Apple unveils the Apple Watch Series 4

Apple just unveiled an updated Apple Watch. And this year’s new Watch is all about the display. Thanks to thinner bezels and a slightly bigger casing, you’ll see more on your screen.

“Apple Watch isn’t just the number one smart watch, it’s the number one watch in the world period,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said before introducing Apple COO Jeff Williams.

Williams framed the watch as a communication device, a fitness device and a health monitoring tool. For instance, the Apple Watch can notify you if you have an unusual heart rate. It’s clear that Apple has put aside the idea that the Apple Watch is an app platform.

“Everything about it has been redesigned and reengineered,” Williams said. The design still looks very familiar, but it’s clear that the screen is bigger. You don’t necessarily see it when there’s a dark watch face. But it’s striking in the Breath app for instance.

The small version has a 32 percent larger display, and the bigger version has a 35 percent larger display. Thanks to a brand new watch face, you can put up to eight complications at once. It looks busy but it works.

In order to put a bigger display, the company had to make the Watch slightly larger. The 38mm model is now called the 40mm model, and the 42mm model is now 44mm large.

According to Williams, the total volume of the Series 4 model is still smaller than the volume of the Apple Watch Series 3 thanks to a thinner design. So there you go — a larger watch in a thinner body.

The displays now has rounded edges just like on the iPhone X. The digital crown has been redesigned to give you haptic feedback. The speaker is 50 percent louder. I’m not sure who uses this speaker, but if you need to make a quick phone call or use the new walkie-talkie feature in watchOS 5, it’s now better.

The back of the device is now made of black ceramic and sapphire crystal, which should help when it comes to cellular reception. The new system-on-a-chip (the S4) is supposed to be twice as fast as the one in the Series 3. Thanks to a new gyroscope, the Watch can detect a fall, which could be particularly useful for elderly.

This is a developing post…

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Apple has now sold almost 2B iOS devices

As usual, Apple used its annual iPhone event to provide us with a few fresh stats about the state of its business. The most important one came right at the start of today’s event.  Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company is about to sell its 2 billionth iOS device.

“We’re about to hit a major milestone,” he said. “We are about to ship our two billionth’s iOS device.”

 

We know that Apple had shipped about 1.2 billion iPhones by early 2017. This is all iOS devices, though, not just iPhones, so it’s no surprise the number is quite a bit higher.

“This is astonishing,” he said. “iOS has changed the way we live. From the way we learn to the way we work. To how we are entertained to how we shop, order our food and get our transportation and stay in touch with one another.”

It’s worth noting that Google announced two billion Android users in early 2017.

In addition to these new iOS stats, Cook also announced that Apple’s stores now see 500 million visitors per year.

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Google gets more RCS messaging support from Samsung

Google has secured a bit more buy in from Samsung for a next generation text messaging standard it’s long been promoting.

The Android OS maker’s hope for Rich Communication Services (RCS), which upgrades what SMS can offer to support richer comms and content swapping, can provide its fragmented Android ecosystem with a way to offer comparably rich native messaging — a la Apple’s iMessage on iOS.

But it’s a major, major task given how many Android devices are out there. And Google needs the entire industry to step with it to support RCS (not just device makers but carriers too) if it’s going to achieve anything more than fiddling around the edges.

Zooming out for a moment, the even bigger problem is the messaging ship has sailed, with massively popular platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram having already offloaded billions of users into their respective walled gardens, pulling the center of gravity away from SMS.

Not that that has stopped Google trying, though, even as it has been muddled in its strategy too — spreading its messaging efforts around quite a bit (with false starts like Allo).

Google doubled down on RCS in April when it pulled resources from the standalone Allo messaging app to focus on trying to drum up more support for next-gen SMS instead.

It has also managed to build a modicum of momentum behind RCS. At this year’s Mobile World Congress it announced more than 40 carriers now backed RCS — up from ~27 the year before. The most recent support figure put the carrier number at 55.

But, three years on from its acquisition of RCS specialist Jibe Mobile — and ambitious talk of building ‘the future of messaging’ — there’s little sign of that.

An added wrinkle is that carriers also have to have actively rolled out RCS support, not just stated they intend to. And it’s not clear exactly how many have.

Nor is it clear how many users of RCS there are at this stage. (Back in 2016 carriers were merely talking about building “a path” to one billion users — at a time when SMS had several billions of users, suggesting they saw little chance of creating anything near next-gen messaging ubiquity via the standard.)

The latest Google-backed RCS development, announced via press release, is of an “expanded collaboration” between Mountain View and Samsung — saying their respective message clients will “work seamlessly with each company’s RCS technology, including cloud and business messaging platforms”.

The pair have previously added RCS support to “select Samsung devices” but are now saying RCS features will be brought to some existing Samsung smartphones — including (and beginning with) the Galaxy S8 and S8+, as well as the S8 Active, S9, S9+, Note8, Note9, and select A and J series running Android 9.0 or later.

Which sounds like a fair few devices. But it’s also muddier than that — because again support remains subject to carrier and market availability. So won’t be universal across even that subset of Samsung Android handsets.

They also now say that (select) new Samsung Galaxy smartphones will natively support RCS messaging. But, again, that’s only where carriers support the standard.

“This means that consumers and brands will be able to enjoy richer chats with both Android Messages and Samsung Messages users,” they add, after their string of caveats.

Despite the PR ending on an upbeat note — with the two companies talking about bringing an “enhanced messaging experience across the entire Android ecosystem” — there’s clearly zero chance of that. A clear consequence of the rich ‘biodiversity’ of the Android ecosystem is reduced ubiquity for cross-device standardization plays like this. 

Still, if Google can cherry pick enough flagship devices and markets to buy in to supporting RCS it might have figured that’s critical messaging mass enough to stack against Apple’s iMessage. So added buy in from Samsung — whose high end devices are most often contending with iPhones for consumers’ cash — is certainly helpful to its strategy.

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Live from Apple’s iPhone event

Gooooood morning, Cupertino. Today’s the big event at Apple HQ. 2018’s been a slow year for Apple hardware (including a complete no-show at WWDC a few months back). As ever, we’ll be on-hand to help make sense of all of the news as it breaks, and you can follow along with our handy liveblog below. For those who want it straight from the source, you can follow Apple’s live stream or over on Twitter.

As far as what to expect, but all accounts, there’s going to be A LOT. New iPhones are basically a given. Likely there will be a sequel to the iPhone X, along with a cheaper version that keeps the design in tact, while swapping the OLED for something a bit cheaper. A new version of the Apple Watch also seems like all but a given at this point. Here’s a rundown of the most likely announcements for today’s big show to help you brace for the news.

Things kick off at 10AM PT, 1PM ET.

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Apple, AT&T, Amazon, Google among tech giants called to Senate Commerce Committee

If you weren’t done watching tech giants get grilled by lawmakers, mark your calendar for September 26 in what’s expected to be another riveting round of questioning.

Policy chiefs from AT&T and Charter, along with senior executives at Apple, Amazon, Google and Twitter will face questions from the Senate Commerce Committee later this month about how each company approaches safeguards to consumer privacy. The tech and telco companies will be asked to “discuss possible approaches to safeguarding privacy more effectively,” among other things.

Noticeably absent is Facebook; though the committee says the witness list is subject to change.

Committee chairman Sen. John Thune ssaid the hearing will allow the companies to “explain their approaches to privacy, how they plan to address new requirements from the European Union and California, and what Congress can do to promote clear privacy expectations without hurting innovation.”

Beyond that, it’s not clear exactly what the point of the hearing is.

A congressional source told TechCrunch to expect each company to explain for one what they could do to protect privacy outside of the law, and what role Congress can play in creating a single set of privacy requirements.

This will be the latest in a string of hearings in recent months following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which embroiled Facebook in an exposure of millions of users’ data.

This will be the second Senate Commerce Committee hearing this year focused on the issue. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify in April and later the Senate Intelligence Committee has held several hearings to discuss election security and disinformation campaigns around the 2018 midterm elections.

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Live from Apple’s iPhone event

Gooooood morning, Cupertino. Today’s the big event at Apple HQ. 2018’s been a slow year for Apple hardware (including a complete no-show at WWDC a few months back). As ever, we’ll be on-hand to help make sense of all of the news as it breaks, and you can follow along with our handy liveblog below. For those who want it straight from the source, you can follow Apple’s live stream or over on Twitter.

As far as what to expect, but all accounts, there’s going to be A LOT. New iPhones are basically a given. Likely there will be a sequel to the iPhone X, along with a cheaper version that keeps the design in tact, while swapping the OLED for something a bit cheaper. A new version of the Apple Watch also seems like all but a given at this point. Here’s a rundown of the most likely announcements for today’s big show to help you brace for the news.

Things kick off at 10AM PT, 1PM ET.

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New leak suggests iPhone Xs, Xs Max and Xr names

We’re just hours away from Apple’s big iPhone event and it looks like the company may have leaked its own news. AllThings.how spotted the names of future Apple products on Apple’s own website.

According to AllThings.how, Apple updated the product sidemap file minutes before taking the Apple Store down to add the new product pages. And this sitemap pointed to pages of unreleased products.

In particular, you could see links to products pages for the iPhone Xs, the iPhone Xs Max and the iPhone Xr. It lines up with previous rumors.

According to previous rumors, Apple is going to update the iPhone X with better components. In addition to this rumored iPhone Xs, there will be a bigger version of this device — a gigantic 6.5-inch iPhone Xs Max. Finally, Apple is going to replace the iPhone 8 with the iPhone Xr, a 6.1-inch device with an LCD display and a design inspired by the iPhone X.

Based on this sitemap file, the iPhone Xs and Xs Max should come in space gray, silver or gold. You’ll get to choose between 64GB, 256GB and 512GB. The iPhone Xr should be available in black, white, red, yellow, coral or blue. Storage starts at 64GB as well, and you can pay a bit more to get 128GB or 256GB of storage.

In addition to iPhone names, the updated XML file contains interesting information about the new Apple Watch. A previous leaked image obtained by 9to5Mac showed a new edge-to-edge display.

And it looks like the Apple Watch display will be slightly larger indeed. According to today’s leak, the small Apple Watch will feature a 40mm display (instead of 38mm). The bigger version will sports a 44mm display (instead of 42mm). It doesn’t sound like a huge increase, but you should also see an improved screen resolution.

Finally, the sitemap doesn’t indicate any change in the iPad and Mac lineups. Maybe Apple won’t mention those products at all. The company might also talk about updates that will be available later this year. Or Apple could unveil updated devices in the coming months.

Again, this is just a sidemap and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the final names of those products. But given the timing of this leak, it sounds more than plausible.

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