Apple WWDC 2017 : Quick Recap

It’s June again, so it’s time for Apple to give the world a look at what it’s been up to and what we should expect from the iPhone, the Mac, and everything in between in the months to come.

Here are the 3 announcements from today’s event.

Apple outs HomePod to battle Amazon Echo

Apple HomePod features:

• Powered by Siri and Apple’s A8 chip
• Has 7 tweeters and a 4-inch subwoofer
• Spatially aware to adjust and improve music quality
• Works for Apple Music
• Siri can answer questions, set timers, read news and reminders
• Available in white and space gray

Apple’s billing the HomePod as a home music speaker first of all, connecting it to the iPod, iPhone, Apple Music, and AirPods. So there’s a lot of focus on Apple Music integration. Even still, with integrated microphones and Siri, it obviously competes with Amazon’s various Echo devices and Google Home, and Apple hasn’t really discussed in detail how Siri and HomeKit will match the extensibility of those platforms. But it’s exciting, and we’ll see when it ships in December for $349.

Apple iOS 11 is now official

Features

• Added iMessage apps and stickers in Messages
• Redesigned app drawer
• Apple Pay person-to-person payments integrated with iMessage app
• Synchronized conversations across iCloud, iOS, and macOS
• Siri blended into iMessages
• Siri uses Deep Learning for different intonation of voices
• Siri has on-device learning to give smarter suggestions
• Translation for Siri
• Improved image quality using Portrait Mode
• New Loop and Bounce effects for Live Photos
• Tweaked Control Center layout
• Drag and drop feature for the iPad
• App pairings for the iPad
• Files app for file management
• Indoor maps for airports and shopping centers on Apple Maps
• Lane guidance, speed limit, and Do Not Disturb feature for when you’re driving
• Support for multi-room audio for iPhones, iPads, and 3rd party speakers
• Redesigned App store
• ARKit for augmented reality at the core of iOS

Apple CEO Tim Cook started by saying that iOS 10 is installed on 86 percent of iOS devices. Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi then introduced us to iOS 11’s new features. “There’s a big focus on technologies with iOS 11, but also new features,” Federighi said.

macOS High Sierra

This release is mostly about the fundamentals. The default file system on macOS is now the Apple File System (APFS), for example. It’s a 64-bit system with built-in crash protection and instant file and directory cloning, for example. This is the same file system Apple alreadyr iOS and tvOS.

MacOS also has support for HEVC as the default video container, which will replace H.264. This will be hardware accelerated on new Macs and integrated into apps like Final Cut. On the graphics side, Apple also announced Metal 2, the second version of its graphics-rendering framework. The focus here is mostly on graphics speed, but it can now also be used to speed up machine learning workloads on the GPU. In addition, Metal 2 can now access external graphics, using a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure with an AMD graphics card, which is now available for developers.