It’s that exciting time of year when Apple announces its big software and features’ upgrades and oh boy this year didn’t disappoint. Of course these iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS updates won’t be available to the public until September but for the beta testers out there, Apple has certainly given us a lot of reasons to be excited about over the summer months. 

Before diving into a summary of my favourite features let me share a few thoughts on the format of the last 3 WWDC keynotes. Let's start with WWDC20. Of course my first reaction (and I'd guess pretty much everyone else's) was that the new online format is something temporary and will be never beat the in-person experience - and that goes for both the developers, the rest of the world and the Apple employees. But hold my beer. Over the years it kinda grew on me (and yes the fancy drone transitions and footage of the Apple Park was one of the reasons). Jokes aside I believe Apple prepares better looking presentations and more concise and to the point feature-release videos - notice how much shorter WWDCs are these days! The developers attending the event are of course much fewer but for those attending can really benefit from spending more time with the Apple employees. So the days when all the Apple employees working on these new features were attending the WWDC are long gone! ..and that’s good. Let me sum this - unnecessary people are not present, the videos for the online viewers are much better, the presentation is shorter - pretty good deal for everyone if you ask me.

But enough with these, here are my favourite new features.

You can watch all the new announcements of dub-dub 22 in 15'

A long awaited feature I must say but admittedly caught me by surprise. It's not often that Apple completely revamps and overhauls something and with the new lock screen they've gone the extra mile. 

This changes everything. It's proper multi-tasking on iPad something that, let's be real, it lacked since day 1. A side feature that is also more than welcomed is the ability to extend your iPad screen on an external monitor (even wide-screen) instead of just mirroring - FINALLY!! But let's go back to Stage Manager. What is actually this new Stage Manager feature. As 9to5mac describes it, Stage Manager is an entirely new multitasking experience that automatically organises apps and windows, making it quick and easy to switch between tasks. For the first time on iPad, users can create overlapping windows of different sizes in a single view, drag and drop windows from the side, or open apps from the Dock to create groups of apps for faster, more flexible multitasking. The window of the app users are working on is displayed prominently in the centre, and other open apps and windows are arranged on the left-hand side in order of recency.

The downside is that Stage Manager is only available on iPad Pro and iPad Air with the M1 chip (for processing requirements). Nevertheless this is something I will be definitely be using on my M1 iPad Air. Which got me thinking is time to ditch my laptop? Let's see in the next few months (I only code on my work laptop these days).

I truly believe this is huge leap for the Apple Watch. Primarily because Apple didn't have to constrain its new features to the smaller screen, older processor and fewer sensors of Apple Watch 3. At long last Apple Watch 3 won't be supported. 

Amongst the ton of new features (which you can see in the video above), I'm more excited about the new running workout metrics and customisation. watchOS 9 adds extra metrics' screens that display the elevation profile, power details, heart rate zones but also notifies you when you're falling into and out of specific heart rate zones, allowing you to train for specific goals and fitness levels.