Notes About the September 2025 Apple Event

Today’s Apple keynote opened with a classic quote from Steve Jobs.

Then a video played, focused on the fundamental geometric shapes that can be found in Apple’s products: circles in the HomePod, iPhone shutter button, iPhone camera, MagSafe charging ring, Digital Crown on Apple Watch; rounded squares in the charging block, Home scene button, Mac mini, keycaps, Finder icon, FaceID; to the lozenges found in the AirPods case, MagSafe port, Liquid Glass carousel control, and the Action button on Apple Watch Ultra.

Then Tim Cook repeated the notion in his opening remarks:

At Apple, design has always been fundamental to who we are and what we do. For us, design goes beyond just how something looks or feels. Design is also how it works. This philosophy guides everything we do, including the products we’re going to introduce today and the experiences they provide.

Apple announced a bunch of products today, including:

• AirPods Pro 3 with better active noise canceling, live translation, and heart rate sensing (more below)
• Apple Watch Series 11, thinner and with hypertension alerts and sleep score 
• iPhone 17 with a faster chip and better camera (as always)
• iPhone Air at 5.6 mm thin! They packed all the main components into a new full-width camera “plateau” (I guess that’s the new word for camera bump)
• iPhone 17 Pro / Pro Max with a faster chip and even better camera (as always), along with unibody construction and cool vapor cooling (like liquid cooling, but with vapor), and a beefy camera plateau

Highlights

Live Translation is Star Trek’s Universal Translator

In the Star Trek universe, humans regularly speak English with aliens and the audience hears those same aliens reply in English. Of course, it’s television and it was always explained away—that a “universal translator” is embedded in the comm badge all Starfleet crew members wear.

With AirPods Pro 3, this is becoming real! In one demo video, Apple shows a woman at a market. She’s shopping and hears a vendor speak to her in Spanish. Through her AirPods, she hears the live translation and can reply in English and have that translated back to Spanish on her iPhone. Then, in another scene, two guys are talking—English and Italian—and they’re both wearing the new AirPods and having a seamless conversation. Amazing.

Heart Rate Monitoring in AirPods

Apple is extending its fitness tracking features to AirPods, specifically the new AirPods Pro 3. These come with a new sensor that pulses invisible infrared light at 256 times per second to detect blood flow and calculate heart rate. I’m always astonished by how Apple keeps extending the capabilities of its devices to push health and fitness metrics, which—at least their thesis goes—helps with overall wellbeing. (See below.)

Full-Width Camera Bump

Or, the new camera plateau. I actually prefer the full width over just the bump. I feel like the plain camera bump on my iPhone 16 Pro makes the phone too wobbly when I put it on its back. I think a bump that spans the full width of the phone will make it more stable. This new design is on the new iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro.

To Air or Not to Air?

I’m on the iPhone Upgrade Program so I can get a new phone each year—and I have for that last few. I’m wondering if I want to get the Air this time. One thing I dislike about the iPhone Pros is their weight. The Pro is pretty heavy and I can feel it in my hand after prolonged use. At 165 grams, the Air is 17% lighter than the 16 Pro (199 grams). It might make a difference.

Overall Thoughts

Of course, in 2025, it’s a little striking that Apple didn’t mention much about AI. Apple framed AI not as a standalone product but as an invisible layer woven through AirPods, Watch, and iPhone—from Live Translation and Workout Buddy nudges to on-device models powering health insights and generative photo features. Instead of prompts and chatbots, Apple Intelligence showed up as contextual, ambient assistance designed to disappear into the flow of everyday use. And funnily enough, iOS 26 was mentioned in passing, as if Apple assumed everyone watching had seen the prior episode—er, keynote—in June.

It’s interesting that the keynote opened with that Steve Jobs quote about design. Maybe someone in Cupertino read my piece breaking down Liquid Glass where I argued:

People misinterpret this quote all the time to mean design is only how it works. That is not what Steve meant. He meant, design is both what it looks like and how it works.

(Actually, it was probably what Casey Newton wrote in Platformer about Liquid Glass.) 

If you step back and consider why Apple improves its hardware and software every year, it goes back to their implied mission: to make products that better human lives. This is exemplified by the “Dear Apple” spot they played as part of the segment on Apple Watch.

Apple’s foray into wearables—beyond ear- and headphones—with Apple Watch ten years ago was really an entry into health technology. Lives have been saved and people have gotten healthier because Apple technology enabled them. Dr. Sumbul Ahmad Desai, VP of Health mentioned their new hypertension detection feature could notify over one million people with undiagnosed hypertension in its first year. Apple developed this feature using advanced machine learning, drawing on training data from multiple studies that involved over 100,000 participants. Then they clinically validated it in a separate study of over 2,000 participants. In other words, they’ve become a real force is shaping health tech.

And what also amazes me, is that now AirPods Pro 3 will help with health and fitness tracking. (See above.)

There’s no doubt that Apple’s formal design is always top-notch. But it’s great to be reminded of their why and how these must-buy-by-Christmas devices are capable of solving real world problems and bettering our lives. (And no, I don’t think having a lighter, thinner, faster, cooler phone falls into this category. We can have both moral purpose and commercial purpose.)