A Giant iPad, the iPhone 6s, a TV, a Hermès Watch: Last Night Apple Held the Biggest Product Launch in Its History

A 12.9-inch iPad Pro, the next iPhone 6s, the first Apple TV update in five years: Apple refreshed every product line except the Mac

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At 1 a.m. Beijing time today, Apple held its autumn product event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.

The venue seats 7,000 people, ten times the capacity of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where Apple usually holds its events. The announcements matched the room: the iPad Pro, an Apple Watch made with Hermès, Apple TV, tvOS, the iPhone 6s and the iPhone 6s Plus. Nearly everything Apple could upgrade this year, it upgraded. Apple has almost never launched major upgrades to two product lines at once.

There were so many new products that the newly released iPad mini 4 appeared only briefly in a price list, and no executive mentioned it all evening.

The September event exists every year to launch the new iPhone. This time, though, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro stole the iPhone 6s's spotlight entirely. It is a super-tablet with a screen larger than a 13-inch MacBook's, at the weight of the first iPad. Executives from Microsoft and Adobe came on stage to show their latest productivity and creative apps.

The iPad Pro, an effort to rescue the tablet

"The most important thing to happen to the iPad since the iPad." When Tim Cook said this with the iPad Pro in his hands, you could tell he meant it.

How big is it?

The iPad Pro is an entirely new product line, and, as the rumors largely predicted, it is bigger. The new iPad Pro is more like a laptop, and even more powerful than one.

· A 12.9-inch Retina display with a resolution of 2732×2048, or 5.6 million pixels.

· Two storage options, 32GB and 128GB, though the 4G version comes only with 128GB.

· An A9X processor, 1.8 times faster than the A8. This is a desktop-class chip.

· An 8-megapixel front camera.

· Four speakers, three times as loud as the iPad Air.

· 10 hours of battery life.

· On sale in November, starting at US$799. Apple has not yet announced Chinese pricing; by past practice it should be 5,688 yuan.

Interestingly, the iPad Pro's screen has a 4:3 aspect ratio, which means its screen area is larger even than the 13.3-inch MacBook Air's. The iPad Pro is exactly as wide as the iPad Air is tall, so it can run two apps side by side, each the size of a 9.7-inch screen.

How thin and light is it?

Tim Cook said the iPad Pro is like a sheet of glass. For a huge tablet, thickness matters a great deal to how it feels in the hand.

The iPad Pro is 6.9 mm thick, barely more than the iPad Air's 6.1 mm, and weighs 712 grams, about the same as the first iPad. For comparison, the 12-inch MacBook is 13.1 mm at its thickest point.

Apple now makes keyboards and styluses too

Two accessories launched with the iPad Pro: the Pencil stylus and the Smart Keyboard.

The keyboard does not use Bluetooth. Apple added three contact points to the iPad Pro, called the Smart Connector, and the keyboard attaches to the iPad Pro physically through them.

The Pencil really does look like a pencil. Its tip senses position, pressure and angle, and works at tilts of up to 47 degrees. With these three dimensions, you can draw lines of varying thickness.

The end of the Pencil has a Lightning connector for charging.

The keyboard costs US$169 and the stylus US$99. Both go on sale in November with the iPad Pro.

Microsoft shows up for the iPad Pro

Its larger size lets the iPad Pro handle more office work. Apple kept comparing it with laptops:

· Its processor is faster than 80% of laptops.

· Its graphics performance beats 90% of laptops.

Apple invited three app developers to give demonstrations at the event, including its rival Microsoft.

Microsoft showed its Office suite for the iPad. With the Pencil, you can select and mark up content in documents or spreadsheets. Because the iPad Pro is so large, two Office apps can be open on one screen and share data: you can drag a bar chart straight from Word into PowerPoint and edit it there.

Office on the iPad Pro also supports fuzzy gestures. Draw a clumsy circle, for example, and the app corrects it into a perfect one.

Adobe's demonstration also featured fuzzy gestures and data sharing between apps. You can sketch a few rough shapes in Adobe Photoshop, and the app recognizes them and turns them into standard text boxes for a layout. Then you drag in images and adjust the fonts, and in under a minute the layout is done.

Photoshop Fix is a new feature that adjusts images intelligently, for instance changing the angle of the corners of a mouth in a smiling portrait.

When Steve Jobs launched the first iPad, he hoped it would work partly as a productivity tool. Today's iPad seems to be little more than an entertainment device for watching videos.

The iPad Pro pulls the line back to its original goal: an iPad that is more like a computer, more like a tool for work.

It is the most expensive iPad yet

The iPad Pro starts at US$799, nearly the price of an 11-inch MacBook Air.

By comparison, the 12-inch MacBook sells for US$1,299 (128GB), while an iPad Pro with the same storage costs US$949.

Existing models, including the iPad mini and iPad Air, will stay in production and on sale, which means the iPad line now has a complete range of high-, mid- and low-end models.

Going by Apple's current pricing in China, the 32GB iPad Pro should cost around 5,688 yuan.

The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus bring upgrades you "can't see"

New colors and a new camera

In keeping with Apple's rhythm of "a major hardware update every two years," the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus look no different on the outside.

· Two screen sizes, 4.7 and 5.5 inches.

· Support for 3D Touch (an upgraded version of Force Touch).

· A fourth color, rose gold, alongside black, white and gold.

· An A9 64-bit processor, paired with an M9 motion coprocessor.

· Second-generation Touch ID fingerprint recognition, twice as fast.

· A brand-new 12-megapixel rear camera.

Apple also released several new iPhone cases and charging docks in colors to match the phones.

How 3D Touch changes interaction

Force Touch is a touch-sensing technology that lets a device tell a light press from a hard one and trigger different functions for each. Apple already uses it in the Apple Watch and the MacBook.

On the iPhone, Force Touch has been upgraded and renamed 3D Touch, meaning it offers three kinds of input: "tap," "long press" and "hard press."

This is the first major change in how people interact with the iPhone in its history. On stage, Apple showed what 3D Touch can do:

In Messages, tapping an address in a message opens Maps; tapping flight details in a message shows the full flight information.

Pressing an app on the home screen brings up a menu of shortcuts that jump straight to a function, such as calling a particular contact; in Maps, you can open a saved "Home" route directly.

Third-party apps will support 3D Touch too. Press WeChat on the home screen, for example, and you can choose "Send video" directly.

4K video and moving photos

The 12-megapixel main camera shoots 4K video, and the front camera supports "Retina Flash," which turns the screen white when you take a selfie so it works as fill light.

Live Photos is a new feature. You press the shutter as usual, and the iPhone also records a short clip; when you look at the photo later, pressing hard on the screen plays the video.

The final version of iOS 9 arrives next week

Apple released a beta of iOS 9 at WWDC in June, and today announced that the final version will roll out on September 16.

New features in iOS 9 include a Siri that offers personalized help based on your habits, Spotlight's return to the leftmost screen, and a way to move your data from an Android phone to iOS.

Prices hold, and the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus stay on sale

The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus cost the same as the previous generation. Interestingly, the iPhone 6 Plus now costs the same as the iPhone 6s.

Pre-orders for the two new iPhones open on the 12th, and they go on sale on the 25th, with China in the first wave of countries.

Apple's China website has already been updated: the iPhone 6s starts at 5,288 yuan, and the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have been cut to start at 4,488 yuan. But only the 16GB and 64GB versions are available, in black or gray.

The Apple Watch gets new bands, from Hermès

As expected, Apple did not launch an Apple Watch 2 today; that will come in 2016.

But Apple did bring new Apple Watch hardware:

• A handmade Double Tour band made with Hermès, sold with the stainless steel model. Hermès and Apple are offering three styles, Double Tour, Single Tour and Cuff, which combine with different leather colors and sizes into 10 options. This Apple Watch line will be sold at some Apple Stores and Hermès boutiques. Apple listed no price, but it plainly won't be cheap.
• The stainless steel Apple Watch adds a space gray case, a bright red (PRODUCT)RED rubber band, and a wider range of colors for leather bands. As in the iPod era, Apple will donate part of the revenue from the red models to AIDS research;
• The Sport edition adds rose gold and gold cases at unchanged prices: 2,588 yuan for 38mm and 2,988 yuan for 42mm.

watchOS 2 arrives on September 16

watchOS 2 gives the Apple Watch more uses, including more playful watch faces. You can now customize a watch face's background and the information it shows.

Turning the Digital Crown lets you look back at past events or skip ahead to upcoming appointments.

Native apps still lack imagination

On stage, Cook announced that the Apple Watch already has 10,000 third-party apps. Almost none of them are worth using. The system holds them back: they run on the iPhone and send their screens to the watch over Bluetooth, so waiting three to five seconds after a tap counts as fast.

watchOS 2 lets apps run on the watch itself and opens up functions such as voice recording and playback through the speaker. But none of the apps shown on stage was impressive.

• The messaging app Facebook Messenger, which lets you send voice messages and share your location from the watch;
• GoPro, which shows the view from a GoPro camera right on the watch;
• The medical app Airstrip, the watch app Apple demonstrated longest. Airstrip sends all of a patient's information straight to the doctor's watch. Why a doctor would read a dozen or so vital-sign readings on the Apple Watch's tiny screen rather than check the patient's information on an iPhone or iPad is unclear.

Whether native apps will rescue the Apple Watch from having no apps worth using, this event gave no sign.

After eight years, Apple TV finally gets a major update

Apple TV launched in 2007, the same year as the first iPhone, and after 2010 the line stood still. The latest model, the Apple TV 3, runs on an A5 processor, about as powerful as an iPhone 4s.

Today Apple officially released new Apple TV hardware and a new operating system, tvOS.

Apple TV gets an upgrade, and a higher price

· A dual-core A8 64-bit processor.

· Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi.

· An infrared receiver, plus HDMI and Ethernet ports.

· Two storage options, 32GB and 64GB.

· A new remote with built-in motion and gravity sensors that doubles as a game controller.

· A higher price. The fourth-generation Apple TV costs US$149, the highest price in the line's history.

How do you control Apple TV?

You control Apple TV mainly with its remote, which has a touch surface. On a set of batteries, the remote lasts three months.

The remote has a voice button that starts Siri, which can search for content across services (iTunes, Hulu, Netflix and others) by voice. Ask for "popular TV shows right now," for example, and Siri shows results ranked by popularity.

The remote also has a smooth touchpad for swiping, selecting and tapping. In games, it turns into a controller.

The tvOS App Store has games too

tvOS is an entirely new operating system with its own app store. It may be the most important change to Apple TV: it will open up a whole new world of apps and draw in new developers.

Apple said today that tvOS already has 11 million registered developers, and a wide range of third-party apps will come to your TV. Apps from Airbnb and the online retailer Gilt appeared in the demonstrations.

Besides music and video, games will make up a large share of the Apple TV App Store, so Apple TV will also become a game console.

In a live demonstration, the developer of the hit game Crossy Road showed how to play games on Apple TV: you hold the remote and control the game with it.

The tvOS beta opens to developers for testing starting today, and the new Apple TV goes on sale in 80 countries in October. China is not among them.

It's not only the hardware that is changing

Behind the flood of new products, Apple is pressing hard on its rivals. After launching the iPhone 6s, Apple is not only keeping the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 6 series on sale but also offering them in several storage sizes.

In the past, to avoid hurting sales of the new model, Apple sold only the lowest-capacity version of the previous iPhone. Now the iPhone 5s will come in both 16GB and 32GB versions, and the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in 16GB and 64GB versions. For rivals, especially Samsung, Sony and Motorola, which are trying to set high prices, this is bad news.

Apple has also started its own installment plan in the United States. Instead of signing a two-year contract with a carrier, customers pay Apple US$32 a month and get a new phone every year. The plan may spread to more countries.

From the new way it sells the iPhone, to a watch made with Hermès, to the restart of the iPad and Apple TV lines, Apple, now worth US$640 billion, wants to do more and more, or rather, can do more and more.

The question now is whether the company can find in these products what Cook called "our vision for the future of personal computing."