IPhone 11: Apple's most ambitious bid yet to conquer video and film
Apple made its most ambitious pitch yet for the iPhone as a device for professional photographers and videographers at a launch event in Cupertino on Tuesday, underscoring new camera and editing capabilities.
The newly announced iPhone 11 comes in six colors and boasts two cameras and longer battery life. At $699, it is also $50 cheaper than the starting price of the iPhone XR.
In addition to the iPhone 11, Apple announced the iPhone 11 Pro, which is being touted as “the most advanced and detailed iPhone yet”, with a threelens “pro” camera system, more energy efficiency and spatial audio sound. It will start at $999.
“It enables a whole new level of photography,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice-president of worldwide marketing, of the iPhone 11 Pro. “It’s the first phone we have called Pro.”
Apple underscored the ambitiousness of the new pro system by showcasing images taken on the devices by professional photographers. A short black-and-white film, shot by the director Diego Contreras and the cinematographer Guillermo Garza, on the iPhone 11 Pro and played before the crowd at Tuesday’s event, highlighted “the computational photography mad science” of the new three-lens system with 4x optical zoom. The Oscar-nominated film director Sean Baker, who shot his 2015 feature film Tangerine entirely on an earlier model of the iPhone, was also invited onstage to speak.
“I’m always excited when I see new evolutions in the craft,” Baker said, adding the new tools will help in “reducing the number of takes and giving me more options in post [production]”.
The iPhone 11 has a dual camera, which includes a second camera featuring an ultra-wide lens as opposed to a telephoto lens as in past devices. Artificial intelligence capabilities in the camera will auto-adjust lighting and reduce noise to allow users to take lowlight images and more detailed portraits. It also features a front-facing portrait mode and slo-mo video capabilities in the front-facing camera.
The iPhone 11 Pro has even more advanced photo capabilities, with the three camera lenses allowing for more details, smart lighting and wider shots. Videos made with the iPhone 11 Pro cameras will shoot in 4k resolution at 60 frames per second.
“We think this is the most exciting iPhone we have made yet,” Schiller said.
The announcements on Tuesday come as Apple faces a host of business challenges, from the US-China trade war to antitrust investigations by the federal government. The company has also faced privacy setbacks – in July the Guardian revealed that contractors regularly listen to confidential details about people’s lives while reviewing Siri recordings, and in August researchers at Google revealed an unprecedented iPhone hacking operation.
It also marks the first product launch since Jony Ive, Apple’s longtime chief design officer, announced his upcoming departure.
Apple also revealed the Apple Watch Series 5 at Tuesday’s event, which will have an always-on screen while maintaining up to 18 hours of battery life.
The iPad also got an update. The new 7th generation of the product will have a larger screen of 10.2 inches, up from 9.7 inches, and support for the Apple Pencil and Smart Connector, which lets users attach Apple’s own keyboards to the device to turn it into a pseudo-laptop. The device will retail for $329 and start shipping on 30 September.
As device sales have fallen in recent years, Apple has placed more of an emphasis on new services such as Apple TV+, the company’s answer to streaming platforms such as Netflix and Hulu. Tuesday’s event revealed more details about those services, including Apple Arcade, a subscription service announced in March 2019 that will provide access to exclusive mobile games. Meanwhile, Apple TV+ will launch in more than 100 countries on 1 November at $4.99 a month. It will not have commercials and will feature original series.
The pivot to apps and services comes at a time when it is also facing antitrust scrutiny over complaints that the App Store favors its own services over others.
Apple also took the opportunity on
Tuesday to promote its privacy capabilities, saying privacy is “built from the ground up” in each device. The focus on privacy may be an attempt to draw attention away from other shortcomings, said John Maeda, the chief experience officer at digital consultancy Publicis Sapient.
“As Apple starts to become less relevant to consumers with diminishing impact from fancy industrial design tricks and their cloud software offerings that cannot compete with Google’s, they’re subtly doubling down on how their device ecosystem is inherently more private than any other ones out there,” he said.