Between the lines of Apple's September 2024 announcements

I watched the announcements last night, Finnish time, and I have a few thoughts.

A bad day to own a Hearing Aid company

Prescription hearing aids cost ~$1500 at Costco. Cheap hearing aids cost ~$80. But now you can buy Apple Airpods Pro and get the diagnosis and the solution for one low fee, and it's also possible this will remove some of the stigma of hearing loss.

My hearing isn't what it once was, and I'd rather buy Airpods Pro and get both a really nice set of Airpods and get my hearing corrected than go to a doctor.

Also, maybe not a great day to own a Sleep Lab

Getting diagnosed with Sleep Apnea used to be kind of inconvenient. Assuming you had coverage, you'd have to sleep overnight in a lab. Again, an Apple Watch Series 9/10 is definitely more convenient, likely cheaper, and you get a watch. Nice.

iPhone 16 [Plus] / 16 Pro [Max]

Despite the change in nomenclature (A16 vs A17 in the iPhones 15, A18 Bionic vs A18 Pro in the iPhones 16) and the purported focus on AI, the new phones basically just seem to be ~15% faster than last year's models. That's fine, I only upgrade every 2-3 years and I've been drooling over the 100mm telephoto. Now, by waiting the extra year, I also get a 48MP fusion camera for ultrawide and macro photography.

(It should be noted that Apple seldom talks about bytes or GHz in its consumer product introductions, so it may be that the A18 has substantially more RAM than the A16/A17 and earlier, we'll have to wait until developers get to kick some tires.)

From the perspective of my wallet, it's very bad. I feel like the Airpods, the iPhone 16 Pro, and the Watch Series 10 are all must buys. Only the EU's insistence on crippling Apple might temper my desires.

Apple Watch Series 10 and Ultra

The Apple Watch Ultra is amazingly popular in Finland. I see them everywhere, especially in Winter. I think it's very popular with cross-country skiers and there are a lot of cross-country skiers here.

The new Series 10 seems to bring a lot of the Ultra's advantages down to the main watch, which suits me as the Ultra looks crazy big on my wrist. First and foremost, the screen is actually larger than the Ultra's in a slimmer case.

That said, the Ultra 2 is now a year old, and the only things they added were the black option (which does look sick) and titanium straps (which also look sick).

Airpods Standard

It seems to me that the lack of active noise cancellation in the entry-level AirPods may be pure software, but perhaps not. Anyway, the mid-range AirPods are now AirPods Pro aside from interchangeable tips. Very nice. But the Hearing Aid features of the AirPods Pro are impressive.

Vision Pro—down but not out

The Vision Pro is still being mentioned in dispatches and appearing in the feature infographics. Apple hasn't abandoned it, but it's definitely not front-and-center right now. Might we see a new model in 2025?

Apple's Neural Hardware & Training

I still don't have a solid handle on how good Apple's neural processors are for training models. The headline terraflops numbers look great, but are they crippled in some subtle way? As I understand it, the way Apple is planning to use AI is somewhere between using RAG (which is essentially using data to enhance prompts with a pre-trained LLM) and and creating custom models from your personal data on device (possibly to be used in conjunction with pre-trained models).

E.g. you might have a model to do OCR on text in images, and a model trained on your photos designed to recognize your friends, and both might be used to help drive image search.

But it doesn't seem like there's an particularly good reason to train on your device vs. on a "private cloud". Your photos need to be uploaded anyway (for backup, etc.) so they're already going to be in the cloud.

Final Thoughts

Nothing terribly exciting, and yet I think the new products are each quite compelling, especially the Watch Series 10 and the new Airpods Pro. The iPhone 16 Pro wouldn't be compelling if you already have the iPhone 15 Pro, but it's quite compelling to me as it covers all the most important focal ranges I use a camera for except longer telephoto, which means when I do have my camera with me, I don't need to swap lenses as often.