WWDC 2024 Thoughts

The dust has settled, the hot takes have been claimed and the fat has been thoroughly chewed. So it’s time for me to weigh in with what really got my blood pumping with this year’s WWDC announcements, and what sent my cynicism glands into overdrive.

Top 8 WWDC Features

Let’s count down the 8 things I’m most excited about this year.

8. Dual Language Keyboard

Living in Montreal I know more people who code switch between at least two languages than not. Even my cats are fluent in both the Francophone and Anglophone flavours of Meowese.

So it’s great to see iOS 18 will allow you to assign two languages to the keyboard simultaneously. Whilst it remains to be seen how this operates in practice I’m sure my bilingual and multilingual friends will truly appreciate this feature.

7. Reminders & Calendar Integration

Over the years I’ve settled on Fantastical as my iOS calendar app of choice along with Due for reminders.

But over time I’ve slowly began relying more on Reminders for things like sharing grocery lists. And with Fantastical, I’m grandfathered in to an older paid tier so I’m not really getting any of the new features the app is famous for.

So when it was announced there’d be greater synergy between the Calendar and Reminders app I started considering of it might time to go back to these two stock apps.

In reality I probably won’t stop using Due completely as it still has some unique features which keep me on the straight and narrow, such as nagging reminders.

6. Siri Improvements

Here’s one I’m approaching with a cautious optimism. Siri has been garbage pretty much since it was first baked into iOS and presented aspirations of being more than a cool tech demo.

We’ll discuss “Apple Intelligence” later on, but I’m hoping we’ll see Siri finally start to augment iPhone usage instead of being something people actively avoid because of its inevitable frustrations.

5. Continued OS Support

There was some welcome news with good support for the new OS iterations this year on older devices. On the iPhone, I’m glad to see my own 12 Pro Max isn’t even remotely near the chopping board for iOS 18.

And for macOS Sequoia (it’s going to take me a while to remember how to spell that), I’d had my bets hedged on the fact Apple would be aggressively dropping support for older Intel Macs as it pushed everyone into the Apple Silicon world. But no, I was wrong.

Sequoia has great support for Intel Macs, which caused me to breathe a sigh of relief – more on that later.

4. iPhone Mirroring

This is a lovely feature coming to macOS Sequoia. It will allow you to see your iPhone’s screen on your Mac, and this is more than just mirroring. You’ll be able to fully interact with your iPhone via the desktop using your mouse and keyboard, and notifications will be redirected into your Mac’s notification center.

The cherry on top is that the docked iPhone will keep its screen off when being controlled from macOS meaning you can keep it in nightstand mode.

This is a really elegant implementation, although I do wonder whether having an iPhone mirror on your desktop will be bad for focus and concentration.

3. iOS Updated Dark Mode

iOS 18 brings an updated dark mode to the platform, which will also change your app icons. This is something I’ve been hacking for a while with an unholy combination of focus modes, Shortcuts and two almost identical primary home screens.

Having app icons which just change their look will simplify things massively, with the added advantage of even being able to have icons in the dock change when the theme switches. Magic!

2. Homescreen Icon Placement

This one’s been a long time coming. We will finally – finally! – be able to place icons and widgets anywhere on the home screen grid without resorting to weird workarounds such as “empty” app icons. Even better, we’ll be able to resize widgets without having to remove them and add the different size back again.

Just to give you an idea of how long this has been coming, I developed my own hack back in 2015 for free icon placement. It’s going to be good to finally have this feature baked in without the need for such tedious workarounds. Why did it take so long?

1. New iOS Control Center

In another “finally” moment, Control Centre is going to become incredibly customisable under iOS 18.

As a heavy automator, this is heaven sent. I’ve always struggled to find a perfect home to quickly access Shortcuts. I’ve tried widgets in the Today view or on the home screen, but they take up space from apps and widgets. The lock screen widgets only have a spot for 4 items. I currently have a hierarchical menu which brings up my most used Shortcuts and I’ve even linked this to Back Tap. And there’s also Spotlight as well as just going into the Shortcuts app.

I find all of these options clunky in one way or another, but soon it will be possible to add Shortcuts to Control Centre, and this seems like their natural home. Control centre can be accessed from anywhere, even the lock screen. For some of us, it’s long established muscle memory to pull down from the phone’s top right corner.

Being able to set this up with all my Shortcut automations and remove them from other parts of the interface is going to be amazing.

Take a Cynical Eye

This section is very subjective, but it wasn’t all great news depending on what you were hoping for, and I’ve isolated a couple of things I wanted to talk about.

iPadOS 18

So, there’s not much to say here beyond the disappointment of iPad OS 18 having almost new new features beyond those coming to its iOS counterpart.

Apple sells pro iPads which cost as much as their pro laptops. It really defies my understanding how they’ve allowed iPad OS to languish so far behind the hardware’s potential.

Quoth MacStories’ Frederico Viticci putting it kindly:

iPadOS 18 is not a meaningful update for iPad users who hoped Apple would fill some of the longstanding platform gaps between the Mac and iPad. With no Stage Manager improvements, no changes to audio routing, and seemingly very little happening in Shortcuts in terms of new actions (for now), it’s hard to be excited about iPadOS 18.

At this point I’m not even sure who the iPad Pro is for, and I struggle to understand why a pro user would opt for one instead of an iPad Air given the shortcomings of iPadOS.

“Apple Intelligence”

I’m becoming increasingly sceptical of AI as the days drag on. This thoughtful article from Apple Insider sums up the general state of AI quite well:

The shift in perception on AI has turned a dirty word into a hype cycle.

Apple has attempted to put its own spin on “AI”, re-baptising the two letter abbreviation to mean “Apple Intelligence”, a rather ballsy marketing move in my opinion.

I feel Apple’s spin on AI needs to be tried out in person to see what it’s all about. Ideally AI augments your technology experience, but that’s not the general direction large language models and machine learning has been going. I have hope we’re going to see Apple Intelligence implemented with gentle touch instead of a sledge hammer.

Also, bonus points to Apple for triggering nepo manbaby Elon Musk.

macOS or iPadOS - A Path Diverges

Much of this leads towards a personal tech decision. Those who have been following me on Mastodon know I’ve been trying to wrestle a couple of old MacBook Airs into compliance so I can use them as my secondary machines. It hasn’t gone well. In fact, one of my laptops now has such a swollen battery it’s trying to recreate John Hurt’s chest-busting scene from Alien in slow motion. Honestly, I’m scared.

it’s clearly time to think about a new machine, so I was considering whether to go all-in with an iPad as a secondary device, or instead get a new MacBook Air for my wife and inherit her 2020 Intel MacBook Pro.

I was hinging this decision on WWDC 2024 answering two critical questions:

1. Will iPadOS get a significant update?
2. Will the new macOS version run on Intel devices?

If you’ve read this far, you know it’s “no” to the first question and “yes” to the second. That means Intel Macs are going to get at least another 3 years of software support. This bucks my expectation whereby Apple would be aggressively trying to drop support for Intel devices, but I’m most pleased to have been proven wrong.

All in all, it’s been a good grab bag of new software features this year… unless you’re an iPad owner.