Non-obvious takeaways from WWDC 17
- Apple engineers are now allowed to use twitter, respond to developers, a lot of new faces on the WWDC stage.
- Apple figured out a way to make the iPad desirable and charge a high price for it (Basically apple's business model): Build premium hardware and ship a great OS for iPads, a drag fest as Craig Federighi calls it. They struggled for years with declining iPad sales but figured it out. Let's see how it translates in sales.
- Phil Schiller is on fire with improving the AppStore (taking over this responsibility from Eddie Cue).
- I missed Phil Schiller presenting the new iMacs and iPads hardware. Watch "cant innovate anymore my ass" line. Phil did however have his hardware moment when he spoke about the homePod.
- Apple properly recognized a trend: app developers are suffering in large due to the broken AppStore and it's dysfunctional search. That's why Phil Schiller is on it, and his job title updates have indicated this new responsibility. A lot of improvements have been made both to the store and to iTunes Connect.
- The new macOS and it's name were disappointing. "High Sierra" was mocked a lot by developers but since Apple added very few features to macOS , it's appropriate. Still "El Capitan", "Sierra" and "High Sierra" have not added much and you would be hard pressed to tell the differences when looking at the OS-es. This is bad especially given an extensive report that apple no longer has a dedicated mac team, "There is now just one team, and most of the engineers are iOS first". With renewed iPad focus, is macOS dead?
- Apple listened to the developer community and it's pains. Not only did they listen when we asked for improvements in iOS for iPad, they improved the tooling and opened up the Swift refactoring engine, rewrote it and improved Xcode by a lot. A big thanks to all apple engineers.
- UIKit in iOS 11 has a property called safe Area insets. Rumors on twitter say that's in preparation for the bezel-less iPhone 8.
- Cellular data on/off is finally available in the Control Centre. A little too late now that most people have unlimited data plans.
- Control Center got a huge revamp, allowing for a lot of controls in a limited space, thus stopping the ever increasing complexity of CC.
- This year's sherlocking was done by launching PDFKit and ARKit. Notably, one of the contestants in Apple's own show, Planet of the Apps, built an app and ARKit makes it trivial.
- The new iPad A10X SOC are beasts, beating Intel cpus in some benchmarks. Is Apple secretly maintaining an ARM build of macOS?
- Apple went public this year saying they have plans for rearchitected Macs in 2018, yet they launched an insanely powerful iMac Pro, refreshed iMacs. The iMac bezels take > 20% of it's full height. When are we getting an infinite display iMac and should we invest 4999$ + tax in the current iMac Pro? Sounds like a trap.