Apple Launches Three New iPhones, the Cheapest at 6,500 Yuan

Consumers trading down? Apple doesn't think so.

The jittery theme from Mission: Impossible starts up. A female Apple employee, escorting the new product, rides a bike and wades through water, overcoming — with Siri's help — the greatest hardship the First World can imagine: an office campus that is simply too big. She reaches the Steve Jobs Theater and hands a stern-faced Tim Cook the box holding the products about to be announced. Inside there is only a clicker for the slides.

That was the opening film of Apple's fall event. About 1,000 people sat in the Steve Jobs Theater, cheering and laughing when it ended.

And like that box with no product in it, the keynote had nothing left to give away. The leaks beforehand were thorough and accurate, down to the iPhone's wallpaper. Nothing exceeded expectations. As of publication, Apple's stock was down 1.24%.

The surprise was what didn't get updated. No new iPad, no new Mac. The nearly two-hour keynote covered two product lines: the iPhone and the Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch got a new design — bigger screen, thinner body, more sensitive sensors. The star of the show, the iPhone, arrived exactly as leaked: three models, the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR, pronounced "Ten S," "Ten S Max," and "Ten R."

In Apple's system, the S stands for Speed. The iPhone XS and XS Max are a very "S" upgrade — the only change on the outside is one added color (gold), while the specs and features improve. The A12 chip is faster and draws less power, and performance and machine learning took up most of the iPhone segment. Capacity went up too: the iPhone now tops out at 512GB, while a quad-core MacBook Pro costing 14,000 yuan holds only 256GB. And, of course, there is the dual-SIM support Chinese users have been waiting for.

Beyond the spec sheet, Apple promised on stage that Face ID — which has been through several software updates over the past year — will also work better.

One small change from the previous generation: the little holes on the bottom of the phone are no longer symmetrical. There are only three on the left.

The biggest difference between the two S models is size. The iPhone XS keeps the iPhone X's 5.8-inch screen; the XS Max grows to 6.5 inches, the largest iPhone yet. Bigger screen, higher price: the iPhone XS Max now runs from 9,599 to 12,799 yuan. Apple also found a new naming convention. It used to be Android makers copying Apple's names, from S to Plus to SE. "Max" runs the other way.

The iPhone XS Max really is big. Hold it and you will remember the first time you picked up a Plus. Its body is in fact about the size of a Plus.

The other small differences also track price. Both phones can keep two phone numbers on standby, but only the Max takes two physical SIM cards; on the XS the second number runs through an eSIM, which Apple cannot yet offer in China.

The XS and XS Max are a textbook "S" improvement, not the leap from the iPhone 7 to the iPhone X. As Cook said on stage: "This is the most advanced iPhone we have ever made." He says it every year.

The cheaper iPhone XR is Apple's thornier problem. Apple has never been able to keep two tiers of product line running well at the same time.

In 2013, the toy-like iPhone 5c, with no Touch ID, failed to establish a low-price line. In 2016, the iPhone SE, cheaper and built on an old design, failed to rescue an iPhone market that was then in decline.

Last year's iPhone 8 was a worse failure. Its price was cut less than a month after it went on sale, and it took none of the attention away from the iPhone X. Meanwhile OPPO, vivo, and Huawei — the three big Android makers — pushed their high-end models above 4,000 yuan, into the vacuum just below the iPhone X.

This year's XR is Apple trying again to hold two price tiers at once.

You could tell the iPhone XR was different from the fact that it got its own segment at the keynote. Its ad had a lot of the iPod about it, set against six colors.

Apple stressed that this is a phone on par with the iPhone XS, not the iPhone X. The same way of using it, the same upgraded Face ID, the same A12 processor, and it can do Portrait mode, AR, and Animoji too.

On its fourth try, Apple took an entirely new approach with the iPhone XR: a brand-new, lower-priced model with the same specs and the same structure as the flagship of its own generation.

The frame material has gone from stainless steel to aluminum, but the iPhone XR basically looks like a slightly larger XS.

Apple's design language is converging. Face ID and the notched full-screen display have completely replaced the old fingerprint sensor.

We spent a few minutes with the iPhone XR at the event. Its 6.1-inch screen is a size up from the pricier iPhone XS, and closer to the most expensive model, the iPhone XS Max. That runs against instinct: iPhone screens have only ever grown, and a small screen has always meant lower specs and a lower price.

Apple no longer intends to keep that distinction. A bigger screen means more content consumed. A Wall Street Journal article reported that people with 6-inch phones install twice as many apps as people with 5.5-inch phones, watch more than twice as much video a day, and are 62% more likely to enjoy games. All of it helps Apple's services business.

To hold costs down, the iPhone XR uses a new LCD screen, with the pixel density of the iPhone 8 — lower than the XS. But unless you put your eyes right up to the screen and stare for a few seconds, you will not see the difference in sharpness. And LCD still reproduces color more truthfully than OLED, so it is hard to call this a downgrade.

Three things clearly set it apart from the other two. One is the bezel: the iPhone XR's is a good deal wider than the iPhone XS's, and side by side it is easy to tell which is the cheap one. The XR's materials are in fact the same as the iPhone 8's, but the wider border stands out all the more against the colored backs.

The iPhone XR skips the core selling point of the iPhone XS and XS Max — the camera. It has a single lens on the back. But for most people the weak link in a photograph is not the lens; it is basic composition, and no camera or chip can save that.

Along with those few compromises comes the fact that the lower-tier iPhone XR is not cheap at all: 6,499 yuan to start, 7,899 yuan for the largest capacity. That is less than 200 yuan below what the iPhone 8 Plus cost at launch last year.

In the end, Apple's answer to the positioning problem was to sell everything for more.

The XR takes over the Plus's price slot. The iPhone XS edged up to 8,699 yuan with the exchange rate, and the iPhone XS Max starts at 9,599 yuan, the most expensive version reaching 12,799 yuan. Twelve thousand yuan spread over 12 monthly installments is still 1,000 yuan a month. By Cook's favorite line about "the price of a cup of coffee a day," the coffee has been upgraded from an Americano to a latte.

Over the past three quarters the iPhone X brought Apple steady growth in revenue and profit, and pushed the iPhone's average selling price past US$700 — all of it the iPhone X's doing. That made Apple a trillion-dollar company. As QDaily argued last year, the 8,000-yuan price point has become Apple's new standard.

Still, set against last year's iPhone X, the XR gets you a similar design and better performance for less money. And it has one advantage of its own in China: the XS takes only one SIM card.

A cheaper phone with a new design. There is no doubt the iPhone XR will lift iPhone sales and produce better-looking earnings. The only question is how long the lift lasts.

The transition that began with the iPhone X is complete this year. Touch ID has disappeared from Apple's new phones entirely. Face ID and the notched full-screen display that comes with it will govern iPhone design for at least the next five years. This year Apple stopped hiding that notch behind black bars on either side of its photos and videos.

The iPhone XR's price means Apple still has no low-end product line, even if "low-end" here means 4,000 to 5,000 yuan. That leaves competitors room to move their own products upmarket.

Below are the products in more detail.

iPhone XS and XS Max: The Core Improvement Is the Chip

• The processor uses the newest process node in the industry

All three iPhones use the same 6-core A12 Bionic processor, with 6.9 billion transistors. Apple says it is 15% faster than the A11 in the iPhone X, and that the GPU is 50% faster. Core ML, the measure tied to artificial intelligence, is said to be nine times faster.

A large part of that gain comes from the A12 being the first 7-nanometer chip on the market. Whether Apple would use a 7nm chip had been much argued over, mainly because most chipmakers cannot yet manage a 7nm process — Qualcomm and MediaTek have both pushed their plans to 2019. According to the supply chain, the A12 will be supplied exclusively by TSMC. The 7nm process also cuts the A12's power draw by 40% against the A11.

The stronger processor lets the iPhone XS hold more storage. It now tops out at 512GB, while the quad-core 13-inch MacBook Pro starts at just 256GB.

• Photo HDR improves, using the same method as Google

The camera system also gains from the new processor. The iPhone XS still has two 12-megapixel rear lenses, but the wide-angle camera uses a new sensor with larger pixels, which should perform better in low light.

What stands out is the image processing: HDR on the iPhone XS has been upgraded. The method, which Apple calls Smart HDR, is similar to what Google does on its Pixel phones — shoot a lot of frames and stitch them into one well-balanced picture.

What drew cheers in the hall was a new editing slider: you can drag an aperture setting to change a photo's depth of field. Lytro achieved the same effect before, but it needed its own hardware.

The iPhone XS's video gains show up in sound. It can now record in stereo, capturing more detail in the audio of a video.

Apple said much less about the front-facing Face ID system than about the rear camera. Phil Schiller only stressed that performance is better, thanks mainly to faster algorithms; the sensors have not changed. This is plainly not a full "second generation" of Face ID, but Apple plainly cares about Face ID's speed, and has kept improving it over the past year.

• Finding more uses for AR

AR is an application Apple has pushed for several years, and at this keynote it again talked about how AR performs in mobile games and other apps.

Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls: Blades was the first game demonstrated. Todd Howard stressed how it looks on the iPhone XS. Unlike the Mario mobile game that debuted here, though, The Elder Scrolls: Blades had already been announced at E3.

The second demo brought artificial intelligence into NBA training, presented by retired NBA star Steve Nash. An app built on Core ML lets the iPhone XS recognize a player's motion during shooting practice, count the shots and where they were taken from, and produce a training report.

Recording a training session like that in real time usually takes professional equipment; now an iPhone can do it. AR apps have long been criticized as unsuited to daily life — not many people scan a table to measure its length very often — so basketball training can be read as Apple looking for more serious uses for AR.

• A bigger screen with higher resolution, but display refresh is still 60Hz

The iPhone XS Max's screen is 2688×1242, keeping the iPhone X's 458 PPI.

But going by the information in Apple's presentation slides, both upgraded OLED screens still run a 60Hz display refresh with 120Hz touch sampling, the same as the previous iPhone X — most likely still a limit of OLED panels.

Unlike the iPhone XS, in mainland China and Hong Kong the iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR handle dual SIM with two physical cards, loaded on both faces of a tray the same size as before. Models sold abroad instead pair one SIM with an eSIM.

iPhone XR: Even the Cheapest Costs 6,500 Yuan

• Few compromises on specs

The iPhone XR uses a 6.1-inch LCD screen — and it is larger than the iPhone XS's. As the lower-tier new iPhone, it still makes no compromise on specs: the same latest A12 processor as the other two.

It also shares Face ID and the same full-screen front as the high-end models. On an LCD panel Apple even managed what it does with OLED, curving the screen to shrink the bottom bezel.

The frame uses the same rounded-corner design, so from the front the full screen looks like the iPhone XS Max's. In the hand, the back of the iPhone XR looks a lot like the iPhone 8's, and the body is about the size of an iPhone 8 Plus.

There are still plenty of differences. First, resolution and pixel density: the XR is 1792×828, with the same pixel density as the iPhone 8, only 326 PPI, short of the iPhone X's 458 PPI.

The XR uses what Apple calls a Liquid Retina HD display, an LCD panel rather than OLED. OLED's advantages are color contrast and true black; because of how it works, an LCD is still emitting light when it shows black.

Even so, the display is better than expected. Liquid Retina is LCD, but with the screen off the front still looks deep black rather than washed out.

The other change to the screen is that the iPhone XR drops 3D Touch. It was not Apple's most popular feature, but pressing hard on Alipay or WeChat from the home screen to jump straight to the payment page, without opening the app, was genuinely convenient.

• The biggest differences are still the camera and the bezel

The iPhone XR carries a single 12-megapixel camera. To get the look, Apple uses algorithms to produce a depth-of-field effect from one lens.

Apple offers six colors: white, black, blue, coral, yellow, and (PRODUCT)RED. Because the price is lower, the iPhone XR's middle frame is 7000-series aluminum rather than the stainless steel of the iPhone XS.

But Apple has painted the frame the same color as the back, so the whole thing reads as one color. In actual use, though, the colored shells are not as vivid as they look in the ads.

Color is the largest thing separating the iPhone XR from the other two iPhones.

As on the iPhone 8, a sheet of glass covers the back, which mutes the color. The coral and yellow versions in particular lack the candy brightness of the 5c era.

Visually, the bezel matters most. The black border is wider than on the iPhone X and XS, wide enough for the naked eye to notice. By our estimate it is about 30% wider than the iPhone X's.

The colors plus the bezel give the iPhone XR a distinctly cheap feel. It does not look much like a 6,500-yuan phone.

• Launch timing is another difference

Pre-orders for the iPhone XR open on October 19 Beijing time, and it ships a month after the XS, on October 26. That matches earlier reports from the supply chain, which put the delay down to the LCD screen. Bloomberg said the iPhone XR's LCD screen had a backlight-bleed problem, and Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty likewise said backlight bleed on the LCD had delayed mass production of the 6.1-inch iPhone by a month.

• Some useful updates Apple did not mention on stage

Apple wrote in a WeChat official account post that on all three new iPhones, once the battery runs down and the phone shuts itself off, a reserve charge inside the phone keeps the transit-card function working for up to five hours. It only works after an automatic shutdown; power the phone off yourself and the reserve does nothing.

Apple has also improved its touchscreen algorithm, and says the screen still responds normally when wet. That should mean the phone works in the rain and by the pool.

AppleCare+ has been updated too. On its website Apple now offers an optional loss-and-theft plan. If the phone is lost or stolen, a user who has turned on Find My iPhone qualifies for a replacement. The plan is not offered in China.

It is a separate, more expensive plan that cannot be added to existing AppleCare+ coverage. It costs US$299 for the iPhone XS and XS Max, US$249 for the iPhone XR, 8 Plus, and 7 Plus, and as little as US$199 for the iPhone 7 and 8.

As for accessories, the new iPhones no longer come with a 3.5mm headphone adapter.

Apple Watch: The Product That Changed Most at the Fall Event

Introducing this year's Apple Watch, Apple COO Jeff Williams again summed up the Series 4's main features under three themes: communication, exercise, health. The direction of the new generation has not changed; compared with the last one, this is more bricks laid on the same foundation.

• Routine upgrades inside, and to the interface

Apple designed its own 64-bit dual-core S4 processor, twice as fast as the previous one. The iPhone has processing power to spare, but a watch this slow to respond genuinely needed more.

Apple reworked the new watch's interface, letting users put up to eight features of their choosing on the bigger screen: one-tap contact with a friend, a world clock, heart rate or workout records, and so on. The watchOS interface has moved to rounded-rectangle displays, with more animated faces and livelier backgrounds.

For communication, the Series 4's speaker is 50% louder than the previous model, and the microphone has moved to the other side, which improves how calls pick up sound.

• The first change to the shape in three years, and a big one

The Apple Watch has barely changed in appearance since the first generation arrived in 2015. This year's model finally breaks that.

The Series 4's screen is a full 30% larger than the last one's, the body is thinner, and the bezels are no longer as heavy as on the older models. A QDaily reporter tried the new watch at the event and found the Series 4 a real improvement on earlier generations. The side crown is smaller and thinner, the whole body much more compact; in the hand it feels like a smooth, rounded pebble.

The curve at the four corners is more pronounced, the screen covers almost the entire front, and the bezel barely registers. Next to it, earlier Apple Watches look dated — the same feeling that came with the iPhone 6's larger screen and the iPhone X's narrow bezels.

The screen has grown a great deal, but not enough that anyone will read books or watch video on it. Making the watch's screen that much bigger may in the end mean nothing more than that it looks better.

For materials, the Series 4 comes in aluminum and stainless steel only; the ceramic version is gone. The Series 4's gold case is of course not real gold, which traditional watchmakers may find hard to accept. As for weight, picking up the Apple Watch you can barely tell whether the new model is heavier or lighter than the old one.

The red dot on the crown, the thing people complained about most on the Series 3, has become a red ring. When the crown is turned, the watch vibrates to imitate the feedback of turning the crown on a mechanical watch. On the back, the look of the Apple Watch's sensor has been redesigned for the first time: the original four "eyes" have become one, which looks cleaner.

• ECG and fall detection: health features that make the Apple Watch a good fit for older people

The Series 4's sensors are more precise and read more deeply, taking readings from two places, the back of the case and the crown. Its upgraded gyroscope can tell a fall, a drop, or a tumble from other motions and judge when to raise an alarm — calling for help automatically, for instance, if the wearer has been on the ground for a minute after an accidental fall. The Series 4 can also monitor heart rate, warn the wearer when it is too low or too high, and suggest a heart examination.

A small high point of the keynote came when Jeff Williams announced that the Series 4 adds an electrocardiogram (ECG) for the first time. In his demonstration, a finger placed on the crown works with the sensor on the back, and the Apple Watch shows a live ECG. The Series 4 also works with iOS devices, keeping the complete ECG on the wearer's iPhone or iPad, to review or to hand to a doctor. The Series 4's ECG has been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

For now, the Apple Watch is already the best-performing smartwatch in health, even though features users want, such as sleep apnea detection, still have not appeared.

In short, this looks like a product well suited to older people — provided they are willing to carry, on top of a phone, one more thing that needs charging every day. Even with a much bigger screen, Apple has kept battery life at 18 hours. That is no small feat, but it is still short of what users want.

• The new Apple Watch costs more

Like the iPhone and the MacBook Pro, whose prices keep climbing, the Apple Watch keeps getting more expensive. The Series 4 comes in gold, silver, and gray, in 40mm and 44mm. The GPS Series 4 starts at US$399 (3,199 yuan in China), the cellular version at US$499 (3,499 yuan in China). This time last year the Series 3 GPS and cellular versions cost 2,588 yuan and 3,188 yuan — increases of 19% and 8%.

With the new model out, the Series 3's price on Apple's site has of course come down. The GPS Series 3 now costs 2,199 yuan, the cellular version 2,999 yuan.

The Apple Watch Series 4 opens for pre-order on September 14 and ships on September 21. watchOS 5 arrives on September 17.

Existing Apple Watch owners may still find the bigger screen and the new features appealing. For anyone who has never bought an Apple Watch, the Series 4 offers no more of a reason than the Series 3 did.

Cover and in-article images shot on site.

Graphics: Xiuxia Feng, Kaiman Wang