Apple Event – October 2020 summary

Today’s apple event was pretty clean and simple, with a few key items.  Mostly phone and sound updates – but here’s the stuff I felt matters within the context of what Apple announced.
HomePod Mini –
  1. Smaller speaker with same great sound the HomePod is known for – at $100 price tag.
    1. Main benefit here is the price tag.  Apple is aggressively hitting the smart speaker market with this and positioning it to have multiple units in a home…
  2. Introduced Intercom – ability to use all apple devices -in particular with HomePod and HomeKit – as an intercom to announce and talk with family throughout the house.  If used properly this will have large ramifications and use-cases of how home structure and family habits behave.
ALL PHONES this year –
5G – apple made a big hoopla to point out their collaborations with verizon to leverage 5G in all their 2020 phones.  This stands out as it now is the standard. Even the budget options have 5G.
  1. Also of note is the use case of 5g being dynamically turned on and off depending on data needs to conserve battery (5g uses massive amounts of battery).
  2. This will be interesting to see how the toggle works with input lag/latency if gaming…..
  3. along with the 5G… comes MUCH better improved antennae for 4G.  The bandwidth theoretical max is now 2gb…. up from 1gb before.  Not to mention increased processing speeds.  All in all – this should be a good improvement for any cellular user.
XDR OLED Screens for all – high contrast bright screens.  These are phenomenal screens and have excellent color rendition and HDR capabilities.  Great for movies and media content.  Not the best in the industry…. but VERY close.
Magnetic charging back – now all the phones have a magnetic coil on the back to help align with chargers (likely gonna have proprietary Qi chargers) … so that when you place the phone down… it sticks and gravitates to the perfect charging spot so you don’t have to fumble around.  Simple cheap and elegant design idea.  Will also be used with cases and accessories (like wallet and credit card holders) to stick to back without those ugly giant stick on things you have to pry off when you sell your phone.
A14 chip – newer faster more powerful chip. Advancements in AR and computational photography as well as leveraged for HDR processing of Dolby Vision recordings (see pro model below).  Big point was made about 11 trillion computations per second.  That’s hitting Xbox one X and PS5 processing power (they are around 12 teraflops).  That’s console level processing power… in your pocket.  For comparison – the Nintendo switch is 1 TFlop…. yes it’s different purpose.  But should give you an idea as Apple IS repeatedly saying this is a gaming machine)
League of Legends – the game is coming to iOS.  The main point of this is a dig at Epic games.  Riot games being an esports competitor to fortnite and the recent legal drama between the two companies… it’s interesting apple is partnering with Riot…. who’s had their own legal issues…. to leverage this … older… game… that’s still HEAVILY the bread and butter of esports.  Riot has many properties… and this partnership could be galvanizing the gaming industry for leverage against EPIC.
Ceramic shield/crystal displays – basically they grow ceramic crystals in a snowflake shape to make the screen.  We’ll have to see how great it is… but the key benefit is that If it’s durable and offers good clarity / image… this will be CHEAP to manufacture.  Growing the crystals by piecemeal… could yield higher “quality” glass rather than having to make them one giant motherglass pane at a time and hoping it’s good quality.  This could offer cost reductions while increasing performance.  Could then change how all screens are made in the industry.
iPhone 12 and mini –
  1. New base model.  A14 chip with GPU.  Typical faster performance
  2. the mini is interesting – new size.  Small as the original iPhone 8 regular smaller phones or the old IPhone SE… but with a larger full screen (5.4 inches).  Gets same specs and features as the larger boys.
  3. look at these if just wanting to upgrade and don’t need all the fancy features of the pro model (which I suspect are just software restricted)
iPhone 12 pro –
  1. LIDAR – the new LIDAR integration was shown to be used for :
    1. pitch black dark room accurate focus of objects.  Friggin amazing
    2. ability to measure a room and objects with just a photo….. it was used by hospitals to quickly plan and design ER rooms.
    3. This will have large impacts to AR industry.  Being able to accurately measure items within a millimeter by just pointing phone at objects is disruptive
  2. HDR DOLBY recording and editing native – apple was touting the HDR and camera capabilities now being able to record and edit 4K HDR in DOlby vision … live… on the fly .  While this is cool …. there’s 3 key points
    1. excellent news on dynamic range.  The cameras now capture 60x more dynamic range than prior phones…. partly due to the capabilities of sensor and ML from the A14 chip…. this feels like software limitation.  They could easily enable all of this in the regular iPhone 12… but chose not to.  Cause $$$$
    2. Dolby partnership.  Dolby is not open source. It’s proprietary and requires contracts.  Apple is going hard on this.  It does look great… better than HDR10… but it’s interesting apple is choosing to partner with this cinema leader… in this pandemic when cinema business is dying.  I imagine they got a great deal out of Dolby.  This can skyrocket the HDR standards to be “Dolby or bust”.  could wreck HDR10 open source.
    3. With it being default integrated into phones… and likely coming to next year’s ALL iPhones… this means approx. 40% of the USA population will be leveraging DOLBY HDR.  This means the mess that’s there on windows and other tv’s and streaming systems will all have to use DOLBY and accept it.  Windows in particular will be interesting to see (hdr on windows is a disaster)
    4. all the computational and HDR photography now can be done with the selfie camera as well.
    5. ProRAW – you now have the ability to capture images with RAW format, adding apples’ ProRes compression to the files.  This will MASSIVELY add to the ability to edit and enhance lighting/saturation/color corrections in post production work.
IPhone 12 Pro Max – all the features on the regular pro – plus some camera improvements :
  1. Adds sensor shift.  Basically sensor uses image stabilization vs the camera lens.  This allows slower shutter speeds at hand held… thus allowing better low light photography
  2. Larger pixels on the sensors.  Approx 30% larger pixels due to a larger sensor.  This will mean increased color accuracy and low light photography.
All in all. – if you care about photography – get the max.
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