Apple Event Rundown: September 9, 2014

So, I watched the Apple Event this morning, as best I could. The feed was terrible. It wasn’t the sort of caliber of production that I have come to expect from Apple and that terrible feed is what took over Twitter for most of the event. It overshadowed most of the neat stuff that was announced. Here’s a brief rundown of what I managed to catch from the event. More details are available on apple.com

iPhone 6 was announced. It’s a 4.7″ 780p display device with the A8 64 bit CPU. It has a faster GPU than the iPhone 5S. Has the new Retina HD display with better color and more pixel density. The new iSight camera captures Slo-mo video in 1080p. Improved auto-focus. LTE and Wifi download speeds have increased.

iPhone 6+ has all of the above features and includes a 5.5″ 1080p Retina HD display. It also has an improved auto-focus capability that is above and beyond what is on board the iPhone 6.

iPhone 5S experienced a price drop to 99$ for the 16GB model and 149$ for the 32 GB model. The 64GB model of iPhone 5S has been dropped from the product line. The iPhone 5c is available free with contract from carriers in the US.

Apple Pay will be available in October on the iPhone 6. It’s unclear if Apple Pay will be available for iPhone 5S users. Apple Pay uses the Touch ID system to allow you to make payments at a store on your debit card. The security measures in place that allow this are incredible and top notch. I have seen nothing like it in the mobile field to date.

iPhone 6 starts at 199$ for a 16GB device. iPhone 6+ starts at 299$ for a 16 GB device.

iPhone 6 and 6+ are available for pre-order on September 12, 2014. The phones begin shipping on September 19th, 2014. If you want a gold one, order it the minute the ordering opens, though I do hope that Apple has corrected their iPhone 5S blunder of ordering far too few phones made in that color. I had to wait for two months for my gold iPhone 5S to show up and I ordered it on release day.

The big deal of the day, was the Apple Watch.

Apple Watch is a device that allows you to leave your phone in your pocket and send text messages, read emails. There are supposedly a number of apps that will link into it too. I imagine it must do a lot of this via Siri. It also replaces every fitness gadget I have ever used in conjunction with an iPhone App. Farewell Fitbit. The Apple Watch is here.

The price point of the Apple Watch, starting at 349$, does not leave Fitbit or even Nike out of the game. With the Fitbit Zip starting at just 60$ it’s a cheaper fitness option than the Apple Watch, but the Apple Watch does so much more. I believe we have not seen all that Apple Watch will be capable of today. It is also the most customizable Apple product I have seen to date. We’ll know more as its release gets closer to reality. As of today, all we know about when we will see this product come to market is “some time at the start of next year.”

I’m not really feeling the 6+. I’ve never understood the whole “phablet” fad either, but the Apple Watch actually makes this larger device more attractive to me. We’ll have to see what Apple does with this. I also wanted to add, for those of you out there with iTunes accounts, U2’s new album, “Songs of Innocence” is available to all iTunes users for free until October 13th.

I’ve already got my copy. How about you?