After a mountain of fluff and one announcement about Apple working with Nintendo to FINALLY bring Mario to iPhone and iPad with the release of Mario Jump, Apple confirmed the Apple Watch 2 and the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.

Here’s 9 Quick Points On The Apple Watch 2.

As expected, the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are essentially what we’ve been reading about for the past six months. They look like last year’s models, just with tweaked internals, an impressive new camera and a couple of new colour options in the form of “Jet Black” and “Black”.

Neither handset has a 3.5mm headphone jack, which really does suck despite Apple’s claims to the contrary about being “brave” for removing it. The workaround Apple has come up with is an adapter which will ship with all iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 units.

Apple says its solid a billion iPhones since 2007, which is impressive. The pace of adoption over the years has been frankly insane. But that party is drawing to an end. As we saw earlier this year, things, while still very respectable, are beginning to slow down.

Tim Cook glossed over dipping sales in 2016 but that’s to be expected. Apple’s main MO for the event was simply to show off how many brands it is now associated with – brands like Nike, Pokemon, Nintendo and, err… James Cordon.

Before we get into the new iPhones, we might as well get the price and release date out of the way first. Both the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will be available to buy from September 16. Prices start at $649 and $749, respectively, in the US.

Here's a breakdown for each iPhone 7 model:

32GB - $649 (£599, AU$1,079)
128GB - $749 (£699, AU$1,229)
256GB - $849 (£799, AU$1,379)

32GB – $749 (£619, AU$1,129)
128GB – $849, (£699, AU$1,379)
256GB – $949 (£789, AU$1,529)
Pre-orders will begin September 9 and shipping starts on September 16.

If you’re looking at picking up yourself an iPhone 7, you might want to check out Amazon’s MASSIVE iPhone 7 products hub which includes everything from headphones to protective covers and iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus cases. 

For the design, well…the rumours were true.

The new iPhones are different, sure, different enough that you can distinguish them very quickly and easily at a glance compared to their predecessors.

The most notable thing is that the antenna bands dividing the bodywork have been moved, they’re now stealthed a bit into the upper and lower edges. While the handsets still come in colour variants we’re familiar with, including gold, rose gold, and silver; space grey is now gone in favour of what Apple simply called "black", and there’s a new gloss black variant as well called "Jet Black".

On the font of the phones the old clicky Home key is now replaced with a sleeker looking capacitive alternative, which still performs Touch ID functionality. The new capacitive key is also now a multifunctional one capable of operating Home, multitasking, Siri, Touch ID, Apple Pay and more, complete with a Taptic feedback engine for actions, messages, notification, ringtones and more - it is linked into a Taptic Engine API allowing developers to use the feature.

Less from an aesthetic perspective and more from a functional one, the new iPhones do indeed dispose of the 3.5mm headphone jack in favour of using the Lightning port for headphones (complete with a bundled-in 3.5mm adaptor), as well as introducing, for the first time ever on an iPhone, IP67 water and dust proof certification. Yes that’s right, this is the first iPhone you can drop in the toilet and not enter a wild panic...well...assuming you dropped it in water that is!

The camera hardware is a key change just as with previous iPhone launches. The iPhone 7 has a 12MP primary sensor just like its predecessor, however, there are significant tweaks once again, most notably the inclusion of an OIS module.

Apple has also updated the setup with a wider f/1.8 aperture, a new 6-element lens, and the sensor tech has been modified to be 60% faster and 30% more energy efficient. The camera offers 3x longer exposure and allows in 50% mre light, and there's a new quad-LED TrueTone flash, featuring a flicker sensor for better quality in artifical light, and there's a new Apple Image Signal Processor (ISP).

True to the rumours, however, the major camera capabilities come via the iPhone 7 Plus dual-camera setup; a pair of 12MP sensors with an OIS module. One sensor is for telephoto while the other is a wide-angle. The front-facing secondary camera on both phones is a 7MP affair with digital autostabilisation.

"With two cameras and two lenses we can create a zoom feature in the iPhone," said Phil Schiller. Indeed the phone supports a 2x optical zoom and up to 10x software zoom. It also replicated Bokeh depth-of-field effects via a depth map system - although this will not ship onboard, it will come via a software patch.

"We are not saying to throw out your DSLRs, or that this will replace DSLRs... what we are saying is that this is the best camera ever on an iPhone. For many customers, this will be the best camera they ever own," said Schiller

The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus use the same resolution displays as their predecessors, however, Apple has added in wide-colour support for better colour production.

Bizarrely, the company is still standing behind the claims that it makes the best displays in the business. Odd when you consider that Samsung’s AMOLED panels have been shown to be vastly superior in almost every regard, providing you have a phone that doesn’t explode.

I was hoping for an update here, but I guess we’ll have to wait until 2017 when Apple switches to AMOLED panels for any advancement in resolution.

A10 Fusion CPU – 64bit four-core processor; two cores are high-performance and are 40% faster than A9. The other cores run at one-fifth of the power of the high-performance cores which in theory saves on battery.

The A10 CPU is 120% faster than the chipset inside the first iPhone. The GPU inside the A10 is 240% faster than the world’s first iPhone and also twice as powerful as the GPU present inside the iPhone 6s.

Apple says this kind of GPU will introduce a new benchmark for gaming. Apple discussed a new F1 2016 game that is coming to iPhone and claims it will feature “console-like” gameplay.

"The basic theory behind a multi-type/multi-cluster design is to further min/max power efficiency by developing a set of high performance, high power cores for tasks that need maximum performance, and a second set of low performance, low power cores for simpler tasks that need only a small amount of computational time. By not sending the latter tasks to the high power cores, in theory you save on power consumption. This is the basis behind ARM’s big.LITTLE design philosophy," notes Anantech.

It added: "The trade-off with this philosophy is that you now have to manage migrating tasks between the CPU clusters, which itself has a power cost. So while it’s a more efficient route in theory, in practice it can be difficult to implement, especially in a performant manner. Apple has previously stuck with their single cluster design, using the same CPU cores to run the gamut from low power to high performance, and while we may never get a full answer, I am very curious what happened behind the scenes at Apple and what they found to get to this point."

Apple says the iPhone 7 will give you around 2+ hours of battery life a day. With the iPhone 7 Plus model, you’re looking at an hour of additional up-time.

So yes, the 3.5mm headphone jack is gone in favour of the Lightning port and a new set of Lightning-based headphones bundled-in with the phones. What's also bundled-in is an adaptor dongle allowing users to keep using their 3.5mm headphones with the new devices. However, the iPhone 7 series non-headphone audio setup has also been upgraded; it's the first set of iPhone devices with stereo speakers!

On top of this, Apple has also developed a set of wireless "Airpods" allowing you to free yourself from wired headphones altogether. The Airpods feature a 5 hour battery life and are button-less, their setup is also synchronised across iCloud between devices. They use a dedicated W1 chip for audio and wireless, while built-in infrared sensors detect when you place them in your ears. Motion accelerometers detect touch to activate Siri and Voice accelerometer enhance your voice for calls and commands. They will ship in October and cost $159.