The unimaginative Apple in four paragraphs

No big surprises in the Apple event this morning, with little to tell about the products besides what was told following the rumors. Few updates on the Apple Watch: the discourse was 50% about apps and 50% about straps. The money is currently on the latter (that’s pretty clear from that time devoted to design and fashion), but watchOS could really make a difference if apps really take advantage of certain features that give the Apple Watch independence from the phone.

The iPad Pro seems to be the swan song for Apple tablets: an iOSified version of the Surface Pro 3 that is too big to work as a tablet all the time and that in my opinion can not replace a Macbook Air or even a Macbook for productivity. It’s a cool product on paper, but I can’t understand what user would prefer that over a laptop for any serious productivity content -except drawing- or over a smaller tablet (or phablet) for mobile content consumption. I’m going to spend the same 5 seconds they’ve spent for the iPad mini 4 launch to say this: last year hardware at this year prices. Same (even worse) happened with the mini 3.

The Apple TV has had a solid upgrade, probably the most interesting of all. New interface, Siri integration, and above all, apps and games. Good evolution of a device that could really hit it off in the market. The touch panel on the remote seems interesting too. The best of the show.

The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are logical upgrades of last years models. We’ll have to see the camera, but also battery life (no data/specs on that). Force Touch 3D Touch seems a neat idea but we’ll see if it really delivers in real life. The starting 16 GB models are a joke for a device that can record 4K video and that will be used to capture and consume more and more data. iCloud doesn’t solve this (well, it does for Apple, you pay an extra).

 

Javier Pastor is a technology journalist that has been writing about tech since 1999. He started writing for PC Actual in Spain, the leading printed magazine in the country, and in 2006 started to write online. First as the Chief Editor for The Inquirer ES, and after that for MuyComputer until 2013. That year he became senior editor at Xataka, the leading tech news website in Spanish with over 5M uniques/month (Aug'15, comScore). Xataka is part of Weblogs SL, a blog network that gets over 40M uniques/month and that has a wide catalog of publications in Spanish. The Unshut is his new venture and allows him to express his opinions and thoughts on everything touched by technology, and follows what he has been doing at Incognitosis, his personal blog, since 2005.