[UPDATE] Wonderlust – Apple September event; new iPhones and watches

[Paul Thexton]

5 hours ago, hishnash said:

Something very interesting in today's presentation was the fact that apple told us that metalFX a 17 uses the neural engine for upscaling, in the past we were always led to believe that metalFX was more like AMD solution and p shaders however they said explicitly in today's presentation that on A17 the neural engine is driving the upscaling

Interesting. I didn't pick up on that. I'm going to presume that Metal.framework will implement a different solution based on the Silicon it's being run on?  Either that or the neural engine *is* already used and attempts by people to see whether that's happening have simply failed to spot it?

[Paul Thexton]

10 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

Are the AV1-obsessed crowds here happy that Apple Silicon (the A17 Pro and, hence, probably the M3) is finally getting hw AV1 decoding?

The position will shift to moaning about lacking AV1 encoding.  Wonder if they'll add that to the Mx chips?

[Obioban]

30 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

The position will shift to moaning about lacking AV1 encoding.  Wonder if they'll add that to the Mx chips?

I feel like AV1 encoding would be a bit silly on the iPhone, but quite useful on a Mac... but don't know if that's just my personal use case biasing me.

 

Running the upscaling on the neural engine is pretty great, since they're otherwise generally idle in games. "Free" performance. I'd assume that's either how they have been doing in on Mac, or, if it's new, how they will be doing it on Mac from M3 on.

[Paul Thexton]

11 minutes ago, Obioban said:

Running the upscaling on the neural engine is pretty great, since they're otherwise generally idle in games. "Free" performance. I'd assume that's either how they have been doing in on Mac, or, if it's new, how they will be doing it on Mac from M3 on.

I just fired up RE:Village for 5 minutes with MetalFX set to Quality mode with `sudo powermetrics --samplers ane_power` running in a Terminal and I didn't see any evidence of the NE using any power... But, that could just be me misunderstanding how to use the powermetrics utility.  I still feel like MetalFX is GPU only, at least on macOS Ventura (I haven't tried running Sonoma Beta on my actual laptop, I always confine trying out beta OSes to VMs).

[HenrySalayne]

17 hours ago, Paul Thexton said:

With the A17 going to 3nm, I'm most interested to hear real world reports on battery life vs. the non-pro... Always pretty hard to objectively measure though as it's going to depend on all sorts of factors.

Apple had the ugly habit to use their efficiency advantage to reduce the battery size instead of selling "marathon" phones. I wouldn't be surprised if there is basically no runtime difference with the new generation.

15 hours ago, Retro_R said:

Ok, i have some thoughts about the "new" airpod pros they kinda announced today. I say quote on quote new, because they're not really new. They're the same 2nd gen pros, but now with USB-C charging. Soo, what about the people who already have the 2nd gen pros with lightening? Are we just fucked and have to carry a lighting cable just for my airpods? "Oh but just buy another pair" i'm not paying $250 for the same product with a different port, and i think most people won't either. Will there be some type of replacement program for old ones? There was no talk of it and this is apple we're talking about, i dont think they're gonna do that.

I imagine 3rd party accessories which are basically a small 90° Lightning to USB C adapter. That shouldn't be too intrusive, but it adds a little bit of thickness and it's not as clean.

 

[Paul Thexton]

3 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Apple had the ugly habit to use their efficiency advantage to reduce the battery size instead of selling "marathon" phones. I wouldn't be surprised if there is basically no runtime difference with the new generation.

Yeah I can see that happening, or otherwise efficiency savings being used to service the brighter display etc resulting in no net charge life gain. That would be disappointing.

[LAwLz]

34 minutes ago, Obioban said:

I feel like AV1 encoding would be a bit silly on the iPhone, but quite useful on a Mac... but don't know if that's just my personal use case biasing me.

I want Apple to implement AV1 encoding too. 

I think it's good that they are finally adding decoding support and that's absolutely the most important one, but encoding would be very nice too. 

The reason being that I would want cameras to shift over to using AV1 for video and images captured. It's annoying to have iPhones use HEVC when we got a free and open solution that performs better. As long as something as big as the iPhone keeps using HEVC, we can't really get rid of it or it's very expensive licensing fees. Or you could do like Apple does and transcode to other formats whenever files are moved off-device, but that reduces quality and increase file size so that's not a good solution either. 

 

We should try and move all video and images to AV1 so that we get more uniformity.

If be happy with moving to JPEG-XL for images but that sadly seems unlike because of Google's idiotic decisions. 

[HenrySalayne]

32 minutes ago, Obioban said:

I feel like AV1 encoding would be a bit silly on the iPhone, but quite useful on a Mac... but don't know if that's just my personal use case biasing me.

Who could ever need efficient encoding of an efficient codec on a mobile device with limited (and shared) bandwidth? Total waste...

[Retro_R]

11 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

The lossless low latency mode is not exclusive to the usb-c case Airpods Pro2. It will work the same on the old lightning ones. The buds themselves are unchanged

Well, i would think so, but i looked at the fine print at the bottom of the page, it clarifys USB-C case, although that may just be because of something else, but just looking at that page it kinda makes it seem like the usb-c version is the only one that will do that. Plus when i checked the page from like 3 days ago when they were still advertising the lighting version, it had no mention of the lossless audio, although that may just be because they didn't wanna change the page before the event. Although i do hope it does carry over to the "older" version, and i really don't see why not, it just seems like it may.

 

11 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

3 of these are still perfectly current.

Just saying.

Yeah, sure they're fine, but like, it's fucking annoying. Like i'm gonna get the iPhone 15, and now imma have to have 2 cables on me where ever i am to charge the phone and the airpods. Kinda defeats the point of "just one cable for everything" Now i know this is a very specific issue and theres probably only 5 other ppl who have this same issue, but like still sum to point out.

 

11 hours ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

It's going to be interesting to see how fragmented the OS and app experience will get because of this.

Tbh, i don't think it'll affect it to much. Especially when you compare that to all the different types of screen styles on android phones (not saying its a bad thing, just that it's a thing). So compareitvly, it should be easy since they know all the aspects of the different screens, and they've done it before (iOS 16 currently works on all of those display types).

 

10 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

Is there a way to get rid of the dynamic island from screenshots? It's so fucking ugly!

Now that you say that, it would be cool to have a option to remove the black part of the screen for the dynamic island so you can have as much screen as possible. Is it gonna happen? No, but it would be cool.

 

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I think you can buy new charging cases for Airpods, so Apple will probably start selling those soon. At that point, you might be able to buy just the case (seems to be 80 dollars for the current one) and just replace that

Oh, i guess that would be the solution. I didn't really think about just buying the case, i guess because they didn't sell the pro case standalone, at least not like the 2nd gen airpods. But now that you brought that up, thats a more fair option. I understand what you're saying earlier, but this isn't even like a whole new gen, it's just the same 2nd gen with a different connector u feel? I know i sound annoying as shi but like, it's just weird to me. Especially with all the "oh we environmentaly friendly we don't like e-waste" stance they been taking (which i like)

 

 

[Obioban]

10 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

This is perhaps the most cringe part of the Apple keynote trying to placate everyone that they're now Eco friendly but no mention of easier repairs. I mean look at the like/dislike ratio. Apple must've paid a lot of money to these actors lol.

iFixit said the iphone 14 was the most repairable iPhone ever made, and this keynote did mention some further improvements, so it's not like they're not making progress in that direction.

[saltycaramel]

12 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

 

The lossless low latency mode is not exclusive to the usb-c case Airpods Pro2. It will work the same on the old lightning ones. The buds themselves are unchanged. 

 

I stand corrected, what I wrote is wrong, I had misinterpreted the "1." footnote here:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-upgrades-airpods-pro-2nd-generation-with-usb-c-charging/

 

But that footnote was not referring to the lossless mode.

 

And the new L/R buds have new identifiers, they're literally not the same buds:

https://x.com/aaronp613/status/1701796454518436233?s=20

 

So @Retro_R you've (unfortunately) got it right, looks like there will be no lossless mode on the 2022 Airpods Pro 2, only on the 2023 Airpods Pro "2.1".  (the charging case is irrelevant of course and is only useful in marketing/support material to quickly identify the new 2023 Airpods...and that's probably why they don't sell the new usb-c case stand alone to retrofit old 2022 Airpods, the whole thing would become confusing)

Now, I wish I was one of the lucky few hundred thousand people, mostly U.S. based, for whom this difference will be relevant anytime soon...i.e. the less-than-1-million people who will manage to obtain (and can afford) a Vision Pro in 2024. 

 

For the rest of us, we're not getting lossless audio anyway..

[saltycaramel]

50 minutes ago, Retro_R said:

 

Yeah, sure they're fine, but like, it's fucking annoying. Like i'm gonna get the iPhone 15, and now imma have to have 2 cables on me where ever i am to charge the phone and the airpods. Kinda defeats the point of "just one cable for everything" Now i know this is a very specific issue and theres probably only 5 other ppl who have this same issue, but like still sum to point out.

 

 

If you carry this in your pocket:

https://satechi.net/products/usb-c-magnetic-charging-dock/Z2lkOi8vc2hvcGlmeS9Qcm9kdWN0VmFyaWFudC8zMTk3MjMyNDc2OTg4MA==?queryID=5b90528e719f6422e2cf2cd8360f7bb3

 

You can use it to charge both you Airpods Pro2 case and (if any) Apple Watch.

Technically not a cable 

 

(also by inserting that dongle in the usb-c port of the iPhone 15 you can use the phone as a powerbank to reverse-charge the Airpods Pro2 case or a Watch)

[Lightwreather]

So, here are all the announcements, and stuff that happened:

Apple Watch Series 9

-Largely the same design, the most significant changes are to the internals

-Improved performance, but more crucially, longer battery life, are promised by the new S9 chip. Apple claims 60% more transistors than the Series 8 and a GPU with 30% more transistors. The neural engine's significant improvements to on-device processing for Siri requests, including 25% faster voice dictation, may be the most significant.

-Display now goes up to 2000 nits, double the brightness of Series 8, making it easier to use outdoors. Also goes down to a single nit in dark conditions

-Addition of an Ultra Wide-Band chip to show you the distance and direction to your phone, rather than simply having your phone make a loud noise.

-Apple also promised a new gesture - "Double Tap" that it claims Watch users will be using "every day". This works supposedly by the Neural Engine's detection of "the unique signature of tiny wrist movements and changes in blood flow when the index finger and thumb perform a double tap." Bit skeptical if this will actually catch on though.

-FineWoven is a new watch strap design that Apple is phasing out of its whole product line to replace the leather. FineWoven is a "microtwill made of 68 percent post-consumer recycled content that has significantly lower carbon emissions compared to leather," according to Apple. 82 percent of the yarn used to make the new Sport Loop is recycled.

- Supposedly, the company's first carbon-neutral device.

The Apple Watch SE remains available for $249, while the Series 9 starts at $399. They're both available for preorder today and should be released on September 22.

 

Apple Watch Ultra 2

-The Ultra 2 has the same new S9 chip as the Series 9 alongside the same "double tap" feature.

-There's a new display that hits 3k nits, even more than the Series 9. (Sidenote: How bright would be too bright?)

-There's also a new "modular ultra" watchface that uses the edge of the display, “to present real-time data, including seconds, altitude, or depth”.

-There's also now support for Bluetooth cycling accessories, and ANT+ support.

-The battery is the same, hitting 36 hours on a single charge and 72 hours in low-power mode.

 

iPhone 15 and 15 Plus

Why, it's star of the show, and was literally what everyone was waiting for, waiting agonising minutes after it was revelled to see if a highly anticipated feature would be released. It was.

 

-Apple ditched its proprietary Lightning port in favour of USB-C (albeit on the USB2 standard; some claim it's because of SoC limitations) on this iteration of the iPhone, very likely because of the EU.

-The edge of the aluminium enclosure has a new contoured design that looks a bit different from the iPhone 14 and gives me a Pixel 4-esque vibe

-Apple also claims the iPhone 15 devices are the first phones to have a "color-infused back glass." Apple's announcement said that it strengthened the phones' back glass with a "dual-ion exchange process" and then polished it with nano-crystalline particles and etched it for a "textured matte finish."

-Dynamic island was introduced.

I take minor issue with Apple calling it an "all-new design" when it really isn't that different from the iPhone 14 and 14 Pro but I suppose that's a me thing.

 

-Spec bump to the A16 which was on last year's Pro line-up

-Main camera system was upgraded to a 48 MP sensor that takes 24 MP photos, using a default computational photography process. This is the same system found on the iPhone 14 Pro. Alternatively, you can opt for the "2x Telephoto" option with three "optical-quality" zoom levels (0.5x, 1x, or 2x).

-Additionally, for all of the iPhone 15's cameras, machine learning will automatically switch the main camera into portrait mode, with richer color and low-light performance, when appropriate. Night Mode ("sharper details and more vivid colors") and Smart HDR (brighter highlights, and improved mid-tones, shadows, and renderings of skin tones) are reportedly upgraded, too.

 

-The cameras will also introduce focus and depth control, which lets you switch focus on an image from one subject to a different subject after the photo has been taken.

I will admit, that is pretty cool

 

-Also includes the second-gen Ultra Wideband chip (same as in the Apple Watch). Apple said it enables connectivity with other devices from up to a three-times longer distance.

-The iPhone 15 is supposed to have better audio quality during calls, thanks to a new machine learning model that automatically prioritises your voice and can filter out more background noise, if you select "voice isolation" mode during a call.

This is also pretty cool, and will absolutely be very helpful when yer trying to listen to someone talking in a very windy place. THANK YOU APPLE.

-Apple is also adding Roadside Assistance via Satellite with the new devices. Users will be able to text roadside assistance and then select what they need assistance with, with options such as "flat tire" and "locked out" appearing via a menu that comes up in response. The feature will debut in the US with AAA.

-The iPhone 15 starts at $799 (128GB), and the iPhone 15 Plus starts at $899 (128GB) available on September 22, with preorders starting this Friday.

-Apple also launched new case options for the iPhone 15 series, including the new FineWoven material.

 

Apple (via ArsTechnica)

 

iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max

-Apple announced that new iPhone 15 Pro line-up will switch from a stainless steel frame to one made out of a brushed "grade 5 titanium," which they says makes the phone more durable and lighter.

I honestly expected them to bump the price just because of this

-The phone is also a little smaller than past models thanks to slimmer display bezels. The screen sizes stay the same—6.1 inches for the base model and 6.7 inches for the larger iPhone 15 Pro Max one. Apple didn't announce any changes to the phones' actual screens, so expect the same resolution, ProMotion refresh rate, and brightness as before.

-The iPhone's tradition mute switch was replaced by an "action button" . By default, it still serves as a mute switch, but users can change it to launch apps or the camera or custom Shortcuts workflows, which I see as a neat inclusion. There will be a different haptic response depending on if the action mutes or unmutes.

-The Pro line-up will once again be a generation ahead of the non-pros with the introduction of the A17 Pro, which is apparently Apple's first chip built on TSMC's 3nm node. It continues to use two large high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores; Apple says the performance cores are 10 percent faster than they were before, a relatively mild improvement, while the efficiency cores are more efficient rather than being faster.
   -The A17 Pro's six-core GPU is 20 percent faster than the A16 and Apple has also added hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. This is something I don't see as being particularly useful on a phone, but I did call out that this would be implemented by Genshin Impact and Honkai Star rail. Speaking of which RE4 will also be coming to the iPhone.

   -The chip also includes hardware acceleration for the AV1 video codec that is becoming more popular on streaming services.

-Apple has also added a new USB controller to power that USB-C port, allowing the iPhone 15 Pro (Max) to use USB 3 transfer speeds. 
"technically, this would make it either a USB 3.1 gen 2 or 3.2 gen 2 controller, if you can keep the USB-IF's naming straight" –ArsTechnica

-Apple says the Pro's 48-megapixel main sensor is larger than the one in the regular iPhone 15. Like the iPhone 15, by default, it will shrink the finished product down to 24 MP to save storage space, but if you're shooting in ProRAW mode you can get the full 48 MP image for cropping and editing. The camera defaults to a 24 mm focal length, but 28 mm and 35 mm options are also made possible by the large sensor, and you can set any of the three focal lengths as your default.

 

-Apple says that after an iOS update "later this year," the phone will be able to shoot spatial video that can be viewed in three dimensions in a Vision Pro headset.

-The iPhone 15 Pro starts at $999 (128GB), and the iPhone 15 Pro Max starts at $1,199 (256GB) available from the 22nd of September with preorders starting this Friday. FineWoven cases will also be available for the Pro line-up.

 

iOS and macOS

-iOS 17 hits supported devices on September 18

- macOS 14 Sonoma will be available on September 26, just over a week after iOS 17

 

Sources

Apple - [1] [2]

ArsTechnica – [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

[hishnash]

5 hours ago, Paul Thexton said:

I still feel like MetalFX is GPU only, at least on macOS Ventura

I believe it might well be Jeep you only on anything but this new hardware, it may well have had to make hardware changes to accommodate low latency directly between the NPU and GPU to facilitate handing off work to the NPU. At least at a public API level this has not been possible in the past, we always had to go through the CPU and dispatch work to the MPU that was always much much too slow to be used a display stack.

[hishnash]

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

We should try and move all video and images to AV1 so that we get more uniformity.

If be happy with moving to JPEG-XL for images but that sadly seems unlike because of Google's idiotic decisions. 

Does AV1 even support the same dynamic range HDR feature set that you can include in HEVC.   and do any of the other hardware decoders support decoding AV1 with these higher a bit depths? 

Give me a bit is now an ISO standard for HDR images why would people adopt JPEGXL, HEIC provides much more flexibility.

[RoseLuck462]

That new grey color does look pretty sick, gotta admit

[LAwLz]

19 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Does AV1 even support the same dynamic range HDR feature set that you can include in HEVC.

It depends on what specific feature you're referring to. If you're talking about bit depth then yes. AV1 (or rather, AVIF) supports up to 12-bit depth. 

If you're talking about things like the rec 2020 color space then the answer is yes, it supports that too. 

 

19 minutes ago, hishnash said:

and do any of the other hardware decoders support decoding AV1 with these higher a bit depths? 

Most seem to support up to 10-bit depth but I am unsure about 12-bit depth. But thats the same situation as HEVC is in. You won't find many HEVC implementations that does 12 bit in hardware, at least not in consumer products. 

 

 

19 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Give me a bit is now an ISO standard for HDR images why would people adopt JPEGXL, HEIC provides much more flexibility.

JPEG-XL has a lot of benefits over HEIC. Not just is it superior for actually impressing images, it also is free to use, and has some really good features like progressive loading, backwards compatibility mode, lossless conversion from old JPEG (while still making the image smaller) and so on. If anything, there is no reason to keep HEIC since it's pretty much strictly worse than JPEG-XL. The only thing it really got going for it is adoption, and even they it's basically just Apple. 

 

 

JEPG-XL really is the holy grail of image formats. Sadly, Google seems to not want to support it. It's kind of embarrassing that Apple has better support for it than Google who is usually on the forefront of advanced (and free) formats. 

[captain_to_fire]

11 hours ago, Obioban said:

and this keynote did mention some further improvements

I was referring to the Mother Nature segment where they mentioned nothing about repairs

[captain_to_fire]

8 hours ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

Apple announced that new iPhone 15 Pro line-up will switch from a stainless steel frame to one made out of a brushed "grade 5 titanium," which they says makes the phone more durable and lighter.

Because of the difficulties in anodizing Titanium, Apple created the most dull and boring colors in pro iPhones to date.

[Dracarris]

2 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

Because of the difficulties in anodizing Titanium, Apple created the most dull and boring colors in pro iPhones to date.

I beg to differ. The colors of the regular 15 are the most ass-boring colors to date IMHO.

[Paul Thexton]

Unless you're like me and aren't so careless with your phone that a phone case is a necessity, which appears to be the majority (based purely on almost everyone I know doing so)... does it even matter what colour a phone is?  Just wondering.

[CarlBar]

Just going to drop this here as i don't feel upto tring to make a new thread about it atm, but figured it would be of interest to apple centric folks:

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66795168

 

TLDR france has ordered Apple to fix an EM radiation issue with the iPhone 12 within 2 weeks or face a forced recall, mandate likely to spread across the whole EU as other nations examine the french regulators data.

[Dracarris]

20 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

Unless you're like me and aren't so careless with your phone that a phone case is a necessity, which appears to be the majority (based purely on almost everyone I know doing so)... does it even matter what colour a phone is?  Just wondering.

That's a valid point. The color remains visible around the camera bump even with a case, but that's only a tiny portion on the back. Well, unless you get a clear case..

 

I think it's more an issue of, "if I spend over 800$ on this thing, it better be visually appealing"..

[saltycaramel]

3 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

Because of the difficulties in anodizing Titanium

They said they’re not using titanium anodization, they’re using PVD coating..I’ve looked up titanium nitride PVD coating and there are a number of other colors (including gold-like) they could pull off in the coming years..

[captain_to_fire]

5 hours ago, Dracarris said:

I beg to differ. The colors of the regular 15 are the most ass-boring colors to date IMHO.

No gold and purple on the 15 Pro