iOS 9, the iPad, the Watch: Everything You Need to Know About This Morning's Apple Keynote

New operating systems for the Watch, iPhone, iPad and Mac

At 1 a.m. Beijing time today, Apple opened its annual developer conference, WWDC 2015, in San Francisco. Attendees came from more than 70 countries, and 80% of them were there for the first time. Instead of the usual corporate promo video, Apple kicked off this year's conference with a spoof starring comedian and host Bill Hader.

Numbers still mattered, though. This time Apple didn't talk about how many iOS devices it had sold. It talked about the App Store instead: since it launched in 2008, apps have been downloaded from it more than 100 billion times, an average of 119 per user. Along the way, Apple has paid developers US$30 billion.

As usual, the big news at WWDC was new operating systems. On the iPhone and Mac, though, you won't find many new features; most of the upgrades are thoughtful refinements.

The biggest changes come to the iPad and the Apple Watch. Yes, the Apple Watch, on sale for less than two months, is already getting a new operating system. This fall, all the new systems will arrive on your Apple devices for free.

Here is what was worth noticing:

The Apple Watch gets a new system, watchOS 2.0

In the month or so since it went on sale, the Apple Watch has drawn mixed reviews. No one can yet say whether smartwatches need to exist, or whether Apple can deliver a new kind of computing device beyond the PC and the smartphone.

Amid that uncertainty, Apple has released a new watch operating system, watchOS 2.0. The iPhone waited a year after launch for a new system; the Apple Watch waited less than two months.

The new system brings a series of features meant to make your watch a little more useful:

New watch faces

You can set a photo, or a whole album, as the watch face. Apple has also shot time-lapse videos of several cities, including London and Shanghai, which can serve as watch faces too.

Third-party apps can now put information into the small open slots on the watch face, such as your car's charging status or the time of your next flight. No more padding those slots with moon phases and sunrise times.

Time Travel

The Apple Watch's small screen can't show much. An iPhone can display your next three calendar events at once; the watch can show only one. Apple's answer in the new system is to let you change the time.

On the watch face, turning the Digital Crown fast-forwards to a point in the future. Your calendar, the weather, and even features in third-party apps, such as your car's charging progress, all update to match.

More independence

Right now the Apple Watch can get online only when it is connected to a phone. With the new version, the watch will automatically join Wi-Fi networks it has used before, so even when your phone isn't nearby, the watch can still give you basic information.

Other small changes

A bedside clock: you can't wear an Apple Watch to bed, because it always needs charging. Apple has added a useful feature, Nightstand Mode, which turns the watch into a clock that shows the time while it charges.

Digital Touch now supports more colors, so the drawings you send other Apple Watch users can be more colorful. But does anyone actually use this feature?

Siri can now start a workout by voice. Before, you had to open the fitness app on the watch and pick one by hand. On a small screen, Siri has become more practical.

You can now reply to email from the watch, though you still do it by dictation.

New developer tools: are genuinely useful watch apps finally coming?

The Apple Watch already has thousands of apps, but few of them are any good. One reason is that developers have had little time to get to know the watch; another is that these apps can't run on the watch itself.

For now, every Apple Watch app not made by Apple is very slow. All of an app's computing happens on the iPhone, and the results are sent to the watch over Bluetooth, so you can imagine the efficiency. The new developer tool Apple released today, the native watchOS SDK, will let third-party apps run directly on the watch.

Besides speed, the new tools let apps record audio on the watch, control its vibration, play music and video, and read the wearer's heart rate and other vital signs. In short, most of what Apple's own apps could do, third-party apps can now do too.

Take the new WeChat. Before, if you spoke a reply in WeChat, speech recognition turned it into text, often inaccurately. Now you can send the voice message itself, just as you would in WeChat on a phone.

watchOS 2 and native Apple Watch apps will reach ordinary users this fall.

iOS 9: an overhaul under the hood

Apple has focused the new system on improving the basics. It is said to use less power, adding an hour to the iPhone 6's battery life, and a new low-power mode adds up to three more hours on top of that. Take an iPhone 6 out for the day and you can mostly stop worrying about the battery.

The free space needed to install an update, long a sore point, drops from 4.6GB to 1.3GB, which is good news for anyone who could only afford a 16GB iPhone. Beyond these basic improvements, the standout features of iOS 9 are a smarter Siri and Spotlight.

A more proactive assistant: "Apple Now"

At the Google I/O conference that just ended, the most exciting feature of the new Android M was probably "Now on Tap." It lets Google's assistant, Google Now, answer questions in the context of what you're doing: you call it up when you need it and skip the hassle of a voice search.

But while Google Now grows more proactive and easier to use, Siri, the first voice assistant to reach ordinary consumers, has stayed conservative and passive. Now Apple wants it to open up a little.

As with the Proactive feature leaked earlier, the new Siri in iOS 9 can offer personalized help based on the time, your location and the app you're using. When you leave home on a weekday morning, for example, Siri can check the traffic and plan your route to work.

Today's so-called intelligent assistants are plainly not intelligent enough. By narrowing the range of questions the assistant has to consider, the new Siri should give more accurate answers.

Spotlight returns to the far left

In an earlier update, Spotlight lost its place on the home screen. Now it's back, and more powerful. Swipe right on the home screen to reach the Spotlight search screen, which is divided from top to bottom into three sections: Siri Suggestions, Nearby and News.

"Siri Suggestions" shows the contacts and apps you use most; "Nearby" offers location-based recommendations for eating, shopping and entertainment; "News" draws on Apple's new app of the same name.

The new Spotlight is also a doorway into third-party apps. Search for a restaurant, for example, and it can show information straight from Dianping; one tap opens that restaurant's page inside the app.

A new app: News

After Newsstand failed, Apple has launched the News app to replace it.

News resembles Flipboard, Zaker and Facebook's new Instant Articles. In the app, you can subscribe to what interests you by publication, topic and keyword.

The magazines and websites signed up so far include The New York Times, Wired, Quartz, ESPN, 17 Condé Nast magazines and The Economist. Their articles are re-laid out, with more photos and video added to make them easier to read. Apple and other tech companies are clearly working to pull text media, the "news," into their own ecosystems.

Home, a smart-home hub

At last year's WWDC, Apple introduced HomeKit, a framework that lets third-party developers connect smart hardware to Apple's smart-home platform. A year later, Apple's own smart-home app has finally arrived.

The app, called Home, uses iCloud to control all the smart devices in your house and links them so they work together. When you get home in the evening, for example, the air conditioning and water heater are already running, and you can take a comfortable shower and go to bed.

For anyone who hasn't bought smart-home devices, though, it's just one more iPhone app you can't delete.

Beyond these major updates, there are a few smaller improvements:

• Apple Pay keeps gaining ground: apps such as Square and Pinterest now support it, and next month the service launches in the UK. Passbook, the old app for managing cards and tickets, now supports store cards and has a more fitting new name, Wallet.
• Notes now supports drawing and lets you insert images, links and other content, moving toward note-taking apps like Evernote.
• Maps now offers public-transit directions, covering the vast majority of Chinese cities.

Two apps on one screen: ready to get real work done on the iPad?

The big-screen iPhone 6, launched last year, has been a runaway hit. Its sales not only knocked Samsung off its perch as smartphone leader but also did real damage to Apple's own iPad.

Big-screen iPhones made the small iPad mini look almost pointless, as buyers found that a big phone handles a tablet's most important jobs, watching video and browsing the web, perfectly well. The use Steve Jobs defined for the iPad, leisure, has been taken over by the iPhone. Tim Cook needs to find the iPad's next role: not leisure, but work.

So today Apple gave the iPad two especially important features: an enhanced QuickType keyboard and split-screen multitasking. The iPad finally looks a bit like a productivity tool.

QuickType

The QuickType that came with iOS 8 last year was still basic. It predicted and completed words from context as you typed in English, which made it close to useless for Chinese users. The new QuickType will surprise you.

It lets you use the on-screen keyboard as a trackpad to cut, move and paste text, so you can type and rearrange text quickly. And with an external keyboard, the iPad now supports keyboard shortcuts in iOS 9, using the same keys as OS X.

Multitasking and split screen

The long-rumored iPad split screen is finally here, along with a better-looking app switcher. While using one app, A, you can swipe in from the side at any time to call up a second app, B, which floats temporarily over app A. In other words, you can run a full iPad app and an iPhone-sized app on screen at once. Apple calls this Slide Over.

If you want to work in both apps as full iPad apps, just tap app A again and A and B sit side by side on the same screen. That feature is called Split View.

On top of that, video from any app can be pulled out into a small picture-in-picture window that stays visible everywhere.

These two features change how the iPad is used at the root: the first upgrades input, the second output, both to a productivity level. The iPad still isn't a desktop computer, but for simple word processing it is more than enough.

Unfortunately, of all the iPads Apple has made, only last year's iPad Air 2 gets full Split View multitasking. The iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3 and first-generation iPad Air get only Slide Over. But don't worry: split screen works better on a bigger screen, and the long-rumored big-screen iPad may well arrive later this year.

OS X El Capitan: steady, with changes

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software, opened by celebrating the adoption of the previous OS X release, Yosemite: an astonishing 55% within eight months of launch, the fastest uptake of any desktop system in history. He also took a dig at Microsoft's Windows 8.1, which only 7% of users had installed eight months after its release.

The new OS X keeps the tradition of naming releases after California landscapes. El Capitan is one of the best-known landmarks of Yosemite National Park, perhaps a hint that this release shores up the stability of the previous version's core.

According to Apple's figures, apps launch faster, switch faster and preview PDFs and other files faster in this version. Apple has also updated Metal, the graphics API it introduced at last year's WWDC, which can make big 3D games run better on the Mac.

The new desktop system also has a few smaller upgrades:

Safari

Safari is once again catching up with Google Chrome. The new tab bar adds pinned tabs and one-click muting of pages, two features Chrome has had for a while.

Spotlight

Apple has added more widgets to its system-wide search, such as stocks, weather and sports scores, much like the special search features Google, Baidu and other search engines adopted long ago.

Mail

Mail's compose window now has tabs, and the search box has become a little smarter: it understands what "emails I haven't replied to" means.

Window management

The most notable thing in this OS X is how it handles multiple windows and screens. Windows on a screen snap into alignment automatically and are easier to manage from a multi-screen bar at the top. Windows 8 had this long ago, but judging from the live demo, Apple is better at detecting window edges.

An unexciting "One more thing"

In Apple's eyes, the centerpiece of this WWDC was neither the iPad's step toward productivity nor watchOS's big leap forward, but the long-rumored music service: music, the business that once did so much to build Apple up from almost nothing.

There are two reasons I call it an uninteresting service. First, it isn't coming to China yet, so it has little to do with me. Second, it isn't cool: the app is too bloated. Think of Apple Music as several services stitched together, as if Apple had stuffed an iPod, a Spotify, a Pandora and half of a WeChat-style official account for singers into one app.

When one app lets you download albums, stream on demand, listen to radio with live DJs and interact with pop stars, when everything to do with music happens in a single app, people may actually lose interest in music. Would you want a do-everything music app like this?

After eight years, the iPhone and the Mac have both matured, and what we see on them now is more polish than invention. Judging from the software announced at this WWDC, Apple's attention has shifted to the Watch, which has just taken its first steps, and the iPad, whose sales are falling. Whether either can match the iPhone's success will depend on how many new possibilities Apple can open up through software over the next two years.