An excellent, as always, overview of last week’s Apple event, as well as John’s initial thoughts on the new iPhones, iPad Pro, Apple TV, and Watch.
I was bummed that I couldn’t watch the Keynote last week — I was in the air during the event, on my way to Dallas to speak at the 2015 Circles Conference (more on that later). Being at Circles, I was offline most of last week and missed a lot of the new Apple product news (aside from this ridiculous newspaper headline).
But I did still wake up at midnight to pre-order a new iPhone. I decided to go crazy and went with the iPhone 6S Plus. I’m perfectly happy with the size of the 6, but I thought it would be fun to try out the bigger sized phone. Just about everyone I know with the 6 Plus loves it. So we’ll see. Also, after getting a massive headache trying to figure out the new pricing structures and what would be the best route to go, I decided to jump off the subsidy bandwagon and bought a contract-free, unsubsidized phone through AT&T. I prefer to keep my iPhones after the contract on them is up, either for resale, or — now that I’ve got two boys — for watching Mighty Machines on long road trips.
Another thought on the new iPhones: 3D Touch looks fantastic. It was pretty obvious that it’d be coming to the iPhone; after just a few weeks with my Watch I was already naturally trying to Force Press app icons and menu buttons on my iPhone. It may be “for power users” but I also think it’ll be quick to acclimate to, and in a few days we’ll all be grumbling about how our iPads don’t have it.
I’m also excited about the new Apple TV. Like a lot of you, I suspect, my house doesn’t have cable TV — we watch all our shows and movies via Netflix and iTunes (with an attic antenna we use during football season).
What John Gruber had to say about the new Apple TV only makes me that much more amped:
Apple TV is hot. I only got a brief period to play with it, but it seems fast, responsive, beautiful, and intuitive. It feels alive. If I worked at Apple I’d want to be on that team. On first impression, it is everything I wanted to see. It sounds like a small talented team got to build the Apple TV they wanted to see and use themselves. There is a clarity and vision to the entirety of its design. I think it exemplifies the best of Apple. […]
I think Apple TV might be the most disruptive product from Apple since the iPhone. Not the most lucrative, necessarily, but the most disruptive — in the sense of defining how all TVs will work in a few years.