I was at thin Apple iPhone debut but two even better upgrades will change lives

APPLE’S thinnest iPhone ever stole the show at this year’s big September event – but there are two life-changing upgrades I reckon are even more important.

I was there at the company’s posh Apple HQ this week to check out the new goods, and there’s plenty to like.

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The uber-svelte iPhone Air is impressive, yes.

It’s stick-thin at 5.6mm, extremely light, and shows off some very brainy Apple engineering.

And I’m also pretty fond of the new Cosmic Orange colour option on the iPhone 17 Pro models. It’s a welcome treat – I was only expecting fun colours on the regular iPhone 17.

But put all that iPhone goodness aside for the moment. Don’t let it overshadow what really are game-changing features.

First up is hypertension detection on the Apple Watch. Wow.

This really is a life-saver in the most literal sense.

Hypertension is chronic high blood pressure. It can lead to heart attacks, stroke, and kidney diseases. Not good.

The problem is that plenty of people are out there who have no idea they have hypertension.

It’s not a visible problem like a snotty-nosed flu, a fungal rash, or a suspicious mole.

So Apple is making clever use of the optical heart sensor in the Apple Watch.

It will examine how the vasculature of the blood vessels in your wrist respond to each beat of the heart.

And it will then use an AI model to identify the signs of hypertension.

If your blood vessels are stiff, your heart is having to pump against a higher pressure.

And the Apple Watch can spot this and alert you to the problem. Brainy.

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It won’t give you proper systolic and diastolic blood pressure readouts like an at-home monitor or one at the doctor’s office would.

But it will give you the nudge that you need to get yourself checked out.

This is obviously a massive boon to public health.

In fact, Apple says that in the first year of this new feature going live, over a million undiagnosed Apple Watch wearers will be alerted to hypertension.

That is an almost incalculable good.

And it’s worth mentioning that this is in addition to all of the other potentially life-saving Apple Watch health features that already exist.

So that includes high and low heart rate notifications, the ability to detect atrial fibrillation, sleep apnea alerts, and even car crash detection.

I wear an Apple Watch every day and honestly, it’s increasingly hard to imagine taking it off.

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There’s seemingly no end of life-preserving tricks that Apple is serving up.

And you can be sure that Apple is cooking up even more of this goodness for future Apple Watch versions too. Think of what we might have in five, 10, or 20 years.

Right, on to my game-changer feature number two.

Saving lives is admittedly hard to top, but Apple is delivering a pretty decent trick with the new Apple AirPods Pro 3.

They can now deliver real-time language translation, and I’ve already given it a go.

You simply stick the AirPods into your ears, activate the translation mode on your iPhone’s Translate app, and away you go.

So if you set it to French, you’d be able to understand everything a French person was saying to you.

Yes, really.

I had a go at this at Apple HQ.

I listened to a story from a Spanish speaker sitting right there in the room with me.

And I could understand every word she said, because I could hear English translations of her Spanish in my ears.

The AirPods deliver the translations in phrases to account for language differences.

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So, for instance, Germans will put verbs at the end of sentences – whereas we put them at the start.

That means you won’t get translations after every single word. Instead, you’ll hear the translation after each phrase or sentence, which works just fine.

I thought it was extremely impressive. I’m already excited to try it out on a future holiday.

If anything, it’s a nice excuse to book a trip. This has been a very busy month, and I’m only halfway through.

Anyway, initially the feature will only work with English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Then by the end of the year, you’ll hopefully get Italian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese too.

It’s also worth mentioning that your conversations aren’t being beamed up to the cloud for AI processing – potentially exposing them to snooping.

It’s all happening between your AirPods and iPhone.

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In fact, you don’t even need phone signal for this feature to work.

As long as you’ve downloaded the language packs, you could run off to the Swiss alps, slap on the AirPods deep in the wilderness, and perfectly understand the European hikers trudging up the mountain alongside you.

Or maybe you’re on a remote stretch of a Spanish beach and you need to ask the locals some questions.

The AirPods will sort you right out.

I’m sure you’re already conjuring up memories of times when you wished you’d had this feature.

And it’s very to imagine loads of situations in which real-time language translation would come in very handy.

Sometimes tech companies drop new features for their gadgets, and you’re dumbstruck.

You think: who actually needs this? Who is this for? They’ve clearly just dropped this to look busy, and get a bit of flash marketing around their new mobile.

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But that is not the case here. Clearly.

Apple’s hypertension tracking and real-time language translation are both very clearly wholly good features.

This isn’t some new social media perk that will actually make your life more miserable.

These are plainly beneficial to basically everyone. The features are looking out for your health and helping you connect with people that you otherwise couldn’t in a more natural way.

And anything that makes ordering a beer on holiday easier – and staving off death while doing it – is good in my books.