“Apple Watch is the most personal device we’ve ever created,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the event. “It’s not just with you, it’s on you.”
There will be three “collections” of the watch, which has a reported 18-hour battery life.
Apple Watch Sport, made of aluminum, will be available in silver or space grey. The 38 mm model will cost $349 and the 42 mm is priced at $399.
Apple Watch, the second-tier model, is made from stainless steel. Depending on the watch band, this edition will cost $549-$1,049 for the 38 mm model and $599-$1,099 for the 42 mm.
Finally, there’s the Apple Watch Edition, encased in solid 18-karat gold, which will be available in limited quantities and only from “select retail stores.” Pricing starts at $10,000.
All three collections will be available on April 24.
The smartwatch can be controlled with the Apple Watch app for iOS 8.2, which is available today. Note only Apple iPhone users can sync the watch effectively to their apps.
The watch face will be highly customizable, with widgets for stopwatches, dates, calendars and more. Some faces are animated, like a Mickey Mouse face demonstrated at the event. There will also be a feature called Digital Touch for communication with friends. Any figures drawn on your watch face will automatically be sent to your friends.
Health-related features will also be plentiful — the device will apparently tell you if you’ve been sitting down too long. It will give you a weekly report on your health and allow you to set goals. As with most other smartwatches, it will receive any notifications found on a regular phone, with updates on sports scores, social media and more, and will allow for calls. Pressing the watch’s “crown” button will offer access to Siri. Double-tapping the side button brings up Apple Pay.
Some of the first few apps include Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Passbook, MLB At Bat, Salesforce Wave and American Airlines. The watch can interact with doors in various ways, such as working with hotel room doors and garage doors.
Though the watch was the most hyped attraction, Apple also offered updates on and new iterations of a bunch of other products.
MacBook
The company announced a new MacBook, simply called the MacBook. With a 12-inch screen, it weighs just two pounds and only 1.31 cm thin — it’s apparently 24 percent thinner than the MacBook Air. It also features retina display with edge-to-edge glass and 2304 x 1440 resolution. The new MacBook also redesigns the keyboard with a “butterfly mechanism,” making the act of typing feel a little different. It’s also the first MacBook with no fan, allowing more room for battery power. The “terraced contoured battery cells” allow for 9 hours of web browsing and 10 hours of video playback.
It will feature one port using a reversible “USB-C” cable that connects to USB, DisplayPort, Power, HDMI and VGA. That means you can’t charge your iPhone and computer at the same time.
The touchpad is also redesigned, and is reportedly not going to make clicking sounds. The pad will recognize a “force click,” which replaces the need for a right-click option on a Mac. It features many other options, like offering a document preview or making a video play even faster when hitting the “fast forward” button on QuickTime.
The MacBook will be available in silver, space grey and gold. The model, out April 10, will be priced at $1,299 to start, or $1,599 for a faster process and double the storage space.
Apple TV
HBO will be partnering with Apple in a big way,. In fact, Apple will be an exclusive partner for HBO’s standalone streaming service, HBO Now. The service will be available for $14.99 and the first month is free if you sign up before mid-April. Also, the price of Apple TV has now dropped to $69.
ResearchKit
Apple also announced ResearchKit, a new suite of apps built to help medical research. In partnership with various hospitals, these news apps can help people test for diseases like Parkinson’s with their iPhone, and can help contribute to scientific knowledge of disease. Apple says it will never look at your data, and users decide how much data they want to put forward. ResearchKit will also be open source, a rare move from Apple. The kit will be released next month with five apps to start.
