1. There’s two of them! The screens are bigger than the older iPhones, but their bodies are thinner.
2. The smaller iPhone is called the iPhone 6. It has a 4.7-inch screen, which makes it smaller than flagship phones from Samsung, Nokia, and HTC.
3. The larger one’s is called the iPhone 6 Plus. Its screen is 5.5 inches, positively phablet-sized. Samsung’s Galaxy Note lineup can still claim to have a bigger phone than Apple. While Tim Cook has walked back on Steve Jobs’s insistence that smaller phones are better phones, he hasn’t dishonored his predecessor’s memory by adding a stylus.
4. The iPhone 6 runs for $200 for 16 GB, $300 for 64 GB, and $400 for 128 GB. The iPhone 6 Plus comes with a $100 price premium. The phones are on sale on September 19, with pre-orders starting on the 12th.
5. Both phones run Apple’s new operating system, iOS 8, which will be available for download for existing phone users on September 17th. It will support phones as old as the iPhone 4S, and iPads as old as the iPad 2.
7. Apple has finally added mobile payments, with a product is called Apple Pay. The new phones have an NFC radio antenna and secure chips that store payment information. Security is provided through the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, and credit cards are stored in Passbook, Apple’s coupon app. While the payments work at any of the 220,000 merchants that have NFC readers in place, Apple worked with a handful of merchants such as Bloomingdales, McDonalds, and Whole Foods on deeper integrations. The payment system can also be used for one-click purchases within mobile apps.
8. Here’s a bullet point for the nitty-gritty tech specs: The phones use a new 64-bit chip, the Apple A8, which Apple says has 25 percent faster processing power. The camera has 8 MP camera (same as the 5S) but tweaks features like image stabilization. The front-facing camera gets a better sensor.
9. Both phones have better battery life than the last iPhones, with the iPhone 6 Plus packing in better battery life than the 6.
