Thoughts on WWDC24

11 June 2024

Here are my reactions and thoughts about Apple's announcements at WWDC24:

• That intro was incredible. Phil flying the plane and using an old iPod, Mike wearing a Vision Pro. Craig's hair helmet was perfect.
• I cannot wait for Severance season 2.

Vision Pro

• 2000 apps for Vision Pro, but no Netflix or YouTube.
• Turning 2D photos into 3D looks cool, interested to see how well this feature works.
• I wonder how much the new Canon lens for capturing spatial video costs.
• Vision Pro coming to more countries. That's exciting, more people will get to try the demos in-store. Of course there's no New Zealand, but can't complain as we don't even have Apple stores here.

iOS

• Placing icons anywhere on the grid. FINALLY
• Years ago I wanted dark mode app icons, but since then I've come to appreciate the beautiful colours of icons from different apps. Colour tinting does not look very nice in my opinion, at least not the colours they showcased in the keynote.
• You can remove the app names under the icons. FINALLY
• My friend said it well, the rounded icons in Control Centre look like a Xiaomi Android skin.
• Third-party controls in Control Centre. And you can replace the flashlight and camera. FINALLY
• Locked and hidden apps. Not something I care for myself, but definitely a good feature to have.
• New Contacts privacy API is great.
• Emoji tapbacks. FINALLY
• Looking forward to the new Mail design, it makes the app look more modern.
• The Photos redesign looks nice if you have a lot of nice photos.
• Reminders integration in Calendar. Nice!

Audio and Home

• I wonder how sensitive the nod/shake detection is for AirPods. I could see accidentally accepting/declining calls if you move your head too fast.

watchOS

• Training load and effort rating is a neat feature. Reminds me of some of the stuff Fitbod is doing.
• Pausing activity rings and custom goals for each day of the week. I might start using the rings feature now, it didn't really click with me in its current state.
• Double tap API. Hopefully we will see more third-party apps adopting this feature!

iPadOS

• The floating tab bar looks neat. Customisation reminds me of the old iPod/Music app tab bar in like what, iOS 6? More of that please!
• I like the new file picker design in the iWork suite and Swift Playground.
• Remote control of iOS/iPadOS devices during screen sharing is huge for family tech support.
• Calculator app on the iPad. FINALLY
• The new Math Notes feature is awesome. This will be huge for uni students and makes me tempted to use an iPad for note-taking.
• New handwriting stuff in Notes is cool. The fake handwriting feels slightly weird to me though, but a nice feature nonetheless.

macOS

• iPhone mirroring is super cool. Great for accessing those iPhone-only apps without leaving your Mac workflow. Can't wait to use this feature.
• Tiling window management. I currently use Moom for this functionality. It's likely more powerful than Apple's but still great to have this built-in.
• Passwords app. FINALLY

And now we get to the juicy stuff in AI.

Apple Intelligence

• It's all very private, (mostly) on-device and basically the "Apple way". Thumbs up
• Summaries in Mail, Messages and notifications are great.
• System-wide writing tools. This is what tools like Grammarly offer but in every text field across your devices. Maybe turning your emails into poems is gimmicky but proofreading and grammar checking is genuinely useful.
• Can't wait to try those new Siri prompts like "show me all the photos of Mom, Olivia and me" and "play the podcast that my wife sent the other day". If they work as advertised, it would be a super cool feature.
• I was not expecting Apple to go that heavy on the image generation stuff. There's Genmoji (we should've seen that name coming. First Animoji, then Memoji, now this.) which is fine, it works as stickers and even iMessage tapbacks. But then there's the whole Image Playground thing which they're telling people to use in presentations and reports to enhance their content. Personally, I do not like how current AI images usually look, and think it does not look Apple-like and cheapens the brand.
• ChatGPT access through Siri and the system writing tools? It's what the rumours suggested but having a major third-party system baked into the system is unexpected coming from Apple.

What an event. We'll see a ton of more details as people start digging into the betas. I'm already excited for the new OS releases without any AI features, and the AI stuff looks mostly very cool (except for the image generation), so I'd say it was a good keynote.

What do you think of the announcements at WWDC24? Let me know on Mastodon.