This was the best WWDC kickoff in years, even before the Vision Pro reveal. These were some of my thoughts as the keynote was flying by. All in all, the stuff I use every day will get a little better. Perfect.
15" MacBook Air
So revealing to hear the positioning on this one. All the comparisons were head-to-head against unnamed i7 Windows machines, with even a mini-Continuity demo showing off Continuity Clipboard and Messages between the iPhone the prospective buyer already owns. Switchers, this one's for you, and it's going to sell like crazy.
Mac Studio + Mac Pro
The product lineup is clear now. The role of the Mac Pro is "the Mac Studio with PCIe slots". Nice to see the Avid cards in the lineup, too. Feels like a bit of a waste of that gorgeous case.
Going straight after Nvidia in touting the model training ability of the M2 Ultra was interesting. Is training locally important? Not for OpenAI-scale LLMs. Those are why Nvidia has this turnkey-ish datacenter. Maybe local training is for an app developer custom-training their own non-LLM model? Does the smoothie-ordering demo app have a fruit classification model now?
I'm still a bit surprised that the RAM story ends at 192GB. The previous-generation Intel Mac Pro could be configured with up to 1.5TB. I honestly don't even know concrete examples of use cases for that much memory, but Apple seems to have either discovered that there just aren't really any of note, or all 15 people who would use that didn't make the P/M fit cut.
iOS 17
The keyboard changes are über-Apple. "What will Apple have to say about LLMs?! What will Apple's story be for writing assistance, like in Gmail or Word?" A transformer language model in the keyboard, and used for dictation. On-device, secure, used constantly, OS-level. None of the tacked-on "AI" features Google and Microsoft are shoveling into their products are half this useful (or will get used a tenth as much).
"Live Voicemail" is the perfect example of the power of a good name. Android has had that feature for what, 2 years? I didn't remember it existed until I heard the good description from today's keynote. Live Voicemail. Like Visual Voicemail. I love it.
Messages letting you build your own sticker library (from subject-isolated photos) makes that actually attractive to me. Before, I couldn't have given less of a shit about stickers. And sending a Memoji reaction is treated as a cry for help in my group texts.
Interesting to hear the presenter, going over Memories improvements, say "from experience, we know how much people love..." Never underestimate dogfooding, even (especially?) at Apple's scale.
iPadOS
I can't tell if the very quick yada-yada-ing of Stage Manager flexibility was because the keynote was already packed or because they're still not confident that it's solved. I will admit that I had the briefest moment of FOMO seeing the iPadOS dock and Stage Manager windows on the Studio display. Is that the future of computing? I ask myself, owning an iPad Pro and still typing this on a Mac.
macOS
In Safari, the Home / Work / School contexts seem like a more usable iteration of Tab Groups, which I never found compelling.
I'm biased as product manager of a web app but the addition of web apps as pseudo-apps in macOS is a dream. I can't wait to get to use that and encourage my users to do the same.
Other OSes
FaceTime on AppleTV is fantastic, and something I've wanted for a while. It's amazing how many years of constant building a "just add X to Y" takes, though. Continuity camera is one of several shared technologies (shifting participant windows was a 2020 addition I believe) that all had to be in place to ship this "X to Y" feature. Same story with Airplay in Carplay. Two examples of the awesome capabilities building in a deliberate and strategic way unlocks for you.
The watchOS redesign is the clear final step in what I believe is the product strategy here. Ship a device that covers a ton of use cases. Users will tell you which ones they care about (health, fitness, notifications). Wrap everything around those use cases — and now watchOS feels tailored to what the device is best at.
Apple Vision Pro + visionOS
Still thinking about this one. What I can say, is thank God that the first company to do a good VR product did so humanely. visionOS seems to be tuned to let real humans interrupt as frequently as it makes sense. Ignoring real life would have been a terrible UX precedent to set.
So revealing to hear the positioning on this one. All the comparisons were head-to-head against unnamed i7 Windows machines, with even a mini-Continuity demo showing off Continuity Clipboard and Messages between the iPhone the prospective buyer already owns. Switchers, this one's for you, and it's going to sell like crazy.
Mac Studio + Mac Pro
The product lineup is clear now. The role of the Mac Pro is "the Mac Studio with PCIe slots". Nice to see the Avid cards in the lineup, too. Feels like a bit of a waste of that gorgeous case.
Going straight after Nvidia in touting the model training ability of the M2 Ultra was interesting. Is training locally important? Not for OpenAI-scale LLMs. Those are why Nvidia has this turnkey-ish datacenter. Maybe local training is for an app developer custom-training their own non-LLM model? Does the smoothie-ordering demo app have a fruit classification model now?
I'm still a bit surprised that the RAM story ends at 192GB. The previous-generation Intel Mac Pro could be configured with up to 1.5TB. I honestly don't even know concrete examples of use cases for that much memory, but Apple seems to have either discovered that there just aren't really any of note, or all 15 people who would use that didn't make the P/M fit cut.
iOS 17
The keyboard changes are über-Apple. "What will Apple have to say about LLMs?! What will Apple's story be for writing assistance, like in Gmail or Word?" A transformer language model in the keyboard, and used for dictation. On-device, secure, used constantly, OS-level. None of the tacked-on "AI" features Google and Microsoft are shoveling into their products are half this useful (or will get used a tenth as much).
"Live Voicemail" is the perfect example of the power of a good name. Android has had that feature for what, 2 years? I didn't remember it existed until I heard the good description from today's keynote. Live Voicemail. Like Visual Voicemail. I love it.
Messages letting you build your own sticker library (from subject-isolated photos) makes that actually attractive to me. Before, I couldn't have given less of a shit about stickers. And sending a Memoji reaction is treated as a cry for help in my group texts.
Interesting to hear the presenter, going over Memories improvements, say "from experience, we know how much people love..." Never underestimate dogfooding, even (especially?) at Apple's scale.
iPadOS
I can't tell if the very quick yada-yada-ing of Stage Manager flexibility was because the keynote was already packed or because they're still not confident that it's solved. I will admit that I had the briefest moment of FOMO seeing the iPadOS dock and Stage Manager windows on the Studio display. Is that the future of computing? I ask myself, owning an iPad Pro and still typing this on a Mac.
macOS
In Safari, the Home / Work / School contexts seem like a more usable iteration of Tab Groups, which I never found compelling.
I'm biased as product manager of a web app but the addition of web apps as pseudo-apps in macOS is a dream. I can't wait to get to use that and encourage my users to do the same.
Other OSes
FaceTime on AppleTV is fantastic, and something I've wanted for a while. It's amazing how many years of constant building a "just add X to Y" takes, though. Continuity camera is one of several shared technologies (shifting participant windows was a 2020 addition I believe) that all had to be in place to ship this "X to Y" feature. Same story with Airplay in Carplay. Two examples of the awesome capabilities building in a deliberate and strategic way unlocks for you.
The watchOS redesign is the clear final step in what I believe is the product strategy here. Ship a device that covers a ton of use cases. Users will tell you which ones they care about (health, fitness, notifications). Wrap everything around those use cases — and now watchOS feels tailored to what the device is best at.
Apple Vision Pro + visionOS
Still thinking about this one. What I can say, is thank God that the first company to do a good VR product did so humanely. visionOS seems to be tuned to let real humans interrupt as frequently as it makes sense. Ignoring real life would have been a terrible UX precedent to set.