Some interesting announcements today by Apple (and some not so interesting). After 40 minutes of absolutely nothing new, the announcements started: new iPods, new iPhone 4S and some interesting software pieces. I personally don’t care about iPods — Apple dominates that market and there’s nothing interesting happening in there. Apart from the iOS 5 update for the iPod Touch, which ships on October 12th, alongside iCloud, there isn’t much talk about, really. Let’s talk about the new iPhone 4S.
The big media was predicting an “iPhone 5” launch today, but I started doubting that a while back when I thought it would only make sense to increase the number if something really groundbreaking was going to show up. And new processor, camera and some software bits aren’t really that major. Apple would likely release an iPhone 5 only when it moved to a full 4G phone, and this isn’t the right time to do it.
iPhone 4S: new features
On the outside, the new iPhone 4S is just like the iPhone 4. The changes are inside:
- New A5 dual-core processor, just like in the iPad 2.
- New 8 MP camera, with backlit sensor and a 5-element f/2.4 lens.
- 1080p video recording.
- New radio design allows download rates up to 14.4 Mbps (HSDPA).
- Dual radio mode: CDMA and GSM.
- AirPlay display mirroring.
All changes are welcome, some are cool, but the really important one is the single-phone design for both CDMA and GSM networks. This will reduce significantly manufacturing costs for Apple, so they’ll probably achieve higher margins selling this new phone than they did with the iPhone 4.
iPhone 4S: Siri
The most important piece of information on all of the event was Siri. It’s a product from a company named likewise that Apple bought a while back which makes your iPhone 4S understand what you say and perform tasks. The best way to illustrate this is with a video, and Apple has one here.
Now, Siri is not new technology in essence. It was already available since 2010, but it seems Apple has improved it. It isn’t about saying pre-programmed phrases to the phone. Rather, it looks like it deals very nicely with parsing natural language (think of it as an IBM Watson, but in a much smaller scale). Of course, this requires a lot of processing, so it will only work on the iPhone 4S. Although this is recycling and repackaging of existing technology, it looks like Apple might have made it consumable, just like it did with iCloud. What some tech enthusiasts don’t get is that the vast majority of the population never configure or install new things on their devices. By getting these features into the OS, Apple reaches the vast majority of the market (literally, read about prices below).
The demo looked very good and worked flawlessly. If that works as promised, this could be the first usable “A.I.” in the market — because Vlingo isn’t, really. I wonder how long will it take for the “follow-the-leader” game start again.
Closing
And then there’s the price. As always, they haven’t changed: the 16GB iPhone 4S for $199 and 32GB for $299. But now they have a 64GB option for $399. And to add more spice into the mix, they’re releasing an 8GB iPhone 4 for $99 and the 8GB 3GS becomes free. All the prices are for a 2-year contract, of course. And in the U.S., Sprint is the 3rd carrier to offer the iPhone, joining Verizon and AT&T. I must say this free iPhone 3GS thing is a very good strategy to approach the entry level market. The next quarter results will show if this strategy worked or not.
The new iPhone 4S start shipping on October 14th in the U.S. and 6 more countries. 22 more countries join the party on the 28th, and 70 will get the new phone by the end of the year.
And that’s pretty much it. It was probably the dullest Apple event since 1997, but since my expectations were already low, it wasn’t that bad (apart from the 40 initial minutes). My next Apple post will probably be the iOS 5 review next week, so stay tuned!
* Edited to add an important paragraph about Siri. It seems to many people are confusing preset-based voice activation with natural language-parsing-based voice commands.