Last night, Apple held its keynote presentation to mark the start of this year’s World Wide Developers Conference, WWDC, in San Francisco.
Here we look at the key points for our customers and discuss what’s next in terms of Apple hardware.
The overriding impression from last night was that Apple took WWDC back to its routes. For a while now they have used the conference keynote speech to launch new Macs. For example, the new Mac Pro was launched at WWDC a couple of years ago.
Last night however, there was no product launch. In the run up to the event, rumours were circulating about a new MacBook Pro, revised MacBook Airs and even a 5K Thunderbolt display.
However, all failed to materialise.
As you would expect, social media was awash with complaints about the lack of new hardware but if Apple have been good at one thing it has been keeping anticipation surrounding its products at a fever pitch. As the social media frenzy calms back down in the days after WWDC, it will surely hit a frenzy come Apple’s Autumn event.
We kind of liked the fact that the event centred on the four platforms of tvOS, watchOs, iOS and Mac OS X, or as it will now be known macOS. That’s right – your Mac’s Operating System got a name change last night and has fallen in line with the other software platforms. In fact, macOS will be launched this Autumn and to give its full name – it will be macOS Sierra.
There were some pretty cool features on the new macOs. We really liked Auto Unlock, which allows you to unlock your Mac without having to type a password. Authentication is complete via your Apple Watch or iPhone.
Siri’s debut on the Mac was a key part of this WWDC and we were treated to a number of demos of how it would work. It will allow you to search for files, play music whilst in full screen mode and search online.
We were also pleased to see Apple Pay come to the Mac. You will now be able to make online purchase with retailers who support Apple Pay. You will just need to confirm the purchase via the Touch ID on your watch or iPhone.
Universal Clipboard is a feature that will now allow you to copy and paste between all of your Apple devices. If you are working on a picture on your iPad you will now be able to copy and paste it into a document on your Mac. We see this as being really important to those users who work extensively between iPad Pro and iMac.
We were also interested to see the claims made that Optimised Storage will help free up storage space on your Mac. Last night, we were treated to a demo that showed a Mac with only 20GB of space. After running all of the available Optimised Storage facilities, this increased to 150GB. We see this being of real use to users who have opted for smaller Flash Storage capacities on their MacBooks and MacBook Pros.
There were also significant updates to tvOS, watchOS and iOS 10. We personally have been hesitant about the watch but OS apps were launching much quicker and were live instantly. We are starting to warm towards it! Likewise, in iOS 10, we really liked the memories section on the Photos App and thought that the Auto Video feature was extremely impressive.
We would be interested in hearing from you about this year’s keynote speech. Did you watch it? Were you expecting to hear about new Macs? Were Apple right to just focus on software at WWDC? Let us know what you think.