Apple debuted its latest iPhone on Tuesday, trumpeting the smartphone’s slimmest design yet. The device, named the iPhone Air, is one of several upgrades the company unveiled at its annual product showcase, promoted with the title “awe-dropping”. The event kicked off at 10am PT with the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, speaking in front of its Cupertino headquarters.
“Design is at the core of everything we do,” Cook said. The CEO touted the company’s thin iPhone, which sports a width of 5.6mm, as the “biggest leap ever” for the device, which first debuted in 2007. Cook said that Apple had set a “new standard” for the gadget industry back then and “today we’re raising the bar once again” with its iPhone 17 lineup.
The skinny phone is made of “spacecraft titanium”, has a 6.5in display and comes in a palette of colors that “evoke lightness”, the company says. Apple executives who spoke at Tuesday’s event promised that, despite the phone’s thinness, it will be durable and crack-resistant. They added that the phone also comes with the same fast-charging battery, wifi and features as its thicker phones.
The iPhone Air will retail for $999, with preorders starting on Friday in advance of general availability on 19 September. Apple’s iPhone 17 lineup also includes standard, Pro and Pro Max editions. The company announced refreshes of the other versions of the smartphone on Tuesday as well, focusing on their cameras, processing speeds and battery life. The front-facing cameras in the new iPhones will ship with a dual filming mode that will capture the view from both the front and rear-facing lenses. The iPhone lineup will also come with additional storage capacity.
Cook also introduced new versions of Apple’s signature white earphones and AppleWatch. The latest version of earphones, the AirPods Pro 3, comes with boosted noise cancellation and in five sizes of adjustable earpiece.
The biggest feature coming to the new AirPods is live translation, allowing wearers to hear a translated version of a conversation with a person speaking another language. The earbuds go on sale on 19 September and will run for $249. The update brings Apple in line with its competitor Google, which added the translation feature to its Pixel Buds headphones years ago.
Apple also revealed the Apple Watch series 11 with updated versions of the Apple Watch Ultra and the Apple Watch SE . The lineup of watches comes with new health features geared towards improving hypertension and sleep. The company said the former feature will notify wearers of possible hypertension, which Apple expects to do for at least 1 million people this year.
Looming over the new product announcements are Donald Trump’s tariffs, which threaten to disrupt the iPhone’s complex global supply chain with large price hikes, particularly the steep levy on China that is still under negotiation. Consumers may be forced to shoulder the burden of increased costs if they wish to upgrade. However, Cook has so far dodged doomsday predictions of a $2,000 iPhone, shifting a major portion of Apple’s production to India from China and flying hundreds of tonnes of iPhones into the US ahead of the tariffs’ effective date.
Investors and iPhone owners alike had been watching for mentions of Apple Intelligence, the suite of features meant to bring generative artificial intelligence to the iPhone that rolled out in October 2024 to mixed reception. Among last year’s announcements was a pledged overhaul of the virtual Siri that never materialized, a rare unfulfilled promise from Apple. During Tuesday’s event this week , Cook and others made scant mentions of the iPhone’s generative AI features.
In a July earnings call, Cook said the company was “making good progress on a more personalized Siri” and promised a release next year. Apple has also reportedly engaged in talks with Google about using the latter’s Gemini AI models to revamp Siri, according to Bloomberg, much like how Google provides the search engine for Safari.
Wall Street analysts have come to see Apple as lagging behind other Silicon Valley giants on artificial intelligence, particularly Google, which has already infused its flagship Pixel line of phones with features powered by AI.
Source: www.theguardian.com
