I missed Steve Jobs and the first iPhone, but luckily I didn't miss you ten years later

There are many ways to live. Different people have different ways to express gratitude and respect. But the way I respect and appreciate humanity is to make something beautiful and then make it public.

You will never meet these people, you will never shake their hands, hear their stories or tell them yours, but the act of putting so much energy and love into creating something, that alone conveys something. It is a way of conveying gratitude for humanity to other fellow human beings.

Therefore, we need to face ourselves and remember the things we think are important. Not forgetting our original aspirations is what makes Apple what it is.

At 10 a.m. on September 12, Steve Jobs' voice echoed in the theater named after him. Apple chose to use the quote of the late legendary founder as the opening. After 20 seconds of applause, Tim Cook walked to the center of the stage with tears in his eyes and said in a choked voice: "It's appropriate for him to open his own theater."

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Today, there are news reports and comments about this conference and product everywhere. We know that you may have been overwhelmed by the excessive information. Don't worry, we will slowly unfold it. Here, we will only share with you what you want to know.

 Retail: The ultimate Apple retail experience, upgraded again

It cannot be said to be the best, as people have different ideas after all, but the Apple flagship store is undoubtedly the most unique retail experience among mainstream consumer brands.

Three years ago, former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts joined Apple to oversee the retail experience. You would have thought she brought a luxury retail experience to Apple...

This is not the case. Before this, Apple Stores were already similar to luxury stores - exquisite decoration, modern and artistic design. After entering the store, you can pick up the products and play with them. Within ten seconds, a clerk will definitely come to answer your questions.

Under Ahrendts' leadership, Apple's retail experience is undergoing a comprehensive transformation. First, the flagship store's name has changed from Apple Store to Apple Townsquare. In Western countries, townsquare is the place where the most important local events take place, including political rallies, speeches, farmers' markets and gatherings of local residents.

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In Ahrendts's view, an Apple flagship store visited by 500 million people every year is enough to become a townsquare.

In fact, Apple flagship stores have already had similar functions in their transformation over the past year. Apple launched Today at Apple, a flagship store activity program around the world, which covers the simplest programming, painting tutorials, and free lectures by top artists, making Apple flagship stores the venue for more and more civic cultural activities.

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The naming change is not isolated, it means that Apple needs to transform its stores and the surrounding environment. "In my opinion, the flagship store is Apple's biggest 'product'. Just like product iteration, we will add new features and new designs," said Ahrendts.

Next to the largest flagship stores, Apple will buy a larger piece of land and build a veritable city square where you can gather with friends, relax, or participate in the increasingly frequent cultural activities carefully organized by Apple.

These activities will also take place inside flagship stores. Apple will add quiet meeting rooms in its largest stores to allow entrepreneurs, programmers and Apple's professional development and teaching staff to meet face to face, and also provide local artists with a more relaxed and inclusive stage to showcase their talents.

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In the glass cube on New York's Fifth Avenue, Apple plans to open up the entire plaza around it, cutting holes in the ground to let natural light into the flagship store located underground in the plaza. On the Champs-Elysées in France, Apple opened the entire fifth floor to the public. In Milan and other places, Apple will take advantage of the geographical features of the site to build more plazas next to the flagship store. In Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, Apple has been approved to transform the Carnegie Library into a flagship store . "This building was built to spread knowledge, and it is very appropriate to put Today at Apple here.

When the core purpose of Apple flagship stores is no longer to sell Apple products, it is much easier to understand why they are given a name that means more than retail.

 Watch: Solving the pain points of smartwatch fans

Last quarter, Apple Watch sales increased by 50% year-on-year, replacing Rolex as the world's best-selling single-brand watch, with a consumer satisfaction rate of 97%.

There is no doubt that this data proves that people are accepting the concept of wearable intelligence.

The latest Apple Watch and watch operating system watchOS may not be able to change the minds of those who are pessimistic about smart watches, but it is enough to make those who have already accepted the concept deepen their love for Apple Watch.

The most important new feature of Apple Watch Series 3 is the addition of cellular support, that is, the LTE data function. With the newly added GPS module, this means that you can only wear the watch when exercising, and it can accurately record your exercise trajectory without missing important calls, emails and WeChat.

The watch's phone number is the same as the phone's, and traffic will be recorded in the same account. Apple has worked with global carrier partners including China Unicom to use a special virtual carrier card technology, so you don't need to insert a card , you only need to pair and complete the necessary operations to make calls, receive emails, and listen to music on the watch.

Yes, music. The fundamental reason why Apple added LTE to the Apple Watch may be music.

In the past, to listen to music on the watch, you had to save Apple Music to the watch, which actually downloaded the music files locally. The new watch supports mobile data, which means you can listen to new music on the watch, not limited to the storage space of the watch. The watch supports Bluetooth, so you can use it with AirPods or any Bluetooth headset.

With Apple Watch Series 3, you can wear 40 million songs on your wrist without an iPhone - and the iPod's slogan back then was "Put 1,000 songs in your pocket."

The built-in processor of the third-generation watch is 70% more powerful than the previous generation. In addition to cellular mobile, the size has not increased, and the case is still the same as the previous generation.

The appearance is available in three colors: gold, silver and space gray. The watch strap has been added with a nylon sports version, and other materials (such as leather) have also been added with many colors. Apple has continued its cooperation with Nike and Hermès, and the exclusive hole-stud silicone and leather straps have also been added with new styles. As for the highest-end white ceramic shell version, a black version has also been added to the third-generation watch.

The new watch with cellular and GPS is priced at RMB 3,188 and will be available for pre-order this Friday, September 15. As mentioned earlier, China is the first country to launch the cellular function, and China Unicom will support it first, with China Mobile and China Telecom adding support later.

 TV 4K HDR: Stable upgrade

Apple is a pioneer in Internet TV (boxes), but like the iPhone, its TV boxes don't always have the highest resolution.

This time, the new TV box has two major upgrades in picture quality compared to the previous generation: the first is 4K (finally...), and the second is HDR, or high dynamic range, which greatly improves the contrast and color vividness of the picture, making bright places brighter, dark places darker, and colorful places more delicate and relatively more intense.

Simply put, the difference is:

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Wrong... it's this:

But what may make consumers scream the most is Apple’s promotion efforts on the new TV: the hardware price remains the same, starting at US$179, but the resolution of most of the content provided by Apple, including movies, TV shows, Live Sporit sports events, etc., as well as App Store games that can be run on TV, has been increased to 4K.

What’s even more exaggerated is that the HD content you have already purchased will be automatically upgraded to 4K without any additional charge. Apple is working with the largest Hollywood distributors such as 20th Century Fox, Universal, Paramount, and Sony to bring more 4K HDR movie content to the new TV box - the price is the same as HD.

iPhone 8/8 Plus: True flagships in the shadows

No one would object to the fact that Apple "invented" the rhythm of holding a press conference once a year and updating its flagship models every year.

This rule is now universal across the industry. It improves a mobile phone brand's ability to retain users, and also pushes the brand's own design, manufacturing and product line management capabilities to the limit.

Every time Apple releases a new phone at a press conference, it will become the focus of everyone's discussion for the next year. But unfortunately, at this year's press conference, the real flagship iPhone 8/8 Plus only took the lead for a few dozen minutes.

In terms of appearance, the biggest difference between the iPhone 8/8 Plus and the previous generation is that the back cover is replaced with a glossy glass. The rest is similar to the iPhone 7/7 Plus, except that the rose gold version is a little more "pink". It combines the rounded curved frame from the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 4 "glass sandwich" (glass panel-metal frame-glass back cover) structure, which is highly praised as a consumer electronics product design.

The new structure also means that the black model will become a fingerprint collector. This reminds me of the iPhone 7 in Jet Black color. The poor glossy back cover and dirty fingerprints made it the worst model in the history of iPhone users.

Fortunately, there is a difference between the glass back panels of Jet Black and iPhone 8. The former is the result of metal surface polishing, while the latter is the natural smoothness of glass material. Combined with certain anti-oil technology, it is believed that it will feel much better than Jet Black.

Another benefit of the glass back is that it makes wireless charging possible. The reason why the iPhone has not been equipped with wireless charging before is probably because of the metal back design since the iPhone 5. The metal back will be heated by electromagnetic waves, which is why most wireless charging phones choose plastic or glass backs.

This also reduces the demand for the Lightning interface, and to some extent, it can also provide a reasonable explanation for the cancellation of the 3.5mm headphone jack. In addition, Apple is also developing a charging pad (named AirPower), which is very large and can charge mobile phones, watches, and the AirPods battery case that will be released in the future that supports wireless charging.

It's a good thing that Apple has embraced wireless charging. It means that Android phone manufacturers that had a brief romantic relationship with wireless charging in the past few years but later wanted to catch up with Apple's trend of metal integrated bodies may reconsider the body design of their next generation of mobile phones.

In addition, Apple has chosen Qi, the most widely used wireless charging standard, which means that the road ahead for other standards may be difficult.

In other aspects, the upgrades of iPhone 8/8 Plus and its predecessors are not so intuitive. For example, the screen is still a Retina HD screen with the same resolution, but it has added the True Tone display technology that has appeared on the iPad Pro before, which can automatically adjust the screen white balance in different lighting environments to make the display look more comfortable; and dual-domain pixel, which significantly improves the viewing angle of the screen.

To be specific, if someone is playing Honor of Kings and you are watching him play next to you, you can see the scene as clearly as he does.

The iPhone 8/8 Plus also has a slight improvement in photography over its predecessor. The camera still has 12 million pixels, but it takes pictures faster, reproduces colors more realistically, and has optical image stabilization. On the iPhone 8 Plus, the Portrait mode has a technology called "portrait lighting" that adjusts the light and shadow of the portrait based on the results of a machine learning algorithm, making the photo look like it was taken in a studio.

Interestingly, this feature can completely blacken the background and darken the brightness of the portrait, and was named "dead portrait mode" by our readers...

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Apple named the A11 chip "Bionic", which literally means bionics. This chip has a dedicated neural network computing unit "Neural Engine" built in, and the portrait light function mentioned above is realized through its calculation.

It also plays an important role in the augmented reality games and other functions of iPhone 8/8 Plus, because in the past, the CPU and GPU in the mobile phone processor consumed too many resources (computing, battery) to achieve augmented reality calculations, and this neural network computing unit is excellent in this regard.

Why are iPhone 8/8 Plus the real flagships in the shadows? Let’s talk about iPhone X first.

iPhone X: 10th anniversary, new revolution

First of all, the pronunciation: it’s not iPhone ten, iPhone X, iPhone X, or iPhone X, but iPhone ten.

We are already very familiar with everything about it, and there is almost no difference between the real machine and the previous leaks.

In a body that is slightly larger than the iPhone 8 and slightly smaller than the iPhone 8 Plus, Apple has managed to fit a 5.8-inch OLED screen, which is larger than the 8 Plus model. Apple calls it the Super Retina Display. The only supplier of this screen that meets Apple's quality standards is Samsung.

There is a bangs above the "full screen" on the front because it integrates an infrared (depth) camera, a proximity sensor, an ambient light sensor, a left/upper speaker, a microphone, a front camera and a component called a dot projector.

Using a combination of cameras, a dot projector, and an infrared camera, the iPhone X can begin a "prepare to unlock" process when a person looks at it.

After that, it will project thousands of invisible dots onto your face, draw a three-dimensional depth "face map" of your face, and then compare it with the face map recorded by the system - just like Touch ID, this facial unlocking function is called Face ID.

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In addition to unlocking, this camera set can also add new features to more applications. For example, Snapchat can more accurately recognize faces and expressions, making filters more vivid; Apple Pay can also use face verification; Apple’s own Animoji function, for example, allows you to use your own face in iMessage to record an Emoji animation with expressions and send it to friends.

There are new ways to show off your new iPhone. Are you excited?

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In addition, the iPhone X's dual rear cameras now have optical image stabilization, and selfies with the front camera also have portrait depth of field effects.

But due to this set of components and the extremely low production capacity of OLED screens, the iPhone X is destined not to become a street machine like other iPhones. You can only pre-order this phone from October 27th, and it will be difficult to buy it this year. It will undoubtedly become the model that scalpers pay the most attention to at the end of this year and the beginning of next year, so if you can buy it on the official website at the original price (8388 RMB), you are really lucky.

This is why the iPhone 8/8 Plus has become the flagship in the shadow. If you can’t buy an iPhone X and don’t want to let scalpers make money, you may have to make do with the iPhone 8/8 Plus in the end.

In two hours, Apple once again brought a number of exciting consumer electronics products, as well as a mobile phone that was revolutionary enough to make most people dream about it for the next year.

At the end of the press conference, Cook repeated what Jobs said at the beginning.

At Apple, we all work hard to build great things, and I think Steve would be proud of us.

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I missed Steve Jobs and the first iPhone ten years ago, but fortunately I didn’t miss this launch event ten years later.

Thank you for reading this and supporting our iPhone launch coverage. I suddenly realized that we didn’t say much about the configuration and price before, so:

 Watch Series 3 (gold, silver, space gray, stainless steel, ceramic, etc., including Nike+):

GPS: Starting from ￥2588; GPS+Cellular Network: Starting from ￥3188 (band and case prices vary); Hermès GPS+Cellular Network: Starting from ￥8988; Edition Ceramic Case: Starting from ￥10188

 TV:

32GB: $179; 64GB: $199

iPhone 8 (gold, silver, space gray):

64GB: ￥5888; 256GB: ￥7188

iPhone 8 Plus (gold, silver, space gray):

64GB: ￥6688; 256GB: ￥7988

iPhone X (Silver, Space Gray)

64GB: ￥8388; 256GB: ￥9688

Good morning, goodbye.