There are so many updates, and it’ll be worth going into detail about a few items over the next week as we find out more. For now, here’s a rundown of what Apple revealed during their keynote at WWDC 2020.
In This Article:
iOS 14
New Home Screen
First, yes, there are home screen widgets. You can pull the widgets out of the Today view and right onto your home screen. You can resize them to take up either 2×2 or 4×2 areas in your app grid. There’s also a special Smart Stack widget. This widget displays a group of widgets. You can swipe through them and they’ll occupy the same space on your home screen. Your iPhone will learn how you interact with the smart stack, and what you like to use it for throughout the day. So if you check weather in the morning, it’ll show you the weather in the morning. If, by 10am you need calendar invites or stock information, that’s what you’ll see. At night, you may get your news widget. It will work largely like the Siri watch face on the Apple Watch, providing the information you need before you realized it was what you were looking for.
But that’s not the only way Apple has upgraded the home screen interface.
App Library
The new App Library will automatically organize your apps into categories. It’ll also show a section of Siri suggested apps as well as recently downloaded apps. The apps in the category icons will reflect your most recently used apps from those categories. Furthermore, there’s a search bar. Tapping it will bring up an alphabetical list view of all of your apps. This is similar to the launcher I use on Android. I don’t actually arrange my apps, I have a list of favorites that appears on my screen, and, upon swiping, I can access an alphabetical list. That’s it. That’s the whole launcher (it’s called Niagara Launcher, if you’re interested, Android users).
Now Apple will have that same simplicity. You’ll even be able to hide entire pages of apps so you can try out this new view for as long as you’d like, preserving yet hiding your former home screen layout.
Screen-Saving Siri
Smaller Call Notifications
Picture in Picture
Translate App
Messages Updates
Messaging apps these days aren’t just for communicating with one person via text. You send emoji, memoji, gifs, stickers, and perhaps most importantly, have group chats. Apple’s new messaging app will allow you to pin conversations, select photos for groups, chain conversations with threading like Slack, and more. Plus, Apple’s updating memoji so you can better customize the electronic version of yourself.
Although, honestly, mine already matches pretty well.
What, you don’t think so?
Maps Update
Now you can get biking directions from Apple Maps. You can select routes based on elevation, or whether or not you’ll have to get off your bike and go up stairs or take some other pedestrian shortcut. This is why I skate, by the way. I mean, it’s far more fun than biking, but when you can pick up your means of transportation and take the train, go into the office, or hide it under a restaurant table, it kind of makes the other forms of transportation seem silly. But now you can get cycling directions, which work just as well for scooter directions, roller skate directions, or longboard directions.
For those with electric vehicles, you’ll be able to tell your iPhone what kind of car you have. It can plan out routes based on the range of your vehicle and your charging type, so you’ll never be without a charging station on a long road trip.
Carplay
Speaking of cars, Apple has updated Carplay as well. Now you can set a wallpaper background.
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You can also unlock your car with your iPhone. You’ll be able to use your phone in place of your car keys. You can even set up other drivers, and set up profiles, like limiting your teenager so they can’t access sport mode in your 2021 BMW M5, which is the first vehicle that will have the feature this year. If you were choosing cars based solely on whether or not you could unlock and start them with an iPhone, you could do a lot worse than an M5.
App Clips
This isn’t like Apple’s mostly forgotten Clips app. App Clips are more like Android’s Instant Apps. They allow you to access part of an application to perform a certain task. For example, say a parking meter in a city uses an app to buy time. You could scan a code or use NFC on the device to download the app clip, a smaller version of the app used to pay for time in that parking space. When you’re done with the app, your iPhone will clear it out of storage automatically. In many situations, Apple Pay or the full app will be better options. This is why Instant Apps haven’t been popular on Android. Still, it may come in handy some day, who knows?
Secret Feature: Default Browser and Mail Apps
Apple didn’t show this off during WWDC, or, rather, they didn’t discuss it at length. But a slide revealed that iOS 14 will finally allow users to set a default app for their web browser and mail client. That means you won’t have to use Apple’s mail for any mailto: links, and you can open links in any app in Firefox, if you want to.
Widgets and default apps? Is there any reason to switch to Android anymore?
iPadOS 14
Apple also improved navigation with a sidebar. This will function much like the side pane of macOS apps, giving iPad users a more intuitive method of going where they want that further differentiates iPadOS from iOS.
Outside of the drastically improved Apple Pencil support, iPadOS largely just retains the updates from iOS. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. iOS 14 looks to fix many of the issues the platform has had, and is going to be very popular with users.
macOS 11: Big Sur
“On the new software side, we can expect iOS 14, macOS 10.16 (I really wish they’d just go to 11, as they don’t call it “OS X” anymore anyway)”
– … Me
Well, Apple did it. They finally released macOS 11. So does that mean it’s a huge upgrade over macOS X, which was initially introduced as “OS X” in 2001?
Yes.
Yes it is.
Design Overhaul
Neumorphism is something different. This takes a simplistic and flat interface and adds 3D effects and other small visual indicators to make the software items appear as though they could be real, if they weren’t so clearly software. It almost makes everything feel like AR. User interface objects, while flat, seem to show depth and light direction, as though they were pressed out of a singular surface. It creates a clean yet friendly interface, and it’s my favorite modern software design trend.
Apple is also rounding corners more, to increase this friendly effect. The dock will “float,” with all sides being rounded, instead of feeling like it’s coming off one side of your screen. Apple’s also forcing icons into their rounded square icons, like those in iOS. This should make groups of icons look more uniform.
Widgets and Control Center
So touch-friendly! It’s a shame Apple doesn’t have a touchscreen Mac… yet.
Apple’s bringing iOS-style widgets to the Mac, with a larger widget area that combines widgets and notifications. The new notification center is accessed by clicking the clock, rather than a dedicated icon (presumably, swiping from the side or a keyboard shortcut will still work as well).
Apple’s also adding control center, with a few shortcuts for settings. These shortcuts can be dragged to the toolbar, or live in the little control pane. The controls look exactly like what you’d see on iOS. It seems a shame that Apple still hasn’t released a touchscreen Mac. This new interface would be perfect for an iMac with a Surface Studio-like design and Apple Pencil support.
Catalyst
Catalyst is the tool that helps iOS developers bring their apps to the Mac. With macOS 11, the feature will be complete. In fact, the reason Apple’s new Messages and Maps apps have all the features of their iOS counterparts is because in macOS Big Sur, the Messages and Mail apps are iOS apps. Apple has converted their iOS counterparts to macOS apps using Catalyst. If Apple thinks it’s good enough for their native apps, it’ll certainly work for third party developers.
Safari Upgrades
Taking another page from Firefox, Safari will also use web-based browser extensions. This means developers of extensions for Firefox or Chrome will be able to easily import their extensions to Safari. Improving upon the privacy of Firefox and Chrome though, is Safari’s ability to limit extensions. You’ll be able to limit extensions to certain pages, or disable them by default, only enabling them for a day at a time. Extensions was a huge motivator for leaving Safari behind. With real extensions, not dependent on controlling applications, Safari might be ready to be your main browser again.
As rumored, Safari on the Mac will also get automated translation. Safari will be able to translate a page as you scroll through it, automatically detecting when the language of the website isn’t your native language. With Siri’s more natural-sounding translations, you may not even realize the webpage wasn’t written in your native language to begin with!
Apple SOC (ARM) Support
Apple hasn’t clearly stated how this will work yet. They claim it can offer power and performance benefits, but had no benchmarks to stand by. The closest they came to showing any improvement was a chart with a little cloud of where they want A-Series powered Macs to sit, between power and performance. That’s it. The details of this switch were worryingly vague. Will it just be consumer Macs, the way Windows PC manufacturers have ARM-based Windows tablets? What about the entire lineup? Will Apple still use dedicated graphics from AMD, which are far more powerful than Apple’s chips? We don’t know. All Apple would say is that all of their native apps have been converted to run on their ARM-based chips. Third party developers will have to recompile their apps so they work on both Intel’s 64 bit chips (x64 architecture) as well as Apple’s system on a chip (SOC) based on the ARM architecture.
Apple says it will take two years to complete this transition. That means, in two years, all of your apps and games that haven’t switched over to ARM versions will be useless on your computer. Those that have switched over may be useless as well. Apple’s including a Rosetta layer to translate between ARM and Intel code, but it’ll slow your apps down significantly, as it did for the PowerPC to Intel transition.
Transitions like this are a messy pain for developers, and users may not see a clear benefit. But Apple will. Since they won’t have to pay Intel’s prices for processors, they’ll be able to increase their profit margins on A-Series Macs… if anyone still wants them.
SOC Woes
This was what I wrote in my notes as soon as Tim Cook mentioned rewriting something about macOS’ core.
When Tim Cook stated that Apple had been working on a deeper overhaul to macOS, I’ll admit, my stomach dropped. I’m very much against Apple using their own processors in their Mac lineup, at least not for the entire lineup. This is because they still don’t match the performance of higher end Intel or AMD chips, they don’t work with dedicated graphics cards (yet), and they wouldn’t work with everything out of the box. I’m a developer, an Android developer at that. Do I think Intel’s HAXM acceleration for Android emulators is going to carry over? Will Google even make upgrades to Android Studio for macOS? Will I still be able to use a Mac at work at all? What about legacy games? I already lost a number of the games I own on Steam because Apple no longer supports 32bit libraries, and many games rely on those libraries still. That’s at least a similar architecture! ARM is completely different from x64.
Apple showed games running on a Mac with an A12Z chip, but failed to point out that the only reason this was seamless was because the game was designed with Metal. Apple could just swap out the Metal layer for their new version and the game could run almost as smoothly as it would on an Intel machine. Most games aren’t using Apple’s Metal. Frankly? We’re not ready for this yet.
The performance increases will only be seen on the lower end, even for native apps. Higher end machines with dedicated graphics cards from Nvidia or AMD will outperform Apple’s hardware. After all, if the iPad was powerful enough to replace the Mac, it would have by now.
The real reason we’re seeing this change is so Apple can save money on processors, brag about battery life, and offer similar performance. Their margins will increase, but at the cost of the utility of their computers.
Apple is selling a $500 developer kit to registered developers. This is a Mac Mini powered by Apple’s A12Z from the iPad Pro. It’s available for reservation on Apple’s developer website now.
Compatibility
AirPods Firmware Update
But the updates to the AirPods Pro may be even more astonishing. AirPods Pro will get spacial audio surround sound. This creates a 3D, immersive effect with surround sound and head and device detection. If you move your head or your device, the sound will seem to emanate from the same direction. It’s the kind of thing you’d see only in virtual reality applications, but will now come to all of your music, movies, and games. The new feature will work with multichannel surround sound as well as Dolby.
Airpods go where they’re needed.
Also unannounced during WWDC, we’ve since learned that the AirPods will also support new battery charging techniques. If your batteries don’t need to charge because you’re unlikely to use them, they won’t, or they’ll only trickle charge. This will help preserve battery longevity, so your AirPods won’t run out of juice so quickly a year or two after owning them.
watchOS Updates
🤔
However, your Apple Watch with watchOS 7 will be able to detect when you start washing your hands. It’ll then count down from 20, making sure you kill all those nasty germs. And, yes, I mean destroy the lipid encapsulation and rinse them away. But to your body, the difference is minimal, at best.
Apple will also let watchOS 7 users add multiple complications from the same app to their watch faces. App developers—and pretty much everyone else—will be able to create watch faces and share them with others. Many app developers may want to do this to set a theme or create a watch face that only has their complications on it. You’ll be able to download them from just about anywhere you can click a link.
Finally, there’s a new feature to track your motions as you sleep. The Apple Watch sensors can closely estimate your stage of sleep based on your motion and heart rate. Apps like Sleep Cycle have taken this a step further, waking you in your lightest stages of sleep so you feel more alert in the morning. I’ve been using it for years though, and still never feel alert in the morning.
Apple TV
Apple didn’t even have a tvOS preview page, so here’s an old photo of an Apple TV.
If you ask me, Apple’s squandering the potential of the Apple TV. A small, A-series processor-powered device with Siri support (but only through the remote) connected to what is likely the largest screen in your house. Apple’s using it to be something you forget about, a portal into Netflix, Hulu, and Apple TV+. But it could be so much more. The hardware could have “Hey Siri” support, it could have its own speaker for non-visual requests, and the Apple TV software could serve as the central hub of all your devices.
At least Apple brought us closer to that last point with tvOS 14, if only slightly. Mostly, it makes your Apple TV a better gaming machine.
tvOS will support picture in picture, so video playback can continue in the background or in a small window on your screen. This also applies to video feeds from your cameras. So, without getting up or picking up your phone, you can check on the kids, see who’s at that door, and continue binging your favorite TV shows.
Developers will be able to add support for multiple users in games, so your little sibling won’t save over your save file. You’ll be able to progress through your game with your own profile. To play those games, you’ll also be able to use a touchpad, keyboard, or mouse, existing Apple/iOS controllers, PS4 controllers and Xbox controllers. Now, Apple’s adding support for the Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2 as well as the Xbox Adaptive Controller. The Adaptive Controller is one of the greatest ways for people with different or limited mobility to play games.
Privacy Enhancements
A small dot shows you that an app is using your camera or microphone.
Between Apple and Google, Apple’s the one focusing on consumer privacy and on-device machine learning. Still, as long as any information about a user can escape your device, there’s room for improvement. Apple made a number of improvements to privacy in their latest operating systems.
First, you know how Apple released Sign in with Apple last year? Every app that allows users to sign in with a third party service like Facebook or LinkedIn has to also allow users to sign in with Apple. Apple’s service focuses on privacy, giving developers a randomized email that Apple forwards responses from to your inbox. You’ll have a unique ID for each service, ensuring they can’t track you across devices. With Apple’s latest updates, you’ll be able to convert existing accounts to these anonymized Apple ID accounts.
You’ll also be able to see what permissions an app uses before downloading with a clear screen. It’ll also tell you how they use the data they collect. No, not like a lengthy privacy statement, more like a summary. This will make it easier to find apps that are mining your data.
Your Home-connected appliances will be able to communicate with end-to-end encryption. Cameras will be able to not only alert you when it detects a person, but use the photos on your phone along with facial recognition to tell you who’s at your door, if it’s a familiar face. Of course, this is all still local, between your own devices, so your privacy is secure.
You’re probably telecommuting a lot these days, if you’re working from home. Are you on a lot of video calls? Get nervous about a window into your apartment from your coworkers’ computers? Yeah, me too. iOS will now tell you when the camera or microphone is active with a small indicator.
In Short: A Mixed Bag
Expect new versions of Apple’s operating systems by the fall, with Apple’s first “Apple Silicon” Mac coming to consumers before the end of the year. Until then, you may want to wait to buy a Mac, if only to see how this transition pans out. If we’re lucky, they’ll scrap it altogether!