Apple event: release dates for iPhone X, 8 and 8 Plus revealed – as it happened

The first outing in the Steve Jobs Theater saw unveiling of flagship iPhone X, as well as iPhone 8 and 8 Plus and updated Apple Watch and Apple TV

• iPhone X: even an embarrassing glitch at launch can’t knock Apple off the top.
• iPhone X: new Apple smartphone dumps home button for all-screen design.
• Facial recognition is here. The iPhone X is just the beginning.

Key events

• 7.51pmiPhone X pricing and availability
• 7.33pmiPhone X
• 7.17pmWireless charging
• 7.13pmiPhone 8
• 6.54pmApple TV 4K
• 6.39pmApple Watch series 3
• 6.28pmWatchOS4

8.05pm

Everything announced today

So, from top to bottom:

• The Apple Watch Series 3 ships on 22 September. $329/£329 without cellular connection, and $£399 with.
• The Apple TV 4k ships on 22 September, at $£179.
• The iPhone 8 starts at $£699 for 64GB and the iPhone 8 plus $£799, shipping on 22 September.
• And the iPhone X (that’s “iPhone Ten”, if you want to be one of those people who calls a gif a jif) starts at $£999 for a 64GB model, rising to an astonishing $£1,149 for the 256GB version, and will be available for pre-order from 27 October, shipping on 3 November.

7.57pm

And that’s it. No musical guest, just a quote from Steve Jobs to play us out. Welcome to the future; hope it’s slightly less dystopian than some of Apple’s marketing material made it look.

iPhone X pricing and availability

The phone will start shipping 3 November for $999 for the 64GB, and it can be pre-ordered on 27 October.

The iPhone SE also has a price cut to $349, iPhone 6S to $449, and iPhone 7 to $549.

7.45pm

A small update on wireless charging: it’s also supported by the Apple Watch series 3 and the new Airpods. And if you have an Apple-designed power mat, you can charge them all at the same time. Apple’s calling it AirPower, and it looks like it might become a future standard – but for now it’s unique to Apple. Not out until next year, though.

7.44pm

The iPhone X has good cameras. Both 12MP like on the 8 Plus, but a faster telephoto lens, which also gains optical image stabilisation.

The flash is also improved, but some things you can never really fix, and one of those is a camera flash placed right next to the lens. Just find better lighting, people.

The front-facing camera now supports a bunch of the twin-camera features, like portrait mode, that were previously only possible on the 7 plus, and it’s going to mean you can shoot some really attractive selfies.

MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL: The iPhone X has a quoted two hours extra battery life than the iPhone 7.

7.39pm

Oh dear, Face ID fails first try in Craig Federighi’s demo. That… doesn’t bode well. Still, the rest of the demo looks impressive enough, and it is a very pretty full-screen phone.

Snapchat is also supporting the FaceID tech, with two special snapchat lenses, and oh god Craig Federighi is demonstrating the animoji again, these things unsettle me on a primal level.

Phil Schiller returns.

7.33pm

iPhone X

It looks like we knew it would look like: a huge screen taking up the whole front with a, er, 5.8 inch OLED “super retina display”; a glass back; a dual camera; and a small bump cutting in to the top of the screen.

With no home button, the display is enabled simply by tapping on the screen, you get back to the home screen by swiping up from the bottom, and you get to multi-tasking by swiping up and pausing. The side-button is now dedicated to Siri.

What about TouchID? It’s been replaced with “Face ID”. It’s “the future of how we unlock our smartphones”, Schiller says – and it’s based on the front cameras, which are more than just a camera. Seven separate sensors are packed into that little band at the top, and it’s how the company hopes to overcome flaws with previous face unlock systems. It also works at night.

Schiller also reveals what the “bionic” label is on the A11: it’s the neural engine, a subset of the chip dedicated to neural network processing, and that’s how Face ID works. The company even trained its system on professionally made masks, to make sure that it only works on real faces.

More importantly, Schiller says it “requires user attention”, such as looking at the camera, to unlock – so hopefully a pickpocket won’t be able to wave your phone in front of your face then dash off.

“The chance that a random person in the population could unlock your iPhone X and unlock it with their face is one in a million”, Schiller says, comparing it to one in 50,000 for TouchID. But unlike TouchID, it can get confused more easily if someone looks similar to you. If you have an evil twin, “set a passcode”, he says. It works with everything else TouchID does, including Apple Pay.

The neural engine has one other use: terrifying animated emoji. I never want to receive one. Wow. I’m shaken.

Craig Federighi comes onstage to demo the phone.

7.19pm

Tim pulls the “one more thing” card. This isn’t as much of a surprise as the iPod was, but it’s going to be quite big. Cook says it’ll “set the path of technology for the next decade”. We’ll see. It’s called the iPhone X. And it’s pronounced iPhone 10.

Phil Schiller returns for the big one...

7.17pm

Wireless charging

Schiller’s not done yet, and he returns to announce the biggest change coming to the iPhone 8: wireless charging.

The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus will now support the Qi wireless charging standard – that’s the one which is built into a lot of IKEA furniture. You’ll soon be able to charge your phone by just leaving it on your bedside table. Hooray!

The iPhone 8 will start at 64GB, from $699, and the 8 Plus will start at $799. Pre-orders from 15 September, available from 22 September, and iOS 11 will be released on 19 September.

Back to Tim.

7.13pm

iPhone 8

Phil Schiller comes up to talk, but don’t get too excited: it’s the iPhone 8. It looks a lot like the iPhone 7, but it’s now all-glass, and it comes in three colours (silver, grey and rose gold).

There are some new features in this phone, including the True Tone tech carried over from the iPad (it adjusts for the temperature of the light), louder stereo speakers and a new “A11 bionic” chip, but you can tell we’re all rushing through to get to the good stuff.

Still, we should make the most of it while we’re here. Apple’s also showing off its first ever fully in-house GPU (after it broke with Britain’s Imagination Technologies), and a new image signal processor – the brains behind the camera – with noise reduction and faster low-light autofocus.

The camera itself gets a new sensor and new colour filter on the normal 8, while the 8 Plus gets two new sensors for its two new cameras, and the telephoto lens gets better in low light.

But it’s the software where the cameras are getting impressive changes: the 8 Plus can now use the two cameras to build a depth map of a portrait photo, and artificially alter the lighting of the images.

Schiller also calls the iPhone the first phone “designed for Augmented Reality” (that doesn’t sound true, given Google’s Project Tango was explicitly just that, but hey), and shows some AR apps, like a Warhammer game and a baseball analytics app.

Games developer Alti Mar, from Directive Games, arrives to show a multiplayer AR tower defence game. It looks like quite an annoying way of playing a game, but maybe I’m just lazy.

6.57pm

Cook returns for another segue, and it’s the big one: the iPhone.

But first, navel-gazing. Cook rattles off highlights: The first iPhone; the App Store; the Retina display; Facetime and iMessage; Siri; TouchID and Apple Pay; and cameras.

“Now, we can create devices that are far more intelligent, far more capable, far more personal than ever before. We have huge iPhone news for you today,” Cook says. And the advert for the new iPhone rolls.

6.54pm

Apple TV 4K

The new Apple TV finally brings HDR and 4K technology to Apple’s set-top box, allowing owners to view content in the best picture quality possible (until the next must-have new feature). For context, Amazon’s competing hardware has supported 4K for two years.

Still, the new Apple TV is twice as fast in the CPU and four times as fast in the GPU, Cue says.

More importantly, Apple’s secured 4K content for iTunes – and the company won its fight with Hollywood to not raise the price in the move from HD. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video will also support the platform.

The Apple TV app – that’s an app that runs on the Apple TV, so it’s technically the Apple TV Apple TV app – is also coming to other countries than just the US, including the UK, and it’s getting support for live sporting fixtures and live news. The Apple TV app also runs on the iPad and iPhone, so all of this affects them too.

Games developer Jenova Chen of thatgamecompany arrives on stage to show off its new game, Sky – which looks like a spiritual sequel to its 2012 indie hit Journey, a PlayStation 3 exclusive. Sky is an Apple exclusive, on TV, iPad and iPhone.

The new Apple TV starts at $179, and will ship on 22 September.