Apple’s Press Conference - A Retrospective
By Adam Lacombe
Another much anticipated Apple press conference has come and gone. With it, my hopes of innovation. The event unveiled the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, Apple’s new AirPod wireless earphones, the AppleWatch “Series 2”, and a new Nintendo — Apple collaboration. Although there were many product feature enhancements to be had, net new innovation was lacking.
Let’s start from the bottom. The Nintendo collaboration was probably the most exciting news to come out of the event. For anyone that’s still playing Pokemon Go, you can now play straight from the Watch. Using haptic feedback, the watch warns when you’re near a Pokestop, allows you to hatch eggs, and catch pokemon, all from the watch’s interface. Even more exciting is the announcement that Super Mario will be making his first mobile gaming debut on iOS with an exclusive Apple partnership. The strategic partnership was brilliant from a nostalgic aspect alone.
The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus release has Apple playing the catch up game. The new phones are water resistant, with a rating of IP67. Apple is marketing this new water resistance as “splash and water resistant”. The Samsung Galaxy S7 and Note 7 on the other hand have a rating of IP68, allowing them to withstand submergence up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes. Storage was another point that evoked a sense of catch up. Apple has upped their minimum storage to 32GB, doing away with the 16GB option of the past. They position the change as “doubling their storage”, while Samsung already offers this with the option to expand up to 256GB of extra storage on microSD. We have to give it to Apple with the dual camera on the 7 Plus. The dual cameras will allow for telephoto and wide angle capabilities.
Next up, the AirPod wireless earphones. The AirPods are a clever response to the water resistance, and lack of headphone jack on the new iPhones. The actual interest that the earphones prompted in us, was the W1 chip. Apple’s proprietary chip was left as a mystery, leaving us to assume that it must be magic. Regardless, with Apple, and Beats, using this new proprietary hardware, the war on bluetooth has begun.
Finally, the Apple Watch Series 2. Swim anyone? The new Apple Watch is waterproof! That’s actually pretty cool as it will allow watersport athletes to track biofeedback the same way runners do. That said, the additional features and advancements in Series 2 are rather lackluster after our two year wait.
The product updates that are coming out of this release should be noted as the moment that Apple started listening to users again. Apple’s traditional “tick, tock” release cycle has seemingly gone through another ‘tock’ cycle. We can only hope that Apple is holding back in preparation for the iPhone’s 10th anniversary with the iPhone 8 next year.
