Heads up, devs: Apple has a new iPhone and Watch out this year

As part of a press event in San Francisco today, Apple announced plans to release new models of both its smartphone and its smartwatch that are slightly better than the old models.

What's most intriguing about these announcements is that they were heralded by game industry notables taking the stage -- Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto to debut Super Mario Run for iOS, Niantic's John Hanke with Pokemon Go for Apple Watch. 

The fact that Apple opened its press event with games is a good reminder that they've long generated the lion's share of revenue on Apple's App Store -- and are expected to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

That future likely also includes countless revisions of Apple's mobile hardware, and today the company debuted a new version of its Apple Watch (the "Apple Watch Series 2") and a new iPhone -- the iPhone 7.

The new version of the Watch looks just like the original model, but Apple says it has new innards that will allow it to run roughly 50 percent faster with "double" the graphics performance. It's also waterproof and reportedly brighter than the original Apple Watch, which game devs were cautiously optimistic about after it debuted last year.

Apple's new phones, the water-resistant iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, also look very much like their predecessors, with one notable difference -- no headphone jacks. Instead, the new phones have an extra speaker along their top edge (where the headphone jack should be) and come with an adapter that will allow owners to jack their headphones in via the device's Lightning connector port. Apple, of course, will also ship a pair of redesigned Apple earbuds with each phone that connect via its Lightning port.

Game devs should know that the new phones are shipping later this month, sporting brighter displays with a wider color gamut than their predecessors. They're driven by a new A10 Fusion chip -- a 64-bit quad-core mobile processor that Apple claims is 40 percent faster than its predecessor, the A9. 

For further details on these products, devs should keep an eye on Apple's website.