Apple delivered a knock-out performance at WWDC 2019 showing great updates to MacOS, iPadOS, iOS and tvOS
The 2019 edition of WWDC showed Apple on top of it’s game. It was one of the best presentations I’ve seen from the Cupertino giant in a long while with Apple hitting all the right notes. Updates to tvOS, watchOS and iOS looked great while the introduction of iPadOS was surprising but a very welcome move. Even MacOS is gaining some interesting features and yes, there was new hardware as well with the Mac Pro.
Let’s start with the insanely powerfully but the funny looking Mac Pro. On screen it looks like Apple took the old Mac Pro tower and gave it a cheese grater makeover but it’s really the insides that make an impact. It is insanely powerful as demonstrated by Apple with the hundreds of audio streams in Logic and three simultaneous 8K videos rendering in real time on Final Cut Pro X. It will get professionals excited, although I do think that the Radeon 580X and 256GB SSD as base config at $5,000 is a bad decision. At that price Apple should have equipped a Vega and 512GB of storage. Also, $999 for a monitor stand?
Moving on to MacOS Catalina- the biggest change is the introduction of the Catalyst framework that allows iPad apps to work on MacOS with minimal effort. The third-party apps demoed by Apple show good promise and a huge improvement over the few first-party apps we saw shipped with Mojave.
Apple is also splitting iTunes into dedicated Music, Podcast and TV apps with iOS devices now appearing in the sidebar instead of iTunes. The ability to use the iPad as a secondary screen with Sidecar will also be helpful to some- there are already some apps already dedicated for this exact scenario but bundling it into the OS could provide a better experience.
