Gather Round Event: Quick Thoughts

Today, Apple had their annual iPhone announcement event. Pretty much everything was leaked this morning or in the weeks prior to today, but let's go over it anyway. One major difference to this year's rumors than previous rumors was the lack of iPhone rumors. We pretty much knew there would be three models, one an 6.1-inch LCD in multiple colors and the other two being different sized OLED models. We also knew their names, the iPhone XS, the iPhone XS Max, and the iPhone XR (Marketing team really burned the midnight oil on these ones). Other than that, we didn't know much. And that's because there was nothing else to say. There is next to nothing new with the iPhones other than "this is faster" and "this is 50% better" or "this lasts 30 minutes longer than the iPhone X." The only purpose of this generation of iPhone is to make a bigger iPhone X and a cheaper iPhone X, the two biggest requests since the iPhone X came out. You can hear the nervousness in the speakers' voices, because they were stretching an event that should have been 45 minutes tops into 2 hours. "Look at this photo! Doesn't it look great?" Like, yeah, but you said that last year. There's nothing groundbreaking. "We have three developers to lengthen the show!" "I'd like to invite up John Appleseed to reiterate exactly what I just said." It was painfully slow at times. And I know this is an "S" update, but even the iPhone 6s had Live Photos and 3D Touch. The iPhone 5s had Touch ID. All models still start at 64 GB, which seemed weird for me. I feel like the higher end models should have started at 128 GB, especially with the decline in SSD prices in the past few months. By far, the most surprising part of the entire keynote was Todd Howard coming on stage, even if what he was showing off wasn't groundbreaking either.

Let's talk about the Apple Watch. This was definitely the highlight of the show, even if we knew about it due to leaks. That one leak was probably the best we've seen it and the rest of the images we saw didn't really do it justice, so I'll have to see it in person when it comes out. I am long overdue for an upgrade from my Apple Watch Series 0 and this is an Apple Watch worthy to upgrade to. That ECG/EKG (they're the same thing) looks really cool. The focus on health is a huge selling point. You could tell the speakers were catering this model towards Series 0 and Series 1 owners, because they listed every feature to come out since Series 1 at the end of the Apple Watch section. It would've been nice if cellular came standard on the Series 4, but I can't really complain about that. The option of cellular just confuses me, because that was what defined Series 3, even though it was optional there too. The Series 4 is definitely on the pricier side, so when you throw in all of these optional features, it feels like you're at a car dealer.

We got nothing on AirPower, which we now have reason to believe has been delayed further. We literally only got updates to the iPhone and Apple Watch. Some minor news includes the iPhone X, the iPhone SE, the iPhone 6s, and the Apple Watch Series 1 being discontinued.