Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for the most exciting product that has ever been announced in our lifetimes. IT’S. THE. NEW. AIRPODS PRO! LET’S GET RRRRRRRRRREADY TO RUMBLE! No, wait, there were iPhones announced at this event? Crap man, I gotta redo my notes! Too bad, so sad: Apple just concluded it’s annual iPhone event and it was really, really good! I feel like I say this every single time Apple hosts an event, but I was wholeheartedly expecting this one to be boring. Of course, all of your favorite YouTube pals risked heart disease to get their grubby little fingers on the new phones, and watches and watch a 2 hour long YouTube video, but that’s alright! Let’s talk about this new stuff, starting with the boring, then the medium, and finally the exciting.

Let’s start with the boring: new AirPods Pro! Pretty much every leaker and their dog confirmed that the new AirPods Pro would be announced at this event, and well, they were right. I hate it when that happens. Memes aside, the new AirPods Pro really aren’t very interesting. They have a new and improved H2 SoC for better noise cancellation, transparency, and audio engineering; a new driver for better quality; and a new case! The case now has speakers at the bottom for Find My sounds, and a lanyard slot hanging from the side. Neat, I guess? I still would have wished for the U1 for better Find My capabilities, basically making the pods an AirTag, but maybe next time? The case also charges with the proprietary Apple Watch charger, so that’s neat, I guess? Maybe? Someone please validate my opinions here. Oh, and One More Thing: the buds themselves have a capacitive touch sensor to finally CHANGE THE FREAKING VOLUME WITH YOUR HEADPHONES! YES APPLE! WHY DID THIS TAKE YOU SO LONG? The price still remains the same, you can order them on Friday, and they’ll be here later this month. Sounds good? Great. Boring upgrade — please get over it.

Next: New Apple Watch SE. This is probably the most boring announcement during the entire keynote, but I’m including it because of the precedent it sets. What is that precedent? It’s that the Apple Watch Series 3, the $199 watch that can’t even run the latest software update, IS DEAD! HA! THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER! REST IN HELL, APPLE WATCH SERIES 3! Anyway; the problem with this is that the new SE starts at $250, which isn’t cheap enough. If Apple really wants to be price competitive in this space, the watch needs to start at $199. This doesn’t do that, which is sad. Because of that reason alone, this is a bad buy. For one, it doesn’t have an AWD, which is really dumb. It’s not a watch if it’s not on all of the time! Additionally, it doesn’t even have the new screen introduced with the Series 7. It’s literally a Series 4 with a better processor (kind of, Apple says it’s 20% faster than the previous SE), crash detection (which I’ll talk about in the Apple Watch Series 8 section), and a new (cheaper) back design. That’s literally it. There’s nothing else there, at all. No temperature sensor. No blood oxygen sensor. No new colors or materials. It’s just a new SoC that’s cheaper. Do not buy this watch. Spend that money on a refurb Series 6 or 7 and be happy about it. This is a bad watch. It is and will always be boring.

Now, onto the medium interestingness level: Apple announced 2 new watch models — one of which is really boring and the other is really interesting. Let’s start with medium boring; The Apple Watch Series 8 is a very minor upgrade from the Series 7. The biggest highlight feature is Crash Detection, which, as it says on the tin, detects if you’re in a car crash and calls for help automatically. The way Apple is doing this is actually pretty simple; they have a high-sensitivity accelerometer built into the watch that’s separate from the main one that works all the time, and sends an alert when it detects that you’ve been in a crash. It’s basically technology that they used for fall detection. Big deal — mostly sarcastic. Next, they introduced not one, but 2 temperature sensors! Well, kind of, but not really. The caveat is that the data collected from both sensors is for one feature, and that’s ovulation prediction. A couple years ago, Apple announced cycle tracking for the Apple Watch and iPhone. Now, they’ve taken it a step forward. Now, women will be able to receive an estimate of when they’ve ovulated based on their internal body temperature, and receive alerts, which is helpful for planning a family. The Watch compares readings from the external sensor and the sensor close to the skin to get a more accurate estimate of when you’ve ovulated. It’s also used for better cycle predictions, Apple says. Most importantly of all, thanks to our current political climate here in this country, all of this information will be encrypted, secured, and private, which is a concern for many women across the world right now. Many men in the Apple world are getting worked up about how Apple made a feature only for women, and y’all need to shut up. This feature is game-changing for family planning. It will literally change the lives of families. It lets women be informed about what is happening with their body, and it’s a chance for all of us to learn about how technology can prove to be a vital tool for something humankind has done quite literally for hundreds-of-thousands of years.

But there’s a much more exciting watch announcement that took the virtual stage this year, and that is what Apple has branded as… the Apple Watch Ultra. Yeah, I hate the name too. It seems like Apple’s marketing department had a field day with this name for some reason because this watch is not “Ultra” in any way. It’s a rugged, extreme sports watch that competes with every other sports watch and that is meant for people who are professional sportsmen. I don’t understand why Apple branded it is this way because it’s grossly inaccurate. This is not a “better version of the Apple Watch.” In fact, I think it’s a complement to the already good Apple Watch regular. But whatever, I digress. Apple’s marketing department clearly cannot be stopped. Anyhow, the watch itself is pretty cool. Really cool, in fact. But let’s first talk about this design: I hate the design of this watch. It is so ugly, it might even be the ugliest thing Apple has ever created. For one, the watch is absolutely ginormous, and I’m talking 2 inches big. That’s massive for a watch. Like seriously, have you seen the hands-on images with this? It makes me want to cry. Additionally, the watch is also squared off, and the display is flat which makes it look like this giant pancake on your wrist. As someone with small wrists, this makes me shiver. I don’t even think it’s gonna fit on my wrist! It looks like an iPhone you strapped onto your wrist with one of those running straps with an OtterBox defender on top. It is literally repulsive. It makes me want to throw up. It is also a chonky boy, being 14 mm thick. Do you know how massive that is? That’s a whole ham sandwich on your wrist. It’s also made out of pure titanium which just makes the watch look like this massive, clunky, wrist computer. It has a massive crown guard and increased knurling on the digital crown, both for increased usability with gloves. The side effect is that it looks like an ugly bump on the side of the watch. This watch is impossible to dress up, but I guess that makes sense. It’s a utility watch and it should be thought of like that. I can forgive the ruggedness for what the watch can do, starting with my favorite part, Backtrack. If you go off the grid a lot, you’d know that a compass is the most reliable method of mapping. You can’t depend on GPS all the time. Backtrack makes the compass much better, but here’s the fun part; this feature is available on all watch models that support WatchOS 9 — it’s not special or exclusive to the Watch Ultra in any way. Basically, it’s a waypoint system where you can pin points in space, like camp or water stations, or even destinations, and the watch will remember where you went and create a route based on the compass measurements back to the original location. It’s actually really cool! If you find yourself lost in a forest or something, a simple click of a button can route you back to home base. But wait a second, click of a button? What is this, 1987? No, actually: the new Watch has a bright orange button (the color is “international orange” as described in the keynote which is just hilarious) on the left which can be programmed to open apps, be mapped to specific buttons in certain apps, and even run specific shortcuts to perform complex actions. That button can be mapped to create and backtrack waypoints, start workouts, and control specific workout parameters, which is really neat. But there’s more; the button can even start a full-fledged diving computer, or so Apple says. It uses a new depth gauge which provides measurements in real time up to 133 feet, improved water resistance making it “2 times more water resistance,” and better, more accurate GPS (which we’ll get to in a minute). I’m skeptical of this, because divers are really pedantic people — they want extremely accurate projections and data because they rely on it to stay alive! Diving computers are supposed to monitor your oxygen levels, send important safety alerts to everyone in your group, and be able to interact with the outside to call for help. The new Watch Ultra does none of those things well enough to be able to use this product over an actual professional diving computer. But for recreational divers, this might just be good enough. Maybe. They partnered with a company named Huish Outdoors and made a special app just for this watch called Oceanic+, which is where all of the diving computer stuff lives. It has health alerts, depth measurement functionality, gives you information about how long it’ll take to get to the surface, distance, dive time, and more. Apple says all of the information would then be logged in the health app, which I guess is where Apple comes into play here. Regardless, someone out there is going to find this handy. It might not be perfect, but it includes enough of the good features to be used as a full-fledged diving computer for amateurs, and maybe a supplementary diving computer for pros. I said I’d talk about one more thing which is important, and that’s the new GPS. In cities and places with a bunch of trees, GPS is hard. The typical GPS used is L1, and it’s fine for 99% of scenarios. But Apple shoved an L5 into the watch for dual-band GPS, which removes signal and noise and makes tracking actually feasible in cities. Apple says this also works with offline Apple Maps for more data, but we’ll have to see how that works when actual runners and bikers and triathlon runners get their hands on this product. Other than that, this is a pretty rugged, utility focused watch as I said before: it’s more water resistant, has a raised body to protect the screen, uses titanium, has up to 60 hours of battery life which is just ridiculous, and seems like an expensive utility watch. But the people at the fruit company shocked us all — this watch costs $800 with all of the bells and whistles. If you think that’s a lot, you don’t understand what this is competing against. Other watches that do what this does cost $1200 at the lest, and diving computers cost $1000 more. Even though it might not do everything the best, it does it all at half the price, and that’s something that deserves to be applauded.

I’ve just rambled on the paper for 13 minutes and still haven’t gotten to the good stuff. Let’s talk about the new phones, starting with the utterly boring ones; the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus. Yes, those are the official names, and I really like them. iPhone 14 Max made absolutely no sense to me because it’s not a Max, it’s not the best. Whatever, at least they didn’t name it Ultra. I’m going to speed by, cut out the BS, and get to what’s new because these phones are mega boring: there’s a new size, one more GPU core, a new camera feature, crash detection, satellite connectivity, and a price hike. In addition to the 6.1” standard iPhone they’ve had since the XR, there’s now a 6.7” iPhone with the same sized screen as the previous Pro Max. With it, the Plus also brings a larger battery, which Apple, in typical Apple fashion, calls the “most battery life in an iPhone.” No crap, Einstein. Other than that, the displays are the same. No ProMotion, no AWD, same notch. The chip on the 14 is basically the same as last year’s, but Apple wanted to make it sound cool and give it some airtime in the keynote. It’s now the full A15 found on last year’s pro, so it has 6 GPU cores instead of 5. Other than that, it’s nothingburger. The cameras now have 2 new features: action mode, and the new “photonic engine.” Action mode takes your 4K videos and crops into 2.8K, allowing for image stabilization that’s actually really good. People are saying this is going to kill gimbals, but it absolutely won’t. This is going to hinder the quality of the original video significantly and even though initial hands on from your favorite YouTube pals proved that the feature is promising, I probably won’t use it often. The “photonic engine” is probably the dumbest marketing name of the event. I can live with Dynamic Island, but what the heck does “photonic engine” even mean?

pho•ton•ic /fōˈtänik/: technology concerned with the properties and transmission of photons, for example in fiber optics

en•gine /ˈenjən/: a machine with moving parts that converts power into motion

So, does Photonic Engine mean “Machine that transmits photons?” I’m utterly confused, this marketing term actually makes no sense. And it’s not even the term: I don’t see what this adds or replaces. Looking at the technical specifications page on Apple’s website, Deep Fusion and Smart HDR still exist and are actually improved this year — so what’s the deal with this? They haven’t elaborated at all in the keynote, and it’s very confusing. I wouldn’t use it as a reason to upgrade. Anyway, crash detection also comes to the phones using the exact same tech as the Apple Watch. No changes — they’re using a 250 g-force accelerometer in the phone and will call SOS if you’re in trouble and can’t respond. Cool! NEXT. *Leakers, rejoice: *the new iPhone 14 models have satellite connectivity. To introduce the feature, they showed this overly dramatic video in the keynote video like a bunch of idiots where some guy’s leg is broken and this girl calls 911. Here’s how the feature works, in a nutshell: if you call 911 (I’m specifically saying 911 as it only works in the US and Canada) and the call can’t go through, the phone will show a screen with a button that asks you if you want to try connecting via a satellite. When you tap the button, the phone shows you a wizard with a circle and a graphic of you and a satellite. The phone then prompts you to raise your arm and move around until it establishes a connection (think Precision Finding). Once it connects, it alerts you and moves into the next screen where it asks you simple questions to describe the nature of your emergency. You go through the prompts and tap your answers to the questions. Apple said that the reason you’re prompted with questions vs. instant text messages is because messages might take minutes to send if there’s even light foliage in between you and the satellite. Instead, the phone (while offline) gathers answers to all of the questions, and sends them through one compressed message that sends faster (it still might take minutes). The video then shows that first-responders can send messages for follow-up questions and where to stay so that you can get help fast. That was a lot of information and a lot of stuff — and wow does it look promising! The jury’s still out on how good the feature will actually work and exactly how it works (after all, there aren’t any large antennas in the phone that we know now), but it actually looks to be a good feature that may save lives. Apple says that the feature will be available in November (which I think is the first time Apple has given us a specific date for a feature rather than a cryptic “later this fall”) and “the iPhone 14 will receive 2 free years of satellite connectivity included with purchase.” Nobody knows how much the feature will cost after that, but I bet they’ll do an Apple TV+ with it and never charge for it and included it in Apple One or iCloud+. No, you won’t be able to text your BFF Jessica and post your hot vacation pics on the ‘gram, but this is a life-saving feature. I’m really happy it’s coming to the iPhone in some capacity. But all of this isn’t without inflation, and that’s important for a lot of people. The regular iPhone 14 costs the exact same as the previous iPhone 13, which is still being sold on the store. In reality, this is just a coincidence: I hypothesize that the original plan was to bump the price back down to $699 like the iPhone 11, but inflation took over and they moved it up to $799 and made the Plus $899, which is not a price we’ve seen before for the lower-end flagships. Regardless, these phones are expensive for what they are, and from what it looks like now, unless you were to buy the iPhone 14 Plus, I’d just stick with the 13 (since you can buy it from Apple still). It’s such a minor upgrade, and such a meh phone. I’m really disappointed.

If you thought I was done yet, you’re wrong! There’s one more phone class Apple announced, and it’s the real meaty boy: the iPhone 14 Pro! Despite what Eva Jobs thinks, this might be the biggest update to the iPhone since the iPhone X. The 14 Pro (obviously) has all of the features from the 14, but with massive updates to the screen and camera. The screen has had the biggest facelift since a long while. The notch? It’s gone. The display? It never turns off. The nits? There are more of them. The bezels? They’re smaller. Let’s get into the details; The notch has been replaced with 2 cutouts joined together in software. Apple calls this feature the Dynamic Island, probably because someone in Apple’s marketing department took offense to the fact that people started calling the “TrueDepth Camera System” the notch. The name is really goofy, but I’m not going to dwell on it further because this feature is packed. Instead of remaining static at all times, the pill at the top fills up with ambient information and widgets from apps, like Music or a timer. These elements can then be used to launch an application and display information from that app. Say for example, you have music playing in the Music app. Swiping to go home would play this animation and the music album art would be dumped into the pill, making it slightly longer but displaying song information. Now, say you setup a timer — the timer UI showing how many minutes are left would display on the other side of the pill. When it rings, instead of showing you a notification, the timer UI in the pill would expand out to take control of the whole pill and shake around. If you connected your AirPods or had a low battery notification, the pill would display that information within it rather than sending a compact UI notification. Instead of alerting you with a full-screen dialog box that an AirDrop is coming in, the notification would be neatly displayed within the Dynamic Island. The way developers can integrate with this is via Live Activities: if you have a Live Activity playing on the Lock Screen, that data can automatically “bubble up” in the Dynamic Island. The Dynamic Island gets larger and smaller as more things go in, and even removes items from the status bar if needed. All of this lives nearly in the menu bar and is completely interactive — meaning that you can tap and hold on the individual processes to get more information, kind of like a widget. I’m really excited for this and for this alone I think it’s worth it to upgrade to this phone. We’ll have to see in the full-review as to how gimmicky this feature really is, but it looks really great right now in the promo material and I’m really impressed. Wow. In addition to ditching the notch and making it better, they also FINALLY brought an Always On Display to the iPhone 14 Pro via a 1 hz LTPO. The writing was on the wall here since Apple brought widgets to the lock screen via the Apple Watch complication API, and I’m all here for it — Android has had this feature literally for years and the fact that it’s now on the iPhone is worth breathing a sigh of relief for. Contrary to what every leaker said, the wallpaper is just dimmed, not hidden. Apple says they’re using AI to determine skin tones in images and keeping those tones intact, while dimming everything else and making the widgets monochrome. This allows for the display to refresh 1 time a second and not cause major issues with battery life. Other than the current widgets and lock screen customization options we have now, there’s nothing else that you can do to customize the AWD. It’s simply your lock screen, but dim. I do have one question about this, and that’s burn-in: I know this won’t be an issue in the short-run, but how is Apple changing the pictures and widgets so that they don’t cause burn-in? Samsung wiggles the widget slightly and changes the tint of images every now and then to avoid this, but so far, we don’t know anything about the AWD here. Now, when the AWD is not on, this screen gets brighter than any other iPhone before it, because it now goes up to 2000 nits before thermally throttling and going down to 0.275 nits. As Flossy Carter would say, that’s maximum nittage. Nobody knows if this is 2000 nits sustained or only in HDR mode, but nevertheless, that’s a reasonable upgrade that finally catches up with the competition! In addition to all of these pretty substantial improvements to just the display alone, they also made the biggest improvements to the cameras since the iPhone 11. Pretty much all of the changes came to the main sensor with the exception of the front camera gaining autofocus, but that’s it. For the first time ever, I feel like these improvements might actually make a sizable different in everyday image quality. The sensor is now 48 mp, finally catching up to the competition. Most of the leaks basically assumed that the sensor would be binned back to 12 mp all the time because of how much light is needed to “power” (I’m grossly oversimplifying this because honestly it doesn’t make sense to talk about it in this context) the sensor. Apple was more brave in this regard though, because the way it works officially is that if the sensor senses (ba dum tss) that you’re outside in the light, it’ll use the full 48 mp. If it’s darker, it bins to get a higher quality image. I actually really like this approach — it lets user take advantage of the sensor in their phone, but does some AI magic to make images look good. Nice! The other advantage with a higher-resolution sensor is that you can crop in with negligible impact to photo quality. This means that Apple has added a 2x zoom button to the list of options that you can crop into. It lives alongside the 3x lens and allows users to shoot 4K video with the primary sensor cropped into 2x. I started jumping with joy as I heard this in the keynote, because 3x is just way too zoomed in, especially for portraits. 2x is just perfect. Apple also insinuated during the keynote video that there are more options for digital zoom available, but this isn’t confirmed. I don’t even know how this would work either since the telephoto wasn’t touched at all. Would they just use the main sensor? Guess we’ll have to see in the full review. Finally, the main sensor now has a faster ƒ/1.78 aperture for better low-light photos and less exposure capture time. Oh, there is one small caveat in the fine print: the sensor is now 24mm instead of 28, which is weird. I don’t see why they’d do this, but it seems like a change that people will absolutely notice. All of this makes me even more excited for the Pro — this is actually one of the most impressive cameras spec wise on the market. I’m thrilled. Even though all the other sensors have remained untouched (they should really fix the telephoto, as I said in last year’s review, it ain’t it), the phone still has the “photonic engine,” action mode, and now 24 FPS 4K Cinematic Mode which is supposed to bring more clarity and better edge detection now with iOS 16, so I’ll absolutely be giving that a try. Other than those glaringly obvious differences, the phone basically remains unchanged. Battery life is supposed to be the same, charging speeds are the same, MagSafe is the same, everything except for the A16, which is now built on 4nm for better power efficiency and speed. Apple once again bragged about how the “nearest competition” is still trying to compete with the A13 from 3 years ago while the new chip is 30% faster or so, which I guess is neat. You’re probably never going to notice the difference here — Apple silicon is mighty impressive and no matter what Snapdragon pulls out this November, they simply cannot be beat. One more thing: the iPhone prices, contrary to every single leak about pricing that we’ve had in the last month, are the exact same as before with the same storage configurations. Trade-in prices aren’t the best either: I got $600 for my year-old 13 Pro base model which is not ideal. The colors are also kind of meh — the gold is the same, the silver is a little whiter, the graphite is not graphite, and is instead named Space Black (which I called) and is darker, and there’s a very muted purple which is so lovely and I really want it. And that’s the iPhone, which is pretty good this year. I’m happy. At least we didn’t hear much about 5G.

What I’m not happy about is the omission of the SIM tray in the US. In this country, we don’t have functioning governments, and as a result, carriers can charge anything from $30 to $100 as an “upgrade fee” if they sense that you swapped over your eSIM. In addition, it makes switching to Android harder, which is just ridiculous. I don’t know how much money carriers threw into Apple’s pocket for this to happen — it’s anti-consumer, provides no benefit, and is just infuriating. I hate this. I hate Apple for this.

That’s it for my event coverage this September for Apple’s Far Out iPhone event. If you enjoyed, let me know! It’s encouraging. I’ll be pre-ordering a purple iPhone 14 Pro on Friday and will be publishing my full review as soon as possible. Thanks for reading, stay safe, and wear a mask.