Blurred Lines
Some thoughts on WWDC 2020…
It takes a lot of restraint not to use an “it goes to 11” joke in the headline. It apparently takes even more restraint to not use it in the lede. So here we are.
But seriously, buried in their onslaught of news today, Apple snuck in a quick screen (during the ARM Mac demo) detailing that macOS “Big Sur” is technically macOS 11.0. Yes, after fifteen 10s, it finally… well, you know.
I think it works. Visually, Apple is calling this the biggest update to macOS since it shipped way back when as OS X. And clearly the ARM transition is another key moment for the platform and software, as Tim Cook alluded to. Power PC. OS X. Intel. Now ARM, with macOS 11 to boot, quite literally.
And it works because this does feel like a new phase of the software itself. Yes, it has a touched up coat of paint, but it really feels less like OS X now and more like an amalgamation of iOS and OS X. I quipped on Twitter that it felt like we were approaching 50% of macOS features now being iOS features ported over, but people thought I was way off — that we’re way on the other side of that now. And it’s hard to disagree, even if just in practice. While the iPad Magic Keyboard caused us all to realize that the iPad Pro was not-so-slowly becoming a laptop, the reality is that, at least software-wise, the Apple laptops are now much closer to iPads.
The difference came down to macOS vs. iOS. But it now feels a lot more like the only actual difference is touch.
And that’s interesting because while Apple keeps saying all the right things about the Mac and iPad being different devices with different purposes, their actions suggest otherwise. The software now looks the same. The hardware increasingly looks the same. They’re about to run on the same chips. They’ll be able to run the same apps.¹ So…
Anyway, I know this is sort of a religious argument within the Apple community. Again, I just think their actions speak louder than their words here. Do we all think MacBooks and iPads will be two different devices in 10 years? Yesterday, I still may have said ‘yes”. Today, I’m not so sure…
Some other thoughts on WWDC 2020
iOS 14
The new iOS widgets look great. Yes, they’re long overdue, but I’m happy to have them, finally. As someone who charts their iPhone homescreen quite closely, this is obviously going to be one of the biggest changes to iOS from a pure usage perspective well, ever.
The video showcasing the widgets is fun — though also a bit nerve wracking? Why so much emphasis on the shaking! I’m a little worried about this in general as I actually find myself getting worse at “jiggle mode” over time, rather than better at it. And now it’s more important than ever!
The ‘Today’ area looks great with the new widgets. Much cleaner.
I found it a little odd how much time Craig Federighi took to walk through the new picture-in-picture functionality. Looks nice, but it also existed in some form before. I’m just not sure how much it needed top-billing here with iOS 14 in an event that was just shy of two hours?
The new Siri stuff looks pretty good — nice to see how it’s more out of your face. The key, as always, will be how Siri itself performs. Apple keeps promising the moon and delivering something more akin to a small boulder. And that’s putting it nicely.
The ‘Translate’ app looks great. Very clear, very Apple. Can’t wait to see/hear how it compares to Google’s offering, which is excellent, of course.
The Messages updates seem solid. All fairly obvious things, but will make the app more useful. I wish there was a more ephemeral option, perhaps in line with Apple’s privacy and security stance?
Maps, again looks nice, but we’ll see how it compares to Google Maps. I keep testing it out from time to time over years now, and I always end up back at Google, which seems to realize I don’t mean London, Ontario, when searching for ‘London’. The EV routing bit was fun — of course no mention of a certain category leader in EV… Same with the digital key thing.
If the App Store is 12 years old, App Clips is something Apple clearly should have been doing about 11 years ago. Again, better late than never, I suppose. The way they framed it almost makes it seem more as Apple Pay and especially ‘Login with Apple’ lead gen?
iPad OS 14
First and foremost, I’m glad Apple didn’t try to do an ‘iOS 14’ & ‘iPad OS 2’ juxtaposition or some nonsense. Keep it simple. iPad OS 14 really is iOS 14 with a few design tweaks here and there. That was clear by the presentation which highlighted iOS 14 features more than anything inherently iPad-focused. Sidebars, I guess? Yay, sidebars!
Still no sign of Instagram for iPad. I seriously think that alone would have brought the virtual house down. Alas… sidebars! (Okay, Apple Pencil “Scribble” sounds cool too.)
AirPods
The only thing that matters is automatic switching between devices. I will use this multiple times a day. I worry that there’s a high likelihood of this being easier said than done. And if it fails to work, it’s one of those things that will annoy me more than not having it. But we’ll see. Or hear. Or not hear, I guess!
(Yeah, “Spatial Audio” sounds cool too — but will have to hear it to know for sure.)
watchOS 7
“Face Sharing” is the key here — which, odd name aside, is something I’ve long wanted. I basically switch between two watch faces on my Apple Watch, even though there are many complications I would get a lot of use out of. I just never set aside the time to figure out the best new configurations. I’m more than happy to outsource this to others.
Sleep detection is a welcome addition as well, as I’m someone who has “hacked” this for years by turning on “Theater Mode” when going to bed so my slightest movement didn’t ignite the beacons of Gondor multiple times a night.
Hand washing detection. Very timely, of course. Very Apple.
Privacy
All the new privacy stuff sounds good. It’s something where we likely won’t know the impact until it’s out in the wild. The idea of “upgrading” your account to ‘Sign In with Apple’ seems like it will be controversial, depending on how Apple rolls it out…
I definitely appreciate having the indicator light when camera/microphone is on. Way too many hot mics/cams in the age of Zoom… (I hope it looks better than it first appeared — off-center?)
Home
I’ll be honest, I just can never get excited about any of this Home stuff. It’s probably because I’ve never bothered to set anything up beyond a HomePod and a few Eeros. I feel like this should interest me more but just doesn’t for whatever reason.
Apple TV gets multi-user support, though that’s still nowhere to be found on the iPad… Apple TV+’s Foundation show is very much my jam though. Lee Pace! Please be good, please be good, please be good.
macOS Big Sur
We covered the b11g points above. Though I did enjoy the Jony Ive-esque walkthrough video by VP of Human Interface Alan Dye. No British accent. No “a-lew-min-e-um”. But still, a nice voice.
Like seemingly everyone else, I haven’t been the biggest fan of the Catalyst Mac apps, but I am happy Messages is getting that treatment, simply because while it works 100% of the time on iOS, it works something closer to 50% of the time on macOS, in my experience. It just seemed too left in the iChat past. So here’s hoping this version is better. And I would say the same thing about Mail — which works great on iOS, but is truly awful on the Mac, even though they’ve claimed to rebuild it at least a dozen times now. No word on if this version is Catalyzed (it seems like it’s not?) but it has seemingly been rebuilt once again. JUST MAKE IT WORK LIKE THE iOS VERSION.
The new Safari looks great. Favicons done correctly, finally. And another stab at extensions — seemingly admitting their first few stabs didn’t really work, so now they’ll work with other browsers’. I just really hope these new features don’t bloat up and slow down Safari to the point where it runs like Chrome. Which is to say, hot and battery intensive. The talking points suggest it won’t, but again, we’ll see.
Apple Silicon
Apple clearly went out of their way not to say either “ARM” or the name of the chip they’ll use in their first “Apple Silicon” Macs. But I appreciated how much time they spent trying to convince us that this would be a “whole new level of performance”. I was surprised the other day by the rumor that the MacBook Pro (and iMac) would be the first machines to get the new chips because I had assumed they’d start “small” and work their way up to the Pros. But it may in fact be the opposite, and today makes it clear that Apple feels very confident in their ability to pull this off.
I enjoyed the Johny Srouji bit. It felt fittingly technical, yet not overly so. He built up a good tick-tock of Apple’s chip development up until today. Apple should be proud of this work and effort. Truly. I even enjoyed that Srouji was in an IT closet? In the Cerebro room, no less.
Federighi’s reveal that an ARM Mac was the demo unit for all the Big Sur features thus far was a nice touch. The Word and Excel demos? Less impressive. Not because they looked bad, just because, well, I’d sure hope a Mac using any processor could run Word. But we get it, Apple wants to showcase these machines are already getting there with the day-to-day stuff you need.
Photoshop was more impressive. Final Cut Pro, even more so. But the proof will be in the dev kits.² Well, presumably.
Running iOS apps on the device? Boom. (No mention of how the touch-to-mouse backward translation will work but… one thing at a time, I guess.)
Presentation
The presentation itself was… fine? Honestly, it seemed two clicks too cute for my taste. All the silly “handing off” the speaking baton and zooming across the virtual Apple Campus. I honestly thought Snap’s approach for how to do these types of events virtually was more elegant. Apple’s even looked more artificial because it was trying to look more real? It looked like people presenting on a spaceship because, well, that’s what Apple’s campus looks like! The Apple Watch part in the gym and the Apple Silicon portion in the “undisclosed location” were a bit better. The mood lighting during the privacy part was…weird. Apple seemingly chose to highlight the eerily empty Steve Jobs Theater in the intro as it was Cook’s backdrop, which was an odd choice. Though it got a bit better when he took a seat on the stool to talk about the tragedies happening around the country.
Cook, in my opinion, is at his best at delivering that kind of message. He’s less good, I think, at the big picture product stuff. That’s why Craig Federighi is so key to Apple right now (well, beyond the actual work he does, of course). He’s a natural at this. Different than Steve Jobs, dad jokes and all, but still good. And you can see the dichotomy on display during the ARM portion when Cook tries to zoom out to talk about the Mac’s “three major transitions”. “And now it’s time for a huge leap forward for the Mac.” It just sounds a bit flat. No one can reasonably ask for a Steve Jobs performance here, but I do think someone like Federighi would deliver this message better.
This is indeed a massive shift for Apple. It puts them more in control of their entire stack than they’ve ever been. As an operations guy, you know that matters to Cook. Still, there’s something to be said about conveying that enthusiasm. Cook just isn’t great at it.
Anyway, these are all nits. The keynote was good because the announcements were good. They were, for the most part, important. I’m excited to use all of the new software. I’m excited to see where Apple can take the hardware when unchained from Intel. And I’m most excited to see what developers do with all of this stuff.³
To me, it boils down to this: how confident was Cook in all that was announced today? So confident that he busted out “courage” in his closing remarks. That truly takes courage.
¹ Pretty good call, two years ago, if I do say so myself.
² Mac mini with A12Z chips and 16GB of RAM shipping this week!
