Tag: apple events
Apple's September iPhone Event 2019 Notes
Tim Cook photo courtesy of Apple/C Apple 2019
Apple's annual iPhone event is often the one most leaked ahead of time. Case and accessory designers, investors, journalists, corporate and education buyers, and the general public want to know as much as possible, as soon as possible, to make their products in time for release, know if Apple's fortunes will change, write articles, and make decisions about future purchases.
This year's high-end iPhones are rumored to have a new ultrawide third camera lens for "uncropping" images, and a new "Pro" designation. The Xr replacement may have a second camera, and just be called "iPhone 11".
Also rumored are a new Apple TV device, which is long overdue, a $5 monthly price for Apple's Apple Arcade subscription, and possibly no iPad and Mac hardware announcements. Although there is a rumor of a new MacBook Pro redesign coming with a 16-inch display, that seems more likely to be announced at an October event along with refreshed iPads such as a 10.2″ base iPad.
Here's everything that Apple actually announced at today's event in Cupertino at the Steve Jobs Theater, lets see if the leaks were accurate:
Ann Thai was introduced to talk about the Apple Arcade subscription service. As announced previously, the Arcade subscription promises that the games included will not have in-app purchases or advertisements, and will be available across Apple's platforms. Thai reiterated these promises as well as mobile platform exclusivity and said there would be over 100 games included in the subscription. I understand the need for details to be vague prior to launching a service, when deals are presumably still being done, but there is a pretty big range between 101 and 199 that would be included in the "over 100" range. Presumably there won't be 200 games in the Arcade service at launch. Thai said that no other game service has had this many games available at launch.
Thai also promised that the new App Store tab for the Arcade subscription would include preview and game guide editorial content, which can be presumed to be un-bylined non-critical garbage.
Thai introduced Konami's Brand Manager Benjamin Kinney to demo a new Frogger game from Q-Games, the developers of the PixelJunk games. Frogger in Toy Town has Frogger rescuing friends and collecting jelly beans while hopping through an isometric-ish world that looks a little bit like a cross between a more-realistic looking Little Big Planet and the Micro Machines racers.
Frogger is an interesting choice, and it looks like this spinoff takes something back from the Frogger-inspired Crossy Road games, Frogger in Toy Town has different costumes just like Crossy Road, though it shouldn't have the in-app purchases to unlock them. Kinney promised that Frogger in Toy Town would be available at the launch of the Arcade service.
Thai returned to introduce Capcom's Peter Fabiano to talk about Shinsekai: Into The Depths, a side-scrolling game featuring the last person on the planet and a drone assistant who both have to survive underwater. Fabiano didn't promise that Shinsekai would be available at launch, but did promise that it would be exclusive to the Arcade service.
Annapurna Interactive's Kelsey Hansen was introduced to demonstrate a new game from the well-regarded mobile developer, Simogo, Sayonara: Wild Hearts. Hansen promised that the game would include both racing and rhythm-based tapping for the broken-hearted heroine protagonist. Hansen made no promises of exclusivity or a release timeline.
Thai returned to show us a logo-salad slide featuring various the partners and a release date of September 19th in "over 150 countries" with a price of $5 per month, that is $60 per year, (family sharing included) and "…over 100 new games in our launch catalog in the weeks ahead."
If I were running the Apple Arcade service I would have some different priorities. I would require participating game studios to have modern labor-first principles with either a co-operative business model or a pro-union stance. It isn't known how the developers deals work out, but $5 per family isn't a lot of money to go around. I would expect this could work out for the developers who have a greater volume of players, but then the slice of their pie dedicated to player retention and engagement through community and support would be even lower.
I am also curious to see how game developers and publishers that remain in what is now almost exclusively a free-to-play market outside of the Arcade subscription react if the subscription model is successful and drives players away from their free-to-play model. This subscription business could potentially destroy the predatory nature of the free-to-play business if it is popular. Of course if the developer's contracts under the subscription service are based on metrics like the time players spend in the developer's games, there could be new predatory game mechanics that latch on to people's time more than their wallets.
It is tremendously disappointing that the creative outlet of games is still deeply rooted in the need for survival and I've never been more curious about what games and other art people would make if their needs were taken care of by a state that was based on compassion instead of profit.
Still, it is clearly a good deal for families to sign up for the $5/month service if the games are truly good, and I'm hopeful that this subscription could help eliminate some of those predatory free-to-play games or make them change if they want to be included in the subscription.
Tim Cook returned to talk about their Apple TV+ subscription service and the exclusive shows it would have. Cook introduced the trailer for See, their post apocalyptic series starring Aquaman's Aquaman Jason Momoa where almost nobody can see.
Apple TV+ will be available on November 1st in "over 100 countries" for $5/month. Just like Apple Arcade, the one subscription works with Apple's family sharing. Cook promised that starting today any new iPads, iPhones, Macs, or Apple TVs would include a year of Apple TV+.
Apple TV+'s original content isn't very compelling to me, and I don't think it will be very compelling to most people. There are so many subscription services for TV and movies and without a large catalog of shows I am not personally motivated to sign up for another one. If anything, I would love to drop more of those services. The pitch from Apple for Apple TV+ makes me think they understand how lacking their service is and that might be why they're offering the seemingly-generous subscription deals to start. Who knows what the cost of these services could be down the line.
Just like with Apple Arcade I'm curious about the labor practices involved in the shows' development, although I'm less familiar with the TV industry I believe it has a stronger group of labor organizers than the game industry.
iPad Cheap 10.2″
Apple's cheapest iPad product, the 2018 6th generation 9.7″ device, is getting replaced by a 10.2″ 7th generation device for 2019. Cook boasted about the iPad lineup and the new iPadOS fork of iOS before introducing Greg Jozwiak to talk about the 2019 cheap iPad.
Unfortunately the larger 10.2″ screen of the new iPad still retains the older home-button-based facade of previous iPads instead of the 2018 iPad Pro's closer to edge-to-edge style. The OS is already focused on swipes and other gestures instead of home-button taps, but the home button is so backwards in 2019. I know some folks prefer it, but that makes the bezel so much larger.
On the upside, this iPad has Apple's "smart connector" borrowed from the 2017 iPad Pro devices and the 2019 iPad Air. This connector enables a small collection of accessories, mostly keyboards, and almost exclusively from Apple. Perhaps with a larger contingent of iPads featuring Apple's smart connector we might see more accessories that use it.
With the home button and lightning port I do not at all buy Jozwiak's line that this iPad is designed for iPadOS. Jozwiak also boasted that the new OS could take advantage of flash drives, but the 2019 iPad Cheap's lightning port means we are limited to drives with a lightning port or numerous adapters. The future is USB-C and this iPad is held back by an aggressively regressive design. This iPad is also limited to the A10 Fusion SoC, now three generations behind the iPhone. That is the same SoC as last year's 9.7″ iPad Cheap. It's also only compatible with the first-generation Apple Pencil.
What a disappointing iPad update. .5 inches of new screen real estate and a smart connector aren't enough. $330 base price for 32GB of storage, $430 for 128GB, available for pre-ordering today online, it'll ship at the end of the month. Punishing their most price conscious users with these restrictive storage tiers, misleading talk about the suitability of this iPad hardware for the modern gesture-based OS, and proprietary connectors is something that Apple's executives should be ashamed of.
Cook boasted about the health benefits of Apple's watch with an advertisement focused on stories from people who contacted their company.
I don't doubt that the Apple Watch can be beneficial for some folks, but the video reminded me about the exclusionary nature of Apple's Watch. You have to be relatively wealthy to get the modern models of the Apple Watch with their heart monitoring functionality. Only the wealth has access to those benefits and why it's disappointing that more people don't have them. Apple is limited by the profit motive to charge a restrictively high price for their watch.
Cook introduced Dr. Sumbul Ahmad Desai to talk about the Apple Watch health research studies Apple participates in. I don't know enough about the academic research world to talk about Apple's exploitation of it. I don't think that there is any reason to be less skeptical of Apple's efforts in the medical research field after today. This is a sales pitch for their Watch, after all.
Apple's Stan Ng was introduced to talk about the Series 5 line of watches with an always-on display. The new display is promised to have a variable refresh rate for lower power consumption, and will dim with a low brightness that matches the surrounding environment until the watch is raised or activated with a tap. Ng boasted that the Series 5 watch has an all-day 18-hour battery life.
The Series 5 watch also has a compass, Ng said, for the Maps app, a new compass app, and a watchface complication.
Ng said the Series 5 models would have more colors and materials than before, Space Gray, Silver, and Gold and the higher end titanium and ceramic materials. Nike and Hermes models are also available.
I think this is an extremely compelling upgrade for people on versions of the Apple Watch prior to the Series 4. The always-on display means that this could be one of the most accurate and useful watches you can buy, even though these Series 5 models remain luxuries at high starting prices of $400. The Series 5 external case design appears extremely similar to the Series 4 design, I'm not sure anyone could tell except for when you see the display active at all times.
The Series 4 watches aren't available on Apple's website anymore, the Series 3 models are still available at $200 to start.
Cook closed out the Watch section with this ad.
Cook introduced Kaiann Drance to talk about the 2019 iPhone 11.
The base model of the iPhone 11 replaces the Xr, which is good because that name was confusing and the Xr only has a single camera. The 11 has two, so it will no-longer be an exact downgrade from the old Plus models of iPhone. Confusingly, the new second camera is not a "telephoto" that can get a true optical 2x shot, instead the 11 model has the rumored ultra-wide camera.
The camera app has been updated for the new ultra-wide camera to let you optionally zoom out of the frame more, instead of zooming in. Drance boasted about something called Semantic Rendering new to the image capturing technology of the iPhone. Drance said this feature better identifies the subjects of photos taken with the iPhone 11 for other processing features to work on their captured images. Drance boasted that the portrait-mode image capturing would now work with pets, now that the system has a second camera to work with.
Google has been capturing what are pretty impressive images at night on their Pixel phones using additional image processing that Apple may have been reluctant to do previously because it is less true to what the sensor and our eyes see, and it may have other drawbacks as well. You have to keep the shutter open longer, which is very difficult to do when people are taking quick snapshots without the aid of a tripod.
Drance said the iPhone 11 would also take these kinds of enhanced shots at night with the aid of new image processing features, and did not mention the competition.
The iPhone 11 camera app now takes a video when you hold down the shutter button instead of the burst mode of photo frames. That's a fine change, I often find myself wanting to capture a video and not getting to the option quickly enough.
The front-facing selfie camera on the 11 has been updated with a wider view when the phone is in landscape orientation. The front-facing camera also gets 4k60 video recording and slo-mo. Drance called slo-mo videos "slofies," ugh.
Of course there is a new system-on-a-chip package for the iPhone 11, the A13 replaces the A12.
Drance introduced Yang Yang from TipsWorks to talk about a game called Pascal's Wager for the iPhone. It looks a lot like the PS4 exclusive Bloodbourne, some of the textures and geometry looked really low resolution, but the game does boast a solid 60 frames-per-second and this is a pre-release preview, those could change. Interestingly, this game is a separate purchase instead of an Apple Arcade exclusive, pre-orders will be available next month for Pascal's Wager. I don't think there will be any reason to pre-order the game, pre-ordering games is usually a bad idea before reviews are available. I hope it isn't free-to-play garbage.
When Drance returned she boasted that the iPhone 11 would have an hour more battery life than the Xr, which had more battery life than the Xs and Xs Max. It would also have faster Face ID. "WiFi 6" which is the new marketing name for 802.11ax, the successor to 802.11ac.
The base iPhone 11 also has new color options, purple, white, green, yellow, black, and red. The overall design of the 11 retains the style of the iPhone X, but with a similar 6.1″ LCD screen to the Xr.
The iPhone 11 display is the same resolution as the Xr, 1792 by 828. This is still lower than the iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone 7 Plus which had a straight 1080p physical display resolution.
Drance closed out the iPhone 11 talk with this ad for the base-model unit.
It's an interesting ad because it shows the iPhone getting knocked around, into a purse, off a nightstand, and getting splashed with water, et cetera. As far as I know, the Apple warranties still do not cover water damage and definitely don't cover damage due to the iPhone being scratched or destroyed in a purse or from a fall. Only the AppleCare+ insurance plan covers damage and that is only with an additional incident fee, and even then only two or so of those incidents. The ad also shows the night mode photo screenshot in some weird-ass bar with people wearing masks, and from the perspective of the viewer the photo the camera takes is brighter than the reality of the situation. Very strange advertising situation when these accidents aren't covered by the built-in warranty.
The starting price for the iPhone 11 is $50 lower than the Xr's $750, so $700 gets you a base model 64GB iPhone 11. 128GB is $750, 256GB is $850. 128GB is a nice sweet spot for the future unless you're taking a lot of 4k60 video or downloading big movies and shows. The storage tiers should not exist, storage upgrades should be possible with MicroSD cards unless they're prohibitively slow compared to the built-in flash storage, but at least a decrease in price is positive. The iPhone 11 will be up for pre-order on the 13th at 5AM Pacific time. I would recommend waiting for reviews.
Cook returned to introduce a short ad for the 2019 iPhone 11 Pro, and then Phil Schiller to talk about the product. The Pro distinction was framed by Schiller as being for professionals who need something they can "count on" while also being for "all of us who simply want the best product made." The "Pro" distinction for Apple obviously means "better" "more expensive" and "higher margins" for more profit. The iPhone 11 Pro is no exception, three cameras, stainless steel body, the back is still glass for no good reason, despite being termed something to "count on."
There new color options are Midnight Green, Space Gray, Silver, Gold.
As with the 2018 iPhone Xs, which was smaller than the 2018 Xr, the 2019 11 Pro has a smaller 5.8″ display than the regular iPhone 11. The iPhone 11 Pro Max has a 6.5″ display again. Both the Pro models have an OLED screen with genuine Retina resolutions, no half-assed 1792×828 bullshit like the iPhone 11.
Schiller also compared the iPhone 11 Pro models' display to that of their desktop Pro Display XDR, Apple's only in-house display, that costs $5000 before you even consider their $1000 stand. That's one way to frame the high prices for modern iPhones in a positive light.
Sri Santhanam was introduced to talk about the A13 processor in the iPhone 11 line. Santhanam talked about the technical improvements, which makes it even more ridiculous that they are withheld from 2019 iPad Cheap, iPad Mini, and iPad Air. Presumably the Pro line of iPads will get the A13 updates next month, and the other devices could get it next year but it seems likely that Apple will continue to withhold the highest end SoC from some of those models.
Schiller returned to boast that the 11 Pro gets up to 4 hours more battery life than the iPhone Xs. The iPhone 11 Pro Max gets up to 5 hours more battery life than the Xs Max. We'll have to see how that works out in reviews when last year's Xs and Xs Max had less battery life than the Xr which has now been replaced by the base 11.
Of course, with three cameras on the back of the iPhone 11 Pro that means this device has at least four total if you include the front-facing selfie camera. The "telephoto" 52 mm focal length camera is only on the Pro models. What I wouldn't give for just a single large camera lens.
Schiller showed off the new camera systems with professional, creative, photography shot on the iPhone 11 Pro models. As much as I appreciate seeing good photos taking by good photographers, I would also like to see comparisons of typical snapshots that regular people take. A photo at a bar, a birthday party, a bird in the distance, there are lots of challenging situations to take photos in that typical iPhone photographers (all of us!) would like to see, and while it would be unusual to show typical photos instead of pro photography for an Apple iPhone event, it would be very helpful to show the improvements in these photos instead of just pro photos taken on a cherry picker over a skatepark as Phil Schiller demonstrated. I believe the value of these phones and their camera system improvements are in the ease-of-use and improvement for non-professional photographers.
Schiller introduced the idea of a new camera feature he called Deep Fusion to take advantage of the A13's machine learning capabilities to take a great photo even in "…low to medium light" by combining 9 images into one composite. Schiller said this feature was a "sneak peek" and that before you press the shutter button the iPhone has already taken "…four short images" (he's referring to the time the lens is capturing, exposure length) and "four secondary images." Pressing the shutter button causes the iPhone to take one long-exposure image and then work on a final image that it determines to be the best. I would very much like to see this in comparison to a DSLR or mirrorless camera, the extents the engineers at Apple have to go to in order to work around the small sensor sizes physically available on an iPhone are ridiculous.
I suppose if Apple were excited about making these comparisons to real cameras, they would do so.
Video improvements are also on deck for the iPhone 11 Pro, all three back-side cameras can apparently shoot 4k60 video. Schiller introduced a Hollywood-quality video shot with these phones, I'm still kind of burned out on professional videography, this is not within the capability of a typical user. A hand-model demonstrated a user taking video of two children in a field of colorful sheets hanging on what appeared to be lines, but again, this is a ridiculous, non-typical, test.
Schiller also pointed out that iOS 13 will allow users to edit video within the photos app for more than just trim adjustments. As someone who has been suffering by bouncing out of the app to iMovie for years to make simple corrections like rotating the video to the appropriate orientation, this is greatly appreciated.
Schiller introduced Sean Baker and Chris Cohen for FiLMiC Pro to talk about the app's future upgrade to include shooting from multiple cameras at the same time. The demo video is professional, but almost entirely outside the realm of a typical user. The iPhone in the demo sits on a specialized rig with one person operating the iPhone 11 Pro on some ridiculously expensive looking tripod and mount, and another person pushing the first person on some fancy ass stool and mount to hold the tripod and the rest of the rig on top of a movable platform.
I recently attempted to record a video on a Sony NEX-6 mirrorless camera and I've never seen a better example of how important the powerful optical image stabilization is on an iPhone for video. I regret using the Sony for that task, but the Sony's sensor is so much better for still-photography just because it's physically larger and lets in more light. I can crop photos from the NEX-6 and they don't up looking like a water-color painting.
Finally, the 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max include a faster 18 watt charger, a huge upgrade over the 5 watt charger included with every prior iPhone and the regular iPhone 11. All of the iPhone 11 models (Pro and regular) have lightning ports instead of USB-C.
Schiller closed his talk about the iPhone 11 Pro with this advertisement.
The ad is just as ridiculous as the one for the regular iPhone 11, depicting all kinds of scenarios that are not covered by the warranty and tests done in laboratories. The ad does mention one improvement that was rumored but not on-stage, Face ID improvements mean that it'll work from more angles.
Last year I wrote about how I was considering getting off the iPhone upgrade cycle so that I could focus my still photography on a compact mirrorless camera. I've finally been able to do that with a 6-year old Sony NEX-6. The difference in experience between shooting on an NEX-6, even in comparison to the iPhone Xs Max I carry every day is huge. There is only so much that Apple can do with the physical constraints of the iPhone's depth, and while I am hopeful that the improvements to the camera system this year will improve the experience of shooting, I am more sure than ever that the right move for someone who is disappointed in hobbyist photography on the iPhone is to get off the upgrade cycle and stick with a phone for more time, and decide to move to a standalone camera for stills at least.
It can be frustrating to carry around a second device just for stills. The NEX-6 for example has a much lower quality display than any iPhone ever made, it can make photos look poor until they're transferred to another device with a better display, but it's also a liberating experience. I treat the SD card almost like a roll of film and just transfer photos to my iPhone with Apple's lightning to SD card dongle at the end of the day, which is also when I have time to briefly edit them and share them with friends and family.
I love photography, I believe the iPhone is a technological wonder, but this 6 year old camera that is full of limitations (don't even ask me how broken the NEX-6's "app store" is) does a better job in most of the challenging situations I end up taking photos in than an iPhone that was released last year!
Just like the iPhone X and Xs, the iPhone 11 Pro is a thousand dollars for a 64GB model, and then it's a $150 upgrade to get to the 256GB model at $1150. That is probably the right storage for future proofing if you're not shooting 4k60 video constantly. 512GB is $1,350. The 11 Pro Max is $1,100 for 64GB, $1,250 for 256GB, and $1,450 for 512GB. Both new iPhones will be up for pre-order on the 13th at 5AM. I would recommend waiting for reviews.
The external designs of the iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max appear largely similar to the X, Xs, and Xs Max these "Pro" models are replacing. I don't think anyone would notice the difference between an iPhone 11 Pro and an iPhone Xs if they were both in a case that covered the back, unless you count the cameras or see a bit of the new green color. Notably, Apple now makes clear cases for all of the new iPhone models to show off the color choices, not just the Xr replacement in the base iPhone 11.
I feel no desire to upgrade my iPhone at this time, as an experiment using a standalone camera alongside the iPhone Xs Max has been a success and I might just upgrade my camera at some point in the next few years. The "Deep Fusion" feature is interesting, and of course each year you wait to upgrade your phone will make the next leap that much more interesting. If I were still on an iPhone 7 Plus or older device, it seems like it'd be a great year to get the iPhone 11 which finally has two cameras again, even though neither is the telephoto 55mm lens of the 7 Plus, they can at least have stereoscopic imaging for better "portrait mode" photos which I have all but given up on with my Xs Max. They still error out between strands of hair and between legs and arms too often to be useful.
I've never been more disappointed with Apple's exclusionary pricing and terrible labor practices. Their technology is wonderful, but the profit motive absolutely corrupts the products and services at almost every turn. Boasting about thumb-drive compatibility on the new cheap iPad when you'll need an adapter or a new thumb-drive to work with the lightning port is ridiculous and that's just one of the decisions Apple made to keep costs down on one of their devices.
I'm happy for people who are able to afford Apple's devices and receive health, privacy, productivity, and other benefits, but I'm disappointed more people can't access them and Apple's labor practices globally with their retail and manufacturing employees remain detrimental to their image.
Despite the things that Apple does in terms of the environment, their rich executives and investors are profiting off of low wages in manufacturing and retail, and environmental destruction.
Apple's competitors are worse in many of these regards, but that doesn't mean that Apple should be shielded from criticism.
One more oddity, every game demo had the presenter introduced, but not the person actually playing the game.
The leaks were mostly correct. We can expect another event later this year, possibly in October, for iPad Pro and Mac updates. Hopefully the rumors about the new Apple TV hardware, the current Apple TV 4K has the older A10X SoC which will limit game performance, and the rumored Tile-style tracker using the new U1 chip that provides very accurate locations to the new iPhone 11 models, will also be announced. Though those updates and the release of the new Mac Pro could be done in a more limited fashion if Apple's people decide not to do another big event.
Author Jack SlaterPosted on September 10, 2019 September 15, 2019 Categories appleTags apple, apple events, iphone, iphone 11, iphone 11 proLeave a comment on Apple's September iPhone Event 2019 Notes
Apple WWDC 2019 Event Notes
Apple held their annual World-Wide Developer Conference event in San Jose, California today. Here's what they announced:
The event opened with this ad romanticizing overworked developers.
Tim Cook's Services Showcase
Tim Cook hosted and reiterated how great he thinks Apple is, and briefly recapped their services event. As if to fix their perplexing lack of trailers or clips of their original TV programming (Apple TV+) from the services event, Cook introduced a clip for For All Mankind. It's the Ron Moore-led show about the Russians winning the space race, and it was extremely incongruous with the rest of the event.
tvOS Updates
Cook introduced a redesigned home-screen for tvOS with full-screen background previews of shows.
Up next, multi-user support for tvOS so you only see your shows. A blessing for parents who never wanted Game of Thrones mixed with Sesame Street. Unless it's in a Sesame Street parody of Game of Thrones, which I am ready for.
As an aside, Cook showed how you could swap users in tvOS using a new control-center menu that looks like it is available via a swipe in from the right.
The components in the new tvOS control center showed the time, date, profile pictures for the different tvOS users, a quick option to put the Apple TV to sleep, music controls, the audio output dingus which will be handy for AirPod users, and a search icon.
Cook showed that users would have personalized music options, again, my recommendations will no-longer be destroyed by the music I play for my family. Fantastic. This multi-user stuff needs to be on every Apple device.
The updated Apple Music app for tvOS would display lyrics while you're listening.
Apple Arcade was demonstrated with Oceanhorn 2.
Cook promised that the Apple TV would now support the Xbox One S and the PlayStation Dual Shock 4 controllers, which both have Bluetooth functionality. This is fantastic because the only MFi controller that has clickable thumbsticks is wired. I believe this functionality is coming to iOS as well.
Screensavers are getting updated with underwater vistas in collaboration with the BBC's Natural History team.
Cook boasted the current functionality of the watches Apple makes before introducing Kevin Lynch to talk about new features.
Lynch promised "more watch faces this year since the very first Apple Watch." I think he meant that there are more new faces this year than there have ever been before.
Lynch demonstrated five new faces. A gradient face that moves an angled gradient with the minute hand. A "large numerals face" that showed the current hour in multiple languages. A modern digital face with huge chunky numbers. Finally, a hideous analog California dial with roman numerals (X, XI, I, II) above the horizontal midpoint of the watch and traditional Arabic numbers (8, 7, 5, 4) below. Finally, a new solar face that had multiple circles to represent the movement of the sun during the day.
According to Lynch he new faces would have an optional hourly chimes that they call Taptic Chimes. Each hour you'd either feel a nudge on your wrist from the "taptic engine" of the watch or if sound is on you'd hear something like a bird singing with the new modern face. This is extremely obnoxious. I can't imagine anyone using it.
There are also new apps for the Apple Watch, an audiobook app for books purchased through Apple's book store and a Voice Memos app to match the phone's. Another new app is an Apple-provided calculator.
Finally, WatchOS gets apps that run only on the Watch. Previously, every Watch app had to have a companion app for the iPhone, even when that made little sense.
In the first actual nod to developers for the event, Lynch promised new APIs. An Extended Runtime API lets apps run for longer. Lynch specifically called out that this would be for apps using sensor data, like meditation, exercise, or tooth brushing.
A new-to-the-watch Streaming Audio API would let developers stream audio over the network. Three examples were given, podcasts (Outcast app), music (Pandora), and the MLB's watch app with the Phillies versus the Brewers.
Lynch also promised a new UI framework this year.
Independent apps also mean that the watch gets its own App Store app to browse for & install new apps.
Dr. Sumbal Desai, Apple's Vice President of Health was introduced to talk about new health and fitness features for the Watch.
Desai promised an updated Activity app with more long-term information through trending data. The updated app is supposed to provide new data points that weren't previously exposed.
One of the new features of the Watch is the new Noise app that monitors your auditory environment and alerts you when it's so noisy that you could damage your hearing. There's also a complication for the watch face to display the current noise level.
Desai promised that the Noise app wouldn't record or save audio, and instead just sample the volume every so-often.
Another new feature for the Watch is the Cycle Tracking app for period tracking. It'll also be available in the iOS Health app.
Lynch returned to discuss a newly redesigned iOS Health app. A Summary view provides health related notifications and other summarily-provided information. He also promised that all of your health information would be private and securely-stored on your iPhone or encrypted in their data centers.
WatchOS program lead Haley Allen demonstrated the new watchOS functionality. Allen started with a new watch face, the Modular Compact face that had four items on the screen, a large analog dial in the upper right, two new complications (Wind and Rain) on the left side, and a large complication space in the bottom with an upcoming calendar item. Allen replaced the large calendar complication with a Noise complication to measure the environmental volume and had the audience cheer to raise the volume.
Allen moved on to the Infograph Modular face with a pretty cool two-tone color scheme of whte numerals with red highlights. Allen demonstrated the audiobook complication that let her tap to get back into the audiobook watch app.
The new app store was demoed, and it looks fine, although it isn't clear how easy it will be to navigate from these short demos.
Finally, Allen demonstrated the MLB app streaming Red Sox versus Orioles game.
Lynch returned with the traditional "didn't have time" feature jumble and mentioned that the watch would finally update itself without requiring the user to do so on their iPhone.
Lynch said there would be new watch bands and colors, he specifically called out a new pride band.
Apple shortchanges all of their retail workers equally when they make people line up for mandatory off-the-clock searches before being allowed to leave at the end of their shift.
Cook returned to move things back to iOS and introduced Craig Federighi who joked about the tremendous creativity behind the iOS 13 name, and then moved on to talking about how much performance has increased in current devices with the new operating system.
Federighi gave some examples and said that Face ID would be 30% faster to unlock devices.
Apps would be packaged differently for iOS 13, and would be 50% smaller to download and updates would somehow be 60% smaller. Who knows how much work is involved on the part of developers to attain those numbers, and what exactly is going on. Compression, selective assets, it could be any number of things and those could be effective or not across a wide variety of apps and games.
Apps, Federighi said, would launch twice as quickly on iOS 13.
Moving on to new features, Federighi introduced a video advertising the new iOS dark mode.
Dark Mode is a feature that debuted on macOS last year. Federighi demonstrated it in use on an iPhone, starting with the lock screen switching from a light version of a wallpaper and theme to a darker version. He moved on to News, which will no-longer blind you in the middle of the night, then swapped to the Calendar, Notes, and Messages. It's a feature that should have been on iOS as soon as OLED screens became an option.
While in Messages Federighi demonstrated that the keyboard, also updated for dark mode, has swiping functionality. He later called it the "quick path keyboard".
Federighi showed that the new share sheet in photos also adjusted to dark mode, and it had sharing suggestions in addition to a redesigned interface for sharing to apps and actions.
The darkness embraced the music app, which also has time-synched lyrics just like the TV Music app.
Federighi exited the darkness and talked about other app updates.
Safari is promised to have quick functionality to scale the text of the site you're viewing, and per-site preferences.
Mail is to get "…desktop-class text formatting, including support for rich fonts."
Notes has a new gallery overview, shared folders, and "much more."
Reminders has been "completely reinvented" and "completely rewritten from the ground-up." It's supposed to give you suggestions of when or where you might want to be reminded, a quick-type bar lets you quickly add locations or photos to your reminders.
To-do lists can be embedded inside a top-level reminder for more organizational functionality. People can be tagged in a reminder so you're reminded to talk to them about something you wanted to remember.
The Maps app is supposedly updated with new information from a fleet of Apple's mapping vehicles. The entire US is to have the new data by the end of the year.
Meg Frost was introduced for a demonstration of the new maps app. She's wheelchair bound and has what I can honestly say is the most awesome looking wheelchair I've ever seen.
The redesigned Maps app has a horizontally-scrolling list of categorized favorites under the search bar, collections of places in a vertical list, and then your recently viewed places.
Finally, there's a street view mode with a binocular icon that launches users into a "look-around" view that appears comparable to Google's app.
Federighi returned to quickly list off a few more changes to the maps app. A junction view for China that lets people see how traffic will flow in an upcoming intersection, and ETA sharing via quick on-screen shortcuts.
Federighi reiterated his company's commitment to privacy with another word jumble and then talked about new privacy controls. Location could be shared with an app just once, and then it'd have to ask for approval the next time. You'll also get regular alerts to apps using your location in the background, and said they wouldn't allow apps to scan WiFi and Bluetooth signals to track your location.
Federighi promised that Apple would create a new single-sign on functionality for streamlining logins to apps without third-party services or new accounts. It'll be up to the developer to support this method of sign-on. Federighi promised that this would create a new account for the app without revealing "… any new personal information." Signing in would use Face ID, or presumably Touch ID. Developers can optionally request your name and e-mail address. Users can optionally share a one-time email address that Apple creates on the spot to forward mail from that app. Federighi said that you could delete the new address at any time to stop receiving mail from that app.
This will inhibit situations where, for example, you want to log into the web version of an app, so it isn't clear to me how that will work but Federighi said that it'll work on websites. It won't work in Firefox, Chrome, or Edge unless Apple has built something for those browsers.
Next, Federighi talked about a new feature of HomeKit, Secure Video, for home security cameras to analyze video locally (on an iPad, HomePod, or Apple TV box) instead of on remote servers. When the video is uploaded, it'll go to iCloud but be encrypted and Federighi promised that Apple can't even see the video.
Federighi said that storage for 10 days of video recordings would be included in existing iCloud accounts, and that this video storage wouldn't count against iCloud storage limits.
The first companies to support this new Secure Video functionality are Netatmo, Logitech, and Eufy. At leat two of those sound like Pokemon.
Federighi promised that there would be HomeKit enabled routers which just makes it even more infuriating that they stopped developing their AirPort line of network routers. HomeKit-enabled routers would segregate the network connections of internet-of-things devices. Federighi said that Linksys, Amazon-owned Eero, and the Spectrum ISP would make these routers at first.
Moving back to Messages, Federighi immediately sherlocked Casey Liss's Vignette by saying that you could optionally share your name and photo with people you message so they wouldn't just get a random phone number.
Federighi introduced popular YouTube spec workers' "Memoji" avatars to talk about new features for those avatars. There are a ton of new features, here's the video:
After the video, Federighi spoke about Memoji stickers. These could replace regular emoji with automatically generated Memoji versions of the regular emojis. It's interesting that these are also included in the system keyboard, and Federighi said that the customized stickers would work in mail or other apps.
Finally, Federighi said that users without FaceID, but who had at least an A9 SoC, could create, edit, and share Memoji. Although they wouldn't be animated without the iPhone and iPad Pro sensor suite.
The Camera and Photo apps have also been updated.
New Portrait Mode features include "high key mono," and you'll be able to move the virtual portrait lighting lights further or closer to your subject.
Edits are promised to be easier to make, have new features, and be available for video as well. You can finally rotate a video while editing without using another app.
Browsing photos is to be easier, separating out screenhots and photos of things like receipts, and organizing photos to only show a single photo of a particularly scene instead of every duplicate.
Justin Titi demonstrated the new Photos app, and how it organizes photos into easier collections of days, months, years, or still allows users to dig into every photo.
Federighi returned to introduce Stacy Leizeig (not sure on the spelling of that name) to talk about AirPods, HomePods, CarPlay, and Siri updates for iOS 13.
AirPods can optionally announce incoming messages as soon as they come in, so you can reply immediately. Leizeig said this would work with any messaging application that uses Apple's SiriKit API.
Audio sharing will be available in iOS 13 to share audio between multiple devices. There is a user consent dialog before this happens, and audio is controlled independently.
Leizeig said that people could use the HandOff API to share music or a podcast to a HomePod by holding their device close to the HomePod. Recovering the listening session happens by the same gesture.
Siri is promised to have live radio access with over a hundred-thousand live stations.
The HomePod will finally recognize multiple speakers and personalize answers and data for Messages, Music, Reminders, Notes, and so on.
CarPlay updates include a new dashboard view with more information. Siri is promised to stay "out of the way" and not obscure the entire display. We need that functionality on regular iOS.
Siri Shortcuts is built into iOS 13 and "more powerful than ever." The Shortcuts app will make more suggestions about multi-step shortcuts that might be useful to you.
The Siri voice in iOS 13 is promised to be entirely software generated for the first time, as opposed to generated using clips of different speech sounds to create each word. I hope this fixes Siri's pronounciation of Hawaiian names, because it's pretty awful. Leizeig compared iOS 12's Siri to iOS 13's Siri pronouncing a complex sentence scientifically describing absolute zero. The iOS 13 Siri sounded much more natural and human.
Federighi returned to close out the iOS 13 discussion and talk about the split to iPadOS. He introduced a video that has not been excerpted onto Apple's YouTube channel yet, it showed new functionality that would be exclusive to the iPad.
Federighi demonstrated the newly defined iPadOS. He showed that an iPad Pro (2018) running iPad OS with more icons on the home screen, and by swiping over from the left, the widgets previously on their own home screen are now visible on the regular screen.
Multitasking is improved by giving slide-over windows their own grab handle at the bottom of the slide-over window that lets you quickly choose a recent window.
Split-view was demonstrated in Notes by grabbing a note from the list and splitting it off into a different split-view window. Finally. The iPad has been available for almost 10 years and multitasking needs these improvements.
Federighi demonstrated dragging and dropping individual notes next to other "spaces" with other apps open in other windows. App Expose would allow you to see any fullscreen space with a Note open, in Federighi's example.
Federighi also demonstrated two Microsoft Word documents side-by-side in SplitView.
Federighi then demonstrated splitting e-mail composition into a new window while continuing to browse through other emails before dragging and dropping an image from another e-mail he had received to the e-mail he was composing. He also showed previewing a link in another e-mail, and then dragging that link and dropping the link into the e-mail he was composing.
An e-mail in the background joked about screensavers for iPad OS, including Flying Toasters. I'll be holding out for the Dancing Disco Pig.
Federighi also talked about improvements to the Files app. New views like icon and list views. A Column view with previews, and quick actions.
iCloud Drive will finally get folder sharing.
The Files app in iPadOS is to get Samba sharing, it sounded like it was just to access network shares and not share from iOS.
Finally, the Files app will get external storage support for thumb-drives, SD cards, and other connected drives. Holy shit this took forever.
Finally, you can import directly from a camera into an app (Lightroom was the example) instead of going through iCloud Photos.
Safari is also getting updated on the iPad with "Desktop-class browsing" so that iPad users won't get served the mobile version of websites.
Federighi specifically said that browser apps like Google Docs, Squarespace, and WordPress would work better now.
As rumored, Safari is getting a download manager. There will also be 30 new keyboard shortcuts for Safari.
Also rumored, fonts are easier to manage in iOS 13. They'll be downloadable from the App Store. Fonts have been an important focus of Apple's software for as long a very long time, this is a big Finally for iOS. It will be interesting to see how fonts are managed, and if they will be freely loadable without going through the App Store.
iPadOS multitouch is supposed to be easier. Federighi showed a giant hand grabbing the page scroll indicator directly on a long document, grabbing the cursor while editing a note and moving it easier while also adjusting that movement into a selection. A new gesture enables copy and paste on the iPad. Once text is selected it is possible to copy by pinching with three fingers and then pasting by moving the cursor and spreading three fingers out.
A three-finger swipe left is the new iPad undo gesture. Federighi joked about how people won't have to shake-to-undo the iPad anymore.
The Apple Pencil latency is supposed to be reduced from 20 miliseconds to 9 miliseconds. The Pencil drawing tools are improved and available to third-party developers via a new API called PencilKit.
iPadOS 13 will allow you to mark-up "…anything on any app" by dragging up with the pencil from the corner of the screen to get a screenshot of the screen and mark it up. This is said to also work with an entire document, instead of just the currently visible screen area.
Toby Patterson was introduced to show off iPadOS' new editing functionality, including bringing up a small iPhone-sized keyboard for typing with one hand. He accessed that new small keyboard by pinching the large keyboard with two fingers. Patterson was visibly flustered when trying to demonstrate some of the text selection gestures, which weren't cooperating with him.
Patterson said you could still shake to undo, but he also showed off the new three-finger swipe. He said these gestures would work in any application that supports cut, copy, and paste with undo and redo, not just text-based document applications.
Moving onto the Pencil's new tool pallete. Patterson showed it being dragged and dropped around the screen, so it could get out of the way of his work. It can be pinned to the edge, or minimized out of the way.
Patterson also showed the markup mode, and how it works with screenshots and can be toggled in apps that support it to the document mark-up mode.
Cook was brought back out to move things to the Mac Pro. John Siracusa's dreams have come true. After a decade he can finally get a new 2019 Advanced-Cheese Grater Mac Pro.
John Ternus was introduced to talk about the long overdue replacement for the Trashcan Mac Pro. The Intel Xeon-based computer supports up to 28 cores.
The RAM is 2933Mhz ECC RAM, 6 memory channels, there are 12 DIMM slots. You could havce up to 1.5 terabytes of RAM.
Ternus said the new Mac Pro has 8 internal PCI-express slots. Four double-wide, three single-wide, and one additional half-wide slot that has IO ports. That card has two Thunderbolt 3 ports, two USB-A ports, and a regular 3.5 mm audio minijack. There are two more Thunderbolt 3 ports on the top of the computer.
There are two gigabit ethernet ports near the power connector at the bottom of the back of the 2019 Mac Pro.
Ternus said there is a new Mac Pro Expansion (MPX) module specifically for containing video cards that has it's own 500 watts of power, a regular x16 PCI express edge connector, and then an additional PCI express/ DisplayPort/Power thing on the end. The starting graphics card would be a Radeon Pro 580X. I'm a little confused by that part, because it sounds like the 2017 Radeon Pro 580. Another option for graphics is the Radeon Pro Vega II, or two of those Vega II GPUs. I really wish the Nvidia and Apple feud would end so some other competing options could be availalbe.
Ternus called the dual Vega II configuration "The world's most powerful graphics card." before he introduced another marketing term, the Infinity Fabric Link, which supposedly lets data move between the GPUs five times faster than the PCI express bus.
Ternus said you could also configure the new Mac Pro with two dual Vega IIs modules.
Ternus talked about an add-on card for editing ProRes and ProRes RAW video. This card has a custom ASIC that allows the Mac Pro to process huge video data streams. Ternus said the Mac Pro could play 3 8K ProRes RAW streams.
The new Mac Pro has a 1.4 kiloWatt power supply. Ternus said that "under typical load conditions" the new three-fans-and-one-blower thermal cooling setup in the new Mac Pro is as quiet as an iMac Pro.
There are optional wheels for the Mac Pro.
Ternus boasted about the third-parties that are working with Apple for the new Mac Pro and specifically boasted about performance beating an Nvidia+Windows configuration.
David Earl was introduced to talk about Logic and Final Cut, and showed adding hundreds of instruments to a soundtrack for a documentary. He added about a thousand tracks and then worked with 8K video.
The starting price for this Mac Pro $6000. The availability was given as "this Fall."
There will also be a special version of the 2019 Mac Pro for rack-mount configurations.
Colleen Novielli was brought out to talk about the new display for the new Mac Pro. She compared it to a pro display that costs $43,000. The APDXDR is 32 inches and has a resolution of 6016 x 3384. Novielli called it a 6K Retina Display. The new display was said to support P3 wide color gamut, 10-bit color, and has Reference modes built-in. Novielli said the display has contrast that is 25x better than a typical LCD.
Novielli also said there was a superior matte option available for the display that doesn't degrade image quality compared to older technologies.
This display is supposed to maintain higher brightness levels, 1000 nits in perpituity, 1600 nits at the peak. Novielli said the display would have a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
Novielli said the 15 inch MacBook Pro can have two of these displays connected, while the new Mac Pro can have six of these displays connected.
The arm for the display is custom, and supposedly makes the monitor feel weightless while it is being adjusted. There is also an optional VESA mounting adapter.
The Apple Pro Display XDR costs $5000. There is also a "Nano-Textured" version of the display that costs $6000. The VESA adapter is $200. The "Pro-stand" is a laughable $1000. If you don't have either I guess you've gotta get some plywood and screws out or keep it on your lap?
macOS 10.15 Catalina's iTunes Breakdown
Cook returned to summon Craig Federighi to talk about the new version of macOS.
Federighi walked us through some of the features of iTunes added over the past 18 years, paused to joke about adding Mail and Safari and a Dock to iTunes, before introducing a split of iTunes into three apps. Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, and Apple TV. It wasn't immediately clear if the new app would still support local libraries of music and features like iTunes Match.
Federighi talked about how the Apple Music experience would be better in the new app before introducing the idea that sync for iOS devices would be moved to the Finder app.
Apple Podcasts gets its own app, as well. Federighi said that the new Podcasts app has machine learning'd it up to scan the spoken word content of the podcasts so you can search for the actual content instead of just the name or episode title.
The Apple TV app is split off into its own app. Federighi boasted that the new app would support 4K HDR playback supporting HDR-10, Dolby Atmos, and Dolby Vision standards.
The rumored iPad-as-external-display feature is real, and it is called Sidecar. Goodbye to the podcast ads? This functionality supports the Apple Pencil, and works wired or wirelessly.
Federighi introduced an accessibility ad for new voice features to control Macs and iOS, as well as rich text composition:
As rumored, Find My iPhone and Find My Friends have been combined for both iOS and macOS into one app just called Find My. Apparently devices will now emit Bluetooth signals so you can track them down even when they are offline, via a mesh network of Apple devices. Federighi promises that this is encrypted and anonymous.
Activation Lock
Macs with the T2 security chip (an ARM SoC from Apple) get the ability to be locked down via activation lock.
macOS 10.15 Catalina, Again
Federighi talked about how the new updates to Photos would make it to this version of macOS, along with an updated start page in Safari, and the new gallery view in Notes. Reminders is also coming to macOS along with Screen Time.
Project Catalyst (Marzipan?)
Federighi's got a marketing name for the stuff that brought shit iPad versions of News, Stocks, Voice Memos, and Home to macOS Mojave. Federighi says that this new cross-platform support is much improved, the slides are not very convincing.
In terms of third-party support, Federighi boasted about the racing game Asphalt, Twitter's iPad client which is not somebody I want to hear about when they hate third-party developers to a degree that is profoundly disturbing for the long-term success of that platform. Finally, Federighi introduced somebody from Atlassian to talk about Jira for the Mac. Zzz. it'll be in the Mac App Store this Fall.
Catalyst is available to developers in Xcode preview today. No multiple window support was demonstrated. I am not hopeful that this feature is at all improved over the awful News, Stocks, Voice Memos, and Home apps on macOS today.
Federighi talked about the new AR API RealityKit, for developers that don't have experience with existing game engines. Reality Composer is a new app as part of Xcode, or for iOS and iPad. It has a bunch of pre-existing models to stuff into your app. Very strange. ARKit 3 was demonstrated with a new people occlusion feature to allow for people to be better placed in-between AR models. Motion capture was also demonstrated.
Minecraft Earth AR Demo
It wouldn't be a modern Apple event without an awkward demo featuring VR or AR. VR is a little out of fashion, so it's an AR demo from Lydia Winters and Saxs Persson of Mojang. I'm not sure how many people will want to hold an iPhone or iPad for hours to view an AR version of Minecraft called Minecraft Earth. All things considered this demo could have been much worse.
Federighi returned to talk about a new framework for the Swift programming language, SwiftUI. Federighi gave an example of a huge list that would be a huge piece of code but minimized when it was converted to the SwiftUI framework.
Federighi said that new features would be brought to apps with SwiftUI automatically, like Dark Mode. He also said that there's a new interactive, upgraded preview type of thing in Xcode for SwiftUI. Federighi compared it to Swift Playgrounds but said it was much more powerful.
Josh Schafer was brought out to demo SwiftUI's new editor in Xcode. He made a joke app to make up phony versions of MacOS, and immediately showed his changes both in the Xcode Preview as well as on a live iPhone.
Federighi returned to say that the SwiftUI framework was also available for watchOS, and all Apple platforms.
Cook's Close-out Deals
Cook returned to tell us that developers betas were available for all of the new operating systems and software today, with public betas in July. The usual promised release window for the new operating systems was "The Fall."
The world's most performant Mac Pro is great if you're working on movies or high-end audio production Apple still can't ship a reliable laptop keyboard or a tower for normal people who aren't at Pixar. It's also not clear at all what storage upgrades for the Mac Pro will look like, I'm not sure if the word "T2" was mentioned during the keynote, but the product page for the new Mac Pro mentions the dedicated ARM SoC Apple calls T2 so it seems like you might be limited to add-on PCI-express modules or hooking up external peripheral storage. This is especially galling on the base-model Mac Pro that only includes 256GB of storage.
The display that costs extra if you want to put it somewhere besides flat on your floor is just the ridiculous cherry-on-top of unapproachable high-end hardware.
The OS update for the Mac was couched in the end of iTunes, which will hopefully still be available if some functionality is missing from the new Music, Podcast, and TV apps. Windows users, are of course still suck with the worst version of iTunes.
iCloud is still capped to an increasingly paltry 5GBs of free storage. I am very tired of reading help posts from iPhone users online who have lost their entire photo and video library when their phone breaks and they couldn't afford enough iCloud storage. Somehow Apple has deemed the subset of their user base that has home video security cameras more important than the millions of iPhone users who would refuse to pay for secure backups.
One way that Apple could work around this is with their own home network router that had a disk inside for backups of all your devices, but the AirPort line of routers is dead and I am sad about that.
I'm not sure how much I buy the split of iOS and iPadOS, it didn't seem like this event was organized to emphasize that split, but I am glad that they're working on the iPad to make it a better competitor to a traditional laptop computer. Still, there are so many limitations of an iPad compared to a modern Mac. For example, there is still no generally available multi-user mode for the iPad. The HomePod is getting that feature first, I'm glad the HomePod is going to be more useful, but it's ridiculous and looks more like a cash grab that everyone in a house needs their own iPad if they want it to be tailored to their uses.
I am a little concerned that the only way improvements can come to these platforms is bundled in a cute marketing name. The iPad needs more improvements yet to be more competitive as a laptop replacement, maybe we don't need our home screen to be just a list of apps and a select few widgets. Maybe a home screen could include files and be arranged however someone wants it, just like a real computer. Apple is so slowly trickling out features to the iPad, I'm looking forward to more. Perhaps they'll come faster with the rebranding to iPadOS.
The most important Pro app for iPads to be a full computer and ship their own apps is Xcode, and we still don't have it. Until an iPad can ship iPad software without any other device, I'm not sure Apple is really onboard with the iPad as a real computer.
Author Jack SlaterPosted on June 4, 2019 June 4, 2019 Categories appleTags apple, apple events, apple tv, apple watch, ipadOS, mac pro, macOSLeave a comment on Apple WWDC 2019 Event Notes
Apple Services Event March 2019 Notes
Apple opened yesterday's event at the Steve Jobs theater in Cupertino with a 1960's-style movie credits animation that paid homage to previously successful products their people have created. The iPod, the iPhone, the Mac, all great things but an odd thing to reference for an all-services event.
Tim Cook came on stage to introduce the notion of services as a third pillar of Apple's work, alongside the software and hardware. He referenced many of the services Apple provides today, like their podcast directory, and photo storage with sync.
Cook talked about Apple's News app and said that it is the #1 news app due to Apple having over 5 billion articles read by readers each month. It isn't immediately clear if there are other benchmarks available to compare, and no chart was displayed on-stage for this claim.
After a video about how important written and photographic journalism is, Cook introduced VP of Applications Roger Rosner to talk about their subscription service for news and magazines. Rosner said their subscription would cover over 300 magazines. Last year, Apple acquired a digital magazine subscription service called Texture, at the time Apple boasted that Texture had over 200 magazines.
Rosner introduced Wyatt Mitchell, Apple's Director of Design for Applications, who has worked at numerous magazines in the past, to demo News+. Mitchell introduced a redesigned News app and an issue of National Geographic inside it, with a video cover surrounded by the traditional yellow border.
Mitchell also showed the new News+ tab in the redesigned News app, and talked about how the app would automatically download recent issues so you have them available offline, demonstrated some of the other navigation features, and went back up the stack by handing off back to Rosner. If you don't sign up, your News app is now less useful and has a tab you don't want.
Rosner said News+ include subscriptions to various online news sites and papers like the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Rosner highlighted that Apple doesn't know what you read, by making recommendations on-device instead of on their servers, and doesn't allow tracking from advertisers in the News app. Essentially a shot at what the websites for these magazines and newspapers have had to give up to to advertisers in order to keep paying their executives and investors.
Rosner said there has never been a service like this before, which is extremely suspect given that Apple acquired the magazine portion of this service, which already existed. Rosner then continued to talk about how these magazine and newspaper subscriptions would normally cost a ridiculous amount of money each year if you were to subscribe to each individually, in order to provide context for the final price of $10 per month. Family sharing members get access without an additional fee, Apple's Apple Music streaming music service is $15/month for families or $10 for individuals, as an example.
News+ is available in yesterday's macOS (10.14.4) and iOS (12.2) updates.
Apple's News app has been notoriously unavailable in Canada, and will now finally be available there in French and English alongside Canadien newspaper, The Star. News+ hits Australia and the UK this Fall.
Apple Pay & Apple's Credit Card
Cook took things back to talk about growing Apple Pay statistics, and mention that Portland (Oregon) would be getting transit passes through the Wallet app alongside New York City and Chicago. This has been available in some other places like Japan for some time.
Cook talked about their perceived problems (ease of application, privacy, etc) with credit cards and introduced VP of Apple Pay Jennifer Bailey to talk about their Apple Card credit card through Goldman Sachs and Mastercard.
Bailey demonstrated how the Wallet app would show charts to help people understand their spending, and how people could text Apple to handle issues with the card like changing an address. I'm not sure why we need to text to handle something that could be done via a user interface experience, but it's more likely that Apple just wanted something easy to demonstrate that wasn't fraught with the usual anxiety around a stolen card or other issues.
Bailey promised that Apple had used machine learning to change the transaction logs and statement to make them easier to understand, and would associate the useless info we usually get on a statement into the name of an actual business. As an example, they used an animation to transform an address from a line on a normal statement into a named 7-11 location.
Bailey moved on to talking about rewards programs, and how hard typical credit cards make it to understand the value of their points. Bailey said that Apple's rewards (called Daily Cash) are given to you directly as cash sent to your Apple Pay Cash account each day, which is a different tool that is already in the Wallet app. The Apple Pay Cash competes with similar digital debit cards from Square and other companies. The Apple Card credit rewards would be given back to you as 2% of the purchase amount whenever you use Apple Pay. Retail and digital purchases at Apple stores or through Apple's services would get 3% cash back.
Most credit rewards programs are given after a new statement, so a daily payout could be better, but I imagine the credit card companies feel the pennies they give back to their customers are more impressive when it's 20 bucks at the end of the billing cycle instead of 16 cents the next morning.
Usurious interest rates and statements "designed to keep you paying the minimum each month" was the next topic from Bailey. She demonstrated the UX for paying off Apple's credit card that she claimed would help people understand how much interest they would accrue if they only paid a minimum amount.
Bailey promised that the Apple credit card would have "no fees" for late payment, annual fees, international fees, or fees for going over your limit, and it would have "lower interest rates" without penalty rates.
Security and privacy were the final subjects, Bailey said that Apple wouldn't know what you bought, where you bought it, or how much you paid for it, and promised that the graphs and other information were all rendered on the device. Goldman Sachs and Mastercard presumably would have to know these things, of course, but Bailey promised that they (the bank and credit card middleman) would not share this data with third parties.
A very short video showed how Apple created the physical card for non-Apple Pay transactions. It's made out of titanium and has no visible number, CVV, expiration, or signature, only your name and branding from the companies involved. Hiding the numbers on the front and back is probably not that useful. They're all in the magnetic stripe and unless the stripe can change dynamically, there won't be much of a benefit to people using the card. As frustrating as it can be to have a credit card stolen, it'll probably be more frustrating to open the Wallet app to get the digits each time you need them for any online transaction that doesn't take Apple Pay.
The physical card only gives 1% cash back, and presumably the magstripe isn't updated like the one in the digital wallet so you'll always have the same number and limited security on the physical card.
The Apple Card credit card will be available this summer.
Cook returned to introduce Ann Thai, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Apple's App Store to talk about games, the positive culture around them, and Apple's commitment to them before introducing their Apple Arcade game subscription service.
Thai introduced a video that has designers and developers talking about their games. Beyond A Steel Sky, Where Cards Fall, Sakaguchi with Fantasian, Lifelike, Bekah Saltsman with Overland. Thai returned to talk about the Arcade subscription that she says includes over a hundred games that are mobile exclusive (presumably that means phones and tablets, and not precluding versions for the Nintendo Switch). "We'll be adding new games all the time." makes me wonder if games be removed all the time, too.
Thai says that the subscription will be found in a new app store tab and on the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac computers and the games will have cloud saves so you be more seamlessly able to swap devices. Pour one out for Game Center.
As a poke at Google's recently announced game streaming service, Thai mentioned that these games would be playable offline. No features or content would be excluded behind in-app purchases (IAP) and there would be no advertisements in the games.
Thai said that Apple wouldn't share your info with the companies making the games, and that this subscription would also have no additional charge for family sharing before introducing a montage video featuring more games that would be on the service.
Apple Arcade launches this fall, no price was given yet.
Apple TV Channels Subscriptions
Cook took the stage again to talk about Apple's plans for TV. Peter Stern was introduced to talk about the redesigned Apple TV app on their devices and the integration of various third-party live and on-demand streaming TV bundles under the new marketing umbrella of Apple TV Channels.
The "Apple Channels" subscriptions look like you just have access to the smaller name subscription services that you typically would go to a third party app for. Not Amazon Prime Video or Netflix, but HBO, Starz, Showtime, CBS All Access, and so on. They'll probably be the same price, just embedded inside the Apple TV app so you don't have to leave that app.
Cindy Lin was introduced by Stern to do the app demo. Lin accidentally scrolled down instead of over because the Apple TV remote is a beautiful piece of shit that Apple hasn't done anything to fix in years.
It looks like this app has the same problem as Netflix, trailers that autoplay when you scroll onto the page for a show. I hate that part of Netflix, the last thing I want to have happen when my kid is in the room or when I'm idly browsing through shows or movies is to have anything autoplay a trailer for an inappropriate, and loud, show.
Stern returned to tell us that the new Apple TV app is out this May, the app is also coming out this Fall for macOS. It'll also be on Samsung, LG, Sony, and Vizio televisions as well as Roku and Amazon's Fire TV devices that hook up to your television.
It isn't clear yet if those television makers are skimming what you watch when you use the Apple TV app on their TVs as they do for everything else you watch. It can probably be assumed that they do, and they can already do that if you hook an Apple TV box up to an HDMI port. Any contract they have with Apple might prevent it for both scenarios or none.
Cook introduced us to Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht to talk about Apple's plans for original video programming under the banner of Apple TV+. I am not sure how much I buy their compassion for stories that they're telling us so much about. They introduced a video from various directors and actors talking about their work. Steven Spielberg started it out, and then showed up on stage to talk about how he got started and introduce a show based on Amazing Stories, the elder statesman of long-running science fiction magazines at over 90 years.
After talking about the idea for a TV show for a bit, and not showing any footage, Spielberg disappeared when some stage lights went down and he was replaced by Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon to announce their TV show called "The Morning Show." It's a comedy about a morning show.
Steve Carell joined them onstage to have more relatable celebrity banter about how funny they are.
The stage blackout ate another cast and replaced those three celebrities with two others, Jason Momoa (Aquaman) and Alfre Woodard (Mariah Stokes/Dillard in Luke Cage on Netflix) introduced their show, See, about a planet where nobody can see and everybody is blind.
Kumail Nanjiani appeared after the next blackout to tell us about his show, Little America, about different stories of immigrants in the US before the blackout consumed him.
Big Bird of Sesame Street came by the darkest place he's ever been, an Apple stage with another Jim Henson style muppet to announce a show called Helpsters that teaches coding.
J.J. Abrams appeared after the blackout with Sara Bareilles to talk about their show called Little Voice. Bareilles then sat at a piano and performed the title song for the show. I don't think I've ever heard her perform but she is obviously extremely talented.
Finally, this too-long bit wrapped up with a promise of the "highest quality storytelling" and a montage video that actually had footage from some of these shows.
Apple TV+ is promised for this Fall. No price announced, and no ad tier bullshit, at least.
Tim Cook returned to introduce Oprah Winfrey as the "one more thing," who talked about her shows for the platform.
I have no interest in any of the shows Apple is putting forward, because we don't really know anything about them. They could be good, but no critics have seen them yet. We're not supposed to make fun of Planet of the Apps anymore, but it was complete garbage even if it was created by other people who aren't working on Apple's TV programs anymore. I have a little bit more hope that these programs could be good, but only a little.
News+ is probably fine, but it isn't clear how much of those top papers you're getting, and how much of that will just be magazines that aren't that informative or useful. It could be useful if there were local newspapers involved, but only a handful of big papers are integrating with News+. It isn't clear yet if the subscription could be good for smaller papers or a weight to drag them down.
The Arcade subscription could be a good deal for players and developers to get us out of the rut mobile gaming is in where too many good games are ruined by the free-to-play business model or buried with ads. Can you even get a match-3 game on iOS without an energy mechanic or some other garbage hidden behind consumable IAP? Apple made the mess, is profiting from it, and does too little to stop it. The subscription might not be the worst thing, I hope the games that come out of it are eventually available for purchase separately, especially on platforms that have a better possibility for archival.
I don't like how rent-seeking Apple has been and continues to be. The credit card is perhaps the worst example of that. The card could be better than most others, it's difficult to be worse, but watching Apple's executives onstage with literal dollar signs behind them is not a good look and they were correctly roasted online for it.
If you let them, Apple will provide you with every kind of media you consume to the exclusion of all others. Apple's executives want us to pay them $1500 for an iPhone on an installment plan, use the Apple credit card to pay them rent for our photo and video storage (which is still limited to 5GB a month on the free tier), listen to music, watch TV, enjoy movies and play games through their subscription services. The only allowable criticism and journalism is read through Apple News and Apple's internal editorial teams vacuum up talented journalists who go without any kind of byline when their writing appears in Apple's App Stores and elsewhere.
Apple is already doing everything they can to run affiliate linking editorial out of town on a rail, and almost took Touch Arcade with them.
I miss the days where Apple was focused on products and services in their wheelhouse instead of this rush to expand into every possible business to continue their never-ending quest for increased growth. These new services probably aren't taking personnel from those products, but they're clearly taking executive focus. Today's Apple can't even ship a laptop keyboard that works.
Author Jack SlaterPosted on March 26, 2019 March 27, 2019 Categories appleTags apple, apple arcade, apple events, apple news, apple tv, apple tv+, news+Leave a comment on Apple Services Event March 2019 Notes
Apple's WWDC 2018 Event Notes
Here's everything that Apple announced today.
Here's everything that Apple announced at their World Wide Developer's Conference Keynote for 2018. The event opened with this four-minute nature documentary style advertisement on migrating developers:
Craig Federighi boasted about iOS 11 being available on iOS devices from 2013, and that the majority of their users are on 11 versus the 6% they claim are on the latest Android update. According to Google, the percentage of Android users running their latest operating system (Android 8.1) is 0.8%, ouch. I would guess that Apple based their estimate on the percentage of devices that are capable of running 8.0 or 8.1, which is 4.9% and 0.8% respectively. The majority of Android users (25.5%) appear to still be in the stone age on Android 6.0.
According to Federighi the primary focus of iOS 12 will be performance, specifically he said that older devices would perform better. Using an iPhone 6 Plus as an example, Federighi claimed that apps would launch 40% faster, the keyboard would display 50% faster, the camera would open 70% faster.
Because this keynote is ostensibly for developers, Federighi announced a new format for 3D scenes to be bundled together, USDZ. Pixar created the USD format in 2012, and this is their update to it for 2018 (thanks to coolpowers).
Adobe's CTO Abhay Parasnis announced that their products would support the new format and that Apple's developer State of the Union would have some kind of demo of this integration.
Federighi announced a new app for augmented reality, Measure, which will presumably replace everyone's first ARKit app by giving you measurements for real-world objects. The app can detect some shapes and automatically provide measurements for those, but you'll need to tap at the ends or corners of most real-world objects to get the app to measure them.
Apple's USDZ Demos
Federighi showed off a USDZ 3D scene of a fish embedded in their Apple News app, and then customized a guitar on Fender's web store only to display it on the stage through an iPad's AR viewfinder.
Federighi said that iOS 12 would include a new version of their ARKit API for developers to create augmented reality experiences. The flagship feature for ARKit 2, shared experiences, allows multiple devices to view and interact with the same scene. A slide depicted a pre-recorded video of people playing a multiplayer AR game where both participants and an observer could see and interact.
Martin Sanders, the Director of Innovation at Lego, demonstrated the new object detection features of ARKit along with shared experiences by scanning a physical Lego set and then awkwardly holding two iPads around it with someone else from the Lego company. The iPads showed a city being built around the town square Lego set with some limited interactivity to place vehicles and minifigures. It looked like it could be fun, but this kind of AR scanning will probably be limited to sets that Lego produces, not the modifications people make to them. Sanders said that the Lego AR experience app would ship later this year.
Photos Search & For You
Federighi said that Photos would improve in iOS 12. He highlighted the search functionality that would offer suggestions and other improvements to help you find photos you're looking for. The app will also get a new tab, For You, that offers suggestions of photos you might like to see or ways you could change them to make them more appealing. It seemed like the editing suggestions were limited to ones that involve Apple's features like looping a live photo or making some specific change to a portrait photo.
The For You tab will also suggest sharing photos with people who appear in them. He said that they would be shared at full resolution, which is an improvement because photos shared today aren't at the original resolution. Federighi also said that the recipient of shared photos would be prompted to share photos from the same event so that everyone ends up with the entire set.
Federighi mentioned a new feature called shortcuts that would let Siri easily start functions of other apps. The first example was "I lost my keys" which would have Siri open part of the Tile app's functionality within Siri and look for them. Apps in iOS 12 would make suggestions of shortcuts to add to Siri. The iOS 12 lock screen and search will make suggestions of things to do like re-ordering coffee or turning on Do Not Disturb when you're at a movie theater.
Federighi said that you'd be able to make your own shortcuts in a new "Shortcuts Editor" app.
Apple's Kim Beverett demonstrated the shortcuts functionality with a few examples. One of which was adjusting a shortcut she made in the Shortcut Editor. Beverett's Heading Home shortcut would compress a bunch of steps into one action. It lets her roommate know how long it'll take her to get home, set her thermostat to 70 degrees and turns on a fan, and opens maps with the course home preconfigured. Beverett quickly used the editor to play a radio program she wanted to listen to every time she goes home whenever she uses the shortcut. This Shortcut Editor is clearly the Workflow app that Apple acquired last year.
Other App Updates
Apple's Susan Prescott demonstrated a few other iOS 12 app updates. Apple News is going from a 5 tab interface to 3 tabs with a new tab called Browse to handle the functionality from the current Search and Following tabs.
The Stocks app is completely rebuilt, and has business news built-in and new charts. The app will also be on the iPad.
Voice Memos is "even easier to use" and is also on the iPad, it'll also use iCloud for file synchronization.
iBooks is getting refurbished with a new name and interface, it's just Apple Books on iOS 12.
CarPlay is going to support 3rd party navigation apps.
Federighi returned to show us how iOS' Do Not Disturb will be updated with a new feature called Do Not Disturb During Bedtime. It will hide notifications so you won't be "barraged" with them if you wake up in the middle of the night and just want to see what time it is. You can also granularly enable Do Not Disturb until you leave a location or for a certain amount of time.
Notification Updates & The Screen Time App
You'll be able to change the way notifications are delivered, or turn them off entirely, directly from the lock screen. You'll also get suggestions to disable them for specific apps when you rarely interact with them.
Notifications will also be grouped together by what app sent them.
The Screen Time app will give you a weekly report of how you're wasting your life on your devices. It'll also let you set time limits for each app. You'll get reminders about that limit when you're about to reach it, or you can set limits for the apps your kids use by category or by picking each specific app.
Animoji & MeMoji
Animoji are getting updated to let you stick out your tongue with your 3D avatar, they're also getting four new characters. The ghost, koala, tiger, and t-rex. You can also make a character based on your own face, Apple calls that a "MeMoji."
Kelsey Peterson demonstrated these effects on stage, and the selfie camera can now display the characters over your real face.
Facetime can now have up to 32 people on a group video chat. It can be launched directly from a group text message chat in Messages. The different camera effects, like Animoji, are also available on Facetime.
Apple's Kevin Lynch talked about new improvements for fitness and communications.
WatchOS 5 is getting improvements to compete with your friends in exercise. The Workouts app is getting a Yoga workout type, hiking, running gets a rolling pace measurement, pace alerts, and cadence measurements. WatchOS 5 will also automatically detect when you've started some types of workouts, it'll retroactively credit you with the workout if you tell the Apple Watch to start the workout late.
There's a Walkie-Talkie app for WatchOS 5 that goes over cellular or wifi connections.
The Siri watch face is getting information about sports, map information, and your heart rate. Siri Shortcuts will be on that Watch Face, as well as third-party apps.
Raising your wrist will let you talk to Siri right away, you won't need to use the "Hey Siri" hotword.
Notifications can also be more interactive, like on the phone. One example was getting a notification from Yelp about a dinner reservation
Apple's WebKit embedded browser will be available for some web links on the Apple Watch.
The Podcasts app is going to work on the watch, it'll sync full episodes from your phone.
Apple's Julz demonstrated these new features while riding an exercise bike, which was pretty impressive.
Kevin Lynch returned to tell us about Student ID Cards coming to the watch, it'll work with just 6 universities to start, but it includes Temple University in Philadelphia.
Lynch also introduced a new rainbow watch band and watch face for Pride month. The watch face is supposed to be available today.
Apple's Jen Folse talked about how the Apple TV 4K from last year is getting Dolby Atmos in the next version of tvOS, she also talked about how movies will get free upgrades to support the new audio format.
Folse reiterated Apple's support for live TV and sports.
Folse also said that various cable providers are letting their users replace their cable boxes with the Apple TV, and use a new "Zero Sign-On" instead of the single sign-on system from last year.
The Aerial screensaver on the Apple TV is going to tell you what you're looking at, finally. It'll also get a new view from the International Space Station of the Earth.
Craig Federighi returned to talk about the new features in macOS Mojave.
As Apple leaked, the next version of macOS is getting a dark mode. Previously you could dim the menu bar dock in their settings, but this is a system-wide feature that is more complete.
Desktop Stacks is another new feature that organizes the crap that gets scattered all over your desktop into stacks of documents matched by type, or date, or by tags. It'll automatically keep those stacks organized as new files are added to the desktop.
Finder gets a new Gallery View that appears to replace the Cover Flow view with thumbnails at the bottom of the screen and a quick look type of view at the top.
The Finder is also getting a detail side bar with shortcuts to different actions you might like to take on the file, Federighi specifically mentioned adding customized automator actions to the side bar for certain types of files like watermarking files with one that was put together earlier.
The quick look utility is enhanced to let you do more from it, Federighi demonstrated trimming a video without opening a separate editor and signing a PDF document.
Screenshots are enhanced to be similar to the iOS functionality but with more powerful functionality that you'd expect on a computer. You can also capture video directly from that utility now.
The Continuity Camera feature was demonstrated by Federighi to take a photo from his phone and pop it directly into a Keynote slide. It can also scan in documents from your phone directly into a Mac app.
A few iOS apps are hitting the Mac. Apple News, Stocks, Voice Memos, and Home for using HomeKit devices.
Mojave will have better privacy enhancements to prevent other apps from getting access to your personal data unless you want them to do so.
Safari on Mojave and iOS 12 will prevent advertising publishers from tracking you based on sharing functions and comment fields. Mojave and iOS 12 will also hide more of your information from being fingerprinted by websites and advertising publishers.
The Mac App Store is finally getting updated, it hasn't had many changes since 2011. Apple's Ann Thai showed off a redesigned UI that takes a lot from their iOS App Store. It looks much better.
Metal & Core ML on iOS and macOS
Federighi returned to talk about Apple's Metal graphics and computation API and external GPUs. He boasted about the speedups that Macs can get from up to four GPUs. It's kind of crazy that the only GPUs that Apple supports for external GPUs are from AMD.
Apple's machine learning API, Core ML, is getting updated with a 2nd version. It's supposed to be 30% faster with a 75% reduction in the model size.
UIKit on the Mac
As has been rumored, Apple is making it easier to bring iOS apps to macOS. No specific name was given for this technology, but Federighi says they're using it internally with apps like Apple News and promises that it'll be available for 3rd-party developers next year.
Release Dates for iOS 12 and macOS Mojave
"This fall"
I'm very happy that macOS is getting updated with a new Mac App Store, it's been way too long and developers have been abandoning it for independent distribution systems. I like having apps bundled into one store, but it's also good that Apple finally wants to compete with independent distribution.
It's a little disappointing that the iPad Pro didn't get updated with this event, but perhaps they're moving the majority of hardware updates to the Fall event.
I'm very happy to see that Workflow is still getting updated, and it looks like it is even more useful after Apple has updated it under the Siri banner. I wish that it were on the Mac as an alternative to Automator.
Author Jack SlaterPosted on June 4, 2018 Categories appleTags apple, apple events, keynote, macOS, tVOS, watchos, wwdc, wwdc 2018Leave a comment on Apple's WWDC 2018 Event Notes
An iPad Cheap for 2018
Apple announced an updated iPad Cheap today.
Apple announced a new iPad with a bunch of backslapping about how much they love education today at their event held at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago. It's an updated version of last year's iPad Cheap with an A10 system-on-a-chip that also works with their stylus, the Pencil. The 2018 iPad Cheap is still missing a ton from the more expensive iPad Pro line, like more modern display technology with a variable framerate. The iPad Mini still hasn't been updated in almost 3 years despite Apple charging $400 for the iPad Mini 4 versus $330 for this new iPad Cheap.
As usual, I round numbers up to the nearest whole dollar because I don't care for deceptive pricing.
Here's an updated rundown of their iPad lineup:
2018 iPad Cheap at 9.7
non-laminated (thicker) display
Supports the ($100) Apple Pencil.
Old ass 1st generation Touch ID.
32GB ($330) or 128 GB ($430) wifi only
32GB ($460) and 128GB ($560) with cellular
iPad Mini 4 at 7.9
laminated (thinner) display
A8 processor
128GB ($400) wifi only
128GB ($530) with cellular
iPad Pro at 12.9
Wide color gamut (for professional color accuracy and better looking photos and videos)
True tone (makes the screen match the color temperature of the environment like a sheet of paper would)
ProMotion (variable frame rate)
A10X processor
64GB ($800) 256GB ($950) wifi only 512GB ($1150)
64GB ($930) 256GB ($1080) and 512GB ($1280) with cellular
64GB ($650) 256GB ($800) 512GB ($1000) wifi only
64GB ($780) 256GB ($930) 512GB ($1130) with cellular
Since I last revisited the table of confusing iPad decisions, Apple bumped up the price of some storage tiers.
Apple also updated their free iWork office utilities today with new features like smart annotation. Additionally, they announced other software for educators, students, and developers who want to work with the new ClassKit API.
New hardware was announced from Logitech, including a cut-down $50 version of Apple's Pencil, called the Crayon that lacks pressure sensitivity but has a better external design for normal human beings. It appears that this device will only be sold through educational sales channels.
One good thing that Apple announced is that students and teachers get 200GB of iCloud storage as long as the Apple ID they use is managed through their organization. Regular iCloud accounts have a tiny 5GB of storage for all their photos and other data. Apple typically charges $3 per month for 200GB of iCloud storage.
Apple's extended warranty program with accidental damage insurance was dropped in price to $70 for this iPad Cheap as well as the Mini.
Overall, I don't think that this new iPad Cheap is at all an approachable device for many educators who are still scrounging for basic materials like paper and pencils, while their students are dealing with hunger and homelessness. The $30 discount offered for schools who want to buy this new iPad Cheap is probably meaningful with large purchases, but it won't mean anything for the poorest schools and students.
The education theme of the event is an extension of the ongoing co-option of public resources by private businesses. Just like NASA ceding their public work and research to private industries, using expensive closed platforms for public schools is not a good look. One Apple presenter even referenced JFK's "We Choose to go to The Moon" speech.
Apple spend a large part of the presentation advocating for the iPad as a device for creation, but also for coding software. To treat the iPad as a replacement for the modern computer in creative endeavors, or a device for coding, is especially ridiculous when you realize that you can't ship a game or app for Apple's app store without using a Mac. iPads don't have Xcode.
For anyone else who wants an iPad with support for Apple's Pencil stylus, almost as much processing power as the current Pro models, but is OK giving up enhanced display technologies and half the RAM, the 2018 iPad Cheap is a fine choice and a decent upgrade to last year's model. It's available today and I would expect more updates to the iPad line later this year.
Author Jack SlaterPosted on March 27, 2018 March 28, 2018 Categories appleTags apple, apple events, crayon, ipad, ipad cheap, logitechLeave a comment on An iPad Cheap for 2018