Apple’s Tim Cook and other familiar company faces took to the Steve Jobs Theater stage to introduce a new crop of gadgets. Among them was the iPhone 8, the newest addition to Apple’s bread and butter product. This generation got the customary facelift and some new, significantly altered hardware.  

On the surface, this generation is housed in front and back glass, water and dust resistant body, now allowing for wireless charging, so the iPhone can take its place on the charging pad next to the iWatch and AirPods (if inside the new wireless charging case). The new handset features speakers touted as being 25% louder than that in the previous model and as having deeper bass.

The newly-improved camera will make use of a 12 megapixel sensor, optical image stabilization, and a wide-angle f/1.8 lens. The 8 Plus throws in a f/2.8 telephoto lens for real, optical zoom. Additional improvements include extensive lighting adjustment options and improved image processing for low-light scenarios and the highest quality video-capture ever in a smart phone. Users will be able to shoot 4K video at 60 frames per second and 1080p footage at 240 frames per second, twice that of the 7. Slow motion footage will be capable of being twice as slow.

The iPhone 8 will offer improved AR capabilities with an improved gyroscope and accelerometer, spatially immersive audio and augmented reality camera calibration.

Inside, there’s the new A11 bionic chip reckoned as the most powerful and smartest chip in any smartphone with a new 64-bit design and 6 processing cores, reportedly making it 70 percent faster than the 7.

Further improvements include the Apple-designed graphics processing unit, able to function 30 percent faster and with half the required power, intended to improve performance for 3D applications, games and machine learning.

Contributions by David Fitch