iPhone Event 2023

With the new iPhones coming out tomorrow, I thought I’d put down my thoughts on how last week’s announcement went.

This year’s iPhone event wasn’t as jam-packed as I have come to expect from previous years. While no-one expected to see devices beyond the iPhone, Watch and AirPods, it seemed to come with a lot of additional filler. Important filler, but filler none the less.

iPhones 15

This announcement can be really summed up as this: iPhone 14 Pro without the telephoto camera.

Yes, there are few other little additions that the current generation of iPhones doesn’t have, such as the 24 megapixel option on the main (48Mp) camera, but the iPhone 15 also lacks an always-on display. Give an inch, take an inch.

iPhones 15 Pro

These were the headline of the event.

New, lighter, titanium finish, bringing the weight closer in line with the aluminium chassis of the non-Pro models.
A faster A17 Pro that is setting the iPhone and future devices up as game consoles in your hand.
A new Action Button, that is similar in functionality to what is on the Apple Watch Ultra allowing for programmable response beyond using it as a mute switch.
USB-C

Oh, and they made the camera better. I swear these are more like camera that make calls than phones that can take photos now.

A17 Pro

This was a boost aimed at gaming rather than efficiency. In fact, the battery life for this phone is identical to last year’s. They had to go all the way back to the iPhone 12 Pro for their battery life comparison. The A17 makes the neural engine twice as fast and introduces hardware support for ray tracing, a feature nVidia introduced in their 20-series desktop GPUs, such as the 2080 RTX.

“iPhone 15 Pro has up to 6 more hours video playback than iPhone 12 Pro”

— www.apple.com

Titanium

Apple shaved 10% of the weight off the Pro phones, bringing them more in line with the weight of the regular aluminium chassis. Word on the street, and from Dr Drang, is that it actually feels 15% lighter due to its change in the “moment of inertia”.

Camera

The iPhone has made a number of quality-of-life improvements to their cameras. The headline feature is the new 5x zoom on the Pro Max, but they’ve also done a lot with the main camera as well. It remains a 48Mp sensor, but using machine jiggery-buggery, it is able to create 24Mp images without any loss in quality, but with the same low light performance of the 12Mp images.

Auto-portrait is the feature I’m most looking forward to. You no longer have to select Portrait as a setting, the iPhone will just analyse the image and determine if it’s a person/dog/cat and automatically take a portrait image. You can then select portrait blurring after the fact, and even the focus point! We are living in a world where we have our own lightfield cameras every where we go.

USB-C

Apple is finally moving away from the ageing Lightning standard. Don’t get me wrong, Lightning has been great for the last 11 years, and was way ahead of its time when it was introduced to replace the 30-pin connector while USB was supporting mini and micro standards. Remember those shitty connectors that you couldn’t tell which way it was supposed to insert? I hate them so much.

So now we can do away with one more connector. The speeds are faster, but who ever transfers files via cable unless you’re taking professional video? I did buy a little Samsung 256GB USB-C drive to plug into the bottom of it though. So that’ll be fun.

AirPods Pro 2(and a half?)

While not a huge announced change beyond the move from Lightning to USB-C charging, the AirPods Pro did receive a couple of little under-the-hood updates not in the Lightning version: an improved resistance to dust, and a low-latency (single digit milliseconds) higher bandwidth connection to the Vision Pro headset. This will allow for lossless high resolution audio between the two devices. The frustrating part is that they’re still called AirPods Pro 2, even though they’re not the same as the Lightning version.

Actually the full name is “AirPods Pro (2nd generation) with MagSafe Charging Case (USB‑C)”. Chinese SEO sellers on Amazon can take a lesson out of Apple’s Big Book On Naming Things.

Apple Watches

They, erm, have a faster chip, which they didn’t need.

They have a brighter screen, which they didn’t need.

They have a new pinch gesture that was already available as an accessibility option.

<Checks notes> Oh, and Siri is on-device now. So she’s twice as fast at not understanding what you’re saying.

Cool.

Apple’s Environmental Announcement from Saturday Night Live

Apple brought in Octavia Spence as Mother Nature to review Apple’s environmental initiatives.

I’m not sure what was going on here. It only went for ten minutes, but felt more like twenty. The message was important, but its place in the keynote (along with an very unfunny delivery) caused it to fall flat. I get it, if you’re going to point out the greenwashing of other large tech companies, satire is the best way to do it, but this whole sequence just felt misplaced. It had a couple of moments, like Tim Cook practicing his lines before Mother Nature’s arrival, but this combined with a very similar message from Lisa Jackson afterwards formally outlining Apple’s environmental initiatives felt onerous.

I’m glad Apple’s doing what it is for the environment, and setting itself strict timelines for its entire production pipeline (unlike the half-assed efforts of the Australian government), but the whole sequence didn’t sit right for me delivered in the way that it was.

Final Words

So what will I be getting tomorrow? Well I have a nice new iPhone 15 Pro in natural titanium finish on the way. I won’t be getting the iPods Pro 2, as I already have a pair that I charge almost exclusively via induction. I always planned on keeping my Apple Watch Ultra for at least two years as the upgrades have been so incremental, and my plans haven’t changed with this announcement.

So that’s it, just a new iPhone for the iDan.