Apple
Inc. announced on Wednesday the upgrade of its flagship product, the
smartphone known as iPhone, with new features such as water resistance,
double-lens camera, stereo speakers and wireless headphone.
Along
with the new iPhone 7, which will be available for pre-order on Friday
and for delivery starting a week later, Apple said at an event in San
Francisco, northern California, that it had upgraded its smart watch,
known as Apple Watch, to be water resistant.
However,
away from its description in the initial offering of the watch nearly
two years ago, when Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook called the product
"a collection," Apple renamed the previous version "Series 1" and the
new wearable "Series 2", which includes global positioning system (GPS)
function.
Apple
Watch, once expected to catch up with the popularity enjoyed by iPhone,
has extended its working with luxury brand Hermes and sports brand Nike
by highlighting features of the two brand names.
About
the iPhone, the new series has a new A10 central processing unit (CPU)
chip with 4 cores to run hardware and software operations, improved
battery life that is claimed to last two more hours on average than
iPhone 6.
Significant
changes to the hardware include the elimination of headphone jack; the
introduction of AirPod, a wireless headphone with 5 hours of battery
life on each charge; the two speakers imbedded to replay stereo sound;
and the camera with a wide-angel lens and a telephoto lens to better
suit different situations.
Compared
with previous Apple events of the kind, the technology company
headquartered in Cupertino, south of San Francisco, brought fewer
executives onto the stage, and the response seemed to be less
enthusiastic off the stage.
Cook,
like in the past five years, did speak as a host at the two-hour event
on Wednesday, but he and other Apple officials did not mention the
company's other products, which include iPad tablet and MacBook notebook
and Macintosh desktop computers.
In
a video clip shown at the beginning of the event, Cook seemed to be in
the passenger seat of a vehicle and on the way to Bill Graham Civic
Auditorium, San Francisco, where the event was held, and the driver
talked about the security of iPhone 7 and called it the best. Cook
agreed. But he did not discussed the topic once within the auditorium.
Apple
has bragged about security features of its products, especially iPhone.
Earlier this year, when it refused to work with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) to access an iPhone 5c used by one of the two gunmen
in the San Bernardino, California, terror attack on December 2, 2015,
Cook opened his speech at a similar event in late March by talking about
data security.
"We believe strongly that we have a responsibility to help you protect your data and protect your privacy," he said then.
However,
the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which runs the FBI, on the same
day scraped its request for Apple's assistance at a federal court and
said a week later it had retrieved the data from the phone in question.
In
the months thereafter, there have been reports about vulnerabilities in
iPhone's operating system iOS that could expose users to hackers.

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