Apple Event 2018 Roundup: All Important Features, Announcement & Updates

The much-awaited Apple event 2018 finally kicked off today at Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park. After months of rumors and leaks, we finally got to see the latest iPhones namely iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR along with the Apple Watch Series 4.

A lot of rumors and speculation regarding Apple’s upcoming devices had been doing rounds in the tech town for quite some time. Most of us were already aware of the major features and changes through leaks, so nothing took us by surprise.

Nevertheless, the Apple event 2018 is over so let’s take a look at the highlights of the annual event.

New iPhone(s)

Apple unveiled three new iPhone variants — iPhone XS, XS Max, and iPhone XR in the event. Here’s a quick rundown of the specifications of each phone:

iPhone Xs

• Storage Options: 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB
• Color Options: Gold, Silver, Space Gray
• Display: 5.8″ OLED (458 PPI) (Super Retina HD display)
• Chipset: A12 Bionic Chip
• Rear Camera: 12MP wide-angle camera (ƒ/1.8 )+12MP telephoto lenses (ƒ/2.4)
• Front Camera: 7-megapixel camera (ƒ/2.22)
• Battery: Lasts up to 30 minutes longer than iPhone X
• OS: iOS 12

iPhone Xs Max

• Storage Options: 64GB, 256GB, and 512GB
• Color Options: Gold, Silver, Space Gray
• Display: 6.5″ OLED (480-500 PPI) (Super Retina HD display)
• Chipset: A12 Bionic Chip
• Rear Camera: 12MP wide-angle camera (ƒ/1.8 )+12MP telephoto lenses (ƒ/2.4)
• Front Camera: 7-megapixel camera (ƒ/2.22)
• Battery: Lasts up to 1.5 hours longer than iPhone X
• OS: iOS 12

iPhone XR

• Storage Options: 64GB, 128GB, 256GB
• Color Options: Red, Yellow, White, Coral, Black, Blue
• Display: 6.1″ LCD (Liquid Retina HD display)
• Chipset: A12 Bionic Chip
• Rear Camera: Single 12 MP wide-angle camera (ƒ/1.8 )
• Front Camera: 7 MP (ƒ/2.2)
• Battery: Lasts up to 1.5 hours longer than iPhone 8 Plus

Availability and Pricing

• iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max will be up for pre-order from September 14 and available in stores from September 21 at a starting price of $999 (US) and $1,099 respectively
• iPhone XR will be up for pre-order from October 19 and be available in stores from October 26 at a starting price of $749

Apple Watch Series 4

Apple’s “gather around” event also brought a new lineup of Apple Watch Series 4. The new Watch series comes with a bunch of drastic changes like an almost bezel-less screen for larger display and new S4 64-bit dual-core processor. The latest Apple Watch is available in both GPS and Cellular and has advanced features like Digital Crown with Haptics, Fall Detection, ECG heart rate monitoring, Swimproof, etc.

The Apple Watch 4 will be available in two versions – Cellular+GPS at a cost of $499 and the GPS only at a cost of $399. You can pre-order it from the official Apple Website starting September 14 or buy it from the stores from September 21st onwards.

A12 Bionic Chipset

Apple deems its A12 Bionic Chipset as the “smartest and most powerful chip ever in a smartphone” and industry’s first 7nm chip. All the three new iPhones have the A12 in it that has six-core CPU (two “performance” cores to handle heavy computational tasks and “four” efficiency cores to tackle everyday tasks). It has a four-core GPU which is about 50% faster than the A11’s.

The main highlight of the latest Apple-designed chip is the updated Neural Engine which contains eight cores as compared to the two-core Neural Engine released last year. As far as performance is concerned, the old Neural Engine could perform up to 600 billion operations per second, whereas the latest version can handle 5 trillion operations per second.

This type of processing muscle would enable new functionalities especially for apps that use Core ML. Apple showed off such an app called Homecourt which can record your basketball gameplay and analyze the misses and hits in real-time to improve your game.

Other Announcements

We were expecting more from Apple like the announcement of new iPad and the speculated Macbook. But the company left us disappointed as it wrapped up the event with the aforementioned devices only. However, Apple announced updates for HomePod and tvOS 12 with Atmos that would be available from September 17 onwards.