Five Biggest Apple Announcements: iPhone Air, A19 Pro Chips, Apple Watch Ultra 3

Among the announcements: new AirPods that can translate conversations and a new watch that can message via satellite and scan for high blood pressure.

Apple introduced updated versions of its phones, headphones, and watches on Tuesday during its annual event featuring a half-dozen or so executives positioned in Apple stores and offices around the world.

“Today we have a huge day of announcements about air pods and Apple Watch, and we're taking the biggest leap ever for iPhone,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook from the company’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.

The company announced the iPhone Air, which has a very thin profile except for a “camera plateau” near the top. Apple also took steps to include AI capabilities into its devices, though the long-promised AI-enabled Siri was not among the new products.

Instead, Apple focused on infusing AI behind the scenes with live translation offered through its AirPods Pro 3 headphones. The headphones dampen the speaker’s voice so the listener can hear the translation more clearly.

Apple users can also speak into the device and a live translation of what they said will appear on their iPhone screen. The company said it scanned more than 10,000 human ears to improve fit and comfort. The devices now include a heart rate monitor in case a user isn’t wearing their Apple Watch, which also has a heart rate monitor.

Additionally, the company said it’s possible for two people who are both wearing Apple headphones to have a conversation in their preferred language translated in real time. The new Apple headphones have longer battery life with up to 10 hours on a single charge.

The new headphones will retail for $249 when they are released on Sept. 19.

Apple also introduced a crossbody strap that works on all three of its new iPhone models, so users can wear it like a purse, in the event they don’t have or wish to use their pockets or handbags. It has magnetic latches and sells for $59.

Here’s a roundup of some other devices highlighted during Apple’s new product announcement.

Apple Watch Ultra 3

$799

The company’s vice president of health announced that the latest iterations of Apple Watch will come with technology that can monitor for chronic high blood pressure. She said sensors are expected to alert 100,000 Apple Watch users that they have hypertension, which the company warned is a “silent killer.”

Additionally, the company put 5G connectivity into the device so users can take and make calls, download music, and use Apple Pay without a phone.

The Apple Watch Ultra 3 has a longer battery life and fast charging that provides 12 hours of use in 15 minutes. The company said the watch will last 72 hours in low power mode and 14 hours with GPS and heart rate readings enabled.

The watch also offers satellite communication so even when users are off the grid without cellular or Wi-Fi, their watch will keep them in constant contact with the world they left behind.

iPhone 17

$799

All of the new iPhones have a more durable ceramic coating. Apple pointed out several times that this coating is bonded at the “atomic level” and makes the surface three times more scratch resistant.

The 18-megapixel front-facing camera uses Apple’s Center Stage machine-learning technology to adjust the lens to fit more people inside the frame for group selfies. Apple said its users took 500 billion selfies last year, which it boasted was more than users of any other phone.

On the back of the phone, there are two cameras each with 48-megapixel sensors for extreme detail. The sensors offer four times better resolution on ultrawide photos than the iPhone 16.

The phone’s storage options begin at 256 GB.

The company also debuted its A19 chip that it says makes the phone using it 50 percent faster. The A19 has a six-core CPU. It can also modulate the 6.3-inch screen’s refresh rate to conserve battery life, so when a user is scrolling a news story it will slow the refresh rate to 10 Hz and when playing a videogame, it can boost it to up to 120 Hz.

That gives users up to 11 more hours of video playback.

iPhone 17 Pro

$1,099

This phone comes with water inside.

It’s a feature, not a bug.

Apple has built a vapor chamber inside the device filled with deionized water that it says is an entirely new approach to dissipate the heat produced by the A19 Pro chip. The chamber is laser-welded into the aluminum chassis so when the chip starts to heat up, the vapor circulates inside the chamber and is absorbed by the metal.

The design of the phone also features a plateau on the back around which Apple has placed the phone’s antennae. This turns out to be a good spot and produced the highest-performing antennae system ever in an iPhone.

The phone has a glass back with a ceramic shield that is four times more crack resistant than previous iPhones with back glass, the company said. The ceramic front coating makes it three times more scratch resistant, Apple claims.

For users of the iPhone 17 Pro Max, the extra space provides a bigger battery and up to 40 hours of video playback.

The front-facing camera is 18 megapixels and uses Apple’s Center Stage. The rear has three, 48-megapixel camera sensors that feature a fusion design that incorporates several lenses into a single port.

iPhone Air

$999

Anyone who has ground titanium stock knows it is a rigid, lightweight metal that is highly resistant to abrasion.

That material forms the frame of the iPhone Air, a super thin, highly polished device that measures – less than a quarter inch – 5.6 mm across at its most narrow point. It weighs in at 165 grams or 5.8 ounces.

It uses what Apple calls a camera plateau to give it a bump to hide the electronics that make it work as an iPhone.

The iPhone air uses a large 48-megapixel camera sensor the provides better shooting conditions in low light or night photography situations.

Despite the thin profile, Apple claims the battery lasts 27 hours on video playback, but for an extra $99, Apple also announced an optional attachable battery that snaps on and can extend that to 40 hours.

A19 Pro, N1, and C1X

The A19 Pro chip comes inside the iPhone 17 Pro and the iPhone Air.

It has a 6-core CPU, the fastest chip in any smartphone, and offers improvements in front-end bandwidth and branch prediction. Additionally, it has a 6-core GPU architecture that includes neural accelerators built into each core. The GPU in Apple’s A19 Pro was upgraded. It has Apple’s second-generation dynamic caching architecture, and double the 16-bit floating point math rates, while Apple also built a new unified image compression.

The GPU cores work in tandem with a 16-core Neural Engine to power AI models. It has a larger cache, more memory, and three times the peak GPU compute of the A18 pro.

New for the iPhone 17 is an N1 Apple-designed wireless networking chip that can power Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 6, Thread, and improves the overall performance of Hotspot and AirDrop.

The C1X is Apple’s newly designed modem. It is one of the advances that made iPhone Air possible, the company said. The company introduced C1 this spring and has pushed out a new, faster version six months later called C1X. It’s two times faster than the modem in the iPhone 16 Pro and uses 30 percent less energy.