Category: Technology

Tucked away in Apple’s iPhone 17 press releases was a bonus for off-grid owners of older models. The company gave iPhone 14 and 15 owners free access to satellite features for another year. This is Apple’s third extension since Emergency SOS via satellite launched with the iPhone 14.

“The free trial will be extended for iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 users who have activated their device in a country that supports Apple’s satellite features prior to 12AM PT on September 9, 2025,” the company’s copy reads. An Apple support page lists Armenia, Belarus, China mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia as unsupported countries.

Apple’s off-grid feature set began in 2022 with Emergency SOS via satellite. In iOS 18, it expanded to include Messages via satellite, Find My access and roadside assistance. The features work through a partnership with Globalstar.

As for why Apple keeps extending the free access, a Redditor floated a logical-sounding theory after last year’s announcement. “I can’t see Apple ever charging for [Emergency SOS via satellite],” u/rotates-potatoes posted. “The positive PR of ‘saved by Apple’ is too good, and the negative PR of ‘died because they didn’t pay $3’ is too bad.” (It’s worth noting that the pricing was speculative. Apple hasn’t said how much it plans to charge.)

You can demo the features on your iPhone right now. To test Emergency SOS, head to Settings > Emergency SOS, and scroll down to “Try Demo” (at the bottom). For the texting feature, go to Settings > Apps > Messages, and scroll down to “Satellite Connection Demo.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-gives-iphone-14-and-15-owners-an-extra-free-year-of-satellite-connectivity-202434416.html?src=rss 

Surprising absolutely no one, Apple has unveiled the new iPhone 17 series, including the iPhone Air, which CEO Tim Cook said freed the company up to make the Pro handsets the most Pro ever. Here at Apple Park, I was able to take a high speed hands-on demo of the iPhone 17 Pro, and made a beeline for the new Cosmic Orange model. I’m already very taken with the way it looks and feels, and don’t even mind the new camera plateau, but maybe that’s just because I’m a sucker for change.

This isn’t a shiny new thing, to be clear. Far from it. The iPhone 17 Pro that I played with was the orange version and it has a sort of matte finish and a vague “soft touch” feel compared to the iPhone 16 Pro I’ve been using for about a year. In spite of the new unibody design, I found the camera control button on the right still reasonably easy to press, although I think I’m more used to the one on the iPhone 16 Pro and find it a bit easier to click at the moment. 

More importantly, and this is something I’ll have to spend more than an hour with an iPhone 17 Pro to verify, the redesign should help with battery life. The camera plateau now houses many components, freeing up space in the rest of the iPhone’s body for the battery. That, together with the A19 Pro processor’s improved power efficiency, is supposed to make the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max last longer than before.

Only the lighter orange rounded rectangle part on the back of the iPhone 17 Pro is covered with Ceramic Shield, by the way. The rest of the more metallic orange bits are the aluminum unibody housing. That means the camera plateau is also uncovered. It contains the three 48-megapixel Fusion cameras that Apple described during the keynote, and I can verify that I saw camera zoom options that went up to 8x in the viewfinder.

I also had a chance to quickly check out the new Centerstage selfie camera, and I have to say it now makes sense why Apple had to redesign the camera app with iOS 26. To enable new features like the auto-rotating aspect ratio or the dual-camera video capture, you’ll have to dive deeper into menus. I didn’t immediately know where to find the switches for these but I’m sure I’ll learn over time. For now, a helpful Apple representative standing next to the phone showed me where everything was.

I didn’t spend much time playing with the 4x telephoto zoom or the 8x “optical quality” options, so we’ll have to wait till we can review them to see if the claims Apple makes hold up. 

Though I’m quite taken by the new look and color of the iPhone 17 Pros, I have to admit I’m a little envious of my colleague Sam Rutherford, who got to spend some hands on time with the new iPhone Air. While the colors aren’t as appealing in that line, the extreme thinness is certainly very seductive. Based on my limited experience, the iPhone Air has slightly more rounded edges compared to Samsung’s super thin Galaxy S25 Edge, but you should definitely check out Sam’s impressions for more details. 

This story is developing, please refresh for updates.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/iphone-17-pro-hands-on-the-unibody-and-camera-plateau-feel-more-significant-in-person-185553855.html?src=rss 

Apple might not admit it (at least not yet), but the iPhone Air is more than just a slimmed-down version of the company’s latest handset or a more sophisticated take on its usual Plus model. It’s a super sleek preview of its upcoming foldable.

Now this might seem like a stretch and there’s something to be said about the difference between a traditional OLED display and one that’s meant to be bent. However, the arrival of a foldable iPhone has become one of the tech world’s worst-kept secrets. Still not convinced? Well, consider this. If you were in charge at Apple and were faced with the task of figuring out how to engineer and design the company’s first phone with a flexible display, how would you do it? Would you try to re-invent the wheel? No, you’d check out your competitors to see if there was a formula that you could re-purpose for your needs. Enter Samsung, which is not only one of Apple’s biggest rivals but also a foldable phone maker that’s already seven generations deep.

Furthermore, if we look back to this spring when Samsung released the Galaxy S25 Edge, you might already be noticing some similarities. Just like the iPhone Air, the S25 Edge is a thinner and more elegant take on Samsung’s middle-child flagship phone: the S25+. It has a lot of the same shortcomings like a smaller battery and fewer cameras than you’d otherwise expect on a premium device that costs around $1,000.

But the biggest clue that Apple might be taking a page out of Samsung’s playbook is the iPhone Air’s thinness. The idea of simply making a slimmer iPhone with worse specs without lowering its price doesn’t really make sense in 2025. Unless you’re doing so in preparation for a future product. So if we consider the S25 Edge again (which measures just 5.88mm thick) and then compare that to the Galaxy Z Fold 7 (which came out just a couple months later and measures 4.2mm thick when unfolded), suddenly an unmistakable pattern begins to form. The iPhone 17 Air is one half of Apple’s upcoming foldable and if the rumors are correct, next year Apple is essentially going to smash two of them together while adding a hinge and a flexible screen. Voila, there’s your iPhone Fold (or whatever Apple ends up calling it).

When viewed side-by-side next to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7, it’s not hard to see how the iPhone Air’s design might translate into a foldable iPhone.

OK, enough speculation, what about the iPhone Air itself? In short, this thing is deliciously thin at just 5.6mm. It really is one of those things that you can’t fully appreciate until you hold it in your hand. It has beautifully polished edges and while I don’t love the term camera plateau, there’s a lot of engineering that went into creating the subtle slope that rises up to meet the phone’s lone 48MP rear camera.

In front, the Air’s 6.5-inch looks as colorful and vibrant as you’d expect and I’m delighted to see it get ProMotion support as well. And for selfies, I really like Apple’s new Center Stage system which uses a square 18MP sensor so you can smoothly transition between typical portrait style shots to landscape photos. Plus, if you don’t want to control things manually, there’s also an automatic setting which could seriously streamline future social media photo and video shoots.

The shiny finish on the Air’s titanium frame is a rather nice, though if Apple hadn’t said so, I might have thought it was stainless steel. That said, at just 165 grams, titanium was the only way to get the Air’s weight down that low. I also want to add that the sky blue is my favorite color for the Air because depending on the light, its hue shifts from bright robin’s egg to a more understated gray. The only downside to its overall design is that the chassis is a bit of a fingerprint magnet.

However, I still have a few remaining questions that will need to be answered after further testing. The addition of a A19 Pro chip and a ProMotion screen should give the phone a big boost in power efficiency. But it remains to be seen how the Air’s battery life will hold up in real life. Apple is claiming continuous video playback of up to 27 hours, but it’s sort of telling that during the keynote, the company showed a new super sleek MagSafe battery pack, which may end up being a must-have accessory for people who care about longevity.

Additionally, from the handful of camera samples I’ve seen, the iPhone Air’s 48MP rear camera has excellent image quality, though I’m still not sure about the move to a single lens system, even if it does support up to a 4x zoom.

Regardless, with the iPhone Air filling in the gap where the standard Plus model would normally be, Apple has taken its traditionally underappreciated middle child and turned it into the most sleek and stylish handset the company has ever made. Unfortunately, all that sophistication does come with a slightly higher price of $999, up from the $899 for last year’s iPhone 16 Plus.

This story is still developing…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/iphone-air-hands-on-the-super-sleek-precursor-to-apples-upcoming-foldable-185851102.html?src=rss 

The worst kept secret of 2025 is official. At its Awe Dropping event on Tuesday, Apple announced the iPhone Air, its thinnest iPhone to date.

Just how thin is the iPhone Air? At its thinnest point, the new model is 5.6mm thick. To put those measurements in perspective, the iPhone 16 Pro is 8.25mm thick, making the Air over 2mm thinner than Apple’s 2024 flagship. Prior to today, the 6.9mm thick iPhone 6 was the company’s thinnest smartphone to date. Since then, newer iPhones have been thicker to accommodate larger batteries, Face ID, multi-camera arrays and other components. The iPhone Air reverses that trend.

At the same time, Apple claims the Air is its most durable phone yet, with a frame made from recycled titanium. Additionally, the Air is encased in the company’s Ceramic Shield material, which on the front Apple says is now 3x more scratch resistant than previous iterations. As for the display, it’s a 6.5-inch screen with ProMotion support up to 120Hz and always-on functionality.  

Internally, the iPhone Air features the company’s new A19 Pro chipset. Tim Millet, vice president of platform architecture at Apple, said the new chip, with its six-core CPU, is the fastest smartphone processor on the market. The A19 Pro also comes with an upgraded GPU and Apple’s new N1 chip. In conjunction with the Air’s C1X modem, the iPhone Air offers WiFi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread connectivity out of the box. What’s more, the new 5G-capable C1X is more power efficient. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone Air will only support eSIMs. Apple did not include a physical SIM slot to make space for other components.  

For the photos, the Air comes with a single 48-megapixel main camera that has an f/1.6 aperture lens and 2x telephoto zoom. Like the iPhone 17, the iPhone Air also comes with Apple’s new Center Stage front-facing camera, which makes use of a 18MP square sensor to allow you to take both portrait and landscape shots without reorienting how you hold the phone in your hand.    

Now, for the question on everyone’s mind: battery life. Here, Apple is claiming you’ll be able to get “all-day” usage out of the Air. Of course, all-day can mean different things to different people. Even Apple today said the Apple Watch Series 11 and Apple Watch SE 3 — which offer 24 and 18 hours of usage on a single charge, respectively — both feature “all-day” battery life. Apple will sell a new MagSafe battery alongside the iPhone Air that will extend its battery life, but at that point you might as well have bought the iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro. 

The iPhone Air will start $999, with 256GB of internal storage included with the base model. Apple will begin accepting pre-orders on 8AM ET on Friday, with general availability to follow on September 19. The Air will be available in four colors: space black, cloud white, light gold and sky blue.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/the-iphone-air-is-apples-thinnest-phone-yet-174342422.html?src=rss 

While all eyes are likely on the iPhone Air this year, Apple is introducing several new features in the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max that should keep its more demanding users satisfied. The company says it went back to the drawing board to develop a new unibody aluminum case, a revamped vapor chamber cooling system and the biggest batteries ever put into iPhones. There’s also a completely revamped rear design, featuring a new horizontal camera array and a combination of glass and Apple’s Ceramic Shield along the bottom half. The latter update should increase overall durability, while also allowing for MagSafe wireless charging.

While all of Apple’s new iPhones are getting massive camera upgrades this year, the Pro rightfully remains the most capable with a new 48 megapixel telephoto lens. That joins 48MP wide and ultrawide sensors, as well as the new 18MP Center Stage front-facing camera. The telephoto camera can now shoot up to 8x “optical quality” zoom at 12MP and 4x at its full 48MP. As usual, Apple shot its iPhone announcement event with its new Pro phone, and it looked on-par with a true professional camera.

Under the hood is Apple’s new A19 Pro chip, a six-core CPU that offers “MacBook-level processing power,” according to the company. Strangely enough, the A19 Pro is also in the iPhone Air, but the iPhone 17 Pro’s vapor chamber cooling should allow for better sustained performance. (You can’t really push heat out quickly from a super-thin case, after all.)

Developing…

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/the-iphone-17-pro-has-an-aluminum-case-and-vapor-chamber-cooling-180141734.html?src=rss