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Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

As a whole, this WWDC feels like Bikeshedding, Billions of Dollars of Technical Investment Edition.

What would you say they should be focusing on instead?

When I wrote that, they were talking about many non-improvements and slight adjustments to iOS. I'd say the bikeshedding peaked at the AirPods segment.

I don't think they should be focusing on anything in particular; they know their market better than I do, and it seems plausible that consumers prefer bikeshedding rather than major change. I'm just saying it bores me.

This is the first time in a long time where the Mac segment has been the most interesting thing, and I'd say that they should probably start doing what they're doing to the Mac to iOS. Even if it's not necessarily things I think that are positive, it's exciting.

> I'd say the bikeshedding peaked at the AirPods segment.

Algorithmically translating spatial audio to correspond with head position is fundamental to AR. It's also cool that it will improve watching movies in the meantime, but you're missing the point if that's all you saw.

It's not novel, though. That's already been done, and with fewer computational resources available.

"Allow Apple to control who can unlock your car" seems to very quickly lead to "Congratulations, law enforcement will literally never knock, ask or notify when breaking into your car going into the future." I could just be cynical though.

iPad improvements are interesting; I can't think of any other product that started with so much potential but was completely fumbled in the same way.

iPad Siri literally copies those web chatbots you see everywhere now, design-wise; bottom right corner, larger-than-necessary circle.

'Universal Search' seems to be a clone of Spotlight, now on iPad. Interesting.

'Draw into any text field and OCR it' is another instance of bikeshedding but I can't help but feel impressed by it.

Next in "Are we getting trolled?": they're doing an entire segment on AirPods.

Something probably unintentional that they're highlighting with this particular presentation style (frequent female presenters, infrequent male presenters) is that seemingly every role that they require someone in a position of power talking for, it's male, while the grunt work doesn't seem to have been at all. Personal progressiveness mixed with systemic sexism?

"You all have trouble sleeping so we're going to make your phone teach you yoga and meditation" is a very weird thing to do automatically instead of just blue-light reduction (which they already have a feature for) seems weird, but they know the market better than I do I guess.

All of the Watch features feel like they're aimed at a significantly younger demographic than the rest.

Film adaptions of Asimov have been pretty poor but this could be interesting.

A full redesign of Mac? Well, this can't go well.

Ah, yeah, Mac is now fully iOS-like design wise. The new icons look really bad.

It looks like Deepin but slightly less polished, which is funny, because Deepin was Mac but slightly less polished.

Complete murder of contrast.

Control Center shows up, confirming that this was just to make it all like iOS.

WebExtensions will probably be a huge benefit to Mac users.

Aaaand there's the ARM release.

Kind of mundane. Apple's chips trump many desktop chips, so I imagine the Mac might get an edge on performance again, which would be interesting. They're probably going to blow it though.

I wonder if this means that they're going to put the final bullet in the Mac for Linux with an iOS-like TPM.

They're bragging about Rise of the Tomb Raider's performance under Metal, a 2015 game, at medium settings.

Still bikeshedding, but there were some interesting things.

All their chips have a Secure Enclave, so yes. That doesn't mean Linux won't be able to run, it just means Linux won't be able to use any of the Secure Enclave's secrets.

Macs presently also have a TPM, but it doesn't lock the device down to the same extent. That's the bit I'm interested in seeing if carries over.

When I read the Foundation books a few years back, I was thinking about what it would take to film them and the biggest challenge I saw was the overwhelming sexism in the storytelling and characterizations. That part of Asimov's writing has not aged well. Not sure how the puzzlebox plots would translate to the screen.

Absolutely agree.

The only thing iPad Pro users were hoping for was real external display support, no sign of that unfortunately.

Although the presentation video seemed to skip ahead on the car key part on Firefox, I noticed they said the key will be stored only locally on the phone, unless you share it with someone else. Guess we'll see next year when cars equipped with the feature actually start to show up.

They also (seemingly) said you could transfer it to others or disable it without your phone via iCloud, so I'm skeptic.

It really isn't too hard to think of ways to do this that involve "iCloud" for key transfer, but keep the locus of control at the car/primary-drivers-phone nexus. Doing it differently would only introduce liability that Apple would rather not have.

iCloud is a service that Apple holds users' encryption keys with, and gives up control of to other organizations (which is what they did in China, for example). Given their focus on privacy is almost purely superficial, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/26/17052802/apple-icloud-enc...

I agree, although I doubt it will have anything to do with Apple. The automakers will just build in a "lawful access" feature and the hundreds of law-enforcement adjacent agencies will have remote access to that feature w/o any meaningful oversight.

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