This is Technology Bytes, episode 14 for June 11th, 2023.
🎵 Intro Music 🎵 Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share my brief insights on an interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This past week, Apple held their Worldwide Developer Conference 2023.
This is always a big time for people who develop for Apple products and Apple services.
That’s not me.
I’m a consumer of those things.
But I really do, in that consumption, enjoy the fact that people are willing to put effort into making my Apple devices do things beyond what Apple has done themselves.
And I’m always interested to watch and listen to the State of the Union, or, let’s see, what comes first, the keynote, I guess.
Sometimes I will follow up with the State of the Union.
But listening to the keynote and watching that opening event for the week of the Developers Conference is always something that I look forward to, and this year was no difference.
And today I just want to cover some overviews of that event and things that sparked my interest.
And over the next weeks, I will be diving more deeply into the things that Apple announced.
Worldwide Developer Conferences for developers, those people who create software, those people who create apps that we load on our phone from the App Store, or we load on our computers from maybe the person’s website, whatever way we get to interact with the software that these people have developed.
And so, oftentimes, we don’t get hardware announcements at these conferences because it’s not a hardware conference.
But this year was significantly out of that norm, and they announced lots of hardware.
They, Apple, announced lots of hardware.
It started right off, just right into the keynote, with the MacBook Air 15-inch.
I currently am running a 13-inch MacBook Air.
I really like it, but it is on the small side, but it was something that I could afford and it was something that was available.
And if the 15-inch MacBook Air had been there at the time of purchase, I know I would have gotten the bigger screen.
In the meantime, I have a second screen in the form of an iMac and using universal controls to use the two screens.
So, if I was in the purchasing world, then I would be definitely looking at that MacBook Air 15-inch.
The other thing they announced was the Mac Studio, and they also announced the Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro really is the last of the Intel versus Apple Silicon devices that they had not announced, if you don’t think they’re going to make a larger screen iMac.
But the Mac Studio, and they announced the UltraChip with the M2 designation, so now they’ve gone to the Max.
No, because Max is the different one.
They’ve gone to the largest and most powerful chip that they have, at this point, made for any of their devices.
And the Mac Pro gets that same thing with support to crazy things.
They mentioned six screens that are super high resolution.
They’re Pro XDR screens.
You can do, I don’t know, 23 8K streams, up to 192 gigabytes of RAM.
It’s a computer that’s out of reach for me financially, but also out of the realm of even momentary necessity for the things that I use my computer to do.
But all in all, great hardware.
I know I’m not covering the elephant in the room, but I want to talk about that last hardware towards the end of this microcast.
The next thing that Apple did was talk about their operating system.
So iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma.
Again, leaving off the last operating system for a little discussion at the end.
And for the most part, I don’t know that there’s anything super huge that came out in any of these base software offerings from Apple in the operating system itself.
There’s some really nice things.
I think one of the people I listened to said they really leaned into collaboration and health and those kind of things.
So there’s some nice changes.
So nice, in fact, that I actually am running the developer betas on everything that I own.
Because this year, Apple also made a change where you don’t have to pay for the developer account, which is $99 a year, and they still allow you to put the developer betas on your devices against all sane advice, against all reason, because I am who I am.
I tried and tried to stay away from that developer beta and failed miserably.
So now I’m running everything beta in the developer side.
So far, keep my fingers crossed, so good.
Things are working well.
There’s a few things, obviously, that don’t work yet, apps that aren’t out yet, things that they’ve announced that I’ll talk about in more detail in the following weeks.
So now I want to talk briefly about the one more thing.
So haven’t used that phrase in a while from some of the historians of Apple that I listen to on a regular basis.
I think the last time was for the Apple Watch.
But a phrase that Steve Jobs made famous, as it were, in his announcements, and they talked about the Apple Vision Pro.
And it really is a headset.
They strayed.
They did not use the industry words that everybody wanted to hear in this announcement.
They didn’t in the whole keynote.
They stayed away from artificial intelligence.
They stayed away from virtual reality.
They stayed away from augmented reality.
I don’t think they used those words at all through the entire two hours of this keynote presentation.
And instead, they focused on what they want people to do with what they have to offer.
How can people use these tools to help them get work done, to help them interact with others, to help them improve their health?
All these things that Apple wants to focus on besides the buzzwords of the industry.
And that makes some people nervous because they feel like Apple is falling far behind in that arena of the artificial intelligence, which is really machine learning, which is a word that they did use.
And it really is not intelligence.
It’s just the ability, through the power of computing that we have today, to gather information in such mass and in such volume that it feels like you’re interacting with an intelligent living being when really it’s just someone who can bring up ideas and concepts of what they have read and gathered and make it feel like you are talking to a person.
Pretty amazing technology.
They have not, at this point, used it at all.
So I’m really just talking out the top of my head.
But what they did say is, we have made an environment for people to do stuff.
You can do entertainment.
You can do gaming.
You can do work.
You can do things that make you feel part of the world in which you live.
You can be immersed.
You can be not immersed at levels that are up to you.
And they have made it in such a way, this device, the Apple Vision Pro, in such a way that you can interact with your environment without being totally disconnected with this device on your head and also interact with a virtual environment at the same time.
And so they have really made some amazing technology that the technology that’s built into the Apple Vision Pro is nothing short of spectacular.
I know I’m an Apple fanboy, so that may not surprise you.
But just in general, the technology that they’ve used to make this device do what they want it to do is far and above what we have seen from others who make similar devices.
And it is expensive at $3,500, but it is a number of things that if bought individually could add up to that.
It is a full-blown computer.
It is a full entertainment system.
It is a communication device.
It is all these things.
And the way that they’ve written the software for it, and that’s Vision OS, so now they’ve added another OS for us to remember.
But they’ve provided a world, in their words, Apple’s words, for developers to create things for, to create software for, to create environments for, that are above and beyond or just totally different than anything we have seen in the recent past.
There are obviously limitations, and I will talk about this device in a little more detail over the next weeks.
But obviously limitation, it is a first-generation device.
Most of the people who tried them on at the Worldwide Developer Conference Keynote are saying great things about them.
They are amazed by the technology.
But of course, it is a controlled environment with Apple at your side, Apple engineers at your side, showing you what they want to show you and giving you just what they know the device will do at its best.
But even in that, people are starting to see what it might do for them in their personal life.
Still a lot of money, still a lot of unknowns, but more information will be coming from Apple because this device isn’t even supposed to be here for another six months at a minimum.
And many are thinking it could be closer to eight to ten months.
So we’ll have to wait and see.
But overall, I was very pleased with the Worldwide Developer Conference Keynote.
I’m happy with the things that they have offered, minor as they were in the different OSs, enough so that I’ve put the developer betas on all of my hardware, and it seems to be working.
And I look forward to what is done as they polish all of these announcements that they made last week.
You have been listening to the Technology Bytes Microcast.
Until next time, continue enjoying your technology.
