Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Top 5 WWDC 2017 Announcements!”.
Hey, what is up guys mkbhd here and today was apple’s wwdc 2017 and there’s a lot of stuff announced. Actually so for those of you who don’t want to sit through a video of the entire three hour keynote that we sat through this video is for you. So there were actually six main announcements at wwdc. This is a top five, so that means one of them didn’t make the list so tv os hope you don’t mind, didn’t make the top five. But you know it’s better.
Now it’s refreshed. It’S got a new ui. It now supports amazon, prime video uh, but yeah that’s about it, so it didn’t make the top five, but now you know about it, alright. So the number five announcement is the new watch os four for the apple watch.
Now i’m not a big smartwatch person and i don’t wear a smartwatch that often, but if you do, you will notice that there are quite a few little improvements to the apple watch. They added some watch faces, so a kaleidoscope watch face which is fun. A toy story couple of watch faces and also now a siri watch face which shows a bunch of new information and there’s some other minor stuff like being able to send data back and forth between compatible gym equipment and your watch apple watch is a pretty popular Fitness watch so makes sense, but all together and all these little minor improvements, there wasn’t really anything massive that would make someone who wasn’t considering a smartwatch now think about getting an apple watch. It was more of a bunch of improvements that would make someone who already owned one and stopped wearing it.
Try it again, maybe stop collecting dust on a shelf on the corner. Maybe it’ll do that for me. Actually i’ll try it so number four is a new version of mac os, so the current version we have on every mac. The latest version is mac os sierra. The latest version now, which now has a new name, is called mac os high sierra. That’S that’s it. There’S, no, that’s, there’s no joke, it’s just that’s the new name. I guess the reasoning is it’s supposed to be an improvement on sierra, like a perfection of all these little new features that make it great? So it’s high sierra, i don’t know just ignore the name, but again the id here is the same.
It’S a refinement. It has a bunch of minor improvements. Things like safari now auto blocks those annoying autoplay video ads. It now also has intelligent ad tracking prevention to help you stop seeing the same ads over and over all over the web. It also now has a couple new filters in the photos: app there’s a split view in the mail app. You know little things like that.
The nerd in me loved the announcement of h.265 support, which is a new video codec, which will now also be hardware, accelerated and built into final cut pro. Let’S go and apple’s now gotten serious about supporting vr and external gpus, so for vr they’re. Now supporting the unity and unreal engines natively in mac os and for external gpus they’re, now focused on harnessing the power of thunderbolt 3 and making that a more viable solution for a lot of people. So, there’s now actually a developer kit with a reference box, external gpu enclosure, with a radeon pro graphics card inside that you can buy from apple, i kind of want to get it either way: that’s mac, os, high sierra, that’s the real name, public beta coming in Late june and then free upgrade for all mac users coming in the fall now number three home pod.
Now this is the announcement that was probably the most hyped coming into this event. We knew like a tiny bit of what might be shown, but there’s a whole lot more. That just got revealed and it was a bit of a surprise.
So the homepod is this: this balloon sized, like toaster, small toaster sized hi-fi speaker that also has some assistant features built in on top side. Note i personally don’t think home pod is that good of an idea for a name i would have gone with something? Probably more like apple home or siri, home or siri speakers, or whatever something like that, but you know ipod branding is so strong and it is a speaker first. So they went with homepod.
So this thing has seven tweeters. These horns all the way around the circumference around the base, so omnidirectional audio there and then a four inch woofer firing upwards and apple spent a lot of time hyping and talking about how good this thing is going to sound. It is definitely a premium hi-fi speaker. First, it’s gon na have some smart features that can detect wherever you put it.
If it’s near a wall, it’ll know to bounce certain sounds off of that wall and spread out certain other sounds away from the wall. It’S supposed to be an extremely smart speaker and they spent a lot of time with that on stage now, you couldn’t really listen to it that well in the demo area, but i did get to listen to one in a quiet area and i actually compared it To an amazon, alexa and a sonos speaker – and i can tell you for sure it sounded a lot better than the amazon alexa speaker and it sounded decently better than the sonos too. It has a lot of bass. Obviously the smaller speakers are lacking and plenty of highs too, but what struck me was the mids were actually really full and rounded and legible, where they weren’t in the sonos.
Obviously the alexa was not very good at all, so i got ta get one at home. Obviously, and listen to it with my own music and my own sounds and figure out if it’s worth it in that category, but assuming the siri functionality on top of it actually works. Well, where you know you can use voice controls to listen to music and ask it questions about the music and ask it for the weather and for your calendar appointments, and hopefully it’s gotten better since that comparison, i did with it versus google now, assuming all that Stuff is true, then it looks like it’ll be a pretty decent product, it’s supposed to come out for 349 in december, so it’s got some time before that comes out and before it’s actually a finalized product, but that gives it time to get good and we’ll be Able to see if it’s actually worth that price 349 bucks sounds like a lot, but when compared to other high-end speakers, that’s right in line, and hopefully it does more things, and hopefully also by december. That gives us time to know what we can do with it.
Like right now, they advertise it as just like a siri and apple music box, but what, if i don’t use siri app? What if i use, google and and google play music or spotify or soundcloud, or any of those things will work as just a bluetooth speaker. I don’t know that’s to be seen all right. So number two is ios 11 and this this got a lot, a lot of little features added to it and then a surprisingly big visual refresh. They didn’t even talk about it that much.
But it’s a lot flatter and more colorful now, but it’s clean it’s clean, so the new features include things like imessage in icloud. So now, when you switch between phones, it’ll also bring all your imessages across. You can apple pay between people. So now, if you want to pay someone who also has an iphone, you can use apple pay inside imessage to pay them, so that kind of makes it tough on things like venmo and paypal.
If this catches on there’s h.265 video support again and there’s also now a high efficiency image format, which will supposedly take a lot less space on your phone with all the photos, you take and there’s new image processing to make better quality photos from the camera and Siri got a new voice, it’s a little bit smoother and there’s also a male version too. Here’S the forecast for the next 10 days, sunny, sunny and sunny. I love machine learning, especially since i’m a machine learning and the control center is redesigned. Now this definitely looked a little bit odd to me at first and i didn’t like it right off the bat, but it’s definitely going to take some getting used to, and i think this is one of the things we’re going to have to get used to because Ios control center right now on the iphone is a little bit finicky already.
So it looks to be an improvement to that. Even if it’s not pretty, it responds to 3d touch, it’s now no longer paginated. So all your controls are your fingertips and it appears to have more controls than you did before so hopefully, this is something that i can get used to, even though it’s not the prettiest thing, there’s also some improvements to other first party apps, like apple photos and To apple maps, it’s got things like lane guidance now, which is long overdue, but why i really like ios 11 and why it’s so high on my list at number two is because of what it did for ipads for the longest time, the biggest weakness of ipads. For me was for how much they claimed to be able to replace a pc and be a primary machine for so many people. They could never really do even some of the most basic things that pcs could do, at least in the multitasking and productivity side of things. They were severely lacking, but ios 11 on the ipad now has, for example, a full-on dock like the mac.
So a bunch of apps that you can store down there. You have not only just the split screen multitasking, but you can copy and paste things between them. You now have a full files app, so you have access to file system on the ipad. There’S a new scanning feature in the notes app where, if you take notes with the apple pencil, it will actually be able to scan that as text and recognize all your handwriting and then be able to archive and search through that with spotlight, which is amazing and Craig on stage went through all this stuff and even more insanely fast.
I could barely keep up. I was scribbling it all down, but bottom line was it actually made me reconsider how i think about the ipad as possibly really being a first computer or a primary device for a larger number of people. That’S obviously going to be its own full, deep dive. I have to get my hands on the new ipad and that’s definitely going to be its own, separate, video plus, possibly the most underrated announcement from all of today’s stuff, and no one seems to be talking about it as much as they should. Is that the new ipads, the new ipad pro came out? You know 10 and a half inch display slightly slimmer bezels, but it has a display that refreshes at 120, hertz 60 frames per second constant, every animation and you notice it. I casually dropped it on stage. Like, oh, it will dynamically switch between refresh rates. You know lower refresh rates for slower tasks like reading, but also higher refresh rates, and you normally go up to 60 hertz on most displays. But this will be 120 hertz, not just for gaming, but for, like all the swiping, through the ui and swiping through pages and typing, and drawing with the apple pencil, it’s extremely responsive. It’S like butter.
It’S like water, like pulling your hand across the ui, it’s hard for me to show, because this is all 30 frames per second video, but trust me when i say it’s very different and people should be pretty excited about that. So that takes us to number one. The highest profile new announcement from today’s wwdc, which is new max and the new imac pro, so there were hardware refreshes announced throughout all of apple’s lineup. You got new macbooks new macbook pros new imacs, there’s now also a baseline 1399 4k imac, and a new baseline 1399 macbook pro 13-inch and all the imacs now have brighter displays 500 nits standard, which is great now, has fusion drives by default, which is meh, but They also now have the ssd option, is faster and can go up to two terabytes.
So i highly recommend that and they’re all running kb lake intel chips on the latest. Gen amd radeon, pro graphics cards, uh faster ram, more ram and they added two usb type-c thunderbolt 3 ports on the back of the new imax. It’S about time. So now it’s looking like a real nice, solid, 2017 refresh and then out of nowhere out of literally nowhere, we got out of left field.
This imac pro this all space, grey, matte black workstation grade beast of an imac that i mean out of nowhere up to 18 cores on the cpu side, workstation grade xeons, amd vega, gpus up to 128 gigs of ram and then up to a four terabyte ssd And 10 gigabit ethernet on the back and four usb type-c thunderbolt 3 ports. Where did this come from? It even comes with a brand new exclusive space, gray apple wireless keyboard, with the number pad a space, gray track pad and a dark grey magic mouse. All for this workhorse of an imac with a 5k display, so i got to look at it. I got to admire it.
I got to even touch it. Obviously, this thing has my attention: they even kept the sd card slot on the back, which is great. It’S looking like a pretty robust suite of i o for a pro user and the numbers and the specs are making it look, pretty damn tempting for a pro user. For someone who uses final cut pro. This seems like a machine that would crush final cut pro, but the more i think about it. It actually seems like this is a really elaborate trap set by like johnny ive preying on content creators, whose mac pros are on their last breaths. This thing is going to be starting at 5 000 in december, so it’s not like you can get one right now.
You actually have to wait a little time or pre-order and get one in a couple months. But if you think about it, who on earth is in the market for a super high-end all-in-one with workstation grade parts? That’S totally not upgradable, but as a total beast, you know, you know see what i’m saying. It’S two completely different things. You can’t upgrade the ram cpu drives gpu any of the things in this computer, but it’s going to be an absolute monster. People who are buying multi-thousand dollar workstation grade computers, like this, don’t buy imacs unless you paint them space gray.
I don’t know – maybe i’m not learning my lesson from the 2013 trashcan mac pro, but i really want an imac pro. This thing looks absolutely sick and a lot of people from the photos. I’Ve posted and reactions on twitter have also been really into it too, but either way. Let me know what you think: are you into this imac pro or any of the other announcements from wwdc 2017.. I’M certainly interested to hear your thoughts down in the comments section below right below that, like button we’re all talking about it all day, uh and that’s where we’re geeking out down there. So that’s pretty much it. Thank you for watching this recap video. Hopefully it uh.
Suffice your needs for not watching a three hour keynote. You got all the info. You need feel free to share this info for anyone else who might want to see it.
That’S pretty much it thanks for watching talk to you guys, the next one peace .