First, Craig Federighi does a slow motion run at WWDC 2022 and now John Ternus winks at me. Why are the Apple execs trying to rizz me up as the kids say? Also, props to the production team for putting that drone and travel budget to good use this year.
Impressions:
iPad Air
- 11 and 13 inch model
- Cameras on the long edge – finally!
- M2, Wifi 6E, Double the bass on the larger model
- Apple pencil hover
- A keynote so short John Ternus had to record his speaking scenes on his regular BART commute
- Starts at 128gb and goes up to 1TB
- 11in – $599, 13in – $799
iPad Pro
- The ad of an entire recording studio being hydraulically pressed into an iPad is pretty creative
- 11 in at 5.3mm thin, 13 in at 5.1mm thin
- Thinnest apple product ever (even thinner than iPod Nano! Thinnest Apple product ever)
- The ghost of Jony Ive has had its last laugh with these wafer thin iPads
- Ultra Retina XDR – two layers of OLED to create a Tandem display panel to jack the brightness up to 1600 HDR brightness
- Nano-texture glass option
- M4 chip – 2nd gen 3nm architecture, new display engine, 4 performance/6 efficiency cores, 10 core GPU, Neural Engine with 38 trillion ops/sec, improved efficiency, 20% better thermal performance
- AI mentioned! (Probably gonna want to get used to Apple saying AI for the next few years)
- Camera on the long edge, and back camera is quietly reduced to just 1, probably a good trade off
- I was curious how Apple was going to differentiate the Pros now that the Airs have eaten up a lot of the features of the old pros and I think they largely did the work on the hardware side. Now it remains to be seen if they can finish the job with the software story at WWDC
- Starts at 256gb and goes to 2 TB
- 11in – $999, 13in – $1299
Final Cut Pro 2
- Live multicam – Enables streaming in 4 cameras at once and control multiple iPhone/iPad cameras, enabled by a new Final Cut Camera app
- External project support so you can edit directly off a drive and 4x more streams (Note that some of these features seem to be M4 iPad Pro exclusive)
- A keynote so short, Will Hui recorded his speaking lines between sets at the climbing gym and had to wear the same outfit to the recording studio scenes
Logic Pro 2
- Session Players – AI based base and keyboard players
- More effects to simulate analog hardware
- Stem Splitter – isolates parts like voice and drums in a song
- “Mr President, a second AI mention has hit the keynote”
Magic Keyboard
- Retained floating design
- Function row – As Craig says: “We truly live in an age of wonders”
- Haptic trackpad
- Aluminum base
- $299 and $349 for the different sizes – Apple wants you to know that Aluminum aint free so you get to pay $50 more for the bigger one
Apple Pencil Pro
- Squeeze function with haptic feedback to bring up menus
- Can rotate the pencil to change brush orientation
- Haptic feedback used to also add tactile feeling to snapping and other functions
- $129
iPad
- Price drop to $349
- I wonder if this means Apple can finally drop the old home button iPad and the first gen Apple Pencil – Edit: Seems like they’ve dropped the old iPad but kept the 1st gen Apple pencil given that it is something that existing users might still buy
Wow a brisk 38 minutes. I like that they’re not afraid to have the attitude of “we only got 38 min of content so thats how long its gonna run. Some of the older in person keynotes could really start to drag. You can feel Apple holding back on acknowledging Ai too much here to save it for WWDC.
Talking Shop With city_block 