Apple Event Roundup: Apple Watch, New MacBook

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco US was the setting of the latest Apple Live event. Everybody was expecting Apple Watch to be deconstructed, pulled apart and generally drooled all over and yet there still remained a mystery surrounding the event. Some were predicting an update to Apple TV, others a fresh Macbook. News about the new music service from Apple was also largely expected. In case you missed anything from the yesterday, TechBeat followed the action and here are the highlights of what took place.

The show kicked off with Tim Cook announcing a new retail store in China, this was closely followed by raucous applause. Tim went on to announce they have 453 stores in 16 countries and 120 million customers visited stores last quarter.

Next he moved onto Apple TV: Cook started off talking about HBO and named a few shows, next he introduced Richard Plepler the CEO of HBO to announced a standalone HBO streaming service called HBO Now. Apple is the exclusive provider of the service. The new product is going to be charged at $14.99 per month. Plepler then proceeded to introduce a trailer for Game of Thrones. Cook came back to stage to announce a price drop of Apple TV from $99 to $69.

Cook then moved onto the iPhone. He informed us of the the most recent sales of 700 million iPhones sold globally and took great delight in announcing a 99% customer satisfaction rate for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple’s CEO went onto speak of Apple Pay’s 700,000 locations in the US and then announced every major car brand are now committed to CarPlay and he also spoke briefly of HomeKit.

Cook then went on to speak about the advances of health, with HealthKit and Medical Research. Cook invited up Jeff Williams to speak about the new initiative called ResearchKit.

Research Kit is a software framework made specifically for medical research and clinical studies. The ResearchKit app will turn iPhone and HealthKit into powerful diagnostic tools. Apple have been working with different medical research teams, such as Stanford, Penn Medicine, Weill Cornell and the Michael J Fox Foundation to further medical research into diseases such as breast cancer, Parkinson’s Disease,  diabetes and asthma. A really interesting announcement was that they are making the SDK Open Source and the first five apps are now available.