A Smart Speaker, a New OS, and Upgrades Across the Mac and iPad Lines: 33 Things Worth Knowing From Apple's Keynote Early This Morning

This was Apple's most crowded product keynote in years

In May 1997, Steve Jobs, not long back at Apple as interim CEO, held the annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at the San Jose Convention Center, where he laid out his plan to remake the company to thousands of developers who wrote software for the Mac.

Twenty years later his successor, Tim Cook, returned to the same San Jose Convention Center and told 5,300 developers, "This is going to be the biggest and best WWDC ever."

The two men faced very different worlds. Apple in 1997 was close to bankruptcy and had to rebuild Mac software and hardware from the ground up. Apple today is the most valuable company in the world, sitting on more than $200 billion in cash.

But one problem hasn't changed: Apple still needs to remake its computer business. iPhone growth is slowing. Meanwhile, years of half-hearted updates have left Mac developers unhappy.

Outside the traditional PC business, Apple also seems to be trailing its rivals in moving into new categories. The iPad Pro, Apple's bet on the future of the touchscreen PC, hasn't changed in any real way since its big update at the end of 2015, while Microsoft's Surface family keeps trying new designs.

Amazon's Echo smart speaker, meanwhile, is already in more than 10 million American homes, and Google put a rival product on sale last year. These voice-controlled speakers are not just a way into music services and voice assistants; they are trying to become the control center of the smart home. Apple, which built Siri back in 2011, has made no headway on any of it.

Apple's whole hardware and software lineup needed a big upgrade. This WWDC was built for that.

Over a keynote that ran nearly two and a half hours, Apple did its usual operating-system upgrades, but it also refreshed the entire Mac and iPad Pro hardware lines and introduced a smart speaker with an odd name. It is the first time since 2013 that Apple has shown new hardware at WWDC.

iOS 11 Arrives

1. iOS 11 looks different again, mostly in Control Center

The most visible change in the iOS 11 shown at WWDC is another reworking of the animations that carry the interface. Control Center, which you summon by swiping up from the bottom of the screen, has gone from iOS 10's card look to something closer to bubbles, and 3D Touch now opens further settings from it. Locking and unlocking have switched from a left-right swipe to an up-down swipe, and the animations for opening and closing apps look a little different too.

2. Apple Pay can now send money, and comes with a virtual debit card

Apple Pay has finally added cash. In the new Apple Pay you can send cash to friends and family inside iMessage, and cash you receive from other people lands in an automatically created virtual account, which you can spend directly or move to a debit card. In short, it works much like the cash features you already use in WeChat.

One thing to note: for now the cash feature is described only on Apple's English-language site. When it reaches China is anyone's guess — it will probably need approval from banking regulators, just as Apple Pay did before it launched here.

And if the cash feature does eventually arrive in China, iMessage has far fewer users than WeChat, so it is unlikely to dent WeChat's or Alipay's financial features.

3. Siri got smarter

Apple showed few new Siri features at the keynote, but it did play a clip of a male and a female voice, both generated by Siri, having a conversation. Next to today's Siri they sounded more natural and more human; the same word read twice could come out with completely different intonation.

Apple demonstrated little, yet its description of Siri was full of phrases like "artificial intelligence" and "deep learning." Broadly, Siri can now translate foreign languages for you, learn your taste in music, and work out how to spell the unfamiliar word you are about to type.

4. More photo and video features, and they take up less space

The camera in iOS 11 has picked up a number of new features, such as QR code scanning, which lets you open webpages and apps or pay by scanning a code. It also adds things like automatically generated long exposures, which can turn a stream in a photo into silk ribbons, or stretch car headlights on a road into bands of light.

Apple also brought two new file formats to iOS 11: the HEIF photo format replaces JPG, cutting a photo's file size by half; H.265 encoding in the HEVC format replaces today's H.264 video, also halving video file size.

5. iOS 11 has artificial intelligence everywhere

Apple repeated "artificial intelligence" and "machine learning" tirelessly at the keynote, and a few iOS 11 features do show something AI-like. Say you read an article about Iceland in the browser and it contains an unfamiliar Norwegian word. Switch to a messaging app to tell a friend about the article, type the first letter, and the keyboard finishes the word for you.

6. iOS 11 has a distinctly heavy-handed Do Not Disturb While Driving mode

Accidents caused by phone use behind the wheel are an old story, and iOS 11 adds a safety feature aimed squarely at it: Do Not Disturb While Driving. The iPhone infers whether you are driving from the state of your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and gyroscope; once it is sure, it blacks out the screen entirely and shows no notifications. Only after you stop the car does everything you missed pop up at once.

While the mode is on, anyone who texts you gets an automatic iMessage reply saying you are driving. If it is urgent, they can send a second text with a keyword to break through and reach you right away.

7. iOS 11 has a handful of China-only features

As in past years, Apple built a few features just for China: spam text blocking, Shanghainese Siri, mixed pinyin-and-English keyboard input, a phone number as your Apple ID, and so on. In Maps, navigation in mainland China now flags speed cameras, and you can pick a specific entrance or exit for a large building or area — a university's east, west, south or north gate, for instance. But these features presumably come from Amap, Apple's map data partner in China, and they are already dated; third-party map apps have had them as standard for years.

8. iMessage now syncs through iCloud

iMessage in iOS 11 finally syncs your chat history everywhere. Conversations from any point in time can be read on every device you are signed in on, and deleting a message on one device deletes it on all of them.

You may not use iMessage as your main chat app — you probably use WeChat — but by comparison WeChat has no chat-history sync at all, and its backup system is a pain to use.

9. Some features are just catching up with the competition

Apple spent a good stretch on the new Photos features: searching all your photos by the objects in them, sorting photos by facial recognition, automatically generating short music videos. But these are nearly identical to what Google Photos already leads with, which makes Apple's habit of studying Google's products hard to miss.

The Maps built into iOS also got updates, among them indoor navigation and, in driving directions, a display of which lane you need to be in for a turn. That may help people who are stuck with Apple Maps through CarPlay, but next to third-party map apps — Baidu Maps, Amap or Google Maps — Apple's native Maps still has a long way to go.

The iPad Pro Gets a New Size: 10.5 Inches Replaces 9.7

10. The screen changed — 10.5 inches instead of 9.7

The new iPad Pro announced at this keynote replaces the old 9.7-inch model; the whole line moves to a 10.5-inch screen with narrower bezels. The new model's display area is 20% larger, while the body still weighs 469 grams. The 10.5-inch screen has a resolution of 2224 x 1668 and a pixel density of 264 ppi.

The ordinary 9.7-inch iPad released earlier this year stays on sale, unchanged.

11. With resolution out of road, Apple raised the refresh rate to 120Hz

Ever since the iPhone 4, Apple has kept pushing display resolution across its devices until the entire lineup became so-called Retina screens. Resolution now has little room left, so at this keynote Apple raised the new iPad Pro's refresh rate to 120Hz.

Most displays have long refreshed at 60Hz — that is, they flicker 60 times a second. The new iPad Pro's higher rate suits moving images better, and in theory scrolling should feel smoother.

The refresh rate does not stay at 120Hz; it shifts with what you are doing. Reading webpages drops it to 24Hz to save power, and watching a movie sets it to 48Hz to match the texture of film.

The new iPad Pro's Chinese product page is already up. The Wi-Fi model starts at 64GB of storage for 5,188 yuan; the 256GB version costs 5,988 yuan and the 512GB version 7,588 yuan. iPad Pros in mainland Chinese stores are still waiting on regulatory approval and are not yet for sale, though they can already be bought in the US, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

With the New OS, the iPad Pro Feels More Like a Touchscreen Mac Than an Oversized iPhone

The iPad's biggest change is not the hardware but the operating system. It is still called iOS 11, but for now it looks very different from the iOS 11 on phones: a familiar Mac-style Dock along the bottom, a double-tap of the Home button to show every open app on one screen, and a standalone file manager that handles your cloud-storage accounts. An iPad running iOS 11 looks much more like a touchscreen Mac.

12. Apple moved the Mac's Dock and split-screen handling onto the iPad Pro

As on the Mac, there is now a Dock at the bottom of the screen holding your frequently used app icons. It is no longer limited to six apps the way earlier iPads were; like the Mac, it takes many. While one app is running, drag another app from the Dock into the middle of the screen and it automatically opens in split screen.

Apps in the Dock also support 3D Touch: press and hold the file manager, for example, and the last few files you used appear.

13. The iPad can manage files directly

iOS 11 builds a file manager into the iPad. Alongside local iCloud files, it has built-in support for the main cloud-storage services — Dropbox, OneDrive, Baidu's and Tencent's cloud drives. In Apple's onstage demo, you could drag a link or an image straight from one app into another without tapping share first.

After the keynote we tried an iPad Pro running the developer preview in the demo area. Perhaps because it was a developer build, its split-screen handling did not look especially smooth yet.

14. With the Apple Pencil, the iPad becomes a digital notebook

Apple demonstrated a set of Apple Pencil features at the keynote: marking up a message inside Mail, annotating a screenshot and emailing it, photographing a paper document with the camera and then writing on it.

In Apple's own Notes app, words written with the Pencil can be recognized as digital text and turned up by system-wide search. Characters on a paper document shot with the camera can also be converted to text and dropped into Notes, and searched the same way. On the whole, the new iPad Pro with iOS 11 feels a lot like Microsoft's Surface with OneNote.

15. The keyboard is tuned for touch input

iOS 11 on the iPad Pro also includes a new virtual keyboard. Swiping up on a key enters letters and numbers from that single key, so you no longer have to hit the ".?123" key in the old keyboard's bottom-left corner — faster and easier while you work.

Mac Desktops and Laptops Both Got Upgrades, and You Can Now Attach an External Graphics Card

16. The Mac gets external graphics cards

One high point of the keynote came when Apple said future MacBooks will support external graphics cards. Macs, Apple announced, will attach discrete GPUs directly over Thunderbolt 3, and the first one will be an external AMD RX 580. Apple's website says the external graphics card arrives in spring 2018.

As things stand, only Alienware and a few other brands sell external graphics boxes for gamers, and nothing like it has caught on. Given how thin the Mac's game library is, external graphics on the Mac will probably be aimed at work like video production instead.

17. The iMac's specs went up, and it supports virtual reality

The new iMac looks the same on the outside but has switched to Intel's new Kaby Lake architecture — the seventh generation of Core processors. Memory went up too, with up to 64GB available as an option. The updated 21.5-inch iMac carries Radeon Pro 555 and 560 graphics and sells for 8,688, 10,288 and 11,888 yuan. The 27-inch model has a 5K screen and Radeon Pro 570, 575 or 580 graphics, at 14,288, 15,888 and 18,288 yuan.

The professional use Apple chose to show off for the faster iMac was game production. Industrial Light & Magic dialed in remotely to a staff member standing in front of a green screen wearing an HTC Vive headset, using an iMac to render in real time a scene with Darth Vader, one of the leads in Star Wars, on the planet Mustafar. The Mac, Apple announced, now supports SteamVR and the HTC Vive.

18. The MacBook Pro got a small upgrade

The MacBook Pro line, updated not long ago, was refreshed again at this keynote, with the whole range moving to seventh-generation Intel Core processors. The unusually short gap is really Intel's doing: when the MacBook Pro launched at the end of last year, the seventh-generation Core chips had slipped, so Apple had to ship older processors for the time being.

The new MacBook Pro's prices: the 13-inch base models without the Multi Touch Bar cost 10,288 and 11,888 yuan; the 13-inch models with the Multi Touch Bar cost 14,288 and 15,888 yuan; the 15-inch versions cost 18,888 and 22,288 yuan.

19. The iMac Pro was previewed — the expensive tool Apple promised developers

Much as Apple previewed the "trash can" Mac Pro three years ago, this keynote showed a brand-new iMac model: the iMac Pro, finished in space gray.

The iMac Pro has a 27-inch screen and very serious specs. The CPU can be an Intel 8-, 10- or 18-core Xeon; memory is 32GB of 2666MHz DDR4 ECC, configurable up to 128GB. For graphics it uses AMD's new Vega chips, with a Radeon Pro Vega 56 as standard and a Radeon Pro Vega 64 as an option, good for at least 22 TFLOPS of floating-point performance. The iMac Pro also moves 80% more heat than a regular iMac, to cope with what that performance throws off.

The iMac Pro is built for professional video artists and game developers and starts at $4,999, roughly 34,000 yuan — but it will not go on sale until the end of the year.

The iPod Has an Heir: the HomePod Smart Speaker

20. Apple announced a speaker that looks like the old Mac Pro

The Siri speaker rumored for more than a year is finally named: HomePod. It stands 18cm tall, and a shifting colored light on top shows the device's status, in a color and shape borrowed from the Siri icon. Inside, it is a smart device built around the same A8 processor as the iPhone 6, put to work here managing bass to keep the speaker's sound faithful.

21. Unlike Amazon's and Google's speakers, Apple's is pitched on sound quality

Apple says the HomePod holds seven custom "beamforming tweeters," each with its own amplifier, which together produce a balanced, rounded sound. Two HomePods can pair and work like a set of stereo speakers; with two units the system detects and balances the two channels automatically and plays over a wireless connection.

The HomePod also senses the space around it. It can tell whether it is in a corner, on a table or on a bookshelf, then tunes volume and direction for what it judges to be the best sound.

22. AirPlay 2 arrives, and several people can each pick songs

Along with iOS 11, Apple announced new AirPlay 2 features, including wireless control of several AirPlay devices playing different things. For now the HomePod looks more like an Apple Music accessory: you can build playlists, and when a group of people are together, everyone can throw the songs they want from their own iPhone into a new shared playlist.

23. The HomePod is Siri made physical — but you can't buy one yet

The HomePod has six microphones, and like the Amazon Echo its basic mode of operation is a voice assistant. Siri will remember your taste in music. You wake the device with "Hey Siri" and ask it questions like "Who wrote this song?"

Like Amazon's and Google's, this device that starts out as a speaker also wants to become the hub of the smart home. Today HomeKit needs an iOS device permanently at home to act as that hub; from now on the HomePod takes the role, and people can use it to ask Siri to turn on the lights, close the curtains or run a particular scene.

Unfortunately, in the press demo area after the keynote the HomePod was displayed like a museum artifact: no sound playing, no touching allowed. You cannot buy one yet either. The earliest release is December, and even then it goes on sale only in Australia, the UK and the US, at $349, about 2,400 yuan.

The App Store Becomes an App-Recommendation Publication

Cook said at the keynote that the App Store has passed 180 billion downloads, with $70 billion paid out to developers. Yet the App Store has barely changed since it launched in 2008.

24. The App Store's interface has been redesigned

We tried the new App Store briefly in the demo area. It uses a new card-based design, very close to Apple Music.

The bottom bar is now split into "Today," "Games," "Apps," "Updates" and "Search." The "Today" screen is built from cards, with a daily app recommendation and short pieces on using apps — "Five VSCO Tricks," for instance. The old "Categories" tab has become "Games," holding game recommendations, tips articles, the most popular in-app purchases and so on. The "Apps" tab works the same way.

25. Human editors' picks matter more than ever, but individual apps may get seen less

Beyond the reshuffled layout, the App Store's biggest change is the volume of human-edited content. Apart from all the short articles, app recommendations are now essentially chosen by editors.

Open a particular app and the page has changed too. The app's video plays automatically, and further down are the reviews, also selected by editors. An app picked for a feature gets an "Editor's Choice" write-up. Altogether, today's App Store feels more like an app-recommendation publication.

But bringing editors in has pushed the old charts out of view. The download rankings are now a single card sitting somewhere in the page. As edited content takes more of the weight, most of what fills your screen when you open the App Store is editorially chosen apps and games.

The Mac Operating System Has a New Name, and Now Supports VR

26. The new macOS name sounds like a joke; mostly it is about performance

The last version of macOS was called Sierra. When Craig Federighi announced at the keynote that the new macOS would be High Sierra, for a moment it sounded like a joke. It isn't. As tradition requires, it is the name of an area in California's Sierra region; as a name for the Mac's operating system, High Sierra amounts to a small step up from Sierra.

27. macOS finally supports virtual reality

This keynote brought a new iMac, the iMac Pro and external graphics cards for future MacBooks — and the large jump in graphics performance across the board is certainly tied to virtual reality. macOS High Sierra now supports the HTC Vive headset: as a player you can use SteamVR to play VR games; as a developer you can use Epic's Unreal 4 Editor, Unity Editor or Final Cut Pro X to make and edit VR video and games.

28. Safari, Photos, and a few other small improvements in the new macOS

To deal with the now widespread problem of videos embedded in webpages playing by themselves, Safari has added a feature that blocks autoplaying video, with per-site settings so users can decide where autoplay is allowed.

The built-in Photos app also works with third-party software for the first time. In the new macOS, right-click a photo in your library and you can choose to edit it in Photoshop; the edits are saved back into the library automatically.

29. The new file system ships, and copy-and-paste gets faster

APFS, the Apple File System that Apple has been promoting for a while, formally replaces the existing HFS file system in the new macOS. It brings a clear performance gain and better encryption. At the keynote Apple showed a video being copied inside a single folder: a job that takes over ten seconds on the old Mac file system finishes in an instant on the new one.

The Apple Watch's Interface Has Changed Into Cards

30. The next watchOS uses a new card-based design

The interface of watchOS 4, arriving this fall, has changed again. The rectangular modules of before are now cards, each one growing larger as it slides to the front.

The interface uses more animation, and the design makes it easier to find what matters at a glance. It will probably also ask more of the Apple Watch's hardware.

31. Apple built its own Google Now for the watch

Apple added a few new watch faces as usual, and the one worth noting is the Siri face. Drawing on your personal information, it generates information cards on its own: how much earlier you should leave for the airport given traffic, or a button, ready before you go to sleep, that turns off every light at once.

From the brief demo on stage, this looks a great deal like Google Now, the AI-driven card feature Google built earlier.

32. The Apple Watch will connect to more devices

The Apple Watch will be able to sync data with gym equipment — a treadmill will know your heart rate, calories burned and other vitals without you entering them by hand every time.

TechnoGym, Life Fitness and Star Trac, the equipment makers you find in high-end gyms, are all on the partner list.

Beyond VR, Apple's Keynote Also Showed AR

VR is virtual reality; AR is augmented reality. Among Silicon Valley's three big technology companies, Google is putting all its strength into mobile VR and has built a dedicated VR app platform for Android; Microsoft is using HoloLens to develop mixed reality, or MR — an advanced form of AR — and seems to have little interest in VR. At WWDC 2017, Apple, a beat behind on both, dropped neither.

33. AR done in software on the iPad, like a simpler HoloLens

At the end of the iOS 11 segment, Apple brought out the company Wingnut AR for a demo. On an iPad whose model you could not make out, a busy miniature settlement appeared on a bare table on stage, with tiny people walking around in it. Then spaceships and a space battle filled the sky above, and a few of the small figures jumped off the edge of the table.

All of it was visible only through the iPad screen in the presenter's hands. Apple's technical demonstration made the point that on existing camera, gyroscope and CPU hardware it will hand developers an AR development platform. Apple also showed a new demo of the hit game Pokémon GO, in which Pikachu looked alive, far more convincing than in the current version.

On the whole, augmented reality built on iOS 11 looks like a lower-spec HoloLens. The performance gap is real, but HoloLens costs more than 20,000 yuan, and the barrier to entry on iOS is far lower.

Cover image and photos in this article: shot on site.