Apple Event on 13 October 2020 Announcements

[OtinG]

I’ll use this thread to list the announcements from today’s Apple event. I’m going to watch it on my TV 4K from my living room so I’ll be using my iPad mini 5 to type in the information, and typing on an iPad with old, arthritic fingers is slow and cumbersome, so I’ll just include the main points for now then add more details later.

HomePod mini

Price: $99

Ships on: Nov 16

Details

• Spherical design
• S5 chip
• Can form stereo pairs with another HomePod mini
• Integrates with Home app
• Intercom feature to exchange short voice messages with other devices, but not true intercom capability

iPhone 12 with 5G

Price: $799

Ships on: Oct 23

Details

• Flat sides like iPhone 5 had
• 6.1” screen with thinner bezel
• Super Retina XDR display
• 2,000,000:1 contrast
• Ceramic Shield glass from Corning
• A14 Bionic chip
• Dual lens, Ultra-wide 12MP camera
• MagSafe for iPhone, enables chargers and other accessories to snap in place on the iPhone via magnets
• Includes USB-C cable, but no charger or earpods

iPhone 12 mini with 5G

Price: $699

Ships on: Nov 13 (need to verify this date)

Details

• Flat sides like iPhone 5 had
• 5.4” edge to edge screen with thinner bezel
• Super Retina XDR display
• 2,000,000:1 contrast
• Ceramic Shield glass from Corning
• A14 Bionic chip
• Dual lens, Ultra-wide 12MP camera
• MagSafe for iPhone, enables chargers and other accessories to snap in place on the iPhone via magnets
• Includes USB-C cable, but no charger or earpods

iPhone 12 Pro with 5G

Price: $999 (128GB)

Ships on: Oct 23

Details

• Flat sides like iPhone 5 had
• 6.1” screen with thinner bezel
• Super Retina XDR display
• 2,000,000:1 contrast
• Ceramic Shield glass from Corning
• A14 Bionic chip
• Tri lens, Ultra-wide 12MP camera, 2.5x telephoto, sensor shift, Apple ProRAW format, can record HDR video, Adobe Vision
• MagSafe for iPhone, enables chargers and other accessories to snap in place on the iPhone via magnets
• Includes USB-C cable, but no charger or earpods
• LiDAR scanner

iPhone 12 Pro Max with 5G

Price: $1099

Ships on: Nov 13

Details

• Flat sides like iPhone 5 had
• 6.7” screen with thinner bezel
• Super Retina XDR display
• 2,000,000:1 contrast
• Ceramic Shield glass from Corning
• A14 Bionic chip
• Tri lens, Ultra-wide 12MP camera, 2.5x telephoto, sensor shift, Apple ProRAW format, can record HDR video, Adobe Vision
• MagSafe for iPhone, enables chargers and other accessories to snap in place on the iPhone via magnets
• Includes USB-C cable, but no charger or earpods
• LiDAR scanner

That is everything announced in a nutshell....

[OtinG]

No macOS 11 Big Sur today. I’m guessing they are waiting to release it when some new Macs are available.

[OtinG]

It doesn’t look like there will be a new TV this year either.

The HomePod mini looks decent. It looks very similar to the new Amazon Echo Dot 4th generation, but I suspect it will have much better sound. I think their Intercom feature that isn’t actually an intercom will be a let down though. Perhaps they will turn that into a true intercom feature rather than just an audio messaging feature, which seems rather lame IMO.

I had to laugh at how they tried to spin the omission of chargers and earpods from the iPhone boxes as “saving the environment”. Yeah right! They are just being cheap...

[OtinG]

iOS and iPadOS 14.1 have been released. I haven’t seen it show up yet, but a few sites on the internet are saying it was released today by Apple.


ETA: Apparently Apple has now pulled the 14.1 releases off of the developer site. So either it was put their by mistake or they have another release booboo like they did with 14.0.

ETA2: Apple placed 14.1 back on dev site but as the GM release. So apparently someone screwed up releasing it earlier. But it never went out OTA.

[kyteflyer]

Originally Posted by OtinG

It doesn’t look like there will be a new TV this year either.

The HomePod mini looks decent. It looks very similar to the new Amazon Echo Dot 4th generation, but I suspect it will have much better sound. I think their Intercom feature that isn’t actually an intercom will be a let down though. Perhaps they will turn that into a true intercom feature rather than just an audio messaging feature, which seems rather lame IMO.

I had to laugh at how they tried to spin the omission of chargers and earpods from the iPhone boxes as “saving the environment”. Yeah right! They are just being cheap...

The Homepod mini was the standout for me, especially as I was brinking on getting an Echo Dot. Yes, it costs more, but I’m already into Apple and only subbed to Amazon Prime, with one Kindle I rarely use... bit of a no brainer. I could never justify the expense of the original Homepod but this Mini might just do it for me.

The iPhones look nice, too, but I think I will wait and see what turns up next year.

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by kyteflyer

The Homepod mini was the standout for me, especially as I was brinking on getting an Echo Dot. Yes, it costs more, but I’m already into Apple and only subbed to Amazon Prime, with one Kindle I rarely use... bit of a no brainer. I could never justify the expense of the original Homepod but this Mini might just do it for me.

The iPhones look nice, too, but I think I will wait and see what turns up next year.

If I was into using Apple Music I would get the HomePod mini. Good price, and with Apple you pay more but you tend to get top notch quality. I don’t use Apple Music or any paid music service though, so it wouldn’t be a good fit in my home. But just like the various Amazon Echos, the HomePod won’t sound all that great by itself, they all need to be paired to produce stereo sound. No way you can get good stereo sound out of a single device because that requires greater physical separation between speakers than those devices can accomplish in their small package design.

[salamanderjuice]

Amazon Echos can play Apple Music too. Plus Spotify, Amazon Music (of course) and others. Can play Audible and do TTS of Kindle books. I've been pretty impressed with my Echo Show 5 I got on sale for $60 CAD. I have it hooked up to my bluetooth bookshelf speakers which I imagine sound way better than the tiny Homepod mini or even the Homepod. Way cheaper to do too.

[OtinG]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Amazon Echos can play Apple Music too. Plus Spotify, Amazon Music (of course) and others. Can play Audible and do TTS of Kindle books. I've been pretty impressed with my Echo Show 5 I got on sale for $60 CAD. I have it hooked up to my bluetooth bookshelf speakers which I imagine sound way better than the tiny Homepod mini or even the Homepod. Way cheaper to do too.

My Show 5 is pretty bad. It is nearly deaf, and the Tips continue to try to come up even when set to not display, which renders the screen unusable as a bedside device since it flickers in brightness level every few minutes. I bought it as a bedside alarm clock, so major fail there. I wish I had returned it, but I too got it on sale. I kept it because it does a good job of showing lyrics to songs that are playing. But to be honest, it isn’t worth what I paid for it, even on sale.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by OtinG

It doesn’t look like there will be a new TV this year either.

There is still time to do another event. We only learned of this one a week ago. Maybe when they announce first Apple Silicon Mac.

I think more frequent events covering fewer products is probably better for everyone.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Amazon Echos can play Apple Music too. Plus Spotify, Amazon Music (of course) and others. Can play Audible and do TTS of Kindle books. I've been pretty impressed with my Echo Show 5 I got on sale for $60 CAD. I have it hooked up to my bluetooth bookshelf speakers which I imagine sound way better than the tiny Homepod mini or even the Homepod. Way cheaper to do too.

From Apple site:

HomePod mini will work with Apple Music and a number of other music and radio services, including iHeartRadio, radio.com, TuneIn, as well as Pandora and Amazon Music in the coming months.

I assume things are still not worked out with Spotify, but of course you can still handoff to HomePod (hold near HomePod) and connect to HomePod using the Spotify app, as you can with any number of other third party apps.

Most of the time, I actually prefer to find things to play on my phone ‘manually’ and hand them off rather than using voice control. This was true even with Echo devices we had. Maybe I’ll never get used to talking with computers.

[tomsem]

Product I’d like to see: iPad mini Pro with the iPhone Pro cameras.

[OtinG]

I would definitely like to see the next iPad mini to keep about the same dimensions but use the small bezels of the newer Pro models to achieve a larger screen in the same small package. They could probably achieve a 16 x 9 screen ratio that way as the bottom and top bezels are very large right now. Pro speed and power would be nice too, but I don’t won’t to pay out the backside for it. I like the $400 price, add too much and that will climb up quite a bit.

I suspect at least one new Mac might get released before Black Friday, but I’m not expecting to see a new TV 4K this year. If we see one, great, if not then no big deal as the current models are still good. My only complaint with my TV 4K is that some streaming services like Philo don’t seem to have enough knowledge of the tvOS because their apps are not as good on TV as they are on Roku and FireTV. Not much Apple can do about that. Hardware wise though, my TV 4K produces much better video streaming quality than my Roku or FireTV. The FireTV is really cheaply made and it shows in video and audio streaming.

[ilovejedd]

Looks like we'll be updating an iPhone XR to the 12 unexpectedly. AT&T's giving $700-800 discount (via monthly bill credits) with trade-in of iPhone 8 and newer.

[kyteflyer]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

Amazon Echos can play Apple Music too. Plus Spotify, Amazon Music (of course) and others. Can play Audible and do TTS of Kindle books. I've been pretty impressed with my Echo Show 5 I got on sale for $60 CAD. I have it hooked up to my bluetooth bookshelf speakers which I imagine sound way better than the tiny Homepod mini or even the Homepod. Way cheaper to do too.

The new Homepod Mini can also be the AppleTV speaker, instead of your TV speaker. Can the Echo dot do that? If so, I’m going to go get 2 of those because Prime Day cheap.

[pwalker8]

Nothing that is going to make me pull out the wallet this year. The homepods are pretty cool, but how do I listen to my DVD's?