Apple paid an interior designer a lot of money for that tastefully curated bookshelf and they are getting their money’s worth by using it for every presenter.

Impressions:

Platforms - iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, visionOS 27

• The stoner macOS naming joke will never get old
• Liquid Glass slider between clear and tinted - that’s as close to an apology the community is going to get
• Icon redesign with additional refraction
• Speed Bump
  • Improved CPU scheduler now on all phones back to iPhone 11
  • Improved WiFi and cellular switching so you no longer need to turn off WiFi after the plane lands to reconnect to cellular - very welcome quality of life improvement
  • iPhone and iPad apps launch 30% faster on Mac through preloading
  • Photos appear 70% faster after taking them
  • 80% faster AirDrop
  • 5x faster iPad file transfer
  • Improved search index of all content on device
  • But does Safari feel snappier?
• Cycle - supports menopause and perimenopause
• Maps - much improved flyover detail
• Photos - Android and Windows users can contribute to iCloud photo albums - imagine receiving someone’s Windows webcam photo, straight to trash
• AirPods - Custom EQ - now the worst person you know can give their AirPods that classic Skullcandy Beats fried bass boosted sound
• visionOS
  • Panorama conversion to spatial scenes
  • Panorama as environment
  • The way this is all we get today for Vision is really not helping the doom narrative
  • Supports the same models as iOS 26

Child Safety Features

• Controls over apps children can use and people they can talk to
• Communication safety stops gore images - but when will it stop the stale memes that YouTube Shorts users send me?
• Improved time allowance design for apps and categories of apps
• Screen time schedule based on time of day - some of y’all on your phones at 2am need this
• Developer APIs to control content and communication

Apple Intelligence

• Not Apple’s first rodeo, Apple’s second rodeo.
• Apple Foundation Models - collaboration with Google Gemini
• Voice model for better dictation and speech generation
• Siri AI
  • Guys be nice, it’s Mike Rockwell’s first time walking in a non virtual environment
  • Significantly more conversational and cross context - Siri no longer has goldfish memory (fun fact, that’s a popular misconception)
  • Personal context understanding, Semantic Index, Broad World Knowledge - fancy term for Siri can now Google stuff and look through your phone
  • Siri in Spotlight - respect to Apple having the presenter sit there waiting while the AI thinks instead of shortening the sequence artificially
• Redesign
  • New liquid glass look - the Avengers assemble of features r/apple hates
  • New app grid on Apple Watch with Siri front and center
  • Floating orb on Vision Pro for us to ponder
  • Standalone app with conversation view
• Visual Intelligence
  • Receipt splitting
  • Circle to search
  • visionOS - Siri uses your line of sight to put real world content into context
• Apps
  • Safari
    • Automatically group tabs - imagine a little goblin in your browser that reorganizes your tabs at random
    • Monitor websites for things like registration opening and notify you
    • Vibe generate extensions
  • Passwords - one press to fix all compromised passwords
  • Messages - one tap suggestions based on context
  • Calendar - natural language adding and editing of events
  • Phone App - pull up relevant info for calls
  • Notifications - AI organizing and summarizing
  • Home App - AI descriptions of recorded events
  • Shortcuts - vibe code shortcuts
  • Image Playground - generate photo-realistic images
  • Photos
    • Clean up quality improved for complex scenes
    • Extend photos to expand images
    • Spatial Reframing - change perspective on photos
  • Xcode - Gemini integration, AI device testing, improved testing with simulated multi touch and dynamic resizing

Seems like Apple is taking a reset year to make sure they fulfill their delayed promises and do the AI right. Rare personal note by Tim Cook - going to miss his “Good Morning” every event.

False Vacuum: A theoretical state where space appears stable but actually exists at a higher energy level than the true minimum, meaning it could spontaneously “decay” into a lower energy state.

In March of 2024, Walmart began selling the refurbished MacBook Air M1 for $699 and soon after Best Buy offered the same for $650. This represents what those of us in the enthusiast community consider a screaming deal. And up until last month, it was still a great deal.

When the MacBook Neo was released, it was no surprise that a vocal minority in the community scoffed at the idea that a value-oriented MacBook was anything new. After all, why settle for a device with a lower-quality screen and no backlighting when a flagship model from a few years ago can be had for nearly the same price?

But the world isn’t made of tech fanatics. It is composed of people who walk into a Best Buy and take the advice of the teenager working the laptop section. Parents holding the wallet often won’t feel satisfied buying their child something that isn’t brand new. That is exactly who this MacBook is for.

The idea of buying a cheaper, older flagship model is a false vacuum. It appears to be a good strategy and makes sense on a pricing sheet, but it does not match consumer psychology. “Old,” “refurbished,” and “price-reduced” are not premium words befitting the public perception of Apple as a luxury brand. The MacBook Neo pops this false vacuum, placing Apple in a new, stable state where customers wanting to enter the ecosystem no longer need to dig through various age and refurbishment tiers. They can walk into an Apple Store and be offered a laptop or phone that is current and new—no asterisks—and, most importantly, at the price they want.

The team ran out of Apple Park to film and are now mining their flagship stores for backdrop. Intro video calls back to Wonderful Tools.

Impressions:

AirPod Pro 3

• 2x better ANC compared with AP2 (4x better than AP1) - “Worlds best noise cancellation”
• 5 sizes of foam infused eartips, smaller body
• Live translation (also coming to Pro 2 and AirPods 4) - I feel like silicon valley has been launching this once a year for the past 5 years
• IP57 sweat and water resistance
• Heart rate sensing, workouts now can be started on iPhone. Integration with third party fitness apps
• 8 hours with ANC, 10 hours in transparency with hearing aid
• $249

Apple Watch Series 11

• Here we go another Dear Apple video
• 2x more scratch resistant cover glass
• 5G - For all those Netflix shows y’all seem to be streaming onto your watch
• New health features: hypertension alerts, sleep score
• 24 hour battery life
• 100% recycled aluminum - Seems they dropped the carbon neutral designation after the controversy
• New Hermes face with a flying pixelated horse because whimsy is for the wealthy

Apple Watch SE 3

• S10 chip, Always on display, 5G
• Gesture support
• Wrist temp sensing for ovulation tracking, sleep score + apnea
• Play music from speakers
• 18 hour battery life, 2x faster charging

Apple Watch Ultra 3

• Larger, brighter screen with wide angle OLED and LTPO
• 5G, satellite connectivity for messaging
• 42 hour battery life
• 100% recycled titanium

iPhone 17

• I just know the AirPods exec who had to drive themselves to SF to film their segment mad as hell they didn’t get a Miami trip out of it like the iPhone exec did
• Screen
  • Larger 6.3in ProMotion display - Big day for r/apples most annoying people (all of us)
  • 3000nit peak brightness
  • Ceramic Shield 2, 3x better scratch resistance
  • 7 layer anti reflective coating
• A19 - 5 core GPU, 16 core Neural Engine for Apple Intelligence to tell us it cant help with a new level of cognition
• 8 more hours of video playback vs iPhone 16, faster charging
• Camera
  • 48MP main with fusion ultrawide
  • 12MP 2x telephoto with macro
  • 500 billion selfies taken last year - 300 billion of those by me alone!
  • 18MP double size square sensor with Center Stage - so you don’t need to rotate to take a landscape group selfie
• $799 - 256gb - black, white, green, blue, purple

iPhone 17 Air

• Leave it to Apple marketing to make this thing I absolutely should not buy extremely desirable
• Engineering
  • Titanium frame polished to a mirror finish, 70% recycled
  • 5.6mm - thinnest iPhone ever - you just know marketing was mad they couldnt say “thinnest Apple product ever” becuase the iPad Pro took that crown
  • 3k nit 6.5in ProMotion Display
  • Ceramic Shield on front and back - 3x better scratch resistance, 4x more resistant to cracks - not that you’ll need since it’s so light it will simply waft to the ground like a tissue
  • Components moved to top of the iPhone behind the plateau
  • “Exceed our stringent bend strength requirement” - Bendgate trauma still hurts
• A19 Pro
  • 6 core CPU - “fastest CPU of any smartphone”
  • 5 core GPU - Guys, they DOUBLED the 16 bit floating point math rates, I know that was on everyone’s wish list
  • Neural Accelerators in each GPU core for those GPU intensive workloads demanded by the ultra thin fashion phone crowd
• N1 wireless chip
  • Wifi 7, BT6, Thread
  • C1X Modem - 2x faster than C1, faster and more power efficient than 16 Pro, 30% less energy
• Camera
  • 48MP fusion camera, 2x 12MP telephoto with sensor crop
  • 18MP center stage front camera
  • Dual capture video of front and back camera
  • 4k60 Dolby Vision video
• eSim only - our European and Asian r/apple Redditor friends have something new to complain about
• “All day battery life”
• New low profile MagSafe battery - boosts Air to 40hr video playback
• $999 - 256gb - black, white, gold, blue

iPhone 17 Pro

• Joz aura farming at the Brooklyn flagship store
• Engineering
  • Aluminum alloy body - Wow 20x better thermals than that wacky titanium we championed last year and also 10 minutes before for the Air
  • New Vapor chamber to dissipate heat through the body
  • Larger battery - “best battery life ever on an iPhone” - 39 hours of video playback
  • A19 Pro - 40% better sustained performance
  • Ceramic shield on front and back wioth 7 layer anti reflective coating
• Apple really pitching the eSim trade off hard with an animation of the battery expanding to fill the sim space
• Camera
  • 18 MP center stage front camera
  • All three cameras are 48MP fusion sensors
  • Improved imaging pipeline
  • 4x zoom telephoto, 8x sensor bin zoom, sensor shift image stabilization - Pro Max 5x telephoto fans just fell to their knees in a Walmart
  • ProRes RAW video capture
  • GenLock for video sync, must be what they used for the recent 28 Years Later film
• TechWoven case here remind the leather case fans they will never get leather again
• $1099 (Pro Max $1199) - 256gb - silver, deep blue, cosmic orange

I think this might be one of the most interesting iPhone lineups in a long time. Curious how much market share the Air captures from the other iPhones and whether it is more from regular users or Pro users.

Production value of these intro segments have obviously reached a new peak. This feels like Craig’s fantasy.

Impressions:

New Design

• VP of Human Design Alan Dye sits in a room full of colorful glass panes and moves them over each other all day. What do you do for work?
• Launching on all platforms
• Liquid Glass - Aqua is back!
  • Animated transitions and light refraction - combo of dynamic island, iPadOS cursor, and Aqua
  • ngl the animations are pretty slick

iOS 26

• Moving to year based numbering - Apple not too worried about what happens after 2099
• Lock Screen
  • Dynamic scaling time on lock screen that shifts around as notifications come in
  • ML generated spacial 3D effect on when you move - good use of the Vision OS Spacial Photo upscaling
  • Animated album art
• Camera App - Simplified interface with swipe controls
• Photos App - Minor UI refresh with spacial photos
• Safari tab bar now shrunk smaller into animated Liquid Glass bubbles
• CarPlay redesign, updated interface and widgets
  • CarPlay Ultra also updated to Liquid Glass for those Bentley drivers out there dying for an update after checks Apple Watch, one month!
• Phone App - unified layout for favorites, recents, voicemail
  • Automatic call screening answering calls in background - Pixel had this for a while and its good to see iOS adding this finally
  • Hold Assist to help keep spot in line without listening to hold music
• Messages App
  • Animated backgrounds
  • Polls
  • Apple Cash request and sending in groups
  • Typing indicators in group chats
  • Spam Screening to sweep away unknown senders
• Emojis can be combined into new emojis - FINALLY OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER, you can make a sloth that sings karaoke
• Live translate text as you type, and in FaceTime
• Apple Music
  • Lyrics translation
  • lyrics pronunciation - big day for the annoying kpop fan in your life
  • Automix between songs to flow between music
  • Pin favorite music to top of library
• Maps - The mockup is unrealistic. Living in Presidio, school at Palace of Fine Arts, and working at Ft Mason Park? Who has this lifestyle?
• Wallet
  • Increased CarKey and Driver License adoption
  • Digital ID with US Passport for domestic travel - Cant wait for Airports to support this but not actually allow it
  • Refreshed boarding passes with indoor maps, Find My, and shareable live activities - neat!
  • Order Tracking
• Games App - Central App to manage apps, friend leaderboards
• Visual Intelligence can see your screen now when you screenshot to do things like search for products, create calendar events, answer questions
• Whew! Big update this year!

watchOS 26

• You know the gym is staged because they have good form and aren’t slamming weights
• Workout Buddy - Gathers all the data from workouts and “identifies meaningful insights”
  • Jumps in with AI generated encouragement and status updates
  • Mine is going to say “Wow you got 5 hours of sleep, your worst yet, go get it king!”
• Notification sounds are dimmed in quiet settings
• Wrist flick to dismiss notifications
• Context based actions in Messages like surfacing sharing location
• Notes App

tvOS 26

• Cinematic Poster Art
• AppleTV has lots of shows coming
• Use iPhone as karaoke mic

macOS 26 - Tahoe

• Craig Federighi carrying the Apple humor entirely on his back
• Redesign allows you to make macOS as ugly as you desire, even all pink!
• Live Activities from iPhone
• Shortcuts can call AI models as part of a shortcut
• Spotlight
  • Can issue commands and take action directly in spotlight even within apps
  • Short Keys to keybind letters to actions
• New: Phone App, Games App, Journal App

visionOS 26

• Spacial widgets to decorate spaces - You can do things simply not possible in the real world like putting a clock on the wall or hanging a picture!
• Improved Spacial Photos with better 3D
• Safari Spacial Browsing: like a reader mode but for VR, look to scroll
• Improved Personas - disembodied horrors of our own making!
• Shared Spacial experiences in the same room so you can now watch the same movie not on a TV but on everyone’s own personal Vision Pro, the future is here!
• Support for PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers
• Support for 180-degree, 360-degree, and wide field-of-view content from Insta360, GoPro, and Canon
• Unlock phone while wearing Vision Pro - big day for looking at a blurry iPhone screen through my headset
• Better sharing, now my friends don’t need to redo set up before trampling through the OS like they’ve never used a UI before
• Folders on home screen - technology has finally progressed to allow this to happen

ipadOS 26

• We macOS now, bois!
  • macOS style window controls and tiling
  • MacOS style regular mouse pointer and trackpad gestures
  • MacOS Style menu bar for apps
  • Available for all iPads, big day for the iPad Pro Mini crowd
• Updated Files App
  • Updated list view
  • Set a default app for opening specific file types
  • Folders in dock
• Preview App - Dedicated app for opening files and marking up PDFs
• Background Tasks - keep tasks running in background. - Now what will the iPad-as-production-tool community complain about? Oh, right, lack of audio input controls!
• New audio Input control on an app by app basis
• Other: Reed pen, 3D graphing in calculator, import/export notes in markdown, accessibility reader

Other

• AirPods
  • Improved recording quality
  • Control camera by pressing stem
• Vibe coding in XCode
• Apple Intelligence
  • Model Refinements, Expansion to more languages
  • New API to access on-device model

That was probably my longest one yet. The sheer volume of info they can cram in and still shave off half an hour vs the old live events is insane. Anyways, here’s your AI break so enjoy it before next year when we get an hour of Apple Intelligence 2.

They finally ran out of Apple Park buildings to film so now the video team is burning through San Francisco landmarks

Impressions:

Apple Watch Series 10

• Bigger brighter display - 30% more screen area, bigger than the Ultra
• Thinner, more rounded design
• New polished aluminum jet black color alongside the rose gold and silver in the old aluminum treatment
• Faster charging - 30 min to 80%
• Introducing polished titanium (natural, gold, and dark) to replace stainless steel as the midrange model. It’s also carbon neutral now
• Sleep Apnea Detection - now you can tell your partner they snore and have the data to prove it
• Swim - Tides app, depth app, water temperature, custom swim workouts

Apple Watch Ultra

• New satin black finish - 95% recycled titanium
• Updated black bands including new titanium Milanese Loop

AirPods 4

• 2 models - with and without ANC/transparency mode/Adaptive Audio
• Slightly refined shape
• H2 chip - New acoustic architecture
• $179 with ANC, $129 without

AirPods Max

• New colors (blue, purple, orange, gold)
• $549
• USB-C - finally! I actually didnt catch this the first 5 times they said it for some reason. Thanks to the commenters who saved me from myself

Other AirPods News

• Stuff for both Pro and Max
  • Hearing protection to reduce volume while retaining range
  • Hearing Test feature
• AirPods Pro 2 is getting a hearing Aid feature - This feels like a big deal, there are a lot of people who are unwilling to get a hearing aid who may be persuaded if it’s AirPods

iPhone 16

• 85% recycled aluminum
• new colors (ultramarine, teal, pink, white, black)
• 50% tougher display class - 3x tougher than any other smartphone class
• Screen can go down to 1 nit for those of you who like to ruin your health by staring at your phone in bed at night
• Action Button from the Pros is here
• New camera button
  • Click for photo, hold for video
  • 2 stage shutter and touch sensitive to automatically lock focus and exposure and also enable gestures like double click & slide to change tools
• A18 Chip
  • 2nd Gen 3nm - for those not in the know, this is the 3nm process the nerds have been waiting for
  • 16 core neural engine
  • 17% more memory bandwidth
  • 6-core CPU- 30% less power
  • 5 core GPU - 35% less power
• Cameras
  • 48MP “Fusion Camera” with 2x telephoto portrait - 4k60 video in Dolby HDR
  • 12MP Ultrawide - x2.6 more light and macrophotography
  • Spacial capture from the new camera design for those of you who shell out for Vision Pro but not for iPhone Pro
  • Don’t think they talked about this but you can pause video recording now, the future is now, folks
• Redesigned interior
  • New thermal 30% higher sustained performance
  • Hardware Ray tracing
• Random game ad for Tencent
• $799 ($100 more for Plus) - Starts at 128gb

Apple Intelligence

• Unsurprisingly coming to all phones this generation
• Can send a pic to Apple Intelligence to ask about things like restaurant hours and “whats this plant” type queries - Of course they found a way to make the camera button an AI button
• Mostly a rehash of things like Private Cloud compute and on device models
• Available next month in English and December in localized English, next year for other languages (Chinese, French, Japanese and Spanish)

iPhone 16 Pro Max

• Design
  • Larger 6.3in and 6.9in screen
  • Thinnest borders on any Apple Product
  • “Grade 5 Titanium” in a micro blasted texture (Black, white, natural, desert)
  • Max has the best battery life ever
• A18 Pro Chip
  • 16 core neural engine - 35T ops
  • 6 core GPU - 2x faster ray tracing
  • 2 Performance cores, 4 efficiency cores - 20% less power
  • Display engine, faster USB 3 Speeds, video encoder, ISP for 2x faster video processing
• Cameras
  • 48MP Fusion Camera with 0 shutter lag
  • 48MP Ultrawide
  • Tetraprism for the zoom camera on both models now
  • 4k120fps Video - Pretty sure they brought back the same actors from the Cinematic Mode ad they ran 2 years ago to introduce this. We doing sequels to ads now
  • Audio mix feature to segment different parts of audio
• Voice Memos can allow for layering another track on top of the recording for musicians
• $999 ($200 more for the Max)

Other iPhone

• New Cases with a sapphire crystal camera button
• New MagSafe Charger with longer cable and faster charging
• 100% fiber based packaging

Not bad upgrades overall if a bit iterative. Can’t beleive we brought back the camera button from early Android days. Seems like enough stuff left over for an ecosystem focused October event.

Tim Cook is shouting from the roof, Craig and the exec team skydiving, Mike Rockwell in a Vision Pro, Apple video team budget at an all time high. Seat belts on folks, its a big one this year

Impressions:

visionOS 2

• 2k native apps, 1.5m compatible apps
• Photos: ML to turn 2D photos into 3D spatial photos, Shareplay
• Quick access hand gesture menu
• Mac Virtual Display supports different screen sizes including ultra wide which simulates two 4k monitors side by side
• Travel mode adds train support
• Cannon will sell a spatial lens for their cameras
• Other - rearrange home screen, mouse support, new APIs, available in 8 more countries

iOS 18

• Home Screen
  • App icons and widgets can be placed anywhere
  • Adds ability to tint all apps by color, dark mode darkens app icons
  • Lock or hide apps
• Control Center
  • Multiple pages including full screen home and music widgets
  • developers can build for control center too
• Swap lock screen controls for other actions - finally!
• Secure Bluetooth pairing for apps that looks like how AirPods pair
• Messages:
  • Tapbacks support any emoji or sticker now
  • Scheduled messages
  • Text formatting
  • Text effects
• iMessage and SMS via satellites - I feel like this would have been a huge feature any other year
• Mail:
  • On device categorization
  • AI powered digest of emails
• Photos App has been redesigned entirely with filters for screenshots, pinning, grouped people photos
• Other
  • Maps - Topographic maps
  • Tap to Cash - pay each other by tapping phones
  • Better event tickets
  • Journal app adds features like stats and streaks
  • Game mode in iPhone
  • Reminders in calendar
  • RCS support launching

AirPods

• Nod yes or shake for no to respond to Siri
• Voice isolation for Windy or loud environment

tvOS

• Insight in video to identify actors and music
• Adjust voice in video to make them clear - now we can finally know what Michael Caine said in Interstellar
• Supports 21:9 projectors for those of you with full theater set ups in this economy

watchOS 11

• Training Mode - measure intensity, duration, effort, training load
• Fitness app - cards can be reorganized
• Vitals App - check key metrics like heart rate and insights over time
• Cycle Tracking app - supports pregnancy and gestational metrics - Now Apple can sell a million watches to anxious first time parents
• Widget stack sorts itself based on context like weather changes and ongoing Uber rides
• New watch faces created by an AI selecting your good photos and reframing them

iPad OS

• Redesigned apps with a more Vision Pro like animated tab bar
• Shareplay - draw on or even remotely control other peoples screen - big day for
• HOLD THE PRESSES - CALCULATOR APP IS HERE
  • Math Notes - handwrite expressions with variables with Apple Pencil and it will automatically solve them. supports graphs as well
  • Math in Notes app too
  • Now what will this subreddit complain about anymore?
• Notes Smart Script
  • makes your unreadable handwriting look good. I know some people who need this badly
  • Spell check for handwriting
  • Automatically shifting words around as you write

macOS Sequoia

• Were not even halfway in and absolutely blowing through these platforms, hmmm I wonder what they are saving time for, what a mystery
• Continuity
  • iPhone Mirroring - a lot of Android manufacturers have been doing this for a while now and its a very welcome addition here, sometimes you just want to quickly access a thin on your phone
  • iPhone notifications can go to mac now and automatically trigger iPhone Mirroring
• Tiling and snapping to edges/corners - finally!
• Presenter preview for screens sharing, background replacement
• Passwords App - surfaces iCloud Keychain features - imo much needed as 1Password is one of my most used apps because it is surfaced
• Safari
  • Highlights - identify and surface key info from a webpage
  • Reader - summarizes websites - still no mention of AI
  • Automatic picture in picture
• Gaming
  • Metal 3
  • Game Porting Toolkit 2 with better support for Windows Games - we got a mention of MS Windows before AI
  • Coming to Mac: Frostpunk 2, Control, Assassins Creed Shadows,

Apple Intelligence

• “AI for the rest of us” - Craig
• Writing tools available across the system
  • Proofreading
  • Write emails and notes
  • Summarization for emails as well as email snippets
  • Asks you questions to generate a response
  • Inbox summaries
• Notification summaries, selective surface only important notifications to reduce interruptions
• Can use your OS for you to do tasks like pulling up apps to play music and creating folders
• Understands personal context from aggregated data across the system
• GenMoji to create a custom emoji
• Image Playground
  • Create images across the system including of people in iMessages
  • Makes it easier to create images based on traits and styles
  • Happens entirely on device
  • Image Wand can convert a rough sketch into a better image
• Can create videos based on concepts and find photos from a long time period to tell a story
• Record and transcribe audio in notes and phone
• Privacy
  • On device processing on A17 and all M chips
  • Private Cloud Compute for large server based models
  • Data is never stored or shared with Apple
  • Verifiable software for independent researchers

Siri

• Better language understanding that understands corrections and context
• Type to Siri
• Siri can help with tech support for Apple products
• On-screen awareness - can ask for things to be done based on info on the screen
• Command Siri to take photos, take notes, or search for something across the system including actions in videos
• Can do compound understanding like finding a drivers license number and typing it into a form for you or finding a persons flight number and finding its live status to determine if it works with existing lunch plans
• Rest in peace standalone AI gadgets like Rabbit R1 and Humane Ai Pin, we hardly knew ye

ChatGPT 4o

• Siri can go ask ChatGPT for things like answer general knowledge questions and generate more complex images
• Free and info not logged, chatGPT subscribers can access paid features
• Other AI models will be added in the future - sure, throw Google a bone too I guess

Whew! What a day, this was probably the most jam packed WWDC I have watched in a long time. They definitely went deeper on integration that I thought they would. Hats off to the developers working crazy hours to make the features announced a reality.

First, Craig Federighi does a slow motion run at WWDC 2022 and now John Ternus winks at me. Why are the Apple execs trying to rizz me up as the kids say? Also, props to the production team for putting that drone and travel budget to good use this year.

Impressions:

iPad Air

• 11 and 13 inch model
• Cameras on the long edge - finally!
• M2, Wifi 6E, Double the bass on the larger model
• Apple pencil hover
• A keynote so short John Ternus had to record his speaking scenes on his regular BART commute
• Starts at 128gb and goes up to 1TB
• 11in - $599, 13in - $799

iPad Pro

• The ad of an entire recording studio being hydraulically pressed into an iPad is pretty creative
• 11 in at 5.3mm thin, 13 in at 5.1mm thin
• Thinnest apple product ever (even thinner than iPod Nano! Thinnest Apple product ever)
• The ghost of Jony Ive has had its last laugh with these wafer thin iPads
• Ultra Retina XDR - two layers of OLED to create a Tandem display panel to jack the brightness up to 1600 HDR brightness
• Nano-texture glass option
• M4 chip - 2nd gen 3nm architecture, new display engine, 4 performance/6 efficiency cores, 10 core GPU, Neural Engine with 38 trillion ops/sec, improved efficiency, 20% better thermal performance
• AI mentioned! (Probably gonna want to get used to Apple saying AI for the next few years)
• Camera on the long edge, and back camera is quietly reduced to just 1, probably a good trade off
• I was curious how Apple was going to differentiate the Pros now that the Airs have eaten up a lot of the features of the old pros and I think they largely did the work on the hardware side. Now it remains to be seen if they can finish the job with the software story at WWDC
• Starts at 256gb and goes to 2 TB
• 11in - $999, 13in - $1299

Final Cut Pro 2

• Live multicam - Enables streaming in 4 cameras at once and control multiple iPhone/iPad cameras, enabled by a new Final Cut Camera app
• External project support so you can edit directly off a drive and 4x more streams (Note that some of these features seem to be M4 iPad Pro exclusive)
• A keynote so short, Will Hui recorded his speaking lines between sets at the climbing gym and had to wear the same outfit to the recording studio scenes

Logic Pro 2

• Session Players - AI based base and keyboard players
• More effects to simulate analog hardware
• Stem Splitter - isolates parts like voice and drums in a song
• “Mr President, a second AI mention has hit the keynote”

Magic Keyboard

• Retained floating design
• Function row - As Craig says: “We truly live in an age of wonders”
• Haptic trackpad
• Aluminum base
• $299 and $349 for the different sizes - Apple wants you to know that Aluminum aint free so you get to pay $50 more for the bigger one

Apple Pencil Pro

• Squeeze function with haptic feedback to bring up menus
• Can rotate the pencil to change brush orientation
• Haptic feedback used to also add tactile feeling to snapping and other functions
• $129

iPad

• Price drop to $349
• I wonder if this means Apple can finally drop the old home button iPad and the first gen Apple Pencil - Edit: Seems like they’ve dropped the old iPad but kept the 1st gen Apple pencil given that it is something that existing users might still buy

Wow a brisk 38 minutes. I like that they’re not afraid to have the attitude of “we only got 38 min of content so thats how long its gonna run. Some of the older in person keynotes could really start to drag. You can feel Apple holding back on acknowledging Ai too much here to save it for WWDC.

Tim Cook’s intro went so hard I thought he was going to break into dance. The CGI and set budget for this show must rival some movies

Impressions:

M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max

• 3nm
• Performance cores - 30% faster than M1 - 15% faster than M2
• Efficiency cores - 50% faster than M1 - 20% faster than M2
• M3 - 8 core CPU - 10 core GPU
• M3 Pro - 12 core CPU - 18 core GPU
• M3 Max - 16 core CPU - 40 core CPU
• Big next gen GPU upgrade
• Dynamic caching which increased memory utilization efficiency in GPU
• Hardware accelerated mesh shading and ray tracing
• 2.5x faster rendering performance over M1

MacBook Pro

• Space Black is back! (on M3 Pro and M3 Max models)
• Newer design now comes with M3 base model now as well - I wonder if this is meant to replace the previous base model with touchbar (Update - yes it is, touchbar 13in Pro now gone)
• M1 Max goes up to 128gb memory now
• Apple making a big pitch to get the remaining Intel Mac users to upgrade for 11x performance and 11 additional hours of battery
• SDR content at 600 nits (20% improvement)
• $1599 - likely to accommodate the new lower CPU tier.

24in iMac

• Update to M3 …that’s all.
• They announced this one in practically a single run on sentence. I don’t think they spent more than 5 minutes on this update and that was with rehashing the existing features

MacBook Air

• Hang on, wait, the show’s over? I had the section header typed up for this already!

This meeting truly could have been an email. This was the shortest Apple event in recent memory. I never thought I’d miss the segments where they pull out some 3rd party devs to talk about how impressed they are. They could have just posted this whole show on TikTok so we could all watch it at our leisure during commute.

It’s been a minute since we saw something of a big wildcard strategy play from Apple but it’s become clear that the folks at Apple have renewed their efforts to court gamers to the ecosystem.

Big indicator here was the WWDC announcement of MacOS Gaming emulation that temporarily blew up the tech internet with videos of games like Cyberpunk 2077 running on Mac, a previously unthinkable proposition. And not just running, but running well. However, given Apple’s previous endeavors, it was easy to write this off as a one time thing; a side effect of the capabilities unlocked by the M series era of chips. Recall the M1 was demoed with Tomb Raider; a respectable but undemanding game that proved a point nonetheless that an Apple laptop was capable of gaming at a higher level than had previously been taken for granted by the public.

(I wouldn’t be surprised at all if gaming receives a big chunk of the attention at this weeks Scary Fast special event)

And then in September when Apple announced in no uncertain terms that they want iOS to be the best console in the world with a slate of AAA titles like Assassin’s Creed and Resident Evil all playing at full console quality with Console textures on the A17 Pro chip of the iPhone 15 Pro.

iOS is Apple’s biggest platform by far, and one of the most influential platforms in the world. It is also by some measures the largest gaming platform in the world. But it has also been derided by gaming culture as too casual, microtransaction centered, and generally not being legitimate. I am inclined to agree somewhat. Recall the collaboration with Nintendo to bring popular IP to the platform in the form of Super Mario Run and other related titles that failed to generate any large-scale commercial momentum?

I am doubtful that Ubisoft expects Assassins Creed to do the kind of numbers on iOS that they get on PC and console. So why are they getting into the iOS game?

Sure, the software stack is now unified so an iOS port can also be sold on Macs which are finally strong enough to handle games. External display and controller support has finally gotten good. And the ecosystem as a whole has reached a level which can support gaming development. Additionally, Macs are growing ever popular. I would also be surprised if Apple wasn’t doing quite a bit of dealmaking in the background to make this shift happen as well.

But there is something else too…

Vision Pro is the wildcard here. We saw during WWDC users casually sitting back while playing video games over controllers on a massive floating window. If the headset catches on in a big way, it could be the TV of choice for the next generation of users. This would be very bad news for the console industry which relies on the prevalence of TV. This is certainly not a for sure deal. But in many ways, spatial reality displays could shape up to be a 1:1 replacement for home television. It could also be the next computer of choice for people. This is a powerful motivator. Ubisoft and others know that the core fundamentals of their product delivery is at risk. You go where the customers are. and pushing console games onto iOS is a good way to be ready to capture the momentum of the coming boom.

Posting this a week late:

Apple video team getting bold about getting Tim Cook wrapped up in their shenanigans.

Impressions:

Apple Watch Series 9

• S9 chip, 5.6 billion transistors (60% more), 30% faster GPU
• Neural Engine for on device Siri for faster responses even without internet
• 2000 nit display (2x vs last gen), display goes as dark as 1 nit
• Gen 2 ultra wideband chip for precision finding for iPhones
• Double Tap feature - Looks like the accessibility feature got promoted to full fledged interaction type. Looks pretty neat
• new pink aluminum colorway

Visit from Mother Nature

• Tim Cook’s return to acting after the iPad Pro ad
• More companies should do their sustainability reports in short segments with Octavia Spencer as Mother Nature
• Carbon neutral by 2030
• Apple Watch entirely carbon neutral - Recycled aluminum, gold, tin, copper, tungsten, cobalt yarn
• All Watch manufacturing is powered by 100% renewable energy
• Apple will match 100% of expected electricity use of Apple Watch
• No more leather in Apple products, replaced by FineWoven which is “suede-like” - This makes sense in hindsight to help achieve carbon neutrality
• Apple is going really hard on sustainability message this year
• The median annual income of the actors in that ad is probably north of 5 million a year

Apple Watch Ultra 2

• All the features from the S9
• 3000 nit display
• Various software improvements
• 95% recycled titanium

iPhone 15

• Dynamic Island takeover of the entire lineup is complete
• Peak brightness 2000 nits (Peak HDR brightness now 1600 nits)
• Slightly contoured edges - looks nice
• The glass on the back is now also color infused - Imagine being a member of the design team trying to explain this subtle difference to their parents
• 48 MP main camera - pixel binning every 4 pixels into one pixel to produce a 24 MP photo
• Sensor cropping to achieve 2x optical zoom - this is similar to what Google Pixel does too. It’s a nifty trick
• Bigger battery - neat!
• Satellite for Roadside Assistance - Neat, seems like this still trickle down to almost every feature eventually. I think recent Huawei phones can send chat messages with this same technique so iPhone will probably get this soon too
• 75% recycled aluminum, 100% recycled cobalt and copper
• Solid update for people on old phones. Really adds a lot of the pro features people wanted $799 regular, $899 for plus

A16 Bionic

• 16 core neural engine
• 5 core GPU (50% more memory bandwidth)
• 6 cores(2 high performance, 4 efficiency)
• Gen 2 Ultra Wideband friend finding. This is the real announcement today. Crazy quality of life upgrade for friend groups

USB-C

• !!! It’s happening !!! We did it Reddit, we bullied Apple into complying !!! The EU maybe helped idk it was us all the armchair experts on Reddit commenting that did it
• AirPods Pro minor refresh with USB-C, dust resistance, and a mysterious new wireless protocol for low latency lossless between AirPods and Vision Pro
• Now what will people on this subreddit complain about?
• Watch the general public backlash on this be so huge cause “they’re changing the charger again!!!”

iPhone 15 Pro

• Titanium casing - lightest Pros yet
• Smaller border, same screen size
• “Same alloy used on the mars rover” - Ok this will be so useful for when I accidentally find myself on Mars after a drunken night out
• “Using aluminum on the inside creates synergistic properties with the titanium enclosure” - my mind just touched the void
• More repairable structural frame allows back glass replacement - neat!

Action Button

• Replaces the slider
• Press and hold with haptic feedback - hopefully no accidental activation risk
• Activate quick actions like camera, voice recorder, and shortcuts
• Strange feeling now that we have essentially looped back around to having shutter buttons on phones

A17 Pro

• This is the first time, I think, we have seen a clear differentiation in iPhone chips like this with a Pro designation
• 3nm, 10% faster performance cores
• Neural Engine 2x as fast for 35 trillion operations per second
• ProRes Codec, AV1 decoder
• USB 3 - 10 gigabits per second
• 20% faster GPU - Hardware accelerated Ray Tracing

Console Gaming Coming to Mobile

• The Division Resurgence, Resident Evil Village & 4, Assassin’s Creed Mirage
• I think Apple by doing this also makes these games compatible with MacOS. Are they leveraging iPhones market power for an ecosystem assist in Mac gaming? Interesting to think about
• Every year I think I only need the regular phone, then engineering pulls out some neat tricks that gets me to spring for the Pro models

Pro Camera

• 48 MP camera for ProRAW and HEIF (24 MP default photo)
• 12 MP ultrawide with some minor improvements
• Similar pixel math to simulate different 7 different optical zooms - Macro, 13 MM, 24 MM, 28 MM, 35 MM, 48 MM, 120 MM
• Support for direct capture tools like Capture One
• Pro Max exclusive 5x optical Zoom - 25% larger sensor - “tetra prism” to create a longer focal length (Regular Pro has 3x Telephoto no prism)
• Using ultrawide and main camera together to capture spatial content for Vision Pro - Concerns about people using their Vision Pro to take video are anticlimactically resolved now

Overall, a short event but pretty solid upgrades all around. I am mostly excited for this console gaming on phone thing. Seems like an interesting strategy.