Apple WWDC 2023: Hot or Not? (Premium)

Apple’s WWDC 2023 keynote was another prerecorded affair with somewhat interesting new hardware and software announcements. But there was nothing new from services, and the late Spring timing means we’re just a few months away from new iPhones and other consumer releases. What we’re left with is a developer show keynote with little in the way of developer news. Was it any good?

To find out, I’ve stepped through the keynote a second time. And here are my takeaways.

Mac

Though the Mac has slightly worse market share now than it did two years earlier—7.2 percent in 2022 vs 7.9 percent in 2021 and 2020—Apple’s transition to its own M-series chipsets has been undeniably successful. The technical advantages to this shift are enormous, with major gains in battery life, iOS and iPad compatibility, and integrated graphics and AI acceleration. And Apple has raced to improve the product line, having released 7 updated chipsets since the original M1 in late 2020.

That said, Apple Silicon has its challenges, especially for higher-end and workstation-class products, key among them the lack of memory and system board expansion. And so we had to wait until now, and the M2 Ultra chipset, to get an expandable Apple Silicon-based Mac Pro tower. The M2 Ultra doesn’t support RAM expansion, so that remains an issue, but it does allow customers to get much more RAM at purchase time, up to 192 GB worth. And the new Mac Pro ships with 6 open PCIe Gen 4-based expansion slots plus an impressive array of Thunderbolt 4, USB-A, HDMI, and Ethernet ports too.

Of course, it’s also very expensive, with a starting price of $6,999 in tower form. (There’s a rack-mounted version with an even higher starting price.) And that’s what makes the Mac Studio so compelling: this pro-level Mac looks like a tall Mac mini but it can be had with an M2 Ultra chipset and up to 192 GB of RAM now as well, and it starts at just $1999, which I suspect puts it in the sweet spot for Apple’s pro market.

These products help reaffirm Apple’s position with pros, but there was another Mac introduced today that is of more interest to me and, I suspect, to many of you as well: there’s now a new 15.3-inch MacBook Air with an M2 chipset that offers up to 18 hours of battery life in a thin and fanless design that should be tempting to a much broader audience.

The 15-inch MacBook Air starts at $1299 and is available in four colors: midnight, starlight, silver, and space gray. And if you’ve been holding out on the M2-Based 13-inch MacBook Air, here’s some more good news: the starting price of that laptop is now $100 less, or $1099. (The original M1-based MacBook Air with the old design sticks around and brings up the rear at $999 and up.)

We’ve known that Apple would release a 15-inch MacBook Air since last year, but this is a big deal (literally). It’s light for its size—3.3 pounds—has a bright 500-nit display and a MagSafe charger, and it exceeds contemporary premium PCs in other ways. That said, its two Thunderbolt 4 ports are a bit on the light side. And that notch: ugh. But we’re nitpicking here. It looks great and should sell well.

You can learn more about the new Macs here.

iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, and MacOS Sonoma

This is going to be a year of minor software releases for Apple, and its flagship iOS platform is no exception. The best new feature, perhaps, is real-time voice mail transcriptions that appear on the lock screen as a person is leaving a message. And a new Check In service in messages looks useful if Apple-centric, allowing friends and family members to let you know they’ve reached their destination.

But the other updates were quite minor. Apple is expanding on last year’s lock screen customizations, which were nice, with new personalized contact posters, also nice, that appear when people call via phone. Facetime is getting audio and video messages, and new reactions. And Messages is getting new emoji stickers because of course it is.

In an odd move, Apple is adding a Standby display to the iPhone but not the iPad that turns the device into a mini smart display of sorts when docked in landscape mode. It features widgets, glanceable information including a clock, full-screen photo slideshow and entertainment experiences, weather, and all the other obvious features.

And then there’s a new Journal app that lets users “reflect and practice gratitude through journaling,” as Apple puts it. The less said about that the better.

On the iPad front, Apple continues to ship last year’s biggest new iPhone features one year later on its tablet. So iPadOS 17 will include the redesigned and customizable lock screen from iOS 16, and, even more important, its own version of the Health app for the first time. It will also bring new features related to PDF files, Messages, Facetime, widgets, Safari, and more.

It looks like watchOS 10 will be a similarly uneventful update with Smart Stack being the only notable new feature. Smart Stack contains widgets that appear as needed based on the time or your location so you can see things like the weather, a travel ticket, workout apps, or whatever else. Beyond that, there are the expected new watch faces, new features for specific workouts, and new and improved apps.

Oddly, of the software platform updates, I was most impressed with macOS Sonoma, though the opening discussion about new screensavers was off-putting. But it got better, and two of the new features–smarter video conferencing and web app updates for Safari–really stood out.

For the former, macOS Sonoma will provide a presenter overlay that lets users display themselves over or next to a share presentation display, integrated reactions, and an improved screen-sharing picker, and these features will work with third-party video conferencing solutions, including Microsoft Teams.

And Safari, finally, will acknowledge that web apps exist by allowing users to pin web apps to the macOS dock and then access them as if they were native applications outside of the browser.  Yes, this functionality has been available in Chromium-based browsers for years, but Apple ignoring it has held back the industry, so this is a nice addition.

Apple is also letting users move widgets from the standalone display onto the Mac desktop. And it’s letting users access their iPhone widgets on the Mac for the first time, using Continuity. (The iPhone needs to be on the same Wi-Fi network or nearby.) And speaking of features Windows users are familiar with, the Mac is getting a dedicated Game Mode and lower latency access to AirPods and Xbox and PS5 controllers. (The arrival of the years-old Death Standing game, even in a Director’s Cut version, was much less impressive.)

You can learn more about the new iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS features here.

AirPods

Apple didn’t announce any new AirPods, but it did reveal that it will ship a software update “this fall” that will bring new features to its wireless earbuds, including a more seamless automatic switching feature that will make it easier to use multiple Apple devices, plus Mute/Unmute and personalized volume functionality.

But the second-generation AirPods Pro is getting is also getting additional new features that are even more impressive. They will enter a new Conversation Awareness mode when you start talking that lowers the background noise, lowers the volume, and enhances voices in front of you. And there’s a new Adaptive Audio feature that automatically blends Transparency mode and Active Noise Cancellation together based on the current environment.

Fine, I guess. But I thought this was a curious time to announce these features. And as it turns out, Apple had an even bigger announcement with an even further out timeline. And that is …

Vision Pro

I wrote about Apple Vision Pro, the firm’s first augmented reality (AR) headset, earlier today. Here, I’d like to expand a bit on my most obvious contribution to this discussion, which is my experience using Microsoft HoloLens.

On the one hand, there’s a lot of “been there, done that” to what Apple announced today: having used HoloLens many times and having seen it improve over two major hardware versions and several software revisions, I recognize exactly what Apple is doing and can draw obvious comparisons to experiences that Microsoft has offered for years. And it is hard—very hard—not to get instantly cynical about that, to believe that what Apple is doing here isn’t really all that impressive, especially when you consider the several years that have passed since the initial HoloLens announcement.

But on the other, I will remind you—and myself—that I had this same reaction to the iPad when it was announced several years after the first Tablet PC. And that my copious experience with that platform blinded me to the simple but important improvements that Apple brought to its own device, improvements that ended up setting the iPad apart and elevating it beyond anything that Microsoft and its partners had offered.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that Apple could—could—succeed here where Microsoft failed, just as it did previously with iPad. But we should take that in context, too: the Vision Pro headset is far too expensive to be successful in a mainstream way, relegating it to a sub-Apple Watch level of success at best. By comparison, the iPad was better than any Tablet PC, but it was also much less expensive. The Vision Pro does not benefit from that condition.

Yet. It’s clear from multiple rumors that Apple wanted its AR headset to be more glasses than goggles and that it will, as always, work toward a more elegant form factor. After all, the first iPad, which looked elegant in 2010, today looks chunky and thick. Apple will likewise cost-reduce its AR offering and perhaps introduce new models that are less expensive. Calling this the future of computing is a stretch. But I’ve learned to never count out Apple. It has made some mistakes but it tends to go after markets that matter. Even if I—or you—can’t see it.

Final thoughts

I watched most of the WWDC keynote live but had to leave about halfway through to go to a doctor’s appointment, so I watched it again from the beginning when I got back. And with a few exceptions, I was mostly underwhelmed. But don’t misunderstand that: aside from visionOS, Apple’s platforms are all mature and feature-packed by this point, and there aren’t really that many obvious major upgrades left. So I have two takeaways from that. Sometimes, boring is better, and while Apple’s cross-platform integration hobbles interactions with users on competing devices, they collectively represent what’s best about sticking with Apple. And WWDC 2023 showed that both trends will continue this year.

As someone with more of an investment in the Windows side of the world, it’s impossible not to be envious of the fit and finish that comes with Apple’s otherwise minor updates. Unlike Microsoft, its client platforms are elegant and consistent, and instead of mucking them up and adding new layers of UI and technology, it is instead just making them better and making them work better together. Even those who hate Apple must find that intriguing.