Apple Unveils Their New Products at WWDC [Highlights + Facts]

San Jose, US, June 3, 2019 — At the annual WWDC event, Apple now unveils their latest products, product updates, as well as new services to the world. While some aspects had been expected, they still managed to keep a few things top secret until the actual keynotes took place at the San Jose Convention Center.

WWDC is the short term for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. While it is aimed towards a professional audience, it has grown to be also highly anticipated even with consumers and especially all the fans of the brand across the globe. It has been live-streamed on various platforms and we are including one of the captures below the article for you to watch if you would like to know more.

So, what’s new?

This time around Apple had some interesting new announcements in store from which some might not affect everybody but to the developers and people working in the Apple-sphere, it should definitely have a big impact.

App development

• SwiftUI will help UI developers as it provides a powerful framework while being easy to use.
• ARKit 3, RealityKit and Reality Composer will help developers to build immersive environments in augmented reality (AR) for consumers or business use cases.
• New tools, as well as APIs, will be launched to help simplify the process of bringing iPad apps to Mac.
• Core ML and Create ML will provide a better solution for machine learning platforms to leverage computer-vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition.

New and updated tvOS 13 features

• Apple TV 4K gets a new Home screen with a focus on letting users discover more content that they might like.
• Using Apple TV kits in the living room makes now more sense for families with enhanced multi-user support.
• Apple Music also leverages this multi-user support to provide personal playlists and libraries to each user. There are now also on-screen lyrics shown to sing along to if you wish to do some karaoke.
• Apple Arcade is planned to launch in Fall and will offer a gaming portfolio without showing any sort of ads or add-on purchases. Apple further states they will support Xbox One S and PlayStation DualShock 4 game controllers.
• New screen savers with 4K HDR video captures of nature and animals, filmed in collaboration with the BBC Natural History Unit.

Upcoming macOS version ‘Catalina’

• As macOS Catalina for desktop computers comes, Apple begins to remove its legacy platform iTunes and will replace it with Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and the Apple TV app.
• The new Sidecar option allows users to extend their Mac desktop to their iPad device as a second display. Alternatively, they can also use the secondary device as a high-precision input device across creative Mac apps.
• Apple worked on various security hardening features and permission handling. The T2 Security Chip supports the Activation Lock that could brick a stolen device remotely.
• Voice Control lets users do everything they want to do by leveraging voice prompts and commands for better accessibility.
• There are new Screen Time metrics and features coming up to inform the users how much time they have been working and when it might be time to take a break, similar to an Apple Watch telling you to stand up and walk around a bit. This can be synchronized with the overall screentime of your other Apple devices for a holistic digital health overview.

New watchOS 6 comes for your Apple Watch

• The new Cycle Tracking features provide female Apple Watch users the ability to log information related to their menstrual cycles and get predictions for upcoming periods and fertility windows.
• The Noise App provides information about the sound level in the environment of the user and can warn you about potential damages to your hearing in loud areas, such as a concert.
• The new watchOS 6 comes with improved activity logging and gives you a better overview of how active you were through the new Activity Trends and suggest improvements when possible.
• The App Store will become available directly on your Apple Watch and gaining a bit more independence from other devices. Developers now are able to build apps that run only on the Apple Watch itself without a corresponding iOS app.
• Other watchOS 6 updates include new dynamic watch faces, new API to stream media, voice memos, Audiobooks app, Calculator app, Siri search query web results directly shown on the watch, Apple GymKit compatibility for Octane Fitness, TRUE Fitness, and Woodway.

New iPadOS delivers new tablet experience

• Instead of merging to one single OS, Apple now decided to move towards a special iPadOS just for their iPad tablet devices. While being built on the same foundation as iOS, the experience is planned to aim entirely at tablet usage.
• A new Home screen is planned to display more apps on each page and there will be Android-esque widgets to give you information from your calendar or your weather app.
• The Split View and Slide Over features allow for improved productivity by getting a better overview of all the running apps and switching easily between the same. The split will also allow users to have multiple active apps open at the same time so they could, for instance, compose a message while having a website open for reference.
• More applications for the Apple Pencil are coming and the overall pen performance was improved with prediction algorithms to as low as nine milliseconds.
• The Files app is now becoming more of a file explorer with advanced productivity and file management options.
• Browsing in Safari on your iPad is now becoming an experience more comparable to a desktop browser experience. Web apps such as Google Docs, Squarespace, WordPress, and others have been improved to work a lot better with Safari on iPad now.
• Text editing is now easier on the iPad. There will be new gestures for increased productivity on frequently used functions such as cut, copy, paste, and undo.
• Other new features include a dark mode, custom fonts, the new floating keyboard, curated photos, Sign In with Apple to access apps and websites with your Apple ID, Maps with a new base map, and overall performance improvements.

Preview of iOS 13

• Dark mode to save power and for better viewing at night.
• Easier photo browsing and editing features.
• Sign In with Apple to access apps and websites with your Apple ID.
• Maps with a new base map, richer details, and better road coverage.
• Other new features include intelligent reminders, Memoji are turned into sticker packs for Messages, Siri gets a more natural voice, Siri Shortcuts now supports Suggested Automation, CarPlay gets a big update with new Dashboard, HomePod can distinguish various voices to deliver personalized results, AirPods now allow Siri to read out incoming messages as they arrive, voice control gives better accessibility, Notes gets a new Gallery View, QuickPath improves one-handed text entry on iOS Keyboard with swiping feature, text scrolling is more accurate on text editing, Files app gets the ability to share folders with iCloud Drive and external storage, Health monitors hearing health and menstrual cycle, more control on how your location is shared, and overall performance improvements.

The thrash can is replaced by the cheese grater; introducing the new Mac Pro with Pro Display XDR

• The Pro Display XDR has a 32-inch Retina 6K display with P3 wide and 10-bit color, 1,600 nits of peak brightness, 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a superwide viewing angle. You can rotate the display by 90° if you wish to work in a portrait resolution with the Pro Stand.
• The new Mac Pro brings you Xeon processors with up to 28 cores, 1.5TB local storage capacity, eight PCIe expansion slots, and the world’s most powerful graphics card (56 teraflops of graphics performance in a single system).
• It also features 64 PCI Express lanes, over 300W of power, along with a state-of-the-art thermal architecture to keep the system cool.
• The memory capacity is scalable and can grow as you need it, featuring a six-channel memory architecture and 12 physical DIMM slots.
• Apple also introduces their Afterburner, which is a new accelerator card to enable the playback of three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously.
• There are various graphics options for the Mac Pro but it starts with the Radeon Pro 580X. Mac Pro introduces the Radeon Pro Vega II, bringing you up to 14 teraflops of computing performance and 32GB of memory with 1TB/s of memory bandwidth. Mac Pro also debuts the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo, with two Vega II GPUs for 28 teraflops of graphics performance, and 64GB of memory. The Mac Pro can accommodate two MPX Modules in one tower, so customers can use two Vega II Duos for 56 teraflops of graphics performance and 128GB of video memory.
• Mac Pro starts at $5,999, Pro Display XDR starts at $4,999, Pro Stand is $999 and the VESA Mount Adapter is $199. Apple expects these products to be available in Fall.
• It’s a cheese grater. Yummy!

YouTube: Apple Keynote WWDC 2019 (Full Stream)

Photo credit: All photos shown are owned by Apple and were provided for press usage.
Source: Apple WDDC event and newsroom