If you care about mobile technology, we’re sorry to inform you that today’s WWDC was mostly about the software we’ll see on the new iThings coming later this year. If you care about Mac computers, though, there are a lot of very, very interesting products on the way.
The Mac Pro Is Back
The Mac Pro was a long neglected workhorse of a computer popular among video editors, but as iThings caught on, Apple reasonably focused on what made them money. Apparently, they’ve decided big, powerful, desktop computers can make them money because holy crap.
The new Mac Pro is a beast with up to twelve cores capable of streaming 4K resolution video to three displays at once. Apple has been showing them off using raw Pixar footage. All we know beyond that is that they’re built in America, will probably cost more than several major organs, and will be arriving later this year.
The Macbook Air Gets An Overhaul
The Macbook Air, perhaps unsurprisingly, will get Intel’s Haswell processors. Essentially this means you get more battery life; Apple is claiming “all-day” battery endurance. Oh, and of course, it’s faster, as well.
iOS 7 Looks Prettier, Has Lots Of Swiping, Is In Beta As Of Today
Let’s be honest here, nobody wants to listen to Jony Ive talk about design at length except other designers. Basically, iOS 7 now has flat icons, more animations, and touches like Notification Center finally hitting the lockscreen. Swipe up from the bottom and you get a settings menu.
Under the hood…
- All apps can now multitask, which is a welcome relief.
- The apps you use more often are pushed further up the update queue, and apps are now updated in the background, and only when you’ve got a strong signal.
- Mobile Safari finally gets unified search, vertically stacked tabs, and other bits that essentially make it more like Chrome.
- Camera now sorts your photos into “Moments” using metadata.
- Siri is now fully integrated with Twitter, and can now search Wikipedia, and Bing, for some inexplicable reason.
- Apps are grouped by age range and also by location, which a lot of tasteless jokes will be made about, we’re sure.
- Quietly buried was FaceTime Audio, allowing you to make audio calls via WiFi. That’s probably the most interesting new feature of all.
Essentially it’s the usual mix of catch-up and minor advances that make up these things: It looks good and it’ll serve you well, but there’s nothing earth-shaking.
Except for FaceTime Audio. We want to know more about this feature, and we suspect we’re not alone in that.
iOS For The Car Debuts
iOS for the Car is fairly interesting. Essentially, your iDevice will pair with your car’s onboard computer and you can use Siri for all your on-board needs. This is apparently something we’ll see more of in the 2014 car models, but it’s still pretty cool.
iRadio Is Now iTunes Radio
It’s built into the Music app. Apple didn’t get into details, just showed off a system that functions quite a bit like Pandora. In fact, it basically is Pandora, but you can see for yourself: It’s available across all of Apple’s platforms starting today, and will be ad-supported.
Apple Maps Is Getting a Desktop Client, Because Apple Hates You
Oh, come on, like there could possibly be another reason.