The IT Nerd

Today was the keynote at the Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference, and as usual there was a lot announced. So let’s get right to it.

• Tim Cook showed off a new Apple TV+ show called “For All Mankind” to highlight the fact that Apple TV+ is coming later this year. It’s a show that will re imagine the space race and it looks great.
• tvOS was next up. Multi-user support for music and movies is now part of the OS along with a control center that looks like something like iOS. XBOX 1S and Playstation Dual Shock 4 controller support is coming as well. There’s new undersea screensavers shot in 4K HDR. Time synced lyrics are making an appearance. .
• watchOS 6 was next. New watchfaces are inbound with more complications for many of the watch faces. But a new feature is taptic chimes which will allow you play a sound on the hour. There’s a new voice memo app, a calculator app which includes tip calculation, and an audiobook app. Apps that are completely independent are coming with API’s for streaming audio and extended API motion data. An app store for Apple Watch is coming and you can access and purchase apps from the watch. When it comes to health and fitness, Apple is adding trending for the activity rings and a few more metrics. There’s a noise app that will monitor noise and it will warn you if sound in your environment can damage your hearing. Finally, for the women out there, there’s now cycle tracking and the information will be replicated to the health app on iOS which has been redesigned.
• For those who like new Apple Watch bands, Apple has introduced new bands today including a new Pride band.
• Now over to iOS 13. Apple took a cheap shot at Google as Apple claims to have a 85% adoption rate to Google’s 10% adoption rate when it comes to the latest version. Trolling aside, they claim faster app launches, smaller downloads, smaller updates, and faster Face ID unlocks. Dark Mode is making an appearance as all the cool kids have a Dark Mode. There’s also a swipe style keyboard. Improved sharing functionality with intelligence. Time synced lyrics are making an appearance. Reminders are brand new from the ground up. Maps is being rebuilt from the ground up. The US will be done by the end of 2019 and “select markets” by the end of next year. It will have street view type functionality with some slick looking navigation. There’s going to be more security to stop tracking whether you’re in real life of online. In the case of the latter, Apple will have their own sign in system that promises no tracking. Messages is getting WhatsApp functionality in terms of faces and memoji. Speaking of memoji, there’s way more customizing memoji with new memoji stickers with support for any device with an A9 chip or later. In terms of the camera app, there’s new photo editing functionality as well as portrait lighting effects and this will all work with still and video including the ability to rotate a video. There’s also new automatic ways to organize photos and video in the Photos app. There’s also new security for cameras in HomeKit with iCloud storage. If you have AirPods, Siri can now read messages and allow you to respond hand free as long as the messaging app supports SiriKit. You can share songs via a tap if you both have AirPods. Handoff is coming to HomePod. Live radio is coming too with 100,000 radio stations. HomePod will now recognize individuals. CarPlay is getting a huge update with split screens. Calendars is now available in CarPlay, Album art is back in CarPlay. Siri Shortcuts is improved, and Siri’s voice will sound better and more natural with Neural Text To Speech. Call and text spam is being addressed to.
• There’s a new OS called iPadOS where Apple has forked off the iPad support into a separate OS. It will have a lot of the iOS functionality that I have already mentioned. But it will also have iPad specific features for multitasking and navigation. New file management is part of the package. Folder sharing and SMB file sharing is on the table along with the ability to plug in a thumb drive. You can also import from a camera directly as well. Desktop class browsing is coming to iPad complete with a download manager. Font support is coming. Editing gestures are coming as well. They are expanding Pencil support with lower latency, more developer tools and the ability to mark up anything. All of this makes me think of what this person said on Twitter:

iPadOS is totally a backdoor replacement MacOS in a few years. #wwdc19

— Kevin Costain (@cwlco) June 3, 2019

• Apple showed off the new Mac Pro which is long overdue and looks really cool as it is a bit of a throwback to the “cheese grater” Mac Pros of a few years ago. It’s fully modular and can be spec’ed with 28 cores and 1.5 TB of RAM. It comes with 8 PCI slots and two 10GB Ethernet ports. It also has multiple graphics options with a variety of AMD graphics options that promise insane speed. Nvidia fans need not apply. There’s an option called After Burner that will play back multiple 8K Prores Raw streams. It even has wheels. None of this means anything if there’s no software support. Thus app companies such as Adobe, Pixar and RED are supporting the new Mac Pro. A new version of Logic was shown off as well taking advantage of the power in the new Mac Pro by demoing an insane amount of tracks playing back. A new Final Cut was shown off running 3 8K streams at once. This will start at $5999 USD available this fall. And there will be a rack version.
• Along with the new Mac Pro was a new 32″ 6K Retina display with Extreme Dynamic Range support. Thus the Pro Display XDR name. There’s a matte option using nano texturing as well. It can do 1000 nits of brightness indefinitely without heat issues. It peaks at 1600 nits. There’s also 1 1000000:1 contrast ratio. You can hang six of them off a Thunderbolt 3 cable. The stand is engineered to be weightless and you can rotate the display. This will go for $4999 or $5999 for the matte version. This will be available this fall.
• macOS 10.15 Catalina is next. For starters, iTunes is dead. Long live AppleTV, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Music. For those who sync their iDevice with iTunes, it’s built into the OS as opposed to an app. Podcasts seems at first glance to be just like the iOS version. Ditto for the AppleTV app, but Dolby Atmos, Dolby Vision, and 4K HDR support on “recent” Macs. There’s support for using an iPad as a second display for the Mac with Apple Pencil support. You can control your Mac (or iOS device) with your voice. There’s a new app that combines Find My iPhone and Find My Friends called Find My. It will find your Apple gear even when it is asleep using nearby Apple devices. Activation Lock is coming to the Mac if you have a T2 equipped Mac. Photos is updated. Safari is updated. Reminders is redone. Screentime is coming to the Mac too. Apple talked about Project Catalyst (aka Marzipan) which allows a developer to port iPad apps to the Mac and it is available to developers today. That means a developer only has to write an app once.
• AR got a shoutout with a new RealityKit API which makes developing AR environments easily. Reality Composer can help to build an interactive AR environment. ARKit has been updated with people occlusion which allows one to do do depth, and real time motion capture. All of this was demoed with an AR version of Minecraft.
• SwiftUI was announced which allows you to use a few lines of Swift code to come up with complex user interfaces. Apple TV, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch are supported.
• All developer beta versions of all the OSes that were announced are available today. Public betas are available in July. And release versions will be available in the fall as usual.

That covers everything from the keynote. If you want a link to the actual video, I’ll post it here as soon as it is available.

UPDATE: The video of the event can be found here.

This entry was posted on June 3, 2019 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.