News Tech — Apple Keynote @ WWDC2017
Monday was the internationally followed Apple’s keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2017 #WWDC2017.
Craig Federighi, Phil Schiller and Tim Cook, executives at Apple, took the stage and announced several updates as well as new products. Here are the main highlights:
- Say Hi to iOS 11
iPhone and iPad are getting a new operating system this fall.
First of all, Siri is getting some nice updates. It will sound more human, and translate automatically to Chinese, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Siri is also getting better at understanding the context and your personal interests: it will monitor your browsing in order to determine what you like the most, and to give you news and more information about it.
The Photo app is getting new features as well. Apple’s High Efficiency Image Format allows you to save better images that take up less room thanks to new information compression technology. Regarding videos, a new video encoding can decrease 4K video sizes. And last but not least, the iPhone camera app can finally read QR Codes !
About Maps, Apple adds new cities, speed limits and lane guidance. Also, there is a new “Do Not Disturb While Driving” mode, which desactivates all your notifications while driving.
The Control Center has evolved - no need to swipe anymore, all the Control Center boards are now accessible all at once. Everything can be controlled from there and can be personalized. For example, you can add a Screen Recording that captures a video of your screen.
There is also a new Appstore that looks a lot more like Apple News. There is a Today tab, Games tab with suggestions. Among others, there are much fewer things on the screen, so being featured by Apple is going to be a bigger deal with this redesign.
Mobile payment also becomes easier since Apple Pay will be available in 50% of retailers this year. Evermore, you can now send direct payments to friends by using Apple Pay in iMessage.
- Powerful iMac Pro - VR Ready
Apple launched the new iMac Pro, a 5K and all-in-one computer. It can have processors up to 4terabytes of storage, 22 teraflops, and a memory up to 128 gigs. Two fans are included in the new thermal cooling system, and it even has a new keyboard and trackpad.
About the price … it starts at $5,000. However it’s worth it as the computer is really powerful, and Apple intends it for machine learning, VR and real-time 3D rendering.
Furthermore, there will be an upgrade to all the MacBook and iMac models. The processors will be more efficient and have more autonomy. The MacBook Pro and Retina iMac will get a price drop, both starting at $1,299. The new iMac Pro will be available in December, while the new Macs are already shipping today.
- Personal home assistant : the HomePod
It has been few months since Amazon and Google has launched their Home speakers. Apple has finally revealed its own Siri-connected speaker.
Cylindrical, the speaker called “HomePod” looks like the Mac Pro, is 7-inch tall, has an Apple A8 chip that makes the sound better than your average smart speaker. Apple promises to “reinvent music in the home” and “rock the house”.
Its biggest and exclusive feature is the “Spatial Awareness” technology that allows the device to detect the space around it and adjust the audio to match its surroundings. Two HomePods can work in stereo and create richer sounds. It boasts echo cancellation technology, bass modeling and real time acoustic.
Its smart assistant Siri is included into the speaker. Six microphones are fitted around the edges of the device. Users will be able to control Siri through voice commands, and access services like news, weather, reminders, and Apple’s HomeKit to control connected home devices with speech.
“HomePod packs powerful speaker technology, Siri intelligence and wireless access to the entire Apple Music library into a beautiful speaker that is less than 7 inches tall” — Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing
It will be available in white or dark grey, for the US, UK and Australia in December at $349, and in 2018 for other countries.
- iPad Pro
During the second half of the WWDC 2017 keynote, Apple introduced the iPad Pro and its specific features on iOS 11. It focuses on productivity, and makes easier for people to use the iPad as a laptop.
The dock can now be filled with a bunch of apps, like the dock on your iMac, and it can appear on any screen so you don’t have to escape an app to see it. You can also use an App Switcher so you can multi-task and switch between different windows you are working on, each of them maintains split-view apps if you are using them. Apple also introduced the drag-and-drop into the iPad thanks to the split screen, so you’ll be able to drag images or text.
Regarding file management, a new app simply called Files enables a desktop-style file management to the tablet, and brings together all of your files, supports tags, search, iCloud, Dropbox and Google Drive.
- Apple ARKIT
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO had been teasing the world for several months now that the company is serious about augmented reality.
And here it is! Apple introduced its ARKit, a new suite of developper’s tools to help them create AR apps for iPhone and iPad. It is supposed to allow “fast and stable motion tracking”, a software that could place virtual objects into the real world via the iPhone’s camera. To demo it, they generated a digital lamp and a coffee cup on a table.
ARKit supports Unity, Unreal Engine and Scenekit and it will be coming to iPad and iPhone pretty soon.
Apple is just catching up with its competitors aka Google and its Tango. But for now, Tango is only available on a few Android devices, while Apple ARKit will be available across the entire iOS ecosystem which makes it the largest AR platform in the world.
- Conclusion
We witnessed a pretty impressive number of announcements from Apple: about their softwares with a new iOS 11, MacOS High Sierra but also about hardware with a new iPod Pro, the HomePod speaker and a powerful iMac Pro.
We can’t really say those products are innovative since we’ve already seen Google and Amazon’s Home Assistants, and the Surface Pro by Microsoft. Maybe more disappointing, ten years on from the launch of Apple’s first iPhone, no announcements were made about the next iPhone8.
