Livestream just began!
No real rumours have leaked, so everything is pretty much going to be a surprise to me. Whether interesting or desirable, I can’t say.
This space reserved for snarky comments.
[I don’t care enough anymore about Apple even to grouse. They’re a supply chain driven company now with more cash than the US and nothing to spend it on.]
Interestingly, they seem to be talking about a renewed focus on improving the performance of older devices. They started out by talking about getting significant concrete improvements on an iPhone 6+ with iOS 12. Not really the actions of a company only out to get people upgrading to the newest devices.
IMO that’s hopefully both smart engineering and good PR.
Apple took a bit of a hit on the fact they were slowing older phones down deliberately. Most people won’t care and i wouldn’t oversell it.
OTOH the big thing is the end of the subsidized phone era. In the US at least the “subsided” model meant Apple users always upgraded on a 2 year cycle. Carriers hated that and now it’s done - you pay for the phone outright or pay the carrier a 0% or low % interest loan. And just anecdotally everyone i know is hanging on to their phones for much longer (including me).
You’re absolutely right. But considering that my wife is still clinging to her iPhone 6, this is nice news.
So far, the rest of the keynote has been about AR. Apple has really gone all-in on it, but I haven’t personally found any real reason to use it in real life. I even shut it off in Pokemon Go (which I still, surprisingly, play).
The shared user AR stuff looks fun, but I honestly don’t know if it’s something that I’ll ever try.
Maybe @wumpus is right but iPhones are so fast for the last few generations i literally never need to upgrade. Honestly aside from the camera improvements there isn’t a single thing i care to upgrade since the 6 series. Maybe some 3D game i never play performs better on the newer models. I mean i can play Titan Quest on the iPad Mini 4 - albeit it is a bit laggy at times but still totally playable.
Third party maps in CarPlay. Wooooo.
Still no real system-wide dark mode, that’s the rumor I want most to be true.
The rumours I heard about Apple trying to help people deal with smart phone / notification addiction seem to be true. The improvements to Do Not Disturb seem great. So maybe the dark mode is coming!
Yeah, that stuff is nice, and grouped notifications are huge, iOS is waaaaay behind Android there.
Talking about activity reports for children now, hopefully that means multiple accounts/profiles, which is another huge missing link on iOS.
A whole section for new Animoji. Yikes.
Group facetime is huge. Catchup to Google Hangouts from several years ago, but still a big deal.
For a quiet update with no iPad-specific stuff — yet, the iPad stuff came later last year, but I’m not expecting anything this year — the Notifications and tracking stuff are things I will use a lot.
Don’t have an iPhone X so the emoji stuff doesn’t interest me.
All the next-gen phones are rumored to have the FaceID sensors, so you will soon enough.
I got the 8+ instead of the X. So, yeah, in about 3 years.
Hey, Apple invented walkie-talkies! (It’s a new feature on watchOS 5.)
This is a pretty compelling demo for Apple Watch. I bet a lot of people are watching this and thinking that they can get all this stuff done while they work out. Very well done.
Yup, just got my wife a new 8 and I inherited her 6. Were going to get a 7, but there were some snags making the transition to xfinity mobile and they sold out before we could complete the purchase.
Dark Mode for the new MacOS Mojave. No word yet if there’s going to be an iOS version.
Yeah, and that’s nice, but iOS is where I really care about it, because there’s no way to do a real system-wide dark mode on MacOS third-party programs. My Outlook is still going to be white. Also my iPhone is OLED and black consumes less battery.