Apple Announces Smart Speaker HomePod, And Other Good Stuff From WWDC
Did you have a restful weekend? Are you ready for a whole slew of Apple product news? Well, friend, it's your lucky day. At Apple's annual developer conference keynote on Monday, the Cupertino company announced a brand new smart speaker called HomePod, a new iPad Pro, new MacBooks and iMacs, and a lot of updates to MacOS and iOS.
Below, you'll find the highlights in reverse chronological order. So if you missed the keynote, and want to experience the whole thing from start-to-finish, go on and scroll down to the bottom to start from the beginning.
One More Thing… HomePod
In Short: It's a Siri-enabled speaker for $349. It'll probably sound better than an Echo and be more functional than a Sonos. You can get it in December.
When can you get it, and for how much? The answer is December and $349. It comes in two colors.
Compared to Alexa, Apple says that HomePod will not be listening to you all the time, waiting for the "Hey Siri" wake word. Also anything it sends to Apple will be encrypted.
Outside of music, here's a list of things a HomePod can do. It'll also work with any HomeKit device — functioning as a base you can access with phone.
It sports six microphones, and the top lights up when you say "Hey Siri." Importantly, it'll have Siri functionality, so you don't need a series of rote commands to work it.
It has good guts. A Woofer and tweeters and an Apple A8 chip to make everything sound good. It'll detect the room, the song you're playing and alter the mix to make it sound, presumably, better. A full mix to "fill the room." You can even buy two and they'll work in concert with each other.
So here it is: HomePod.
Tim Cook thinks that when it comes to music at home, we can do better. Apple wants to reinvent home music. They want to combine a Sonos with an Echo.
iPad Pro
In Short: The new entry-level iPad Pro will have a 10.5-inch display with a 120 hz refresh rate. They ship next week. Tim Cook calls it "perfect."
There are a bunch of improvements to the Markup app, but the best thing is probably the fact that with iOS 11, your iPad can now read and index your handwriting for searching later.
We hope you're sitting down for this. On the iPad, iOS 11 will feature a file browser. It's called Files. Incredible. You can browse all your files on the iPad, with a single app. The crowd is going wild.
Basic GUI functionality like dragging and dropping stuff? Yeah it's there.
Oh wait, there are also some iOS 11 improvements to the iPad! The dock? It's larger.
So two versions of the iPad Pro now. Both starting at 64 GB. Here's all the prices, they ship next week.
Pro gamers will be excited to learn that the iPad Pro will have a 120hz refresh rate. It'll make your scrolling "buttery smooth" if that's your kinda thing. More importantly, it'll make the Apple Pencil more responsive. And if you're worried about this killing battery life: Don't. The iPad Pro will have the ability to switch refresh rates based on the app you're using. Powering all this will be a new processor, the A10x Fusion — the, you guessed it, the most powerful yet.
Well hey would you look at that, a new iPad Pro. It's the iPad Pro, but with a 10.5-inch display — settling in between the 9.7-inch and 13-inch version. The Goldilocks iPad Pro, if you will.
iOS 11
In Short: Siri will now be watching your every action to make "useful" suggestions to you. Expect a wave of AR applications. The App Store looks better. All of this will be yours come this Autumn.
You know how Populous was designed to look like you're playing on a table? AR kit will allow you to turn any table into a moving scene you can walk around, zoom in on and frame as you see fit. Like an in-game cutscene on your phone, I suppose. Watching Peter Jackson's Wingnut Studios demo it has a real wave-of-the-future feeling.
Perhaps the coolest addition iOS 11 will bring is AR support. Developers will now have access to ARKit, an API that will draw on the existing hardware in the iPhone and iPad to bring fast, functional AR to your mobile device. In other words, Pokémon Go is going to look so much better.
On the user side, the App Store is getting a redesign — chief of which is the Today tab. Apple wanted to recapture the "magic" of the early App Store, where users would excitedly visit the story daily to see what new Apps hit the marketplace. Today basically functions as a curated feed of new and noteworthy apps. Games and Apps will also get their own dedicated tabs for the traditionalists.
The App Store is getting some updates — for developers (Hey! this is a dev conference after all.) Here they are, in word cloud form.
iOS 11 comes with Airplay 2 — which lets you configure and control, hmm, speakers in various rooms. This seems like an update for something else Apple might be working on that has a speaker.
The Maps app will now support floorplan layouts of everyone's favorite places: Malls and airports.
Going back to Siri learning more about you. If you read a single article about something the News app will suggest more articles about that thing, and then when you go to text people about that thing it'll correct you when you attempt to spell it. Here, the example given is Iceland — which is so hot right now.
Have you ever unlocked your phone with a bunch of notifications on the home screen? iOS 11 is going to make browsing those notifications a little easier by just swiping up once the phone is unlocked.
Control Center is getting a welcome update. It's a single page. You can 3D Touch into more options.
For those with aging iPhones and free iCloud storage, iOS 11 will capture images with a new image format that will, practically speaking, take up less space on your device. Apple assures that it'll be compatible across platforms.
Of course, these are just parlor tricks compared to the biggest change to Siri: On-device learning. Basically, Siri tracks what you do and what you look at and suggests stuff for you. Sounds awesome and incredibly terrifying.
Siri is getting a new voice. It sounds less like… Siri? For example, it can say the same word with different inflections. It can also translate, which actually seems way easier than just Googling "Order coffee french."
You can also now just pay people with Apple Pay straight in messages. So yet another way to send money over the internet.
The first big update is to messages. Which will now store all your messages in the cloud. Good news if you stay signed into a device that's not yours.
Yup. They made the joke. iOS is getting turned up… to 11.
Mac, MacBook And iMac Pro
In Short: The iMac and MacBook Pro get a spec upgrade. The iMac Pro replaces the Mac Pro as a workstation machine. It starts at $4999 and you can get one in December.
It might be the most "powerful" iMac ever created, but the price seems… somewhat reasonable? You can get it in December for $4999.
New to the iMac lineup, the iMac Pro. It's space-gray not silver. You can get it with an 18-core Xeon processor, Radeon Vega graphics, 128 GB of ECC memory and a 4TB SSD.
The MacBook Pro also gets a bump in terms of CPU (Kaby Lake) and GPU, and a price drop for the 15-inch MBP.
And here's all that in Keynote bullet point form.
Hardware announcements at WWDC? Sure. New iMacs will support better displays, 7th-gen Intel Kaby Lake CPUs, up to 64 GB of RAM, Fusion Drives are now standard, and new GPU options — most importantly 4K iMacs will come with discreet graphics cards, Radeon Pro cards, which should be a huge upgrade when it comes to churning out polygons and VR support. Here's all that running an Unreal Engine 4 VR app on a 27-inch iMac.
macOS
In Short: High Sierra is a refined version of macOS Sierra with a new filesystem and graphics API. Also an easy target for weed jokes.
If you thought a new file system was exciting, well, get a load of this: High Sierra will feature a new graphics API: Metal 2. This means better performance for games, functionality for AI and machine learning processing, support for external workstation graphics and, most importantly, VR is coming to the Mac.
"Deep Technology" is what Apple is touting as the strong point of High Sierra. The first part of that is introducing a new file system: Apple File System, or APFS. According to Apple it's faster and more secure, but probably a pain when transferring files between Mac and Windows machines.
The Mail app gets a split-screen view in case you're the kinda person to do emails in fullscreen mode.
The first big feature? Safari has feature to block autoplay videos. Which seems like a pretty good reason to switch?
There's a new version of macOS Sierra. It's called High Sierra. Which is the highest point of the Sierra Nevada mountains. They made weed jokes.
watchOS
In Short: Siri will now recommend stuff for you on your watch. There are some Toy Story watch faces you can use.
Changes to the Music app, you can guess, will also incorporate some elements of personalization pulled from Apple Music. It also sports an album art-driven design, if that's important to you.
The same sort of personalization is coming to Activity as well. Your watch will now push you to work harder — in case you're not hard enough on yourself already.
Say hello to a new version of watchOS, watchOS 4. The first big change is a Siri-powered watch face. It uses "machine intelligence" to give you a "dynamically-updating" face as you glance at your watch throughout the day. The first few hints that Apple is going to bolster Siri's role as a digital assistant.
tvOS
In Short: I mean, it was one thing. You can watch Amazon Prime Video on your Apple TV.
The only. big update to tvOS? Amazon Prime video. And yup, that's it. Cook says you'll hear more updates "later this year."
Opening… Remarks?
Anyway, Tim Cook takes the stage and claims, as he loves to do, that this WWDC is the "biggest ever." Here are some Keynote bullet points to prove that to you.
WWDC 2017 kicks off with a video imagining what would happen if the world didn't have app developers? (Spoiler: Apocalypse I guess?)
The stoke levels are very high. A lot of waving at the camera. Some guy got his MacBook to say "WOW" and is offering it up to the Apple Gods.
Hey we're live! People are milling about, waiting for the thing to start. Here's an image of that happening.
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