I had Apple's keynote livestream going in one window yesterday and a hurricane tracking map open in the other, and honestly the split screen felt about right for this week. Everybody's talking about the new iPhones. I want to talk about the watch, because the watch is the thing that actually stuck with me.
So yes, Tuesday Apple did the whole Steve Jobs Theater thing again. iPhone XS at $999, XS Max at $1099 if you want the giant 6.5-inch one, and the XR coming later in October starting at $749 in that whole rainbow of aluminum colors. Faster chip, better cameras, dual-SIM stuff most of us in the US wont use. Fine. Good. Ill probably upgrade my XS Max eventually. Not today.
What I keep coming back to is the Apple Watch Series 4, and specifically the ECG feature. Not the bigger screen (which is nice, thinner bezels, more room for complications), not the redesigned digital crown with the haptic click, not even the fall detection thing which is genuinely clever for older users living alone. The ECG app is the part that made me sit up. Apple got FDA clearance to put an actual electrocardiogram sensor in a consumer device you buy at a mall kiosk. You touch the crown, it reads electrical signals through your wrist and your finger, and thirty seconds later it tells you if it thinks youre in normal sinus rhythm or possible atrial fibrillation. Starts at $399 for GPS only, $499 if you want cellular.
Im not a doctor and I dont pretend to know how good the sensor actually is in practice. Cardiologists are already arguing about whether this leads to a wave of anxious people showing up at urgent care with a squiggly line their watch didnt like, and thats a fair worry. My grandfather had AFib for the last decade of his life and never knew it until a routine checkup caught it almost by accident, so Im biased toward thinking more data beats less, even messy data. Your mileage may vary. Doctors I trust seem split down the middle on this one, which tells you something.
Anyway. The reason my attention kept drifting off the keynote is that South Carolina and North Carolina have been under evacuation orders since the weekend, and Florence has been sitting off the coast doing that thing hurricanes do where they slow down and just menace everybody for days instead of getting it over with. Forecasters have been going back and forth between calling it a wall of wind and calling it a slow-motion flooding disaster, and either way a few million people spent this week deciding whether to board up windows or just leave. I dont have family directly in the path this time, which I'm grateful for, but I spent way too much time yesterday flipping between the Apple stream and NOAA satellite loops like some kind of split-brain experiment.
Small complaint while Im here: Apples own Weather app is still kind of useless for anything beyond "is it going to rain on my walk to the train." No radar loop worth looking at, no real storm tracking, nothing. I ended up on a browser tab for that instead of any app on my phone, which feels backwards in 2018.
iOS 12 lands next Monday, the 17th, and Im more excited for that than for any new hardware honestly. Screen Time and the Shortcuts app baked into the OS are the kind of unglamorous stuff that actually changes how I use my phone day to day, versus a slightly bigger screen I'll stop noticing within a week.
One more thing nobody's really framing right: putting a medical sensor with actual regulatory clearance on the wrist of tens of millions of people is a bigger structural shift for the health tech industry than anything about camera bokeh or chip benchmarks. Fitbit and Garmin and the rest are going to have to answer this somehow, and I dont think "we have more battery life" is going to cut it as a response for very long. Worth watching where that goes over the next year, more than worth watching whether the new phone camera beats last year's phone camera by 4%.
Stay safe if youre anywhere near the Carolinas this week. Check on your people.