Are you excited for today’s Apple event? We are, and we know exactly how to help you watch it live. Apple events have become something of a tried and tested formulae: Tim Cook says hello, he shows off the beautiful Apple campus, then Apple wows you with as much futuristic technology as it possibly can in about an hour until your credit card is basically falling out of your wallet.
So, how can you survive an Apple Keynote without succumbing to the charms of the Cupertino captains of industry? Well, you can play a bit of Apple bingo. So, pour yourself a cold one and take a sip of the beverage of your choice whenever you hear an Apple executive mention the following words, or the following things happen.
1. Apple intelligence
No points will be awarded for a mention of Apple Intelligence, since it’s a given, but award yourself 1 point for every time it gets a mention, and if you get over 30, you can legitimately strike it off your Apple Event bingo card.
2. Genmoji of Tim Cook
Apple got very excited about the Genmoji feature, that uses Apple Intelligence to generate emojis that look like your friends and family, or anything you want, at its WWDC 2024 event, and we’d expect Apple to be all over it today. If we get a Tim Cook Genmoji, then consider it a win.
3. Live demo catastrophe
Apple events usually run like clockwork, but who can forget Steve Jobs getting annoyed that the WiFi wasn’t working because too many bloggers were clogging it up at the launch of the iPhone 4 in 2010? Any live demo always has the potential to go wrong, especially if it involves cutting-edge technology like AI, as it did so spectacularly for Google at the launch of the Pixel 9 range.
4. Random celebrity appearance
There was a point in the 2000s when John Mayer appearing at Apple events started to become a regular fixture, but Apple are still cool enough that most celebrities are happy to be associated with the brand, meaning we could get a drop-in from pretty much anybody – film stars, pop stars, YouTubers, etc. If Apple build it, they will come. Just please Apple, don’t let it be Bono.
5. A giant iPhone 16, 16 Pro, 16 Pro Max
Well, it’s what we’re all here for, so Apple better announce the iPhone 16, but how many versions will we see? And just how large will the iPhone 16 get? The days of phones that easily fit in your pocket seem to be gone forever. I, for one, welcome our new giant-handed overlords.
6. AirPods Max 2
Would a September Apple event be complete without some new AirPods? We don’t think so. We have some idea of what to expect from Apple today, and new USB-C connected AirPods are looking likely.
7. Vision Pro
Remember the Vision Pro? It was recently lauded as the future of computing, but now it’s starting to feel like it’s been kicked to the kerb by the new Apple Intelligence-powered Siri on your iPhone or Mac. The massive battery you had to lug around with you didn’t help, but we’d be surprised if Apple didn’t try to remind everybody about Vision Pro at least once during the event.
8. Apple Watch Ultra 3
Apple released a new Apple Watch Ultra 2 a year ago, and it basically looked exactly like the last one, so unless Apple has something radically new to offer we can’t see why it would do another minimal upgrade for an Apple Watch Ultra 3, but you never know, stranger things have happened.
9. Siri getting ChatGPT
With Siri getting the full AI treatment in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia, we can expect to see an Apple exec having a conversation with the new iPhone 16 today and delving into the possibilities that ChatGPT offers as a built-in Siri companion. How will the two AIs get along? Let’s hope the iPhone 16 is big enough for both of them.
10. One more thing
The tradition of a “One more thing” section of an Apple event was started by Steve Jobs, and while we don’t always get one from Tim Cook, we sometimes do. Get ready to cheer if you hear those three magic words because it usually means something good is on the way…
