A quick rundown of all my most-anticipated announcements (and unannounced tidbits) from WWDC 2024:

visionOS

• Mac Virtual Display — Huge updates for productivity!
  • Mouse Support — This makes working with Vision apps and Mac Virtual Display way more seamless.
  • Wide and Ultra Wide Screen Options — YES. I can easily see myself downgrading from the 16-inch screen to 14-inch for my next MacBook Pro.
• New Gesture — Way easier and efficient to invoke Home View and Control Center! Also alleviates my annoyance with how inefficient it was to see the time.
• Create Spatial Photos — Fucking. Awesome. All of my food photos can be transformed with AI into Spatial Photos. I've already done a few and this is just mind-blowing. It's hard to describe, but the experience is somewhere between looking at a two-dimensional photo and actually being there in the moment.
• Rearrangeable Home View
• New Bora Bora Environment — Great addition! These immersive environments are going to be such delightful additions like getting new watch faces in watchOS.
• AirPlay Receiver — Not sure exactly how I will use this but I appreciate any feature that let's me bring non-AVP things into my AVP.
• Improved Hand Tracking — Upgraded from 30Hz to 90Hz to make my hands feel more realistic when immersed. (For context, Meta Quest is 60Hz.)
• Improved Full Screen Videos in Safari — Huge improvement for watching videos on YouTube, Hulu, and other streaming services that can only be played on AVP via Safari. This gets the YouTube experience from completely unbearable to totally doable. Nothing will beat a native app but this is good enough to significantly increase my AVP usage.

Apps

• New Passwords App — Goodbye, 1Password! For me, this will be a game-changer for helping me manage my parents' passwords.
• Messages Improvements — Some of these are catch-ups but some are also enhancements to subtly keep iMessage blue bubbles positioned above SMS/RCS green bubbles.
  • Scheduled Messages — Finally. I constantly find funny links that I want to send to certain friends but know it's inappropriate to text late at night.
  • Easier Tapbacks — Love to see iMessage adopt this from Slack/Discord.
  • Text Effects — This will be fun to play around with.
  • Messaging via Satellite — Wow. Maybe I can start doing more outdoorsy, off-the-grid type things when I travel?? Very curious to see how this evolves.
• Reminders in Calendar — Goodbye, Fantastical! This alone will save me $57/year.
• Math Notes — Goodbye, Soulver! (Assuming this works as I hope it does.)
• Highlights in Safari — A welcomed enhancement for browsing websites. I like how Apple is using AI to enhance the web instead of trying to replace it like Open AI and Google.
• Redesigned Photos — The navigation is controversial but customizable so we'll see how this pans out.

iOS & iPadOS

• Home Screen and Control Center Customizations — Finally. Not sure how much I will personally use these new options but this should've been implemented years ago.
• Customizable Lock Screen Buttons — I'm looking forward to replacing the bottom-left Flashlight button with Camera and the bottom-right Camera button with Overcast. This just makes so much sense for me when I'm taking food photos with my left hand or opening Overcast when I get in my car.
• Lock/Hide Apps — Finally. Also, this will be awesome for parents who let their kids play with their phones.
• Remote Screen Control during Screen Share — Huge for being our parents' tech support.
• Vocal Shortcuts — Custom voice trigger words!
• Custom Charging Limits — A nice little improvement for maintaining battery health.
• T9 Dialing for iOS — A nice little quality-of-life improvement that is a welcomed copy from Android.
• Calculator App for iPad — Holy. Shit. A basic calculator app should've been added over a decade ago but they just dropped this bomb like Taylor Swift.
• Smart Script for iPad — As someone who has struggled with chicken-scratch handwriting all my life, this thing is absolutely mind-blowing.

AirPods

• Head Gestures — Wow. Such a brilliant feature to answer/reject voice calls.

tvOS

• Subtitles on Mute — A delightful enhancement for such a common use-case.
• InSight for Apple Originals — This won't replace Callsheet for me because it won't have actor ages and heights, but this is a welcomed enhancement that I could see being added to to any video played in the TV app.

watchOS

• Double Tap for Third-Party Apps
• Live Activities
• Distance and Route Maps for More Workouts
• Vitals App
• Custom Ringtones and Text Tones — Finally.

macOS

• iPhone Mirroring — Wow. Apple's Continuity continues to be the gift that keeps on giving! I totally expect this to come to Apple Vision Pro but I'm also curious to see if this will eventually evolve into something like Samsung DeX.
• iOS Notifications on Mac — Fuck yeah. Back in 2011, I wrote about how redundant push notifications will be a problem. Apple went a different route than I proposed but I'm here for it!
• Window Snapping — Finally. Not sure if I will personally use this but this is a welcomed copy from Windows.
• Keep Downloaded for iCloud Files — Big quality-of-life improvement for managing offline assets that are hosted on iCloud Drive.

Apple Intelligence

• Onscreen Awareness and Personal Context — Because the system has an understanding of what you're looking at, what your tendencies are, and what actions your apps can do, Siri can take action inside and across apps. Fucking amazing and I'm dying to play around with it.
• ChatGPT Integration — It's here! It's free! And it's private. (Love how it'll seamless upgrade to ChatGPT Pro too.)
• Priority Notifications — Curious to see how this pans out, especially with the auto-summaries.
• Reduce Interruptions Focus Mode
• Clean Up in Photos — Finally we'll be able to remove people and things from our photos in the native Photos app.
• Smarter Search in Photos — I just want to be able to say, "Siri, show me everything shot on this day."
• "Siri, how do I…?" — Huge for my parents.
• Genmoji — This honestly might replace GIF reactions for me in my daily interactions. Can't wait!

Overall, this would have to be one of the best WWDCs I've seen. It had an excellent variety of quality-of-life improvements, nice catch-ups from Android, meeting AI expectations, and a few mind-blowing announcements. Can't wait to get my hands on the public betas!

Back in 2017, I wrote:

While everyone is talking about next-gen smartphones like the very impressive Galaxy Note 8 and the highly-anticipated iPhone X, I'm more interested in what's being built on top of smartphones that will bridge us to the next big thing — Augmented Reality.

At the time, Apple was on the verge of launching ARKit for iOS developers, which was Apple's first public building block towards the next big (hardware) thing that comes after the smartphone[^1].

Fast forward seven years to today, we finally have Apple Vision Pro (AVP).

The hype cycle has completely come and gone these past few months, but I've been using my AVP every day since launch and I've collected all my thoughts on the hardware, software, and user experience into this post.

Let's get into it.

Read More

It blows my mind how many people preach this conspiracy theory. Marques Brownlee, the one tech reviewer who loves tech without being a fanboy in either direction, explains it best.

Lots of hot takes immediately dismissing the Apple Vision Pro. They're all short-sighted. Here are some historical fun facts about Apple products:

• iPhone did not get copy-and-paste until the third-generation iPhone 3GS.
• iPhone didn’t get mainstream adoption until the iPhone 4.
• Apple Watch did not have clear killer app until watchOS 3, when Apple doubled-down on Fitness & Health.
• The first-generation Apple Watch had as much compute power as two iPhone 4s.
• When AirPods were first released, it was ridiculed for its looks. Today, AirPods are the gold standard for wireless earbuds and headphone jacks are non-standard on modern flagship smartphones.

So what are people saying about Apple Vision Pro?

"It costs 7x as much as the Meta Quest…"

Yes, that's true. As Ben Evans puts it:

Meta is trying to catalyze an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware - Apple is trying to catalyze an ecosystem while we wait for the right price.

Both paths are good bets…but I think Apple's vision is smarter.

Zuckerberg envisions everyone wearing VR headsets for most hours of the day, both at work and at home. His belief is that your digital life will be as important as your physical life. To Zuckerberg, living in the digital world is socializing, not isolating.

Apple disagrees. Tim Cook has said for years that the goal is to have AR enhance the real world around you. The Vision Pro is built from the ground up to let interact with both the real world and the digital world at the same time.

Nilay Patel of The Verge, summed it up the best:

Meta Quest 2 is a mid-range Android smartphone on your face.

Apple Vision Pro is a MacBook on your face.

In the pre-iPhone era, the smartphone was thought of as a cell phone with apps. Then Apple launched a mobile computer with a phone app.

If the "metaverse" is going to be a thing, Apple will make it just one dimension of spatial computing.

"The 2-hour battery isn't even long enough for a movie! LOL"

Yup, and that's fine for this v1.0 model! This generation is targeted for developers and will only be used for indoor, stationary situations. The fun begins when it becomes portable, but we need developers to make that meaningful.

"Creepy Black Mirror vibes."

I gotta admit, the spacial camera demo of the father recording his kid's birthday while wearing Apple Vision Pro is a bit cringey…and we all know how Google Glass was rejected. But remember: there was a time when having a camera on a cellphone was considered creepy too.

We'll see how this pans out, but for now, Apple Vision Pro will clearly indicate to others when you are recording.

"I'm not going to walk around with ski goggles on my face."

I'm not planning on it either, lol. But that's fine, because Apple is playing a very, very long-game here.

Overall, Apple Vision Pro is a massive step towards AR glasses. This is a long stop-gap to get developers building on the AR platform until the product is portable to wear outside and affordable enough for the common consumer.

And if there's any tech company in the world that will miniaturize powerful hardware into something the size of a pair of sunglasses, it's Apple.

Nokia and Blackberry were skating to where the puck was going to be, and felt nice and fast and in control, while Apple and Google were melting the ice rink and switching the game to water-skiing.

At the time, Nokia and Blackberry seemed to be leading the way to the future. There weren't wrong…but iPhone and Android completely changed the game.

The biggest argument I've heard in support of side-loading and third-party app stores for iOS is:

I'm paying over $1,000 for my device. I should have the right to do whatever I want with it!

While I do agree with that sentiment, I firmly believe that would only lead to a shitty path for iOS. Marco Arment perfectly illustrates my my same sentiments:

I don’t expect side-loading or alternative app stores to become possible, and I’m relieved, because that is not a future I want for iOS.

When evaluating such ideas, I merely ask myself:

“What would Facebook do?”

Facebook owns four of the top ten apps in the world. If side-loading became possible, Facebook could remove Instagram, WhatsApp, the Facebook app, and Messenger from Apple’s App Store, requiring customers to install these extremely popular apps directly from Facebook via side-loading.

And everyone would.

And then:

Alternative app stores would be even worse. Rather than offering individual apps via side-loading, Facebook could offer just one:

The Facebook App Store.

Instagram, WhatsApp, the Facebook app, and Messenger could all be available exclusively there.

The majority of iOS users in the world would soon install it, and Facebook would start using leverage in other areas — apps’ social accounts, stats packages, app-install ads, ad-attribution requirements — to heavily incentivize (and likely strong-arm) a huge number of developers to offer their apps in the Facebook App Store, likely in addition to Apple’s.

Maybe I’d be required to add the Facebook SDK to my app in order to be in their store, which they would then use to surveil my users.

Maybe I’d need to buy app-install ads to show up in search there at all.

Maybe I’d need to pay Facebook to “promote” each app update to reach more than a tiny percentage of my existing customers.

This would be true for any conglomerate, including Amazon and Google. But I'm specifically concerned about Facebook.

We all know how much Zuckerberg hates Apple for implementing so many tracking-prevention measures that harms Facebook's business model. There's no doubt in my mind that Facebook would leverage its apps against Apple.

I support this.

At the very, very least, Apple needs to allow developers to offer alternative payment options:

• all in-app purchases must offer a Pay with iTunes option
• the Pay with iTunes button must be more prominent than any other payment option

Here's a quick rundown of my favorite updates announced at Apple's annual WWDC.

tvOS

• Xbox One and PS4 controller support for games

watchOS 6

• watchOS App Store => Apple Watch Independence!
• streaming support
• menstrual cycle tracking

iOS 13

• system-wide dark mode
• built-in swipe typing
• Maps: favorites, collections, street view
• up to 30% faster Face ID
• up to 2x faster app launch
• Sign in with Apple button — privacy-focused version of "Sign in with Facebook/Twitter/Google"
• HomeKit Secure Video — store videos from HomeKit cameras to iCloud
• HomeKit support for routers
• iMessage Profiles — add your own display name, avatar. Only people in your contacts can see this.
• Memoji — makeup, hats, piercings
• Memoji stickers — automatically turns your memoji into a sticker pack with all standard emoji facial expressions
• Video editing in Photos app
• dual iCloud accounts per device (for personal and work)
• smaller volume HUD — changing volume doesn't bring the stupid dialog in the middle of the screen

Siri

• auto-announce messages on AirPods
• audio sharing — play your music on a friend's AirPods
• Music HandOff to HomePod — music on your iPhone will continue on your HomePod with a physical tap
• live radio stations on HomePod
• Siri Shortcut Events — automatically run shortcuts based on an event
• Voice ID for HomePod => multi-user support

iPadOS 13

• multiple windows for the same app
• easily switching Slide Over apps
• App Exposé
• Safari: download manager
• third-party font management
• built in Zip/Unzip files
• three-finger swipe gesture to undo/redo
• mouse support (hidden as accessibility option)
• iCloud Folder Sharing
• network drives support in Files app
• USB/SD drives support in Files app

Mac Pro

• starts at $5,999
• $4,999 - $5,999 for 32" monitor
• $999 for monitor stand (LOL)

macOS Catalina

• Project Catalyst and SwiftUI— an easy way for developers to make apps for ALL of Apple's platforms! The future of the Apple ecosystem.
• SideCar — wirelessly use your iPad as a second monitor
• full voice control
• Find My - combines Find My iPhone, Find My Friends into one app. WORKS WITH OFFLINE DEVICES
• Activation Lock — like iOS, if someone steals your MacBook, you can lock it down so they cannot format your computer.
• approve with Apple Watch — like Unlock with Apple Watch but for EVERYTHING

ARKit 3

• people inclusion — people are detected in real-time and AR elements can visibly work around people
• motion capture for people