By Jason Snell

June 8, 2021 12:15 PM PT

WWDC 2021: Testflight on Mac, Xcode Cloud promise better betas

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

Apps don’t spring, full-featured, onto our devices. App developers have to put the code and all the other assets together and create that thing—and it’s a whole process. Developers rely on beta testers to take their in-progress code and discover all sorts of ways in which the software fails—so they can be fixed before the app is released to the general public.

On iOS, developers use an Apple tool called TestFlight to send beta versions of their apps to testers. It’s got a lot of convenient features, but hasn’t been available for macOS before. On Monday at WWDC, Apple announced that TestFlight is (finally) coming to the Mac, and it’s good news for developers and testers alike.

TestFlight for Mac will support regular Mac apps, but it’ll also support iOS apps running on Macs with Apple silicon. (Developers decide who gets to see their iOS apps, controlling whether an iOS app is available for Mac testers on a group-by-group basis.)

As a user, TestFlight will work more or less like it does on iOS today. There’s an app you can use to add or remove apps you’re testing. You can choose to automatically update to the latest builds as they’re uploaded by the developer, or take control of that process manually. Beta apps from TestFlight will appear with a yellow dot next to their name in the Dock and in Launchpad, and in the Finder their Kind will be labeled as Beta Application.

Developers will need to provide a provisioning profile for their apps to be distributed via TestFlight, but that’ll be handled automatically by Xcode if the app is handling signing. If signing is being handled manually, a developer will need to explicitly include that profile.

And then there’s Xcode Cloud, which Apple also announced on Monday, and is rolling out in a limited beta now, with a larger group of testers later this year, and broader availability next year. Apple’s goal with Xcode Cloud is to allow developers to build and test apps faster, especially when collaborating with other members of a development team. While developers will still build their apps on their local Macs, Xcode Cloud lets developers design custom workflows that can allow, for example, commits to specific branches to result in custom builds or TestFlight distributions.

In addition to being integrated directly into the Xcode app, Xcode Cloud has a web app version as well. It will allow developers to test their code on virtualized Apple hardware, which might be a great alternative to having to keep a bunch of devices around and laboriously build and deploy on each of them. Apple also says that it’s focused on security in Xcode cloud, because every build environment is temporary—and securely torn down between builds—and all code is encrypted when it’s not being used.

By Stephen Hackett

June 8, 2021 11:58 AM PT

WWDC 2021: watchOS 8 to shave time off everyday interactions

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

With watchOS 8, Apple isn’t setting out to radically change the experience of using an Apple Watch, but the new capabilities the release will give developers will make it feel more dynamic and useful throughout the day.

The biggest change in this regard is how applications will be able to work in the “Wrist Down” position. In watchOS 7, apps were dimmed and blurred out when the Watch was inactive, with the time overlaid in the upper-right corner:

With watchOS 8, the blurring will be replaced with a new dimmer state, that is ready to become inactive with just a single tap:

watchOS tells the application the state of the Watch, and the app should be able to quickly dim and hide personal data that shouldn’t be visible to others when the user’s wrist is down.

In this dimmed state, a watchOS app can still receive data from the system and update their UI. Workout apps or audio apps can update once per second when there is an active session going on to keep the user informed with a mere glance. Out of session, this time between updates is once per minute to preserve battery life.

In watchOS 8, Apple is also updating how apps are sent updated information from HealthKit. Critical data — such as fall events, low blood oxygen saturation and heart rate events — is sent immediately. Other data types are delivered hourly, if not longer.

If you use a Bluetooth heart rate monitor or other equipment and pair them directly with the Apple Watch, watchOS 8 has some features for you, too. Bluetooth device will be able to connect when their corresponding application is in the background, as long the app is being used as a Complication. From there, data from the device (such as heart rate) can be kept up to date directly, up to four times an hour.

Lastly, text entry is being sped up this year as well, as the Watch will remember if the user prefers Scribble or Dictation, on a per-app basis.

The Apple Watch has always been about small interactions, and with watchOS 8, Apple has continued to work in making those faster and smoother than before. Starting later this year, the Watch will be more up to date all the time, even when your wrist is down, while Health data and even text entry will be faster as well. These small interactions are often just seconds long, but time matters when it comes to the Watch.

[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]

By Dan Moren

June 8, 2021 11:15 AM PT

WWDC 2021: ShazamKit lets Apple and Android developers add audio recognition

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

Shazam! It ain’t just a movie starring Sinbad.¹ Apple integrated the song-recognition service into Siri back in iOS 8; four years later, it bought the whole company. Last fall, iOS and iPadOS 14.2 added a button for Shazam to Control Center, and as of this year, the company has rolled out an API for developers to take advantage of the technology: ShazamKit.

ShazamKit allows developers to add the song recognition feature into their own apps, but with a couple of interesting additions. For one thing, ShazamKit isn’t restricted to Apple’s own devices: in addition to the latest versions of iOS/iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS, Apple has also provided documentation for building ShazamKit apps on Android.

In addition to being able to match against Apple’s extensive song catalog, ShazamKit allows developers to create a custom catalog of audio which it can then match against. This enables apps and services to provide audio-matching technology that’s not just limited to commercial music.

Shazam can match audio playing live or in a pre-recorded piece of audio or video. To protect user privacy, Apple suggest developers only use microphone access for as long as they need to identify a song—and because it uses a lossy sample to match the audio, other sounds in the track are discarded and can’t be reconstructed.

In a glance at a previously unannounced iOS/iPadOS 15 feature, those who don’t have the Shazam app installed will still be able to access their list of previously matched audio by pressing and holding on the Shazam icon in Control Center.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

June 8, 2021 11:01 AM PT

WWDC 2021: tvOS 15 will let you sign into apps with on an iPhone or iPad

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

Now that Apple has shipped an improved remote for the Apple TV, it might seem like your tvOS woes are over—but even with a better input device, entering login credentials by picking one letter at a time is still a bummer.

However, starting in tvOS 15 this fall, developers will be able to implement a new authentication method for logging in: using another Apple device like an iPhone or iPad.

Previously, users have been able to use their iOS device’s TV remote feature to type in text on their Apple TV, or even fill in passwords from iCloud Keychain, but this takes things a step further. When you select the Sign in with Apple Device on tvOS, a notification gets sent to a nearby Apple device.

That notification will summon a prompt where you can sign in with suggested password from iCloud Keychain, and authenticate via Face ID. (Or, presumably, Touch ID, on a compatible device.) You can also manually enter the password directly on your iPhone or iPad, if need be. Once authenticated, you’ll be logged into the app on your Apple TV.

This method joins a roster of other methods that Apple has used to attempt to simplify the login process in tvOS apps, including signing in with TV providers, zero sign on, Restore Purchases, and so on. Unfortunately, some of the options that required adoption by third parties, such as cable providers, have been slow and only cover certain cases.

Signing in with an Apple device seems like it will make this process easier in many cases, it will be interesting to see how many developers integrate the feature (seeing as how dedicated many of them seem to be at reinventing the wheel).

But while the preponderance of options might make signing in more versatile, they don’t necessarily make it simpler. And Apple could still improve the process of setting up a new Apple TV from scratch, rather than having you go through this login process for every single app that you own—when it already presumably has your passwords for all of those services stored conveniently in iCloud Keychain.¹

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

June 8, 2021 9:39 AM PT

WWDC 2021: iCloud Private Relay plugs a few more privacy loopholes

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

When Apple’s latest operating systems debut this fall, many of their users will benefit from a whole new kind of built-in privacy protection in the form of iCloud Private Relay.

While your actual web traffic has long been generally secured by encryption using HTTPS connections (that little padlock we all got used to looking for in the address bar), there have remained ways in which your ISP or the website you’re visiting could learn more about your traffic and perhaps even use that information to build a profile of you.

iCloud Private Relay, which will be available to anyone paying for an iCloud storage plan, aims to protect against two of these loopholes. The first is when your ISP can tell what site you’re visiting: for example, that you entered or clicked on a link to apple.com. While it can’t necessarily tell what pages or content you accessed, it does often know the top-level domain because that has to be translated into an IP address using the Domain Name System (DNS). Combine with all the domains that you visit on a regular basis, that could allow your ISP to build a profile of you that advertisers might be interested in.

The other loophole is that the website you’re contacting knows some information about you, because it can see your IP address. For one thing, that allows the server to trace that IP address back to a specific geolocation. (Precision varies, but usually at least your city, if not even more specific—when I geolocated my IP, it gave me a location about half a mile from my house.) But it can then cross-reference that IP address with other sites, companies, advertisers, etc. in order to build a richer profile about you.

iCloud Private Relay helps combat both of these loopholes through the use of a dual-hop architecture. Essentially, any traffic from Safari on an Apple device, as well as DNS queries, and a subset of app traffic (specifically insecure web traffic), will be routed through two separate servers: an ingress proxy managed by Apple that hides your IP address (by essentially slapping its own IP address on the request), and an egress proxy, run by “a content provider,” which only sees the server you’re trying to access.

This means that your traffic still goes to the website in question, but it gets only the ingress server’s IP address. There are several ingress proxies which bundle together users from specific regions, providing broad geolocation powers. (So, for example, the server might know you’re from North America, or even from the northeast—Apple says a list will be provided, though I wasn’t able to locate the document at the time of this writing.) Apple urges websites to stop using IP addresses for identity, relying instead on having users login or by explicitly asking for location information only when really needed.

While iCloud Private Relay will affect the bulk of web traffic from the devices of iCloud+ users, it does not apply to traffic over the local network or via private domains, transmitted via VPNs, or using proxy servers.

Most apps won’t have to make significant (or, in many cases, any) changes to use iCloud Private Relay, as long as they’re using modern APIs for network access—the system comes baked in.

One area that might run into challenges, however, are content filter and parental control services that aren’t run on a device. But apps that use use the Screen Time API will still be able to see and filter websites before those sites can be accessed. (Given that local network traffic is exempt, filtering at a local network level seems like it would continue to work, but it’s not entirely clear.)

For institutions that have policies requiring monitoring or intercepting traffic on a entire network (such as enterprise or education), blocking the hostname of the iCloud Private Relay ingress proxy will effectively disable iCloud Private Relay. Users who join that network will be notified and prompted to continue using the network without iCloud Private Relay, or not using the network.

All in all, iCloud Private Relay is poised to be one of those services that’s essentially transparent to users but has significant benefits in terms of decreasing tracking. It obviously won’t solve all privacy concerns: at the end of the day, if you’re logging into a website and have already given them your personal details, they can still build a profile on you and your activities on their site. But it may make it harder for that information to be collected without your knowledge or combined with details from other sites.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Stephen Hackett

June 8, 2021 8:42 AM PT

WWDC 2021: Shortcuts for Mac

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

For years, automation on the Mac has been an onion of sorts. Automator and its ability to create Quick Actions, Folder Actions and even Applications has given Mac users the ability to create workflows with drag-and-drop efficiency since its introduction with Mac OS X Tiger way back in 2005.

Applications can donate actions for use in Automator, but this never took off the way it was intended.

Thankfully, Automator came with an escape hatch: the ability to run scripts within workflows. This meant that bailing out to something like AppleScript or even a shell script was simple.

None of this even touches the wide range of third-party tools for automation on macOS such as Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Alfred and more.

As good as these utilities are, as the platform owner, Apple needs to steer the ship when it comes to automation on the Mac, and with macOS Monterey, it’s poised to do just that … with Shortcuts.

What was once Workflows on iPhone and iPad, then bought by Apple and reworked as Shortcuts is coming to Mac later this year, and so far, I’m impressed. Shortcuts on the Mac looks like it does on iOS, and feels like a Mac app. Its data even promises to sync over iCloud to other devices seamlessly.

It’s important to know what sorts of applications Shortcuts can be used to automate. Here’s what Apple says on the macOS Monterey features page:

Run compatible iPhone and iPad shortcuts on Mac with M1 or on Intel-based Mac systems with Catalyst apps.

However, things are actually a bit more complex than that. Developers of traditional Mac apps — even those built with AppKit — can add Shortcuts support to their projects via Intents, just like support is added in iOS apps.

That might seem surprising, but considering that Apple pitched this as the start of a longer transition, getting traditional Mac apps on board is going to be required if Apple wants to discontinue Automator somewhere down the line. Even though the app future is probably more SwiftUI or maybe Catalyst, almost every major Mac app uses the much older AppKit framework. Ignoring those apps really wasn’t an option.

Moving workflows from Automator to Shortcuts couldn’t be easier. Drag and drop your .workflow file onto Shortcuts, and it will be transformed into a Shortcut automatically.

To make this work, Apple has added many new actions to Shortcuts, based on the most popular actions in Automator. Here’s the complete list:

In short, the importer crawls your Automator workflow and translates it, step by step, into the correct Shortcuts actions. If for some reason it can’t be translated, Shortcuts will let you know. Given Automator’s rather thin support, my guess is that most people’s workflows will just come over without any issues.

Additionally, Shortcuts for Mac brings with it new actions extending what the software will be able to do on macOS:

With these new actions, I think Shortcuts is going to feel Mac-native from day one. Most people won’t miss Automator.

You may have noticed that in those screenshots, Apple highlights AppleScript, JavaScript and shell scripts as actions within Shortcuts for Mac.¹ Like Automator before it, this will allow users to fall back to more traditional automation methods within their larger workflows, bridging Shortcuts’ new fanciness to the old solid foundations under macOS.

Over the last several years, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about what Shortcuts would mean for old-school Mac automation. It is clear to me that Apple thought about this, and has designed Shortcuts for the Mac to be able to support the old and new, all at the same time. That’s not always Apple’s modus operandi, but it was the right move in this case.

[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]

By Jason Snell

June 7, 2021 6:27 PM PT

WWDC 2021: I love it when a platform comes together

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

There was a time when Apple rolled out the next versions of its operating systems and the story went like this: The iPhone and iPad added a bunch of new features, and the Mac got a few of its own and, if it was lucky, a subset of what the iPhone and iPad got.

Apple has spent the last few years unifying its platforms. The subsystems that are shared between macOS, iOS, and iPadOS have been brought back into line. Apple’s newest Macs run on the same processors that power iPhones and iPads. Macs can run apps from iOS—either directly on the M1 processor, or indirectly on Intel or Apple silicon via Catalyst.

The WWDC 2021 Keynote on Monday showed that Apple, after years of work, is moving its platforms forward in lockstep. Nearly every feature Apple announced was followed by the statement that it was available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac alike. Yes, each operating system is still different—iPadOS continues to show signs of being positioned right between the Mac and the iPhone, similar to both but not quite either—but the most important stuff rolls out to all of the devices at once.

Take Live Text, a banner feature of the iOS segment of Apple’s keynote presentation. It automatically recognizes text in images and makes that text searchable, selectable, and editable. A few years ago, that would be an iOS-only feature, but it’s also in macOS Monterey, where you’ll be able to open a screenshot and copy out the text without missing a beat.

Similarly, the redesign of Safari and the introduction of Tab Groups spans all of Apple’s platforms. Tab groups are the same on all devices; add a browser tab in a particular group on the Mac and it’ll be there when you switch over to an iPad.

Reinforcing all of this is the new interactions Apple has built to connect its devices. A couple of years ago macOS Catalina introduced Sidecar, a feature that lets you turn an iPad into an additional display for your Mac. You can use the Apple Pencil on certain windows in certain Mac apps, which is kind of fun. But it’s more one device taking over another than the two of them cohabiting.

Contrast this with Monday’s announcement of Universal Control, a feature I don’t think anyone saw coming. With Universal Control, you can still place a Mac and iPad next to one another, and use them both—but when you point, click, and type on the iPad, you’re no longer just using it as a Mac monitor—instead, it’s still an iPad! It’s just being driven by your Mac keyboard and mouse. The Mac and iPad are allowed to remain true to themselves—but you can control them both without having to move from one set of input devices to another.

And then there’s my favorite announcement of the day: Shortcuts for Mac. With one move, Apple has re-invigorated user automation on the Mac—and it did so by bringing over the system it used to add user automation to iPhone and iPad a few years ago. It seems almost obvious now, but in context this move is a real mind-bender—after all, the Mac is supposed to be the platform for nerdy computery stuff like automation. How in the world could iOS contribute the foundation of a new era in macOS automation?

It turns out that iOS was acting as an incubator, allowing Apple to figure out what it saw as a modern take on user automation… and then, with all its platforms aligned, Apple was able to bring that new approach over to the Mac.

Of course, any iOS apps running on the Mac will be automatically supported by Shortcuts. But Apple isn’t planning on limiting Shortcuts on the Mac: It will support AppleScript, shell scripts, and even import Automator workflows. And in a sign that Shortcuts is here to stay, developers of native Mac apps will be able to add support for Shortcuts, as well.

It took years, and presumably a lot of pain and hard work inside Apple, but the company’s focus on bringing its platforms together is paying off—and the Mac is a huge beneficiary.

By Dan Moren

June 7, 2021 5:28 PM PT

WWDC 2021: Platforms State of the Union emphasizes saving and valuing time

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

While Apple’s keynote focuses largely on the company’s consumer audience, the Platforms State of the Union is where things start to get technical, really targeting the core WWDC audience: developers on Apple’s platform.

Apple made a ton of big announcements at WWDC this year, and the State of the Union delved into just a few big categories of those. But in doing so, it gives a look at what Apple’s emphasizing for developers over the next few months leading up to the official release of its next major operating systems.

Code faster and in more places

The import of Xcode Cloud may not have registered for most non-developers in the keynote audience, but this substantial new system that Apple is rolling out has the potential to vastly streamline developers’ workflows in two ways. First, by integrating a lot of the various tasks that developers do—from working with teams to distributing betas—directly into Xcode; and second, by offshoring some of the most time-consuming tasks, like building and testing apps, to a cloud-based system.

Obviously, moving parts of this process to a cloud-based system can bring major advantages. For one thing, you’re not strictly limited by the hardware on which you’re writing your code. While developers often favor getting the most powerful system to help build their apps faster, letting users take advantage of the cloud opens the door for those who may not be able to afford high-end systems.

For another, it suggests a glimmer of future development workflows that don’t strictly rely on the Mac.

In that latter case, it ties in neatly with another big reveal mentioned during today’s keynote: the ability to build iPhone and iPad apps in Swift Playgrounds for the iPad. This marks the first time that developers have been able to write apps for Apple’s mobile devices on those devices. Moreover, Swift Playgrounds lets you export projects that are compatible with Xcode on the Mac, opening up new possibilities for developers.

Of course, Swift Playgrounds doesn’t support developing macOS apps yet, so your iPad probably won’t be replacing your Mac for full time coding work just yet, but again, the glimmers of a future are there, and this just marks the first steps.

Continue reading “WWDC 2021: Platforms State of the Union emphasizes saving and valuing time”…

By Dan Moren

June 7, 2021 1:17 PM PT

WWDC 2021: My favorite features that didn’t make the keynote cut

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

Even with a nearly two-hour keynote, Apple didn’t have time to discuss all the new features coming to its platforms in the next major updates. So I’ve gone through and pulled out an even half-dozen of my favorite features that didn’t merit screen time. (But don’t worry, there are a lot more.)

Super Password

Apple seems to be making a hard play at being your password manager with its latest software updates. In macOS Monterey there’s a new Passwords pane in System Preferences, which not only bodes poorly for the venerable Keychain Access app¹, but also perhaps mounts a challenge to third-party competitors. You can even import passwords from other password mangers—though you can export too.

Even better, all of Apple’s platforms now get the ability to generate two-factor authentication codes and automatically fill them in when you’re logging in. That ought to make doing the multi-app dance a thing of the past.

Shortcuts gets easier for power users

In addition to making a much-needed jump to the Mac, Shortcuts has gained some benefits for all of its users. For one thing, sharing shortcuts with others has gotten easier—Apple says it will no longer require managing “complicated security settings”, which was always a pain on iOS devices.

More over, Mac users who are embracing shortcuts will not only have the ability to import Automator workflows, but also the option to enable compatibility with AppleScript and shell scripting, which will unlock a lot of possibilities.

Don’t remind me

Yes, Reminders gets tags that can get be collected into Smart Lists, great. But the big news here is that there is finally an option to quickly delete all of your completed Reminders, something which I’ll certainly make use of. What’s unclear is if you can set those completed tasks to automatically expire, but baby steps I suppose.

Separation anxiety

All of us who have ever left home without our keys or our phone can now sweat a little less. A new feature for Find My lets you set separation alerts for your items (either devices or AirTags), and let you know when you’re leaving your current location without them.

More like weCloud

iCloud+, Apple’s new enhanced cloud offering, will allow you for the first time to use a custom domain with your iCloud email, and lets you share that custom domain with people in your family group.

Also, in an uncharacteristically generous move when it comes to iCloud storage, if you’re updating to a new iPhone or iPad and don’t have enough room for your iCloud Backup, Apple will loan you the space for up to three weeks, so you can be sure to transfer all your data and settings.

All a(key)board

Recognizing that people are using external keyboards more than ever with their iPads, Apple has revamped a bunch of features connected to them. That includes adding global keyboard shortcuts for multitasking and contextual menus, the ability to use the globe key as a modifier, and a redesigned interface for the keyboard shortcuts view that organizers commands into categories like File, Edit, View…hmm, where have I heard those before?

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Dan Moren

June 7, 2021 6:32 AM PT

Can Apple change the narrative with WWDC?

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

With just hours to go before the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off, I find myself wondering if Apple—a company that has long maintained an unparalleled mastery of storytelling—can indeed narrate its way out of the drama in which it’s become enmeshed.

Apple’s been in jams before, to be sure. Like the entire 1990s. But the challenges it withstood in those days came predominantly from the outside, even as its most loyal customers sticking by its side to ride out the storm.

These days, that selection has inverted: while Apple’s financial success and external consumer support have reached stratospheric levels, the criticism now comes from those who have traditionally been its most ardent supporters—and, more to the point, the very developer audience that WWDC is designed to appeal to, highlight, and uplift.

This morning, Dieter Bohn’s piece at The Verge laid out the case that perhaps the most apt metaphor for Apple’s recent behavior is that of the carrier. And though, like any metaphor, the comparison is imperfect, parts of it ring true in a deeply uncomfortable fashion.

It’s not fair, but the tune sounds familiar because the parallels strike a chord. And the bitter harmony that I hear is the stifling of innovation to maximize profit.

Apple forces all apps selling digital goods of any kind to use its payment system and pay its cut. The arguments for why Apple thinks that is necessary are well-known. But the effects of that (and other) rules are that new and innovative business models simply aren’t possible. Instead of paid upgrades, developers must resort to subscriptions. The nascent market to pay creators directly on services like Twitter and Substack must account for Apple’s platform fees. Instead of game streaming apps, there is… well, nothing.

I don’t want to get into arguing the nuts and bolts of this particular discussion, because it’s not really about this piece itself. It’s that this is the prevailing narrative right now. When it comes to Apple, this is what people—or, at least, the tech press, pundits, and outspoken developers—are talking about.

Usually, the hours before Apple’s keynote event are filled with speculation and excitement, but this year there is far more frustration and antipathy than I can remember seeing in my decade and a half covering Apple. There’s always been some degree of dissatisfaction, especially amongst developers, but it’s hard to escape that the current story about Apple is less about its products and more about its attitude.

Throw in the recent kerfuffle over Apple’s decision to have employees return to the office for the majority of the week starting this fall and it has more than a few folks less excited and wondering if Apple even really listens.

WWDC marks Apple’s opportunity to take control of the story. Whatever its executives announce when they take the stage later today has the potential to dominate the tech news cycle for days and weeks to come.

But the real question is whether, by sheer compelling nature or simply by volume, it can drown out the existing narrative.

Short of announcing a massive overhaul of the App Store and its developer policies—which seems unlikely, given that the company just engaged in a lengthy trial which it seems likely to win—it’s hard to imagine that any flashy feature or product announcement could wipe away the undercurrents of dissatisfaction, though it may mute them for a while.

In the past, Apple’s live events have fed off the energy of the crowd. It’s unclear whether or not this year’s WWDC keynote, which Apple merely says will be “streamed directly from Apple Park”, will be the same slickly produced videos we’ve seen over the past pandemic year, or eschew them in favor of a presentation more like the traditional in-person event, but it occurs to me that, if the latter, it’s not out of the question that Apple employees themselves might be in attendance.

And, as is traditional for the WWDC keynote, there may come a moment when an Apple executive—perhaps Tim Cook himself—boasts about the amount of money the company paid out to developers, potentially teeing up a moment where that figure is wildly applauded by a cadre of Apple employees. I can think of no more tone-deaf moment that would truly encapsulate the moment in which we find ourselves.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

June 3, 2021 12:08 PM PT

Fun With Charts: More speculation about Apple silicon

Note: This story has not been updated since 2021.

Will new MacBook Pros be announced at WWDC next week? Your guess is as good as mine. I’m sure Apple wouldn’t mind thrilling developers with new power laptops, since they are so often those very developers’ tool of choice.

But new MacBook Pros would require a chip more capable than the M1 chip currently residing in—let’s see here—the low-end Mac mini, the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air, the 24-inch iMac, and the iPad Pro. Is that chip ready? Reports suggest that these new MacBook Pro models are on the way, but might not arrive until “Q3 2021.”

An optimist would point out that Q3 2021 starts in less than four weeks—plenty of time for Apple to announce them on Monday and ship them in July. While Apple usually resists announcements of new hardware with long lead times, this year has been different, due to some serious shortages in the supply chain. Add to that the unique circumstances of the move to Apple silicon—most MacBook Pro buyers are already holding back on their purchases due to the chip transition, so sales won’t be harmed by an early announcement—and it seems like Apple wouldn’t mind jumping the gun a little bit if it provided a shot in the arm to developers during WWDC week.

A pessimist, of course, would point out that Q3 2021 ends on September 30, an awful long time from now. And it’s certainly possible that new MacBook Pro models just won’t be ready until the fall.

But back to that new chip. Right now, all we know for sure about Apple’s approach to using its own chips in Macs is what we’ve seen with the M1. A single data point isn’t really great in terms of understanding trends, philosophies, or anything of the sort. But a second chip allows us to understand what Apple’s really up to—and how the Apple chip architecture can extend to support higher-end devices that are more powerful than any Apple has yet been asked to design.

Here’s how Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman described these new chips:

For the new MacBook Pros, Apple is planning two different chips, codenamed Jade C-Chop and Jade C-Die: both include eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores for a total of 10, but will be offered in either 16 or 32 graphics core variations.

So following up on my Apple silicon speculation of last year, I thought I’d sketch out on the back of an envelope just how well these MacBook Pro models might fare in terms of raw multiprocessing performance:

Though Gurman’s report suggests these would be 10-core systems, the important number is the number of high-performance cores—eight. Though energy-efficient cores are very helpful in keeping a Mac bubbling along nicely, they don’t make enormous contributions to the overall top performance of a device. It’s all about the performance cores. And eight is—follow me here—twice as many as four.

So if an M1 processor scores around a 6180 in GeekBench 5’s multi-core score, I can extrapolate and guess that a new chip—let’s call it the M1X¹, because I’m guessing that this chip is based on the same cores as the M1 and the A14 chips—would score roughly double the M1—let’s say 12,500.

To put this in context, I’ve included the current high-end Intel MacBook Pro models in the chart. The M1 models already surpass the existing 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, but the eight-core 16-inch model still wins out in overall multiprocessor performance. (I’m leaving aside single-core performance, graphics power, and energy efficiency here and just focusing on top CPU speed.)

The 16-inch MacBook Pro would pale in comparison to the M1X, though. And it’s not hard to imagine Apple executives appearing in a video next week and declaring that the new MacBook Pros are roughly twice as fast as their predecessors.

Just for kicks, I also threw together a chart based on Gurman’s report that Apple is also planning Mac Pro models based on the same chip design, but variants with 20 and 40 performance cores. Yep, that’s a lot of cores. Just for kicks, let’s make a guess about future Mac Pro performance and compare it to existing Intel-based Mac Pro models:

The back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests a 20-core Apple silicon-based Mac Pro would be quite a bit faster than a 28-core Intel Mac Pro at multiprocessor performance, making it the fastest Mac of all time. And that 40-core model would be… well, yeah, more than twice as fast as the previous speed champion.

Those Mac Pros, when they come, won’t come cheap. But keep in mind that even the rumored M1X processor will be faster than every Intel Mac ever made that isn’t a high-end Mac Pro. You’ll probably be able to get that power in a MacBook Pro, and (presumably, at some point later this year) a Mac mini and iMac.

Will it all play out this way? We’ve had years to track iPhone and iPad chip patterns—and only have that one data point for the Mac. I’m hoping we find out more at WWDC next week—not just for the data point, of course, but also for the speedy new hardware that would be enabled by that new chip.