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Yesterday, Apple unveiled the iPhone 15 in all of its variants: regular, Plus, Pro, and Pro Max.
I think we might be beyond the whole ‘tick/tock’ update cycle for the iPhone. As I’ve noted on multiple occasions, Apple is firmly in the mould of iterating the iPhone rather than shoving it into the stratosphere.
This is why, today, I’m not writing about a huge leap forward in design, performance, or display technology. Nope, instead, I’m going to reveal what I think is the coolest update to Apple’s smartphone – and it’s one you might have missed.
There is, however, a big question mark over its freshness which paints a much bigger story about Apple’s premier product.
Let me explain.
Thanks, Final Cut Pro!
My studio sits on a busy road.
“Oh don’t worry about that,” said the estate agent when I viewed the empty space back in 2021. “People rarely use that road during the day.”
As it turns out, the road directly outside my studio is one of the main cut-throughs for anyone who wants to avoid town centre traffic.
Which is everyone. Always. Every single day.
The studio itself is also, in fact, just an office. It’s not purpose-built for recording audio and video, and, as such, delivers more audio reflections than your bathroom during a top-of-your-lungs Freddie Mercury bath time impersonation.
Last year, I was on the verge of pulling the trigger on a significant sound-deadening exercise in that room. It wouldn’t be cheap, it was going to take an age to install, and it would be a pain to remove when I eventually moved out. I was not looking forward to it, at all.
Then, Apple dropped a fortuitous new update for Final Cut Pro. Among the usual bug fixes and minor tweaks lay a new check box and corresponding slider. Known as ‘Voice Isolation’, this new feature used machine learning to remove background noise from vocal tracks, leaving the vocal itself intact.
It worked like magic. With one tick of that box and a slight tweak of the slider, the road noise disappeared, and the reflections vanished. It was one of those rare magical moments to which only Apple can occasionally treat us. It also meant that I could abandon my expensive sound-deadening investment.
What does this have to do with the iPhone? Well, it appears that Apple has grabbed that checkbox from Final Cut Pro and thrown it into iOS, which essentially means the iPhone 15 processes the same voice-isolating machine learning magic in real-time in the way your Mac does with Final Cut Pro.
That’s deeply impressive and genuinely useful and it was the main thing that grabbed my attention during yesterday’s event.
But – and as immediately noted by a few viewers during my live stream reaction to the event yesterday – there’s a problem.
Voice Isolation isn’t new… is it?
As it turns out, Voice Isolation isn’t new. It actually arrived with iOS 15 in 2021. It was just never publicised much by Apple, which is why it slipped by largely unnoticed.
So why tease it as a new feature with iPhone 15?
Before you tell me – again – that this is old news, let me quote from the event itself.
“iPhone 15 uses a more advanced machine learning model that automatically prioritises your voice,” they said, yesterday, before playing out a scene where a shopper at a busy market uses Voice Isolation to completely cut out the background sounds of the bustling area.
It was touted as a new feature, albeit with selective, smart language. Reading between the lines, it sounds as though the iPhone 15 simply uses the power of the A16 Bionic chip to make Voice Isolation better and worth shouting about.
There’s another problem with that, though; the A16 Bionic is last year’s iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max chip, which means that, if my assumptions are correct, Voice Isolation was just as ‘new’ and improved last year, too.
I’m trying here, guys – I really am.
Thoughts on the iPhone 15 launch
There’s a point to all of this waffle about road noise, old-new features, Freddie Mercury, and market stalls.
This isn’t a big year for the iPhone. Mercifully, prices remain unchanged (mostly) across the board, and we do have a nice set of new focal lengths on the Pro and Pro Max series. The new A17 Pro chip also features Apple’s biggest GPU overhaul to date, enabling impressive gaming capabilities.
And, no, it’s impossible not to immediately want a titanium iPhone more than you want to retain the use of your dominant arm.
But this is not a big year for the iPhone, folks. It was never going to be.
The presence of the Voice Isolation feature during the presentation – along with Apple’s admirable yet slightly over-egged promotion of its carbon-neutral efforts – reveals that there simply wasn’t enough to shout about.
I’m ok with this. It makes the iPhone events of today far less exciting than those of old, but this is what happens when a product reaches peak innovation – there’s not much more they can do.
Apple is clearly banking on its sustainability project making most of the headlines this week. The Apple Watch Series 9 is its first ever carbon-neutral product, and by 2030, all Apple products will have a net zero climate impact.
That’s important. Impressive. It’ll force others to follow Apple’s path and make just as big a noise about it.
It also means that, for now, we’re going to have to dig really deep to find new (or, in this case, questionably new) features that impress us.
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