656: A Long T-Shirt

All right, Apple event time. They opened with Steve’s line, design is how it works. Felt perfect on the surface, right?

It hurt. I still miss Steve, and invoking him is risky. Using that quote while so much of Liquid Glass feels wrong shows Apple still cannot read the room.

That quote was the exact opposite of reality. The criticism of Liquid Glass is about how it works, not how it looks. Putting that up felt like denial. And since the public has not used Liquid Glass yet, they were responding to us.

Betas have been out a while and lots of non-developers install them. Overcast shows 6.4 percent on iOS 26. Anyway, products.

AirPods Pro 3: rumors said meh, but this looks like a big, across-the-board upgrade.

Yeah, better in basically every way—fit, ANC, sound, durability, battery—rather than one headline feature.

Foam-filled tips should boost passive isolation and comfort and help ANC. They claim better bass and wider soundstage. The pods are smaller and reshaped. I ordered day one; these could have the most lasting impact from the event.

They keep studying ears because every revision is a trade-off. These look more like AirPods 4 with foam tips. Fit is always a dice roll.

They say your voice and people around you will sound more natural—maybe lower latency, maybe clever processing. ANC is supposedly two times better, now IP 57, longer battery from six to eight hours with ANC on, ten with transparency, and the price stays the same.

AirPods are probably my favorite Apple product. I use them constantly and happily paid for Pro 3. If they really doubled ANC—electronics plus foam—I am in.

Two times could be a marketing decibel thing, but Apple’s real edge is transparency. They already crush everyone there, and if that got any more natural, great.

Five tip sizes in the box is rare-for-Apple and welcome. Heart-rate monitoring during workouts is in. Live translation is really a phone feature; it also works on Pro 2 and, I believe, AirPods 4. The hard part is social: delays and who it is listening to in noisy places.

I would love translation while traveling, but I am not going first. Apple and others are trying to change norms so people assume you can talk to someone wearing earbuds. If this works well enough, usage will make it normal.

That market vendor demo still felt awkward—holding up a phone to respond. I get it, but oof. Moving on: Apple Watch.

Series 11: sappy life-saved video aside, it runs S10 again. Not a huge upgrade overall.

The big deal is battery—18 to 24 hours. That helps day one and extends usable lifespan. Otherwise: 5G modem and a more scratch‑resistant crystal on aluminum. Hypertension alerts and sleep score are broadly backported, which is great.

Health features keep squeezing more from existing sensors. Also, this year’s two times more scratch‑resistant ceramic coating shows up across products, not just the pricey ones. And yes, they shipped an illegible Liquid Glass watch face—chef’s kiss.

New colors, reflective Nike bands. As a Series 10 owner, I am skipping. If your battery is flagging, this is nice; otherwise, most can pass.

If you have an eight or older, go for it. Nine or ten, you will barely notice.

SE 3: now with always-on, 5G, double-tap and wrist gestures, sleep apnea and sleep score, 18-hour battery with faster charging. Only in starlight and midnight.

Good for a cheaper watch or a kid. If you are a nerd, save up for Series 11.

SE updates are infrequent, so this is the one to get. Also, Apple called the line “Series” on stage, which amused me.

Ultra 3: new wide‑angle OLED, LTPO 3. John, remind me what that is?

Low temperature polycrystalline oxide bits—basically a better, more efficient display stack. Resolution is slightly different. They mentioned 3D-printed titanium and added satellite. SOS is free for two years; satellite messaging appears to require an active cellular plan. Battery is now an estimated 42 hours. Otherwise, small refinements.

Satellite is the headline. The Ultra’s fashion moment faded; I now see it more on people who actually want the battery or features.

Same here—friends bought Ultras mostly for battery life. The fad cooled, but non-athletes still love not worrying about the battery.

iPhone time. Four new models. The regular iPhone 17 colors—what were they?

Lavender, sage, mist blue, white, and black. The case looks unchanged, but it got a bit taller and thicker, and the screen grew to 6.3 inches.

Biggest news: the base 17 finally gets ProMotion and always-on. Three thousand nit peak outdoor brightness. New ceramic shield on the front. Anti-reflective coating across the line. It is a real trickle-down year.

RAM is still unclear; rumors say eight gigabytes. Ceramic Shield 2 claims three times better scratch resistance, and the anti-reflective layer is everywhere. I love the tech parity this year.

A19: three-nanometer, two performance and four efficiency CPU cores, five GPU cores here, and neural accelerators in each GPU core. Feels like a big step.

We now have A19, A19 Pro in iPhone Air, and A19 Pro in the Pro. The Pro parts add cache and one extra GPU core. Otherwise, these chips are surprisingly close.

And a quiet but huge deal: Memory Integrity Enforcement. Hardware-enforced memory tagging on all iPhone 17 and iPhone Air models. It hardens the kernel and key services with minimal overhead. This is the direction of Apple silicon and OS security.

Battery boasts eight more hours of video playback, plus fast charging—half a charge in twenty minutes on a wire. There is also a new slim USB‑C brick that shifts between forty and sixty watts depending on heat.

It looks like their dual thirty‑six watt brick, just single‑port slim.

Cameras: 48‑megapixel main that seems similar to last year’s Pro main, and a big jump to 48‑megapixel ultrawide. Their “virtual lenses” pitch still bugs me—it is crop math, not real optics.

Macro continues to come from the 0.5 ultrawide. The main sometimes sits unchanged year to year—and it was already great.

The sleeper hit is the front camera: 18 megapixels with a square sensor and center-stage framing so you can hold the phone however you want. Dual-capture video—front and back at once—is on all models.

I am weirdly excited for that selfie camera. I shoot daily Day One entries and this will help a ton.

iPhone Air is real. I am both thrilled and pretty sure it is not for me. Gorgeous marketing, ultra-thin body, polished titanium, ceramic shield on both sides. They even named the camera plateau.

Plateau is on-brand for our old camera mesa jokes. It does look Pixel-like. The polished edges are jewelry-pretty and fingerprinty. At 165 grams, it is only about twelve grams lighter than the 17 and still dense because it is so thin and mostly battery. Screen is 6.5 inches with ProMotion and always-on. Colors are barely-there sky blue, light gold, cloud white, and space black.

Between titanium weight savings and that thinness, it should feel noticeably nicer in hand. Apple hammered durability and battery life for a reason. And then, without taking a breath, they unveiled the MagSafe battery.

It is iPhone Air‑only and charges through the phone—no port on the pack. That limitation makes sense given the Air’s super‑tall plateau placement, but still, wow.

Yeah, I do not love that it only charges via the phone. But I get why they did it here.

Are these GPU cores actually different across the lineup, and what is with this last-level cache term? They bragged about branch prediction, a big cache bump, and then huge GPU gains, but only explicitly on the A nineteen Pro. Is that true for all the chips or just Pro?

From Apple's compare page, all three phones list GPUs with neural accelerators. It looks like the cores themselves are the same family, just different counts: five on A nineteen and Air's Pro, six on Pro Pro. The cache and core counts probably give them binning options; one die, three configs.

Either way, they were careful: double floating‑point rates and up to three times peak GPU compute versus A eighteen Pro. That is compute, not necessarily game frame rates. My read is those embedded neural accelerators inside each GPU core are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And yes, they said MacBook Pro levels of compute in an iPhone—so maybe the Studio Display gets pro‑level compute too. Ha.

Quick spec follow‑up: Xcode resources basically confirm RAM as eight gigabytes for the seventeen and twelve for Air and Pro. Makes sense.

Air gets Apple's new wireless chips because it is so thin: N one for Wi‑Fi seven, Bluetooth six, and Thread, presumably at lower power than third‑party parts. And the modem is Apple's C one X—not C two yet—faster than C one, beats the Qualcomm in some ways, still no millimeter wave, but the big deal is roughly thirty percent less power than C one, which makes the Air viable.

So far C one in the sixteen E has been fine in testing: roughly on par with Qualcomm, sometimes better, sometimes worse, no glaring issues. No news is good news for a first‑gen modem.

On the Air itself: forty‑eight megapixel main, two times telephoto via ML, center stage selfie, and Dolby Vision up to four K sixty. It is eSIM‑only worldwide—Ternus dunked on plastic SIMs—and battery is rated at approximately twenty‑seven hours of video playback versus thirty‑three on seventeen Pro and thirty‑nine on Pro Max.

Thermals will separate Air from Pros. Without the new thermal system, the Air will likely throttle earlier. That can help battery life by pulling clocks down sooner, but the Pros should sustain higher performance longer.

Accessories: low‑profile MagSafe battery had me thrilled—until I saw it is Air‑only. There is a translucent sub‑one‑millimeter case and color‑matched bumpers. The cross‑body strap magnetically adjusts and threads through case corners, which is a neat touch.

If you care about the strap, check the case bottoms for the corner holes—some Apple cases have them, some do not. The attachment looks like whisper‑thin line; I want to see the yank test and what reinforcement is behind those holes.

Seventeen Pro colors: silver, deep blue, and the orange I have wanted forever. In hands‑on videos the orange looks paler than Apple's shots, but still a good orange. The air's shiny bands turned me off; I do not think I like that look anymore.

Only three Pro colors and no black is weird, but the big story is the new unibody aluminum. It is a single machined shell with a ceramic shield insert for radios. Aluminum is a much better heat sink than titanium, and they added a vapor chamber that supposedly delivers roughly forty percent better sustained performance over sixteen Pro. Inside, the logic board runs horizontally near the top so the rest can be battery. The whole thing is about half a millimeter thicker and a few grams heavier; the Pro Max gets Apple’s largest battery ever. Also, eSIM‑only models use the former SIM‑tray volume for more battery.

This thermal design looks promising. Passive heat still has to get out through your case, but moving heat faster into the shell will help. And Apple’s iPhone philosophy is clear: spend weight savings on bigger batteries. Even with lighter aluminum, they used the freed volume for more battery and kept the weight in range.

Should we expect odd balance, like top‑heavy Pros or top‑light Airs?

I doubt it. The battery is the densest part and it is not only under the camera plateau. The cameras have a lot of air volume; in hand I do not expect the Pro to feel top‑heavy.

Cameras on Pro: all three rear cameras are now forty‑eight megapixel. The new tetraprism telephoto is four times optical at one hundred millimeter equivalent, with an eight times crop to two hundred millimeter that Apple calls optical‑quality—meaning not truly optical. Still, the range coverage looks smarter than the old five times.

Sensor physics still applies: the telephoto’s pixels are smaller than the main’s, so four times and especially eight times will trail one times quality, but the new sensor is bigger than before and the four times length is a better compromise. Expect less of a downgrade versus the old five times. At eight times, stabilization and ML will matter a lot.

Apple is leaning harder on deep learning for demosaicing and detail enhancement, not just at two times crops. That can produce nicer results—and weird artifacts. Third‑party apps will hopefully expose more direct sensor control. Overall, looks like a solid camera year.

And the real pro video stuff: ProRes RAW capture, external storage, and gen‑lock timecode. No eight K; four K one‑twenty remains. This iPhone is edging into cinema‑camera‑with‑a‑phone‑attached territory. Side note: the keynote looked like sixty frames per second to me.

Cases: Techwoven is here and supposedly stain‑resistant. There are clear and silicone cases, new button designs, and only certain cases work with the cross‑body strap.

I am glad they are trying, but from the site photos I am not sold on Techwoven yet. Peak Design’s fabric case still looks nicer to me; I will judge in person.

Pro Max is basically the Pro with a giant battery and an optional two‑terabyte storage tier. The rumored exclusive camera extras did not happen.

All phones now start at two hundred fifty‑six gigabytes. Prices: seventeen at eight hundred dollars, Air at one thousand, Pro at one thousand one hundred. Preorders Friday eight a.m. Eastern, available Friday the nineteenth. iOS twenty‑six ships Monday the fifteenth. Overcast beta looks great on the redesign; I am not promising Call Sheet by the fifteenth—think early October.

Overcast is submitted; fingers crossed App Review clears it in time. It is a day‑one redesign year for me—almost no new features—and I am probably skipping Apple Watch this round.

MacOS Tahoe on the fifteenth boggles my mind. I have been on the betas nonstop—lots of APIs are broken or changed in surprising ways. All my Mac apps need functional updates. If you rely on pro audio tools or indie Mac apps, I would wait on Tahoe. Be careful out there.

Same. iOS feels fine enough; iPadOS’s new windowing is great if you can tolerate some rough edges. Tahoe, I am probably waiting.

Everything is unusually in sync this year: all OS releases Monday, all hardware on the nineteenth. Wild.

Buying plans: AirPods Pro three for me. iPhone seventeen Pro in deep blue at five hundred twelve gigabytes. I will probably get Erin an orange Pro because UVA colors, obviously. No watch.

I went in wanting the Air, but the orange Pro won me over and I do not like the Air’s shiny bands. I am getting a regular‑size seventeen Pro in orange, probably two hundred fifty‑six gigabytes, maybe five hundred twelve. Skipping the watch for now. Tiff is also going orange, Pro Max, and we are both getting the new AirPods.

Off‑year for me phone‑wise; I am keeping my sixteen Pro. I was tempted by AirPods Pro three because of the new shape and five tips, but I still do not like things in my ear canals. The rest of the family is upgrading: my wife to a seventeen Pro—likely silver for easier case matching—both kids to plain seventeens with modest storage and simple cases. Also trying to solve my daughter’s MagSafe wallet annoyances.

I am considering a big Apple trade‑in dump for old test phones and a worn Ultra. You get less than third‑party sites, but it is easy and safe—and my test fleet is aging out anyway.

Old phones rarely leave our house; they rotate into my wife’s Pokemon Go fleet, which is brutal on batteries. Her long‑time dream finally came true: we now have a Pokestop in range of our bedroom thanks to a savvy friend’s submissions, so she can spin from home and keep streaks on the secondary phones. The charging station is chaos, but with the kids moving to USB‑C iPhones, we can finally retire a bunch of Lightning cables—well, not all. The Pokemon fleet still needs them.