WWDC 2024 highlights and key takeaways: Summary of important announcements

WWDC 2024: From iOS 18 to revamped Siri and Apple Intelligence, here are key takeaways and summary of important announcements from Apple's keynote address

At WWDC 2024, Apple announced significant updates across its entire product lineup, focusing on enhancing user experience, privacy, and ecosystem integration. Moreover, the US-based technology giant revamped its digital assistant Siri with more capabilities powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. Lastly, Apple debuted its personal intelligence system called Apple Intelligence, which leverages generative models for personalised interactions and integrates ChatGPT for advanced content generation. Here are key takeaways from Apple’s WWDC 2024 keynote address.

visionOS 2 for Vision Pro

visionOS 2 is a significant update for Apple Vision Pro, introducing several new features:

• Spatial Photos Experience: Enhances the immersive experience with support for spatial photos.
• New Gestures: Adds support for new gestures, improving interaction.
• SharePlay in Photos App: Allows spatial personas to engage with shared photos.
• Travel Mode: Includes train support for a better travel experience.
• Higher Display Resolution: Later this year, Vision Pro will support a resolution equivalent to two 4K displays.

iOS 18 for iPhone

The new features in iOS 18 focus on customisation, communication, and security:

• Home Screen: Apps and widgets can now be relocated, and the home screen supports customisable colours and new app icons in dark mode.
• Control Centre: Introduces a new group of controls accessible with a swipe-up gesture, showing connected home devices and allowing for quick control customisation. Controls are also accessible from the lock screen, and the Action Button can invoke these controls.
• App Lock: Independent app locking, with hidden apps placed in a secure folder.
• Messages: Includes RCS messaging support, emoji and sticker tapbacks, scheduled messages, text formatting, integrated text effects, and satellite messaging for iPhone 14 and later models.
• Mail: On-device categorisation of emails into primary, transactions, updates, and promotions (coming later this year).
• Game mode: Mac’s game mode is coming to the iPhone.
• Photos: A comprehensive redesign simplifies accessing memories and organising photos, with built-in intelligence for creating collections.
• Audio: Siri supports gestures such as nodding, voice isolation for AirPods Pro, and personalised spatial audio for gaming, with "Need for Speed Mobile" as the first title to support this feature – coming later this year.
• TV: Apple TV Plus gains an insight feature similar to Prime Video’s in-screen option and support for 21:9 format projectors.

watchOS 11 for Watch Series

watchOS 11 introduces several new features aimed at enhancing health and usability:

• Training Load: Tailored for enthusiasts and athletes.
• Vitals App: A new app to view vital health metrics quickly.
• Cycle Tracking: Enhanced with pregnancy tracking features.
• Smart Stacks: Automatically adds widgets like weather and translation.
• Check-In: A new feature coming to the Apple Watch.

iPadOS 18 for iPad

The updates in iPadOS 18 focus on productivity and ease of use:

• Floating Tab Bar: Customisable and movable into a sidebar.
• SharePlay: Allows remote control of someone else’s iPad.
• Calculator App: Finally coming to the iPad, with Apple Pencil support.
• Smart Script in Notes App: Improves handwriting using on-device machine learning, making it smoother and more legible. Pasted text appears in handwritten notes format, with support for spell check, text wrap, and copy/paste functions.

macOS Sequoia for Macs

macOS Sequoia enhances the continuity within the Apple ecosystem:

• Wireless iPhone Mirroring: See and control your iPhone remotely using a Mac. Notifications and audio are redirected to the Mac, with mirroring supported even when the iPhone is locked. Drag-and-drop functionality is included.
• Tile Position: Facilitates quick placement of windows side by side, akin to Windows.
• Background Replacements: Available for FaceTime and Zoom.
• Passwords App: Coming to Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Windows.

Safari

Safari continues to lead with a focus on speed, privacy, and user experience:

• Highlights Feature: Uses machine learning to detect and present interesting content.
• Reader Mode: Now includes summaries and table of contents.
• Viewer: Brings videos front and centre with system video controls.

Apple Intelligence

Apple introduces a new personal intelligence system:

• Generative Models: Designed with privacy in mind, capable of prioritising notifications, summarising content, and generating images using photos from the library.
• Personalised Actions: Across apps and Apple devices, powered by on-device intelligence available on A17 Pro and Apple Silicon from M1 chip onwards.
• Private Cloud Compute: For specialised processing that needs cloud support.

Revamped Siri

Siri receives significant enhancements:

• Natural Interaction: Redesigned for more natural, relevant, and personal interactions.
• Visual Redesign: A new wake visual that glows around the device display.
• Text Input Support: Similar to other AI chatbots, with on-screen awareness.
• Contextual Actions: Drives context from personal content such as photos, messages, calendar events, etc.
• Rewriting Tool: Helps write specialised content with context awareness.
• Smart Reply: For quick replies.
• ChatGPT Integration: For content generation, coming later this year, with user permission required to send information to ChatGPT.