Apple's 2025 Product Announcement / Analysis

The new iPhone is here! And yes, to cut to the chase, I am going to get it because it is bright orange, thank you very much.

I’ll break down my take on the announcements (written by yours truly, not AI).

Yesterday was the flagship annual product presentation of one of the world’s most valuable companies, so I find these events interesting to watch and analyze - what they nail, what they tout, and maybe what they miss.

Firstly, Apple does just an incredible job with the visuals and storytelling - genuine stories about saving lives, transforming people, protecting you, and a commitment to beautiful and accessible design throughout. It’s inspiring!

Watch

The revised Series 11 Apple watch has some improvements to robustness with new coatings that we saw applied across the board and something that is kinda-but-not-quite a blood pressure sensor (over time it will warn you if you might have hypertension, not exactly the same thing as daily blood pressure monitoring, which would have been far more interesting and impressive). I’m guessing the IP battles around this are the main deterrent for them launching this feature properly. Deliberately glossed over was the fact that much of the new functionality is going to be made available on older hardware…and won’t be available on ANY hardware until the FDA actually clears it. The inclusion of 5G is a giant “meh” here; when was the last time you found yourself waiting for your watch to download a giant multi-gig file? Conversely find your iPhone (not mentioned in the preso) is going to remain one of the top-used features. Embarrassing (for users) but true. Fall detection will continue to save people’s lives (AND tie up 911 with false detections, but almost certainly worth it on the whole).

AirPods Pro

I’ll be interested to hear (ha!) if the new ANC is a noticeable improvement; ditto on the claims of improved sound quality. The improved robustness of IP57 dust & water resistance will be welcome (my wife has gone through a few of the older generation that couldn’t survive her intensive workouts) as well as better battery life. I have really weird ear canals; prior generations of AirPods just couldn’t stay in, so I’m kinda curious if the improved fit options will actually make these right for me. Maybe I’ll get a pair for B and try them on? Heart rate sensing is pretty cool to add, but mostly assumes that you’re not wearing an Apple Watch at the same time, I think? (What happens if you are wearing both, is the input from the AirPods ignored since the watch probably has better telemetry?) I’m curious about the size of demographic that goes for a run with their iPhone and AirPods but not a watch. There are some other options they could have thrown in that are mostly software; acting as in-ear monitors for musicians, for instance. Imagine seeing pro musicians on stage performing with AirPods Pro. The translation demo was neat, but is also mostly the phone doing the heavy lifting and this feature is going to be available on older hardware.

iPhone Air

Hey, really neat engineering to make it so thin, but I’m not sure this is really solving anyone’s problem. People with smaller hands really want a smaller phone to hold; making it thinner is less of the point than making it less wide and tall — and the Air 17 is actually both taller and wider than the regularly iPhone 17! They had to compromise so much on battery volume that they tout a MagSafe battery pack (custom to this phone) just to get a day of use. The touting of using an in-house modem seemed more targeted as a flex against chip vendors (screw you, Qualcomm!) than anything that’s likely to be near-term helpful or beneficial for end-users or unlock meaningful new capabilities (there was some handwaving around it being ‘2x faster’ but unclear on what benchmarks) - I found it intriguing that the C1X is ONLY going to be in the Air, not the 17 or 17 Pro. It’s like they are wanting to build confidence before putting it as the core of their flagship? Maybe the 18 & 18 Pro will get the C2 chip after they finish working out all the bugs — and adding mmWave support (which Qualcomm chips have an the C1X does not). Not that I think 5G mmWave has been a game-changer.

iPhone 17 / 17 Pro

Okay, screw it, I f’in love the orange color. Yes, I’m biased. A better telephoto sensor is going to help with soccer games (though they don’t seem to have improved the 3D sensor shift stabilization even over the last two generations?), better battery life is always a win (a lot of the exercise here seems to have been shoving all of the core electronics into the hump so the vast majority of the case is battery) and of course improved scratch resistance is great. This generation finally fixes the “back glass” mistake of the last few generations - this was such an obnoxious aspect of owning an iPhone; if you dropped it - even with a case! - the back glass could often shatter, and repair was near-impossible (a $500 job!!) and completely uncovered by phone insurance since the phone was still technically usable. So, happy that they basically gave up and are using something that won’t expensively shatter on you. Hat tip to all the videos of phones banging into stuff - they “get it” that consumers want a phone that will roll with anything they throw at it without needing a tank of a case. The CPU didn’t change much, RAM neither, storage (other than a 2TB option) neither. There were new video modes only relevant for extreme professionals but it was a little bit surprising to see no 8K support even on the Pro Max or 480 fps slo-mo (even at 720p; Samsung’s had this for a generation already). The front-facing sensor got modest bump from 12MP to 18MP, still a far cry from the now-trio of 48MP sensors on the rear — honestly, I would have accepted a larger notch to get an uncompromising front camera. We have “Wi-Fi 7” but no mention of 320MHz channel support or MLO working well. Unlike for the C1X, all of the iPhone 17 models got the new in-house N1 chip - can’t wait to see what the actual capabilities are here.

The on-board GPU now comes with better matrix multiplication units which could finally enable decent on-board LLM usage. (This is different than the Neural Engine which has been around a few generations but is basically only for small Apple-curated inference.) Local models are going to be a thing and we finally have the phone hardware from Apple to do it. We may need to wait for WWDC 2026 for Apple to really catch up from the OS perspective in helping enable this access to make it as easy as Ollama on desktop.

One of the secret stars of the show that was unmentioned onstage AFAICT was the inclusion of Memory Integrity Enforcement in the A19 chips, which basically make whole classes of common attacks impossible. This is going to make this the phone to get for anyone worried about getting hacked or compromised.

Hilariously missing, of course, was Apple Intelligence or really anything called “Siri” other than the Live Translation demos, which Google Translate has had for the better part of a decade. Honestly, I just want Siri transcription to actually work?? Is that too much to ask? Google is now running laps around Apple in enabling fun and approachable AI features and I think Apple’s weakness here has left an opening for other players to jump in with a re-imagined mobile experience that is truly AI-first.

Not a bad set of updates, and I do like the “Snow Leopard”-like focus on the basics of what a phone needs to deliver in this release: better battery life, tougher equipment, better pictures with larger sensors. It’s clear that Apple can deliver impressive hardware. But they’ve also punted on smart rings, AI pendants, AR glasses, foldable phones, or even useful transcription. There’s a lot that could have been done with software to impress: incorporating AI vision techniques to “watch you” and coach calisthenic workouts, AI therapists for mental health and performance coaching, agentic control of your phone (no, SiriKit doesn’t count). We also didn’t see any updates to Continuity Camera or simple ways for non-professionals to coordinate and produce multi-camera video. Tools to help creators on-phone produce nicely edited clips for YouTube Shorts or TikTok could have been rad.

This is a company that is an absolute execution machine from a hardware perspective but has kind of fallen behind on making visionary products. I think their stock price has kind of baked that in. It’s clear at this point that Tim Cook is a diligent operator and responsible steward, but I think the company is going to need visionary and bold leadership to make some new bets that go beyond incremental improvements.

(Disclosures: I own Apple stock. I am not a financial advisor; this is not financial advice; the above represents my opinion alone and not that of any organization with which I am affiliated.)