The Apple Beat: 7 Takeaways from Apple’s iPhone 7 launch event

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

We have new iPhone’s, shiny new Apple Watches and big decisions to face regarding the loss of the headphone jack, adopting AirPods or other Bluetooth headphones,and Mario is finally coming to iOS.

The two hour launch event was packed tight with announcements, updates and insights into Apple and its products. We know all the highlights by now, but here are 7 takeaways that I observed during the event in no particular order.

1) Apple has smartly cross promoted its products with its exclusive content- The intro to the keynote showed CEO Tim Cook gamely riffing with James Corden and Pharrell Williams (who teleported in and out of that Range Rover) to help promote the company’s *Carpool Karaoke”* exclusive show coming to AppleTV.

2) Inclusivity and diversity were palpable - Apple’s done a great job at allowing some of their female executives to take to the stage and this event was no different with Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of product management and marketing taking the stage plus other female presenters diversifying what has long been mostly presentations run by all white male executives.

I also noticed that many of the videos and new product images spanned people of various races and colours, this has been noticeable for some time now and is really expected from a global company that’s doing business around the world.

3) The 16GB storage tier is gone across the board - iPhones and iPads all now start at 32GB which is a more realistic starting point for most users. The only Apple product with 16GB or less right now is the iPod. 

4) Apple is the no.2 watchmaker behind Rolex - In less than 18 months since the Apple Watch has shipped, Apple has propelled itself as the no. 2 watchmaker in terms of revenue in 2015.

Cook didn’t disclose actual revenue figures but Rolex earned $4.5 billion in sales, so Apple must have made under that. Now, Rolex sells only premium watches and heirloom timepieces so Apple must have sold their Apple Watch at a considerable volume to have beaten out the rest of the players in the watch industry who are likely now having fits over Apple’s surging success.

5) The Camera Industry is on notice - iPhone 7 no longer competes with other smartphone cameras. While those devices might have wider aperture, more zoom, Carl Zeiss lenses and even similar dual-camera setups they don’t have the sheer image computing power or intelligence that the iPhone 7 boasts of, neither do they have the speed and most certainly the ease of use.

Guess what, the same can be said for most point-and-shoot, mirrorless and DSLR cameras in the market today. While pro shooters will stick to their larger bodies and expensive lenses, consumers have all the camera they need right in their pocket and it’s tough to beat what the iPhone 7 camera can reportedly accomplish.

iPhone 7’s  camera has a wider aperture, a six-element lens, a quad-LED, True Tone flash and a 12-megapixel high-speed sensor. It also has a special image signal processor that has twice the throughput of previous versions.

The new chip uses machine learning to detect objects and set exposure, focus, cinema-standard colour, and white balance within 25 milliseconds — 60 percent faster than before.

6) Apple’s figured out Apple Watch - When the Apple Watch was released, it was hard to pinpoint what it could do that the accompanying iPhone could not. A year later, the Apple Watch has been fine tuned as an activity and health tracker, water resistance and a GPS makes it competitive with competing fitness wearables and all the other conveniences of Apple Pay, notifications, Siri, calling and now even gaming make it a bona fide Apple platform.

Apple’s also jettisoned the ultra-luxe Watch Edition models and replaced them with a more (slightly) affordable Ceramic-made model which is all white, the way all Apple products once were. They’ve retained the Series 1 Watch and given it the faster dual-core processor making an attractive entry-level option and the Nike + and Hermes variants might speak to customers who aren’t into Apple per se but who’ll eat up anything branded by those two other companies.

7) iPad Pros, MacBooks and AppleTV devices are coming soon - Apple will likely have another event, possibly in mid-October to showcase the rest of their product portfolio. This makes sense after the hype for the new iPhone 7 has hit a peak throughout mid and late September when most orders would have been fulfilled. Apple didn’t mention any iPads, MacBooks, iMacs, Mac Pros, Mac minis or their AppleTV which are all expected to get upgrades.

 macOS Sierra begins to ship soon so it makes sense to have updated hardware that can showcase the latest, greatest features (Siri, Apple Pay), plus Apple likes to have a full portfolio of new products to sell going into the holiday buying season.