The worst kept secret in the mobile world was made official yesterday. The next phones in Apple’s line-up are the iPhone 5S and the budget-conscious iPhone 5C. Both will be running on the latest mobile operating system from Apple, iOS 7.

iPhone 5C

Let’s get our look at the 5C out of the way first because that’s the one that no one is interested in. Or, at least, you were interested until Apple announced that it would cost at least $100 on a 2-year contract.

The 5C is built from a single piece of “hard-coated polycarbonate” which Apple says means the 5C will have no joints or seams. Said plastic- sorry, polcarbonate comes in pink, blue, yellow, green and white.

The device has a lot of the same hardware as the current iPhone 5, including the same 4-inch screen with a resolution of 1136 × 640, the same Apple A6 CPU, the same 1 GB of RAM and the same 8 MP camera on the back of the phone. The front gets a new HD camera to Facetime with.

As I mentioned up top, the 16 GB variant of the 5C will set you back $99 on a two-year contract and $199 if you get the 32 GB model. That’s not an entry-level phone. Considering that I can get all BlackBerry and Windows Phone smartphones for less than $99 on a two-year contract.

iPhone 5S

While the iPhone 5S looks the same as the iPhone 5 thanks to that same 4-inch display, it’s all new under the hood thanks to a 64-bit A7 processor. According to Apple, the A7 is twice as fast as the old A6 processor that powers the 5 and 5C. There’s also a designated motion tracking chip called the M7 which handles the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass.

The 5S also gets a camera upgrade with a wider aperture and bigger pixels which apparently is a good thing. It’s still an 8 MP camera though so you’re not getting more pixels. The camera will let in 15% more light, feature a new two-colour flash and will use the now common multi-frame picture-taking method that allows you to keep the best shot of the group. The camera will now be able to record at 720p at a rate of 120 FPS to allow you to shoot slo-mo videos.

And there’s this new fingerprint scanner that everyone’s excited about. The home button at the bottom of the phone houses the scanner which Apple is promising big things out of. Most importantly, they say that the fingerprint data will be housed and encrypted on the A7 chip rather than uploaded to a server. Mind you, I’m sure the NSA will still get a hold of it.

Speaking of problems, the one that everyone seems to have is what’s going to happen to old apps now that the 5S’ CPU is 64-bit. Logically, that would mean that old apps won’t run on the new architecture. Apparently Apple has said that it’ll be a seamless transition. We won’t really know until the 5S and A7 chip are out in the wild.

Along with the 5C, the 5S will be available on September 20th with pre-orders starting on the 13th (that’s Friday). The 5S starts at $199 for the 16 GB model with $100 jumps for more memory. The 32 GB model costs $299 while the 64 GB model will set you back $399. All of those prices are on two-year contracts.

Oh, and the 5S is available in three colours. There’s black, slate and gold. Yep, there’s a gold iPhone. I assume that it runs on iDB.

iOS 7

And just like you can set your watch by the new iPhone announcements, you can also count on the annual release of a new iteration of iOS.

There’s a little bit of a visual update to keep you on your toes. The developer tools have been improved and APIs updated to improve background app updates.

On the app front, Search and Siri have both been overhauled. Siri is even getting a male voice so you won’t feel as bad about yelling at it for not doing what you wanted. The iWork suite of programs (which includes iMovie, iPhoto, Keynote, Number and Pages) will be available for free to people with iOS 7 who buy a new device.

There’s a lot to digest from this announcement and some legitimately interesting new features added onto the 5S. The question is if this will help Apple bounce back from the underwhelming iPhone 5 launch or if Apple has peaked in its popularity.