Episode 97 - Apple's "Glowtime" iPhone 16, Apple Watch, and AirPods Event

On this week’s Solid State Podcast, well there’s no other way to say it… it’s iPhone time! We’ve talked plenty of times before about the more-or-less fixed points in each year of the Big Tech calendar, and a September Apple Event has been a tentpole of that calendar for many years now. The size and shape of those events varies year to year, sometimes with them being highly focused, phone only events and others taking shall we say… a broader approach. And boy howdy, was this one the latter. 

Not to say the iPhone itself was an afterthought… not by a long shot actually. But the sheer length of the event couple with the breakneck pace of announcements did have us wondering at times if the phones were ever going to come! In the end though, as the dust settles around Cupertino, we have a shockingly wide array of new entries ranging from the barely-worth-mentioning all the way to me genuinely losing a bet … 

But after you strip away the over-90-minute runtime, the plethora of products, and the “why are we even here” nature of all things AI… what we’re left with is what appears to be an Apple in a state of flux. In many ways, this was a rock-solid iPhone announcement, bringing with it one of the most compelling stories for an entry in the family in years that for once isn’t just because it’s the “most expensive so therefore ‘good’ one”… but in several other ways there’s no mistaking Apple reacting to what can only be outside pressure in some seemingly un-Apple’y ways…

We make the joke often enough about the age old tale of “change the shape or color of an iPod and we’ll sell a million more”… but that seemed to be much more tangibly the strategy here for several topics we’ll cover. 

In the end though, phones were announced, reviews are on the way, and the same question we face every 12 months is upon us… is it upgrade time?