WWDC 2023: What to expect (READ FOR UPDATE)

[Paul Thexton]

Death Stranding port will be interesting.

 

Really not that interested in Vision Pro, some cool looking tech and ways of consuming media, but I wouldn’t be interested at £500 never mind £3,500.

[LAwLz]

Has someone posted a summary of the announcements yet?

 

 

Edit:

 

 

Hardware:

 

New pricing for the M2 MacBook Air

The price of the M2 MacBook Air has been lowered by 100 dollars.

 

Thoughts: I think this makes the old M1 MacBook Air really unappealing. For 100 dollars more you get a better SoC, the updated design, MacSafe, better camera and better speakers.

 

 

New 15" MacBook Air

Everything is the same as the 13" MacBook Air, except it's bigger and has better speakers.

Starting at 1300 USD for the model with 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and the M2 with 10 GPU cores (just 100 dollars more than the 13" with the same specs).

 

Thoughts: Looks good. If you wanted the MacBook Air but wanted it slightly bigger then I think this is a no-brainer. I was expecting more than a 100-dollar price bump. Worth noting that you can get the 13" version with the lower-end GPU, making the price difference 200 dollars instead.

 

 

New Mac Studio

Apple has updated its Mac Studio and announced the M2 Ultra.

They have also included Wi-Fi 6E (up from Wi-Fi 6) support and Bluetooth 5.3 (up from 5.0).

 

The new chips also support better/more video outputs.

The HDMI port now supports up to 240Hz at 4K, and the M2 Ultra version supports up to 8 displays (up from 5).

 

 

Other than the updated chips (and what comes with that, like better Bluetooth), it seems like everything else is the same with the Mac Studio. Same dimensions, same ports (but support for more displays) and same price (2000 dollars for the base M2 Max, 4000 dollars for the base M2 Ultra).

 

Thoughts: The Mac Studio was a really cool computer, and this update just makes it better. But it was nothing really unexpected. 

 

 

M2 Ultra

Like before, the M2 Ultra is created by gluing two M2 Max chips together, creating a 24-core CPU, 60 GPU cores, and 32 NPU cores monster.

 

 

They have also added support for up to 192GB of RAM, up from 128GB.

 

The CPU is 20% faster.

The GPU is 30% faster.

The NPU is 40% faster.

 

 

Mac Pro

The Mac Pro finally joins the Apple Silicon gang. There is no special chip for the Mac Pro. Instead, it uses the M2 Ultra chip. This means the Mac Pro is basically the Mac Studio except with a few key differences.

 

The Mac Pro has:

• Two PCIe x16 and four PCIe x8 slots (all of these are PCIe gen 4 slots), plus one slot taken up by the "Apple I/O card".
  • The I/O card has one 3.5mm headphone jack, two HDMI ports and 2 USB-A ports on it.
• Other ports on the Mac Pro are 8 Thunderbolt 4 ports (six at the back, two at the front) and two 10Gbps Ethernet ports.
• The Mac Pro comes in a tower or rack version.

 

Prices start at 7000 USD for the tower version, and 7500 for the rack version.

 

 

Thoughts: On one hand, I think this is really cool. But on the other hand, I was kind of expecting more. I was expecting support for way more RAM than the standard M2 Ultra. The old Intel Mac could go up to 1.5TB of RAM. I guess they didn't want to move away from their super high-speed unified memory, which they couldn't do with regular sticks of RAM. Still, it would have been cool (not sure how useful) if they had done tiered RAM, so that you could have 192GB of unified RAM and then even more RAM in the form of regular DDR5.

 

 

Software:

 

iOS 17

These three apps are getting major updates:

Phone: 

• Personalized Contact Posters - From what I have gathered, you can now create a poster that appears full-screen when someone gets a call from you. I am not sure how this syncs though. It looks very nice, but personally, I am skeptical. I have seen the pictures my relatives pick as their profile pictures, and I wouldn't want those pictures displayed full-screen on my phone. This is what it will look like:

Spoiler

         

 

• Live Voicemail - Speech-to-text integrated into your voicemail. Basically, when you get a call and it goes to voicemail, your phone will display what the person is saying to your voicemail, as text. You can then choose if you want to answer the call or not. You can also have the voicemail appear as text after it has been recorded. It doesn't need to be live. This looks really neat. This is done on-device, so the voice data is not being sent to Apple for processing.

 

Facetime: 

• You can now leave a short video clip through Facetime if the other person doesn't pick up.

 

Messages: 

• The search in the messages app has been updated. You can now create multiple filters to more granularly and precisely find what you are looking for.
• The messages app now has a "catch-up" button that works like in Discord, where you can jump to the oldest unread message. This is good for those times when you have a group chat going and all of a sudden there are 30 unread messages. Now you can quickly jump to the first message you haven't read and scroll down from there to catch up.
• Audio messages are now transcribed, so you can read an audio message someone sent you.
• Location sharing similar to Facebook Messanger. For those who haven't used this feature, you press a button and a map will appear inside your conversation. That map shows you where you are, so that others can see. Personally, I use this feature all the time. When I am picking up food so that others can track where I am. When I am out running a race and people want to know come and cheer me on. When I am going to meet someone and we haven't decided on a precise time and spot. The list goes on.
• Check In - If you start a "check in", a message will appear in the chat giving an estimate when you should be home. Once you get home, the phone will automatically update the status in the message to inform the chat participants (s) that you have arrived home. If you don't arrive home on time, it will display your most recent location along with other information to the chat participant(s). 
• Updates to stickers... 

 

New features in AirDrop - NameDrop and bringing phones together

If you bring two iPhones close together, you will be asked if you want to exchange contact information. This seems to be the way you are going to share your personalized Contact Posters.

 

You can now also start an AirDrop of files such as photos by bringing two phones close together in the same way as you share contact info. These two features look really neat.

 

 

 

 

Updated keyboard

Updated autocorrect - The keyboard now uses a transformer language model to make text prediction and autocorrect more accurate.

 

Sentence level autocorrection - The keyboard can now analyze the entire sentence and correct things like grammar mistakes for you.

 

Inline prediction - Will display a faded out version of the text it thinks you want to write. Pressing the spacebar will write out the whole prediction. Here is a screenshot:

Spoiler

 

Improved dictation - The speech-to-text feature now has an updated AI model which makes it more accurate.

 

 

New app - Journal

It's a journaling app. It can automatically suggest what to write about.

 

 

New feature - StandBy

Turn your iPhone sideways while charging and your iPhone will become a nightstand clock. It can display the time, widgets, home controls, and so on. Here are two examples, but it is very customizable:

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

A few more features in iOS 17

You can now make Siri respond to just "Siri", instead of "hey Siri".

Apple Maps can now save maps offline.

The "People" album has gotten better at detecting people, and can now also detect pets.

 

 

 

 

iPadOS 17

Widgets - Widgets are now interactive. Some examples they showed were starting a song from the music widget and controlling smarthome features straight from the widget.

 

Lockscreen - New wallpapers for the iPad. You can also add "Live activities" to the lockscreen, which are basically widgets that displays things like Uber Eat food orders, the score in some Major League Soccer game, and so on.

 

The Health app is coming to iPadOS.

 

Updated PDF support. It can identify fields in a PDF and automatically fill them in if you want. You can sign documents and create notes with the Apple Pencil. 

 

The stuff from iOS, like predictive text, improved AirDrop and so on, are also coming to iPadOS.

 

 

macOS 14 - Sonoma

A lot of the iOS and iPadOS stuff is coming to MacOS. 

 

New screensavers.

 

Widgets can now be placed anywhere on your desktop, not just the notification center. It's like Windows Vista!

Widgets also sync data between your Mac and iOS devices, which means you can have for example an iOS app on your phone displayed as a widget on your Mac without having to install it on the Mac.

 

Game mode - Gives games a higher priority in order to try and give a higher performance for the games, reduce input lag and Bluetooth delays (by doubling the sampling rate).

 

New games for MacOS - The only tree I recognize are Stray, WoW Dragonflight and Death Stranding, but there were 11 other games also announced.

Apple has announced a "Game Porting Toolkit" which they hope will allow developers to port their games to Metal and MacOS faster than before.

 

 

New video effect - Presenter Overlay

This is Apple's answer to all the webcam video effects that are so popular these days. With this feature, you will be able to cut yourself out from the background and place yourself on top of content, like a Twitcher streamer. It looks very good in the demo, but how well it works in real life remains to be seen. This feature works in programs like Zoom, MS Teams and Webex.

 

Safari update

There are several things here but I think the biggest one is profiles, which is something I didn't know Safari lacked. Chrome, Chromeium based browsers and Firefox have had this since forever. 

 

Another big thing seems to be "web apps". I am not sure how these works, but apparently you can create an "app" of any website. I thought this was WPA at first, but that has been supported on iOS since 11.3, and it requires developers to add that support, while this new feature doesn't need the developers to do anything according to Apple. So my guess right now is that it is just a regular browser that opens the website, but the OS treats it as a separate program. 

 

 

 

Misc stuff:

AirPods Pro now has "adaptive audio", which can be described as selective hearing. Distracting noises are filtered out by the active noise cancelation, but things like speech are let through so you can hear it.

 

SharePlay is coming to cars. Passengers will now be able to control the music in your car. This works through CarPlay.

 

Facetime is coming to Apple TV. It works by using your iPhone as a webcam.

 

watchOS 10 is getting a big update. A lot of the apps are getting redesigned

The way widgets works have been changed

New features for cyclists, like connecting to Bluetooth bike sensors and special tracking views for cycling data.

Automatically saves the last place you had cellular connectivity as a waypoint, which means if you are hiking and suddenly lose cellular signal, you know where to go to get it back.

New APIs for workouts. One example they brought up was using the accelerometer in the watch to track how fast you swing a golf club or tennis racket.

 

 

A new mindfulness app. Lets you log how you feel and then tries to correlate those feelings to work out what makes you feel good, and what makes you feel bad. Also comes with some tests you can take, get tips on how to improve your mental health, and in some cases it will suggest seeking professional help along with compiling your test results so you can show your therapist.

 

A new vision health app. The goal is to try and prevent myopia (nearsightedness) by tracking how much time children spend outside in daylight, which has been proven to help prevent nearsightedness. Another way to prevent nearsightedness is to not constantly look at things that are close to you, so this app can also use the depth sensor to detect if a user is holding the device too close and will encourage moving it further away.

 

 

One more thing... Apple VR

seems like the rumors were true. Apple announced a VR headset.

This looks very interesting, but too complicated to do a quick writeup of.

 

[porina]

4 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Has someone posted a summary of the announcements yet?

I'm skimming Anandtech's coverage right now. https://www.anandtech.com/show/18895/the-apple-wwdc-2023-keynote-live-blog-starts-at-10am-pt1700-utc

 

This looks like a nice feature. I rarely use voice and it would be nice not to have to dial up voicemail to see if I missed anything.

[WolframaticAlpha]

39 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

Death Stranding port will be interesting.

Great, I can now play virtual walking simulator on a mac /s

44 minutes ago, Obioban said:

MacBook *Air*

 

The processor they compared it against is the modern equivalent of what used to be in the (old, intel) MacBook Air, as it's what fits in it's thermal envelope (back when the Air had a fan).

Yes, comparing a 3+ year old system for your benchmarks is disingenuous. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if their PC competitor was like a 1165G7.

 

[leadeater]

21 minutes ago, JoseGuya said:

The moment they were talking about the several screens and speakers it replaces it was obvious that it would come unlubricated lol 

A good TV and sound system in a room can be shared by many people simultaneously. I'd like to see 4 people wear the same headset at once.

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Has someone posted a summary of the announcements yet?

Freakin Mac Pro M2 Ultra! Available next week, does anything else matter?  /jk

[shermantanker]

The hardware details they did share for the headset sound incredible on paper. We’ll see what people say when they can actually try it.

[WolframaticAlpha]

@leadeaterNo word about GPU compatibility and non expandable ram with a 192 GB cap seems like a disappointment. It's power efficient though I guess.

 

 

18 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Has someone posted a summary of the announcements yet?

Cnet has a roundup: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/wwdc-2023-recap-ios-17-vision-pro-macbook-air-everything-else-announced/

 

[Commodus]

The Vision Pro is pretty much what the rumors suggested: awesome, but also very expensive.

 

With that said, there may actually be more value in it than, say, the Meta Quest Pro. Headsets like that are designed as jump in, jump out devices. You go in to look at a prototype design or party in Horizon Worlds and then return to your everyday computer. Apple clearly thinks you could spend your entire workday in Vision Pro if you wanted (and you're close to a power outlet, of course) — not sure how well that works in practice, but this could replace a laptop or tablet in the right circumstances.

 

I'm not going to drop $3,500 US on this unless I suddenly hit the jackpot, but I would absolutely love to try it.

[Forbidden Wafer]

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

There was a key problem I noticed during the presentation, absolutely zero data entry shown at all or the usage of a keyboard be it physical or virtual on screen. I saw a virtual keyboard once but it wasn't used.

 

So I'm still rather worried about the actual usability aspect of that, it looked great for viewing, displaying and sharing/collaborating such documents and presentations but that whole editing/creating side of it just wasn't shown at all.

Yeah. I assume it must be worse than hololens for them not to even show it.

[WolframaticAlpha]

5 minutes ago, Commodus said:

The Vision Pro is pretty much what the rumors suggested: awesome, but also very expensive.

It seems cool, but I seriously don't want to live in a bleak black mirror-esque future where everyone wears these ski goggles with fanny pack batteries

 

 

3500 dollars creates a big problem for Apple's futuristic system. VR devs, few and far between already, now have to make a choice, whether they make their apps target the more prevalent and cheaper Quest headsets(especially considering that the Quest 3 can do good enough AR) and thus make the experience sub optimal for the expensive but more capable apple vision, or target the apple headset and ignore the millions of existing oculus users.

[TheReal1980]

So AR-porn will be next I assume? You can just go into your living room, put it on and there are 10 girls in front of you and they will do anything you want (talk to them, strip et.c)?

 

Yeah, we are doomed as a society.

[Paul Thexton]

26 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I saw a virtual keyboard once but it wasn't used.

 

Pretty sure I saw someone typing on a Magic Keyboard, couldn’t quite tell if it was physical though, I assume it must have been. Only very briefly showed it though.

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

@leadeaterNo word about GPU compatibility and non expandable ram with a 192 GB cap seems like a disappointment. It's power efficient though I guess.

I do wonder how many will be limited by 192GB ram though. No first party Apple PCIe cards mentioned is a worry.

[WolframaticAlpha]

4 minutes ago, TheReal1980 said:

So AR-porn will be next I assume? You can just go into your living room, put it on and there are 10 girls in front of you and they will do anything you want (talk to them, strip et.c)?

Can't wait for the realistic tentacles

 

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

I do wonder how many will be limited by 192GB ram though. No first party Apple PCIe cards mentioned is a worry.

That is 192 gigs of shared memory.

[Paul Thexton]

They might cover PCIe driver issues during platform state of the union session or a specific session during this week.

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, TheReal1980 said:

So AR-porn will be next I assume? You can just go into your living room, put it on and there are 10 girls in front of you and they will do anything you want (talk to them, strip et.c)?

 

Yeah, we are doomed as a society.

This is already a thing... although not in Apple Vision detail. Well I know the first App category that's going to get banned off the new store lol

[Paul Thexton]

Just now, WolframaticAlpha said:

That is 192 gigs of shared memory

Yeah. Your GPU can get at plenty of data for ML stuff. There’s always pros/cons, keep in mind though that shared != partitioned.

[WolframaticAlpha]

16 minutes ago, Paul Thexton said:

Yeah. Your GPU can get at plenty of data for ML stuff. There’s always pros/cons, keep in mind though that shared != partitioned.

I mean higher end ML and scientific is already kind of dead on mac, and I doubt that people running matlab or mathematica are really going to be the target market for the Mac Pro. It kills it for the select few putting it in servers/making mac compile/render farms. Apple is really going after the video editors and audio producers and they already have render farms.

 

For me, if they don't put in GPUs or expandable memory, what is the point of spending nearly double on the mac pro when the studio exists? Internal expandable storage maybe and some internal network/capture cards, but most of them aren't really straining TB4 as of yet.

 

And it only goes upto 24 CPU cores. Like c'mon apple. I could buy an i9 for 500 bucks and that has the same number of cpu cores as your top of the line machine? And I have seen developers frequently max out their 24 core systems.

 

Glad to see no one is going to pay for this BS pricing anymore:

It is interesting that it only goes upto 12k for the highest end config. Really shows the difference between this and the previous one. You can essentially kit it out for 10700 bucks if you want to save a buck and go for a sabrent 8tb drive instead of apple's ludicrously expensive storage.

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

I mean higher end ML and scientific is already kind of dead on mac, and I doubt that people running matlab or mathematica are really going to be the target market for the Mac Pro. It kills it for the select few putting it in servers/making mac compile/render farms. Apple is really going after the video editors and audio producers and they already have render farms.

 

For me, if they don't put in GPUs or expandable memory, what is the point of spending nearly double on the mac pro when the studio exists? Internal expandable storage maybe and some internal network/capture cards, but most of them aren't really straining TB4 as of yet.

If you use Logic Pro then being limited by  192GB memory would be ultra super rare from what I have been reading, same for Final Cut Pro. Adobe will be fine also for just about anything. So I still come back to who is actually going to find it a problem. Not that these people/usages don't exist but it seems Apple isn't too concerned about it.

 

Who knows, maybe one of the PCIe card options is going to be memory expansion. You are right about the Mac Studio though, why Mac Pro if you don't need a 25Gb/100Gb NIC.

[Paul Thexton]

6 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

For me, if they don't put in GPUs or expandable memory, what is the point of spending nearly double on the mac pro when the studio exists?

I wondered the same tbh. Especially when the same SoC is available in it.

 

All I can think is people doing live production with multiple inputs that necessitates the PCIe expansion. Which would be a niche segment of an already niche market.

[ItsPengoo]

Ahh yes. The apple bean.

 

Also, the wire is stupid. I know its to keep the weight down to a minimum but what's more annoying? A slightly heavier headset or a permanent wire and a battery pack in your pocket?

[Obioban]

41 minutes ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

Great, I can now play virtual walking simulator on a mac /s

Yes, comparing a 3+ year old system for your benchmarks is disingenuous. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if their PC competitor was like a 1165G7.

 

That is the processor that mostly likely would be in the MBA today, if they had not moved off Intel. It shows how the performance of the MBA compares to if they had not gone their own way.

[HenrySalayne]

46 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Did you even look at it? No you didn't did you. Go do that first.

Have you updated your knowledge on "what is AR" in the meantime?

Because it seems like you still don't understand that it doesn't require a "transparent" screen to be AR.

 

Apple took the only logical approach to AR with their headset. Their "vision" of how it is used, will not work (talking to your children, enjoying a birthday party or any personal interaction with this headset is just rude and alienating). But so will any other bulky headset.

[WolframaticAlpha]

5 minutes ago, Obioban said:

if they had not moved off Intel. It shows how the performance of the MBA compares to if they had not gone their own way.

No it fucking doesn't lmfao. That would be comparing like a 1260p or something. And apple knows that the 1260p beats this in raw CPU performance.

5 minutes ago, Obioban said:

That is the processor that mostly likely would be in the MBA today, if they had not moved off Intel. It shows how the performance of the MBA compares to if they had not gone their own way.

Can't wait for Dankpods to meme the shape of it.