With business slumping, Apple has been under pressure to show what it will offer buyers to jump start a new wave of iPhone sales.
On Monday, the technology giant revealed its hand: the iPhone 16, which has a camera button on the outside of the handset. The button is an external clue to changes Apple said it had made inside its latest smartphone to harness the latest in artificial intelligence, or AI. The upgrades will "push the boundaries of what a smartphone can do," said Apple's chief executive Tim Cook, but the firm faces tough competition as other brands have already integrated generative AI features into their handsets.
Apple's stock was down throughout its "Glow time" event, in which it announced the iPhone 16 among other products and ended up flat for the day. The $3 trillion company is under pressure over concerns that it's falling behind in the hot field of artificial intelligence. Sales of the iPhone, considered Apple's most important product accounting for about half its total sales, have stalled in recent months. Sales slipped 1% over the nine months ended 29 June compared with a year earlier.
Apple said the new phones, which tout longer-lasting batteries, more powerful chips and enhanced privacy features, were its first designed specifically to handle AI and its new "Apple Intelligence" tools- many of which were unveiled in June. Those include new capabilities for writing and creating new emojis, as well as integrating OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT directly into Siri to help users with some queries and text generation requests.
On the same day, Apple updated its Apple Watch and its AirPod headphones, which would automatically drop their volumes when users start in-person conversations and call-rejection by headshake. It said that the Pro version of its AirPods would also become a "clinical grade" personal hearing aid for people with mild or moderate hearing loss. The company said it was expecting marketing approval for the device from regulators "soon", adding that the feature would be available this autumn in over 100countries including the US, Germany and Japan. Previously the company had a feature allowing the pairing of hearing aids with iPhones and other devices.
The products were rolled out at a glossy event where protesters gathered in a roped off free speech area across the street calling on executives to step up the effort to protect kids from harmful content in the company's App Store. The protest featured a life-sized blow-up made to look like Mr Cook. Sales of the new range start in September with prices for the iPhone16 beginning at$799. But Apple Intelligence features are not due to arrive on operating systems until October, starting in the US and other countries in the subsequent months. They will arrive in the UK in December.
Ben Wood, chief analyst at the market research firm CCS Insight said it was likely many would dismiss the company's new camera control as a "glorified shutter button". But he said it offered "very significant" upgrades, including visual, AI-powered search and he came away from the presentation persuaded that Apple would win over customers." The combination of Apple Intelligence and new camera features on the iPhone 16 will help spur upgrades from loyal Apple customers," he said. "Particularly as Apple is positioning this latest update as being a future-proof purchase for customers wanting to get Apple Intelligence features as they roll out over the next few years."
Apple has trailed rivals such as Samsung and Google in baking generative AI features for photo editing, translation, and web browsing into its devices. The same rivals are now building them into folding, flipping and even tri-folding smartphones. Pre-orders for Huawei's new tri-fold phone, the Mate XT, topped three million on Monday, according to reports. Because Apple was rolling out AI-ready smartphones later than rivals, Gartner analyst Annette Zimmermann said it was "critical" they deliver. She warned that rolling the features out before they were ready could risk their reputation or prompt sales losses.
