YOUR TWO-MINUTE GUIDE TO APPLE'S BIGGEST MONDAY ANNOUNCEMENTS
FROM THE
APPLE WATCH TO HBO NOW TO THE NEW MACBOOK, HERE'S A QUICK RUN-DOWN OF TODAY'S
APPLE NEWS.
The world's biggest tech company showed off its latest wares this afternoon. As expected, the
event was anchored by the Apple Watch, but it also
touched on a few other product categories. If the flood of tweets and
disjointed news posts are too much to sort through as you pretend to get back
to work, don't worry: We boiled it all down into a two-minute guide.
THE APPLE WATCH SHIPS APRIL 24
Starting on
April 10, you can preorder Apple's first-generation
smartwatch, which starts at $349 for the sporty, rubber-strapped version
and goes as high as $10,000 for the 18-karat gold version for rich nerds. The Apple Watch accepts calls, lets you read and delete emails, hail an
Uber, and helps you perform any number of other tasks that Apple and
third-party developers are busy dreaming up.
THE NEW MACBOOK: THINNER AND FANLESS
WITH A RETINA DISPLAY
The two-pound,
12-inch new MacBook comes in three colors: space gray, silver and gold. Its
super-thin Retina display packs 3 million pixels onto the screen. The trackpad
now includes taptic
feedback technology, much like the Apple Watch. This machine
switches from Thunderbolt to a USB-C port capable of transmitting both data and
power in both directions.
Inside the
notebook, Apple has engineered a much smaller logic board and managed to get
rid of the fan all together. Even the keyboard got a visual refresh: It now
spans the entire width of the computer with wider, thinner keys.
The MacBook Air
is getting faster Intel chips and a Lightning port while the MacBook Pro gets a
new track pad and improved battery life.
The new lineup
of Apple notebooks starts shipping on April 10.
RESEARCHKIT TURNS YOUR IPHONE INTO A
MEDICAL RESEARCH LAB
Perhaps the most
unexpected announcement of the day was the unveiling of ResearchKit. The open
source framework for medical research essentially turns your iPhone into a data-gathering tool for scientists.
With hundreds of millions of iPhones in the world, a framework like ResearchKit
could turn out to be enormously insightful, assuming it's widely adopted enough
to get meaningful sets of data.
APPLE GETS (SLIGHTLY) MORE SERIOUS
ABOUT TV
Could Apple be
transitioning its Internet TV efforts out of the
"hobby" phase? The new $69 price point on the Apple TV sure does make
it look like Apple is clearing out its inventory to make way for
*something*—even if it's just a hardware refresh on its existing video
streaming box.
If the price
drop isn't enough to convince you to ditch your Roku, how about this: Starting
next month, Apple TV boxes will get exclusive access to HBO Now, a standalone
streaming service offering unfettered access to HBO's library for $15 per
month. For the other companies in the business of bringing Internet video to your TV set,
winter may well be coming.
.
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