Apple finished the keynote of its annual developer conference called WWDC last night. This year, Apple announced a lot of new products as well as features and it is said to be the biggest WWDC keynote from Apple, ever. Some of the highlights of the WWDC 2019 were the announcements of iOS 13, macOS Catalina as well as the much-awaited Mac Pro and Pro XDR display.
Apple iOS 13
The latest version of iOS was announced at the WWDC 2019 keynote yesterday, as expected. iOS 13 was announced as the successor to iOS 12 according to Apple’s traditional naming convention. With iOS 13, Apple is focusing on the performance of iPhones. The company says that with iOS 13, apps will load much faster and app download sizes have also been reduced.
FaceID will now be 30% faster after iOS 13, claims Apple. However, the biggest cheer was when Apple announced dark mode for iPhones in iOS 13. This dark mode in iOS 13 will work across all the apps and Apple showed the demo of dark mode in action for apps such as Messages, Photos and others.
Apple also announced “Sign in with Apple” which is company’s way to replace signing in with Google or Facebook. The company says that this is a great way to control your privacy. Apart from that, Photos has been redesigned which looks very much similar to Google Photos. Messages now shows name and photo of the sender who you have previously chatted with.
Apple has added swipe gestures on its keyboard too, finally. iOS 13 is already available for Developers right now whereas public beta of iOS 13 will be available from July. The public release of iOS 13 is said to be coming in Fall. Apple iOS 13 will be available for free on iPhone 6s and later.
Mac Pro and Pro XDR display
Apple made the ‘Pro’ users happy by finally launching a refresh of the Mac Pro as well. We know that previous Mac Pro which had a design similar to Trash Can was launched 9 years ago. Therefore, the new Mac Pro was highly anticipated and Appel finally announced it. The new Mac Pro comes with a 28-core Intel Xeon processor along with up to 1.5TB SSD and eight PCIe expansion slots with up to four Radeon Pro Vega II graphics from AMD.
Also, the new Mac Pro is designed with upgradability in mind. Apple has also included Afterburner, a programmable ASIC to decode up to 6.3 billion pixels per second. Afterburner can stream up to three 8K ProRes RAW videos as well as 12 streams of 4K ProRes videos at the same time.
To support the Mac Pro, Apple announced a Pro XDR display which is a 32-inch 6K LCD display with Retina Pro support. This display would cost you $4,999 without a stand. The Pro stand, which comes with tilt, height and rotation support, alone would cost you $999 in the US. As for the Mac Pro, the base variant is priced at $5999 in the US which comes with 32GB RAM and 256GB SSD with Intel Xeon processor.
Apple macOS Catalina
Apple has shifted from deserts to islands as far as naming macOS versions is concerned. The latest version of macOS is named Catalina which is an island situated in California, US. As we reported earlier, iTunes is replaced on macOS Catalina with standalone apps for Apple Music, Podcasts and Apple TV. Apple also announced Sidecar for macOS Catalina which is a way to extend your Mac desktop to iPad as a secondary display.
Also, macOS now supports voice control for accessibility using Siri’s speech recognition technology. macOS Catalina also brings Screen Time feature to Mac which gives users the ability to track their app usage on Mac as well. Apple has also updated the Photos, Safari, Mail, Notes and Reminders app on macOS.
macOS Catalina Developer Preview is also available starting today for developers. macOS Catalina’s public beta will be available later this year. Interestingly, all the Macs since mid-2012 are still supported by macOS Catalina.
Apple iPadOS
Apple has now separated the iPad from iOS and given its own OS named iPadOS. Although the new features announced for iOS 13 are coming to iPadOS, there are more features in store for iPads. With iPadOS, the focus of Apple is to increase productivity on iPads for power users. Apple has added a split view and slide-over functionality on iPadOS. You can also switch between two apps easily with the gestures on iPadOS.
iPadOS also comes with desktop-class browsing experience for Safari. Also, iPad finally supports thumb drives such as USB sticks, SD cards and other external drives. There is now a file manager which lets you zip, unzip and do much more right on your iPad. Apple has also introduced new gestures for cut, copy and paste on iPadOS.
