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Pre-orders, apps, Amazon and MacBook
Apple just held an event for the Apple Watch. But as it launched the thing last year, we got to hear about much more than just a few of the flimsy things Appleās great wrist-worn gadget will do.
Yes, we now know when the Watch is coming out, and how much weāll have to pay for it, but thereās even more interesting stuff in store too.
How about the brand new 12-inch MacBook thatās even thinner than the MacBook Air? Or the iPhone-led medical platform that Apple thinks is going to revolutionise medical research? As ever, Apple has big plans.
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[li]Hands on: Apple Watch review | Hands on: New MacBook review[/li][/ul]
Weāll be looking at everything Apple showed off at the event, but first a bit on the Apple Watch.
Apple Watch is on pre-order and sale in April
The Apple Watch goes on pre-order on April 10. And in the usual Apple style the actual āon saleā date lands two weeks later on April 24. This is the standard delay Apple puts into its mobile devices. Itās enough of a gap to get you ravenous with excitement, no so long you forget you even made the pre-order.
Just to get those anticipation juices flowing even more, youāll be able to check out the Apple Watch for yourself in Apple Stores from April 10. Thatās a little longer than we normally have to wait for a pre-order, but itās just a quick between then and the Watch landing in your hands.
This is a totally new category for Apple, and there must be thousands, millions out there who are on the cusp of convincing themselves they might need a smartwatch. And even more that just want some first-hand experience so they can ridicule the thing to friends.
Three different models, three very different prices
We always knew that Apple was planning a few different variations of Apple Watch, but now we know exactly how many there are. The answer? Six, if we forget the different straps and colours - and an awful lot more variations if we donāt.
Neglecting the peripheral style choices for a moment, there are Sport, Steel and Edition series in the Apple Watch family, and all three come in two watch face sizes, 38mm and 42mm. These roughly equate to the āmaleā and āfemaleā standard watch archetypes, but letās not put a gendered label on these, eh?
The one we imagine most people going for is Watch Sport. Itās the cheapest of the three, with an aluminium alloy casing and fairly normal-looking straps: three colours plus white and black. Itās $349, Ā£299, AU$499 for the 38mm edition, $399, Ā£339, AU$579 for the 42mm one.
Have a bit more cash? The Watch Collection get you an upgrade to a shiny steel body. There are also much fancier straps, including one woven out of wafer-thin metal wire that feels like fabric.
Prices for this version start at $549, Ā£479, AU$799 and rocket up to $1099, Ā£949, AU$1629 if you pick the fanciest strap. Thatās right, you can double the cost by picking a different strap.
Are you a rapper? A millionaire? Or a normal person with extremely misaligned priorities? The Apple Watch Edition is the 18ct gold version and starts at $10,000, Ā£8,000 AU$14,000, creeping all the way up to $17,000, Ā£13,500, AU$24,000.
Itās to be sold in limited numbers to make it all the more attractive to hardcore consumer types, although it will be available across the world according to Tim Cook.
Apple Watch apps are parasites
There will be loads of Apple Watch apps available on launch day by the sounds of it, but they donāt really have their very own space. Youāll browse through, use and download Watch apps from your phone rather than directly from the watch itself.
We pretty much knew this would be the case as it has been common knowledge for a while that Watch apps donāt run entirely independently and are highly reliant on a connection with your iPhone. Itās another confirmation that your Apple Watch is not going to be much use if you take it too far away from your phone.
Some of the apps Tim Cook and co. showed off during the Apple Watch event include Uber, WeChat, Instagram, Shazam and a home security monitor. Expect to see these plus a boatload of others, including plenty of dross, come April 24.
Donāt expect anything too in-depth, though. Apple VP of Tech Kevin Lynch says most of the Watchās applications are āreally about brief interactionsā¦ many of these are just a few seconds long.ā
Apple TV is playing hardball with Amazon
Think Apple TV is the runt of Appleās litter? Tim Cook is doing his best to change that this year. Not only has the set top box been give a price cut to keep it competitive with rivals like Amazon Fire TV, itāll also get a brand new streaming service that you wonāt be able to get elsewhere. For a while at least.
But first, the price. It now costs just $69, Ā£59, AU$109 bringing it just-about in-line with alternatives from Amazon, Roku 3 and others. No, itās not as cheap as Chromecast, but then few things are, and Apple TV does also include a remote.
This big push is going to happen alongside the launch of the HBO streaming service in the US, which is to launch in April exclusively (to begin with) on Apple devices. That means iPads, iPhones and Apple TV.
Itāll cost you $14.99 and thereās no word of a UK or worldwide release yet. Why is it so much more expensive than the much more content-rich Netflix? HBO has complained for years that the low prices of things like Netflix mean theyād never side with one of the core streaming services. Theyād see it as a devaluing of their content.
Weāre not sure about splashing out that much cash for one networkās goodies, but, they certainly have some classic shows and plenty of people are head over heels for Game of Thrones. Theyāre sure to pick up a few subscribers. Or a few million, more like.
The MacBook has a new baby
Without any real warning, Apple just announced a totally new MacBook. āWe challenged ourselves to reinvent the notebook,ā said Tim Cook.
What the MacBook does is to really suck the most it can out of Intelās new Broadwell M architecture improvements and recent screen innovations to make an incredibly portable device.
Apple says itās the āworldās most energy efficient notebook.ā It also makes a MacBook Air look chunky, at just 13.1mm at its thickest point. Thatās 25% thinner than the Air.
The brains of the MacBook are 67% smaller too, letting Apple jam-pack the rest of the body with battery. Youāll get up to 10 hours off a charge even thought the thing doesnāt weigh all that much more than a first-gen iPad at 900g (2 pounds).
It has a Retina 2304 x 1440 pixel 12-inch screen too. Where you pay for all this tech is connectivity. Thereās just one USB-C and a headphone jack on the MacBook. The USB-C port can be used for everything from charging to outputting video to connecting a hard drive, but thereās only one of them.
Bear this in mind before you bin your MacBook Pro. Itās currently listed as ācoming soonā. Weāll be back with release date updates soon.
This is clearly just a first-gen go at a new laptop format too: the Air and Pro lines arenāt going anywhere just yet. And on that pointā¦
More MacBooks, new technology and Apple love
MacBook Air and Pro are getting a quiet upgrade
Donāt fancy the new MacBook? Some of the Pro and Air models have just been given a light spruce-up too.
The Air models and 13-inch MacBook Pro have been bumped up to Broadwell-generation processors. Until now theyāve been using Haswell CPUs: a bit slower, a bit less efficient. Along with this, you now get Thunderbolt 2.0, which is a whole mess faster, with up to 20 Gbps bandwidth.
The Pros and the 13-inch Airs also get much faster SSDs, completing the a trinity of pretty standard, pretty unimaginative, but also pretty important annual updates.
Lucky 13-inch MacBook Pros get one extra new feature. They have been given the new ForceTouch trackpad seen in the new MacBook design.
Apple just redesigned its keyboard and trackpad
Call us big old nerds if you like (well it is our job), but two of the most interesting things at the Apple Watch event were not to do with the Watch or how slim the new MacBook is, but its keyboard and trackpad.
Appleās engineering bods have redesigned both to try and get rid of two niggling problems with laptops: trackpad dead zones and wobbly keyboard keys. Now, you may not have thought of these as problems, but your current MacBook Air might just feel rubbish as a result after youāve tried the new MacBook.
Instead of having a āscissorā mechanism under each key, the new MacBook keyboard has a butterfly one. This makes the key more stable, and means the key moves straight down even when you apply pressure at its edge.
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Donāt care? Well how about the ForceTouch trackpad? Rather than using a hinged pad, this new one has four pressure sensitive pads at each end of it with the action relayed using āTapticā feedback motors.
Now, the current MacBooks using this sort of software-based feedback already, but this means you can use the entire TouchPad as a button, including the top inch that at present does zilch.
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Pressure sensitivity also allows for different button effects depending on how hard you press. Itās a trackpad gesture without, well, the gesture.
Still not impressed? How about the new keyboard backlight? It now uses separate LEDs for each key to get you more focused light. It also is part of the MacBookās super slim design style. If that doesnāt do the trick, we give up.
Apple is getting into medical research
As well as the bonus Watch details and the new MacBook, Apple just announced ResearchKit, a platform that can help patients log data about their conditions for research and monitoring. Itās open source too, which is about as un-Apple as moves get. Itās brazen altruism at itās finest, not that thisāll do anything to harm Appleās public image.
It has been working with a whole bunch of medical research institutions, including Oxford University, on creating apps that patients can use to log data. We heard about heart health monitoring, diabetes, asthma and breast cancer, but it was the Parkinsonās app that showed how itāll work directly.
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Itāll let patients perform the sort of status checks that you might normally go to a GP for. Your iPhoneās accelerometer/gyroscope will check your gait while you walk 20 steps, and monitor for tremors in your voice as you say āAhhhhhā into the mic. āWeāre incredibly confident that ResearchKit is going to transform medical research,ā Apple said during the talk.
Oh, and weāre promised āApple will not see your dataā. Although we await with dread the day ResearchKit gets hacked.
Apple has sold an awful lot of iPhones, again
As ever with an Apple event we got to hear a few facts and figures on top of the hardware and software bits. Apple has now sold 700,000,000 iPhones. Thatās roughly one for the each person on the Earth circa 1750, or 29 for every person living in Australia (well, according to the census records anyway).
Tim Cook boasted that this was a growth of 49 per cent on the year before.
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It also makes the 25 million lifetime sales of the Apple TV box look pretty puny, but perhaps thatāll change now that it costs just $69, Ā£59, AU$109.
Everyone loves CarPlay, sort of
For a while it seemed like the fuss around CarPlay had been and gone in an instant when it arrived a year ago, but apparently itās going great guns according to Tim Cook.
He boasted that āevery major car manufacturerā has signed up to the platform, and said weād see 40 new CarPlay models by the end of the year.
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While we imagine those āmajorā car brands may be heavily US-skewed, we hope to see Appleās connected platform start to drip down to base models. Not just for those who could splash out for a Apple Watch Edition on a whim. Weāll see, eh?
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