Two things in ninety-nine minutes
September 10, 2024 at 10:09 PM by Dr. Drang
One of the best things about not being an Apple blogger is that I don’t feel compelled to comment on everything Apple does. I was reminded of this when I read Stephen Hackett’s roundup of yesterday’s event. It was my favorite post of the day, and he came up with a great angle on the presentation, but I really felt his struggle to get it done and off his to-do list.
It turns out, though, that I actually do have something to say about yesterday’s announcements—two of the announcements, anyway. I’m not sure it was really worth 99 minutes1 of my remaining life to watch it in real time, but that’s an issue I’ll consider before the next event.
The first item of importance to me has to do with the two new versions of the iPhone Pro. I’m currently using an iPhone 13 Pro, so I’ve long planned to upgrade this fall. Even though, as lots of people have pointed out, the differences between the regular and Pro versions are perhaps smaller this year than usual, I still want the Pro because I take lots of photos outside in which the subject is pretty far away and needs to be brought in by as much optical zoom as the camera can muster. Piyush Pratik’s’ valiant effort (starting about 57 minutes into the presentaton) to make the non-Pro’s camera seem like it had enough zoom fell flat with me.
Which gets to the concern I had before the event. Last year, the 5X camera came on the Pro Max only, and I was wondering what I’d do if that held true this year, as well. Luckily, the 5X camera came down to the Pro (about an hour and twenty minutes [whew!] into the presentation) and I’m not faced with the prospect of buying a phone that’s bigger and more expensive than I would otherwise need.
The other item of interest was the addition of mapping to paddling workouts (about 18 minutes into the presentation) in the Workout and Activity apps. This was mentioned during WWDC, and I was glad to see that it’ll be in next week’s updates to watchOS and iOS. No waiting until “later this fall/year.”
I complained about the lack of mapping for paddling in Workout/Activity back in May. I mentioned in that post that I was going to try Strava. I did and took an instant dislike to it.2 After that, I used WorkOutDoors and Paddle Logger. They both work well—I’m using Paddle Logger now—but have one serious deficiency: they chew through my watch’s battery like nobody’s business.
For example, a couple of days ago I went for a longish kayak trip on the Hennepin Canal in western Illinois. I was out on the water for about 2½ hours, and my watch’s battery went from 100% (I had charged it fully in the car during the drive to the canal) down to somewhere near 35%. I say “somewhere near” because I forgot to check it when I stopped paddling. It was at 35% about an hour later when all I had done in the meantime was drive.
My hope is that Apple’s history of battery consciousness will hold and that the paddling workout will be as parsimonious as the walking and biking workouts. I will gladly give up the extra data Paddle Logger provides if I don’t have to worry about charging my watch before every kayaking workout.
OK, there was one other part of the presentation that caught my attention: the extension of the AirPods Pro into a kinda sorta hearing aid (starting at about the 33 minute mark). Now, the AirPods Pro already have Conversation Boost, but I guess this new thing goes beyond that. I know I have hearing loss at high frequencies—more than normal for my age—but I’ve never had to boost the volume on my TV or my car stereo to a point that makes people with me uncomfortable. Still, the idea of having music adjusted to make up for my hearing deficiencies is pretty intriguing. We’ll have to wait to learn what “this fall” means for this feature.
