Six months after Apple held a high-profile naming ceremony for its streaming TV service, the tech company has revealed the launch date for Apple TV+. Foregoing the crowd-pumping presence of TV+’s all-star lineup (give or take a trailer for the Jason Momoa-Alfre Woodard vehicle See), Apple chief Tim Cook announced that the service will launch November 1, at a price of $4.99 a month. That’s 11 days sooner and $2 less than similarly glyph-festooned competitor Disney+, albeit with a smaller library—but a much greater degree of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carell waging the morning-show wars.
Having revealed how much it’ll cost to watch its first slate of original series, Apple then revealed how much it’ll cost to follow in the footsteps of Steven Soderbergh and Sean Baker (the latter of whom was onstage in Cupertino) and shoot a movie on your iPhone. Starting at $699, the iPhone 11 has two 12 megapixel rear cameras—one equipped for “ultra wide” shots—and an improved front camera that has the ability to take slow-motion selfies, or “slofies” as they’ll be called in advertising, tweets mocking that advertising, and no actual conversations. The $999 iPhone 11 Pro and $1,099 iPhone Pro Max adds an additional rear camera to the mix, and if the footage screened during the keynote is any indication, it’ll shoot video that’s both impossibly crisp and looks like someone forgot to turn the motion smoothing off on reality. Another feature of the new phones: A complimentary year of Apple TV+, which also comes with the purchase of any iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, iPod touch, or Mac beginning today.