Apple unveils the Watch, calling it the company's 'next chapter'
Apple Inc has unveiled a new watch, two larger iPhones and a mobile payments service as Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook seeks to revive the company's reputation as a wellspring of innovation.
The company took the wraps off a larger, 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus. They will support more than 200 telecoms carriers worldwide, including all three in China - a key growth market for the company.
The larger screen size is the most notable change about this year’s iPhones. From the first iPhone in 2007 through the iPhone 4s in 2011, Apple maintained a display size of 3.5 inches, measured from one corner to its diagonal.
In 2012, with the iPhone 5, it increased the display to 4.0 inches; last year’s iPhone 5s maintained that size. This year’s bump to 4.7 and 5.5 inches represents another large jump and brings Apple’s flagship devices closer in screen real estate to Samsung’s Galaxy S5 (a 5-inch screen) and Galaxy Note 4 (5.7 inches).
Apple fans have long defended the company’s refusal to bump up the screen size, deriding its competitors as unwieldy and unpocketable. Samsung, however, appears to have had success in the past several years in part by offering smartphones with generous screen sizes.
Surveys have consistently found that shoppers lust after larger screens and that device owners with larger screens enjoyed having the roomier display for reading text, typing, and watching videos (even though the phones may look a little goofy in their front pockets).
Apple has been under increasing pressure from financial analysts to up the screen size of its smartphones. Despite record sales in each successive year, Apple has not dominated the smartphone market in countries like China and India, where shoppers have flocked to devices with larger screens from companies like Samsung and LG.
The bigger iPhones are seen as an attempt to appeal to those potential customers, who would have otherwise dismissed the iPhone as unrealistically small.
Each new iPhone will come with a "secure element" chip and a near-field communications, or NFC, antenna.
The other new product to be developed and introduced under Cook's reign is a wearable device tethered to the iPhone that will combine health and fitness tracking with communications.
The "Apple Watch" will come in three distinct collections, including a sport edition and an upscale line coated in 18-karat gold.
"Compared to what's out there, it feels like it's very slender. I like the level of elegance and the three different lines, which include sport and luxury," said Angela Tafoya, at fashion blog Refinery29.
Rival watch and wearable device makers are keeping a wary eye on Apple, which up-ended the music industry and drove once-dominant phone makers like Blackberry to the brink of extinction, and whose iPad helped shrink personal computer sales for a time before they recently recovered.
It has an enviable track record when it comes to mobile hardware, though it tends not to be the first to introduce a new-fangled product category. Rival electronics giants such as Sony Corp, Samsung, LG Electronics Inc and Qualcomm Inc have already launched smartwatches, albeit without much success.
Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi estimated that if Apple were to sell 30 million watches at $250 each, it would add about $7.5 billion to its revenue.
The pressure was on for the world's largest tech company to wow at its "special event" in Cupertino. The prospect of the new watch attracted a broader swathe of attendees than usual, with celebrities, fashion industry editors and even healthcare executives rounding out the mostly tech-industry crowd.
Apple also introduced a new mobile payments service dubbed "Apple Pay." Each phone will come equipped with its new payments service, which launches in the United States next month and allows users to pay for items in stores with their phones instead of physically presenting their credit or debit cards.
The move gives Apple access to a trove of data on how consumers shop in brick and mortar stores, where more than 90 percent of US retail sales are still conducted.
Barclays Capital said in a September 5 note that the mobile payments feature would give Apple "one of the largest sets of consumer transaction data in the US"
In a rare move for the company, Apple had planned on livecasting its event online, with a simultaneous translation in Chinese. But the livestream went down for many users about a half-hour in, prompting many to take to Twitter to express their frustrations.
