I just finished watching the two-hour Apple live event. It was interesting, as usual, though without a great deal of relevance to ebooks and ereading. Special guest appearances included an appearance by Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario himself, to promote a new iPhone Mario game, and an appearance by John Henke of Niantic to show off a new Pokémon Go interface for the Apple Watch. There’s a new, waterproof Apple Watch, and a new CPU for the old one that’s staying on.
The biggest news is, of course, the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. As expected, these phones dropped the analog earphone jack in favor of using the Lightning connector for earphones, though both a set of Lightning earphones and a Lightning-to-earphone-jack adapter will be included with the new phone. There’s also a fairly-impressive-looking set of wireless earbuds called the Apple AirPods—truly wireless earbuds that you just stick in each ear, without even a connection to each other. Connecting them to the iPhone, or other Apple devices, is made considerably easier than pairing Bluetooth speakers, though I don’t know that I’d necessarily find them worth the $169 asking price.
The new iPhone 7 is also IP67 dust- and waterproof. As Android Authority explained when the Samsung Galaxy S4 was declared IP67 in 2013, a few years ago, this means it’s completely dust-proof, and can survive immersion at up to 1 meter depth for up to 30 minutes. That’s not quite as good as the 50-meter rating for the new Apple Watch, and you’re obviously not expected to take your phone swimming or scuba diving, but it does mean the phone will probably survive the odd accidental drop into pool or tub. Which is better than you can say for the Kindle Oasis!
The presentation made a great deal out of the iPhone’s new camera capabilities, including the iPhone 7 Plus model with a built-in telephoto camera for taking even better photos, but that doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with ebooks. One thing that might is that the new Retina HD Display is said to have even better ability to present colors—something they repeatedly noted didn’t come across as well on the presentation display, but that people will absolutely notice when they look at the screen on the iPhone itself.
Another important point is that the iPhone 7 will have the best battery life of any iPhone yet, due in part to the use of Apple’s new A10 processor. The processor includes a pair of low-energy, high-efficiency cores for use with tasks that don’t take up a lot of processing power, such as checking email—or, presumably, when reading ebooks.
Something else worth mentioning is that iPhone storage capacities are doubling again—the basic model of iPhone 7 comes in at 32 GB, with the more advanced models boasting 128 GB and 256 GB. Apple is also doubling the capacities of the 6S and 6S Plus phones it will continue to offer alongside the new line. That’s certainly room for a lot more ebooks, though it seems more likely Apple was thinking about music and movies when it made the change.
In fact, ebooks and other print media didn’t come in for a lot of mention during the presentation at all. There certainly wasn’t any mention of iBooks or the new “iBooks Storytime” feature Nate Hoffelder expected to hear about. Presumably that will come later on, perhaps once iOS 10 launches in a couple of weeks. Photography, games, and fitness seemed to be the main orders of business, along with a little mention of music. Are ebooks simply “yesterday’s news” as far as Apple is concerned? Or do they simply recognize that they’re not the gosh-wow feature they used to be?
So, the new iPhone is as spiffy a device as any new iPhone ever was, and waterproof for bathtub reading, too. The lack of a headphone jack is still more than a little offputting, and I’ve already seen Facebook friends avowing an intention to switch phone operating systems over it, but the inclusion of the adapter dongle at least means people who’ve already bought expensive headphones will be able to keep using them. It remains to be seen how quickly other manufacturers will follow suit.
teleread.org 
The port wars have been going on forever. And it’s always the same – a group of chumps complain of betrayals and as time moves on all is forgotten. Apple used to lose the port wars – although its winners were always home runs – but now it has a winning record.
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You’re a more dedicated Apple fan than I am Chris. I didn’t bother to watch this event and haven’t seen any reason to watch excerpts afterward. The last rumors were quite accurate. It’s very much a case of nothing worth seeing. Two minutes reading will inform me better than 90 minutes of watching.
Apple’s becoming a classic illustration of corporate hubris (overwheening pride). I’ve been using its products since 1990, and I’ve never seen them offer such a dreadful set of hardware options as they do now.
In the desktop sector, there’s literally nothing that, from my perspective as a small business is worth buying. I had an iMac and promised myself I’d never buy another. There’s a reason why in the Windows market, all-in-one computers are bottom-tier products. They’re a bad design. They’re a pain to fix and impossible to upgrade. Apple’s iMac is particularly bad in that respect—and it doesn’t even offer cheapness as an advantaage.
A friend of mine is terrified that a little bit of jiggling on his high-end iMac means the display is dying, necessitating replacing the entire computer. With my Mac mini, that’s a non-issue. I’ve already got a spare display I could attach in 15 minutes. But I’ve got the last tolerable model of the Mac mini, the 2012 version. Later versions are little more than digital media centers with wimpy CPUs and soldered in RAM. There’s already a lively used market in those 2012 models.
So Score One for corporate stupidity, not making products savvy users buy. The component desktop is the most popular business computer on the planet for good reason. It’s very cost effective, easily fixed and easily upgraded. Apple does not even make a computer for that huge market. And yet its executives wonder why Mac sales are languishing and few businesses buy their Macs.
Mac laptops are no better. Again, Apple is making them impossible to upgrade and difficult to fix in an utterly stupid, artsy-fartsy pursuit of thinness. Does making a MBA make it any more portable? No, it’s the other two dimensions that require a case. Being absurdly thin does not change that. Score Two for corporate stupidity, letting the artists run the company.
Apple’s iOS products have until recently been better. There, at least this silly obsession with thinness does have a upside. For tablets, thin means lightweight and that matters with tablets (although not with smaller smartphones). Hints that Apple may be abandoning their iPad Air line in an effort to push people into paying far more for iPad Pro features they don’t need are disturbing though.
With the arrival of Scrivener for iOS, Apple’s lousy laptop line doesn’t bother me. My only reason for owning a laptop is writing on the go and a tablet now does that as well or better.
From my perspective, Apple’s hardware line is only tolerable because of its older products and, in the case of the iPhone, those intended for less-rich markets. If my Mac mini dies, I can replace it (for a time) with a refurb 2012 model. If my iPad 3 falls too far behind the tech-curve, I can replace it with a refurb iPad Air 2. And for my iPhone, I’ll get the iPhone SE used, which is likely to keep the headphone jack because consumers in SE Asia will go Android if Apple tries to force them to buy overpriced headphones.
But notice what’s happening. I’m no longer buying from Apple, even Apple refurb of current products. I’m buying used Apple products that earn Apple not a penny. There’ll be about a five-year window in which Apple’s older products will make do for the bad design an engineering of their existing ones. After that, I don’t know what I will do. Since I mostly work with Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps, I could convert to Windows in a morning without spending a penny.
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Apple’s basic problems lies back in the mid-1990s when Apple was dying and buying their products was a really stupid move. In that era, Apple got accustomed to not making Macs for the all-Windows business market and at ignoring the needs of “creative professionals.” It focused, to be blunt, on people with lots of money but not much sense. (Think of those gumdrop iMacs or the utterly ridiculous toilet-seat laptop.) Those are people who don’t have intelligent opinions about technology and will do whatever some authority figure tells them. If that figure tells them headphone jacks are obsolete, they’d actually believe and pay a small fortune for Apple ill-designed earPods or whatever it is they’re called. Like I said, lots of money but no tech savvy.
Long ago as a teen, I remember loathing LBJ as president because his attitude was a Hillary-like, “Hey, I’m a crook and a liar, but that’s OK, you’re too stupid to figure that out.” With today’s Apple, there’s a similar attitude: “Hey, our products are badly engineered and a pain to use, upgrade, or repair, but that’s OK. You’re too stupid to figure that out.”
Nuff said. I’d advise people not to buy the iPhone 7. The improvements aren’t worth the hassle of the lack of a headphone port. And there too, Apple’s executives are being stupid comparing this change to getting rid of floppy drives. I agreed with that move, pointing out to friends that they almost never used floppy drives anyway.
But headphones are, far and above, the most-used iPhone accessory. People use them several times a day to listen to music or podcasts, as well as to talk on the phone with some privacy. This isn’t just a dumb move. It is a really, really dumb one. Now they have to klutz with a stupid dongle that’s get lost or deal with BT headphones whose batteries die unexpectedly.
And alas, I’ve noticed that in the corporate world (and government), the stupider a move is, the less likely it’ll be corrected. Corporate egos are invested in removing this headphone jack. Corporate egos do not admit they’re wrong. Pitiful!
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