What did we learn at the Apple conference? | Articles | Gadgets, gifts and accessories

WWDC 2020, a devel­op­er con­fer­ence that tra­di­tion­al­ly takes place in the mid­dle of the year, this year, on June 22, was held online for the first time. The event is not with­out rea­son addressed to the devel­op­ers, because for them this is the first look at what changes they have to work with. But for the buy­er, this con­fer­ence brings a lot of inter­est­ing news. Although we don’t get exact infor­ma­tion about the com­pa­ny’s new devices, we will find out exact­ly what changes await the soft­ware and some­times, the struc­ture of devices. Apple def­i­nite­ly had some­thing to show us this year.

The main news was the com­pa­ny’s aban­don­ment of Intel proces­sors on the Mac and Mac­book series com­put­ers in favor of its own, which we are quite famil­iar with on the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

The com­pa­ny also talked about the changes that await us in iOS 14, which we will talk about in more detail, about iPad OS 14, which also received a por­tion of updates.

And of course, Mac OS has not been left with­out atten­tion, the new update will be called Mac OS 11 Big Sur (after the coast in cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia), and will receive a com­plete­ly new design.

Well, let’s take a clos­er look at what Apple spoke about at the con­fer­ence.

Source: Gad­gets Now

Processors

The main news that all those hur­ried to report. resources, was the rejec­tion of third-par­ty proces­sors. That’s right, now Apple com­put­ers, both desk­tops and lap­tops, will use Apple-made proces­sors. The first Mac with a home chip will be intro­duced and go on sale as ear­ly as 2020. A full tran­si­tion to your own hard­ware will take an aver­age of 2 years, accord­ing to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. The com­pa­ny also plans to con­tin­ue sup­port­ing devices that run on Intel.

For Apple com­put­ers, this will be the same turn­ing point as the use of Pow­er­PC, the intro­duc­tion of MacOS X and the begin­ning of coop­er­a­tion with Intel.

What is the rea­son for such a deci­sion? Apple is sure that its own proces­sors large­ly deter­mined the suc­cess of oth­er devices. Start­ing with the A4 Bion­ic on the iPhone 4, and con­tin­u­ing in each sub­se­quent device, the proces­sors showed all the best results. The com­pa­ny plans to focus on proces­sor per­for­mance and endurance, plus include AI for machine learn­ing and relat­ed archi­tec­ture.

Source: CNET.com

iOS 14

The oper­at­ing sys­tem of iPhone smart­phones has received sig­nif­i­cant updates. The main one is that man­u­fac­tur­ers have final­ly noticed a big prob­lem for users — the inabil­i­ty or unwill­ing­ness to orga­nize space on the desk­top. Now apps can be col­lect­ed into col­lec­tions on their own and you can even hide the ones you don’t use. In some ways, it strong­ly resem­bles Android.

You can now also add Wid­gets or Wid­gets to your desk­top. They are sim­i­lar to the apps on the Apple Watch, and can be cus­tomized through the Wid­get Gallery.

iMes­sages has added sev­er­al new fea­tures, main­ly focused on work chats. These are, for exam­ple, fixed dialogs and answers under the com­ment.

Final­ly, Siri will stop tak­ing up the entire screen when you access it. It will now high­light a small pop­up at the bot­tom. In addi­tion, now she can send audio mes­sages.

By the way, the fea­tures bor­rowed from Android are not lim­it­ed to desk­top set­tings. iOS 14 will get a pic­ture-in-pic­ture video view­ing fea­ture. Bet­ter late than nev­er.

The long-suf­fer­ing Apple cards are still fight­ing for exis­tence. Now, for some regions, they will include bike path mark­ings and EV mode, which will cal­cu­late the short­est routes for the elec­tric trans­port charg­ing sta­tion.

The Carplay fea­ture has not gone unno­ticed either. She received new wall­pa­pers and even the abil­i­ty to replace the key with a smart­phone, but only in some car mod­els. Own­ers of the new BMW 5 series will be the first to try this fea­ture. The pre­sen­ta­tion even showed how it would work using NFC on the iPhone. The fea­ture will not only allow you to use your smart­phone to open the car, it will allow you to trans­fer the key to any iPhone own­er. The fea­ture will appear for iOS 13 users in July and will also be present on iOS 14.

The last thing they told us about iOS 14 was new addi­tions to the App Store. We are talk­ing about App Clips, name­ly dig­i­tal pop-up win­dows that will offer the user to down­load an appli­ca­tion suit­able for a par­tic­u­lar task. They will be acti­vat­ed using NFC, QR code or text. For exam­ple, it will be enough to wave your smart­phone near a smart bike rental stop. Some­times it will even be pos­si­ble to pay for the ser­vice.

Source: techradar

iPadOS 14

iPad OS, despite a late start in 2018, isn’t all that dif­fer­ent from the iPhone’s oper­at­ing sys­tem. So the com­pa­ny has final­ly turned its atten­tion to the sys­tem and added some new fea­tures that take advan­tage of the tablet for­mat.

New side­bars with links and handy fea­tures, it’s quite an obvi­ous change that is designed for the ease of use of the sys­tem. There are sim­i­lar fea­tures in Adobe appli­ca­tions, and they are a suc­cess.

Incom­ing calls, like Siri on iOS 14, will no longer take up the whole screen, which is an incred­i­ble ben­e­fit for those who pre­fer not to stop their work­flow for the sake of a call. By the way, the same fea­ture is pro­vid­ed on iOS 14 itself.

The abil­i­ty to auto­mat­i­cal­ly orga­nize appli­ca­tions will also move to iPa­dOS. To be hon­est, this is where it can give the max­i­mum ben­e­fit, since the iPad is used for numer­ous tasks, so you can assume that there will be more than enough appli­ca­tions on it.

As promised in rumors and leaks of infor­ma­tion, the Apple Pen­cil did not go unno­ticed. A new fea­ture called Scrib­ble will allow the user to write in pen­cil in text fields such as a search engine. The inscrip­tion will be auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­vert­ed to print­ed for­mat. As for notes and draw­ings, you can align them in order to get a straight arrow, cir­cle or square. All this will also become an addi­tion to the oper­at­ing sys­tem.

Hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion has advanced so far that now the iPad will allow you to copy writ­ten text or part of it, copy and paste it into anoth­er file, where the text will be auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­vert­ed to typed.

AirPods

Air Pods firmware updates also bring news. The already impres­sive Apple ecosys­tem is get­ting more and more con­ve­nient. So now, if you’re watch­ing a video on your iPad using Air Pods but receive a call on your iPhone, the head­phones will let you answer by auto­mat­i­cal­ly switch­ing to the device that needs your atten­tion.

That’s not all there is to Air Pods. The Pro mod­el head­phones will receive an update that will be very inter­est­ing if it lives up to the expec­ta­tions of the pub­lic. The new fea­ture will sim­u­late ambi­ent sound using algo­rithms, sound fil­ters and fre­quen­cy adjust­ments. At the same time, chang­ing the posi­tion or turn­ing the head will not affect the effect, since it will be rebuilt, depend­ing on the posi­tion in space. It is inter­est­ing to test this effect in prac­tice and eval­u­ate all its specifics.

Source: T3.com

Apple Watch6

The first thing they did in WatchOS 7 was to pay atten­tion to the most notice­able part of the watch — the dial. Name­ly, the design of the wall­pa­per, which can not only be cre­at­ed, but also sent through the Face Shar­ing func­tion. Well, when you see a sim­i­lar design, you just need to click on it to down­load it for your­self.

Like iOS 14, Watch OS has received updates to the maps app, the same bike lanes and paths to charg­ing sta­tions. Hills and slopes will also be indi­cat­ed there for easy route plan­ning and obsta­cles.

The update also affect­ed train­ing modes. Now dances are con­sid­ered as a full-fledged sport, and they are divid­ed into cer­tain gen­res (Latin Amer­i­can dances, hip-hop, etc.). Advanced algo­rithms read the dif­fer­ence in move­ment to deter­mine the activ­i­ty of the arms and legs, or both. Com­ple­men­tary work­outs also include abs, strength train­ing, and even post-work­out rest. The Activ­i­ty app has also been over­hauled with a new design.

The biggest addi­tion is, of course, sleep track­ing. It now uses machine learn­ing to rec­og­nize and add sleep pat­terns to the Health app on watch­es and iPhones. The func­tion even pro­vides assis­tance in prepar­ing for sleep.

In the morn­ing, the user can choose to wake up with either an audi­ble alarm or vibra­tion. The greet­ing will be a spe­cial screen that will allow you to imme­di­ate­ly get infor­ma­tion about the weath­er, noti­fi­ca­tions and bat­tery sta­tus of the watch.

As a trend of the last few months, the com­pa­ny has includ­ed hand wash­ing recog­ni­tion. The clock counts the time while you wash your hands and if you have spent the required 20 sec­onds or more on this process, you will hear con­grat­u­la­to­ry sounds at the end.

Source: The Verge

Big Sur

The next ver­sion of macOS com­plete­ly changes the famil­iar design. Win­dows will apply shad­ows, depth, and trans­paren­cy in order to define the hier­ar­chy. It will be avail­able in both light and dark modes.

Appli­ca­tion icons and win­dows will become more square, there will be a new side­bar and tool­bar for the Find­er. Con­trol Cen­ter from iOS will move to macOS, wid­gets and noti­fi­ca­tions will also appear there.

Maps will also be updat­ed, as well as in oth­er appli­ca­tions.

The Safari brows­er will be improved and will be able to keep track of your pass­words for secu­ri­ty in the same way that Chrome does.

By hov­er­ing your mouse over a tab, you can see a pre­view of the page.

tvOS

The lat­est news con­cerns the oper­at­ing sys­tem for Apple TV, where gam­ing will receive mul­ti­play­er sup­port, as well as sup­port for the Xbox Elite 2 and Xbox Adap­tive Con­troller. Pic­ture in Pic­ture will also be avail­able on Apple TV.

All oper­at­ing sys­tems have received their por­tion of updates and, despite the fact that some prob­lems remain unad­dressed to this day, we hope to improve and fix known bugs that users of Apple tech­nol­o­gy face. In addi­tion, we look for­ward to the announce­ment of new devices, their capa­bil­i­ties and the release of new sys­tems. Not all devices will be able to update, so be sure to check the lists on the Apple web­site to find out if your device is com­pat­i­ble.