The three Pro cameras can simulate a range of lenses, and create spatial video for playback on Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset, while the Pro Max exclusively has a 5x optical zoom.
The Pro phones will also be available on September 22, for $1850 and $2200, which is a more significant price jump. Last year’s iPhone 14 Pro Max launched at $1900.
Apple also introduced the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2, which work with a new gesture the company calls “double tap”, where users can bump their thumb and forefinger together twice to activate an app’s main function. Some examples Apple gave were answering or ending calls, or starting timers. The watches have much brighter displays, up to 2000 nits on Series 9 and 3000 nits on Ultra 2, and an ability to find nearby (new) iPhones with much greater precision.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 has a screen three times as bright as last year’s Series 8.Credit: Tim Biggs
The new watches’ system-on-a-chip processes machine learning tasks twice as fast as the Series 8, according to Apple, meaning many simple Siri requests are now processed on the device rather than needing to go to the cloud. Later this year Siri will also gain the ability to access health data on-device, so users can ask about their data, or add new details with their voice.
The Series 9 will be sold in Australia starting at $650, with the Ultra 2 starting at $1400.
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Apple also announced that the watches were its first carbon-neutral products, and that it would no longer use leather on any of its products as part of its environmental commitments, introducing a new textile for its watch bands and phone cases it calls FineWoven.
The author travelled to California as a guest of Apple.
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