No surprise here: Topping a flurry of announcements at Apple Inc.’s closely watched annual fall press event this morning was the new iPhone 11.

There are three new members of Apple’s long-running series of smartphones, featuring “Super Retina XDR” displays of 5.8 and 6.5 inches with extra-tough glass and multiple speakers for a virtualized experience and Dolby Atmos capability. They range in price from a surprisingly reasonable $699 to $1,099. What’s more, the Pro model will have four more hours and the Pro Max five more hours of battery life.

More details on the iPhone 11 later, but the event also featured a new iPad with a more brilliant display, a larger viewing angle and a larger 10.2-inch Retina display, a new Series 5 Apple Watch, a first-ever game subscription service and new programming for the Apple TV+.

In true Apple fashion, though, the event started with a video displaying a progression of Apple’s sleek hardware and user interface designs over time. A flash of logos, an iPod interface, cameras, Apple Watch indicators and other products.

“Give people wonderful tools, and they’ll do wonderful things,” the screen reads as Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook (pictured) walked onto the stage.

“At Apple, we put the customer at the center of everything we do,” Cook continued. “With products and technologies that are designed in the service of humanity.”

First up, the Apple App Store is adding a whole new way to enjoy gaming with the Apple Arcade. To do this, Apple joined game designers to give game players a whole new experience. The Apple Arcade is the first game subscriptions service for Apple that provides gaming across a huge number of Apple platforms.

The new Apple Arcade platform will include games on subscription, recommendations and reviews. New games released every month will also have store pages with game trailers and “expert editorial content” such as game guides and sneak peeks.

Included with the service is an exclusive game for the iPad called “Shinsekai: Into the Depths” from Capcom, a platformer featuring underwater gameplay as one of the last surviving humans. As well as a game called “Frogger in Toy Town,” a revisit of the classic “Frogger” game, also exclusive to the platform. Finally, “Sayonara Wild Hearts,” introduces what gets called a “playable music video” in a game featuring music, racing and collection.

Apple Arcade will become available starting on September 19th in over 150 countries around the world. The launch catalog will include over 100 new games for a cost of only $4.99 a month. The launch will include a one-month free trial for new users to get an idea of what is available.

Apple TV+ will be receiving brand-new programming, produced by and exclusive to Apple. One new show, “See” will feature actor Jason Momoa. The series is about Earth after a cataclysm in which all of humanity loses their vision – but now, something is happening to the children, they can see. It is said, in the world of the blind the one-eyed man is king, no doubt an entire generation of sighted children would foment giant changes.

“See” is only one of many new Apple original movies and series that will appear on the platform at launch.

These new shows will become available on November 1st More Apple originals will be added every month and Apple TV+ will be available in over 100 countries at launch and it will also cost $4.99 per month. Every new purchase of an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV will come with a free one-year subscription.

Next up is the new seventh-generation iPad, which will be a big upgrade with a large number of new features that will take advantage of iPadOS – an operating system built on the iOS framework but designed to take advantage of the form factor and technology built into iPads.

This new generation of iPad will feature a more brilliant display, a larger viewing angle and a larger 10.2-inch Retina display. Inside will be an A10 Fusion chip, which is claimed to be two times faster than top-selling tablets. This new iPad will also include a smart connector and a full-size smart keyboard.

With iPadOS multitasking will be much easier with a user interface designed to allow easy switching between tasks with swiping, pressing and fanning out current processes to choose between running programs. The inclusion of Safari for iPadOS will also provide a foundation to receive desktop-class browser capability that works with things like Squarespace and Google Docs.

The new iPad can be ordered today with a price tag of $329 to start — $299 for students and educators – and it will ship Sept. 30.

Not all observers thought much of the improvements, however.

“I applaud Apple in improving its game on multitasking features, but I don’t believe it will move the needle at $329 versus lower-priced Windows notebooks or Chromebooks,” Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told SiliconANGLE. “When one factors in the extra cost for a pencil and keyboard case, the low-priced iPad becomes much more expensive. Since the inception of iPad, the Windows 10 and Chromebook experience has improved considerably which makes it harder to justify the unique iPad experience.”

Next came updates to Apple Watch. Apple is continuing its focus on health and communication using the wristwatch and included a video about the effect that Watch has had on the lives of users.

Included amid the stories people talked about how their Watch warned them that their heart rate had become too high. In one case, a man fell down while wearing his Apple Watch and it automatically called 911 and EMTs arrived. In another case, a pregnant woman discovered that her heart rate was becoming tachycardic (a heartbeat that is way too fast) in a way that could threaten her pregnancy – the mere existence of the watch saved her from terrible medical repercussions.

Apple wants to make a difference with health research using data gathered from Apple Watch. Three new health research studies are being announced today starting with the Apple Hearing study that will analyze how long-term exposure to noise affects hearing health and will include the World Health Organization and the University of Michigan.

Second, the Apple Women’s Health Study with NIH and Harvard will help track fertility and women’s health tracked by the watch. Finally, the Apple Heart and Movement Study will partner with the American Heart Association, Brigham Young University and Women’s Hospital.

Users can enroll in these studies anonymously via the Apple Research App and the company will not be able to access identifying information and data delivered through the platform.

The Apple Watch Series 5 will include an “innovative new display” that is always on, meaning that the Watch face is always visible. Past versions of Apple Watch would turn off its Retina display, which will simply dim instead of turning off. It will use a low-temperature polycrystalline oxide display, permitting a power-efficient readout capable of shifting between 60 Hertz to as low as 1 Herz to conserve power and maintain a longer battery life – allowing for 18 hours between recharges.

The Series 5 will also include a built-in compass. It is possible to add the compass to the watch face, so you can see your direction at a glance, and there will be a compass app that includes not just facing direction, but altitude, longitude and latitude. Developers will also be able to access the compass in real-time meaning that apps themselves can take advantage of highly accurate directional information.

Series 5 GPS enabled models will start at just $399 and cellular-capable models will have a price tag of $499. Apple Watch Series 5 can be ordered today and will ship at the end of the month. The Series 3 Watch will remain on sale but will have a reduced price starting at $199.

“Watch is the company’s largest mid-term opportunity beyond services and offers a unique and valuable experience,” Moorhead said. “The biggest news to me was the $199 price point for Watch Series 3. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles as Watch 5, it will attract many first-time buyers,” though he doesn’t think it will prompt current customers to upgrade.

One thing was missing in Moorhead’s view. “I love strategically where Apple is going with its health and safety capabilities, but was disappointed to not see a sleep study or feature mentioned,” he said. “Lack of sleep is the new smoking and needs addressed.”

Finally the iPhone took center stage. “Customers love iPhone, and we keep striving to make it better and better,” said Cook. “Last year we launched three new iPhones. These phones together have a combined 99% customer satisfaction. This is the highest in the industry.”

The iPhone 11 will come with updates to the software that provide a greater depth of field, easier portrait mode and a “Night Mode” capability that clears up grainy photographs in low light using adaptive bracketing and intelligent mixing.

The dual-camera setup also has a 12-megapixel wide camera and an ultrawide 12-megapixel camera – capable of a 2X optical zoom. Using both at the same time, it’s possible to see what the wide camera can photograph, while also displaying the ultrawide vision to provide a better view of the potential photograph.

The “TrueDepth” camera on the front of the phone has also been updated to a 12-megapixel, which is also capable of dynamic video with a slow-motion feature. Apple presented this as: now you can take “slow-mo selfies!” or “Slofies.”

As for iPhone performance, the smartphone will include the industry-leading A13 Bionic chip. The iPhone XR uses the A12 Bionic chip as a central processing unit, which the A13 beats out as the fastest chip in a smartphone (by approximately 30 percent faster) and also works as the fastest graphical processing unit in a smartphone.

Battery life is extremely important to most customers, with iPhone 11’s advancements will give it an hour more life than the iPhone XR: giving the phone approximately 26 hours of talk time and 16 hours of internet use.

The iPhone 11 Pro comes with three cameras (one more than the two for normal iPhone 11) and will feature a 5.8-inch Super Retina XDR display – the Pro Max gets a 6.5-inch screen. This display is organic light-emitting diode with over 2 million to 1 contrast, 1200nits of brightness and over 15 percent higher energy efficiency.

The cameras include the wide-angle camera, an ultrawide angle camera and a telephoto camera with a 4x zoom range (2x in and 2x out).

Each camera has been paired to provide the best quality possible by focusing on similar color recognition, clock times and capability. This means that the iPhone 11 Pro camera system can produce high-quality video – with high definition video – in bright light and dim light, and it uses a specialized machine learning capability to take extremely high quality low light photography and video.

The phone will take advantage of the A13 Bionic by optimizing for machine learning using a neural engine and brand-new ML accelerators – these will allow the CPU to run over 1 trillion operations a second. Apple expects this to allow these new smartphones to remain on the forefront of ML uses such as natural language processing, photographic categorization and image inclusion in augmented reality apps.

The A13 does this with 8.5 billion transistors at 7nm, the largest number of transistors Apple has ever added to a smartphone chip. The chip also uses four high-efficiency cores (20 percent faster and 40 percent lower power) that are both powerful and very energy efficient as well as two high-performance cores.

As for battery life, iPhone 11 Pro should last four hours longer than the previous generation and the iPhone Pro Max adds five hours. The phone will also ship with a powerful fast charger making it even easier (and quicker) to top it off after a long day of talking, movie making and game playing.

iPhone 11 Pro price tag starts at $999 and iPhone 11 Pro Max starts at $1,099. All of these models can be pre-ordered on Friday and they will ship on Sept. 30.

Photo: Apple