Apple held their usual March event on the 21st, where they announced a couple of minor software updates for iOS, Apple TV, and Watch OS developers, along with two big hardware announcements.
As always, there were plenty of rumors leading up to the conference, and the March event is normally much less glamorous than the September World Wide Developers Conference where Apple normally announces the next generation of iPhone to the world. This event was held at a much smaller venue, with less people being invited.
The first of the two hardware announcements was actually a new iPhone. The phone is being named iPhone SE, with the SE standing for special edition. This iPhone however is not a flagship device, but is kind of a premium budget phone. It returns to the 4-inch form factor of the iPhone 5, 5s, and 5s that we have seen before, but has been heavily updated internally. Although the phone starts at just $399 for a paltry 16 gigabytes of on-board storage, you can opt for 64 gigabytes if you are willing to shell out an extra hundred dollars. Because of the price, the phone is a little bit outside the price range of what a consumer would consider a budget phone, but since Apple is known for their much more expensive options, this is budget by their standard.
And for the price you're actually getting a very high end phone. Upon first glance it literally looks like Apple fit all the high end tech from their current flagship, the iPhone 6s, and shoved it into the smaller form factor of the iPhone SE. The phone features the amazing 12 megapixel shooter from the 6s, which is capable of shooting 4K video, has the same powerful A9 and M9 chips for graphics and motion, Apple’s own fingerprint scanner Touch ID, and is NFC capable, meaning the phone features Apple Pay. So although this phone is out of the price range of budget, it is by no means a budget phone under the hood.
The second hardware announcement Apple made was the introduction of yet another iPad Pro, but this time they kept with the traditional 9.7 inch form factor. The iPad now has a completely revamped color space, which Apple really touted during the presentation. Colors are 25 percent more saturated, making them pop off the screen. The iPad also takes the newest feature of iOS 9.3 to a whole new level, changing the light/white balance of the screen to match your surroundings to better match the look of paper. Like the bigger iPad Pro, it also is running off an A9X chip, which is incredibly fast and powerful. The downside here compared to the larger counterpart is that this device only has 2gb of RAM, whereas the full sized iPad Pro has double that amount. The iPad also features the same 12 megapixel camera from the iPhone 6s. What I thought was most notable however is the for the first time ever an iOS device has a top tier option of a whopping 256 gigabytes. That does come at a price however, with the 256gb option coming in at $899.
Apple also released iOS 9.3 alongside the announcement of the new devices, which will be running this latest version at launch.