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A Summary of Apple’s WWDC
June 29, 2020
Apple held its 2020 WWDC remotely and announced a bunch of the stuff:
Apple’s ARM-powered Macs will be able to automatically translate some existing Intel apps thanks to Apple’s Rosetta 2 conversion software: while they looked a little ugly, both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Dirt: Rally were running that way, as was Autodesk Maya. But for the most part, Apple seems to be asking developers to take its word that ARM will unlock “a whole new level of performance,” without discussing how that performance actually stacks up right now. The company’s press release says very specifically that Apple’s new chips will “give the Mac industry-leading performance per watt,” and that’s a very deliberate turn of phrase. Apple’s arguing that by building the most efficient kind of chips it can — “the highest performance with the lowest power consumption” — it can achieve more raw performance by tipping the scales of that performance-per-watt formula toward more watts.
Apple isn’t publicly planning to get rid of Intel anytime soon. Not only is Apple planning to release several additional Intel-based Macs in the future, but the company “will continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come.” For a company that prides itself on the “courage” too often make a clean break with the past, it’s a little unusual.
Figure 1: MACs w/Silicon
A Summary of Apple’s WWDC
June 29, 2020
Apple held its 2020 WWDC remotely and announced a bunch of the stuff:
- iOS Changes
- Homescreen widgets: Created in Android, in 2008 giving it an information edge, without needing to open apps. Apple finally caught up just when Android widgets have died out a little. People still use clocks, and weather, and Google search bar, but the days of pages of widgets are long gone as widgets used battery life and Google changed how widgets would work to avoid siphoning off too much battery
- Users set default email, browser apps for the first time: Cunning of Apple to change this notoriously limited feature, but not mention it at the event. Up until iOS14, Apple Mail and Safari were set as the system default apps for sending email and browsing the web, so any time a link was clicked, or an email was sent, or web page was opened, the link opens either Mail or Safari. For those who prefer or primarily use third-party apps, it prevented real choice. iOS 14 lets the user set a third-party app as the default email or browser app systemwide,
- App Library, similar to Android App Drawer, Translate, Google Translate, and much more. Gizmodo’s annual list of Everything Apple Tried to Kill at WWDC 2020 also includes Strava, Google Maps
- Car Key, Enables Car Play to unlock a car with a phone. iPhone will have it first, but Google is part of the same consortium.
- App Clips.
- Small pieces of useful apps that can be used instantly with a tiny download, without the app. Apple’s example was grabbing a scooter, without needing the full app and a whole new account.
- Sleep tracking on watchOS, with machine learning for tracking sleep movements.
- Privacy, Adds a standard ‘nutrition label’ on apps in the App Store to show what data they will request on installation.
- Smart home interoperability, a new smart home standard that Google, Amazon, and loads of others had signed onto.
- And, if you can’t figure out how to comply with the COVID-19 standard for and-washing the Apple Watch hears when you turn on the water and starts a countdown and tell you if you haven’t used the minimum wash time.
- Depth API leverages the scene understanding capabilities built into the 2020 iPad Pro’s lidar scanner to gather per-pixel information about an environment. When combined with 3D mesh data, the API makes virtual object occlusion more realistic by enabling instant placement of digital objects and blending them seamlessly with their physical surroundings.
- ARKit 4’s Location Anchoring supports the placement of AR experiences throughout cities, alongside famous landmarks, allowing developers to anchor AR creations at specific latitude, longitude, and altitude coordinates such that users can move around virtual objects and see them from different perspectives.
- Expanded Face Tracking works on any iOS smartphone or tablet packing the A12 Bionic chip including the iPhone X, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone XR, iPad Pro, and iPhone SE, which can track up to three faces at once.
- Apple announced it is moving from Intel to its own designed CPUs, No, details, but it was developer conference. Most of what Apple focused on was how it affects apps that developers built and what developers will need to do. Using the same Apple A12Z Bionic chip in an $800 iPad Pro, the company showed that a low-power ARM desktop can already handle a variety of power user apps on Mac, including:
- Versions of Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, and Lightroom running natively on ARM
- Three streams of simultaneous 4K Pro Res video in Final Cut Pro
- Rotating around a photorealistic stone face in Cinema 4D
- Rotating around a 6-million polygon scene in Autodesk’s Maya animation studio, with textures and shaders on top
- Rendering effects in the Unity game engine
- The games Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Dirt: Rally running on Mac smoothly (but at low-ish resolution and detail)
Apple’s ARM-powered Macs will be able to automatically translate some existing Intel apps thanks to Apple’s Rosetta 2 conversion software: while they looked a little ugly, both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Dirt: Rally were running that way, as was Autodesk Maya. But for the most part, Apple seems to be asking developers to take its word that ARM will unlock “a whole new level of performance,” without discussing how that performance actually stacks up right now. The company’s press release says very specifically that Apple’s new chips will “give the Mac industry-leading performance per watt,” and that’s a very deliberate turn of phrase. Apple’s arguing that by building the most efficient kind of chips it can — “the highest performance with the lowest power consumption” — it can achieve more raw performance by tipping the scales of that performance-per-watt formula toward more watts.
Apple isn’t publicly planning to get rid of Intel anytime soon. Not only is Apple planning to release several additional Intel-based Macs in the future, but the company “will continue to support and release new versions of macOS for Intel-based Macs for years to come.” For a company that prides itself on the “courage” too often make a clean break with the past, it’s a little unusual.
Figure 1: MACs w/Silicon
Apple is promising its ARM-based Macs will be able to run more kinds of apps than before, thanks to both native iOS app support and hardware-accelerated machine learning chops built into the silicon. They’ll be able to “keep cached cloud content fresh for days” even when your Mac is asleep, and Apple says using your iPad as a secondary monitor for your Mac will get better thanks to the image processing that Apple’s already built into its ARM chips. Though Apple didn’t provide any metrics, the company suggests ARM will provide more battery life, too. In the best-case scenario for a core Apple user who can’t consider going back to Windows:
Nothing is clear at all. Yet, Apple said: we’re dropping Intel and making the best ever Macs with our own chips. Also, by the way, we still have some new Intel-powered Macs in the pipeline! And “we’re really excited” about them! From: DGiT
- Wait for the end of the year, for Apple’s first Apple Silicon device, and get a piece of the future, Apple’s new standard for 2021 and beyond?
- Buy a current Intel-powered Mac, knowing that it will gradually become a legacy device
Nothing is clear at all. Yet, Apple said: we’re dropping Intel and making the best ever Macs with our own chips. Also, by the way, we still have some new Intel-powered Macs in the pipeline! And “we’re really excited” about them! From: DGiT
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