So iPhone 6s preorders opened this morning and I did the thing I always swear I won't do again, which is set an alarm for stupid-early just to sit there refreshing Apple's store page like it's going to change my life. It didn't. The site was doing that thing where it just spins at you for a solid ten minutes before finally coughing up an actual order screen, and by the time I got through, Rose Gold in the size I wanted was already showing a shipping estimate of 2-3 weeks instead of launch day. Not "sold out," just quietly pushed back, which somehow annoys me more than an honest sold-out banner would.
I ended up with the 6s Plus in space gray, 64GB, because I have never once in four years of iPhone ownership stayed under 16GB and I'm done pretending I will this time. $299 on contract, or you can do the new iPhone Upgrade Program thing they announced Wednesday, which is $32.41 a month if you want the 16GB 6s and get a new phone every year. I keep going back and forth on whether that's a genuinely good deal or just a lease dressed up to feel like ownership. Leaning toward the second one honestly, but I get why it exists — AT&T and Verizon have been quietly training everyone off subsidized upgrades for two years now and Apple would rather you lease from them than from the carrier.
About Wednesday's keynote
The actual announcements were fine. 3D Touch is the headline feature and I'm withholding judgment until I can actually poke at a home screen icon myself, because on paper "press harder for a shortcut menu" sounds a lot like every other pressure-sensitive gimmick that got demoed with huge fanfare and then quietly became a thing nobody uses (looking at you, Force Touch trackpad, which I still mostly forget exists on my Mac). The Apple Pencil for the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro looked genuinely nice in the demo, actual low-latency drawing instead of the laggy mess styluses usually are, but at $99 for a stylus plus a $1000-ish iPad to go with it, that's not really aimed at me. I don't draw. I barely doodle.
The new Apple TV is the one I'm actually excited about, not gonna lie. Real App Store, tvOS, a remote with a touch surface and a mic for Siri search instead of the same eight-button clicker they've shipped since 2010. $149 for 32GB, $199 for 64GB, shipping sometime in October. My current Apple TV is the little black puck that can't even run the HBO Now app properly, so this is an easy yes for me whenever it actually ships.
The one part of the whole event nobody's really written about is that the livestream itself went sideways for a few minutes. Right in the middle of Tim Cook talking, the audio just cut over to what sounded like a Chinese interpretation track laid on top of the English feed, so for a good chunk of people watching at home the keynote briefly turned into this weird garbled dual-language mess. It got fixed, everyone moved on, but for about five minutes my Twitter timeline was funnier than the actual keynote. Live-streaming your own hardware launch to the entire planet and having the AV desk fumble the audio mid-sentence is exactly the kind of thing that never happens in the rehearsal and always happens in front of ten million people.
iOS 9 is supposedly landing next Wednesday the 16th, which means I've got about four days to finish backing up this phone before I hand it down to my sister, who is still somehow running a 5c held together with a cracked screen protector and pure stubbornness. She doesn't believe me that the battery life is going to be night and day. We'll see who's right.
Anyway. Preorder's placed, confirmation email says the 25th, and I'll believe it when the box shows up. Back to actual work now, which today mostly means untangling a CSS grid mess on a client site that has nothing to do with any of this.