Apple Watch

Perhaps best known for its excellent Stand for Apple Watch (reviewed here), Nomad Goods today unveiled Pod Pro — a more powerful sequel to its unique portable Pod charging dock for Apple Watch (reviewed here) — and Strap, a premium stitched leather strap similar to an Apple Watch Hermés band, but at a much more affordable price.

Pod Pro expands upon the Apple Watch-only Pod charging puck by boosting both power capacity and device compatibility. Now featuring a 6000mAh battery and an integrated Lightning cable, Pod Pro promises two full recharges of both an iPhone 6 and Apple Watch. Circular with a 98mm diameter, it winds an Apple Watch Magnetic Charging Cable underneath a space gray metal cap. It’s available for pre-order today at a discounted price of $79, going up to a regular price of $100 on October 15, and shipping October 30.

Strap uses impressively thick genuine Italian leather in only one size — 42mm — and one color, a handsome natural brown with beige contrast stitches. To match the color of your Apple Watch, you can choose from silver or PVD-treated space gray buckles, each made from stainless steel. It’s available for pre-order today at a reduced price of $119, with a full retail price of $150 starting on September 30. Strap ships on October 15. More pictures are below…

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Update: Apple has now informed developers that they can submit iOS 9, El Capitan and watchOS 2 apps to the App Store.

Three days later than the normal schedule, Apple is finally letting developers submit iOS 9 apps for review. Apple usually enables submission for apps built against the new SDK as soon as the Xcode GM is published but for unknown reasons, this milestone was delayed.

Although there hasn’t been an official announcement, developers are now successfully uploading binaries through iTunes Connect and are ‘Waiting For Review’. Apple’s review team will now be working double-speed to get the influx of submissions ready for iOS 9’s launch on Wednesday.

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Not to be outdone by iOS 9.1’s set of new emoji, watchOS 2 GM, released this past Wednesday following Apple’s press event, includes a little surprise of it’s own. Alongside a bunch of new watch face colors, dig into the animated emoji offered on the Apple Watch, and you’ll find 26 new options, ranging from faces sporting sunglasses, to sick faces, and even a few sets of clapping and fist bumping hands. Check out the gallery below to see them all in action:
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The iOS 9 GM includes a new feature for Siri to help it better recognize your voice when using the automatic ‘Hey Siri’ activation feature. On all current iPhones, you can activate Siri by saying ‘Hey Siri’ when the device is plugged in to power. On the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, the ‘Hey Siri’ activation feature works all the time, plugged in or not, thanks to new dedicated components inside the latest iPhones meaning it can be ‘always on’.

This makes the addition of voice training particularly relevant. In previous OS versions, Hey Siri would just work if you toggled a switch in Settings. With the GM, the OS now prompts you to go through a few training exercises before the feature will be enabled. Some readers have claimed that this feature is like Voice ID, so that Hey Siri function will only respond when the true owner of the phone speaks to it. Whilst this would be a nice feature, we cannot reproduce this and believe it is only meant to improve general detection accuracy.

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In a new interview posted in the Wall Street Journal, Apple’s Jony Ive and Hermes’ artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas discuss Apple’s first partnership with a luxury fashion brand to create branded Apple Watch models. To recap, on Wednesday, Apple announced Apple Watch Hermes, a collection of watches code signed with the renowned Paris designer. The watches will be available in October.

Ive says the partnership is unprecedented and began before the Apple Watch was even announced to the public, breaking traditional Apple secrecy.

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Apple Pay in the UK is slowly rounding up all the major banks and getting them onboard. Following the addition of HSBC and First Direct last month, Halifax and Lloyds customers can now use Apple Pay from today. The service is still rolling out so if your cards don’t activate immediately don’t fret. Check again in a few hours.

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Hot on the heels of Apple unveiling the highly anticipated iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, popular accessory company Pad and Quill has today announced a new case for the device. The company has revealed its newly designed Traveler case for both the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s. The Traveler case is a bumper style walled case and in classic Pad and Quill fashion, is made from full grain leather.

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Apple released a gold and rose gold Apple Watch Sport plus a new fall collection of Sport bands today, and inside the watchOS 2 software update due out next week is a variety of Sport band-matching color options. These new colors let you personalize the watch face with many more choices than the current software version. Check out each new color below:
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Apple just wrapped up its press event today where it officially unveiled the much anticipated next-generation iPhone 6s lineup, a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro and iPad mini 4, and an all-new, revamped Apple TV experience. It also gave us some updates on Apple Watch with new bands and partnerships with designers, as well as confirmation on release dates for iOS 9, OS X, and iCloud pricing updates.

Head below for handy links to everything Apple announced today:
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With iOS 9 set to release on September 16th, Apple has released the final beta build, the Golden Master, to developers. Along with this beta is an all new preview build of iOS 9.1. The exact changes in iOS 9.1 aren’t yet known, but we’ll keep this post updated with any changes we find in either build.

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Apple’s special media event today marks a full year since it first previewed Apple Watch to the world before putting it on sale earlier this year in late April. Roughly six months since actually going on sale, Apple Watch is still launching around the world so it’s too soon yet for Apple Watch 2. To keep the lineup fresh a year after first unveiling the product, Apple is growing the Apple Watch Sport collection by adding iPhone, iPad, and MacBook matching gold-colored models. Same Apple S1 chip inside and $349-$399 price as its still Apple Watch 1, but the new gold anodized aluminum option joins the silver and space gray options already available.
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The day is here: Apple is holding one of its biggest events in company history. Apple is set to unveil a pair of new iPhones (the 6s and 6s Plus) two new iPads (the iPad mini 4 and iPad Pro) a revamped Apple TV set-top-box, Apple WatchOS 2, new bands, and Apple Watch Sport casing colors. We’ll be following the entire event from start to finish, and we’ll also be using this post to issue live updates of the latest information from before the event. We’ll be publishing separate articles detailing all of Apple’s major announcements, but this post will serve as a hub with direct links to all of them. Follow along with us, below:

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9to5Mac has been reporting that Apple was planning some cosmetic updates to the Apple Watch, including new Sport bands and a gold aluminum Apple Watch Sport, for some time. A few hours ahead of Apple’s event, an image has appeared on Twitter depicting what appears to be a Product (RED) Apple Watch Sport band. To date, Apple has offered Apple Watch Sport bands in white, black, green, blue and pink.

Although Apple is supportive of the charity, the Apple Watch notably debuted without any Product (RED) affiliation. This appears to be changing today …

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As expected, the Apple Store has gone down ahead of Apple’s Hey Siri event later today at 10 AM PST. Although we don’t expect the iPhone, iPad Pro or Apple TV to be available to buy today, the site will return with information about the new products after the presentation is over. There is a chance that Apple’s updates to Apple Watch — new band colors and a new gold Sport watch — may be available immediately.

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9to5Mac has been saying for a while that Apple’s Hey Siri event today will be a product blitz of announcements, with at least three major new products set to be shown off: the new iPhone 6S, the new larger iPad Pro and a revamped Apple TV with a new remote. There’s also likely to be a new iPad mini and some updates for Apple Watch — you can read it all in our roundup.

Some people were confused about why Apple is stuffing so many announcements into one event. Having called a single event “not logical” earlier in the day, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber now agrees with our prior reports: breaking tradition, there won’t be an October event this year.

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What would it take to evolve the Apple TV from a plastic $69 puck into a covetable device worth a premium asking price? A design collaboration between designers Martin Hajek and Andrew Ambrosino provides some compelling answers, borrowing Apple Watch and iPhone 6 design cues to re-imagine the Apple TV as a two-tone, metal-clad box with a matching color touchscreen remote. The remote can be used for basic icon-based navigation of the Apple TV’s apps, or flipped over to reveal a basic game controller.

While completely different from the actual fourth-generation Apple TV expected to debut tomorrow at Apple’s special event in San Francisco, Hajek and Ambrosino’s renderings suggest an alternative reality where Apple could convince people to pay $300 for a set top box. Black and silver or white and gold versions are shown in the gallery below, each with interesting button designs…

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