Here’s the All New Apple TV with TvOS, App Store, Games, Siri and a New Touch Remote!

“TV plays a huge role in our lives and occupies an important place in our homes where we gather,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook at today’s media event in San Francisco as he unveiled a fourth-generation Apple TV set-top box. “We believe the future of television is apps,” Cook said.

Over sixty percent of pay TV content is consumed through Apple devices, in apps, he added. The fourth-generation Apple TV, as you might have suspected, has a powerful hardware and runs a modern operating system which delivers a brand new user experience. And of course, it has an App Store of its own and Apple readily provides an official software development kit for its developers to create apps for it.

Welcome to the future of television.

Apple’s chief of iTunes, content and Internet software, Eddy Cue, showed off the Apple TV’s new remote which has a few physical button, a glass touch surface area and built-in mic for voice control and navigation via Siri. Yes, there are also sensors for Wii-like motion control.

The new remote

The physical buttons on the new remote include dedicated Menu and Home buttons, the Play/Pause button and the volume up and down buttons. A new universal search option allows Siri to search content across iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, HBO and Showtime, with more services coming at a later stage.

In addition to using Siri to search content and to “show you some action movies, just the ones with Sean Connery”, you can also ask her “What did she say?” as you’re watching a movie and she will rewind the movie back fifteen seconds.

As for the remote’s touch surface area, it’s really sensitive and precise. An on-stage demo showed quick menu navigation with just little finger movement on the touch area.

Apps and games

Apple Music is also part of the new software and there is of course the App Store storefront application available for browsing and downloading third-party apps and games like you would on your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

Apple has pretty much redesigned all its stock apps for the new Apple TV.

Apple hopes apps will do the same thing to television what iPhone and iPad apps have done for mobile.

tvOS and the SDK

The new Apple TV runs a new operating system called tvOS and the official SDK supports the creation of apps that use features like Metal, Game Center, CloudKit, UIKit and more. Some of the third-party software coming to the Apple TV include apps like Airbnb and Gilt as well as games like Harmonix’s Rock Band and more.

Apple announces the iPad Pro with the new Apple Stylus and Smart Keyboard!

Today, Apple unveiled “the biggest news in iPad since the iPad,” as CEO Tim Cook put it. Yes, the iPad Pro gets real. It’s got the biggest screen in an iOS device measuring 12.9 inches diagonally and is driven by the fastest Apple-designed iOS device processor yet.

Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller, raved about the benefits of the bigger screen that provides more screen real estate for games and apps.

That screen has a 2,732-by-2,048 pixel resolution, which works out to5,6 million pixels—that’s more pixels than the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.

The screen uses technologies created for the 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina screen, sports an oxide TFT layer and has a variable refresh display rate, a first for the iPad.

The device runs an Apple-designed ‘A9X’ processor with that provides double the bandwidth to the memory, double performance to flash storage and double the graphics over the iPad Air 2’s A8X processor. The A9X has more RAM than its predecessor, too.

“This is desktop class performance,” Schiller said.

The iPad Pro is faster than 80 percent of portable PCs that shipped in the past twelve months. And in graphics tests it’s faster than 90 percent of them.

Apps like AutoDesk 360 from Autodesk can handle huge sets of data and iMovie can handle 4K video editing.

It has four stereo speakers, too, with three times the audio volume of the iPad Air 2’s speaker.

The iPad Pro has the same 10-hour battery life, despite having a much more powerful hardware than any iPad before it.

Smart Keyboard

Apple also said that a new keyboard accessory called the Smart Keyboard will be available for the iPad Pro. It’s interesting that the iPad Pro has a new type of connector based on three new circles running around the sides of the device.

They’re calling it the Smart Connector and it carries power, data and connects magnetically to the keyboard, with the software automatically adapting to the physical keyboard.

Apple Pencil

The rumors were true: Apple now has a stylus of its own.

The Apple Pencil uses highly responsive sensors inside the tip to detect position, force and tilt.

The Apple Pencil has a built-in battery, features a Lightning connector to connect directly into iPad Pro for charging and is highly responsive so it should really feel natural to draw curved shapes and more.

Apple invited Microsoft executives to demo rich content and document creation with the Apple Stylus in mobile Office apps using features like shape recognition, annotations, ink and more.

Adobe showed off three distinct applications running on the iPad Pro with stylus support: Abobe Comp, Adobe Photoshop Fix (a brand new iPad-exclusive app announced today, shipping in October) and Adobe Photoshop Sketch.

Lastly, the demo session ended with a dedicated body anatomy app for the iPad Pro from 3D4Medical that supports the Apple Stylus for “pinpoint precision editing”.

Availability

The iPad Pro starts at $799 for a Wi-Fi-only model with thirty-two gigabytes of storage and goes all the way up to $949/$1099 for 64GB/128GB editions. Wi-Fi + Cellular models are a $130 extra.

The Apple Pencil is priced at $99 and the Smart Keyboard will be $169. The iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard for the iPad Pro will be available in November, Apple said.

Apple officially schedules iPhone 6s and 6s Plus event for September 9!

Apple has started sending out press invites for its next big event. This will take place on September 9 at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California, a venue with seating capacity for around 7,000 people, and one that the Cupertino company hasn’t used before.

This means we may witness one of Apple’s biggest launch events in its history. It’s obviously expected to announce the new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, These have been said to sportForce Touch tech inside their touchscreens, a higher-res camera than their predecessors, a new chipset, and more RAM. As always with “s” releases, expect the exterior to remain unchanged.

Pre-orders for the new smartphones will start on September 11, two days after their unveiling, while sales should begin a week later than that, on September 18, for the first wave of markets. A second wave of availability should hit on September 25. All of this information has been leaked numerous times already, along with a possible September 8 or 9 announcement date. So now that this has been confirmed, there’s no point in doubting the rest of the rumored timeline.

There could be other new stuff in store for us too. A more affordable iPhone 6c has been in and out of the rumors for many months now, so it’s still unclear whether it will ever become reality. On the other hand, Apple might also unveil new iPads, perhaps even the much-rumored iPad Pro. A revised Apple TV may be in the works too, though there’s no telling if it’s going to be ready in time for this event.

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