Apple Invites Media to September 7 Event: ‘See You on the 7th’
Apple today sent out media invites for an iPhone-centric event that will be held on Wednesday, September 7 at 10:00 am at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California. Media invites (via The Verge) offer up a first look at the theme of the event and feature the simple tagline: “See you on the 7th.”
The fall 2016 event is expected to see the debut of the next-generation iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, which are rumored to feature improved cameras, better processors, and improved water resistance, implemented through the removal of the headphone jack and the introduction of a new flush, pressure-sensitive home button. Both devices are said to look similar to the iPhone 6s, with the same general size and shape, but with relocated antenna bands that no longer span the back of the devices.
Faster LTE and Wi-Fi speeds are rumored, as is a jump in storage space with 32GB positioned as the new minimum and a 256GB option rumored at the high end (possibility limited to iPhone 7 Plus). Display improvements first introduced in the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, including the True Tone feature able to adjust the display to match ambient lighting could be offered, and the larger iPhone 7 Plus is expected to have exclusive features like 3GB RAM and a dual-lens camera for crisper, brighter images.
Apple may use the event to debut a second-generation Apple Watch, said to include better waterproofing, an improved processor, and a built-in GPS chip. Design changes are not expected for the next-generation Apple Watch, but new materials and new bands are always a possibility. Apple rotates its Apple Watch band offerings on a regular basis and we expect to see new designs this fall.
Most of Apple’s Mac lineup is due for an update, but the most highly anticipated machine, the MacBook Pro, will reportedly not be debuting at the event, coming later in the year instead. It’s not known if other Macs will see a refresh announcement at the event, but it’s unlikely, and we’re also not expecting any iPad announcements at this time.
We will, however, get an update on the prospective launch dates of iOS 10, macOS Sierra, watchOS 3, and tvOS 10. We’re expecting to see iOS 10 and watchOS 3 launch shortly ahead of the release date of the next-generation iPhone (rumored to be September 16 or September 23), while macOS Sierra could come a bit later, perhaps towards the end of the month. tvOS 10, as a new operating system, could launch alongside iOS 10 or alongside macOS Sierra.
In line with past events, the September 7 event will begin at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time. As it has done with several past events, Apple is likely to stream the event live on its website and on the Apple TV. MacRumors will also be providing full event coverage, both on MacRumors.com and through our MacRumorsLive Twitter account.
Update: Apple has announced it will indeed be live streaming the event.
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42mm Apple Watch 2 May Have 35% Larger Battery
A purported photo of a larger 334 mAh lithium-ion battery destined for the Apple Watch 2 has surfaced on Chinese microblogging service Weibo, foreshadowing expected battery life improvements coming to the wrist-worn device.
The battery is allegedly for the 42mm model, which currently has a 246 mAh battery, suggesting the next-generation 42mm model could have a 35.7% larger battery. The photo does not provide any clues about potential battery life improvements coming to the smaller 38mm model, which is currently equipped with a 205 mAh battery.
The veracity of the photo cannot be confirmed, as is often the case, but KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said an Apple Watch 2 with a higher capacity battery will launch later this year. The larger battery should unsurprisingly lead to longer battery life for the Apple Watch, which is currently rated for up to 18 hours of mixed usage and up to 72 hours in Power Reserve mode on a single charge.
The much-rumored Apple Watch 2 is expected to be released in late 2016 with a faster TSMC-built processor, GPS, barometer, superior waterproofing, and a higher capacity battery — but no cellular. Both 38mm and 42mm screen sizes will be retained with thinner display technology adopted. The device could launch in September alongside the iPhone 7 and spec-bumped Apple Watch 1 models.
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Tag: Apple Watch 2
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Kanex’s ‘GoPower Watch’ Portable Battery for Apple Watch Now Available for $100
Kanex today made its GoPower Watch, one of the first MFi-certified portable batteries for Apple Watch, available for purchase for $99.95. The cordless, portable 1A/3.70V charging solution has a built-in 4,000 mAh lithium-ion battery that can charge an Apple Watch up to six times before it needs to be recharged itself.
GoPower Watch has a built-in magnetic charging puck, the same one that comes with the Apple Watch, and a USB port for simultaneously charging an iPhone with a Lightning cable. It has pass-through charging while connected to power via Micro-USB, meaning that Apple devices charge first, and then the battery pack recharges.
To charge an Apple Watch or iPhone, simply press the button on the front of the GoPower Watch. The LED indicator displays battery levels and charge status.
GoPower Watch is available in Space Gray for $99.95 on Kanex’s website. The portable battery works with all 38mm and 42mm Apple Watch models.
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Tags: Apple Watch accessories, Kanex
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Apple Watch 2 With GPS for Improved Navigation, Fitness Tracking Coming This Fall
Apple plans to announce new Apple Watch models this fall with improved health tracking and GPS chips, according to a new Bloomberg report that confirms previous rumors we’ve heard about the Apple Watch 2.
The upcoming Apple Watch 2 will not, however, feature cellular connectivity to make it less dependent on the iPhone, as Apple has not been able to compensate for the extra battery life that a cellular connection consumes.
Apple had been in talks this year with mobile phone carriers in the U.S. and Europe to add cellular connectivity to the watch, according to people familiar with the talks. A cellular chip would have theoretically allowed the product to download sports score alerts, e-mail and mapping information while out of an iPhone’s reach.
During the discussions, Apple executives expressed concern that the cellular models may not be ready for release this year and that the feature may be pushed back to a later generation, according to the people. Apple warned that, even on an aggressive schedule, the earliest possible shipment time-frame for cellular models would have been this December, one of the people said.
Apple is researching low-power cellular chips for future versions of the Apple Watch, but has been unable to make it work for 2016. The company’s “ultimate goal” for the Apple Watch is to decouple it from the iPhone, but technology will need to improve before it is able to do so. LTE connectivity and significant Apple Watch design changes are not expected before 2017.
The addition of a GPS chip, something planned for the next-generation Apple Watch, will allow the device to more accurately determine a user’s location for better fitness and health tracking capabilities along with improved navigation. Previous reports have also suggested the Apple Watch 2 will include a barometer, a higher capacity battery, and improved waterproofing techniques.
Bloomberg’s report does not give a specific launch date for the next-generation Apple Watch beyond “fall,” but it is possible Apple plans to launch new Apple Watch models alongside the iPhone 7, which is expected to be unveiled at an event that will take place on September 7.
A previous rumor from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has suggested we will see both a second-generation Apple Watch with the aforementioned new features and an upgraded first-generation Apple Watch with an improved processor and superior waterproofing.
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Jony Ive’s Design Team Nixed Apple Watch Band With Sensors
In an interview with Fast Company, former Apple employee Bob Messerschmidt, who helped design the heart rate sensors in the Apple Watch, gave some insight into what it was like working with Jony Ive and Apple’s Industrial Design Group on the company’s first wearable device.
After a 2010 acquisition, Messerschmidt joined the Apple Watch team, where he was in charge of designing some of the sensors for the device. In an anecdote relayed to Fast Company, during one meeting, Messerschmidt proposed putting health sensors in the Apple Watch band, an idea that was quickly shot down by the Industrial Design Group because of a desire for interchangeable bands.
One great example is [when] I went to a meeting and said I’m going to put sensors in the watch but I’m going to put them down here (he points to the underside of the Apple Watch band he’s wearing) because I can get a more accurate reading on the bottom of the wrist than I can get on the top of the wrist. They (the Industrial Design group) said very quickly that “that’s not the design trend; that’s not the fashion trend. We want to have interchangeable bands so we don’t want to have any sensors in the band.”
Messerschmidt’s next proposal was for sensors at the top of an Apple Watch worn tightly against the wrist, which was also nixed because “that’s not how people wear watches.” According to Messerschmidt, it was difficult working within the design constraints at Apple, but it pushed him to figure out “new engineering solutions” and ultimately made for a product with a superior user experience.
Engineers left in a vacuum might say “well, that’s maybe not so important; we can get a better signal by doing it the other way so let’s do it that way.” So, left to their own devices, that would be the way the product would end up. So you have to have a really strong voice supporting the user. I think the idea of focusing on that is uniquely Apple
Messerschmidt goes on to explain other important lessons he learned from his time working at Apple and from Steve Jobs, including that user experience is “everything when it comes to consumer products,” that “good enough is not good enough,” and that it’s important to say no “until it’s just right.”
Following three years at Apple and integral work on the heart rate sensor in the Apple Watch, Messerschmidt left the company to found Cor, a startup producing a device that draws blood, analyzes it, and provides near-instant health-related information.
Messerschmidt’s full interview is worth checking out and can be read over at Fast Company.
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New Semiconductor Processes Offer Power Efficiency Opportunities for Apple Watch
One of the key challenges for Apple in developing the Apple Watch was figuring out how to maintain acceptable battery life for the device in the face of power-hungry components such as the main processor and display.
With watchOS 3 introduced at WWDC in June, Apple showed off the ability to allow multiple Apple Watch apps to remain active and refresh in the background, acknowledging that its initial approach to managing power and other system resources was conservative but that real-world experience had shown the device could handle more demanding tasks.
In addition to software improvements, future generations of the Apple Watch will need to become more efficient on the hardware level, with new versions of the S1 chip that serves as the brains of the device being a primary target for improvement. With that in mind, we’ve taken a technical look at what the future could hold for semiconductor technology as it relates to battery-limited devices like the Apple Watch.
As transistors begin to reach their physical size limits in modern semiconductor processes, it becomes more difficult, and thus more expensive, to make them smaller. In addition to the cost per transistor no longer shrinking, it also becomes more difficult to control waste power, or leakage. New transistor geometries such as non-planar “3D” FinFETs are becoming popular to address device leakage, but as wearables such as the Apple Watch have begun generating consumer interest, the gains seen in these semiconductor processes are simply still not enough.
For a wearable device such as the Apple Watch, controlling power usage while the device is idle in standby mode is critical to keeping the overall battery life competitive. The need for ultra low power and cheaper silicon processes that are also performance competitive have made way for transistors made with more traditional lithography techniques with higher substrate costs.
The leading candidate technology of this variety is fully depleted silicon-on-insulator, or FD-SOI. FD-SOI technology innovates on traditional “bulk” transistors (seen in Apple devices prior to and including the A8) in two main ways. The first improvement is that the ultra-thin channel on top of the insulating body eliminates the need to dope the channel with additional positive or negative charge carriers, eliminating a source of device variation which can hurt performance optimization. The second improvement is that the insulating body and other characteristics drastically reduce leakage current.
The additional benefits of this process lie in the ability to dynamically control the transistor switching performance by way of biasing the transistor body. This can also be done in traditional bulk type semiconductors, but at the cost of impacting leakage performance. In the case of FD-SOI transistors, the effect is that the performance of the transistors can be modulated in real time.
Modern chips already feature multiple forms of dynamic frequency and voltage scaling (DVFS), but the ability to control FD-SOI transistors is even greater through the use of forward body biasing. Transistors can be dynamically controlled to switch faster by modulating the amount of voltage that must be applied to the device gate to effectively form a channel to operate the transistor.
This dynamic control between forward and reverse body biasing means that the transistors can be operated at extremely low voltages, near the threshold point. Operating at as little as 0.5V, power use can be drastically reduced as device power is often directly correlated with the square (or cube) of applied voltage.
The reason this technology is significant for wearables is because the main system on a chip (SoC) can play such a large part of the device’s power consumption, particularly when most usage is idle, as shown in the Android-based example to the right. Reviews have shown that the wrong SoC can absolutely kill a smartwatch’s battery performance. The other large factor in a smartwatch’s battery usage would be the screen – a component where Apple is much more at the direct mercy of its vendors to provide an acceptably performing product.
Rapid design turnaround from Apple’s processor groups, in addition to simultaneous launches of the A9 SoC on competing FinFET processes, show that Apple has the technical bandwidth to commit to introducing an additional design process into its mixture. In fact, we know that the original S1 SoC featured in the debut Apple Watch was manufactured on Samsung’s 28nm LP process, in contrast to the leading 20nm process which would have been available at the time.
It is not unreasonable to think that Apple could make a somewhat lateral move to adopt Samsung’s 28nm FD-SOI process, which is available now. Further down the road is the possibility of a 22nm FD-SOI process, and the technology will no doubt continue to grow if the market proves the demand as time goes along.
FD-SOI also has tremendous promise for analog and RF circuit applications due to its low leakage characteristics. It would not be a surprise to see RF front-end suppliers such as Qualcomm adopt FD-SOI for their modem and multi-band amplifier applications, and should Apple’s hiring of engineers with RF expertise ever come to fruition, it would be a suitable candidate for more custom parts directly from Apple. In any event, do not be surprised if analyses of the next Apple Watch have a few surprises in store when the teardown firms get their microscopes out.
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Tag: FD-SOI
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Upgraded Apple Watch 1 Models Said to Launch Alongside Apple Watch 2 Later This Year
In addition to predicting an all-new Apple Watch 2 with a GPS, barometer, larger battery, and more, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today claimed that upgraded first-generation Apple Watch models with faster TSMC-built processors and superior waterproofing will likely launch in the second half of 2016.
Kuo said the upgraded Apple Watch 1 models will not have a GPS, barometer, or other larger additions reserved for the Apple Watch 2, nor will the waterproofing improvements be as significant, suggesting only an incremental refresh of internal hardware. The watches are said to retain a similar form factor.
The well-connected analyst expects another Apple Watch price cut once the new models are launched, but he did not specify whether the reduction will apply to existing first-generation models, upgraded first-generation models, Apple Watch 2 models, or some combination of the three lineups. Apple lowered the starting price of the Apple Watch Sport to $299 in March 2016, a savings of $50 compared to the device’s initial $349 launch price in April 2015.
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Upgraded Apple Watch 1 Models Said to Launch Alongside Apple Watch 2 Later This Year
In addition to predicting an all-new Apple Watch 2 with a GPS, barometer, larger battery, and more, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today claimed that upgraded first-generation Apple Watch models with faster TSMC-built processors and superior waterproofing will likely launch in the second half of 2016.
Kuo said the upgraded Apple Watch 1 models will not have a GPS, barometer, or other larger additions reserved for the Apple Watch 2, nor will the waterproofing improvements be as significant, suggesting only an incremental refresh of internal hardware. The watches are said to retain a similar form factor.
The well-connected analyst expects another Apple Watch price cut once the new models are launched, but he did not specify whether the reduction will apply to existing first-generation models, upgraded first-generation models, Apple Watch 2 models, or some combination of the three lineups. Apple lowered the starting price of the Apple Watch Sport to $299 in March 2016, a savings of $50 compared to the device’s initial $349 launch price in April 2015.
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Faster Apple Watch 2 With GPS, Barometer, Larger Battery, and Same Thickness to Launch Later This Year
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo issued a research note to investors today in which he predicts an all-new Apple Watch 2 will likely launch in the second half of 2016 with a faster TSMC-built processor, GPS, barometer, superior waterproofing, and a higher capacity battery.
Kuo, well connected within the supply chain, believes the second-generation Apple Watch will retain the same screen sizes and thickness as existing models, with a similar form factor overall, despite adopting thinner display technology. However, while the Apple Watch 2 was once rumored to include cellular connectivity, Kuo does not expect LTE support until 2017.
The analyst also predicted that upgraded first-generation Apple Watch models will debut in the second half of 2016 with the same processor and waterproofing upgrades, but likely without the Apple Watch 2’s most significant additions like a GPS and barometer. Kuo expects another Apple Watch price cut once the new models are launched, but remains conservative about prospective shipments in 2017.
Apple Watch shipments could rise further between 2018 and 2020, pending significant form factor changes, FDA approvals supporting more medical and health applications, and 5G network commercialization, according to Kuo.
Apple has been pushing iPhone and Apple Watch sales together, so updated models of each device launching in tandem would be appropriate. The tentatively named iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are rumored to launch on September 16, with pre-orders possibly starting a week earlier on September 9, so all-new Apple Watch 2 and upgraded Apple Watch 1 models could debut around those dates.
Kuo did not confirm if the Apple Watch 2 will have a FaceTime camera and expanded Wi-Fi capabilities as previously rumored.
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Tags: KGI Securities, Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple Watch 2
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Faster Apple Watch 2 With GPS, Barometer, Larger Battery, and Same Thickness to Launch Later This Year
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo issued a research note to investors today in which he predicts an all-new Apple Watch 2 will likely launch in the second half of 2016 with a faster TSMC-built processor, GPS, barometer, superior waterproofing, and a higher capacity battery.
Kuo, well connected within the supply chain, believes the second-generation Apple Watch will retain the same screen sizes and thickness as existing models, with a similar form factor overall, despite adopting thinner display technology. However, while the Apple Watch 2 was once rumored to include cellular connectivity, Kuo does not expect LTE support until 2017.
The analyst also predicted that upgraded first-generation Apple Watch models will debut in the second half of 2016 with the same processor and waterproofing upgrades, but likely without the Apple Watch 2’s most significant additions like a GPS and barometer. Kuo expects another Apple Watch price cut once the new models are launched, but remains conservative about prospective shipments in 2017.
Apple Watch shipments could rise further between 2018 and 2020, pending significant form factor changes, FDA approvals supporting more medical and health applications, and 5G network commercialization, according to Kuo.
Apple has been pushing iPhone and Apple Watch sales together, so updated models of each device launching in tandem would be appropriate. The tentatively named iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are rumored to launch on September 16, with pre-orders possibly starting a week earlier on September 9, so all-new Apple Watch 2 and upgraded Apple Watch 1 models could debut around those dates.
Kuo did not confirm if the Apple Watch 2 will have a FaceTime camera and expanded Wi-Fi capabilities as previously rumored.
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Tags: KGI Securities, Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple Watch 2
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