WWDC 2023: What to Expect from Apple’s Developer Event

Apple just announced this year’s Worldwide Developers’ Conference (WWDC) slated to be held on June 5. The only Silicon Valley company, which has managed to resist using the word ‘AI’ or ‘cloud’ excessively in recent times, has everyone excited about what it has in store for us this time. Apart from the visual spectacle, with WWDC, Apple is looking to set a strong foot forward with launches in product line, applications, and software support. 

Let’s have a look at what we can expect from this five-day virtual event:

OS advancements

Apple is likely to release the latest iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS features. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, iOS 17 will feature updated Health and Messages apps, as well as significant user experience improvements, although details are scarce. Gurman also revealed that Apple has plans to revamp notifications in both iOS and iPadOS. 

Furthermore, a recent Apple blog post disclosed upcoming accessibility features for iOS, including innovative machine learning-driven features like door detection for visually impaired users and live captions for FaceTime calls. It is expected that Apple will reveal more accessibility features and plugins for all OS. 

Additionally, we can expect that the new iOS will include AR/VR headset intergratibility, with rumours getting stronger that the company will finally release them this June. 

On the watchOS front, it is believed that the new upgrade will be fairly extensive with notable changes to the new interface. Gurman notes that the watchOS will have a fairly big year this year with newer and bigger updates coming to the Apple Watch hardware. 

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports suggest that Apple is overhauling multitasking on the iPad to make it more akin to a laptop experience, with resizable windows. 

AR/VR and rOS

The AR/VR headset is considered to be Apple’s most secretive project so far. Starting around 2015, the product has gone through several iterations, and is finally nearing completion. While the unveiling of the reality headset is expected to take another two months, we will most likely see Apple reveal some details of its new operating system, rOS, which supports these headsets. 

Object Capture and RealityKit will bring real-world objects into augmented reality. One example of it was also seen in WWDC 2022. With ARkit 6, Apple has already opened up several possibilities such as 4K video, 3D object capture, face tracking, motion capture, scene geometry, and more. Naturally, it is almost certain we will see more additions to ARkit in WWDC 2023. 

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Hardware updates

According to reports, Apple is gearing up to launch a revamped version of the Mac Pro with an Apple silicon chip. While the redesign is not expected to be significant, the updates will mainly revolve around the transition to Apple silicon. In a recent blog post, Apple highlighted that on Mac computers featuring Intel processors, the ‘About This Mac’ section displays information on the processors, including the name of the Intel chip. 

The Apple Watch hardware updates are expected to be huge, with rumours milling that the changes will include micro-LED display and a bigger Apple Watch Ultra screen at 2.1 inches. 

New look to Siri

Apple recently released Transformers architecture, which is optimised for Apple Silicon — the technology behind the current LLM and GPT technology. The rise of generativeAI has everyone wondering what will happen to Siri. Now that Apple has been making strides in this direction by launching its own secure and private LLMs that run on edge within the device, the company will definitely look to power Siri with generative AI capabilities. 

Moreover, it is anticipated that the latest iteration of Siri will be capable of processing multimodal inputs. This means that the virtual assistant will not only be able to receive text-based inputs but also handle images, videos, and audio inputs.

Maps and Safari

If we ask you two areas where Apple has been lagging severely behind Google, you would most likely say map and browser. Apple will be looking to gain some edge in both these areas, considering how big a market share Google occupies here. Along these lines, Apple recently released new updates, which include high-definition and up-to-date images. The new ‘Look Around’ perspective changes while moving the map, giving it a more live-like feeling, covering a lot more details. We can expect Apple to reveal more details on what these new features are capable of. 

Meanwhile, Safari is another pain point for Apple. It will be interesting to see if Apple has something in store to give a better experience to Safari. 

A treat for developers 

Apple will help developers create innovative apps by giving them unique access to Apple engineers, while also introducing new technologies and tools to enable this. The company will also be opening the field for developers to participate in the Swift Student Challenge by creating an app playground on a topic of their choice. More information on this can be accessed here.