That like-new iPhone 5s in your pocket? Obsolete. How about that smartwatch or fitness band you’ve been carting around on your wrist for the past six months? Old news. If you whip out your leather wallet and try to pay with a rectangle of plastic — at least at the corporate stores Apple works with — chances are you’ll be looked at like an old fogey.
Apple has, once again, thoroughly owned the mobile category, expanding the ways we communicate, live and transact business in our daily lives.
This domination of the smartphone, smartwatch and mobile payment categories, as revealed in today’s big iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event, has us ready to hand over another load of cash to the Apple mothership, and gladly. As usual, there were some surprises — some awesome and some not so much — but here are the main takeaways.
iPhone 6 is here and it’s huge: Apple’s new flagship smartphone will come in two sizes, huge (4.7 inch) and huger (5.5 inch). Each will boast a curved-bevel display that packs in a whopping 185 percent more pixels on the larger screen of the iPhone 6 Plus.
Photos are worth even more words: The new iPhone camera gets a new 8MP iSight camera with f/2.2 aperture and all-new sensor featuring “focus pixels,” plus phase detection autofocus, which makes it twice as fast as before. You’ll get a new selfie burst mode from the similarly equipped front camera, too, so you can keep taking those awesome pics, kids. Oh, and panoramas will now stretch out to a whopping 43 megapixels, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Quit calling it the iWatch: After months of rumors about the iWatch, we now know the truth: It’s called the Apple Watch, and it comes in three distinct lines (and six different types of interchangeable straps). With innovative hardware, an intuitive user interface and a WatchKit platform for developers to work their magic, people will be lining up next spring when the $349 wearable goes on sale.
Android Wear is now Android What?: Same goes for the Pebble smartwatch, the Fitbit and any other fitness band like Jawbone’s Up. Apple’s long-rumored wearable does pretty much all of the same things as those doomed devices, only better and connected to the iPhone in a very real way. So what if it doesn’t work with Android? This is the smartwatch you’ve been waiting for, says Apple, and it’s going to sell like proverbial hotcakes. Even that gold one.
Your credit card is a waste of space: Instead of pulling out the plastic to buy all your new Apple gear, you’ll just flash your iPhone. Or your Apple Watch, once you get that sucker neatly wrapped around your wrist. For its new mobile payments platform Apple Pay, the company struck deals with big banking institutions that control more than 80 percent of credit card purchases in the United States so you won’t ever need to swipe a card again.
Apple reveals its new crown jewel: The Digital Crown — the fancy name for the scroll-wheel on the Apple Watch that looks like a winder on a traditional timepiece — is a totally new interface that looks completely intuitive. You simply twist it to zoom into a picture or scroll through a list. It’s basically a mouse that makes the small screen on the Apple Watch much more usable. This is the kind of hardware genius at which Apple excels.
Horology is a thing: In his slightly long-winded and oh-so-restrained video spot extolling the virtues of the Apple Watch, Jony Ive went on and on about consulting with horologists in the quest to make the ultimate timepiece. Honestly, horologists? That’s an awfully fancy word for time nerds or watch experts — and it sounds like something completely different. Consider us schooled.
Things are about to get deep: Apple’s Multi-Touch interface apparently wasn’t enough for the Apple Watch. Cupertino’s UI wizards came up with a Taptic Engine that can distinguish when a user presses the watch’s flexible sapphire screen in addition to recognizing the typical touchscreen tap. Paired with the new S1 chip, this opens up a whole new world of “contextually specific controls” for the Apple Watch, according to Tim Cook. If it all didn’t look so damned intuitive, your fingers would get very confused.
Apple shoots the moon (and beyond): During one of today’s big demos onstage, Kevin Lynch, late of Adobe, showed off some of the Apple Watch’s key features with an astronomy app for the diminutive screen, using the Digital Crown to zoom to the moon and back, and even out to see the whole solar system. The astronomy watch face is just one of many that will be available for users so they can customize their Apple Watches. This is pretty stuff.
U2 is the boringest: U2 is like the Whole Foods of the rock world — super-well-known for humanist philosophies, yet somehow strangely irrelevant in our current culture, more a brand than an actual thing. They might have jived it up with Tim Cook onstage before announcing what the Apple CEO called “the largest album release of all time,” but the single the band played will fit right in at a Starbucks, no matter how many Ramones references Bono squeezed in. Paying for records? Totally obsolete.
Additional reporting by Lewis Wallace.
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
25 responses to “Apple makes everything you own obsolete … again”
iPhone 5s is far from obsolete. It still does everything it did this morning. (And it will work with the Apple Watch.)
and iOS 8 and Yosemite. But I guess they are getting at the higher specs and how it’s not the best now.
“Apple makes everything you own obsolete … again”
Hmmm. I think your information must have come from some Android site (ahem). According to the Apple announcement *I* watched, the 5, 5c and 5s work with the AppleWatch, and everything after and including the 4s works with iOS 8.
But hey, bash on if you wish.
I wish I was so hip I could dismiss U2 as irrelevant. Tech hipster gurus must know all the “cool” music….yawn!
groundbreaking stuff…
http://t.co/STHmueJNZg
That is the iPhone 5S
Atleast check before you post wrong stuff :-/
Yikes! You’re right. My bad. Taken from the Apple website last night..
http://www.apple.com/iphone-6/display/
In fairness there’s a vanishingly small difference in it but I will update.
Thanks. Have fixed the link. Hopefully Cultofmac will process update.
I also believe that is the original iPhone.
Still trying to understand your claim here. Are you pointing out that the design has changed minimally?
There’s nothing wrong with the design. It has certainly changed over the years. There’s nothing wrong with the way it is.
Primarily that the design seems to be stuck in a time warp, so I don’t get why this crazy hype and hysteria that seems to accompany every new iPhone release? And why the ridiculous price tag for the minor incremental changes in each version? Off contract it’s small fortune.
Honestly, it’s like the Emporer’s new clothes. They really could rerelease an older model as a ‘Vintage Jobs Tribute’ and a large portion of the fan base would go wild.
On seeing the 6 my immediate thoughts (obviously as someone who isn’t a fan) was that this one even seems to be going backwards by moving back to the rounded edge design.
The primary, icon-based interface is also stuck in time – Tuesday 9th 941 literally.
So my point is that every tiny change is greeted with hysteria. And every lack of change, or even change back to the original reference design is greeted with hysteria. The hysteria seems to be to be able to justify the price tag.
And the pompous justification each time about making something even more perfect does my head in. The square edges of the 4 were justified. Now the round edges again. The small screen was perfect. Now the big screen is even more perfect.
Clearly I don’t buy any of this. I just see the king standing there in his new and so very expensive birthday suit.
I don’t blame Fapple. I would be milking it too if I could get away with it.
(iPhone 3 image from a Bing web search)
Except they didn’t really. Your fancy new Apple Watch has the same fundamental flaw as every other smart watch: it still requires your phone to work fully, therefore your iPhone is essential rather than obsolete.
As a European (UK) citizen I can’t see any reason why Apple Pay would be any more successful than any of the other mobile payment solutions that have been rolled out (presuming it gets launched here at all). Outside of public transportation mobile/contactless payments generally seem to be a solution looking for a problem. Despite widespread UK card distribution and retailer adoption the technology just doesn’t get used that much at the checkout in my experience (large city with big student contingent). Transaction volume statistics confirm this, 157m contactless out of 10bn overall (http://www.theukcardsassociation.org.uk/news/UKPlasticCards2013.asp). Thanks to dodgy terminals, NFC card clash and poorly trained operators it’s still usually quicker to pay cash for small transaction values (which is the problem contactless is supposed to address). For larger payments it is no quicker than simply using chip and PIN, the “slow” part of the process is actually the bank communication to authorise the transaction, Apple Pay won’t change that. It will be interesting to see what kind of transaction cut Apple take as well, UK retailers often don’t take American Express because of its higher transaction charge.
Regarding your comment about Apple Watch—its not a flaw—its designed to work with the iPhone. They made it like that. That’s how its supposed to work.
I have used contactless payments since it came out in the UK, and it has always worked. I think it is great technology, fast and convenient, and an advancement on old, conventional methods of payment. I live in London and many people use this technology and prefer it for its convenience.
I am fully aware that the Apple Watch is intentionally designed to be paired with the iPhone. I consider it to be a flaw/barrier to massive adoption because people have a finite amount of money to spend and the combined cost of iPhone and Apple Watch is phrohibitive. I concede that we really need to see much more information on pricing/specification from Apple before we can make full judgements. At the moment though when you get past the marketing guff I can’t see why this will be deemed to be any more useful/”must have” by consumers than the failed Samsung or Moto equivalents. The use case still isn’t really clear/still feels niche.
I’m sure contactless does get used in London and elsewhere, the figures show that it accounts for approx 1.5% of transactions after all. My point is: why isn’t it used more? It should be. The barriers to using the contactless card are lower than those for phone pay solutions but we still don’t use it much. There are 33m contactless cards in circulation in the UK, it will be years before Apple sell that many compatible devices here. I’m interested to see what effect it has on adoption. I hope it is positive but I think the low use comes down to psychological factors/tradition/habit and these behaviours are much harder to change.
I guess you didn’t watch the whole thing on Apple Pay. The main gamechanger that Apple Pay brings is the security, not just paying with a watch swipe. Using the android versions, the merchant still has your info stored in their systems, if you haven’t heard, a lot of people got their card info compromised in hacker attacks.
Encrypting everything on the phone’s secure element, and sending a code that only means something to a bank and useless to a hacker is the biggest thing going for the system to differentiate it from just using a card.
Lastly, here in the US, when you use a credit card to purchase a big item, the cashier is required to ask you for credit card and ID. So if the cashier is dishonest, they have your name, access to your card front and back. If I were that cashier, I’d have my phone camera pointing up recording, and when I check your card and ID, I’d make sure it passes over my camera, and voila, I have everything I need to take money from you.
I did watch the full thing, they are solutions to mostly American problems, so I didn’t comment on them. I’m not convinced it really increases security for Europeans because the cashier never touches our cards. We insert them ourselves and have to enter a PIN to ID. In terms of hacking I’m not 100% sure how the system converts the phone token back to your credit card account but it seems like it just moves the attack vector from the retailer to Apple. Any retailer that was collecting your address would still presumably need your address to fulfil your order so you would still be open to attacks on retailer systems to an extent.
Samsung does this every 6-8 months though…
I really hope this article was meant to be funny…I love my iMac and Macbook…but this was, at best, Apple playing catch up with the rest of the mobile world.
OMFG, a scroll-wheel? Wow, that’s unbelievable. Truly the work of geniuses!
Have you designed anything and making loads of money from it?
What a dumb article. Apple is far from dominant in the mobile world. This is pure fanboi drivel.
This kind of overtly sycophantic article gives tech journalism a bad name. Apple have great design and marketing teams and create a celebratory atmosphere of self-congratulation at their product launches and for this I have nothing but admiration.
The problem is so called journalism such as this. Other than using a provocative tagline to generate hits and therefore advertising revenue is this article adding any value to anyone?
This is getting blown wayyyy out of proportion…
1st off, the iPhone 5S still has quite a few years ahead of itself before it’s deemed “obsolete.” The only thing it’s NOT compatible with is Apple Pay. People will live. And if anything, if Apple is still selling it, then it’s DEFINITELY not obsolete in their eyes.
2nd thing, …I actually forget my second point because I just lost a LOT of respect for this website by reading the rest of the article. Why the hell are you bashing this so hard? What fire ant crawled up your ass today? I don’t see anything positive in this article. Nothing was deemed outdated, and the event was largely accepted on a positive note.
What the hell is your problem, “Rob LeFebvre” ? You look like a total asshole posting this article. I mean really, who complains about a free album?
Actually I remember my 2nd point now. One of Apple’s passions is music. the iPod is one of their biggest game changers! What’s wrong with a little music at the end? You sound like some 14 year old “HxC” child who thinks just because you’re not into the band, nobody is or should be.
And another thing,
From your article:
“Honestly, horologists? That’s an awfully fancy word for time nerds or watch experts — and it sounds like something completely different. Consider us schooled.”
Horology is the art or science of measuring time. Just because your dumb ass has never heard the word before, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Consider YOURSELF schooled. I knew the word. Speak for yourself. In fact, go BACK to school and learn what it means to use proper grammar. Maybe you’ll write better unbiased articles.
I’m very disappointed that this article would even be on CULT OF MAC….and I’m going to stop myself from continuing this rant.
So unless you’re trying to be sarcastic or funny (you’re failing)…
Get the hell out of here.
Do you need some kind of title for Journalism? Or can any 14 year old know it all kid get a job posting his or her opinion? This is just embarrassing. I mean really. I’m not a journalist, but I know one thing is for certain: you convey the information from the event in an unbiased, professional and informing manner. And you definitely do NOT riddle it with your own opinion. This is atrocious and very unprofessional.
EDIT: Oh, wait. I just remembered something else that I meant to throw in here. Another reason why this article just makes you look stupid. For the past seven, count them. SEVEN. 7. Years, Apple has updated the iPhone each and every year. Everyone is aware of this, everyone expects this. Anyone who is actually reading this article should know this. Why would you make it seem like it’s a surprise that a new phone came out? Most people hate that Apple only updates it once a year, and here you are making an article talking about how last year’s phone is already “outdated” when this has been the deal for years now?
The 6/6phablet is too big. I used a 4.7inch phone before and while it was ok, the 4″ on my 5s is the sweet spot for one handed use. Reachability is ok i think but nothing beats the real “reach anywhere one-handed use” thing. Hope they make a 4″ 6s and even if my contract ends this december. 2014, i’ll be waiting for the 6s.
hm so does my iphone 4 even exist to them anymore ?!