Apple works very hard to try and manage the massive preorder demand for day-one iPhone deliveries every year.1 Apple originally allowed members of the iPhone Upgrade Program customers to set their orders up in advance, but eventually allowed everyone to pre-configure their phones before the official order time, leaving only the matter of the financial transaction to that Friday. Pre-approvals from financial institutions were started earlier than the Friday to try and prevent the rejections that happen when servers start melting down.
And yet, there’s still always some drama.
Some people live for that adrenaline rush of not knowing what will go wrong. Whether or not their orders for themselves, and family members, will all make it across that finish line. Oh, the stories they can tell about how they had the perfect Apple Store app force-quit workflow! Those people are living on the chamfered edge.
There are also people who were never in that group, or phased out of that group. The urgency isn’t there. A desire for a new phone still exists, but it doesn’t have to be the first day. Those people still might want their phone before December, though.
Both groups have to contend with the decision between shipping and in-store pickup. Here, Apple hasn’t been able to make the strides that it has with the ordering process. When purchasing an iPhone, the options are to preorder for delivery within a certain estimated window, or in-store pickup on a certain day at an appointed time. Both can wreak havoc on a person’s schedule, and have actually made me put off ordering an iPhone (and other Apple hardware) before, because I just couldn’t figure out if I would be able to receive the item.
What’s in store for you?
Being forced to pick your delivery method in your initial order can also lead to some regrets, since availability changes over time. For example, you might initially see a late October delivery window, but with in-store pickup happening on day one. Easy choice, or so you think! But once that initial pool of store iPhones is depleted, you won’t be able to select in-store pickup at all until that local store gets more iPhones in stock.
Store appointment pickup times also seem to suffer from cascading delays, especially during the first launch weekend. Apple will tell you that you have a 15-minute appointment window, which is laughably precise given how busy the stores can be. Your pickup could be prompt, or it could take three hours, which is what happened to a friend of mine.2 You just have no idea if you’re going to get to the store and find an Apple employee that just hands you the phone and lets you leave, or if you’re going to wait in multiple lines and eventually check in at the door to the store only to be told that they’re running behind schedule.
However, if you wait until after launch because you want to reduce the chance of being stuck in the invisible DMV of an Apple Store’s overloaded appointment system, then you’ll be checking the inventory of every Apple Store near you every morning to see which models (and colors and storage options) have in-store pickup available. Then you’ll weigh that day’s schedule and guess how smoothly things will go. You might even avoid some stores based on past bad experiences. But you’ll never know until you get to the door and that Apple Store employee checks their iPad and reveals your fate.
Mail privilege
But Delivery is a bummer, too! Even though the majority of my time is spent at home, I truly have no ability to guarantee I will be able to reach my door for a delivery. When I worked in an office, there was still the off chance that the iPhone would be out for delivery on a Saturday. When I’ve needed to travel, I couldn’t redirect the order to a new location. And sometimes the delivery window slips back—or moves up—rendering your plan useless.
I wish Apple could offer something more like an Amazon Locker. Or at the very least, let customers ship to the store after the initial launch-palooza, and allow the customer to set an appointment time once the store had the device. Even Best Buy lets you do that! (But I don’t want to buy my iPhone from Best Buy. I want to buy my iPhone from Apple.)
Shipping to the store gives the safety and security of knowing that your phone is safe and nearby, but removes the pressure to bolt to the store when they’re going to be swamped.
Apple could even contact you if there was a delay with appointments at the store, so things could be rescheduled. And if a delivery window moves up, or slips back, Apple could ask the customer if they want to hold the original date… or change to in-store pick-up.
Many happy returns
The one really positive thing about this entire process is that trading in a device is mercifully easy to do. You can send your expensive, old iPhone into Apple for a undervalued discount on your new expensive iPhone without really feeling rushed, or that you’re putting your investment at great risk. I’ve heard a few stories of people having bad experiences with trade-ins, but not many.
The last time I did this, I had even missed the return window because of travel, and they… just sent a second return kit. No financial penalty incurred. Everything was smooth.
Getting a new iPhone causes me anxiety, when it should be a source of great joy. I’d love to see some creative retail solutions to smooth that out. Apple, please take my money—but don’t stress me out. I’ve got enough going on.
Alas, iPhone orders used to be at a reasonable time for people in California, but then the time was changed to be more friendly to lesser time zones. ↩
That’s way outside the norm, but my friend’s horror story will forever hang in the back of my mind. ↩
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
We break down the arrival of Mark Thompson as CNN’s new boss. Also, there’s a mega letters segment! [This episode was recorded September 7. See you in two weeks!]
Ah, September: the time of years when hot summer days turn to crisp autumn ones, leaves are burnished in shades of red and gold, and pumpkin spice begins its inexorable creep back into all our lives. But if you breathe deep you can just smell something else on the air: fresh Apple software updates.
Yes, Apple this week dropped a slew of revisions to almost all of its major platforms (sorry, macOS, you have to wait until next week). You’ve no doubt already read of contact posters, new widget interfaces, and FaceTime on the Apple TV, but I wanted to take a few moments to wax rhapsodic about a few of my favorite overlooked features—and, specifically, features that help you not overlook things.
Because this year’s updates all provide better ways to navigate the world around us, and even without a second-generation ultra wideband chip, you can still find exactly what you’re looking for.
GQ’s Robert Leedham talks to the teams at Apple and Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates about bringing Snoopy to life on watchOS 10. Most interesting to me was how the watch decides what animations to show:
That first meeting at the Charles M Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, was the Watch team’s first in-person meet-up after the pandemic, and what started as a two-hour drive north from Mountain View ultimately ended with plans for 148 unique animations that would be contextual depending on the time of day, local weather and activities. When you go for a swim, Snoopy dons his scuba gear and floats through your watch screen. When night arrives he’ll howl at the moon, and when you’re not up to much at all you can find him draped over his iconic red doghouse in a series of panels that are a direct lift from the comics. It all amounts to over 12 minutes of animation work that stemmed from an unexpectedly chaotic tête-à-tête.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the attention to detail that wins out here. I love the decisions about what activities are particularly Snoopy-like and what kind of nose to use for the beagle, which has evolved over the years.
Personally, I’ve been using the Snoopy watchface pretty much full time since installing watchOS 10 back in June and I continue to see new animations. They are, to a one, delightful, and greatly improve my day—I also appreciate that even though the watch face doesn’t have any complications, watchOS 10’s new widget stack makes me feel okay about foregoing them. As I mentioned in my first look at watchOS 10, my mom had a Snoopy watch when I was growing up, and continues to give me a solid nostalgia hit.
This week we’re wading into follow-up from last week’s Apple event. Then we say goodbye to beta season and list our favorite features of the newly shipped iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, and watchOS 10.
Sometimes I see that number following the latest release of iOS and do a double-take: really? It's been around that long? Seventeen iterations into the iPhone's software and you wouldn't think there'd be much left to do, but with this latest annual update to its flagship platform, Apple's packed in a surprising amount of features—and cleaned up some shortcomings of prior versions.
Perhaps the most significant indication of the iPhone's maturity is that it's now largely in sync with releases from its siblings: many features this time around are coming to all of Apple's devices, so we've broken out some of the common features in another piece.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of iPhone-specific innovations in iOS 17. On the contrary, not only has Apple spent a lot of time with a core piece of functionality that most people don't think about—yes, we're looking at you, Phone app—but it's also introduced a brand new way to use your smartphone.1
I used iOS 17 throughout the beta period, and now that it's out in the big wide world, it's time to take a more thorough look at what the latest improvement to Apple's software offers. So, without further ado, let's dive in.
Which, dare we hope, may even presage the existence of a new device for Apple. ↩
These days, many new iPadOS features have spent a year incubating on the iPhone. (Or, to put it less charitably, Apple builds for the iPhone first and makes iPads wait to get the good stuff.) This year is no different, as iPadOS 17 integrates the customized Lock Screen introduced last year on the iPhone but doesn’t get access to the customized contact cards introduced for iOS 17.
Still, iPad users will find several major improvements in this version, including the arrival of an app that has long been absent on the iPad. And perhaps the best news of all is that one of the banner features of iPadOS 16 has been dramatically improved this time around.
(And, of course, many of this year’s OS features are available not just on the iPad but also on the iPhone and Mac, so we’ve broken out some of the common features in another piece.)
In recent years, Apple has taken to making more of its new features available across all of its major operating systems. As a result, it’s made less sense for us to cover the same feature in multiple preview articles. Instead, we’ve rolled some of the key improvements you’ll see across macOS Sonoma, iOS 17, and iPadOS 17 into a single article—this one.
The widgets! They move!
Apple introduced its next-generation widgets three years ago in iOS 14. They were beautiful and interesting and helpful, but what they weren’t was interactive. The previous generation of widgets could have buttons that you could click or tap, and then things would happen!
Fortunately, Apple’s modern widgets have now gotten all touchy-feely. Not only can widgets have buttons, but they can change dynamically based on what buttons you’ve pressed. Imagine a photo widget that lets you cycle through different images or a dice-rolling widget that rolls the dice and gives you the result right in the widget! Yes, all this and more is possible as of the fall of 2023.
Now that you can place widgets in Notification Center and on the Desktop/Home Screen on all three of Apple’s major platforms, it’s going to be interesting to see where this goes. There’s an argument to be made that widgets are the simplest form of an app, and depending on what you want to do, you may find yourself using the widgets more than the apps themselves. (Of course, the widget is an extension of an app, so you really are using the app, sort of.)
But without getting too philosophical, interactive widgets could really be game changers. Having basic information available at a glance was great, but being able to perform tasks—whether it’s playing music, turning off lights, or checking off items on a to-do list—without launching apps is a big deal. Think more widgets on home screens, for starters.
While Apple has generated some interactive widgets on its own (though fewer than I had hoped, to be honest), I’ve seen many third-party app developers embrace this new format over the summer while the operating systems were in beta testing. It makes me optimistic that developers will take advantage of this new functionality to make some fantastic little mini-apps inside a widget frame. I can’t wait for this fall’s big app updates, though it will probably be painful to decide which widgets win the battle for my limited screen space.—Jason Snell
Happy new iPhones to all who celebrate! The rumor mill had some hits and misses as usual, but did anyone have “Tim Cook acting” on their bingo card? Hope you enjoyed the event because that’s probably it for the rest of the year.
Milling about
Another Apple iPhone introduction has come and gone, so let’s take a quick look at how the rumor mill did this time around.
Incorrect rumors included the company shipping color-coordinated cords with iPhone. It’s quite possible Apple decided that shipping cords in slightly different shades of gray for the iPhone Pro was a waste of time. Or, when it came time to put them in the boxes, they couldn’t tell natural from white, either. Anyway, good luck figuring out that ongoing tangled mess of white cords in your drawer. Another misinformed rumor was the Apple Watch Ultra shipping black Titanium. Not this time.
Still, some rumors turned out to be correct. FineWoven was the name for Apple’s new iPhone case material, the iPhone colors would be nothing to write home about (if smartphone colors were ever a thing that would cause you to pen a missive), all the devices would switch to USB-C, and the Pro models would feature an Action Button.
Still others get partial credit. The company also didn’t switch the name of the iPhone Pro Max to “iPhone Ultra”, although that rumor was walked back in the days leading up to the keynote and could happen next year.
While the iPhone Pro Max’s price didn’t increase, the price points changed. You can no longer get an iPhone Pro Max for $1099 because Apple doesn’t sell a 128GB model anymore, but the 256GB iPhone Pro Max is still the same $1199. In fact, not only is it not more expensive, it’s technically less expensive because of inflation (via Daring Fireball). The company just removed some of that pesky choice.
What can we learn from these hits and misses? Probably something, but if history is any lesson we will abjectly refuse to take any lesson from it at all.
No longer into leather
Apple spent much of Tuesday’s keynote patting itself on the back for its admittedly lengthy list of environmental accomplishments. The company even hired actress Octavia Spencer to appear as Mother Nature in a skit. Aren’t they cute?
Now, you may not have thought the skit was “appropriate” for the event or “funny” enough or “short” enough, but you have to admit that Tim Cook was completely believable as the CEO of the richest company ever. He’s quite the method actor. The guy toiled away as CEO of Apple for 12 years just to prepare for this role. That’s commitment.
Apple also announced that it would no longer sell leather accessories for its products. Cows are notoriously bad for the environment because of their need for large swaths of grassland and their, well, emissions. Cows are the worst, really, after humans. This move is kind of annoying, though, because we burger eaters could always say “Well, they’re going to kill the cows for leather anyway.” Leather wearers could likewise point to burger eaters. And, of course, those were always the same people. Rationalization is a hell of a drug.
I am sad to report, however, that Apple’s lengthy presentation on its sparkling environmental record went on for so long that the combined energy used to watch it put the company back in the red. Very unfortunate. Better luck next year, Apple.
Next season on “Apple”…
This week’s event was fun and all, but what has Apple done for us lately? The iPhone 15 is so earlier this week. Or 5 AM this morning. When will we get something new?!
Well, it might be a while before we get much. Current reports indicated that, contrary to prior rumors, Apple will not be shipping an M3-based MacBook Air this year.
While Mark Gurman said an October event was unlikely but that Apple could update the iPad via press release instead, Ming-Chi Kuo thinks new iPads won’t come until 2024. Sound of a balloon deflating if true. That would mean there’s no more new hardware for the rest of the year.
Perhaps this is the year I’ll finally learn how to hibernate.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
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It’s a shame they don’t show movies in the Steve Jobs Theater, or at least not ones that I’ve ever been invited to. It’s a fantastic venue with a staggeringly bright digital projection system, but the star of the show might be the sound system. Tuesday’s Apple presentation didn’t just look good from my seat a dozen rows back in the SJT; the bass in the music breaks rumbled my seat spectacularly.
Anyway, sound systems aside, here are my reactions to Tuesday’s big event:
Apple’s slow roll continues
It’s been 13 years since I published a John Gruber column in Macworld about Apple’s iterative approach to product design, but it holds true to this day. Everyone (understandably?) wants Apple to constantly blow minds with revelatory product introductions that will change our lives and the world as we know it. But the truth is, the revelations are few and far between.
Most of the time, Apple just iterates, pushing everything forward. Most people don’t buy every single new model of every Apple product, so they experience that iteration multiplied by two or three or four, many years of improvement dropped into a new phone all at once. (My wife is getting an iPhone 15 next week; she’s been using an iPhone XS for years, and it’ll be an enormous upgrade for her.)
When did the iPhone leap forward? The early years were heady, as early years in just about any product category can be, but after the groundbreaking release of the iPhone 6 in 2014, the only real quantum leap in iPhone tech was the iPhone X in 2017. It’s a slow roll. But roll it does, and today, the amazing cutting-edge iPhone X is so outmoded that it’s not eligible to be updated to iOS 17.
As I watched Apple roll out the iPhone 15, knowing that it was keeping most of its powder dry for the iPhone 15 Pro, I was struck by what a good deal the basic, standard, boring base-model iPhone is. Not only is it perhaps the most affordable iPhone in years, but it’s managed to accumulate a whole lot of great features that debuted in the high-end Pro phones, like the Dynamic Island and a 48MP camera sensor.
Almost every Apple event is greeted with raspberries from a portion of the audience that expects nothing less than revelation. But it’s not Apple’s job to excite that crowd. Its job is to keep pushing the iPhone forward so that everyone who’s finally ready to upgrade has several years of improvements to get excited about.
What’s in a chip name?
On podcasts for the last few weeks, I’ve been grousing about the word Bionic sticking around in Apple chip names. It’s a strange bit of branding in that it basically doesn’t mean anything, and yet Apple insisted on using it to dress up its march of A-something-teen processors. As a kid, I loved “The Bionic Woman” and “The Six Million Dollar Man,” but surely it was time to move on.
This year, Apple has done so—but with a twist. The new iPhone Pro chip is called, well, A17 Pro. Pro like the phone, but also Pro like M2 Pro, Apple’s higher-end Mac chip.
It’s given me all sorts of thoughts that another appearance of Bionic never would. Is this a case of Apple’s marketing just re-using a word it uses for devices and chips in order to simplify things?
I suppose it could be, but what happens next year? Will the base-model iPhone 16 be powered by an A17 Pro chip? (Apple’s marketing of the iPhone 15—”No wonder it started as a Pro chip”—suggests that’s a possibility.) But still, does it mean that every A-series chip into infinity will be “Pro”? Or does the existence of the A17 Pro chip imply that there will also be an A17 or A18 non-pro chip, maybe someday?
I don’t know what Apple will do, but surely it would be a cleaner approach going forward to have the iPhone 16 be powered by an A18 chip and the iPhone 16 Pro to be powered by the A18 Pro chip. Does Apple want to make two separate Phone-class chips, or is that a waste? Would the non-Pro chip power low-end iPhones and HomePods and Apple TVs and the like, while the Pro chip would power the iPhone Pro and some selection of iPads, maybe?
It’s a mystery. This all could have been avoided if Apple had opted for a different name, but this one is going to make me ponder the future spread of the Apple silicon product line for the next year.
What does the A17 Pro mean for the M3?
All signs point to the A17 Pro being the foundation of Apple’s M3 series of chips for the Mac, which may begin arriving this fall or early next year. All the chips in generations of Apple silicon have the same CPU, GPU, and other component designs, but the Mac versions are scaled up, and some other features are added in.
Based on Apple’s claims, the A17’s CPU is up to 10% faster, and the GPU is up to 20% faster—though the A17 Pro has one more GPU core than the A16 Bionic did. Apple also claims the Neural Engine is twice as fast.
It’s hard not to imagine how Apple’s next-generation GPU cores (including hardware-accelerated ray tracing) might manifest themselves in the next wave of Mac releases. Apple’s announcement of some console games coming to the iPhone for the first time with the iPhone 15 Pro makes me wonder about those games also coming to the iPad and Mac.
Did Apple build a better set of GPU cores so that the iPhone 15 Pro could run console games, or does the iPhone 15 Pro run console games because Apple built a better set of GPU cores? It may be that Apple’s focus on creating more graphics power for the Mac has ended up rubbing off on the iPhone a bit, too. Sure, there have always been game demos at iPhone events, but that’s because they’re a great way for Apple to brag about how fast their chips are. Is this more of the same, or is something more going on here? I don’t know.
What to do with 48 megapixels
Last year’s rollout of the 48-megapixel sensor in the iPhone 14 Pro was… restrained. The new sensor was impressive, but 48MP captures were limited to RAW format. Otherwise, the sensor was being used to provide better sampling and generated 12MP output. The only supported camera presets were the full-frame 1x mode and the 2x mode, which used the center of the sensor to generate a picture.
What a difference a year makes! Now Apple’s targeting 24MP for its regular output and has provided a bunch of presets between the 1x and 2x zooms that match equivalent focal lengths. And, of course, you can now opt to shoot a 48MP HEIF image, which is smaller than the enormous RAW file and perfectly suitable for a lot of uses.
But the photo story doesn’t end there. I was struck by how far Portrait Mode has come. When it was introduced, it was a very special feature that involved using two cameras to estimate depth information so that the camera software could digitally blur backgrounds to create a pleasing depth effect.
Today, not only is the iPhone Pro equipped with a LIDAR scanner and three cameras, but it’s also got so much horsepower that it can run a sophisticated machine-learning model designed to detect subjects and backgrounds. The result is the creation of depth maps for images with such confidence and speed that Apple’s now capturing depth data whenever it thinks it’s appropriate—meaning that if you shoot a picture but aren’t in Portrait Mode, well, you can just edit that photo later and blur the background anyway. (And on top of that, you will be able to change the focus point from one subject to another after the fact.)
It goes to show you that it’s not just about the sensor but the software and hardware built around it.
You’re my satellite
Last year, Apple (somewhat surprisingly) announced satellite-based communication features for the iPhone 14 series. The announcement included a carefully worded statement that the features were “free for two years” with the purchase of an iPhone, which set a ticking countdown clock that is—let me just check my watch—about halfway through.
This year, I wondered if we might get some clarity about what Apple’s long-term intentions are for satellite features. And… nope! The space can has been kicked down the space road. New iPhones will still come with two years of free satellite connectivity, which now includes a roadside assistance feature.
I wonder if this feature was always planned or if it’s the result of an influx of “my car broke down” messages to emergency providers who really don’t want to be dispatching tow trucks. Either way, Apple seems to have decided to route that information to a separate dispatcher. In the U.S., where the feature is rolling out first, it’s the American Automobile Association.
So what’s next? Surely, next year, Apple will need to explain what happens to iPhone 14 buyers who are coming to the end of their free two years. I’d imagine that they’ll be offered a monthly or annual service to continue unlimited access or, alternatively, a per-incident charge to their Apple-linked credit card. (The last thing you want to do if you’re Apple is tell someone, “We’d like to save your life, but you didn’t subscribe to iCloud Plus.”)
There’s a bandwidth issue here, too, as Apple’s satellite partner, Globalstar, needs to expand its capacity. It just signed a $64M deal with SpaceX to launch 17 more satellites in 2025, with Apple footing 95% of the bill and getting access to 85% of the capacity.
As Globalstar’s network expands its reach and breadth, I have to imagine that Apple will eventually open up the satellite feature for arbitrary text messaging, so you can send a status report to a loved one from a remote location that’s a bit more than the current pin drop in Find My. But that expansion might require waiting for the expanded network to arrive.
Also, keep in mind that since most iPhones are sold to people who have sat out an upgrade for more than a year, the number of phones with access to the Globalstar network will increase by quite a lot over the next few months. I assume they’re carefully managing the bandwidth, but that might be reason enough to keep the satellite features of the iPhone pretty strictly limited for now.
Easter basket
Finally, a few remaining short takes:
Reinforcement of Vision Pro. I think Apple felt it was important to keep Vision Pro in the public consciousness (or perhaps return it there?) at its most-watched media showcase of the year. Rather than just touching base, though, it went ahead and introduced a new feature that allows iPhones to capture stereo video through the two parallel cameras on the back of an iPhone held in horizontal orientation.
I imagine the stereo effect will be subtle since those lenses are a lot closer together than human eyes are, but I like the idea that Apple can use the popularity of the iPhone to boost the amount of content available for the Vision Pro.
I imagine any recent iPhone with those horizontal lenses will be able to capture stereo video, not just the iPhone 15. And I assume if you’re on a non-stereo device, you’ll be able to view those videos normally as a single capture.
A restrained Apple Watch Ultra update. There are no sales figures, obviously, but from what I can tell, the Apple Watch Ultra seems to have been received quite well. And yet this year’s Ultra 2 announcement was less than a lot of observers expected, most notably in the fact that it’s still only available in the one shade of titanium.
Let’s acknowledge that Apple’s titanium metallurgy department was kept pretty busy with the iPhone 15 Pro this cycle, so the Apple Watch Ultra was not a priority. Still, I might have been tempted by a black variation, and it wasn’t there. (Boo hoo, I know.)
I have another theory, though: Apple famously plans its hardware designs years in advance, way too early to materially react to success or failure in a single model year. So perhaps the plan for the Apple Watch Ultra was always restrained. Obviously, the arrival of a new System-in-Package for the Series 9 would require a commensurate update on the Ultra side, but leaving the exterior design and finish untouched was probably a prudent move.
Apple had other fish to fry this year, but I would expect the Apple Watch Ultra to spread its wings a bit more in terms of design and color in the coming years. In the meantime, I’m holding on to my black titanium Series 7.
Someone check on Apple’s Color Czar. I understand Apple leaning into the titanium finish of the iPhone 15 Pro and creating a series of subtle color variations using a vapor-deposition technique. The phones look great, and it’s not like pro-level iPhones have ever come in bright colors.
But I don’t know what Apple’s doing on the iPhone 15 side. The colors are incredibly pale. Anyone seeking a vibrant option is really out of luck. I do think the new ion-infusion technique they’re using in the glass looks great on the camera bump, and I admit that the camera bump is usually the only part of the phone that peeks through someone’s case. But still… I don’t think it’s too much to ask for at least one iPhone to have a brighter, more forward color.
Not this year. This year, you can have any color you want, as long as it’s either black or found in an easter basket.
What surprised us at Apple’s “Wonderlust” keynote, our thoughts on the new iPhone Action Button, what we wanted Apple to announce at its September event, and the retro Apple design elements we’d like to see again.
The Internet’s very own Dr. Drang tries to figure out how it is that Apple’s titanium phones feel significantly lighter than the steel ones, despite a small difference. And he uses actual formulas and whatnot:
Your ability to manipulate a phone is based primarily on its mass, but also on its moment of inertia. And since the reduction in mass when switching from stainless steel to titanium is occurring almost entirely at the perimeter of the phone, the moment of inertia should be reduced more than if the mass were reduced uniformly.
The math is a bit beyond me, but it’s an interesting look at why Apple’s numbers don’t necessarily tell the whole story. There’s also some good insight on not just the particular version of titanium being used, but also how exactly Apple is attaching it to the aluminum interiors.
Jason’s back from Cupertino and it’s time to break down everything he saw at the September 2023 Apple media event: The new titanium-framed iPhone 15 Pro, the pastel iPhone 15, the DoubleTap-enabled Apple Watch, and… green leaves for some but not others?
I attended the “Wonderlust” iPhone and Apple Watch event on Tuesday, and was able to spend some time with the new products in a demo area set up in the Steve Jobs Theater. Here are some photos and first impressions of the products.
