Apple WWDC 2021

Will this be the year iPadOS gets good?

Will we see new MacBooks?

Will Tim talk about Customer Sat?

I was thinking that i should be buying a new iPad (probably the iPad Air as it seems like the best option) as our original iPad Air is getting pretty long in the tooth. Should I be waiting or are they safe to buy?

Edit I just calculated. 7 years and 5 months. I am goddamned amazed that a tablet can run that long and still perform amazingly well. Say what you like about the cost of Apple products, you certainly get your money’s worth from them.

I’m going to be sad if we get some kind of “Mac-like” iPadOS today. Please, Saint Craig, stick your holy finger in the eye of all Apple tech journalism with another gigantic “NO.” slide.

I am curious – long term – about the inevitable touch-based Mac. At some point, they almost have to do a 2:1 in style device.

I also would love it if they said “All iPad apps can run on Mac, and we don’t care what the devs think.” There is one game – Fury of Dracula – they refused to make a Mac Steam version of, and also didn’t check off the “Can use on the Mac” on their iPad app.

I expect by the end of the day I will cave and think about putting macOS 12 on my M1 Mac.

And. I know they’d never do this, but it’d be nice to see a multi-year roadmap for their OS plans.

Oh boy, that opener was painful.

I know it’s a capability of a bunch of stand-alone apps, but text recognition built into Photos looks awesome.

Yeah, that is going to be damn useful in exactly the setting he used.

Wow, Facetime on the web. That was not leaked.

Rest of the stuff so far is cool but iterative and not opening up the walled garden, but Facetime is a big deal. Zoom and Teams are eating their lunch, and Facetime is no longer a critical differentiator, so they opened it.

Notably iMessage was not opened.

Sucks, because now when someone asks me if we can have a quick Facetime, I’ll no longer be able to tell them ’ Sorry, I don’t use an iPhone’.

You can still say it, and when they say it’s available on android as a webapp now you can say “what’s a webapp? Anyway I’ll look into it” and move on.

OK the Maps updates look pretty cool. We’ll see if it’s as/more useful as Google Maps when push comes to shove though.

Rolling out to non-San Fran locations later next year.

Apple Maps is basically fine now, I stick with Google Maps because it’s better on the web and well, inertia.

Apple invents hearing aids.

Finally fixed the F’in stupid way they did widgets on iPadOS 14. I could never for the life of me figure out why they did that when the iPhone implementation was perfect.

The app library too. Why weren’t these on iPad last year?

The Long National Nightmare is Over!

Shubham is an awesome name. Here’s shabam!

Apple is giving up on the gestures for iPad multitasking. Smart, they weren’t discoverable and even once you knew how to do it, fiddly as hell.

This is an improvement to multi-tasking, but swiping down is counter-intuitive to close an app since you swipe up all other times.

Swiping down moves a window within an app to the “shelf”, it doesn’t close it. This is iPad MDI basically.

Apple Notes, sadly, another one limited to their ecosystem. I would be happy using it if there was a windows program available.

Seriously. Same with Reminders.