WWDC21: Apple Keynote [Live] | Hacker News Reader

WWDC21: Apple Keynote [Live]

apple.com

41 pointsgardaani97 comments

> And it's not just Apple devices that can use a FaceTime link to join a call. Android and Windows devices can join from the browser. Even on the web, FaceTime calls are still end-to-end encrypted.

from https://live.arstechnica.com/apples-wwdc-2021-keynote/

Yes! As an Android user with Apple family, this is great news!

> machine learning blocks out ambient noise and prioritizes your voice

Ooo, and they're catching up with Google.

> Video calls will now get grid view.

Ooo, and they're catching up with Zoom.

> Now you can generate a link for a call and share it anywhere.

Ooo, and they're catching up with...basically everyone for the last 10 years. Was that really not a thing before now?

Apple's whole thing is to see what features the market likes for a 3-5 years and putting it into an integrated package.

Nobody cares that a flagship android device can warp spacetime but could also take down an airplane when its battery explodes. People want to be able to share with their friends in the same ecosystem.

With Facetime, it was only 1-1 calls until the last year or two, now they are branching out and taking the features people like from other apps and making it native. People are less likely to choose those apps now. Google and Apple do the same thing in this regard.

Also Amazon?

Almost nothing about apple software is revolutionary except them getting people to treat them as if they are revolutionary. I got an iphone for work and was comically underwhelmed by iOS. Despite it being frustrating to use for a power user (in contrast to Android which I've happily used for over a decade), it's also unintuitive and convoluted for novice users like my grandma. Their hardware design is sometimes nice, but their final hardware products are equally underwhelming. IMO what makes Apple stand out isn't that it's particularly great, it's that everyone else is so bad.

The thing that is revolutionary is how it integrates. Things just work, without requiring the user to be a power user searching for ways to side load apps and ADM in termal to make it happen.

Almost every time I see an Android user brag about a new feature it turns out that the implementation is horrendous. Of course Apple doesn’t want to put their name to it under they get it right. And they almost always do.

I don't agree at all. I have an old iPad that's a nightmare to use to read comics. Literally just swiping through JPEGs is an ordeal of trying to find some way to go around iTunes, then finally having to manage media through iTunes. On Android, for at least 10 years, you can just drag and drop files. Fast delete is horrible: first it deletes letter by letter, then suddenly jumps to word by word; on Android you just swipe from the delete key and you can see how much you're going to delete. On Android you can easily customize your home screen and swipe down for info; apple has a worse implementation and it took them ages to implement.

To an apple fan this may be nitpicking; to me this is an example of how every single step of the way, apple products are painful and frustrating to use. On a macbook it's not as bad because I can generally override and customize things. iOS is just the worst of both worlds: apple's extremely opinionated implementations, with none of the workarounds available on mac os. I'd take any version of android over any version of iOS.

Wonder if it'll work from Firefox.

Hey Apple employees! All I want is selective contact sharing! Its still all or nothing!

I can't give Clubhouse invites without them and the CCP knowing that I know important people that I don't want them to know! Help!

Also, ban apps from the appstore that link me with people who have shared my phone number/email already. I only want to be auto-suggested with people who we both have shared. No need to be linked with everyone I met once in my life, forever.

Have you dropped this into apples radar ticket system?

https://www.apple.com/feedback/

also it would be interesting if you could sue Apple here for an „assist“ in breaking consent regulations.

I’ve never used it

I’ll take a look

It’s pretty admirable how apple has year after year taken steps to actually reduce device usage*

I really like the “focus” features as this year’s example or this.

*I think they’re trying to increase meaningful device usage, so maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but it feels like overall the result is I use my device less and less while still doing more.

There are aligned incentives here, something a company that focuses on selling devices can do vs the companies that sell your attention

Also reducing frustration. At this point in time its no longer about having the most usage time on a device, it's about quality happy usage time.

If your device annoys the daylights out of you, you certainly won't love it. This is doubly true when you think that there is an entire ecosystem here to think about. You can get messages on your computer, ipad, iPhone and Watch. If you want to focus and can't because it takes several minutes to find and mute notifications on every device... that's very frustrating. Oh and then you might not remember to turn them back on and miss something important later. More frustration.

It looks like Apple maps may actually be surpassing Google maps. Never thought I'd actually say that, but I'd certainly give it a serious shot after seeing that demo, especially once it comes to CarPlay.

yeah I'm officially about to stop questioning people's decision making process when I hear they're using Apple Maps

I'll give it a shot again for general navigation, it is the default any way

Too bad it sucks ass outside of London, Los Angeles, NY, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area and Washington DC.

Works great for me in urban and even rural Texas.

Ditto in Georgia and Colorado (main areas I've been driving in the past few years). The one deficiency, for me, is the lack of offline maps like Google Maps offers, particularly nice when traveling outside the US or in areas with poor cellular service (pretty much all of Wyoming I found out a few weeks back).

They now have user submission for adding reporting to hopefully expedite this pain point

Works great for me all over the United States, including quite rural and remote areas - and I've been using it for over 10 years. Not sure what you mean by sucks ass but it gets me where I need to go and tells me when I'm going to get there and provides me alternate routes when there's construction. Maybe I'm not a power user, but it does everything I need.

It’s pretty interesting to look at a lot of these small updates as stepping stones towards making sure that when they launch an AR device in the next few years that it’s as compelling as possible (e.g. identifying text and objects, a huge focus on improving maps, etc…)

Yeah you know they don’t like to debut stuff until it’s ready, and they’ve been getting ready for ^^^ for like 5+ years now. It’s pretty astonishing to watch the chess match unfold in plain sight.

Case in point is the new object capture feature.

Now you can build apps on the iPad… it’s a baby version of XCode, but you can submit them to the App Store which is pretty rad.

It’s a way more accessible way for people to learn how to engineer apps. I feel like Xcode and git can really be too high a bar for people who are starting from nothing. Not to say they’re not intelligent, it just requires pushing through frustrations in a way that this new feature is eliminating.

I finished an MVP for my screensharing iOS yesterday. Shoot. I wonder what usage will look like for screensharing via FaceTime. It is super neat that they're releasing this alongside their FaceTime update.

Apple keeps trying to make multitasking on iPad work, but it remains as confusing and handicapped as ever.

I wonder if they'll ever just give up and add windows to iPad OS.

I thought the new multitasking features were excellent? What did you feel wasn’t good?

If you use AUv3 host like AUM, you basically already have window manager on iOS. Audio people only!

> This year we're hiding your IP address from trackers in Safari.

Will this only be available in Safari, or also in SFSafariViewController?

from https://live.arstechnica.com/apples-wwdc-2021-keynote/

The WatchOS update seems inconsequential. I don't know what the team did all year. I can only assume they are saving some news for the next watch release because they are hardware-dependent.

Or maybe, they just need some competition. Or, rather, any competition.

I've got to admit, its been really special listening to other people rationalize their other fitness/whatever trackers.

So far the only thing convincing is how long the batteries last on wrist wearables.

Oh yeah when is the iphone getting 'reverse' inductive charging? Thats a little overdue

Did they fix the messages history problem? Where your phone keeps GB of old messages but you have literally no way of accessing them?

Wait for them to get to it. "also, we fixed that really annoying bug that should never have been an issue"...

It’s so bizarre. I wonder if it’s just a tech debt thing. I thought core data had SQLite as a back end, which should handle messages easily. So if this bug persists it must mean they have some legacy back end maybe? But yeah, it’s terrible

Maybe they forgot to VACUUM.

I wonder if they're calculus here is that its more likely a laptop/desktop login is shared than phone access (which will require a gesture, passcode, or specific face). SMS can get real personal much faster than email (can use temp emails for those questionable logins but you tend to have one personal number)

Or its actually a bug, lol

Extensions on mobile Safari is intriguing. Will all functionality from desktop extensions be possible on mobile? Or just a subset?

It is interesting to see that Netflix hasn't implemented SharePlay.

The keynote lists many other partners (such as Hulu, HBOMax etc.)

Yeah you’d think they’d be first. Super cool though they provided an API though.

Netflix doesn’t support normal AirPlay either. Bummer

Netflix don’t implement the Apple TV features that allow you to see content from multiple sources on one page or “up next” either.

I guess that's owing to the fact that unlike all other streaming platforms, streaming is Netflix's core competency and not a side hustle unlike all other owners of streaming platforms. They need the in-app engagement as much as subs.

I’d love to know whether it works in their favour or not. I find myself viewing less and less Netflix content on my Apple TV as the “up next” queue is always full of non-Netflix content.

I’d love to have actors and go-like channels for Swift concurrency.

Also, my biggest complaint about swift is that it’s statement oriented instead of expression oriented. This is a subtle but extremely important concept, and it’s so hard to go back to using statement oriented languages after experiencing Rust and Scala.

Every year, the photos app is a bit better.

But getting photos off the phone onto a PC gets worse than I could even imagine.

Really? I just use the windows icloud app and sync it to my nas.

That's just insane compared to plug in, copy/paste. I shouldn't be limited to 2 OSes, a proprietary app, require an account, and needlessly transfer data over the internet twice to back up some data I'm already holding in my hand.

That's a fair point, although presumably you could just use an app to expose your photos locally.

I must be misunderstanding something, however if you plug an iPhone into a Windows PC, the iPhone will ask if you'd like to share photos and videos with the connected device. Say yes and you get a completely typical DCIM share.

That used to work everywhere, including Linux, where I want to do the backup, but now it requires iTunes, which I have no other use for and limits the entire process to 2 OSes.

The DCIM folder isn't really standard either, there's magic that happens when you start a transfer to convert the Harry Potter photos to standard photos and, I think, video to mp4. If the device doesn't have enough free space to do those conversions, there is no error message on the PC or device, it just stops mid-transfer (1 hour of my day figuring that one out). There's a setting to not do that conversion, but then you end up backing up files you can't read just anywhere. If it were just my phone, I'd turn off those formats on the phone, but it's my entire families devices.

Before I wrote my original post, I verified my assumption by connecting my 12P (14.6) to my Windows 10 box (on which zero Apple software runs -- iTunes has never existed on that device). Immediately got the share confirmation and then a DCIM folder.

That folder has the source files in it. HEIC images. MP4 videos (videos, though they are limited to 4GB because of the FAT32 simulation the iPhone is doing). And the other file type for the live photos (I can't recall the extension). No conversions occur, I can copy them directly, etc.

OK, so it looks like iTunes is not required on Windows, that assumption came from Apple stating iTunes is required to transfer photos in their docs.

But it doesn't work like that on Linux anymore and I'm certain it used to. There's access to a Documents folder that has folders for things like Keynote, but no DCIM folder. Shotwell works, kind of, but is very prone to failure.

As far as the conversion, do you have the iOS Photos app settings set to not do a conversion? "Automatic" vs "Keep Originals".

This is probably going way off topic, It's not your job to help me troubleshoot :)

I do have Keep Originals enabled. Forgot all about that setting, but I do believe it tries to be overly clever in Automatic mode (mostly assuming connected devices can't handle HEIC, etc).

It's insufferable, most video editing workstations these days are PC just because Apple ignored the pro line for so long and it's just cheaper for far more powerful hardware.

But the amount of times I've spent up to an hour just trying to get videos off iPhones and into the editing software is crazy.

Apple's ecosystem "Just working" within itself is a huge benefit until they let one part of the entire computing spectrum slip then it becomes a nightmare.

Once you can't use AirDrop in part of the chain the walled garden becomes extremely apparent on your devices and you'll be screaming at your phone trying to figure out how to get this 2GB video file off it and onto a real machine to work on.

Pretty cool stuff. But what i find just as interesting as the actual features, is the image Apple is trying to present of their idea of an average users life; Social, business and family. I wonder how representative and "with it" Apple are. But regardless, this sideshow is very interesting.

The new Weather app looks nice. But for me, the data source is the real problem. In spring/summer the daily forecast is always 4-10 degrees below the actual temp. I don't want a better looking Weather app. I want one that will actually forecast the weather.

I always thought the Weather Channel was a strange choice versus the National Weather Service in the US. weather.gov is consistently more reliable where I live, and the data is free!

right yeah

I still use Weather Underground even after that app's abysmal UI update. I tried Dark Sky but it just assumes too much.

I just want regional weather from all the thermometers. Apple Weather doesn't.

Apple bought Dark Sky. That’s why they now have next hour rain data I believe.

Swift Playgrounds for iPadOS supports building and shipping apps to the App Store.

Imagine debugging code signing issues on your iPad! Can't wait to try it B-)

This is the first ring of the MacOS death knell, it's a quiet ring but the next will be louder.

AirPlay to Mac will finally allow fitness+ workouts to be viewable on Mac!

As cool as it is to use your phone as your key, what happens when you run out of power? The U.S. needs to develop a public phone charging infrastructure like other nations do.

Seems like an issue fairly easily solved by the semi-standardization of chargers around the main 3 ports (micro, lightning and c) and just asking someone in a shop or another driver for a quick bump charge.

Wireless charging should be built into any key presentation application where mains power is available.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/sec90cd29d1f/... - I've never used it, but it's meant to work for around 5 hours after your battery dies.

The phone will still work as a key even if it's out of power [0]. Obviously it won't work if your battery has been completely dead for weeks, but as long as your phone can show the "out of battery" screen, it can still do NFC stuff.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/express-cards-with-...

Wow. Sending messages from Apple Watch looks horribly awkward. And that's on a carefully edited video! I'm surprised they bothered showing it off at all.

Every year Craig looks more and more like Martin Scorsese

And Kevin from watchOS looks more and more like James Cameron each year.

How did he catch that iPad. Is it clever editing, or did they smash multiple iPads? Also, why are the subtitles so bad when everything else is so good?

It says in the final credits: "no Ipads were harmed in the making of this event." [1]

[1]: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmcbGVA8nAYJN1pjXYHjUfrnAJAoCob1vxRvsAH...

At least it wasn't just me then:)

Wow, I’m super happy to hear the privacy features for Mail, but tbh they kinda hurt the value prop of some stuff I’m working on haha.

> but tbh they kinda hurt the value prop of some stuff I’m working on haha

That's why we are all tuned in to Apple conferences, Pavlovian conditioning of potential stressor

Xcode cloud is “one more thing” worthy

Be nice if it had its own collaborative git repo system

Maybe it does? Implementing a barebone GitHub-like experience is basically built into git, and I can’t imagine how this product would work without something like what you’re talking about.

yeah, Github and other git-companies implement so many expected features on top of the git protocol that is hard to distinguish which things are the protocol and which things aren't

for example, a pull request to teammates is not part of the git protocol, but is something I would like to see in an Xcode Cloud implementation. there is a command that summarizes things from a series of commits but it isn't the same, imo

You can create an iOS App within iPad itself with Swift Playground. That sounds like a very big deal.

Building apps on iPad, which you can submit from your device, is pretty neat.

The M1 iPad Pro make more sense now.

This presentation just keeps giving. "we think privacy is a fundamental human right". As if. Were was this fundamental right for the last 15 years? (exactly were it will remain for the next 15 years of course).

Various sessions of Congress in the early 80s noted that digital artifacts lacked inherent privacy of other properties and would make it harder for people to retain their expectations and rights.

This is just a reversion to the mean 30-40 years ago. The last 15 years weren't different than now, aside from more of the state being behind the curve.

The state will have to learn how to navigate its default state again with actual investigations and new tools, or not be able to stop behaviors it doesn't like.

shelf: per-app dock for multi tasking

Can we get to macOS already?

Haha no, we need to learn about watchOS first.

When will the new macbooks be announced?

Widgets and app library for iOS is basically Android

I wonder if there will be talk about the AppStore after all the drama or Apple will keep playing the "we deserve all the credit for your apps" card.

Edit: Thanks for the downvote, the more we let the monopoly take decisions over our software the better the world will be.

"Our software"? It is Apple's software and ecosystem. Of course Apple has a monopoly over their software, it would be absurd to suggest otherwise.

I don't understand why people think they have some special right to tell Apple how to handle their business and demand a direction for their platform. There are plenty of choices in the world, Apple is not a monopoly in the smartphone world, and by far.

75% of the world uses Android [0]. Technology offers a lot of choice. If you don't like the Apple ecosystem, don't develop for iOS or buy an iPhone, pretty simple.

[0]https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide

Edit: I misunderstood what OP meant by ‘our software’. I was talking about iOS, not the software you develop for iOS/iPadOS

How is an app store developer’s software the property of Apple?

I think I misspoke. I thought OP was taking about iOS.

In the sense of your app they don’t. But you play by their rules. If you don’t want Apple deciding things on your software, don’t develop for iOS, it’s simple.

> This stream is best experienced on an iPhone 7 or later, iPad (5th generation or later), or iPod touch (7th generation) using Safari on iOS 12 or later; or a Mac using Safari on macOS Mojave 10.14 or later. Streaming to your TV requires an Apple TV (2nd generation or later) or an AirPlay 2–capable device with the latest Apple TV software.

Right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com