Apple Announces $99 iPhone 5C, iPhone 5S with 64-bit A7 Processor

From DailyTech: It's that time of year again when consumers go crazy for new iPhones and analysts and tech pundits bicker over whether the newest release is "innovative enough” in the face of strengthened competition.

As has been the case in previous years, much of today's announcement has already been leaked. Over the past few months, we've seen images of both the new iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C. And in June, we got our first glimpse of the operating system that the new hardware will power: iOS 7. IOS 7 marks the first drastic departure from the original “iPhone Operating System” software that we saw with the introduction of the original iPhone way back in 2007, and it will available to the public on September 18.

Today, all the pieces are coming together and we can finally see Apple’s new iPhones in the flesh. The first new model is the iPhone 5C, which is a polycarbonate-bodied smartphone available in green, white, blue, pink, and yellow (now the rainbow of colors in the iOS 7 UI make sense). According to Jony Ive, the "iPhone 5C is beautifully, unapologetically plastic."

The colorful plastic backing is a one-piece design that wraps all the way around the device and up to the glass touchscreen. It also has a reinforced steel frame to give a further feeling of solidity. When it comes to hardware, this is basically last year's iPhone 5, which means an A6 processor, 4” Retina display, and an 8MP rear-facing camera. However, it does add support for 100Mbps LTE.

But the star of the show, of course, is the new iPhone 5S. While not nearly as colorful as its cheaper iPhone 5C sibling, the iPhone 5S will be available in Silver, Gold, and Space Grey. The phone features a new A7 processor, which is the first 64-bit chip used in a smartphone. The new chip has 2 general purpose registers, 2 coating point registers, and over a billion transistors (102mm2 die size). It also supports OpenGL ES 3.0. Naturally, iOS 7 was rebuilt to support the 64-bit architecture of the A7.

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