Geek Beat: Small is Big Again with Apple

Apple’s latest announcements, made at a low-key “Town Hall” hosted at its Cupertino campus, were the focus of this morning’s “Geek Beat” segment on Hawaii News Now’s “Sunrise” morning show. Burt and I talked with Dan Cooke about:

• The new-ish iPhone SE: Essentially the latest and greatest specs (from the iPhone 6S) but in the body of an iPhone 5S (circa 2013). While the introduction of bigger iPhones in 2014 led to record-breaking sales, perhaps as much as 30 percent of the iPhones out there are of the 4″ variety. Apple now has a small, medium, and large phone, and another chance to fill out its market share. The smaller phone also has a smaller price: $399, which isn’t cheap but competitive with other mid-range smartphones.

• The smaller iPad Pro: While the iPad Pro was a spectacular piece of tech, at 13 inches it was also a little unwieldy. Apple is now putting most of the great new things they unveiled with the original iPad Pro into a 9.7″ body… basically the same form factor as the iPad Air 2. So, you get Apple Pencil support, a great camera, and even better screen tech than its bigger brother. It does have less RAM, however, a disappointment to some.

• iOS 9.3 and Night Shift: Apple actually released updated software for all its hardware lines, including OSX, tvOS (for Apple TV), watchOS (for Apple Watch), and iOS. As a “point release,” iOS 9.3 is a pretty modest upgrade, but the marquee feature is “Night Shift,” which removes the blue light spectrum from the screen after the sun goes down. Blue light inhibits serotonin production and often leads to poor sleep, so looking at a warmer screen before bed is widely believed to be better for your health.