Larger screens with better contrast are great, ditto the much longer battery life (iPhone 6 Plus is said to have 24 hours talk time and 12 hours of usage on 3G/LTE) along with the improved camera.
Unkind Android fans will say that the new iPhones are only now catching up with devices they've had for the last year or longer - and it's true, 1,920 by 1,080 pixel screens like the one on the iPhone Plus 6 have been around for a while now.
It's not just numbers taken in isolation though, it's how the entire package works together and the tweaks under the hood.
Apple's ahead of the Android crowd on the processor side with the custom-designed new A8 chip that's 64-bit and said to be a quarter faster than the already quick A7.
The A8 is a substantial change: while smaller than the A7, it's made with a 20 nanometre process (really tiny) which allowed Apple to pack in twice as many transistors at two billion compared to the older processor.
Not much detail has been published on the A8 but on the graphics side, it is said to be 50 per cent faster than the A7. We'll have to wait until the new iPhones become available for testing, but it does look like there'll be more than enough processing power in them to drive the high-res screens even with graphics intensive games.
What's curious here is that Apple appear not to have gone down the quad-core and high clock frequency lane. If the Macrumours published Geekbench result is correct, the A8 is still only dual-core and runs at 1.4GHz with 1GB of RAM.
As for the Watch, it's too early to say anything much apart from commenting on how it looks on the forearms of hordes of tech journalists. I don't know why some journalists are publishing "reviews" of non-working prototypes of Watch.
The most interesting thing about the Watch will be if Apple succeeds where Android makers have failed, in making wristwatches fashionable when the last few generations have largely abandoned these in favour of smartphones (hint: the battery life had better be really really good for that to happen).
Also, what's with the old 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi only on Watches, Apple? Surely that's a typo?
Apple adding mobile payments into the new iPhones and the Watch is a whole different ballgame however.
The statement by Apple's veep of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue that Apple won't snoop on your purchases and that Pay could in fact be safer than using credit cards - although it seems Cue was referring to magnetic strip ones, not chip and pin cards - shows the company has been thinking through mobile payments in detail.
With 800 million iTunes customers and TouchID fingerprint readers on devices, Apple had a strong negotiation position with Visa, MasterCard and AmEx as well as retailers.
As an aside, it'll be interesting to see if Apple decides to develop iTunes after mobile payments come onstream, into an e-tail store front like Amazon's.
I'm curious as to how this will affect EFTPOS: will they be left out of Apple mobile payments completely?
While Apple Pay probably won't hit New Zealand until late 2015 at the earliest, the local electronic payments crowd might want to consider how to respond when it does.
Finally, not everyone's impressed with the new iDevices. The Free Software Foundation or FSF works hard to keep code free and usable for everyone was appalled by the whole Apple product announcement circus.
"It is astonishing to see so much of the technology press acting as Apple's marketing arm. What's on display today is widespread complicity in hiding the most newsworthy aspect of the announcement - Apple's continuing war on individual computer user freedom, and by extension, free speech, free commerce, free association, privacy, and technological innovation," thundered John Sullivan, FSF's executive director in a statement.
Sullivan's point being that Apple's devices are locked and won't let you run whatever software you like, leading to what he calls "digital disempowerment" as well as censorship.
Not quite what you'd expect the FSF to say about a company that's to a large extent built on open source software.
