It has been a minute since I did my best tech blogger impression so I thought Apple’s annual developer conference keynote was as good of a topic as any to stretch that muscle a bit.
I’ll arrange these topics in the order the keynote presented them. The keynote is available here.
Table of Contents
visionOS
Not much to say here. I don’t have a Apple Vision Pro and have no desire or need for one. The only thing I’ll note that it will soon be available in my locale (Canada). I also found it funny that one of the features announced but not actually mentioned by the presenter was mouse support. I suppose they don’t want to highlight that right after they talked about the new gestures they are adding in visionOS 2.
Also, spatial Personas are still really fucking weird looking and not in a good way.
iOS
A decent year for iOS to be quite honest. The home screen customization feature is the big highlight for me. I love the way the icons change with dark mode and being able to arrange app icons more freely got a “finally!” from me. Speaking of customization, Control Center customization is also cool though I don’t know how much I’ll utilize its features. Being able to select which icons you want to do quick actions for on the lock screen is also great.
iMessage is getting emoji tapbacks which I am mildly excited for, I love emoji reactions as a concept. Text effects are also a thing, I sure hope they are not obnoxious. RCS messaging support gets a big old “meh” from me. My group chats in the Messages app are all iMessage only and the vast majority of my Messages app usage is iMessage and otherwise I use a combination of Signal, Discord, Telegram, Element etc.
I don’t know how I feel about the Photos app redesign yet, I want to actually use it to see if the categorization and sorting features will be useful to me.
Audio & Home
I don’t have a Apple TV unit so the only thing of note here for me is “Siri interactions on AirPods Pro”, essentially if you get a call and Siri asks if you want to answer it, you can nod your head to answer “yes” and shake your head left to right to say “no”. I just think this is a neat quality-of-life addition to a already pretty great product.
watchOS
Not much for me here as I don’t make much use of the Apple Watch’s fitness focused features. The one thing that was a highlight for me was “Pause Activity rings”. As far as I know this is the much wanted Rest Days feature that I know a lot of folks, including myself have been asking for.
Apple also mentioned “More intelligent Smart Stack”, I’ll believe it when I see it.
iPadOS
Apple put a Calculator app on iPadOS. Finally. They even joked about it in the keynote so they are at least self aware that this is long overdue. That said, the “Math Notes” feature where you can use your Apple Pencil to write math equations on your iPad’s Calculator app and it will perform the calculations and show the answer for you. That is pretty fucking cool tech.
macOS
Another big “finally!” moment is macOS getting actual window tiling like Windows. This is a big pain point for me and I am glad that I’ll no longer need to use a third party app for this when macOS Sequoia comes out.
iOS notifications on Mac are pretty neat and so is iPhone Mirroring. It will be extremely useful for $WORK related purposes where I need to quickly test a site in iOS Safari.
Apple Pay on third party browsers is also cool but I don’t know how this works and I’m curious.
Apple Intelligence
The big discourse going into this keynote was how Apple was going to respond to the “AI” buzzword that is in vogue right now. The way they did was mostly what I expected. Focused on local on-device machine learning models with some external third party model use (ChatGPT, ugh).
Apple is dubbing it “Apple Intelligence”.
Features of this that I’m cool with:
- A more personal Siri (though I have my doubts how good this will be)
- Reduce Interruptions in Focus
- Priority notifications
- Natural language search
- Clean Up in Photos
- Memory Movies
- Image Wand
- Priority messages in Mail
Features of this that I’m not cool with:
- Genmoji
- Image Playground
- Summarization features
- Writing Tools
- Integration with ChatGPT (but hey at least they ask before they send your query there)
I really hope the ChatGPT feature can be turned off entirely. I don’t want to use ChatGPT. Ever.
Conclusions
Lots of “finally!” moments this year with a good amount of quality of life improvements to Apple’s major platforms balanced with the big unknown of Apple Intelligence and all of its associated features.
This is not the blog post where I write my AI polemic but suffice to say that I am very annoyed that this particular bubble has wormed its slimy tentacles into every corner of technology it can. The only solace here is that at least Apple has implemented its machine learning features in a more thoughtful way than the rest simply by virtue of doing most of it using local models running on-device.
So overall I am cautiously optimistic about Apple’s platforms going into the fall release window.
P. S – Tim, why are you on the roof? Get down from there.