WWDC

Thoughts as they came during the WWDC keynote…

• 15″ M2 MacBook Air: Nice! But since I got a 13″ M2 Air not long ago, I’m not due to upgrade for, oh, a decade or so.

• M2/Max/Ultra Mac Studio: I have no need for a Mac Studio. My M1 Mini does me just fine, and I don’t think I’ve ever really stressed it. But if I had absolutely ridiculous amounts of expendable cash, I’d love to get one of these.

• Apple Silicon Mac Pro: Again, I have no need. But if I had more ridiculous amounts of expendable cash than necessary for the Mac Studio, sure, let’s toss a Mac Pro on my desk! (But starting at $7k…this seems unlikely.)

• iOS

  • iPhone
    • Customized contact posters: Looks slick. But since it’s pushed to other people’s phones, hopefully they can disable it either globally or by contact. I could easily see “pranksters” sending some…interesting images that way.

    • Live voicemail transcription: Okay, that’s nifty.

  • Facetime

    • Facetime voicemail: Also nifty. But I don’t Facetime very much, so maybe not for me.
  • Messages
    • Looks like some nice incremental upgrades. Check-in is an interesting balance between convenience and creepy.

    • Custom animated stickers will probably land somewhere between fun and annoying.

  • Autocorrect is due for updates, but a Transformer language model? Hopefully I get the Autobot release and not the Decepticon release.

  • I’ve never been able to reliably get into any sort of journaling routine (I can’t even keep this blog going without months-long gaps…), so I doubt the Journal app will change that, but for people who are into this sort of thing, yay?

  • Standby will make a nice bedside clock while traveling (I don’t keep my phone by my bed at home)…but I’ll need to upgrade to a phone with an always-on display to really take advantage of it (I’m still on an iPhone 11, though, so it’s getting close to time to upgrade…maybe this fall?).

  • I get Siri triggering when I don’t need her often enough with “Hey Siri”, won’t shortening that to just “Siri” make that problem worse?

• iPadOS

  • Widgets and Lock Screen customizations are things that look like they should be really useful, and I’ve never taken the time to try to set them up and figure out how to make them work for me.

  • PDF improvements? Actually, these are looking pretty nice, particularly being able to fill out forms that have been “scanned” with the camera. And the live collaboration on PDFs in Notes.

• macOS

  • Next version name: Sonoma.

  • Widgets on the desktop, for those who aren’t driven up the wall by a cluttered desktop! (My desktop might occasionally get one or two files dropped on it temporarily as I’m actively working on them, then they get put back away. I hate a cluttered desktop.)

    • Heh. You can tell they recorded this more than a couple days ago, with the Apollo for Reddit call-out.
  • Though I’m not much of a gamer and likely won’t do much that benefits from this, it is nice to see gaming-focused improvements.

  • Oh, the presenter overlays and gesture effects are going to be giving Camo Studio and mmhmm a challenge, at least at the basic feature level. As with any Sherlocking, it’ll depend on what they can do above and beyond the basics.

  • Safari Password family sharing is good, but I agree with those who think that Apple should pull their password/keychain stuff out into a standalone app instead of having it buried in the preferences.

  • Profiles is long overdue, but will be nice to have outside of Chrome.

  • Webapps is just the macOS version of iOS’s feature that I never use, right?

• That guitar is great. Obviously.

• I like the AirPods Pro audio features and improvements, I just wish I could get used to how they fit.

• Oh, AirPlay in hotels needs to get widespread fast. I’d love to have that instead of trying to figure out if the hotel’s TV will let me plug in an HDMI cable.

• If I used FaceTime more, I’d be more interested in the AppleTV integration. Nice to tie that into continuity camera.

• watchOS

  • First question: Will my Apple Watch 4 support Watch OS 10? Or will I need to add that to the “upgrade soon” list? Other than that, looks to be the expected incremental updates.

  • The updates to the hiking part of the workouts app are neat, but are they available on the iPhone too? Some of those (like marking the last known cell signal point) look really useful outside of when using the app for a hike.

  • Again, the Mindfullness app and mood tracking look nice…but are they limited to the watch? Okay, looks like that’s also on the phone.

  • How many children have Apple Watches? More than I’m aware of, obviously.

• Wow…”one more thing”! Haven’t heard that in a while.

  • The Apple headset (Vision Pro) looks a lot like the goggles the away team wore in TOS’s The Cage.

  • I’m still not sold on my need for or interest in AR, but the demos are pretty fascinating to watch.

    • Movies and TV are so often used as demos, because you can get a virtual “big screen”, but it still seems kludgy to have to strap this thing to your head instead of just looking at a TV.
  • I do like that it doesn’t need controllers, but just tracks your hands and gestures. Must be sensors on the underside of the goggles.

  • The screen showing your eyes to other people was an accurate rumor. I’m surprised. That’s…again, somewhere between neat and creepy, but at least last first blush, looked very uncanny valley.

  • How difficult must typing be with a virtual keyboard? At least with the iPhone/iPad screen you have that to type on, even if you can’t feel the individual keys. But without any physical contact? (This is also one of the issues I have with nifty sci-fi holographic user interfaces.)

  • Seeing people on FaceTime calls with the headset, sure. What do they see?

  • Wait, a 3D camera? Interesting.

  • Disney’s on board, huh?

  • Okay, time to get some of the tech details. This’ll be interesting.

    • I still can’t imagine wearing something like this on my head for hours at a time, let alone a full workday.
  • They’re actually addressing the “how do people see you on FaceTime?” question.
    • Okay…your own personal uncanny valley avatar! Yikes.
  • Snark aside, there’s a lot of neat stuff here. Definitely not for me, at least not at this stage, but it’ll be very interesting to see where it goes over the coming years.

And now, cue all the hot takes on how bad all of this is and now doomed Apple is once again!