Like every year, Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) has recently been revealed. It's their developer conference, so we know there's gonna be a ton of software announcements and there were, but of course, we were expecting a little bit of an extra surprise on top, maybe some hardware and we got that too. So there's a lot to cover, let's just jump in.
iOS16:
So the biggest update is what's coming to iOS16.... This will be coming out eventually as an update to your iPhone and launching on the next iPhone when that comes out in the fall, and there are a lot of new features here. So the biggest one easily is the new overhaul to the lock screen on our iPhones. So forever, just for the longest time, our lock screens on iPhones have been the same thing. It's the time at the top and then just a long list of notifications and then whatever your wallpaper was behind all that. But in iOS16, the lock screen is way more personalized, which is actually not typical of what we see from Apple, but this is really a nice update here. Notifications will now roll in from the bottom of the display, it's the opposite of Android right now. Widgets on the lock screen are now can be personalized much more. it's like swapping watch faces on your watch. Music controls are also at the bottom now instead of being a huge massive thing in the top-middle. In iOS16, you also get live notifications, which means instead of having a bunch of notifications from the same app, you now get all of them in a single notification. On the iMessage, you can now edit, undo send and mark a thread as unread to the messages sent, so that is going to be hilarious. Just like live to text, in iOS16, you get the live to video feature, which means you can also copy text or search the text in the videos.
CarPlay:
Can we talk about CarPlay for a second, so they had this statement on stage that apparently, 79% of new car buyers would only consider a new car if it has CarPlay in it. Which, I don't even know if that's accurate, that seems a little high, but the point they're trying to make is that most in-car infotainment systems sucks. They've been bad for a long time and so just having Apple CarPlay in your car made the infotainment system much better and much more usable and that's what people wanted. Now we got a sneak peek at the next generation of CarPlay coming out later this year, which not only revamped the UI a bit but basically is now able to just take over a new car's entire software experience on every screen.
watchOS:
In the new watchOS, they added some other more granular information for tracking certain activities. So now instead of just doing a running workout with just distance and elevation like they always do, this will keep track of not just heart rate but heart rate zones and let you set up interval training if you wanna do such kind of stuff. Triathlon workouts will now automatically be able to detect when you switch from swimming to biking and to running. So you don't have to do it manually. But they also track some more information with sleep. It will track your sleep stages.
Second Generation Apple Silicon:
Then we got to our first bit of hardware at WWDC, Which is the second generation of Apple Silicon in the Mac, the M2 chip. It is officially unveiled. It's still a 5-nanometer chip with 20 billion transistors, which is 25% more than M1. The unified memory bandwidth is now 100 gigabytes per second, which is 50% more than M1. It supports up to 24 gigs of unified memory, which again is 50% more than M1, and CPU performance is generally about 20% higher, while GPU performance is about 35% higher and the media engine gets a huge upgrade as well.
macOS:
So the new version of macOS for 2022 is called macOS Ventura. So it's not much of an aesthetic change but with a bunch of useful features put together in one place. A couple of stock apps get better. The mail app has a better search feature finally. FaceTime handoff between devices is super dope. It also supports a continuity camera, which means you can directly use your iPhone as a webcam at ease.
So overall there are a new bunch of features that Apple has unveiled this year at WWDC, in which few of them are dope and others are long back available in Android!