iLounge Multi-Editorial: WWDC 2014’s iOS 8, OS X Yosemite + More

But WWDC is supposed to include new Apple hardware announcements. Historically, it was the site of three major iPhone unveilings, the forum where Mac Pros and some MacBook Pros debuted, and also is a great opportunity to publicly bump existing products. Years ago, Apple had to pre-warn the press when it was going to focus a WWDC keynote exclusively on software and services. Apple has obviously changed. There’s been a drought of new hardware, and frankly not much to get excited about for months. Going into this event, we would have been glad to see anything new — an Apple 4K monitor or iMac, a 12” MacBook or iPad, or even low-power Bluetooth 4 Mac input accessories. WWDC 2014 effectively put the last nail in Tim Cook’s claim that Apple would be releasing “amazing” new products “throughout” 2014 — it’s now June, and there’s been nothing amazing this year. Even the software announced today won’t be ready for full public consumption until “fall.”

Under Cook, Apple events have become too infrequent, substantially predictable, and sometimes downright dull. The WWDC 2014 keynote thankfully had a happier energy and fewer low points than we’d expected, but also less meat and — despite claims to the contrary — no huge surprise just waiting to blow people away. Apologists will suggest that this is a developer event, and that developers were gifted with the new Swift programming language, Metal graphics technology, and various kits for health, home automation, and cloud content synchronization. That’s true. From a consumer-facing standpoint, however, the improvements Apple is delivering will be hard to spot for months. It’s unfortunate that there’s no amazing new product ready for Apple customers to play with right now.

As someone who covers Apple for a consumer-focused site, I really would have liked to see any of the new hardware rumors come true, and we expected to at least see a MacBook update. But nope, nada. I understand it’s a developers’ conference, but I wanted to be surprised — a shift in what’s become the normal Apple timeline would be fantastic — and it didn’t happen. I’d like to think something is coming before the fall. But that’s probably not the case.

Down the road, the biggest impact from this WWDC will likely come from the introduction of Swift — an opening of the gates.

I see Continuity as the single biggest feature of the many introduced. Without towing the Apple company line, it really seems like it will allow people to work more efficiently. The idea of walking in the door typing an email on an iPhone and finishing it up on a Mac is appealing to me, as is answering a call from my iMac, or any of the other tasks you’ll be able to do. There are plenty of other iterative improvements that people have been clamoring for, like the improvements to group texts and widgets in Notification Center, and I appreciate those too.

Would I have liked to have seen new Macs, an iWatch, or an updated Apple TV? Of course. But when Apple decides to finally ship out some new hardware this fall, I feel that it’s going to be a big, big event. Without any big changes rumored for iPads or iPods, expect an event to show off a larger iPhone, plus lots of Mac hardware, and whatever else Apple has up its sleeves.

OS X by itself received a face-lift and a couple of relatively minor updates, however Apple’s new ‘Continuity’ feature brought together aspects of OS X and iOS that should dramatically improve user workflows, making it far easier to seamlessly use both devices at once. ‘Continuity’ is a feature that addressed some of the minor pain points that many of us have likely felt when using both platforms, such as starting a message on an iOS device and then feeling it would be better finished on a desktop, or eaisly transferring pictures and files between both devices without waiting for iCloud to sync things up.

iOS 8 also showed a great deal of interesting promise in this area by itself, and this is the first iOS update that brings the platform on par with Android in terms of the “openness” that most users are likely to actually care about, such as inter-app sharing of data, and support for “widgets.” While it remains to be seen how readily these new features will be implemented by developers, Apple’s debut of its new development language, Swift, shows that the company continues to be serious about making the development path as easy as possible.