My Limited Take On This Years Apple World Wide Developers Conference

Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) took place in the first week of this month. This much anticipated annual event from Apple is where they announce new products and software updates that will be upcoming in the rest of the year. For weeks prior, rumour abounds, and invariably, there quite wide of the mark, except this year. The word on the street was that Apple would announce their Vision Pro Headset, a first for the company, and sure enough, they did!

Before I comment too much about the Vision Pro headset, I need to tell you about the update in Operating Systems, which will be available from around October this year.

The new Mac OS is called Sonoma (it could be a joke somewhere). It's currently out for Beta Testing, and from what I have picked up, the reaction is quietly positive. I know problems have rendered some machines dead in the water, but that is what beta testing is all about. Sonoma will only be available for older Macs and seems aimed at their newer silicon versions. It would be worth a check before downloading to see if your Mac is compatible.

 One of the new apps that has come to my attention is Journal. It is a new Apple journalling app. It will hit the Day One journaling app that I use pretty hard, although one professional freelance writer that I know will not use Day One after a severe issue with it losing a lot of his data. It has made me consider saving my journals to another source before the update. 

Of course, there will be many updates and new features.

For IOS users, there will be IOS17. There are over forty plus updates and enhancements. The list of iPhones that will be able to take this update must be dwindling, and my 5SE will need help to handle the update.

Before WWDC, there was the long-wished-for announcement of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad. I've seen mixed opinions of both of these. They are slightly stripped-down versions of those available on MacBooks and seem different from what users had wished for. Newcomers to both apps on the iPad will see things differently.

Ok, now to the elephant in the room, the Vision Pro Headset. A totally new direction for Apple, and as always, they have come up with something different. They are not your run-of-the-mill VR headsets, certainly not at the price point of £3500. They will do all the VR things, and you can even immerse yourself in Apple TV (can't you just watch the TV for that). Their strangest feature is the eyes you can see on the front of them. They're your eyes too. Not that you are looking through the headset, It's some clever engineering that's using cameras inside the headset. It's pretty strange

To round up, then. A lot is coming up for developers to get their teeth into. There will be the usual refreshing of Apple's current lines, a new 15-inch MacBook Pro. There isn't any advanced chatter about new silicon chips. The M1 and M2, and their Pro versions, continue to give remarkable performance. Unfortunately, latency built into the Intel versions of MacBooks and iPads will likely see them consigned to history over the next 12 months.

Thank you for reading. I will now go back to writing the novel and maybe a cup of coffee to wake me up.