The new 2022 model has been designed around the more powerful M2 processor, and its design comes closer to that of the 14-inch MacBook Pro, with a more squared-off look than the traditional wedge shape. It features MagSafe charging, two Thunderbolt USB 4 ports, and a headphone jack. It’s 11mm thick and comes in at 2.7 pounds. It will be available in silver, space grey, and new “starlight” gold and “midnight” blue colors. One nice touch is that each model includes a braided MagSafe cable that matches the colorway.
The new version adds the more robust new M2 chips, supports up to 24GB of unified memory and promises up to 20 hours of battery life. The M2 chip offers an eight-core CPU and a 10-core GPU for more performance compared to the M1 model. The 13-inch MacBook Pro can be configured with up to 2TB of storage. It will be available in July.
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The 2022 13-inch MacBook remains mostly unchanged from the previous iteration. It even still includes the Touch Bar, which was removed from the updated 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros.
With the M2, Apple noted that it focused on power efficiency in designing the chip. The company is using a 5 nm technology to build the chip, which features an 8-core CPU and 10-core GPU, for a total of 20 billion transistors. The memory controller offers 100GB/sec of unified memory bandwidth — 50% more than M1 — and can support up to 24 GB of memory.
Ventura's headlining feature is a new multitasking interface called Stage Manager. It's being billed as a way to fight window clutter on a busy desktop—enter Stage Manager mode, and one of your windows floats to the center of the screen, pushing your other windows into a compressed navigation column on the left of the screen. Click a different app window on the left, and it will fly to the center of the screen, knocking the app you were using before into the navigation column.
Spotlight also gets some handy quality-of-life updates, adding the ability to Quick Look search results directly from the Spotlight window, and the ability to run Shortcuts from within Spotlight. Safari picks up the ability to share groups of tabs with other users, letting all users add and remove tabs. The browser is also adding a FIDO-compliant security technology called PassKeys, which aim to replace passwords with cryptographically generated keys that sync between devices using iCloud Keychain. Sites that support PassKeys can be opened using TouchID or FaceID.
The company is adding even more functionality to Continuity, its technology to help its devices work together. A Mac running macOS Ventura can recognize an iPhone automatically, and run the iPhone camera when it's nearby.
The iPhone doesn't even need to be turned on or selected in the macOS Finder. The feature, called Continuity Camera, requires a Mac and iPhone or iPad with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on. Additionally, both devices have to be signed in to the same Apple ID with two-factor authentication enabled.
Are you the kind of person who’d hesitate to charge gadgets from a public charger — like the ones coming to the seat of your plane? Apple’s first beta of the just-announced macOS 13 Ventura includes a feature seemingly designed to address tampering fears. It’ll make USB-C and Thunderbolt accessories explicitly ask for your permission before they can communicate with MacBooks powered by Apple’s M1 or M2 chips.
The new System Settings app looks more similar to the Settings app on the iPhone and iPad, with settings placed in a sidebar for easy access.
System Preferences had been the app’s name for over 20 years, but System Settings is the new name going forward.
At its WWDC 2022 event, Apple just demonstrated how Safari in macOS Ventura will support “passkeys,” a sign-in standard that’s built with cross-platform support to enable logins that don’t use passwords at all. Apple isn’t alone in this effort either, as last month Google and Microsoft joined with Apple to announce their new step forward for a long-in-development plot to kill passwords once and for all.
iOS 16 brings more personalization options to the lock screen, like a "depth effect" where you can make a selected photo appear in front of the time. You can also press and hold to customize the lock screen and swipe to try out different styles, like black-and-white and other color filters, and font and color options for the text and time.
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The lock screen also supports widgets now. Apple demoed moving the lock screen's selected photo down to make space for widgets, like calendar and weather. A block can hold multiple widgets, with Apple briefly mentioning a widget kit for developers.
At any time you can tap Customize to edit a Lock Screen or tap the blue + icon to create a new one.
It’s not exactly clear how many Lock Screens you can make, but so far I’ve created 21 😅.
The new features come with a couple of caveats. The first is that they have a strict time limit. You'll only have 15 minutes to edit or unsend a message — after that, it can't be altered.
Apple also notes that older versions of iOS will not respond to unsend requests. In those cases, recipients on older versions of the OS will be able to see messages even if they are deleted on the sender's end.
When you try to paste text or something else from your clipboard with iOS 16, the app asks for your permission first. If you deny it, that app will not have access to your clipboard. With this new feature, Apple wants to prevent apps from reading sensitive data from the user’s clipboard without the user’s knowledge.
Safety Check can help users manage app access and passwords and inform them who has their passwords and information. It’ll help people in abusive relationships more easily cut ties to an abusive partner across devices. They can do this by reviewing and revoking access for certain people. That includes apps like Find My, location, data, contacts, and more. You can also use the Emergency Reset feature, which immediately resets access for all people and apps at once across devices synced with your iCloud account. That feature can also be used to review your security settings.
iOS 16 will finally allow you to unlock your iPhone in landscape. On the iOS 16 features page, Apple says that select iPhone models will support the ability to unlock Face ID in landscape.
With iOS 16, Apple will bring support for opt-in web notification support later in 2023, allowing users to receive notifications from websites through Safari.
Apple has designs to reinvent the driving experience with a new generation of CarPlay app, one that more deeply melds the forms and functionality between your vehicle's infotainment system and your iPhone. The company is remaining tight lipped about what exactly this reimagined version of the app will be able to do — those announcements will reportedly be teased out later next year — but hinted that they would effectively make your phone the "core" of the in-cabin systems.
On both the iPad and macOS, Stage Manager supports freely resizable, overlapping windows. We'll need to see how this works in practice, but it could be an improvement over the iPad's occasionally clunky split-screen multitasking modes. Apple is also using Stage Manager to bring full external display support to the iPad for the first time, rather than the half-hearted display mirroring feature that iPads have used up until now. You can use up to four apps per screen with Stage Manager—four on the iPad's screen and four on the external display if you have one.
The bad news for iPad multitasking fans is that Stage Manager and external display support have high hardware requirements. They require an iPad Pro or iPad Air with an M1 chip, which means that only the latest generation of high-end iPads will be able to take advantage of the feature at all.
Apple is finally bringing its first-party Weather app to iPad as part of iPadOS 16. Finally. The first iPad launched in 2010, and it hasn’t had the official Weather app that whole time.
The company shared a few screenshots at WWDC 2022, and if you’re familiar with the app on iPhone, it will look pretty familiar.
New running form data such as stride length, ground contact time and vertical oscillation can be added as metrics in Workout Views. These appear in the Fitness app summary and in the iPhone’s Health app, where you can see trends over time and learn from patterns. Or at least that’s the theory—it’s hard for most people to change their running form without active coaching. We’ll see how these metrics compare with those from other systems that rely on foot or waist sensors.
The Workout app also remembers frequently used routes, and you can race against your best or last result and get alerts during a workout for being ahead or behind your pace, or if going off-route. A new pacer feature lets you choose a distance and goal for the time in which you want to complete a run, and calculates the pace required to achieve the goal. During the workout, you can follow pace alerts and related metrics.
The Apple Watch heart rhythm monitor already runs in the background to flag any irregularities that could be signs of atrial fibrillation. Now, users will get a weekly alert about the amount of time they spend in atrial fibrillation. They can also look in the Health app to see a breakdown of how other factors like sleep and exercise might be interacting with the heart rhythm. Users will be able to share a readout of their atrial fibrillation history with their doctors.
The Medications feature, available on both the Apple Watch and iPhone in the Health app, will allow users to manage their medications, vitamins and supplements. They can use the camera to scan a pill bottle to import information, and set up schedules and receive alerts to take their medications on time.
Apple’s watchOS 9 update introduces several new watch face options, including Lunar, Playtime, Metropolitan, and Astronomy, in addition to revamping several of the existing watch faces.
The Freeform app offers a digital whiteboard to work collaboratively in real-time via FaceTime. Users can add images, notes, scribbles, documents, web links, PDFs, and more.
Perhaps the most useful will be an undo send feature, which will let you call back an email within 10 seconds of hitting the send button. It’s a feature that I’m a big fan of in Gmail, and I’ve used it more than I care to admit to save myself from sharing an embarrassing typo.
A “remind me” feature will let you set a time for an email to come back to the top of your inbox. I already use Gmail’s similar snooze button quite often to earmark emails for the weekend. A new scheduled send feature that allows you to specify exactly when an email should go out. And Mail will even tell you when it thinks you’ve forgotten to include an attachment.
New with iOS 16 is an iCloud Shared Photo Library, where members of a family can choose which images to share — or have their iPhones automatically add ones to a shared library.
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It's limited to the people in a user's Family Sharing group. Once set up, any user in that family can manually select an image and move it to the shared library. However, it can also be set up so that when users take a photo and members of the shared library are nearby, they will all immediately get the images.
Apple is calling the new feature “Duplicate detection” and it works as expected. Using on-device machine learning on iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, your device will now easily detect and aggregate all duplicate photos in your library under the Utilities section in Photos.
Apple is adding a new feature to iOS 16 to make the Hidden and Recently Deleted albums in Photos much more private. Starting with iOS 16, those albums will now be locked by default, and you’ll be able to unlock them using Face ID, Touch ID, or a passcode.
Metal 3 will include support for MetalFX Upscaling. Your Mac will render smaller frames that are less compute-intensive. MetalFX will upscale the visuals and apply temporal anti-aliasing. The idea is to deliver better and more efficient gaming performance with higher frame rates than might be possible from pure hardware-driven rendering.
During WWDC, Apple showed off a new Mac running Resident Evil Village and No Man's Sky. Both games will be coming to Macs using the Apple silicon later this year. A MacBook Air will run Resident Evil Village 1080p well, and a Mac Studio can play at 4K, according to Masaru Ijuin, Capcom's advanced technical research division manager.
During the WWDC 2022 opening keynote on Monday, Apple highlighted how iOS 16 enhances the gaming experience with updates to the Metal API and a redesigned Game Center. In addition, iOS 16 adds support for even more game controllers, including Nintendo’s Joy-Cons and Pro Controller.
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9to5Mac has also found out that the support for third-party controllers in iOS is now based on “mobile assets,” which means that Apple can add support for even more controllers over-the-air without having to ship a new version of iOS.
iOS 16 also allows you to mark a particular artist as a favorite. “Keep track of the artists you care about most with new music notifications and improved recommendations,” Apple explains. This new favorite option can be found on the profile of an artist in the Music app.
Unfortunately the codes do not reveal any other details about this unreleased HomePod, but they do make it clear that iOS 16 is ready to support a new HomePod model.
Last week, Apple announced the finalists for the 2022 Apple Design Awards: 36 apps and games in six categories: Inclusivity, Delight and Fun, Interaction, Social Impact, Visuals and Graphics, and Innovation.
Today, the company announced two winners (one app and one game) in each category for a total of twelve 2022 Apple Design Award winners.
The BNPL space has exploded for offering small loans on a purchase-by-purchase basis — suggesting the bleak idea that many people can’t afford everyday purchases like groceries without splitting the bill into installments. For all the convenience of a frictionless splurge, there’s a dark side.
Complications on iPhone's lock screen! (Okay, Apple is calling them widgets, too.) I am so happy with this new feature.
Looking at my current Today's View, I will only need two widgets: batteries, and Pedometer++. Looking at screenshots, it appears batteries widget is already available from Apple, though I have no idea how good it is. (Can it display all the batteries, including AirPods and MagSafe battery pack?) And I am quite confident that the developer of Pedometer++ will have something good when the new iOS is live. So, I'm felling good.
I am just a bit disappointed there are no blue MacBook Air laptops. Since I am not in a hurry to buy one, and given current supply problems Apple is having, we may have to wait for a while anyway, maybe I will wait and see if Apple will do another purple-iPhone-like thing and give us additional color options next year? However, just looking at Apple's website, the Midnight option looks great too.
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Thanks for reading.