Wow. That was a lot.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the Apple Silicon MacPro. Some folks online expressed a bit of sticker shock, but it’s a high end machine and comes with a high end price. Part of that is due to the Mac Studio. Before the release of the Studio, your desktop Mac choices were between a Mac mini and a Mac Pro. In that line up, the mini had to stretch to the mid-range and the old Intel Mac Pro started off in the upper mid range. Now the Studio is positioned to take up that “medium” position, where you’re doing serious work, but not making Avatar A20: The Final Avataring. With the Studio providing coverage for those mid-range workflows, the Pro is really only for top end jobs, especially those that require PCIe card interfaces like a fiber channel interface.
Siri didn’t get the big upgrade I was hoping for. The whole ChatGPT thing has really exploded in the last few months and that’s a little too soon for Apple to act on it in time for this year’s OS release. Siri is getting the ability to handle back-to-back requests. We’ll have to see how that plays out with the betas this summer.
Looking forward to today’s “What’s New in Xcode 15” to get a better feel for the Xcode improvements. The State of the Union seemed to focus on a lot of support for visionOS, but that may just be the shock and awe talking after the big reveal yesterday. Browsing through all the sessions, I’ve book marked 35 I’d like to see, which is a ton. Hopefully I’ll get through ten this week.
Scanning through the session topics, I see a lot of Swift / SwiftUI talks and, as you might expect, a lot of visionOS sessions. Sadly, a lot of topics I’m interested in aren’t getting a lot of attention. tvOS has one session about the Continuity Camera support. There are only a handful of sessions about iOS, iPhone, or iPad and most of those are about running your app in the visionOS environment. HomeKit isn’t mentioned at all. CarPlay and HomePod get one session each. The reality is that even at a week long, online developer conference, there’s only so much bandwidth. There’s so much for Apple to tell us about visionOS and this is their one chance, so it’s all magic googles, all the time.
Now if they just handed out some free samples.