Apple launches the iPhone 14 and Apple Watch Series 8

theguardian.com:

If you feel like you never look away from your phone, Apple’s newest iPhones are for you, with an always-on display letting notification addicts stay connected all day, every day.

Exclusive to the iPhone 14 Pro, the display preserves power by dropping down to an ultra-low refresh rate of just 1Hz, dimming the screen, and handing updates over to a dedicated low-power coprocessor to keep the time, widgets and notifications up to date even with the phone in sleep mode.

The new phones also feature the company’s replacement to the once-mocked “notch” that contains the front-facing cameras on all its handsets since the iPhone X. Now, a pill-shaped “Dynamic Island” will contain the cameras, while the proximity sensor that turns off inputs when held to your ear has been moved under the screen. The black blob will also be incorporated into a new notification style, allowing background apps such as ride-hailing services or voice recorders to keep some info onscreen.

But those updates won’t be coming to the company’s baseline iPhone 14. That phone, which gets a larger sibling in the rebirth of the iPhone Plus, is a much milder update to the previous year’s devices, looking largely the same, albeit with new colours, and even running on the A15 Bionic chip that was first introduced with the iPhone 13. The 14 Pro, by contrast, features Apple’s latest silicon, the A16 Bionic chip.

All models of the iPhone 14 will have one major new hardware feature, however: emergency notifications via SOS. A specially constructed directional antenna allows users (initially only in the US and Canada) to send alerts to emergency services when they’re in difficulty, guiding them to point the phone in the exact direction of the satellite. To overcome the