Apple's latest announcements: delight or disappointment for mobile experts?
Apple’s latest event took place on 12th September, providing a smattering of updates on what users can expect from the upcoming release of the iPhone 15 and other Apple products.
But did the announcements delight or disappoint tech leaders and iOS developers?
We reconvened the morning after the night before with some of Apadmi's most experienced mobile experts to reflect on what the news meant to them.
Matt Graham: Technical Consultant for the Domino’s app
With just under 2 decades of iOS development experience, and 14 years of service at Apadmi, Matt is our go-to for all things Apple.
What do you make of the new iPhone 15 reveal?
It’s great that everyone will now get the dynamic island (that nifty widget near the top of the display that could change shape depending on user needs). This was previously only available on the Pro models so this makes for a far more compelling reason for developers to support it in their apps.
Interesting that there was no mention of the fact that the introduction of the USB-C port was not a choice but rather a forced change…
What about the iPhone 15 Pro?
It's nice to see that the iPhone 15 Pro will have the “thinnest borders ever”, and the action button seems handy too.
However, it’s disappointing that only the Pro gets USB 3. USB 3 is 10 times faster at transferring data. There's also some talk that the Pro is shipped with a USB 2 cable, so Pro buyers won't be able to enjoy USB 3 "out of the box" but rather they’ll have to buy a new cable - not ideal.
Did any of the Apple Watch updates impress?
Processing Siri requests locally on the watch using the new neural engine is a great addition. Using Siri on Apple Watch has not always been a great experience for me up until now.
I also noted that they say the "most common requests no longer have to go to the cloud", so it will be interesting to see what will and won't be included in these "most common requests".
Apple Watch Ultra still seems like a really niche product to me, with so much emphasis on support for scuba diving…which seems somewhat out of place for the average user.
Pat Cavanagh: Technical Lead for major hospitality app
Pat has more than 8 years of experience in software development and works across both iOS and Android projects for a number of Apadmi clients.
What did you make of the event as a whole?
“I think it was a fairly underwhelming, incremental update on the whole. There weren't a lot of leaks ahead of the event this year, but I think that probably correlates pretty strongly with them not having anything overly exciting to announce.”
So what did stand out to you from the announcements?
USB-C is nice to have with everything moving towards using the same cable, but disappointing that by the sounds of it they're still limiting the speeds for the non-pro models and no mention of fast charging even on the pro models.
The Action Button is also a welcome addition, but it’s not a major innovation.
Image: Apple
Did you feel like anything was missing from this event?
I was somewhat disappointed not to not hear more about the Vision Pro. Whilst they did mention they’re “on-track” with it, there wasn’t much more information beyond this.