Apple’s Nice, Tight, and Light Event

Apple Watch and iPad put on a good show, but the undercard of Fitness+, Apple One, and the A14 chip may have upstaged…

We entered through a wormhole. We exited the same way. I’m not really sure what that was all about, but beyond that, today’s Apple event was pretty solid. A nice, tight one hour and two minutes. Two key products on which to focus, as expected: the Apple Watch and the iPad Air.

Though the most interesting elements may have been the tangential ones: Fitness+, Apple One, and the A14 chip. A few more thoughts on the event…

No one actually took the stage at the Steve Jobs Theater this time. A few of the presentations were in that building, but not in that room. Which would have been empty, of course. This was less of a faux keynote, and more of a product showcase, which was smart.

Apple Watch

The new Apple Watch, the Series 6, seems great. The blood oxygen reader is certainly timely in our current COVID predicament, but you could certainly argue that an air quality reader would be even more timely — at least on the west coast of the US, currently under a shroud of smoke. The new colors look nice. Blue is fun and would seem to point to a forthcoming blue iPhone.

Interesting that the ‘S6’ chip in the new Apple Watch is based on the A13 Bionic — aka, the year-old iPhone chip. That makes some sense, still, it’s sort of a weird thing to highlight.

A brighter screen is most welcomed. As are the new watch faces. I enjoyed the continued movement to make Alan Dye the new Jony Ive, at least when it comes to omniscient video narration. The Geoff McFetridge-designed faces are fun — and not the first time Apple has worked with him. As someone who may or may not change my watch face and straps for when Michigan is playing — which, sadly, is not this year #GoBlue — I appreciate the ability to more easily customize faces that match your team’s colors.

Jeff Williams — aka, the presumptive next Apple CEO-in-waiting — really, really wanted to make “there’s a watch face for that” happen. It did not.

The new bands look great as always but I’m a little concerned about the new non-adjustable loops. It’s actually quite a bit more work to figure out the right size — especially in a time when we’re not (for the most part) going into Apple Stores to try them on. Giving people a print out to figure out sizing seems like a lot to ask. Did simplicity breed complexity here?

The new family set-up for Apple Watch is a nice idea. But as Joanna Stern pointed out on Twitter, how on Earth did they do a rather involved family setting for Apple Watch ahead of doing a simple one for a shared family iPad?! Also, cellular only. Which makes some sense but is… pretty complex as well!

Then came the really confusing part: the Apple Watch SE. Yes, it’s the cheaper Apple Watch. But it’s not as cheap as the old Apple Watch, which is still on sale. And that’s also not last year’s Apple Watch, but rather the Apple Watch Series 3. And unlike with the iPhone line, the SE Apple Watch isn’t any smaller than the other versions. Again, it’s just cheaper than the new version, but not as cheap as the old. It’s faster than the old, but not as fast as the new.

No one is asking me — not Microsoft, and certainly not Apple — but if it were me, I would have made it much more simple: call the Apple Watch SE the ‘Apple Watch’ and call the Apple Watch Series 6 the ‘Apple Watch Pro’. If the naming scheme works for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone, it should work here too. You could even still sell the Apple Watch Series 3 at the lower price point, that’s just ‘last year’s Apple Watch’ (well, technically, oddly, a few years ago, but you get the picture). And you could still have ‘Edition’ models.

Next up Lisa Jackson took the stage to announce that Apple would not be including power bricks with the new Apple Watch models in the name of saving the environment. Which, look, I get. But it rings a little less true when the higher end models are still apparently going to have them. So Apple is going to save the world one power brick at a time, unless you’re wealthy and then you can do what you want. Anyway, this is all just setting the stage for Apple to pull the same move with the iPhone next month.

Fitness+

Not only does Jay Blahnik still work at Apple, he got a lot of screen time today to unveil a new service — Apple is really into services now, in case it’s not clear — Fitness+. It looks… pretty solid, actually. It’s entirely built around the Apple Watch and seamlessly interacts with videos you can play on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV. It’s a play Apple can uniquely make thanks to their hardware/software combinations here.

That said, the fact that it made Peloton’s stock drop today is a little comical. In a way, Peloton is even more of the Apple play, at least for cycling (and to a lesser extent, running) with a fully integrated solution. If Apple starts making a bike (and poaches Peloton’s celebrity instructors), then we can talk.

$9.99 a month seems fine. $79.99 a year seems more than fine, relatively speaking. And including the family at no extra charge is the standard Apple nice touch these days. Still, $9.99 is another $9.99 you’re sending to Apple. These services bills are starting to add up. So…

Apple One

No surprise to see an Apple bundle on this end, of course. But it was surprising to hear Apple frame iCloud storage, and not Apple Music, as the “linchpin” of the bundle. I mean, sure. We need it. Are we excited about it? Probably not. Still until we have the real linchpin, the iPhone, as a part of these bundles, this is fine.

For now, the bundle is (in seeming order of importance): iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV+, and Apple Arcade. This will cost you $14.95 (why $.95 and not Apple’s standard $.99? I have no idea). John Gruber was right about the price, and I was wrong.

Though I was also right. Because the “real” bundle is not $14.95 but $29.95 and that includes News+ and Fitness+. More importantly, it raises the iCloud allotment from 50GB (not enough — I’m already past 180GB) to 2TB. (And yes, there’s a family plan with 200GB of storage for $19.95, but that’s also not enough.) The real bundle is the big bundle: $30/month.

Spotify is not happy. Expect many more folks over the coming days to be unhappy about this bundle.

iPad

Tim Cook casually announced that Apple has sold over 500 million iPads (and is still somehow portrayed as a disappointment). They wasted no time making the case to sell more. The 8th generation iPad — Apple really needs to coordinate device branding strategy — is 2x faster the the most popular Windows machines, 3x faster than the most “popular” Android tablet, and 6x faster than the top Chromebooks, according to Apple.

In other words: are you listening school administrators? At $299 (the education edition price), they may be.

But the real star of the show was the new iPad Air. And that’s because it’s seemingly now faster than every other iPad — not to mention iPhone — including the Pro, because it’s the first Apple device with an A14 chip. And this chip does seem like a leap forward, as it’s the first 5 nanometer silicon.

Before we got to that, we got to see the new design which is indeed similar to the Pro design (and the rumored new iPhone design). But in colors! Fun. Also, a new edge-to-edge screen means TouchID had to move, so it’s now in the power button up top. Please, please, please do this on the next iPhone as well. Signed, every single person on Earth now forced to wear a mask.

That’s actually one of the few differences between the iPad Air and the aforementioned now slower iPad Pro: the Air doesn’t have Face ID at all. Nor does it have a “Pro Motion” display. If I’m being honest, I’m not sure how much either matters. I would absolutely get this Air over a Pro right now.

Of course, a new Pro will inevitably be coming soon (likely next Spring). And maybe that’s a good strategy to ‘tick’ and ‘tock’ these releases. Still, it’s really weird that the Air is now more pro in many ways than the Pro.

And cheaper, to boot.

The star of today’s show may have actually been Tim Millet, Apple’s VP of platform architecture, who walked everyone through the A14 chip. He claimed Apple was “challenging the laws of physics” with the 5nm process, where things are measured in atoms. 11.8 billion transistors here — apparently 40% more than the 7nm chips.

USB-C! And it works with the second generation Apple Pencil and even the new Magic Keyboard too. $599 seems like a great starting price for this. Though it’s not available until October — which is interesting because that’s also the rumored launch timeframe of the iPhone. Yet Apple still felt the need not to announce the iPhone here. Might we not see the iPhone until November? Late October now seems likely, at the very least.

iOS 14

Tomorrow. Nice.