Apple September 2014 Event Review

Is Apple ready to dominate the next form factor too?

Apples tight secrecy about their new product launches is something that is well
known ,perhaps it is part of why the companys keynotes are the most exciting
and well presented in the Industry ,to developers ,consumers and the press alike.
As one would expect the September 9
th
Special Event was no different, held 3
months after the announcement of IOS 8 and OS X Yosemite it was an highly
anticipated day in the tech industry with the rumored iWatch set to debut, to see
the direction Apple takes which may very well set the tone for other Industry
Giants to follow along as they have done quite a few times in the past.

Ironically Apple chose the historic Flint Center for the performing Arts in
Cupertino to unveil what CEO Tim Cook labeled The Next chapter in the
companys journey in High Technology. It was in that spot that 30 years ago
Steve Jobs had unveiled the Macintosh which In turn led to a series of event
that helped shape computing for decades to come and in the very same spot he
marked his return to Apple by unveiling the IMac in 1998 which put Apple back on
the Map .


While WWDC is geared toward Developers the other event has always been
about product unveiling aimed mainly at the non-technical user-base.


IPhone 6 & IPhone 6+


As with the IPhone 5 Apple has chosen to introduce 2 variants of the
IPhone, 6 and the Lager 6+ with just subtle difference in hardware with the Screen
Size being the major differentiating factor

SPECIFICATIONS
Processor:

As expected both phones feature an A8 chip with 64bit architecture, and a M8 co-
processor. Said to offer approximately 25 percent higher speed (on paper) than
the iPhone 5s's A7 chip, and 50 percent greater graphics performance. This
Second Generation 64 bit Processor from apple packs about 2 Billion Transistors
on the chip compared to 1 Billion on the A7










Battery Life:
While Most Smartphones quickly hit the Power Wall where increasing
performance drastically hits Batter life ,Apple seems to have taken a much more
carefully crafted approach keeping power efficiency on par and even better in
some cases than the previous IPhone despite the performance improvements











Screen Size:

IPhone 6+ IPhone6 IPhone5 S IPhone5 C

This isnt the first time though that Apple has gone back on its own word, a year
ago lashing out against Samsung about how Anything bigger than 4 inches is
uncomfortable to our hands. Perhaps the pressure to compete in the largely
huge sized high-end smartphone market forced the decision that many users are
clearly unhappy with.
It remain to be seen how loyal IPhones users react to this after the phones hit the
market in many more countries.







Reachability & Side Swiping:
Unfortunately to help smaller hands and one handed use of the phone Apple
seems to have come up with a solution that is so very Un-Apple, a quick double
tap on the Home button pulls your content down so that you can access it with
just one hand, clearly there could have been as better fix to the issue than such
absurd methods.
Moving the lock screen button to the right was a smart move.
Swiping from the right and left edges moves between recent tabs in the browser
and has intuitive function on most major application. This Feature labelled
Sideswipe introduced in IOS 7 seems to have been done in anticipation of the
newer devices
All these moves are aimed at making the larger size easier to use with just one
hand




Resolution:



IPhone 5S IPhone 6 IPhone 6 +

The IPhone 6 and 6 + pack over a Million Pixels In a mobile screen , great but not
exactly unique in the industry with over a 2 dozen android phones already with
1080p Resolution .
The 6 has a little over 720p and the 6 + a full HD or 1080p resolution. (Named by
Apple as Retina HD of course).




Landscape:
Developers can take advantage of the new bigger screens by writing their
applications such that once switched to landscape mode , they can offer a
multi-tabbed selection on the left and the selected content on the right and the
Home Screen now has a Portrait mode too.
And X-Core now enable developers to more easily scale across devices with a new
Desktop Class Scaler tool.









Metal, is this the end of OpenGL?
When Apple decided to do away with flash support for the IPad way back in 2010
it sure was a bold move considering that flash is slowly getting obsolete ,though
many sites we love are built around flash .
In a bold move they announced their new Proprietary Graphics Library Metal in
WWDC 14 which is unveiled with the IPhone 6 and 6+,
Apple Claims Metal has a lesser Overhead than OpenGl and allows Developers to
get closer to the A8 chip than they would be able to with OpenGL.


One of DirectX's three co-creators, Alex St. John, explains why Apple's Metal is
such a blow to OpenGL, and what it means in the long run.

OpenGL drivers are just a grab bag of broken inconsistent functionality without
standard hardware definitions.

Apples pretty much responsible for defining OpenGL as it exists in the mobile space
today, thanks to the iPhone (and in part because Apple never developed its own DirectX-
like API).

But by supporting OpenGL, Apples made it easier for game developers to switch
between iOS and Android, thus a proprietary API like Metal is as much about insulating
Apple as it is getting developers closer to the hardware.

Todays GPUs are so fast theyre held back by lagging CPU technology, and bloated
legacy 3D APIs arent helping matters.

Cloud-based parallelism employed to render virtual worlds may be the future, allowing
processing leaps and bounds that wont occur as rapidly on the client side (indeed, weve
already seen demonstrations of games in which some of the visual assets are rendered on
distant servers, then laid into the client application in real time).

The future looks increasingly CUDA-like (giving developers direct access to a GPUs
parallelism). Heres what St.John said While the rest of the game community is trying
to adopt Mantle, DirectX 12 or Metal, Ill be re-learning my ray-tracing and quantum
physics because I believe those roads all ultimately lead to a more CUDA like API for
cloud based game design. It will just take the market a while to realize that.

It will be interesting to see how a new proprietary graphic library will influence mobile game
development with a lot of major Mobile Game vendors adopting metal already.





Apple Pay:
Apple plans to do way with credit cards with their new NFC-based payment
system Apple Pay, together with the Passbook Application and touch ID ,
facilitating instant ,secure ,hassle free payments.
The idea is simple, all your credit card accounts from ITunes can be used with
Touch ID as an authentication to quickly make payments at NFC based payment
terminals in major retail stores.
And Apple pay also extends to online retail where you can do away with the
hassle of filling out lengthy forms, a quick prompt is shown to you confirming your
Billing address etc. and using Touch ID to confirm or authenticate your payment
mobile payment is easier than ever.
Apple had introduced the Touch ID API in WWDC 14 allowing developers to
integrate touch ID as a means on authentication in their own applications.








Apple Pay could realistically be a huge business, but aadoption will depend on
sales of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, consumer willingness to change and retailer IT
infrastructure and as with any new payment system, measuring Apple Pays
success will take years and not months.












And finally using Jobs Classic One last thing strategy the Apple Watch



It comes in a range of colors, different wrist straps, editions, sizes and more.













As expected the Apple watch is not a standalone device but rather an accessory.



Using Infra-Red and visible light LEDs the watch senses your pulse.




To summarize its functionality The Apple Watch is a music player like an iPod, a
fitness tracker with heart-rate measurements, a communications device that will
send and receive messages, calls and audio recordings, and a handheld portal to
other apps, too. It also makes payments via Apple Pay. It can also control your
Apple TV and act as a remote for connected smart home devices
Not very exiting one may think, but Apples high design standards and uniqueness
have transformed these functions into what seems like an existing wearable
experience.
How? See below.




Specification:
The Apple watchs screen is a tough and durable sapphire crystal
Powered by a new S1 Processor

And a haptic feedback Engine provides gentle taps rather than the unnatural
vibrations to notify the wearer



Revolutionary Interface:
Thankfully Apple has avoided the mistake of cramming IOS into a tiny form
factor, the Apple Watch has a redesigned interface, the Crown or watch Dial serves
as a remarkable input device, serving as a button on clicking and a zoom wheel
too, the idea is to make it intuitive to use, rather than adding something to a watch,
its uses something that people already have seen on a watch , a very nice touch
indeed









A quick tap on the side button shows recently used stuff,





The watch faces can be customized easily to meet your tastes, the problem with wearing classical
watches is that you have to look at the same thing every day, digital technology promises a
viable alternative to the boredom of looking into the same watch face each time



.

And the minimalist smart interface design and Siri makes it possible to communicate on a small
device with ease.






Activity Application and Health
Combined with the IPhone it serves as a brilliant health kit device.
The Watch measures your heartbeat accurately and combined with GPS in your IPhone, the
Activity Application in the watch promises to be like your personnel Fitness Instructor



.


The IPhone 6s new Sensor titled Barometer along with the M8 Co-Processor measures
Altitude accurately in addition to distance


All these technologies work together to estimate not only the Quantity but the Quality of ones
physical Activity which makes it an apt health monitor tool.















Apple watch can be used to get certain fitness goals and receive virtual rewards when they are
accomplished encouraging people to practice a more non sedentary lifestyle


Technology Gets personnel:

The Watch as Jonathan Ive, (Senior Vice President of Design at Apple) sees it , is
very different from our mobile phones in that it is worn by people , it has to feel
closer to us , think of the other things you wear , a wrist band , a wedding ring etc. ,
these things arent utility items , we wear what we tend to relate to , wearables
ought to therefore define something very personnel to the heart , and Apple seems
to have played out with an amazing feature that lets you intimately communicate
to another person nearby and to even send your heartbeat across , this clearly is as
personal and transparent as communication technology gets.



Despite these powerful features and eye candy Apple watch has its downsides
The steep price tag as with other apple products,
Requires an IPhone 5 or above
It remains to be seen whether Apple can overthrow luxury watch makers
Finally many consumers will question the need for another device to their already
huge digital ecosystem or simply put, the real purpose or the problem that apple
watch solves is rather unclear and it will be interesting to see which market
category it will cater to








Links to the original keynote videos
Keynote
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD9ZQ9WylRM

Jonathan Ive narrating the Apple Watch Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcWNcQcgBIA