A Glass of Ice Water in the Desert

M.G. Siegler
500ish
Published in
9 min readJun 5, 2018

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Well, the good news is that I didn’t fall asleep. The bad news is that I probably should have: this WWDC keynote clocked in over two hours long. This was shorter than last year, but it felt longer. That one had iMacs and iPads and HomePods, oh my. This had… well, we’ll get to that. But even for a keynote chock-full of announcements, two hours is pushing it for a single event. I find 90 minutes to be preferable for busy ones. And I believe this one could have been pretty comfortably done in an hour.

Remember those slides that used to showcase all the stuff Apple couldn’t talk about on stage? Yeah, as far as I could tell, there was only one of those this time, and it was hardly crammed with more features. And so we got some highly questionable stage time for Apple TV — I mean, I’m as big of a fan of the aerial photography as anyone, but come on. As well as for Apple Watch.

Look, I get it: Apple has decided to showcase each of their “core” OSes here. But tvOS and watchOS are still clearly little siblings to the big brothers that are iOS and macOS. If they wanted to give them stage time, I would have cut it out of the various demo segments.

Anyway, the event was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be. A push for polish and reliability, with some new functionality around device usage. And a handful of smaller features to appease the developer-centric crowd (‘Dark Mode’ in macOS Mojave for coding probably got the biggest cheer of the day). Again, none of this is a bad thing, I’m just not sure a two-hour long keynote was warranted here, this year…

My other random thoughts and notes on the keynote:

iOS 12

  • Pretty interesting that Apple decided the first thing they should highlight about iOS 12 was that they were focusing on performance for older devices. Again, this speaks directly to the ‘polish’ discussed above, but still, surprising that this was the very first thing highlighted!
  • Aside: when do they start switching iOS to nicknames as they do with naming macOS versions after places in California (and previously big cat codenames for OS X)? Apple — and Craig Federighi in particular — seems to have fun with such names, so you’d think he’d push for this now that he’s in charge of iOS as well. Maybe before iOS “unlucky” 13?
  • Apple creating a new AR file format seems smart.
  • The measure app will undoubtedly get made fun of — “Apple invented the ruler!” — but this is a great use case and showcase for AR. Regular people will use this a lot.
  • Apple noted that Siri is “by far” the most used digital assistant. Apple, careful, your Alexa envy is showing
  • When Apple acquired the startup Workflow, lots of folks were worried it would go away — instead, not only as it stayed alive, it’s now baked into iOS and rebranded to “Shortcuts”. I mean, just look at it, it’s the same app. Which is great!
  • Also smart to tie said shortcuts directly to Siri. Hopefully Apple launches a bunch of examples of what you can do here (it may be hard for regular users to wrap their heads around these building block concepts at first)…
  • It’s unclear to me why Apple felt the need to rebrand ‘iBooks’ to ‘Apple Books’. Do they want to use ‘iBook’ for another product? ARE THEY BRINGING BACK THE iBOOK?! I kid, but only sort of! There are so many other “i” products that still have not been rebranded. Like, say, iTunes, which could really use a rebranding
  • 3rd party navigation for CarPlay is huge — namely for Google Maps and Waze, of course.
  • ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode for bed is better than it used to be. It’s even better in the morning. I always say I’m not going to check my notifications until after I work out, shower, etc. And I always fail because they’re right there, in my face when I need to do anything else on the device.
  • The “instant tuning” of notifications as they come in is long overdue, but very much welcomed.
  • Actually, there’s something far more overdue: grouping of notifications. A legit finally.
  • The app limit stuff seems useful for children. For yourself, it’s undoubtedly just as needed, but as a result, a little sad. Apple as the Nanny State.
  • The children app usage time reports look great.
  • Sort of shocking that Apple beat Facebook to taking on Snap’s Bitmoji (though Facebook is working on it, of course). “Memoji” look really, really well done.
  • I’m going to be fascinated to see if Group FaceTime disrupts not the Houseparties of the world, but rather any corporate use cases. You’d think “no”, but basically all the corporate ones are awful pieces of junk software these days, led by Skype, but including Hangouts and others. Apple’s solution looks great, but the proof will be in the performance. The fact that you can use it from not only iPhone but iPad and Mac as well makes this very interesting…
  • The FaceTime effects look solid — just imagine the fun you can have on work video calls talking as a painted dinosaur with tongue technology!

watchOS 5

  • The smart detection of starting a workout (with retroactive data on said workout) and ending one is nice.
  • The new Walkie Talkie app/functionality is by far the most interesting element of the new OS. I could see this as the first “killer app” for Apple Watch outside of fitness (and notifications). It reminds me of both the old Nextel push-to-talk and, of course, Dick Tracy. The phone call on the wrist thing is a nice-to-have (in some cases vital-to-have, as they highlighted in the keynote) but was always a bit gimmicky. This is much more intuitive and clever. I’ve already convinced my wife to give Apple Watch another go!
  • Not needing to say “hey Siri” when raising your wrist is a nice touch, and an important step in vocal computing. “Hey” is for horses, after all.
  • Another legit finally: Podcasts on Apple Watch. Amazingly silly that the Podcast app has been a part of Apple TV for years, but it took until version 5 of watchOS for us to get it.¹
  • It was noted in passing that third-party apps can now play audio in the background on the Watch, does this open the market to third-party podcast apps as well as Spotify and the like?

tvOS 12

  • Dolby Atmos sounds great, literally. Not sure it needed space in the keynote, but cool.
  • Ditto for Apple TV + Charter Spectrum. I know a lot of people are Charter subscribers, but many more of us aren’t. So… we have to hope this is their version of cutting a deal with AT&T before the other carriers get on board? Anyway, I have Comcast, but only for internet, and I get everything (old school) television-wise I need now through YouTube TV, so I’m not sure how much it matters…
  • “Zero Sign On” is great branding (and functionality). Again, not sure how much it ultimately matters with where the world is heading…
  • The ability to see where the aerial screensaver footage is being taken is most welcomed! I often find myself guessing and trying to Google places based on landmarks.
  • The new space footage is beautiful. But again, does this have to be a focal point in the keynote?

macOS Mojave

  • Basically the first thing said was about how these days many Mac features are inspired by “Pro” users, but designed for everyone. This is clearly another mea culpa — you matter, Pro users, you really matter!
  • Per above, Craig Federighi has a lot of fun with the macOS branding. That’s fun. He missed the obvious joke about macOS Mojave going with the desert theme for how barren it is when it comes to new features. Actually, I’m sure he missed that one on purpose :)
  • Dark Mode does look nice. Another feature that I’m surprised Apple didn’t do years ago (I know they’ve taken baby steps). Does this come to iOS 13 next year? So many apps implement it already… Does it coincide with iOS “Moon” (space themed names for iOS, what do you think?)…
  • Desktop “Stacks” is the end of 99.9% of what I use folders for on the desktop. Good riddance.
  • Apple News on the Mac — yay? (More on this in a second.)
  • “We’re shutting that down” — the first massive shot at Facebook (and Google and everyone else in the data game). Obviously went over very well with this crowd.
  • New Mac App Store looks nice, but will it signal a reverse in many of the policies that are actually hurting the store?
  • Next was a major missed opportunity in my book. When talking about the aforementioned Apple News for Mac (and Stocks, and Voice Recorder, etc), Federighi should have played up how huge these new apps are, in a tongue-firmly-in-cheek way. And he should have kept up the ruse for a bit. In order to reveal… these apps are actually the iOS apps we all know and love built for macOS with our brand new porting tools! The crowd would have gasped. And then he should have noted that “and starting next year, we’re going to let all of you do the same” — the crowd would have gone wild. That’s when he should have launched into his spiel about how they’re not merging macOS and iOS — “No. Of course not.” But to lead with that was a little silly and seemed to just be answering to the press. They should have acknowledged the toe-dip they’re taking first — a great thing for developers, by the way! — before reinforcing the high-level mantra: macOS and iOS serve different purposes, but we continue to see shared points of experience. Boom.
  • This is when we got to see the “and so much more” slide with showcased other new macOS Mojave features, which didn’t actually seem like that much more. But we got notice that favicons are coming to Safari and that’s all that really matters. So I’m happy.

So there you go. Everything I thought worth taking away from the keynote in a matter of minutes, instead of hours :) But seriously, there’s a lot of good stuff in there. Yet the majority of it is what we must acknowledge is smaller stuff. Lots of low-hanging fruit being plucked. To beat the dead horse: this is a good thing. I’m just not sure we needed a two-hour reveal of all of it…²

My hope is that with the focus on polish and performance, the early OS betas are decidedly more stable this year. Because most of these features should have existed yesterday, and so I want to start using them tomorrow.

¹ I’ll note that we have iOS 12, watchOS 5, and tvOS 12 (which is not the 12th iteration of the OS)… This needs to be cleaned up.

² And now we can let the guessing begin in terms of what new iOS functionality was saved for the iPhone 9/iPhone X2 (please don’t let it be called that) unveiling in September… And for some new iPads later in the year?… And those new Apple Watches… And Apple TV — sigh, probably not Apple TV

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Writer turned investor turned investor who writes. General Partner at GV. I blog to think.