Apple launches its largest, most expensive iPhone

Apple has launched three iPhones – two premium phone such as the iPhone Xs and the iPhone Xs Max, and a more affordable iPhone called the iPhone Xr. The iPhone Xs starts at Rs 99,900, the larger iPhone Xs Max begins at Rs 1,09,900 and the affordable iPhone Xr starts at Rs 76,900.

The iPhone Xs and the Xs Max will start shipping on 21 September, while preorders will begin as soon as 14 September. The iPhone Xr, meanwhile, will begin shipping a little later on 26 October.

Perhaps the biggest update to the iPhones is that the phones all support Dual SIM dual Standby. The phones will use a regular SIM alongside and eSIM for delivering this functionality. Airtel, Vodafone and Jio are the only service providers supporting eSIM.

Another important update to the phones is the new A12 Bionic chip. It’s the world’s first 7 nm chip and is packing in a whopping 6.9 billion transistors and a total of 18 cores. Six cores are CPU cores, 4 are GPU cores and 8 are dedicated to the Neural Engine for AI tasks. Of the 6 CPU cores, 2 are high-performance cores that are apparently 15 per cent faster than the previous generation core. The 4 high-efficiency cores are claimed to be 50 per cent more efficient. The biggest bump comes in the GPU department, which is claimed to be up to 50 percent faster. The GPU is Apple’s in-house design.The Neural Engine (NE) is the most exciting bit of the new design, though its true power will be seen only later when more apps are out. According to Apple, the new chip is about 10 times faster than the A11 Bionic on the previous phones.

The phones will be available in 64/256/512 GB storage options. These will be available in the regular silver and space grey colours as well as in a refreshed gold variant as well.