Everything You Need to Know About Apple Event’s New Products

For the past couple years Apple has rolled out big releases at their annual Apple event, including the Ultra Watch and Emergency SOS, that were especially important for people who love to play outside. This year was more muted for us outsiders as the big news focused on Apple’s version of AI, called Apple Intelligence, which is launching on their phones in beta this fall.

We didn’t get an Ultra Watch 3 with a better battery life (which we’re still hoping for), and we didn’t get an announcement about any new satellite features (even though we’re very excited about the previously announced ability to text and send photos/video via satellite when iOS 18 launches later this month).

What we did get were several big improvements to the iPhone’s cameras and two smart health updates. Plus, AirPods get noise canceling and the new Apple Watch has its largest face ever.

Camera Control Button

We started covering the iPhone in Outside years ago because it’s long been the best pocket camera that you can haul along for backcountry adventures. Every year Apple rolls out new camera features that make it significantly better, and this year we’re most excited about something called the Camera Control button.

The Camera Control button, which comes on all the new iPhones—16, 16 Plus, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max—sits on the right side of the phone. With one full press, it immediately brings up your camera. Another press takes a photo. More importantly, a soft press gesture on the button brings up a menu that offers a host of manual controls including aperture and exposure adjustment—letting you play with depth of field or optimize the brightness of something in the shadow or highlight—as well as the ability to adjust your zoom range.

A quick demo we watched made the ability to access these features with a button look surprisingly similar to how you might quickly and deftly control a high-end mirrorless camera. Older iPhones offer the ability to change things like exposure, but with a dedicated button you’re able to control these important aspects of your photograph significantly faster, which allows for more creative picture making in fast-moving situations.

Improved Camera Features on the iPhone Pros

Both the iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max come with a new 48-megapixel (mp) ultra-wide camera in addition to a 48-megapixel standard 24-millimeter camera. This increased resolution for the ultra-wide camera means that when you want to take sweeping landscape shots you’re going to get significantly more detail and resolution. As we pointed out last year in our review of the iPhone 15’s 48mp camera, all that extra detail and resolution is particularly nice when you want to make a print to hang on your wall, or if you want to adjust the color and tone in Adobe Lightroom and not totally ruin your photo.

Last year only the iPhone 15 Pro Max came with a 5x telephoto lens, but both the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max have that higher-powered zoom that allows you to get close to a subject without losing photo quality.

We love to shoot in RAW, but shooting in this uncompressed photo format takes a lot of processing power and caused some earlier iPhones to have a slight shutter lag. Now, thanks to a quad-pixel sensor in the 16 Pro and Pro Max that can read data twice as fast, there’s zero delay between when you press the button and when you take the photo, which is immensely helpful when photographing action.

High-Res Slo-Mo Video

In many music videos, commercials, films, or other pieces of high-end video, you’ll notice that slow-motion video is often used to add drama and intrigue by giving the viewer more of a chance to focus in on the action. To help shooters create this effect, the new 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max now offer the ability to shoot 4K video at 120 frames per second (fps), which is a high-enough frame rate to slow down a mountain biker or skier slashing a turn, or a runner sprinting by on the track. Once the video is shot you can adjust the playback to full-speed, half-speed option, quarter-speed, or one-fifth-speed, which corresponds to 24 fps.

Sleep Apnea and Hearing-Loss Monitoring

Health monitoring has long been a part of Apple devices and for this go-round they introduced two smart and important advances. First, using the accelerometer the new Apple Watch Series 10 (along with the Series 9 and the Ultra 2) can now monitor small movements at the wrist that are associated with interruptions in normal respiratory patterns, something they call breathing disturbances. A new algorithm then analyzes the breathing disturbance data so that the Apple Watch can notify its user if the data indicates consistent signs of sleep apnea. Apple says that this feature was only launched after being validated in a clinical trial that was “unprecedented in size for sleep apnea technology.”

The sleep apnea information that the watch provides is not meant to be a diagnosis, but instead helps a user identify the problem and consult with a physician. According to Apple, more than 1 billion people worldwide suffer from sleep apnea, but most don’t get a diagnosis. If left untreated, sleep apnea can create an increased risk of hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, and cardiac issues.

To address hearing loss, which affects 1.5 billion people around the world according to the World Health Organization, Apple, via a software update launching this fall, is going to be able to offer a scientifically validated hearing test via their AirPods Pro 2 headphones. That test will result in a personalized hearing profile that will turn the AirPods Pro into a clinical-grade hearing aid. Apple says that this feature was also validated via a clinical trial.

The Best of the Rest

Two other updates of note are the large screen on the Apple Watch Series 10, and the launch of the AirPods 4 that come with active noise cancelation. The watch screen is important because it’s actually the largest screen of any Apple watch, including the Ultra 2, and it provides even more real estate to see important information. For AirPods, we love that Apple bought incredible noise cancelation to their more affordable headphones so that you can spend less but still get a feature that allows you to hone in while traveling and working.