Today was the kickoff of Apple's 2016 World Wide Developers Conference including their annual keynote address, one of the most anticipated days of the year for Apple fans and followers of tech in general.
Apple has always been notoriously tightlipped and this year was no exception. Few spoilers were leaked ahead of time and the majority of what was introduced hadn't already been written about ad nauseam. There will be a million articles detailing all of the announcements so I'll make this brief and go over the parts that have me the most excited for the next few months:
Mac OS X Become macOS
This had been rumored for awhile so it wasn't much of a surprise. It brings their oldest and most established operating system inline with the naming scheme of the rest of their products. Still, it'll be strange to no longer be running OS X.
Siri
Another change that had been talked about for weeks was Siri on the Mac, but the implementation is beyond what I was expecting. The ability to use sophisticated queries (including follow up questions) and control 3rd party apps brings Siri up to par with the competition, in theory. I'm anxious to see how well it works in actual day to day use.
Apple Music Redesign
Thank god. The lyrics display is a nice touch but not something I'll likely use very often. The UI changes look good and I hope the "Discovery Mix" that was shown lives up to the bar set by Spotify.
Photos
Confession time: I recently uploaded my entire photo library to Google Photos. I'm not proud of that but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It didn't take long. Fortunately almost all of the features that made Google so attractive are being brought to iCloud Photos. Facial and object recognition, "Memories" and map view are all going to be nice additions.
Messages
The list of changes here are too extensive to go through, and while some of them seem kinda silly (emojifying text?) the ability to incorporate 3rd party apps into Messages makes this a HUGE upgrade.
watchOS 3
What I'm most looking forward to. Faster app opening, customizable watch faces, handwriting recognition, and most importantly better activity tracking including the social aspect that had been missing from the beginning.
The biggest takeaway from all of this has been the furthering of the new "Open Apple" even more. Almost every presentation ended with the announcement that whatever they'd just talked about would now have an SDK for developers to use. Messages, Activity, Maps, Siri - all will be open for 3rd party apps to tap into.
The only real disappointment was the lack of new hardware, but Apple PR had more or less announced that wasn't happening. That's ok with me since I can't afford a new MacBook Pro yet anyway. Hold that off for a few months when I'll be ready to throw my credit card at them no questions asked.
If you've got a spare 90 minutes and actually read through all of this, take the time to watch the entire presentation. Seeing all these new features are a helluva lot more interesting than me rattling on about just a handful of them.