A few quick thoughts on what Apple introduced this week at WWDC 21.

On Monday Apple held the 2021 edition of its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote. Unfortunately there were no hardware announcements, so we didn’t get the Apple silicon-powered 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros that many of us are dying to see. But WWDC is, after all, a software-focused event primarily, so it wasn’t surprising that there were no new Macs. We’ll have to wait until later this Summer or perhaps Fall for those. But what we did get was an early look at the biggest new features that Apple will be introducing this call alongside iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, tvOS 15, and macOS Monterey.

One thing that struck me about today’s announcements were that they felt like modest revisions to what was announced last year. And to me that’s a good thing. Apple doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel every year, and last year was a particularly big year, particularly on the Mac. macOS Monterey mostly looks the same as macOS Big Sur, but with some handy new features. iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 likewise feel like enhancements to what was already present in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. Trust me, as an Apple systems administrator, I am all about updates that aren’t going to cause major headaches to me or my end users. macOS Big Sur was like an Italian car. Beautiful, but with some fragility under the hood. That’s because Big Sur introduce a lot of changes to macOS, not the least of which was the the biggest overhaul of the Mac’s user interface in two decades. A year where Apple takes the good, but at times rocky, start that Big Sur provided and simply smoothes out the rough edges is a welcome one to me.

Another thing that struck me is that, despite what the corporate tech press told you last year, Apple still has no interest in merging macOS and iPadOS. And that’s great! Apple just wants to make each operating system the best it can be for the form factor it supports. Where it makes sense, all of Apple’s operating systems will share features and UI elements, but each will be true to what it is. A Ford F-150 and a Porsche 911 are both great vehicles that do what they were designed to do exceptionally well. You’ll find areas of overlap between each vehicle. (For example they both have seats, steering wheels, gear shift levers, and pedals. You can use either to drive to the office. But each also has unique characteristics that make it well suited for specific tasks it was designed to excel in. The F-150 has a cargo bed and high ground clearance for managing a rough construction site. The 911 is going to be far better on the racetrack. It all goes back to Steve Jobs’s decade-old analogy where the iPad becomes the family sedan and the Mac becomes the pick up truck. And no matter how badly the corporate tech press wants the iPad to be a truck, Apple is wisely continuing to make those disparate form factors excel in both their similarities and their differences.

Another common theme to this year’s WWDC was sharing and tools to foster remote connectivity. You can now listen to music or watch a TV show or movie with friends via FaceTime with a new feature Apple calls SharePlay. I’ll be curious to see how useful people find this. With most of the world (blessedly) coming out of its COVID shell and getting back to normal, these features all seem like they’re a year too late. That just goes to show how long it takes to conceptualize and implement features. Apple also clearly felt the need to step up FaceTime’s game in light of the surge in usage of tools like Zoom in the last year. FaceTime now has portrait mode, the ability to filter out background audio. There’s a Zoom-style grid view and the ability to send links ahead of time for calls. You can even use a link to join a FaceTime call via browser from an Android or Windows device! These are all great new FaceTime additions. Apple’s playing catch up here, but who cares? Apple should copy all of the great features it can.

Some of my favorite announcements from this year’s WWDC include:

• An iPhone Weather app completely redesigned. It’s chock full of useful weather data, has more whimsical animations, and finally adds a weather map which can display radar, temperatures, or air quality. Apple bought Dark Sky in March of 2020, leaving them little time to incorporate its features into Apple Weather, though it did get real-time precipitation forecasts. Now they’ve had time to bring in most of Dark Sky’s best features paired with Apple’s design chops. I’m very happy.
• Text detection in photos. Now when you take a picture of text (Apple’s demo featured a typical office white board), your iPhone can recognize the text in the photo and you can copy and paste it in other apps. And this works in macOS and iPadOS as well.
• Universal Control. You can actually use a single keyboard and mouse to seamlessly control a Mac and an iPad. Just drag the mouse pointer from one device to the other as seamlessly as if it were an external monitor. As someone who typically has both a Mac and an iPad Pro on his desk, I’m going to get a lot of value out of that.
• Swift Playgrounds. Apple’s app for teaching you how to code in the Swift programming language now also lets you build an entire iPad app from start, to finish, to submission to the App Store, all from an iPad. It’s not Xcode for iPad, something many have been asking for for years, but it’s a big step in that direction.
• Maps. Limited to a handful of cities for now, but Apple is adding really rich, really whimsical views of cities. One of the biggest wow moments from the demo.

What was less interesting to me:

• Redesigned Safari. I’m not wild about the new tab/search field design. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, and I may even grow to love it, but right now it looks and feels confusing to me. And the main app you use to get your work done shouldn’t offer confusion.
• Focus. Apple made a lot of our new features for creating focus around specific types of activity. It could prove really useful, but this feels like the kind of feature Apple sometimes puts a lot of demo time into that people wind up not using.
• A lot of times Apple does really well with their opening video. But this year’s skit with developers being asked to come up with ideas for the video was just a cringe-fest. And Tim Cook coming out to address an audience entirely filled with Memoji heads was a swing and a miss in the cool department.