iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Launch Day: What to Expect

Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will launch in the United States tomorrow, with Apple retail stores, carrier stores, and several major retailers offering the two devices for sale.

We’ve gathered up a list of U.S. locations that will be selling the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, listed below, along with general opening times. Customers hoping for an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus are encouraged to call their local stores for specific information on opening times and potential stock.

– Apple retail stores – 8 a.m local time
– Verizon Wireless – 8 a.m. local time (Not all stores are accepting walk-up purchases, and opening times will vary)
– AT&T – 8 a.m. local time
– T-Mobile – 9 a.m. – 10 a.m local time, but opening times vary
– Sprint – 8.a.m local time
– RadioShack – 9 a.m. – 10 a.m. local time, but opening times vary
– Best Buy – 8 a.m. local time
– Sam’s Club – 8 a.m. local time
– Target – Availability will vary
– Walmart – Availability will vary
– Staples – Availability will vary

At Apple Store locations, procedure will be slightly different than it has in past years as Apple will also be handing out iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units to customers who opted for Personal Pickup when pre-ordering online last week.

All customers will be directed to wait in one line until approximately 5 a.m, at which point they will be split into two lines: one for Personal Pickup and one for customers hoping to purchase a device on launch day.

Apple will hand out refreshments like coffee and water, as it does every year, and ahead of the store’s opening, customers in the walk-in line (who did not pre-order) will be given a digital Reservation Pass (sent via email or SMS) to guarantee them an iPhone. This year’s Reservation Passes replace the paper cards that have been handed out in past years.

Walk-in customers planning to wait in line should aim to arrive as early as possible. Many people hoping to get their hands on an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus are already waiting in line across the United States, and will wait through the night. According to multiple sources, supplies of the iPhone are expected to be low, with the iPhone 6 Plus being in extremely short supply.

Line at 14th Street Store in New York City, as of 2:30 PT.
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are already on sale in Australia, and initial reports have suggested that supplies of the iPhone 6 Plus are indeed constrained. According to one MacRumors reader, many stores in Melbourne, Australia received only one iPhone 6 Plus unit.

Apple employees in Australia giving an iPhone to the first customer in line
As for customers who pre-ordered and plan to do Personal Pickup, arriving early is also generally recommended as the pickup line can get long as well.

Customers who pre-ordered early and selected at home shipping will also begin receiving their devices on Friday, September 19, with most shipments listing guaranteed delivery by the end of the day. MacRumors readers who are expecting shipments can join in on several threads in our forums, where readers are tracking their shipments and order statuses:

– The “I just bought/ordered/shipped/received my new iPhone 6/6 Plus” thread
– iPhone 6 & 6 Plus Sprint Pre-Order Thread!
– T-Mobile.com preorder thread
– ATT Pre-order status
– VZW Order Status Thread
– UK iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus Thread
– Apple.com Pre-order thread

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FlightAware Offers Tool For Tracking iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Pre-Order Shipment Flights

Apple began shipping out early iPhone 6 and 6 Plus pre-orders on Thursday morning, and FlightAware, a site that offers live flight tracking, has created a tool that allows users to track the flights carrying their iPhones after receiving a tracking number.

According to FlightAware, users can check the “departure scan” in their UPS tracking information which may match a departure time and flight listed on the tracking page. Currently, the page is tracking UPS flights from Shenzhen, China to Anchorage, Alaska and Anchorage to Louisville, Kentucky, all of which are standard flight rounds for shipping companies.

Currently, many iPhones that will be shipping out to customers overnight and in the morning are aggregated in Kentucky, a worldwide UPS air hub known as Worldport. Apple appears to have shipped the majority of iPhone units using Next Day Air.

The first iPhone 6 and 6 Plus shipments are expected to arrive on Friday, September 19, but oftentimes, some lucky customers receive their shipments early due to shipping company errors. Apple will also begin selling the devices in stores on Friday, but supplies are expected to be tight, especially for the iPhone 6 Plus.

MacRumors readers who are waiting for an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus may also want to join in on the dedicated Apple pre-order thread on the forums, where users share tracking information and socialize while waiting for their devices to arrive.

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Photographer Tests iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in Iceland, Demos Focus Pixels, Other Camera Improvements

With every iteration of the iPhone, Apple aims to bring significant improvements to the device’s camera. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are no exception, packing in several new features like Focus Pixels, Exposure Control, Panorama improvements, Slo-Mo video enhancements, and Optical Image Stabilization for the iPhone 6 Plus.

Professional photographer Austin Mann partnered with The Verge to test the cameras in both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus in Iceland and came away with some impressive results.

One of the major new features in the new devices is Focus Pixels, which is the result of a new image signal processor. As described by Apple, Focus Pixels provides the sensor with more information about an image, which results in faster autofocusing.

In a video, Mann demonstrated Focus Pixels, showing much faster autofocusing on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. As seen in the still below, taken from the video, the iPhone 6 Plus is able to refocus on a scene much more quickly after an object placed in front of the camera causes the lens to refocus.

According to Mann, Focus Pixels keeps objects in focus in photographs, but it really shines when capturing video because it vastly speeds up refocusing. Focus Pixels are also highly useful in low-light situations — where previous iPhones might have had trouble focusing in low light, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus work well, even better than some DSLRs.

Combined with optical image stabilization in the iPhone 6 Plus, the results are impressive. A comparison of an image shot with Phone 5s (top) and the iPhone 6 Plus (bottom) in low light is below.

Another improvement made to iOS 8 and thus the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is Exposure Control, which allows for manual control over exposure and thus more control over the way photos turn out. Two shots, one with exposure control (left) and one with no exposure control (right) are shown off below.

Also new to the iPhone 6/6 Plus and iOS 8 is time-lapse video and improved Slo-Mo video. In iOS 7, Slo-Mo allowed users to capture up to 120 frames per second (fps) at 720p, but in iOS 8, that’s been improved to 240fps, allowing for much improved slow motion video capabilities. Both the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are also capable of shooting 1080p video at up to 60fps.

While Mann doesn’t spend too much time focusing on comparisons between the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 6/6 Plus, he does have a few shots that show much improved picture taking capabilities. Mann also doesn’t make comparisons between the 6 and the 6 Plus, the latter of which has optical image stabilization, but photos taken with the two devices are equally impressive.

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus pack in new innovations that make the camera experience better and more fun. What I love most about these innovations is they focus on enabling iPhone users to better capture and share life rather than just beefing up tech specs. The Apple team clearly understands their user base very well and incessantly strives to create devices that solve technical challenges and simplify experiences and they’ve done that yet again with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

Photographers are really going to enjoy this upgrade… with way better low light, a massive viewfinder and new tools like timelapse that work flawlessly I really couldn’t ask for much more out of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus camera.

Austin Mann’s complete overview of the camera in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus is well worth reading, as it contains a multitude of gorgeous images he was able to capture with the devices.

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Apple Engineers in ‘War Room’ Tracking Down iOS 8 Issues on Social Media [iOS Blog]

Following the launch of iOS 8 to the public yesterday, Apple employees in Cupertino are working to locate and remedy iOS 8 bugs that are popping up. As described by one Reddit user, the company has a “War Room” at Apple where employees are tracking down issues on social media.

After installing iOS 8 yesterday afternoon, Reddit user Kiggsworthy tweeted about a problem he was having with Family Sharing. Shortly afterwards he was contacted by an Apple employee on Twitter, who requested details about the issue.

According to the employee, Kiggsworthy was experiencing a bug the team had been attempting to track down, but couldn’t reproduce, but his experience was able to help them solve the problem and push a fix to other users.

Turns out it was some subset of iTunes content that was uploaded over 8 years ago in a bad format that Family Sharing wasn’t playing nice with. They now know what bad content to look for and are going about putting re-encoded versions of all this media on their servers so that people will not get this error going forward.

I was telling him how surprised and impressed I was with this service, given how busy a day Apple was having, for them to just see something I tweeted (I don’t even have 300 followers) and follow up with me so quickly. He said that they had a “War Room” at Apple trawling through social media and everything they could find looking for anyone having issues (particularly with Family Sharing) so they could address them ASAP.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg writer Adam Satariano detailed a program that Apple runs for iOS devices, called early field failure analysis (EFFA), which helps the company fix bugs almost as soon as they originate. It appears there’s a similar program in place for iOS 8, with the company aiming to solve issues as quickly as possible.

Apple employees on the early field failure analysis team and those working on iOS 8 will likely be working overtime this weekend as the first iPhone 6 and 6 Plus devices with iOS 8 installed will be in the hands of customers tomorrow.

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Apple Watch Likely Uses BCM4334 Broadcom Wi-Fi Chip [iOS Blog]

Chipworks has done an impressive amount of investigative work on the Apple Watch and has managed to determine that the device appears to incorporate a BCM4334 Wi-Fi chip from Broadcom.

Chipworks spotted the chip in the video introduction of the Apple Watch, which shows Apple’s custom designed S1 Apple Watch chip in separate layers. Based on screenshots from the video, Chipworks determined that one of the chips towards the top of the processor resembled a Wi-Fi chip. The pattern specifically matched up with the Broadcom BCM4334.

The Wi-Fi chip on the S1 compared to the Broadcom BCM4334

What really caught my eye is the part located in the centre at the top. The pattern of contacts beneath it shows that it is a wafer-scale package flip-bonded directly to the board. To me, that pattern looks like a WiFi chip layout. […]

So we then compared the pattern on the board to the most likely Broadcom WiFi chips. The pattern of contacts matches a BCM4334 single-chip dual-band combo device.

The Broadcom BCM4334 is a single-chip dual-band combo that combines 802.11 a/b/g/n with Bluetooth 4.0 and an integrated FM radio receiver. It’s been used in the iPhone and iPad, and in Samsung devices in the past, and it’s designed for minimal power consumption in a compact size.

Though the Apple Watch appears to contain its own dedicated Wi-Fi chip, Apple indicates that it will not be able to connect to Wi-Fi on its own. The Apple Watch will instead rely on the iPhone’s Wi-Fi connection, perhaps using its internal Wi-Fi for communicating with a paired iPhone under certain circumstances.

It is impressive that Chipworks was able to determine a part from the Apple Watch just from a video, especially because the device is still months away from shipping to consumers. According to Apple, the watch will be released in early 2015, with prices beginning at $349.

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SwiftKey’s iOS 8 Keyboard Hits One Million Downloads in Under 24 Hours

Earlier today, we highlighted how a number of new third-party systemwide keyboard for iOS 8 are topping the App Store charts, with SwiftKey Keyboard [Direct Link] displacing Facebook Messenger from the top spot on the free iPhone app chart in the United States.

Moving beyond the charts to look at raw download numbers, the success of these new keyboards is even more clear, with SwiftKey telling MacRumors that its iOS 8 keyboard has just passed one million downloads in less than 24 hours.

SwiftKey saw a brief launch delay yesterday due to App Store processing, and thus it did not go live until around noon Pacific Time, meaning that it has reached the milestone in roughly 22 hours.

SwiftKey is certainly benefiting from its positioning as a free app compared to competitors such as Swype and Fleksy, but it offers users a good opportunity to try out an alternative to Apple’s default keyboard. SwiftKey will continue to upgrade its keyboard over time, no doubt at some point adding in premium features to generate income for the company.

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EE will honour its iPhone 6 preorders from Phones4u tomorrow

Since EE is somewhat responsible for the reason Phones4u can no longer honour iPhone 6 or 6 Plus preorders, the network’s trying to make it right, at least for some of you. The carrier’s just told us that when Apple’s latest handsets launch tomorrow, anyone that preordered on an EE plan through Phones4u can walk into a store and pick one up. If you’re still keen on getting a day-one device, then take along a copy of the Phones4u preorder confirmation to get hooked up. EE’s putting aside as many handsets as preorders it received via the troubled retailer, but you’ll have to take out one of the network’s own contract options, rather than whatever you may’ve opted for originally. Reserved iPhones will be spread out across the carrier’s many stores, however, so there’s always a chance you won’t be successful at the first location you visit, but we guess that depends on how many went elsewhere when Phones4u folded. Sure, this is a bit of clever PR on EE’s part, but if you helps you get the handset you want when you want it, then so be it.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple

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