What happened
Four major announcements from Apple today:
- iOS 11, watchOS 4, a new version of tvOS and macOS High Sierra coming in autumn, with a raft of smaller updates including person-to-person Apple Pay transfers, drag-and-drop multitasking on iPad, a do not disturb while driving mode, and Amazon Video on the AppleTV.
- Speed bumps to the iMacs and laptops today, as well as a announcement of the new, $4,999 iMac Pro coming in December.
- A new pair of iPad Pros, including a 10.5in model to replace the 9.7in model, and a host of productivity enhancements to iOS 11 for the devices.
- And the HomePod, Apple’s attempt to take on both the Amazon Echo and Sonos at the same time: a music-focused smart speaker, shipping for $349 in December.
Updated
And that’s it. Cook’s back with the wrap up, and a surprise announcement of a Michelle Obama fireside chat on Tuesday morning, then we’re out.
Introducing the HomePod
The HomePod has seven tweeters and four-inch woofer; it has an A8 chip living inside it, and uses that to make the sound “spatially aware”. That’s a feature Sonos has too, letting the speakers adjust their output to, say, push the vocals down the centre of the room while bouncing the bass off the wall.
And Siri lives inside it. Say “Hey Siri”, and you can give it a huge array of questions and commands about music, all hooked heavily in to Apple Music. Only Apple Music, though: Spotify subscribers will have to go elsewhere, it appears.
Siri can answer non-music questions, too, setting timers, reading you the news, and so on.
Updated
Schiller’s pitch: the music quality of a Sonos system, with the smarts of an Amazon Echo. Apple’s aims: “rock the house”; “spatial awareness”; and a “Musicologist” living inside it.
It’s called the “HomePod”. Even the cheerers in the audience were a bit muted at that name …
Updated
It’s a speaker! Apple’s aiming to “reinvent home music”. Phil Schiller takes the stage …
Updated
iOS 11 wrap-up: free upgrade coming in the autumn. Only one more item left on Cook’s list! What’ll it be?
Oh, there’s more iOS stuff for the iPad.
It’s getting a huge dock, which you can pull up in-app. You can also use it for multi-tasking, and you can drag and drop content between apps.
The iPad is also getting a file browser called Files.
These may be boring features, but they really underscore the “Pro” side of the iPad Pro: if you want to do serious work on these tablets, something like a file browser has long been considered a price of entry.
There’s also more Apple Pencil features, so now you can draw on PDFs and screenshots. And Notes now has a built-in document scanner, which is being introduced as an Apple Pencil feature but I don’t think it is?
Updated
New iPad Pro line
Cook back for number five of six: new iPad Pros.
“We’ve been pushing the boundary of iPads, and today, we’re going to push them further than we ever have before,” Cook says.
We’re getting a 10.5in iPad, in a device the same size as the 9.7in iPad Pro. Both that, and the 13in iPad Pro, get new displays – brighter, with better colour reproduction, and a 120Hz screen refresh rate. The new CPUs are 30% faster and the new GPUs are 40% faster, too. Still got a 10 hour battery life. But also still got a camera nubbin – Apple couldn’t fit a good camera in the body itself, it seems.
These are nice tablets, but it’s really hard to get excited about iPads these days.
They start at $649 for the 10.5in with 64GB, and $799 for the 12.9in with 64GB.
Updated
Now on to the behind-the-scenes stuff for iOS. It’s getting Metal 2, of course, and a new set of machine learning APIs letting developers use Apple’s natural language comprehension and facial recognition tools.
Apple’s also trying to grab a beachhead in the AR (augmented reality) world – think Pokémon Go. The developer tool is called ARKit, and Federighi introduces it with a swipe at the “carefully edited videos” that the likes of Facebook and Magic Leap have shown. Federighi, of course, demos it for real, placing a virtual coffee cup, lamp and vase on the real table.
ARKit works by pulling the camera, CPU and GPU, and motion sensors all together. It’s already supported by millions of iPads and iPhones, Federighi says, and so “overnight, ARKit will be the largest AR platform in the world”. Developers including IKEA, Lego and Niantic – who made Pokémon Go – have already worked the API into their apps. So has Peter Jackson’s Wingnut AR, which gets a fun onstage demo.
Finally (for the iOS segment) Phil Schiller, head of worldwide marketing, comes on to talk about the App Store: it’s getting a full redesign, the first in nine years.
A “Today” tab aims to restore the feeling of discovering new great apps, while games finally get their own dedicated space – separated from “apps”, suggesting that Apple’s finally realised that the two markets have vastly different marketing needs.
(The demo – of Monument Valley 2’s entry in the Today tab – shows that Apple is basically creating its own app blog, replete with pull quotes from interviewed creators.)
Updated
Apple also introduces Do Not Disturb While Driving: it’ll automatically mute notifications while you’re driving the car, and even auto-reply to texts saying “I’m driving”. It’ll be an optional mode, but one which it looks like Apple will be pushing fairly heavily.
HomeKit gets a small update … but that update introduces support for speakers, and AirPlay 2 for remote playing. I wonder what could be coming later?
Apple Music gets social features. Apple’s tried this before (remember Ping?) and it didn’t work too well, but maybe it’ll get lucky a second time round. The app also gets an API, letting other apps do things like add songs to your library.
Updated
iOS 11 updates!
Messages gets a redesigned app draw so you can find your apps and stickers better, as well as automatic sync of message history through iCloud on both iOS and macOS.
Apple Pay gets updated for person-to-person payments, so you’ll be able to send money through iMessage to other iOS users. (Watch out PayPal, Venmo and Monzo …)
Siri gets a new, deep-learning powered voice. It’s more natural-sounding, but still not that natural-sounding. But it can also do translation now (from English to Chinese, French, German, Italian and Spanish, for now), as well as offer multiple answers to some questions. SiriKit – that’s the developer-focused side of Siri – can now hook into more apps, more easily. And more generally, Siri’s getting more proactive in offering help across apps like Apple News and Safari.
The Camera next. Again, it’s being updated to HEVC from H.264 (so your videos will be compressed to be significantly smaller), but JPEG is also being replaced, with HIVC. Apple promises it’ll still be easy to share compatibly with others. The camera app is also being updated, with better low-light performance and a new Depth API so that the iPhone 7+ camera can be used by developers.
Photos is now going to have portrait movies in memories, which is nice. There are better changes afoot for live photos, letting you change their keyframe and edit their length, and do some animated gif-style effects with the looping. You can also use some smart new effects to do things like fake a long exposure using the live photo data.
Maps gets detailed floor plans of shopping malls and airports (only in London, Brits), and lane guidance and speed limits for driving directions.
Finally, and most excitingly, the Control Centre is back to a single pane, letting you control everything by swiping up, once. For more controls, you can 3D Touch the face.
Updated
Back to Tim for update four of six: iOS. Cook announces iOS 11, but not before the customary swipe at Android, pointing out that 86% of iOS users are on iOS 10 while just 7% of Android users are on Android 7. Then Federighi returns …
Updated
New hardware: iMac Pro
And finally, a very un-Apple “sneak peek” at the company’s previously announced “iMac Pro”. It’s dark grey instead of silver (it does look kinda cool).
Ternus promises “workstation class performance”, and the “most powerful Mac ever”: an 8-, 10-, or even 18-core Xeon processor; Radeon Vega graphics; up to 128GB of memory; 4x Thunderbolt 3 and 10GB ethernet. You’ll be able attach two 5K displays to this thing as well as the built-in 5K display.
Of course, it doesn’t exist yet. But when it does, in December, it’ll cost $4,999. A bargain, Ternus says, compared to the $7,000 it would cost to spec a PC to the same level. Of course, you could get the PC today …
Updated
Ternus back for another Mac update.
The MacBook and MacBook Pros are getting Intel’s new Kaby Lake processors, faster SSDs on the MacBook, faster graphics on the 15in MacBook Pro, and a $300 price cut for the 13in MacBook Pro.
(The MacBook Air also gets a small, sad speedbump, mentioned in passing at the end of the segment.)
Updated
Spec bumps for the iMac
Ternus starts by introducing spec bumps for the iMac. We’re seeing improvements to their displays – brighter – and their CPUs – faster – as well as their memory and storage – bigger and faster.
The iMacs are also getting USB-C/Thunderbolt 3, useful for that external graphics enclosure. Not that you’ll necessarily need it, since the company is also boosting the inbuilt graphics cards to be “80% faster” on the cheapest model, and discrete graphics cards on all 4K iMacs – 3x faster.
On the 5K iMac, a Radeon Pro series with up to 8GB of VRAM will be in the mix. That’s the first Mac that can really support VR, and Ternus brings up John Knoll from Industrial Light and Magic to show off what they’ve been doing.
Updated
High Sierra launches in public beta in late June, and in a full free update in the Autumn. Federighi hands over to John Ternus, the president of hardware engineering, to talk about Mac updates.
Update to Metal graphics card
The next tranche of updates Federighi talks about are more for the devs in the audience. A new file system, graphics drivers and so on. Skip this one unless you’re interested in that sort of thing, and just assume that things that you don’t really understand will get a bit better.
Still here? Apple’s bringing APFS to the Mac, the new filesystem it created for iOS. It’s also introducing a new video codec, H.265 or HEVC, to replace H.264.
And Apple’s Metal API, which allows developers to code directly for Mac’s graphics cards, gets an update. Metal 2 will apparently have 10x better draw call throughput, a faster frame debugger, and GPU counters. Yeah, I don’t really know what most of those words mean either. It’ll also be hooked into machine-learning frameworks.
Metal’s also gaining support for external GPUs, hooked up through a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, and a specific implementation for Virtual Reality. This is Apple slowly trying to show that it can do high intensity graphics work, a few years after Oculus founder Palmer Luckey joked that VR wasn’t on Macs because no Macs could handle it.
Updated
Safari to be 'fastest ever desktop browser'
So what are these refinements to macOS? Safari first:
-
Speed updates for Safari, which Federighi promises makes it the fastest ever desktop browser.
- Autoplay blocking, which stops music and video from playing without your permission on websites.
- “Intelligent tracking prevention”, which uses machine learning to prevent ads from following you around the web.
Mac Mail gets split view for the compose window, Spotlight integration for search and 35% improvement on its storage use.
Photos gets a new view of imports in chronological order, a permanent sidebar and improved facial recognition which now syncs across devices. The app also gets a vastly improved editing suite, as well as better integration with pro.
Updated
New version of macOS
Tim back for update number three of six: the Mac. Craig Federighi subs in to talk about the newest version of macOS.
It’s a tock update, focused on refining features rather than introducing new ones, similar to Moutain Lion and El Capitan, so it gets a tock name: High Sierra. (Federighi promises us the name is “fully baked”)
Updated
One neat feature for watchOS 4: you can pick a playlist that auto starts with a workout. Unfortunately, all the watchOS music features still only support Apple Music – no Spotify support here.
The update will arrive this autumn.
Updates for watchOS
On to Cook’s second of six updates: the Apple Watch. He invites Kevin Lynch, VP of Technology, on to the stage show us watchOS 4.
New features in the update:
- A Siri-powered watch face, which automatically displays the information most relevant to you. “In the morning, I might see commute time and my first meeting … and throughout the day, the face will dynamically update with information that’s relevant to you”. (Interestingly, this is Apple repositioning Siri as a general AI assistant. There’s no voice-control element to the feature).
- Some less techy watchfaces: a kaleidoscope set, and three Toy Story faces to match the Mickey and Minnie Mouse ones for people with no taste.
- Personalised activity notifications aimed to push you to fill your activity circles more often, and monthly challenges for those who want to improve their fitness long-term.
- A redesigned workout app, with some new supported workouts including HIIT and pool swimming.
Updated
Amazon Prime comes to Apple TV
Cook’s first update is already a fairly big piece of news: he announces that Amazon Prime Video is coming to the Apple TV. That means the most notable holdout from the platform is there, putting almost every major streaming service on it.
Updated
As ever, we open with CEO Tim Cook giving us a quick overview of Apple’s developer community, promising the “best and biggest WWDC ever”, and introducing us to developers at each end of age spectrum: a 10-year-old Australian boy, and an 82-year-old Japanese woman.
But! Cook dispensed with most of the updates, promising a lot to come and no time to show off – and jumping into the first of six important pieces of news, on tvOS.
Updated
It’s beginning.
With a … short sketch about a world without apps?
(It’s actually kinda funny.)
Updated
Strap yourselves in for a long night, maybe crack open a cold one with the boys: the BBC’s Dave Lee says we’ll be here for over two hours.
We've been told to expect the #WWDC17 keynote to last over two hours. #numbbum
— Dave Lee (@DaveLeeBBC) June 5, 2017
Updated
How to watch
Want to be more switched on than just following the liveblog? The company streams its keynote live these days, though you have to use Safari (or Microsoft Edge on Windows 10) to watch it. If you’re at home with your Apple TV, you can watch it there too – there should be a new icon on your home screen for the event.
Updated
What to expect
WWDC is primarily a software event, a chance for Apple to show external developers its plans for upcoming releases so that they can start incorporating new features into their own apps. That means we’ll see the first versions of the next operating systems including iOS 11 and macOS 10.13. We’ll also probably get updates to the company’s lesser platforms, like watchOS and tvOS.
Hardware isn’t the focus of the event, but that doesn’t mean Apple won’t have some devices on stage. We’re likely to see updates to two of Apple’s hardware lines: the iPad Pro and the MacBook Pro.
The laptops are expected to see little more than a speed bump, maybe extending to the MacBooks and MacBook Airs, but the iPad Pro could see a full redesign, introducing a bezel-free form factor.
And Apple’s definitely experimenting with an Amazon Echo competitor. Will it be ready for today? We’ll find out.
One thing’s for certain: it’ll be a jam-packed event. Last week, Apple sent out the back-slapping press releases (about the number of iOS developers, and minor new features for its coding language Swift) that it normally saves for the keynote. They’re making room for something …
There’s 45 minutes to go until Apple’s latest press event, the opening keynote at the company’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference, begins.
We’re expecting to get our first hints at the next versions of iOS and macOS, as well as a look at some new hardware bumps to Apple’s laptops. We may even see a whole new iPad Pro, and Apple’s long-rumoured Amazon Echo competitor.
Stick with us, as the liveblog will kick off in earnest at 6pm UK time (1pm EST/10am PST).
Summary
Want to be more switched on than just following the liveblog? The company streams its keynote live these days, though you have to use Safari (or Microsoft Edge on Windows 10) to watch it. If you’re at home with your Apple TV, you can watch it there too – there should be a new icon on your home screen for the event.
Updated
