raised $21.5 million from investors, including Origin Ventures, Greycroft and NGP Capital.
WeWork appears to have picked up the company for several reasons, beginning with its ongoing quest to provide its growing base of corporate customers with bells and whistles like “insights” to help make their spaces more productive.
The two also share numerous customers, including GE, whose CTO of digital workplace technology, Jeff Monaco, went so far as to issue a statement about the tie-up, saying that Teem’s “suite of workplace software tools helps make our day-to-day more seamless, so our employees can focus on innovating new projects, not trying to find a conference room.” (GE, along with GM, Samsung, Salesforce, Bank of America and Bacardi are among a growing list of corporate giants to plunk their employees, or their portfolio companies, in WeWork locations.)
The move also extends the general evolution of WeWork into more of a software company and not simply a real estate play. Another aspect of its business, for example, is helping design, construct and manage services on behalf of enterprises that want some of that WeWork je ne sais quoi but would rather lease their own offices.
Either way, we’re told that Teem will continue to operate as an independent business, serving its current customers from its Salt Lake City offices while also providing its services as part of WeWork’s offerings — which, based on recent history, you can expect to expand even further, and fast.
Even if you don’t plan on buying a new iPhone, you’ll be able to get a bunch of new features next week. Apple plans on releasing iOS 12, the next major version of iOS, on Tuesday, September 17th.
As always, iOS 12 will be available as a free download. If your iPhone or iPad runs iOS 11, you’ll be able to update to iOS 12 as Apple plans to keep supporting all existing iOS 11 devices.
Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new in iOS 12. The main feature of iOS 12 is a performance improvement, especially for older devices. If you have an iPhone 6 or an iPad Air for instance, you should see a big improvement when it comes to launching apps, triggering the camera and entering text.
The other big theme of the year is new features to help you spend less time using your phone. There’s a new Screen Time feature to see and control how much time you spend using each app. Notifications are now grouped and you can silence them from the lock screen. You also can turn on Do Not Disturb when you’re in a meeting, for a few hours or for longer.
Apple didn’t stop there, and added new power features as well. Developers will be able to take advantage of a new file format for augmented reality and new features in ARKit 2.0. Apple is releasing the Workflow app as a new Siri Shortcuts app. Developers will be able to add information to Siri, as well, so that you can add a boarding pass or a music playlist to Siri.
The Photos, News and Stocks apps have been improved, as well as Apple Books (the app formerly known as iBooks). Apple is introducing Memoji on the iPhone X. It’s a customized avatar that you can use in iMessage and FaceTime to represent you.
If you want to learn more, read my iOS 12 preview to get my thoughts on this update.
Apple just unveiled brand new phones. The iPhone XS and XS Max are the two new flagship devices, replacing the iPhone X. The iPhone XR is replacing the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus with Face ID and an edge-to-edge design.
And maybe you were waiting for this press conference to buy a new smartphone. So here’s a quick rundown of how much you’re going to pay for those devices.
The iPhone XS is are available with 64GB, 256GB or 512GB of storage for $999, $1,149 or $1,349. You need to add $100 on top of that for the iPhone XS Max with a bigger display ($1,099, $1,249 or $1,449). There are three different colors — silver, gold and space gray.
The iPhone XR replaces the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. It will start at $749 for 64GB, with 128GB and 256GB also available for $799 and $899. There will be plenty of color options — white, black, blue, yellow, coral and red.
As a comparison, the iPhone X cost at $999 for the 64GB model and $1,149 for the 256GB model. The iPhone 8 used to cost $699 with 64GB or $849 with 256GB. The iPhone 8 Plus was $100 more expensive for each option ($799 or $949).
In other words, if you’re confused, the iPhone XR is the entry-level device of this year’s iPhone lineup. The iPhone XS and XS Max are the exact same phone in two different screen sizes. They are the premium devices in the lineup, with a better display, better cameras and better material (stainless steel).
For the iPhone XS, pre-orders start on Friday and shipments start on September 21st Pre-orders of the iPhone XR will start on October 19th and ship on October 26th.
If you want something cheaper, the iPhone 7 now costs $449 for 32GB (with 128GB model also available) and the iPhone 8 costs $599 for 64GB (with 256GB model also available).
A quick recap:
That’s a long lineup.
With the launch of the new Gmail, the writing was on the wall, but today Google made it official: Inbox by Gmail, the company’s experimental email client for Gmail, will shut down at the end of March 2019.
Google says it’s making this change to put its focus “solely on Gmail.” While that makes sense, it’s a shame to see Inbox sail into the setting sun, given that it pioneered many of the features that have now become part of the new Gmail.
I would have loved to see Google continue to experiment with Inbox instead. That, after all, was one of the reasons the company started the Inbox project to begin with. It’s hard to try radical experiments with a service that has a billion users, after all. Today, however, Google now seems to be willing to try new things right in Gmail, too. Smart Compose, for example, made its debut in the new Gmail (and many pundits correctly read that as a sign that Inbox was on the chopping block).
While the new Gmail now has most of Inbox’s features, one that is sorely missing is trip bundles. This useful feature, which automatically groups all of your flight, hotel, event and car reservations into a single bundle, is one of Inbox’s best features. Our understanding is that Google plans to bring this to Gmail early next year — hopefully well before Inbox shuts down.
So there you have it. Inbox for Gmail will shut down in six months, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Google resurrected the idea in a few years to try some other email experiments. Until then, here is Google’s guide to moving from Inbox to Gmail.
… it was nice pressing you. Well, at least some of the thousands and thousands of times. Apple has finally abandoned a feature that’s been a staple of its smartphones since the very start, over a decade ago: A physical home button.
The trio of almost-all-screen iPhones unboxed today at its Cupertino HQ go all in on looks and swipes, with nothing but a sensor-housing notch up top to detract from their smoothly shining faces.
Last year Apple only ditched the button on its premium iPhone X handset, retaining physical home buttons on cheaper iPhones. But this year it’s a clean sweep, with buttons dropped across the board.
If you want to go home on the new iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max or iPhone XR (as the trio of new iPhones are confusingly named) well, there’s a gesture for that: An up swipe from the bottom edge of the screen, specifically. Or a look and that gesture if your phone is locked.
This is because Apple has also gone all in on its facial biometric authentication system, Face ID, for its next crop of iPhones — throwing out the predecessor Touch ID biometric in the process.
“Customers love it!” enthused Apple’s marketing chief, Phil Schiller, talking up Face ID from the stage, after CEO Tim Cook had reintroduced the tech by collapsing it all to: “Your phone knows what you look like and your face becomes your password.”
“There’s no home button,” confirmed Schiller, going over the details of the last of the three new iPhones to be announced — and also confirming Face ID is indeed on board the least pricey iPhone Xr. “You look at it to unlock it… you look at it to pay with Apple Pay,” he noted.
So hey there Face ID, goodbye Touch ID.
Like any fingerprint biometric Touch ID is fallible. Having been doing a lot of DIY lately it simply hasn’t worked at all for my battered fingertips for more than a month now. Nor does it work well if you have dry skin or wet hands and so on. It can also be hacked with a bit of effort, such as via silicone spoofs.
Still, Touch ID does have its fans — given relative simplicity. And also because you can register multiple digits to share biometric access to a single iPhone with a S.O. (Or, well, your cat.)
Apple has mitigated the device sharing issue by adding support for two faces per device being registered with Face ID in iOS 12. (We haven’t tested if it’ll register a cat yet.)
However the more major complaint from privacy advocates is that turning a person’s facial features into their security and authentication key normalizes surveillance. That’s certainly harder to workaround or argue against.
Apple will be hoping its general pro-privacy stance helps mitigate concerns on that front. But exactly how the millions of third party apps running on its platform make use of the facial biometric feature is a whole other issue, though.
Elsewhere, debate has focused on whether Face ID makes an iPhone more vulnerable to being force unlocked against its owner’s will. The technology does require active interaction from the registered face in question for it to function, though — a sort of ‘eyes-on’ check and balance.
It’s probably not perfect but neither was a fingerprint biometric — which could arguably be more easily forcibly taken from someone in custody or asleep.
But it’s irrefutable that biometrics come with trade-offs. None of these technologies is perfect in security terms. Arguably the biggest problem is there’s no way to change your biometric ‘password’ if your data leaks — having your fingerprints or face surgically swapped is hardly a viable option.
Yet despite such concerns the march towards consumer authentication systems that are robust without being hopelessly inconvenient has continued to give biometrics uplift.
And fingerprint readers, especially, are now pretty much standard issue across much of the Android device ecosystem (which may also be encouraging Apple to step up and away now, as it seeks to widen the gap with the less pricey competition).
In the first year of operation its Face ID system does appear to have been impressively resilient, too — barring a few cases of highly similar looking family members/identical twins. Apple is certainly projecting confidence, now, going all in on the tech across all its iPhones.
If you’re inconsolable about the loss of the home button it’s not entirely extinct on Apple hardware yet: The iPad retains it, at least for now.
And if it’s Touch ID you’re hankering for Apple added the technology to the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar (on 2016 models and later).
Yet the days of poking at a physical button as a key crux of mobile computing do now look numbered.
Contextual computing — and all it implies — is the name of the game from here on in. Which is going to raise increasingly nuanced questions about the erosion of user agency and control, alongside major privacy considerations and related data ethics issues, at the same time as ramping up technological complexity in the background. So no pressure then!
At the end of the day there was something wonderfully simple about having a home button always sitting there — quietly working to take people back to a place they felt comfortable.
It was inclusive. Accessible. Reassuring. For some an unnecessary blemish on their rectangle of glass, for sure, but for others an important touchstone to get them where they needed to go.
Hopefully Apple won’t forget everything that was wrapped around the home button.
It would certainly be a shame if its spirit of inclusiveness also fell by the wayside.
Photo by Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images
Apple just announced a new budget iPhone to along with the iPhone Xs. It brings many of the goodies found on the new and expensive iPhone XR but for less and it’s available in a variety of colors.
The iPhone XR and XR are similar but there are key differences. Though they’re similar in design, the iPhone Xs has a more advanced camera setup and a better OLED screen. Likewise, the iPhone XR is available in different colors but only comes in aluminum. The iPhone Xs is made out of stainless steel.
This phone replaces the iPhone 8 as the least expensive iPhone available. Like the iPhone Xs and the iPhone X before it, the XR is a full-screen phone minus a notch at the top that houses the phone’s camera and FaceID sensors. Long live the Home Button. It’s no longer available on any iPhone model.
The screen is a 6.1-inch LCD screen, unlike the OLED version found in the iPhone X, Xs and Xs Max, and Apple calls it a liquid retina screen with 1792 x 828 with 326 ppi. Even at a 6.1-inch screen, the phone itself is smaller than the previous iPhone 8 Plus. Inside is Apple’s new A12 Bionic chip that supports improved battery life, neural networks and advanced processing.
The body is made out of 7000 series aerospace grade aluminum that’s more durable glass and comes in white, black, blue, coral and yellow. The case also has IP 67 protection to keep it safe from dust and water.
[gallery ids="1710998,1710994,1710991,1710990,1710989,1710979,1710978,1710977,1710976,1710974,1710969,1710955,1710951,1710950,1710949"]Unlike the iPhone X and iPhone Xs, the iPhone XR has a single lens camera. It’s a 12mp sensor with a fast 1.8 aperture lens and packs a true tone flash. Even though there’s only one lens, the iPhone Xr can still do portrait mode photos like the iPhone X and iPhone Xs. The iPhone Xr even has adjustable bokah found in the iPhone Xs.
Compared to the iPhone 8 Plus, the iPhone XR has an hour and a half longer battery life.
The iPhone XR will come in five finishes and available with three storage options: 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB, starting at $749. It will be available to order, along with the iPhone Xs, on October 19 and ship a week later on October 26, 2018.
There are many reasons why dual-SIM capabilities make sense. And that’s why many Android smartphones let you insert two SIM cards. Apple is entering the world of dual-SIM capabilities with a physical SIM tray and an eSIM for most of the world, and two physical SIM cards in China.
You won’t be able to buy a second SIM card at the airport and put it in the phone. Instead, just like on the iPad, you’ll have to subscribe to a plan using your iPhone. Few telecom companies support eSIM just yet. Apple showed the logos of Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, Bell, EE, Vodafone, Airtel, Deutsche Telekom, Truphone, GigSky and Jio.
Let’s hope that this move is going to convince more telecom carriers to switch to eSIM. Being able to sign into your mobile plan just like you would sign into your Spotify account sounds like a dream.
If you use two SIM cards, you’ll be able to manage two phone numbers, use two plans and more. This is particularly useful if you live in a fragmented region. For instance, many countries have regional telecom companies. So you need to swap your SIM card if you’re traveling back and forth between two cities.
In China, Apple can’t embed an eSIM into its devices. So the company is going to release a special iPhone XS and XS Max for China. This model will let you insert two physical SIM cards at once, back-to-back.