So, it has happened. A few hours ago Apple finished its WWDC keynote address in a completely packed San Jose Convention Center. A range of expected hardware and software products were revealed along with some unexpected ones in two and a half hours long show before 5,000 people. In case you missed it, here we’re gonna provide you info about all the products that were revealed. So without much delay let’s jump into details:
No Siri Speaker. It’s A HomePod Instead.
As we had told you in our last article, Apple released a smart speaker at WWDC. However, it’s not called Siri Speaker – it’s called a HomePod instead. Anyways, this 7-inch tall ‘pod’ has a mesh design and is almost as tall as a Mac Pro. It has got 7 tweeters, six microphones and an Apple A8 chip underneath. This setup, when coupled with power of company’s machine learning capabilities, makes the speaker sound good, no matter where it is.
According to Apple, it can detect your surroundings and adjust its sound accordingly to make sure that it reaches your ears. During the presentation Phil Schiller said a great deal about its sound quality, so we can hope that it’ll be better than that of Amazon Echo and Google Home. Finally, it’ll come in two colors – Black and Silver. More on it in our dedicated entry coming soon.
A New PC Replacement: iPad Pro 10.5 Inch
Another expected announcement was iPad Pro 10.5 inch. As expected, it’s exactly the size of its predecessor, but with a display with much thinner bezels. This time the bezels are so thin that we can call it an all-screen iPad. The display is considerably larger than that of its predecessor, so large that it provides plenty of on-screen room even with a full-sized on screen keyboard. Now that’s called innovation!
But that’s not the only good thing about this new iPad Pro – it’s also powered by a much more powerful chipset. The six-core A10X fusion makes it many times more powerful than its predecessor. Plus, it also brings the support for HDR videos to iPad. Starting from 64GB of memory, the new models of iPad pro will come with LTE support. We’ll provide more info about them in another post coming soon.
A Ton of Software Updates.
All software platforms owned by Apple received major updates. Let’ take a look on each of them:
- macOS: Let’s start with macOS first. The latest version of Apple’s computing software platform will be known High Sierra. Apple has a tryst with fancy names, you know. This High Sierra thing has got updates that will transform nearly every aspect of your Mac experience. It has been given more power with new Apple File System, so now it comes with built-in crash protection, faster directory sizing and file-level encryption. It’s also optimized for SSDs, so you’ll experience much faster performance. Besides that, Safari on Mac now runs 80% faster and comes with in-built autoplay blocker. Facebook, are you listening?
- iOS 11: Control center now shows all your notifications in one single page. App Store has been revamped and Messages have now been integrated with Apple Pay so you can send money to anyone with a simple text message. Maps have also been provided a “do not disturb while driving” feature, and Photos app will allow you to make loops of your live photos.
- watchOS 4: Starting with this watchOS update your Apple Watch will now also try to motivate you for exercising by showing motivational messages. It’ll also be able to integrate with exercise equipment to track your workout, and help you listen music through AirPods by syncing your playlists. watchOS 4 coming to Apple watches this fall.
- AI everywhere: As expected, Apple’s heavy investments in AI are becoming visible across its all software platforms. macOS is now able to automatically sort your photos according to events or people with whom you’re. Siri is also more intelligent now as it can understand your usage more accurately and show you relevant information according to your needs. watchOS can show you the information that you need at most at any particular time after learning from your habits for a few days, and the new HomePod can detect its surroundings to adjust its volume and sound quality automatically. All of this has become possible only because of Apple’s AI development.
- Augmented Reality on iOS: This was also due from quite sometime. When Google, Facebook and Microsoft all are investing in AR, how could Apple stay behind? The work was being done, and we saw its first glimpse at WWDC. Now your iPhone can detect different surfaces and put some AR objects on them for you to manipulate. How will this be used by developers remains to be seen, but now with AR support built into iOS Apple has provided them the largest AR platform overnight to do something meaningful.
New Macbooks and an Entirely New iMac
New Macbooks were expected at WWDC, but an all new iMac Pro was a wildcard and it caught everyone with surprise. The new Macbooks, as expected, run on latest 7th generation Intel Core processors and therefore offer longer battery life with some performance improvement.
But it was the new iMac Pro lineup that stole the entire show – it’s a Supercomputer with memory up to 128 gigabytes, storage up to 4 terabytes, and it comes with processors clocked up to 22 teraflops. At a price of $5,000 it’s expensive, and even too much powerful for most of us, but professionals who run quite resource hungry programs will love this awesome supercomputer. It also looks quite good – the entire shell is space gray and you can get matching keyboard and mouse with it.
More Info Coming Soon Right Here on HiTechWiki
So this was the entire hardware and software lineup that Apple revealed at WWDC. We’re gonna publish detailed posts about each of these products very soon, so keep checking back for more info on all of these products.
