Apple held its annual developer conference, WWDC, yesterday and we got a few interesting announcements.
The star of the show was the…
Vision Pro headset
This Honda Fit-priced headset is a step up from current mixed reality headsets out there.
What is it? It is a mixed-reality headset designed to be used for gaming, entertainment, and productivity. Mixed reality meaning both augmented reality (a real-world environment enhanced by computer-generated perceptual information) and virtual reality (a simulated experience).
The Apple Vision Pro features two 4K displays, a high-resolution front-facing camera, and a powerful processor. The processor in it is the M2 chip which is in Apple’s high-end computers, a powerful chip.
There is also a new chip in it, the R1 chip. It processes all the other headset inputs from 12 cameras, five sensors and six microphones and sends it to the M2 to reduce lag and get new images to displays within 12 milliseconds
The headset also features eye-tracking and hand-tracking technology. This technology allows users to interact with the virtual world using their eyes and hands.
A user simply looks at something they want to interact with and touches two of their fingers to select. There are multiple cameras tracking the eyes to see what you are looking at and more cameras tracking the hands to see if you make the ‘select gesture.’
Those that played around with it say it feels next-level even if it has its downsides.
The biggest being the price – $3500. There is also the fact that battery life is estimated at around two hours which is not enough to finish a movie, these new movies run much longer than two hours.
You can find out more about the Vision Pro here.
iOS 17
iOS, like Android, is mature now and we rarely get new features that wow us. It’s just neat little improvements that make the experience a little better, and that’s it. However, depending on how you use your phone, some of these might be game changers.
iMessage
iMessage sees some improvements that have been available on WhatsApp for years. You know how you can swipe on a message to reply to it, iMessage is getting that now.
The messaging app will also transcribe voice notes for you. That would be pretty useful for me if it weren’t for the fact that the voice notes I get are at least 50% in Shona. iMessage can’t transcribe that.
The transcription treatment will also be available for voicemail but how many of us receive voicemail in Zimbabwe?
Check In
It sends a note to a selected contact when you reach a location – for example when you get home after late-night travel. Instead of you texting to say ‘Hey, home now,’ the phone will do it for you. Day by day we remove the personal touch, it’s now phones talking to other phones.
When using Check In, you estimate the time you think the trip is going to take and when that time is up, your contact is alerted that you’ve made it home or wherever you were going. If you’re not yet home, your phone knows where home is, you can extend the timer rather than alert your contact.
Apple says we sometimes forget to send those ‘Home safe’ text and this would help. I have to admit I have been known to forget to text that so maybe the feature will change the quality of my relationships. Now I can’t wait for the feature.
Contact cards
Contact posters is a new feature in iOS 17 that allows you to customize the font, image, and background of your contact card. You can customise your contact card to your heart’s content. There are four poster types – camera, photos, memoji, and monogram. Your creativity is the limit.
Interactive widgets
Apple will finally allow you to do stuff right from a widget, making them much more useful like the Android ones. Right now on iOS 16, you can’t even skip a song from a widget, the moment you tap on a widget it opens the app in full-screen mode.
On iOS 17, as Apple puts it, you’ll be able to “Play music, turn off the lights, and more. Right from a widget.”
Text predictions
There will be predictions inline as you type. You know how the likes of Gboard, Swiftkey and most other keyboards will predict the next word you want to type and suggest it to you?
Well, Apple’s keyboard will not only predict the next word but the full sentence. Not only that, you will see the suggestion in the app you’re using, right in the message box or on the note you’re taking. So, with a tap of the space bar, you can have a predicted sentence filled out for you. Kind of like how Gmail does it.
We can’t go through all the iOS 17 features. Find out more here.
Devices
MacBook Air 15
This is a 15-inch MacBook Air, something fans of the ultra-light Air range will appreciate. Apple launched a 13-inch variant last year and the 15 is pretty much that laptop but with a bigger screen and battery.
The MacBook Air 15 is powered by an M2 chip and has support for up to up to 24GB of memory and up to 2TB of storage.
Now, the efficiency of the M2 chip and the bigger battery in the 15 means the laptop can go for a ridiculous 18 hours on the battery. My friend, if you slept for 6 hours a day and charged this laptop whilst you slumbered, you could use the laptop for the rest of the day, unplugged.
This laptop was made for Zimbabweans. You wouldn’t care about ZESA doing its load-shedding thing with this beast.
The only thing stopping us from all flocking to Apple’s website is the $1300 starting price. It’s not too bad though, if you think about it. The Zim Parliament bought US$9200 laptops last year if you recall. The Macbook Air 15 is a bargain in comparison.
Mac Studio and Mac Pro
Both these devices can be had with the new M2 Ultra chipset. This beast of a chipset has the following specs:
- 24-core CPU
- Up to a 76-core GPU
- 32-core Neural Engine
- Up to 192GB of memory
- 800GB/s of unified memory bandwidth
One of the crazy things you can do with the M2 Ultra is stream 22 videos at 8K ProRes resolution at once. That’s bananas.
The Mac Studio can be had with the M2 Ultra. The Studio starts at $2000.
The Mac Pro is Apple’s high-end desktop and it too can be had with the M2 Ultra. It has 8 thunderbolt ports, two HDMI ports and dual 10GB ethernet ports, with six open PCIe Gen 4 slots. It starts at $7000.
There’s plenty more that Apple announced, including:
- iPadOS 17 – the latest iPad software allows for personalization like never before.
- macOS Sonoma – Apple promises this latest software for their computers will boost gaming performance among other things
- watchOS 10 – Apple says its the biggest update since the introduction of Apple Watch
You can find out more about all that here.
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