Let's Talk iPhone Keynote Recap

Hey guys, this is John with Mac Heads 101, and today I wanted to recap what happened at the Apple Let's Talk iPhone event. So, uh, the event opened up, and Steve Jobs was not there because Steve Jobs resigned as the CEO and Tim Cook took his place as the new CEO. Steve Jobs actually didn't even make an appearance.

So first, uh, Tim Cook, he did what they usually do at keynotes. He gave stats about the iPhone and Lion and how Mac is doing, and about their new stores. Then, um, the first new information he revealed to us was like they did—they usually start with small stuff and build their way up to the biggest stuff. Sometimes they'll start with things you already know that they told you at a different event.

Anyways, they started with um, two new apps that Apple made. One of them is called Cards, which lets you make um, mail postcards from any picture you have, and then Apple will mail it to you. $2.99 for cards shipped to the US and $4.99 for cards in other countries. Their other app was called Find My Friends, and it does what it sounds like—it uses GPS, and it finds your friends who also use iOS devices if they allow you to, if they share their um, location with you.

Then, um, they talked about iOS 5, which is coming out October 12th. Apple already made a keynote about iOS 5, but like, uh, just to remind you guys, the main new features of iOS 5 are how that is wireless. So, like, even when you buy your phone, you won't need to connect it to iTunes, and there's nothing that can only be done by connecting your computer to your phone. So you can do your songs wirelessly; you can do everything.

So it's like, maybe it might be more efficient to do things with the wire, but theoretically, it is wireless, I guess. There's also a lot of Twitter integration. You can post things to Twitter more easily. Uh, there's the Notification Center, which lets you look at all your notifications. They updated the camera application; you can take—you can get straight to it from the lock screen. When your phone is sideways like this, you can use the volume button as a shutter.

Uh, there's Reminders, which um, just reminds you about like things that whatever you had it set to. Then, iMessage, which is like the text messaging, but like it works with all iOS devices and adds a little bit more features. But yeah, I'm not going to get too much into iOS 5 because, um, Apple already made a video about it.

All right, next is iCloud, which is going to be available also October 12th. This is Apple has already talked to you about this. Uh, it's gonna sync your music and your contacts and your calendar and your documents wirelessly. You also get five free gigabytes of storage, and that doesn't count your music or your contacts or all that. But you can purchase more if necessary.

And then the way it works is like all of your songs that you've bought through iTunes— instead of uploading them onto the cloud, and the cloud just means Apple server which hosts iCloud.com—uh, instead of uploading it to the cloud so it can transfer, it actually, if you've already bought a song through iTunes, it's just, uh, it's already like on this Apple server. So it's like instead of uploading it, uh, they transfer directly from their server to save time.

But if you didn't purchase a song, well, you can purchase a cert—you can—there's a service called iTunes Match, which costs $24.99 a year. It's going to be available at the end of October, which matches all songs that you didn't purchase through iTunes as if you purchased it. So, um, any song that you have like in MP3 format or whatever, if it can, um, if it can figure out what song it is, it's gonna give you the iTunes version of that song—that's the version that it's going to put on iCloud.com and in the cloud.

And, um, any song which you can't recognize is just going to upload. So basically, Apple’s trying to minimize the uploads necessary, which makes sense. Then Apple, uh, talked about their iPods. They didn't do any major updates, but they still updated their iPods.

So, with the iPod Nano, they lowered the price, and, uh, they gave it a bunch of new clock themes. They showed an accessory where you could like have it as a watch; it was pretty cool. Now, the icons instead of being like four small icons in a tiny little square, you can—it’s like a row, and you can swipe between them, if that makes sense.

All right, next for the iPod Touch, they didn't add too much, um, I mean that I know. I couldn’t actually see the keynote yet; I was just uh, looking at live feeds. But, um, the major new thing about the iPod Touch is now that there's a white one. So there's a white one and there's a black one, and they both come out October 12th—the new iPod Touch.

Next is the iPhone. This is like the main event; this is even the name of the event. So, uh, the iPhone is supposed to come out October 14th, and the iPhone has now an A5 chip. It's called the iPhone 4S, and now has an A5 chip, which is dual-core. It's the same chip that's found in the iPad 2, and it's supposed to, uh, it's supposed to give you up to seven times faster graphics and up to twice as fast performance on CPU-intensive tasks.

Also, um, they changed the way the antenna works. This is probably because a lot of people were complaining about the death grip. So now it actually can switch back and forth between uh, the antennas. It can warn you what it can transmit and what it receives. So based on how you hold it, it's gonna have like—it can switch intelligently between the antennas, which supposedly boosts your download speed up to twice as fast. I don't know how, but apparently it does, according to Apple.

Also, uh, the iPhone 4—there was a GSM and a CDMA version because there's an AT&T and Verizon version. Uh, those are just the technologies that AT&T and Verizon use. Anyways, it's gonna be the same for the iPhone 4S. It's going to be both GSM and CDMA, which means that the same physical phone can work with AT&T and Verizon, and now Sprint too. But I'll get more into what Sprint has done with Apple later.

Anyways, next, um, the second biggest feature on the iPhone 4S is probably the camera. The camera is now eight megapixels, which is, uh, it can take pictures at 3264 by 2448 or something like that, and it was like 60 percent more pixels than the other than the iPhone 4 could take. You can take 1080p video, but like they wanted to focus that it's not just about the megapixels, it's also about the light.

So, uh, it can it can capture a lot more light because there's five elements to the lens now, and, uh, it actually takes pictures faster than it used to. Like, you used to have to like wait, and like, I don't know, apparently it's faster now. Okay, um, and probably the biggest feature of the iPhone 4S is Siri—or if I pronounce that right—which is voice recognition technology.

So Apple, a while ago, has purchased a voice recognition company. I forgot what it was called, so I'm not gonna not gonna say its name. Anyways, so it's been a while and people are wondering why they purchased this voice recognition company, what they were planning on doing, and now they revealed it to everyone.

So, uh, Apple used to have a feature where if you held the home button, you could like, you could like talk to your phone and like, but it was very limited. It wasn't that cool; I mean, it was kind of cool, but like nobody used it. I don't know. Anyway, I think I'm pretty sure they got rid of it, and now they're reintroducing it in a whole new way.

But like, actually anyway, so you can talk to your phone by holding the home button, and you can tap for the commands. But like, type of commands they demonstrated is like if someone—you can like, uh, set a reminder. Like, "Remind me when I get home to brush my teeth," or something like that. And then when you get home, your phone will remind you to brush your teeth, which is part of the new Reminders thing.

You can have location and time reminders. Um, you can reply to text. Like if Joe texts you, "Yo, what's up?" you can say, "Reply, nothing much," and then it will send back, "Nothing much." You can look up information, so I could say like, "What's a good restaurant near me?" and it'll look up restaurants near me, or you can look up like, "Who is Joe Schmoe?" and look up Joe Schmoe on Wikipedia, but Joe Schmoe doesn't exist—you're wasting my time.

All right, I probably won't say that, but you can—it looks up information on the internet. Um, and Siri can also be used for dictation, so you can like type what you say. So, on the keyboard, like you're typing a text, if you're like at the iMessage center or whatever they call their text messaging service now, there's like a microphone button and you just tap on that, and um, you basically just talk and it'll type what you say.

So, uh, now going to happen with their old phones? Well, right now Apple offers the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 4. So they're just going to bump down the line once more. So the iPhone 3GS used to be $99; I think they might be $49 now. Anyway, now it's completely free, assuming that you're signing up for a two-year contract, which is actually how you're going to pay for it. You're not going to get a free device, anyway.

So the iPhone 4—uh, the iPhone 3GS is free for the 8 gigabyte model. The only model iPhone 4 is going to be $99 for the 8 gigabyte model. The iPhone 4S is $200 or $199 for 16 gigabyte, $300 for 32 gigabyte, and $400 for 64 gigabyte.

Now, I mentioned I was going to talk about Sprint. Uh, Sprint's—I don't know the details about this, but essentially they like— alright, so right now there's two big carriers in the U.S.—Verizon and AT&T. Right now the iPhone has only been supported by those two carriers, and Sprint wanted to join the game, but they didn't want to just be another carrier; they wanted to like, have a shot at catching up with AT&T and Verizon.

So they like invested about $20 million in buying iPhone 5s—that's right, iPhone 5, now iPhone 4S—which, um, I think they have like an exclusive contract that's going to come first to Sprint and not AT&T and Verizon until later or something like that. So basically, uh, they're trying to have more people who really want the iPhone 5 go, "All right, I guess I'll switch to Sprint." So that's Sprint's wave of catching up.

Uh, that is basically the right idea. I mean, there might be some details I missed, or like, that might not be the exact picture, but that's essentially what Sprint has done. And that's—so essentially, uh, according to rumors at least, uh, the iPhone 5 is supposed to come out sometime in the first quarter of 2012, and it's gonna come first to Sprint exclusively, and then it will join AT&T and Verizon later.

I hope this helped you. If you have any questions, feel free to comment below or just check out Apple.com to see for yourself about all these new updates. All right, thanks for watching. Goodbye.