Submitted by Jon Reed on
The big news last week was Apple's official announcement of the next generation iPhone event. In a media invite that read "Hey Siri, give us a hint," Apple confirmed that there will be an event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on Wednesday, September 9th at 10 AM PDT. As expected, much of the news that followed came in the form of rumors about the new iPhone and Apple TV, which is also expected to be unveiled at the event.
At this point people are pretty much treating it as a given that the iPhone 6s will feature the same Force Touch technology that is found in the Apple Watch, but if there was any lingering doubt, more evidence turned up last week. A snippet of iOS code was discovered that shows an "enableDeepPress" function that suggests the new iPhone will indeed feature Force Touch.
Additionally, MacRumors compared the iPhone 6 to a partially functioning iPhone 6s and found physical evidence that seems to point toward a Force Touch equipped display. Apparently there is an unidentified chip attached to the rear of the display and the display is slightly thicker and heavier than that of the iPhone 6 (0.2mm and 1.8 g, respectively).
Aside from the addition of Force Touch, the iPhone 6s camera improvements have been much talked about. It is expected that the new iPhone's camera will feature a 12 megapixel iSight (rear) camera (up from 8 in the iPhone 6) capable of 4K video recording, along with a front facing "selfie" camera bumped up to 5 megapixels from 3.8. Last week, 9to5Mac confirmed these upgrades and added that the selfie camera will likely gain video capability as well.While on the subject, Apple last week launched its iSight camera replacement program for iPhone 6 Plus models with defective camera components. Most units exhibiting the problems were sold between the initial launch and January 2015.
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Aside from the new iPhone, the long awaited next generation Apple TV will likely be showcased at Apple's media event as well. According to a report from TechCrunch's Matthew Panzarino, it will be the "first real Apple TV product." As told by his sources, the new Apple TV will be powered by Apple's A8 chip in a dual-core configuration, a vast improvement over the current model's single core A5. One of the biggest improvements, a dedicated App Store will allow for much more high quality content. The remote will have physical buttons, a mic for Siri and will be motion sensitive, all of which open the system up to at least casual gaming. The Apple TV will also be set up as a hub for the home (HomeKit should finally take off) through which various home systems can be controlled.
It was largely thought that Apple was going to unveil the new Apple TV at this year's WWDC, but when that didn't happen many thought it was because of a breakdown in negotiations with content providers for Apple's streaming TV project. Those negotiations seem to still be stalled. If the new TV really is a platform that is above and beyond the competition, and makes its way into a lot of living rooms, Apple could gain some leverage with the networks.