Some quick thoughts on Apple’s WWDC 2024. Notes and analysis across all the OS updates from the event, Apple TV+, visionOS 2, iOS 18, AirPods & Home, watchOS 11, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia and Apple’s newly introduced AI capabilties.

Apple TV+

Apple teased a number of returning shows, new shows and new movies with a lot of star power. Most exciting for me though, is the return of Severance!

visionOS

I’m not a Vision Pro wielder, nor am I intimately familiar with its current feature set / real-world capabilities but from what I’ve gathered based on the newly announced “features” and some of the feedback from prominent Apple journalists, visionOS 2 is pretty lackluster. Hell, one of the features they slapped onto the “new feature grid” graphic was “Mouse Support”. Ooph. This seems like a platform they are having a hard time putting real engineering resources into. Is it due to low adoption? Maybe they’ve been too caught up trying to bring Apple Intelligence (i.e. genAI capabilities) to their platforms? Who knows.

iOS

iOS 18 brings a lot of aesthetic customizability and quality of life improvements, without any real breakthrough functionality. I’ve listed out some of the more interesting added features below…

  • More homescreen customizability, i.e. place app icons/widgets wherever and giving your homescreen icons a uniform color scheme
  • Control Center now has more native controls, control pages and an API for developers to expose third-party app control toggles
  • You can lock and/or hide apps
  • Messages now sports any-emoji tapbacks, text-formatting and text effects
  • Maps now has topographic data which is nicely paired with new hiking route capabilities
  • Apple takes a swing at Venmo with the Wallet apps new “tap to cash” feature
  • Journal app now compiles “insights” into a dashboard and adds a basic search feature
  • The photos app has been “redesigned”, though the redesign looks fairly lackluster despite how excited they seemed for it during the recording
  • Though not given any stage time, Messages now supports RCS
  • Maybe the most interesting feature they announced was the ability to send iMessages and regular text messages via satellite, even in non-emergency situations. Is this a free capability? Would this mean I don’t need a cellular plan to send messages? Lots of questions here…

Overall, not a huge update, but one in which I am excited to get my hands on in the fall when they ship the final release.

Audio & Home

They grouped the AirPods (“Audio”) and smart home (“Home”) updates in the same presentation section. Mostly ho-hum announcements here. Two things I’ll call out though…

First, they coded up a feature they’re calling “Enchance Dialogue” which will accentuate spoken word in movies/shows. This comes as a response to people increasingly using subtitles when they watch TV because they can’t make out what actors are saying. Whether this speaks more to the current state of sound mixing in film/TV production or our ability to actually pay attention to what we are watching (instead of always being distracted with second screens) I really can’t say.

Second, they spent a fair amount presentation time debuting a Snoopy/Woodstock Apple TV screen saver. Look, I kinda like Snoopy / Charlie Brown but is there really a big enough market for this? I wouldn’t use this screen saver as it is not nearly as cool as their stunning landscape screen savers.

watchOS

watchOS 11 introduces a new “Vitals” app which aggregates metrics/data from the various onboard health sensors, a new training mode which can calculate intensity of your workout and more customizable control over your daily activity rings, letting you set a per-day goal and take into account things like rest days (finally!). Some nice features here in what is a decent iterative update.

iPadOS

iPadOS 18 is basically just what they announced for iOS 18. The only thing maybe worth mentioning that is unique to the iPad is “Smart Script”, which does some cool Apple Pencil-related things. A big let-down for those who main iPads though I suspect.

macOS

macOS Sequoia has a decent sleight of new features, but mostly plays catchup, with some sherlocking thrown in for good measure. You can now mirror/control your iPhone directly on your Mac (okay?), tile & snap application windows, and there is a new dedicated passwords app coming. There is also some gaming-related things but honestly I don’t game on the Mac.

I’ve been a 1Password user for a long time. Time will tell, but I didn’t see enough from this first iteration of Apple’s password manager to convince me to migrate from 1Password. They will need to convince me that they have solid multi-device/multi-platform support, dependable iCloud backup/sync, offline backup (in case iCloud does something iCloud-ey), support for multiple types of “secrets” (i.e. traditional credentials, credit cards, secure notes, software licenses, identities, etc…), MFA code support, weak password alerts, a much better password/passphrase generator, etc…

Apple Intelligence

Finally, Apple got around to announcing their (dreaded, for me) entrance into “AI”. I don’t want to spend much time in this post explaining the reasons I don’t like modern generative AI, so instead you can just go read this. So what did Apple announce?

They’ve branded their “AI” suite of capabilities, “Apple Intelligence” (get it? abbreviated as “AI”). It is on-device (mostly), it can write/re-write stuff for you, generate those awful, soul-less images, and has some off-device capabilities which leverage Apple’s own “Private Cloud Compute“1 and even ChatGPT (gross).

One thing I found particularly disgusting is the inclusion of a generative AI “art” feature which Craig described as the ability to create “totally original” images. Really? Totally original? I.e. totally not having stolen from countless other artists and creators? The overwhelming response to this particular aspect of Apple’s AI function-set seems to be pretty negative. But hey, if they’re doing it on-device, atleast that means it’s not some data center consuming resources at humanity-annihilating pace all just to creat cringey, lifeless photos of your mom in a super hero cape. One thing I actually did kinda like was “Genmoji”. Now I can create a whole suite of shark-related emojis that could not have existed before, and because they all have that same kinda “emoji-aesthetic”, I personally think they are less harmful to creators.

Time will tell if these AI features are actually useful, remain private and/or whether they can make Siri not hilariously bad. For what it’s worth, I actually walked away being less discouraged by Apple’s implementation than I thought I was going to be. Yes, they have partnered with ChatGPT in some capacity which I find disappointing, but their ability to implement something purely Apple home-grown, which leverages on-device processing first is something I think is very promising in terms of both their continued privacy stance and their ecological promises. In the end though, I hope all of this “AI” stuff is opt-out or otherwise completely disableable.