This is Technology Bytes, episode 67 for June 16th, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy and here we go.
So this week I want to talk about WWDC.
Last week I did a preview, so I guess today is what we might call a post view.
And I’m not really talking about anything necessarily specific because I’m going to live off the WWDC information for the next few weeks in my podcast.
So I just want to do some general thoughts about what was announced and what I thought about it, and then we will go from there.
So in general, I watched the keynote in a couple of different sessions, mostly because I had some interruptions, but at one point my daughter asked me what I thought and I thought it was a little bit boring to start.
And they were really going over each of the individual OSs.
And so it was kind of interesting because oftentimes when they would go to the next operating system, they would say, well, it has everything we just talked about for the previous one, and then it has these other things.
And so it was kind of weird, but overall I thought it ended up being fairly exciting and I was kind of wrong about my boredom.
So I thought that everything was going to be about artificial intelligence.
And in the first, I don’t know, three quarters, two thirds, I don’t remember the timing exactly, but they didn’t talk about artificial intelligence at all.
They did talk about machine learning and those kinds of things.
But the one thing that I did notice is that the updates that they talked about for all the different things across the platform, across the different platforms, all was very cohesive.
You got the similar things on iOS that you have on iPadOS that you have on macOS, all of these things that really work together, but have the basis of the same updates throughout.
And I thought that was really nice because oftentimes we have to wait for things.
And so I think that was where some of my boredom came in.
But then when I really started listening and started paying attention to what was happening, there were some really neat things.
And of course, I’m going to let podcasts from the next few weeks go into those things in detail.
But I thought that having similar updates for all the platforms makes for a good, well, maybe it pulls us into the Apple ecosystem.
I’m already there, but it makes me want to stay.
It has, I have no intention of leaving.
I would not get an Android phone because I have an iPad, or I would not get a Android tablet because I have an iPhone.
I would not get a Windows PC because I have a Mac.
And all of those things work together to make my life more easy in the technology world.
So I really do appreciate that.
Now the one thing, one operating system, one hardware that still stands a bit by itself is the Vision Pro and the Vision OS that goes with it.
So those were covered at the very beginning, a little bit of a light update.
I probably won’t even talk about that beyond this microcast, but the rest of them had some pretty significant changes.
So when you talk about iOS and you talk about iPadOS, those two things happen very similarly.
So a lot of neat things in iOS that come to iPadOS, I think the big thing that is different is putting a calculator on the iPad.
Now they did make fun of themselves for not having that.
In fact, when I talked to my daughter about it, she goes, they never had one until now.
And I’m like, yep, they never had one until now.
So kind of weird, but they did pull their own chain there in that one.
But some good updates for the operating systems both in that.
And I think that there is some things to be enjoyed in that.
And then in macOS, similar things to happen in the iOS and iPadOS, but then they threw in the iPhone mirroring, which I will cover in more detail in a follow-on podcast from this one.
And so some things happen in the macOS environment where you’re working on a different screen, where Safari has similar things across platforms.
You will probably get more use out of some of those on a Mac than you might on an iPhone or the iPad.
Obviously, tvOS and watchOS end up being almost standalone like the Vision OS, but not entirely.
And so there are some things where it ties the watchOS into things that happen on the iPhone so that you don’t have to have your iPhone to watch certain things.
Live updates is one of those, and I’ll cover that in more detail, but I use that extensively.
And so I’m really looking forward to that.
tvOS made some changes, maybe played some catch up.
And so those were good things as well.
And obviously more details coming.
This is just the ramblings of initial thoughts and probably not enough detail to make this podcast all that interesting to listen to.
But I need an episode for this week and I need to spend more time thinking about what they announced to be more thorough in follow-on podcasts.
But the big news, obviously, was the Apple intelligence.
And I’ve heard all kinds of input on that, all kinds of positives and negatives and why did they do this and why didn’t they do that?
But the reality is, if Siri can be useful, which is one of the things I asked for, if you remember last week, then I am all in.
Also a lot of hardware restrictions there.
In fact, the only iPhones or the iPhone 15 Pro and the 15 Pro Max, I happen to have one, so I fit in that category, but still you’re leaving a lot of iPhones behind at this point.
Obviously anything with the M1 chip in it.
So I just got the new iPad Pro with the M4 chip, so I’m well in, well down the road.
But I gave my old iPad to my daughter, so she will have that even though her phone and her Mac will not be able to run the Apple intelligence.
And some of the intelligence that is in there, and one of them is for developers using Swift, is not going to run on my stuff because apparently it needs at least 16 gigabytes of RAM and I bought all of my things with eight.
And I’m not a developer, so maybe I don’t need that, and I guess I don’t if I’m not a developer.
But my son and I are talking about trying to develop an app that we need for just one certain application, one time of year, it actually is surrounding the Super Bowl, and not having that code completion is going to make it more difficult for me to write code in an environment of which I am not all that familiar.
And my son is not all that familiar either.
But at the end of the day we’re probably going to have to write it in HTML5 or maybe some other thing that ties into that because many of the people that attend the Super Bowl party that my son hosts every year have Android devices, so we need it to work on that.
So lots of things to talk about, and I will be doing that over the next few weeks.
That is all I have for today.
I know it’s not a lot of detail, and I apologize for that, but look forward to the next episodes as they come out.
If you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com, anything you want me to specifically cover.
I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
