For more information on all the great Apple products, features, and services, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227).  Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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Remember, Apple Intelligence features work only on a Mac with Apple silicon, an iPad with an A17 Pro or M-series chip, or an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16. Intel-based Macs and older iPhones and iPads can’t play. If you’ve been holding off on upgrading, this is a fine time to make the jump. Regardless, you must turn on Apple Intelligence, which you do on the Mac in System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri and in Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri on the iPhone and iPad.

What can you look forward to with this second set of Apple Intelligence features?

Image Playground Helps Make Fun Images

With Image Playground, Apple is dipping its toe into AI-driven image generation. The standalone Image Playground app lets you create amusing images with text descriptions, either starting from scratch or from a photo. You can choose from two styles: Animation, which Apple describes as “a modern 3-D animated look,” and Illustration, which “offers images with simple shapes, clear lines, and colorblocking.” (A third Sketch style will appear in a future release, and you can use ChatGPT in Writing Tools to create images in many other styles.) You can also create images directly in Messages, Freeform, Keynote, and other apps.

Once you’ve entered a few words of description or selected a person, you can embellish the image by tapping the buttons for suggested themes, costumes, accessories, and places. Each addition causes Image Playground to generate a new image, and swiping left on that image pushes it to try again. Tap the ••• button to save or share an image you like. Saved images become available on all your devices.

Genmoji Spice Up Chats on the iPhone

Less ambitious but potentially more fun are Genmoji, which are custom emoji that you create with text descriptions. Want to emote about the cold to a fellow musician? Create an emoji featuring two cellos wearing scarves.

To do this, switch to the emoji keyboard, tap the Genmoji button to the right of the search field, and describe your desired emoji. As with Image Playground, you can keep swiping left on the generated image to create more variations. When you get what you like, tap it to insert it into your chat or document.

Remember that a single emoji sent by itself in Messages is quite large; two or three emoji are medium-sized, and inserting any more than that or adding text causes them to display at the smallest size.

Created Genmoji are added to your emoji collection on all your devices, but they’re actually stickers. You can remove them by tapping the ⊕ button in Messages, tapping Stickers, and using touch-and-hold on a Genmoji to access the Remove button. You can’t create Genmoji in macOS right now, but Apple has promised that feature for a future release.

Image Wand Cleans Up Apple Pencil Sketches

In iPadOS 18.2, the Notes app now offers an Apple Intelligence-powered Image Wand tool for those taking notes with an Apple Pencil. Make a rough sketch with your Apple Pencil, select Image Wand, draw a circle around your sketch, and Image Wand will turn it into a polished image. If your circle also contains text, Image Wand considers it when building the final image.

Visual Intelligence Explains What You See

When you upgrade to iOS 18.2 on an iPhone 16, the Camera Control button gains a new capability: Visual Intelligence. Press and hold it (whenever the Camera app isn’t already open, since that will trigger video recording), and Visual Intelligence presents Ask and Search buttons on either side of the shutter button. Tapping Ask causes ChatGPT to describe the image and lets you pose follow-up queries, and tapping Search performs a Google reverse image search; tap any of the results to load it. (If you can’t immediately tap Ask or Search, press the Camera Control button again or tap the shutter button to freeze the image temporarily.)

Siri Channels ChatGPT

Perhaps the most anticipated enhancement to Apple Intelligence is the integration of ChatGPT into Siri. Unfortunately, if your goal is to converse fluidly with ChatGPT, you may be better off using OpenAI’s ChatGPT app, perhaps triggered by the Action button or a widget. The problem is that unless you explicitly direct a Siri query by starting with “Ask ChatGPT,” Siri may try to answer with its own Web search or trigger a command, leading to inexplicable and unhelpful responses. Even when you get Siri to ask ChatGPT for a response, there’s no option to have it read back to you aloud, as with ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode.

If you want to use ChatGPT through Siri, turn the feature on in Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri > ChatGPT. While you’re there, you’ll probably want to turn off Confirm ChatGPT requests, which otherwise ask if you want to use ChatGPT every time it comes up. Although it may not be obvious, once you’re in a conversation with ChatGPT, you can keep talking as long as the Siri animation continues around the edge of the screen. Unfortunately, you cannot scroll back to any previous response while Siri is channeling ChatGPT; for full transcripts, you must revert to the ChatGPT app or website.

ChatGPT Enhances Writing Tools

The final place ChatGPT appears in Apple Intelligence is in Writing Tools, which may be more useful than its Siri integration. The new Compose option leverages ChatGPT to generate content wherever you’re writing, and you can also use it to create images using ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities. Writing Tools also now allows users to request their own changes to selected text (including recasting it as a haiku, for example) instead of relying solely on the canned options to make the text friendlier, more professional, or more concise.

To do this, bring up Writing Tools in any app (by choosing Edit > Writing Tools > Show Writing Tools or Control-clicking selected text and choosing from the Writing Tools menu). Tap Compose and describe what you want ChatGPT to create. If it’s not quite what you want, which is likely, keep asking for refinements or go in a different direction.

What’s Next for Apple Intelligence?

Although this second wave of Apple Intelligence features largely fulfills Apple’s main promises, a few major additions remain for 2025. Most notable are significant changes to Siri that will enable it to take your personal context—your email, messages, and photos, for instance—into account. Siri will also gain onscreen awareness to include what you see in its responses. Finally, Apple is giving Siri access to hundreds of new actions in Apple and third-party apps, which should make it more capable of acting on your behalf. The other notable upcoming change is Priority Notifications, which will evaluate the notifications from all your apps and help you focus on the most important ones.

We also hope Apple will continue to refine and improve the existing Apple Intelligence features. While they’re well integrated into the overall Apple experience, they seldom measure up to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other leading AI systems.

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You may need some of that new hardware to take advantage of Apple Intelligence. Its features work only on a Mac with Apple silicon, an iPad with an A17 Pro or M-series chip, or an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16. Intel-based Macs and older iPhones and iPads can’t play.

Although we have no problem with recommending that you upgrade your iPhone and iPad to iOS 18.1 and iPadOS 18.1, we recommend more caution when it comes to upgrading your Mac to macOS 15.1 Sequoia. There aren’t any general showstoppers, but you shouldn’t upgrade until you’re confident your particular workflows are fully compatible.

What will Apple Intelligence do for you if you upgrade? Here’s what you need to know.

Writing Tools Everywhere

The Apple Intelligence Writing Tools will help you craft and polish your prose—or just make your email sound more professional. Writing Tools provides three core functions:

• Proofread: The Proofread tool will significantly reduce spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes in your text. While it may not match up with a human proofreader, using it will make your text cleaner.
  
• Rewrite: If you’re unhappy with the tone of your text, use the Rewrite tool to improve it or make it friendlier, more professional, or shorter. Even if you don’t adopt the complete rewrite, some of its phrases or word choices might take your writing up a notch.
• Summarize: A straight summary might be useful for condensing text, and specialized summaries can list key points, make a list, or create a table. These features are probably most useful when working with text you’ve been given and need to edit into shape.

Writing Tools are available in nearly all apps that accept text. Either look for an Edit > Writing Tools menu or Control-click a text selection and look in the Writing Tools submenu. Right now, Apple apps like Mail and Notes provide proofreading controls that let you see (and revert) each change independently. With the Rewrite and Summary tools and Proofread in other apps, you have to compare the original and the rewrite manually, with your only options being to replace the selected text or copy the suggested revision.

Photos Enhancements

Photos benefits from Apple Intelligence in three ways as well:

• Clean Up: Many a great photo suffers from a random bystander or distracting telephone pole. Clean Up removes people and objects from your photos, either identifying them automatically or working from your manual selection. It’s not perfect, but Clean Up is a hugely welcome addition to Photos.
  
• Descriptive search: We’ve been able to search for objects in photos for several years now, but with Apple Intelligence, you’ll be able to find photos and videos based on more extensive and natural descriptions, like “Halloween in 2014.”
• Descriptive memory movies: The Memories feature in Photos automatically creates movies based on photos it thinks you might want to see together. With Apple Intelligence, you can describe the photos you’d like it to include.

Notification Summaries

Apple has long been sensitive about how distracting our devices can be due to numerous apps posting notifications throughout the day. Apple Intelligence tries to help by summarizing lengthy individual notifications and groups of notifications. Notification summaries probably won’t rock your world, but it can be nice to have a sense of what’s going on with a group of notifications before you wade into an involved conversation. If you don’t like the summaries for particular apps, turn them off in Settings > Notifications > Summarize Previews.

Mail (and Messages) Enhancements

Speaking of summaries, in Mail, the most welcome Apple Intelligence change is to replace each first-line snippet in message lists with summaries of the message or conversation content. It makes scanning email for important messages easier.

Other Apple Intelligence changes include moving priority messages—those that require a quick reply—to the top of the message list and the option to summarize long messages or conversations using a Summarize button at the top of the message pane. Both Mail and Messages also offer a Smart Reply feature that suggests reasonable replies. They’re like tapback responses on steroids.

Audio Recording, Transcription, and Summarization

Apple Intelligence offers major advances for the Notes and Phone apps: audio recording, transcription, and summarization. Be aware that the Phone app alerts participants when you start recording—just joke, “For quality assurance…” before tapping the record button.

The big win comes with Notes (on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac), which can record a meeting and provide a transcript for later searching and summarization. The clearer the audio, the better. It stumbles on many names and doesn’t differentiate between speakers, but transcripts can be hugely helpful. You can keep a transcript in its recording (left), where you can jump around in the audio by tapping the associated text, or you can use the ••• button to export it to its enclosing note (middle) or tap a button to get a summary (right).

Siri Enhancements

Apple has promised a lot for Siri but hasn’t delivered much. A new interface replaces the animated circle with a glowing light and the option to type your query rather than speak it. However, the only functional improvement from Apple Intelligence so far seems to be Siri’s awareness of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac user guides. If you’re unsure how to accomplish a built-in task, try asking Siri.

What’s Coming Next

Welcome though they may be, the initial wave of Apple Intelligence features won’t set the world on fire. But Apple has big plans for Apple Intelligence, with new features slated for release in December 2024 and more coming in 2025. Things you can look forward to in a few months include:

• ChatGPT will make its promised appearance, bringing world knowledge into Writing Tools and Siri.
• You can jazz up your conversations in Messages with original Genomoji merely by describing the emoji you’d like to see. “Penguin on a surfboard,” anyone?
• The Image Playground feature will let you generate original images in various styles, though none are photorealistic on purpose—no deepfakes from Apple.
• Image Wand will enhance your Apple Pencil sketches by turning them into polished images, and if you circle an empty space, Image Wand will create an image from the surrounding area.
• Writing Tools will let you describe a specific change you want to apply to your text, like adding more descriptive words to a blog post. We hope Apple puts more thought into the workflow so it’s easier to compare the before and after.
• The Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 line will tap Apple Intelligence to help users learn about objects and places in the iPhone’s viewfinder.

Further out, Apple says that Priority Notifications will surface your most important notifications, and Siri will learn how to draw from your personal context, take action in numerous apps, and gain awareness of onscreen information. We’re still curious to see how Apple will integrate a more intelligent Siri into the HomePod and Apple TV.  

For more information on all the great Apple products, features, and services, give us a call!  940-767-MACS (6227).  Or stop by MacTech Solutions, 4020 Rhea Rd, Suite 3B, Wichita Falls.  We’re open Monday thru Friday, 10am to 6pm

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• iOS 17 and iPadOS 17: Settings > Siri & Search > Listen For
• macOS 14 Sonoma: System Settings > Siri & Spotlight > Listen For
• watchOS 10: Watch app > My Watch > Siri > Listen For
• HomePod Software 17: Home app > long-press HomePod > Accessory Settings > Listen For “Siri” or “Hey Siri”

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Before we get into the ten features that we think you’ll most like when everything ships in September or October, we should note that Apple was surprisingly silent on one topic: future Apple silicon chips. Many observers had expected Apple to announce an M1X or M2 chip that would power professional laptop and desktop Macs. We’ll have to satisfy ourselves with the impressive performance of the M1-based Macs we have now and wait a little longer for whatever comes next.

On to the hot new features!

Account Recovery and Legacy Contacts Simplify Recovering Account Data

It’s all too common that people forget their Apple ID passwords and can’t access their accounts. Apple hopes to make that a little less stressful with Account Recovery Contacts. Specify someone as your Account Recovery Contact, and they’ll be able to help you reset your password and regain access to your account, with no need to call us or Apple for assistance.

Also welcome will be the addition of Legacy Contacts. Once this feature is available, everyone should make sure they have appropriate family members or friends set as Legacy Contacts. Then, in the event of your untimely death, your Legacy Contacts can access your account and personal information. Using Legacy Contacts will be far easier than having to provide the legal paperwork to Apple to request access to a deceased family member’s accounts.

FaceTime Gains Features That Make It Competitive with Zoom

During the last year, we’ve all spent vastly more time in videoconferencing apps for work, school, and socializing. Alas, Apple’s FaceTime has been a weak entry in that market. With the features Apple is now promising, however, it should compete well with the likes of Zoom, Skype, and Google Meet. FaceTime will finally get a standard grid view, blur your backgrounds with Portrait mode, and offer two microphone modes: Voice Isolation to cut down on background noise (for standard meetings) and Wide Spectrum to leave ambient sound unfiltered (for performances, say). FaceTime will even be able to alert you when you’re talking but muted.

More important yet is the fact that you’ll finally be able to invite Windows and Android users to FaceTime calls using standard Web links. Non-Apple users will have to use a Chrome-based browser like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Brave. Plus, when you create an event in Calendar, you’ll be able to make a Web link for the call that you can share. And when it’s time for the call, a Join button makes it easy to get in.

Universal Control Lets Macs and iPads Share a Keyboard and Pointing Device

With Sidecar in macOS 10.15 Catalina and iOS 13, Apple made it so you could use an iPad as a secondary screen for a Mac. In macOS 12 Monterey and iPadOS 15, Apple is taking that concept further. With Universal Control, if you merely set a Mac and an iPad next to each other, you’ll be able to use the Mac’s keyboard and mouse or trackpad to work between the two devices (in fact, Universal Control supports up to three). No setup is required—just move your pointer to the edge of the Mac screen and push it “through” the edge to move it to the iPad screen. You can even drag and drop content between devices.

Live Text Lets You Work with Text in Images

Have you ever taken a photo of something just to capture a phone number or address? We have, for sure. Apple’s new Live Text feature treats text in images just like text you type, so you can use functions like copy and paste, lookup, and translate. Live Text will work in Photos, of course, but also in Quick Look, Safari, and Screenshot, and in live Camera previews on the iPhone. It’s an impressive use of image recognition technologies.

Along the same lines, in Photos, you’ll also be able to use the information button on any photo to highlight recognized objects and scenes and get additional information about them. Apple says you’ll be able to learn more about popular art and landmarks, plants and flowers, books, and pet breeds.

Siri Gets Faster, More Reliable, More Private, and More Useful

Thanks to the ever-increasing power of the Neural Engine in Apple devices, Apple says it will bring all processing of Siri requests onto your device. That may not sound like a big deal, but it means that Siri should work faster, more reliably, and more privately. It will be faster because there’s no need to send speech to and from Apple’s servers for processing. It will make Siri work more reliably when your iPhone doesn’t have strong cell service and enable offline support for many types of requests. And Apple won’t know what you’re saying at all.

Other Siri improvements will include the capability to announce reminders when you’re wearing AirPods, improved conversation context so you can refer to what you just asked, and support for controlling HomeKit devices at specific times. HomeKit developers will even be able to add Siri support to their products through a HomePod.

Improved Multitasking Controls Come to the iPad

The big problem with Apple’s multitasking options on the iPad has been remembering how to use them. With iPadOS 15, Apple hopes to solve that with a new menu that will appear at the top of apps, with buttons for entering full screen, Split View, or Slide Over.

Apple also added a new multiwindow shelf that appears at the bottom of the screen at launch and provides a Dock-like view of all the open windows in that app. If you ignore it, it fades away quickly, but it should help you remember which windows you have open and access them quickly.

The iPad Finally Gets the App Library and Home Screen Widgets

Last year, in iOS 14, Apple introduced the App Library and Home Screen widgets. The App Library holds all your apps so you can declutter your life by removing them from the Home Screen. And Home Screen widgets let you add app-specific widgets that provide at-a-glance information. Sadly, iPadOS 14 didn’t include those features.

iPadOS 15 rectifies that oversight, adding both the App Library and Home Screen widgets, complete with some larger widget sizes for the larger iPad screen. They’ll work just like on the iPhone. It’s about time!

Locate Lost AirPods Pro and AirPods Max with Find My Network Support

As it stands now, you can theoretically find AirPods using the Find My app. However, it shows only the last position of the AirPods at a general level, and you have to get within range of them to play a sound. In the future, however, the AirPods Pro and AirPods Max will support the Find My network, so other people’s devices can report their location generally, and once you get within Bluetooth range, you can play a sound to locate them.

Hopefully, that will happen less often thanks to new separation alerts that, when enabled, will alert you when you leave an Apple device, AirTag, or Find My-compatible item behind.

Private Relay Protects Safari Traffic for iCloud+ Subscribers

Apple has been adding lots of privacy-protecting features over the past few years, but Private Relay goes even further to ensure that even your ISP can’t track where you go on the Web and sell that data to advertisers. Private Relay encrypts your Safari traffic and passes it through two Internet relays. No one—not even Apple—can then use your IP address, location, and browsing activity to create a detailed profile of you. Everyone who pays for extra iCloud storage will transition to the new iCloud+ for the same cost and will get Private Relay for no additional fee.

While we’re talking about iCloud, Apple also says that you’ll be able to get custom domain names for iCloud Mail addresses and invite family members to use the same domain with their iCloud Mail accounts.

Use AirPlay to Send Audio or Video to Your Mac

Many people have discovered how neat it is to use AirPlay to display photos or videos from an iPhone or iPad on a TV attached to an Apple TV. Macs could also broadcast their displays to an Apple TV. But what you couldn’t do is use AirPlay to send audio or video from another Apple device to a Mac. With macOS 12 Monterey, that will become possible, enabling you to use a Mac’s large screen to play a video, share a Keynote presentation, and more.

Apple’s upcoming operating system releases boast many other new features, and we plan to explore more of them once everything ships in a few months. We’ll let you know when it’s time to update!

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The post The Ten Upcoming Mac/iPhone/iPad Features We Think You’ll Most Like first appeared on MacTech Solutions.

When you decide to take the leap and install—be sure to make a backup first, just in case—here are four features we recommend you check out right away.

App Library

If you’re like us, your first Home screen or two are well-organized, and after that…where did all those apps come from? We find ourselves searching for little-used apps (swipe down on a Home screen) but wish we could see a list of all installed apps. With iOS 14’s new App Library, we can.

A new screen to the right of your last Home screen, the App Library collects all your apps into folders. At the top, Suggestions includes four suggested apps based on time, location, or activity, and Recently Added shows the apps you’ve downloaded lately. The rest of the folders, which, unfortunately, you can’t rename or rearrange, organize apps by category. In a folder grid, tapping a large icon opens that app, while tapping the group of four small icons in the lower-right corner opens the folder. To see an alphabetical list of every app, tap the search field at the top. You can type to narrow the list.

The App Library is tremendously useful because it contains every app and is always in the same place. That enables you to more easily find apps that you’ve removed from your Home screen. It also works well if you choose to hide entire Home screens, another new iOS 14 feature. Note that you can copy apps from the App Library to a Home screen, which can aid in creating your own organizational scheme.

You might even find that you like having just a couple of Home screens and leaving everything else in the App Library.

Home Screen Widgets

Nothing prevents you from whittling your set of Home screens down to just one, but another new iOS 14 feature might encourage you to have a few more. For some years now, apps have had widgets. Widgets are little summary interfaces accessible in Today View, which you access by swiping right on the first Home screen. In iOS 14, you can now place some of those widgets directly on a Home screen.

Widgets come in three sizes: a small square that occupies the space of four normal app icons, a horizontal rectangle that’s the size of two rows of apps, and a large square that takes up the space of four rows of apps.

To add a widget, touch and hold any empty spot on a Home screen, tap the + button in the upper-left corner, and drag the desired widget out to the Home screen, where you can continue to drag it to your desired position. When viewing the widget collection, tap a widget to see all its available sizes.

Right now, most widgets are from Apple apps, but we anticipate many developers adding widgets for their apps in the coming months. You can have as many widgets on a Home screen as will fit, and there’s no problem mixing widgets and apps within the available space. Think about what information you like to get from your iPhone, and then go nuts creating custom Home screens that show what you want at a glance.

Shrunken Siri and Phone Call Interfaces

In previous versions of iOS, when you invoked Siri, the interface completely took over the iPhone screen. It turns out there was no need for that, so in iOS 14, Apple shrunk the Siri interface so it appears at the bottom of the screen, on top of whatever app you’re using. If Siri’s response requires giving you feedback, that appears on top of the current app as well.

Plus, when you receive a phone call, instead of the call taking over the entire screen, you see a dark banner at the top of the screen with red Decline and green Accept buttons. Tap either of those buttons, or tap or swipe down the banner to reveal the full-screen call interface, where you can also tap to answer. Want to delay? Swipe up on the banner to shrink it to a button in the top-left corner of the screen.

These small changes make using Siri or answering phone calls feel much more fluid than the approach of taking over the entire screen.

Pinned Messages Conversations

We all have individuals and groups that we converse with regularly in Messages. It’s frustrating to hunt through the list of conversations to find them, so iOS 14 adds the concept of “pinned” conversations. Touch and hold on any conversation in the list to bring up a preview of the last few messages and some commands. Then tap Pin to add the conversation to the top of the Messages screen as a circular icon. From then on, tap that icon to enter the conversation quickly.

iOS 14 sports many other features as well, and we’ll be sharing more about them in future articles. Remember, it’s worth waiting a bit to install, and note that iOS 14 is compatible with the iPhone 6s or later, including the first-generation iPhone SE, and the current seventh-generation iPod touch.

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This is how Google, Facebook, and Twitter operate. They provide services for free, collect data about you, and make money by showing you ads. In theory, the more that advertisers know about you, the better they can target ads to you, and the more likely you’ll be to buy. Personalized advertising can seem creepy (or clueless, when it fails), but it isn’t inherently evil, and we’re not suggesting that you stop using ad-supported services.

This ad-driven approach stands in stark contrast to how Apple does business. Apple makes most of its money by selling hardware—iPhones, Macs, and iPads, primarily. Another big chunk of Apple’s revenue comes from App Store and iTunes Store sales, iCloud subscriptions, and Apple Pay fees. Knowing more about you, what Web pages you visit, what you buy, and who you’re friends with doesn’t help Apple’s business, and on its Privacy page, Apple says bluntly, “We believe privacy is a fundamental human right.”

Of course, once your data is out there, it can be lost or stolen—in June 2018, a security researcher discovered that the online data broker Exactis was exposing a database containing 340 million records of data on hundreds of millions of American adults. Ouch!

Let’s look at a few of the ways that Apple protects your privacy.

Siri and Dictation

The longer you use Siri and Dictation, the better they work, thanks to your devices transmitting data back to Apple for analysis. However, Apple creates a random identifier for your data rather than associating the information with your Apple ID, and if you reset Siri by turning it off and back on, you’ll get a new random identifier. Whenever possible, Apple keeps Siri functionality on your device, so if you search for a photo by location or get suggestions after a search, those results come from local data only.

Touch ID and Face ID

When you register your fingerprints with Touch ID or train Face ID to recognize your face, it’s reasonable to worry about that information being stored where attackers—or some government agency—could access it and use it for nefarious purposes. Apple was concerned about that too, so these systems don’t store images of your fingerprints or face, but instead mathematical signatures based on them. Those signatures are kept only locally, in the Secure Enclave security coprocessor that’s part of the CPU of the iPhone and iPad—and on Touch ID-equipped laptops—in such a way that the images can’t be reverse engineered from the signatures.

And, of course, a major goal of Touch ID and Face ID is to prevent someone from violating your privacy by accessing your device directly.

Health and Fitness

People with medical conditions can be concerned about health information impacting health insurance bills or a potential employer’s hiring decision. To assuage that worry, Apple lets you choose what information ends up in Health app, and once it’s there, encrypts it whenever your iPhone is locked. Plus, any Health data that’s backed up to iCloud is encrypted both in transit and when it’s stored on Apple’s servers.

App Store Guidelines

A linchpin in Apple’s approach to privacy is its control over the App Store. Since developers must submit apps to Apple for approval, Apple can enforce stringent guidelines that specify how apps can ask for access to your data (location, photos, contacts, etc.). This isn’t a blanket protection—for instance, if you allow a social media app Facebook to access your contacts and location, the company behind that app will get lots of data on your whereabouts and can even cross-reference that with the locations of everyone in your contact list who also uses the service.

In the end, only you can decide how much information you want to share with the likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and only you can determine if or when their use of your details feels like an invasion of privacy. But by using Apple products and services, you can be certain that the company that could know more about you than any other is actively trying to protect your privacy.

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HomePod

The much-rumored HomePod is Apple’s answer to the popular Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers. In classic Apple fashion, however, the wireless HomePod speaker is focused first on delivering amazing audio quality that competes with the top Wi-Fi speakers available on the market. Setup will be as simple as setting up AirPods; just hold your iPhone next to a HomePod to configure it.

Physically, the HomePod is a 7-inch high cylinder covered in a 3-D acoustic mesh and available in black or white. Inside, it features a 4-inch Apple-designed woofer for deep, clean bass, and an array of seven beamforming tweeters that provides pure high-frequency acoustics.

The smarts in Apple’s smart speaker come from Apple’s A8 chip, which powered the iPhone 6. Thanks to the A8 chip and a six-microphone array, the HomePod can optimize its audio quality for its position in a room. If you put a pair of HomePods in the same room, they detect each other automatically and balance the audio to deliver an immersive listening experience.

Those microphones also let you control the HomePod via Siri. It’s designed to work with an Apple Music subscription, and Siri will be able to respond to many more music-related queries and commands. You can also ask Siri for weather forecasts, sports scores, traffic reports, stock prices, and even unit conversions. Thanks to the HomePod’s integration with the Apple ecosystem, you’ll also be able to send messages, make reminders, set alarms and timers, and control HomeKit devices.

Because it’s Apple, protecting your privacy is paramount, so the HomePod sends nothing to Apple until you say “Hey Siri,” and even then, what you say is both anonymized and encrypted.

When it ships in December for $349, the HomePod will be more expensive than the Amazon Echo or Google Home, neither of which have particularly good sound, but cheaper than many high-quality wireless speakers. We’re looking forward to listening to our music and podcasts on the HomePod, and to seeing how successfully Siri responds to us.

New iMacs and Faster Notebooks

For those who have been waiting patiently to buy a new iMac or Mac notebook, now’s the time. Apple refreshed the entire iMac line with Intel’s latest processors, faster storage, higher performance graphics, and brighter, more colorful screens. They all provide a pair of Thunderbolt 3 ports for driving external displays and connecting to speedy external storage.

The most-improved award goes to the 21.5-inch iMac with 4K Retina display, which should see the most performance gains from faster CPUs and high-performance Radeon Pro graphics processors. Plus, that model can now take up to 32 GB of RAM, up from 16 GB — it’s far more compelling than before, if you don’t need the larger screen and better performance of the 27-inch model.

You can buy a 21.5-inch non-Retina iMac starting at $1099, a 21.5-inch iMac with 4K Retina display starting at $1299, and a 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display starting at $1799.

Looking for more performance than even a tricked-out 27-inch Retina iMac can provide?. Wait for December, when Apple promises to release the new iMac Pro. It’s a workstation-class machine that retains the form factor of the 27-inch Retina iMac but swaps the brushed aluminum look for a space gray finish. It will be the fastest Mac ever, thanks to 8-core, 10-core, or 18-core Intel Xeon CPUs. Other performance enhancements include a next-generation Radeon Pro Vega graphics chip, up to 128 GB of RAM, a 1 TB SSD upgradeable to 4 TB, four Thunderbolt 3 ports, and 10 Gbps Ethernet. It won’t come cheap, with prices starting at $4999 and rising quickly with build-to-order options.

On the portable front, Apple’s top-of-the-line MacBook Pro notebooks should run a bit more quickly thanks to the addition of Intel’s latest processors running at slightly higher clock speeds. These models also get new graphics processors that improve rendering performance. The 13-inch MacBook Pro still starts at $1299 or $1799 for a model with a Touch Bar and beefier specs. The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar starts at $2399.

For those who value portability over all else, the MacBook has become more attractive due to improvements that address its previously underwhelming performance. Along with sprightlier CPUs, it has a new SSD that Apple claims is up to 50% faster, and you can now buy it with 16 GB of RAM, up from the previous limit of 8 GB. It’s still a bit pricey for its performance, with two models priced starting at $1299 and $1599.

If you don’t have much to spend, consider the $999 13-inch MacBook Air. Apple gave it a minor speed bump, replacing the stock 1.6 GHz Intel Core i5 processor with a 1.8 GHz version. It remains upgradeable to an Intel Core i7 running at 2.2 GHz.

By the way, if you’ve been jonesing for a full-size wireless keyboard, you’ll be pleased to learn that Apple also just released the new wireless Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad. It’s $129.

New iPad Pros

Although these days Apple is putting more emphasis on the Mac, particularly for professional use, the company certainly isn’t ignoring pro iPad users. If you’ve been holding off on an iPad Pro purchase, there’s no reason to wait any longer. Apple introduced a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro that’s just a hair taller and wider than the 9.7-inch iPad Pro it replaces, despite having a larger screen that’s 20% larger. The company also enhanced the 12.9-inch iPad Pro with a variety of new hardware capabilities.

All motion on the screens of both iPad Pros will be smoother and more responsive, thanks to a previously unheard of 120 Hz refresh rate. It will make drawing with the Apple Pencil even more fluid. The screens are also brighter, can display more colors, and have low reflectivity. Both models get new cameras that match those in the iPhone 7: a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera with optical image stabilization and True Tone flash, plus a 7-megapixel FaceTime HD camera on the front.

Since professionals care about performance, the new iPad Pros rely on Apple’s new processor, the A10X Fusion chip. Apple claims that the A10X is 30% faster than the A9X used by the previous generation of iPad Pros, and it also delivers 40% faster graphics rendering.

You can buy an iPad Pro with 64 GB, 256 GB, or 512 GB of storage, significantly more than last year’s models. The 64 GB 10.5-inch iPad Pro with Wi-Fi costs $649; jumping to 256 GB increases the price to $749, and going to 512 GB raises it to $949. For the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, a 64 GB configuration starts at $799, with 256 GB at $899 and 512 GB at $1099. Add $130 to any configuration to get cellular connectivity as well.

Although the iPad Pros are available starting this month, you can look forward to them becoming significantly more useful when Apple releases iOS 11 in the fall. That’s because iOS 11 promises to bring a number of iPad-specific features, including:

• A customizable Dock that holds more than six apps
• A new App Switcher that includes split-screen app combinations
• A new Files app for managing documents
• Drag-and-drop capability for moving data between apps
• Instant Notes, which opens the Notes app with an Apple Pencil tap on the Lock screen
• Inline drawing with the Apple Pencil in Notes and Mail
• Handwritten text recognition so you can search what you write

iOS 11

At WWDC, Apple gave us a peek at iOS 11, due as a free update this fall (which likely means September). Although it offers numerous changes, iOS 11 won’t seem like a huge revision, since most of the changes are refinements rather than new apps or wholesale rewrites.

Perhaps the most noticeable change is Control Center, the panel that appears when you drag up from the bottom of the Lock screen or Home screen. Apple has redesigned it so that the audio and HomeKit controls fit on one screen, even on the iPhone. In iOS 10, you may have to scroll sideways to see all the controls, which is awkward. The new design also takes advantage of 3D Touch to let you do more than toggle settings on and off.

We’re looking forward to the new Messages, which takes advantage of iCloud to sync messages (including deletions!) between your devices. What’s most important about this is that older messages will be stored only in iCloud so they won’t occupy precious storage space on your device.

Siri will receive new voices that sound more natural, and it will also sync what it knows about you between devices to personalize responses better. Siri is also getting smarter, or at least more observant. Thanks to a technology called Siri Intelligence, Siri will better understand your interests and the context in which you’re speaking. So, if you search for information about Paris, the News app may start recommending articles about France, and if you type “bor” in an app, the iOS keyboard may suggest “Bordeaux” as an auto-completion.

Apple will introduce new formats to the Camera app in iOS 11, which should result in photos and videos that take up much less space. iPhone 7 Plus users will also appreciate improvements in the two-camera Portrait mode. If you like Live Photos, don’t miss new features in Photos for trimming and editing the underlying movies — you can even apply looping and reversing effects.

Although Maps may always be playing catch-up with more established mapping companies, we’re still pleased to see Apple adding features like indoor maps of malls and airports in major cities. It will also inform you of speed limits and offer lane guidance on large roads.

If splitting a restaurant bill is awkward, you’ll be able to use Apple Pay in iOS 11 to send money directly to another person. It goes into an Apple Cash Card found in the Wallet app, and money stored there can be transferred to a bank account or used to pay for Apple Pay purchases.

Last, but certainly least, is a potentially life-saving feature: Do No Disturb While Driving. When enabled, it will detect that you’re riding in a car and shut off all notifications to your iPhone. You’ll be able to set an auto-reply text message in case anyone messages you, which the sender can break through by stating that the message is urgent. You can also turn off Do Not Disturb While Driving if you’re a passenger.

iOS 11 requires a 64-bit device, which means that it won’t be available to the iPhone 5, iPhone 5c, and fourth-generation iPad, but it will run on all other iOS devices Apple has released since 2013.

macOS 10.13 High Sierra

When Apple releases macOS 10.13 High Sierra this fall, it will include big behind-the-scenes improvements and a few upfront changes in core Apple apps like Safari, Mail, and Photos. The upgrade will be free, and High Sierra will run on all Macs that can run 10.12 Sierra now.

The most important change under the hood is a new file system called APFS (Apple File system), which is designed for modern needs like fast backups of massive amounts of data and optimal behavior when storing files on solid-state drives. The file system is the smarts beneath the Mac’s Finder, helping your Mac to keep track of all its data. The Finder itself won’t change much, but certain tasks like duplicating lots of data will be much faster.

Other low-level technology changes will enable developers to bring faster video streaming and playback to the Mac. Plus, they’ll be able to create graphically demanding apps that have even more realistic images, which is important for the fields of virtual reality and gaming.

More obviously, you can look forward to Safari providing a more enjoyable Web browsing experience, with fewer ads, articles opening in the less-cluttered Reader view, and no more auto-playing audio. You can customize all these settings, as well as the text zoom percentage, on a per-site basis.

Searching in Mail will be significantly faster, with a Top Hits area that Apple says will learn from you over time and get smarter about suggesting ideal results. Mail will also feature a redesigned split screen option that puts the compose window next to your messages, and your Mail archive will consume less drive space than before, thanks to better compression.

Photos gets a lot of attention from Apple in High Sierra, with a refined interface that should make it easier to find tools, syncing of facial recognition training between your Apple devices, new editing tools for fine-tuning and saturation, and fun choices for enhancing Live Photos. Also, Photos will finally allow integration with third-party editing apps like Photoshop and Pixelmator, along with support for printing projects to non-Apple print services, so you’ll have more choices in that area.

Overall, High Sierra looks like it will be a solid refinement on Sierra, with some core improvements for pro users and a nice collection of enhancements to apps that the rest of us use every day.

tvOS and watchOS 4

Although Apple gave tvOS the lead announcement at WWDC, it was just to get it out of the way quickly before making all their other announcements. The news is that Amazon Prime Video will be coming to the Apple TV sometime later this year, and better yet, it will integrate with the TV app. It’s likely that there will be additional changes in tvOS before Apple’s big OS release in the fall.

watchOS, on the other hand, received quite a bit of love during the WWDC keynote. watchOS 4, due for free this fall, will feature a new Siri watch face that feeds you relevant information based on the time of day, your activities, and data from apps like Activity, Calendar, Maps, News, Reminders, and Wallet. Other new watch faces are for fun: Toy Story characters with tiny animations and a Kaleidoscope face that draws ever-changing patterns.

Since fitness tracking is important for the Apple Watch, Apple has made watchOS 4 pushier to help you stay on the exercise wagon. It will send morning notifications to encourage you to match the previous day’s activity levels or reach a new Achievement. It also nudges you in the evening to complete your activity rings and issues monthly exercise challenges tailored to your situation.

The Workout app will help pool swimmers track sets, pace, and distance for different stroke types. Triathletes will like being able to switch between workout types and later combine them into a single session for better tracking. Apple will also add motion and heart-rate algorithms for High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). And if you work out in a gym, you’ll be able to sync exercise data with sufficiently capable gym equipment like treadmills, ellipticals, indoor bikes, and stair climbers.

If you listen to music while you work out, improvements to the Music app will be welcome. It will sync your most-listened music from your iPhone automatically, and if you subscribe to Apple Music, it will also pick up your favorite mixes.

Finally, watchOS 4 will make it easier for developers to connect the watch to more Bluetooth devices, such as for continuous glucose monitoring, analyzing your serve via a sensor on a tennis racket, or recording wave height and calorie burn via a sensor on your surfboard. Let us know if you have a sensor-enabled surfboard!

Happily, watchOS 4 will be compatible with both the original Apple Watch and the Apple Watch Series 2, so all Apple Watch owners will be able to enjoy these new features. Apple said nothing about new Apple Watch hardware, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see some before the holiday shopping season.

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