By Jason Snell

September 12, 2025 3:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: iPhone enthusiasm plateaus

We made it, folks. It’s the end of iPhone announcement week. On Tuesday, we climbed to the top of the highest mountain range, only to find a large, flat area waiting for us.

Living in an iPhone world

There’s too much to cover in a week like this, but my favorite story probably came out of the video Lance Ulanoff of TechRadar and Mark Spoonauer of Tom’s Guide made with Greg Joswiak and John Ternus of Apple, in which Joswiak dared them to bend the iPhone Air. (You won’t be surprised to hear that it didn’t work, but it wasn’t for some lack of trying by two of my fellow middle-aged tech editors.)

Some other videos of note, if you’re preparing to go on a YouTube jag:

• Dallas Taylor, who has pretty good ears for this sort of thing, had a really nice first take on AirPods Pro 3. If you can drown out the sound of the hands-on area at an Apple event, you’re onto something.

• Tyler Stalman was allowed to shoot some sample photos and offload them from iPhone sample units for his first camera impressions video. It’s nice to see Apple allowing this, because there was a time when offloading photo samples from devices in a hands-on area would get you a finger wag and a polite threat to call the principal (Phil Schiller) for discipline.

• Stephen Robles gets a chef’s kiss for his priceless video about the return of the Apple-branded MagSafe battery. Yes, Apple made a new MagSafe battery for iPhones! No, it doesn’t work with any iPhones except the iPhone Air! Stephen’s out there doing the hard work, like charging an iPhone with the battery sideways (cruciform?) or sticking an iPhone 16e into a MagSafe case and charging it that way.

• Marques Brownlee does his usual good job at providing an overview of the announcements, and I’m constantly impressed at these videos being shot in hotel rooms after a very long day of press shenanigans. Speaking of hotel rooms, YouTuber Quinn Nelson is on vacation in Spain and somehow shot an entire video from the resort? As someone who wrote his review of the first iPhone in a tent up in the mountains, I salute you. Bueno.

I hope it’s recyclable

When Apple first introduced satellite communication in iPhones back in 2022, the whole thing was carefully billed as being for a limited time. The question was always: what happens after that time is up? Do the satellites explode? Does your iPhone refuse to save you when you’re strayed out of cell coverage? Is there an upsell, or a big, fat, per-use fee? Apple’s been delaying a decision ever since, extending the period of free coverage by one year, year after year.

Well, this week we finally found out the answer!

Just kidding, we didn’t. Apple kicked the dented can again. And with that, iPhone 14, 15, 16, and 17 users, enjoy your free satellite coverage for as long as it lasts! At least another year. But Apple might need a new can.

Regulators great and small

Say what you will about Apple, it’s well-regulated! First, the good news: after announcing its new hypertension alert feature for Apple Watch on Tuesday and claiming that regulatory approvals were forthcoming, the very next day the FDA cleared it for use in America. Looks like it’ll be turned on next week.

Now the bad: The new AirPods Live Translation feature will launch with support for several European languages, with even more on the way later in the year, but the feature itself won’t work in Europe if your Apple account is EU-based. Which means that American tourists can translate German to English in Germany, and German tourists can translate English into German in the UK, but French tourists can’t translate German or Spanish in Germany or Spain. Like the French needed another reason to hate American tourists.

And the rest

Great news for fans of the Apple TV+ show Foundation, which just finished its third season and earned a renewal for a fourth, especially since its co-creator and showrunner was demoted during the middle of the third season. It’s a widescreen space opera epic that’s common in sci-fi novels but rare to see at this scale on television. I recommend it, but be warned: the first season is a bit of a slow starter. There’s an awful lot of payoff, though. (I wonder if Demerzel could benefit from Apple’s just-announced Memory Integrity Enforcement system?)

And in the least surprising story since dog first bit man, Robby Walker, the embattled leader of the Siri swim team who set a world record for getting nowhere is leaving Apple, according to Mark Gurman. Walker had been placed in charge of Apple’s “Answers, Information and Knowledge team.” I guess he didn’t have all the answers.

That’s it for this week. Moltz will be back next week. Bring on iPhone (and iOS, and iPadOS, and macOS, and watchOS, and tvOS, and visionOS) arrival week! Geez, I’m tired already.