New Apple Products Peak Interests

Erica Harrington, Staff Writer

All questions about Apple’s new products were answered at their Apple Event held last month. Below is a sneak peak into their upcoming releases.

The Apple Watch, OS 2, is now being designed to appeal to people in business. The company announced that they are working with Hermes to begin a collection of different styles of the watch, which will have a traditional Hermes face. Also, new face colors will include silver, space black, gold, rose gold and yellow gold anodized aluminum finishes with a variation of band colors.

The watch has new software options including Time Transit, a time lapse of any preset location, or Third Party Complication updates from the apps you love.

As far as iPads, there are a lot of additions to the franchise, including two new devices, the iPad Mini 4 and the iPad Pro. Cook said at the conference, iPad Pro is the clearest expression of their vision of the future of personal computer. The screen is 12.9 inches diagonally and is the biggest screen ever built into an iOS device. It’s described as a magical piece of glass that buyers can hold in their hands. This will be the first iOS device to have four speakers, designed to adjust to the way the device is being held. The starting price of the Pro is $800.

The iPad Pro also offers two accessories, the Smart Keyboard and the Apple Pencil.

The Smart Keyboard is designed for people that prefer a physical keyboard to the soft keyboard automatically installed into all Apple devices. It’s designed specifically for iPad Pro and iOS9 automatically adjusts to the addition of the Keyboard. It goes on sale in November for $169.

The Apple Pencil appears as a simple stylus, but Chief Design Officer Jony Ive lets us know that it is really an intricate piece of hardware. The Pencil’s actions will directly correlate to it’s use on the Pro. The Pencil has a built in lightning connector that allows the pencil to charge by plugging it directly into the iPad. It will be released in November for $100.

The iPad Mini 4 was barely spoken of but is said to posses the same power and performance of the iPad Air 2 but in a smaller enclosure. It will be sold for $400.

The Apple TV is also being improved upon. The main way is through the remote, which is built on a modern operating system and communicates through Bluetooth, eliminating the need to point the remote at the TV. The remote has a glass touch surface that makes it both fluid and precise to move around and allows you to easily glide across movies and shows. The remote can last up to three months per charge, and when you need to, there’s a lightning connector on the bottom.

In the demo by Folse, she accessed the App Store, photos and Apple Music. Because the full App Store is available, games can also be played on the TV, with the remote, right in your living room. Games such as Flappy Bird and the new Guitar Hero will also be available.

With the Siri button, on the remote you can command him or her of almost anything, demonstrated by Folse. She asked Siri to find an episode of Modern Family with a guest appearance of her favorite actor. If you find that you missed something that was said you can say, “What did (s)he say?” and Siri will rewind 15 seconds and temporarily turn on subtitles.

Siri can also filter search results by genre, cast, director and age rating. The Apple TV, available for purchase in late October, will come in two storage options, 32 GBs of flash storage for $150 or 64 GBs of flash storage for $200. It will be.

The most anticipated announcement was that the iPhone 6s will have a 4.7 inch Retina display, while the 6s Plus will have a 5.5 inch Retina display. The phones will come in silver, space gray, gold and the brand new rose gold. The Touch ID scanner has been upgraded. It now has a 12 megapixel iSight camera and has 50 percent more megapixels, and due to this increase in pixels, the camera now autofocuses. Apple will also release new charging docks in the iPhone finishes. The devices are ready to order now. The 6s will start at $200 and the 6s Plus will start at $300.

The new iPhone has more changes on the inside than the outside. Three major software updates include 3D Touch, 4K Video and Live Photos. The 3D Touch allows the phone to recognize force and give you short cuts on the home screen, such as holding down the camera application to give you a drop down menu that can allow you to go straight to whichever side of the camera needed. The 3D Touch also works within applications themselves. The 4K Video is another update to the camera. The video offers a higher degree of detail because there are 8 million megapixels in every frame. Live Photos will allow moving pictures to also include sound. There’s an indicator at the top of the screen that lets you know they will be live, it’s on by default. Facebook will also begin supporting Live Photos within the app.