The 2024 WWDC has unveiled a major series of updates for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, marking one of the most substantial and feature-rich renewals in recent times. The improvements are designed to optimize usability, enhance personalization, and integrate artificial intelligence into the devices, ensuring a more intuitive and personalized interaction. Let's explore each of the announced innovations.
Home Screen
For the iPhone and iPad comes a redesigned home screen offering greater flexibility in organizing apps. We can now customize the arrangement of the apps and leave blank spaces between them, allowing us to organize aesthetically according to our personal needs. Additionally, we can change the colors of the app icons.
Control Center
On the iPhone and iPad, the Control Center has been completely redesigned to allow smoother navigation between different control groups. With a single gesture, we can easily move between controls for music, home devices, and more, with the possibility to add and organize controls, even those from third-party apps.
Security with Face ID
With iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, Apple has introduced the possibility to lock individual apps with Face ID, Touch ID, or a passcode. This ensures that, even if we lend our iPhone, only we, the authorized owner, can access sensitive applications, protecting our most personal information.
Additionally, we can completely hide certain apps we do not want to be seen. These become accessible only from a "Hidden" folder in the App Library.
Messages
On the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, the Messages app is enriched with new features such as the ability to react with any emoji, use text formats and text effects, and schedule sending messages for later.
Moreover, on the iPhone, the possibility to send messages via satellite has been added, ensuring total connectivity, wherever we are, in emergency situations. And maintaining end-to-end encryption.
On the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, Mail has been enhanced with artificial intelligence to offer automatic replies and more efficient sorting of incoming mails into categories of Updates, Promotions, Primary, and Shopping. This substantially streamlines email management.
Additionally, a new feature will be able to gather information from several messages related to the same topic in one place, improving accessibility through summaries of multiple messages.
Maps and Wallet
On the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, the Maps application now includes detailed topographic information, currently only from the United States.
On the other hand, on the iPhone, the Wallet app has acquired the ability to exchange money via AirDrop, simplifying transactions. Transactions that now only require the two iPhones to be brought close together and authorize the operation to be carried out without the need to exchange additional personal data.
Diary
On the iPhone, the Diary app has been renewed to allow us to record our daily mood and add statistics to our entries. Additionally, search capabilities have been integrated within the app, allowing us to find old entries more easily and organize our diary more effectively.
Photos
On the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, the Photos app has received the most significant redesign in its history, organizing content more efficiently and allowing us to search for photos with great precision based on what we want to see. Also giving us the opportunity to choose which photos we want to see first to give them priority and mark our interests so that they take relevance.
In the lower part, various photo collections now appear: memories, people, places, collections, etc. Additionally, the way photos are organized by days and events has been improved, and the ability to share complete collections with a single touch has been introduced.
New Password App
On the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, a new app arrives for managing our passwords. This application will not only store our passwords but also handle one-time codes and Passkeys.
One of the most useful features of the new Passwords app is its ability to import passwords from third-party apps, making it easier to centralize all our passwords in one place. Additionally, the app will offer access to these passwords not only from Apple devices but also from the Vision Pro and PCs with Windows.
Continuity on the iPhone
The new Continuity feature takes the interaction between the iPhone and Mac to a new level. Even if we have the iPhone far away, we can now use it directly from the Mac. By simply touching a button in the Dock, our iPhone will appear on screen. We can also access it from an iPhone notification, now received on the Mac.
In addition to viewing and operating the iPhone from the Mac, the Continuity feature will allow us to drag files and content between both devices. Notifications from the iPhone on the Mac
have also been improved, allowing us to manage our communications and respond quickly without needing to switch devices.
New Features in Apple Watch
Several new features have also come to the Apple Watch, especially highlighting three:
Vitals
This application will monitor our night-time health and alert us to any anomalies in health metrics, providing a more comprehensive and proactive monitoring of personal health.
Training Load
Aimed at athletes, this feature will help manage and adjust the intensity of workouts to optimize performance and prevent overtraining.
Photos Face
The Photos face has been redesigned to automatically search for and display our best photos, applying intelligent analysis to highlight important people, places, or events.
Apple Intelligence: A Giant in Innovation
Yesterday at WWDC 2024, Apple Intelligence was also presented, a significant leap in integrating artificial intelligence into Apple devices. This technology is not only designed to enhance the general functionality of the system but also to personalize and simplify our experience. Apple Intelligence, free with system updates, extends across multiple applications and services, improving everything from basic interaction to complex processes of analysis and information management.
Integration in Mail
In the Mail application, Apple Intelligence has completely transformed the interaction with email. AI assists in drafting replies through intelligent suggestions based on the content of the received message. It can rewrite our message in a different tone, correct spelling mistakes, summarize, create tables of content, and much more. It can also write a reply automatically based on our reactions to the questions in an email.
Additionally, one of the most notable features is the ability to summarize long emails into key points, facilitating a quick and efficient read. As well as displaying a two-line summary of messages before we open them; the same system, "Reduce Distractions", that will arrive in Notifications to prioritize and summarize them as needed to give us the key information at a glance.
Improvements in Messages
In Messages, Apple Intelligence takes personalization and expression to new levels. We can now create and send personalized emojis, called Genmoji, that will more precisely reflect the desired emotions or reactions. The ability to generate images directly in the app is also added, facilitating the creation of visual content that adjusts to the concepts discussed in the conversation and even to the appearances of the participants, as the AI understands who the people we are talking to are.
Innovations in Notes
The Notes app has been enriched with the ability to convert simple sketches into complete and detailed images, using AI to facilitate visual creation to the fullest. Additionally, if an empty area is selected in a note, the app will automatically suggest relevant images that can be inserted, generated on the spot by the AI. This transforms how users interact with and utilize their notes, making the app a more dynamic and visually interactive tool.
Transformation in Photos
The Photos app will utilize Apple Intelligence to organize and manage images more intelligently. The AI analyzes and categorizes photos based on content, people, places, and dates, making it easier to search for and access specific memories, even within a section of a video.
Additionally, the new technology allows users to remove unwanted objects from photos with a simple tap and automatically enhance the quality of images. The creation of Memories has also been enhanced. Simply describe what you want to remember, and the AI organizes the appropriate images to create a coherent visual narrative.
Image Playground: Photo Creation
A new app called Image Playground will allow users to quickly create new images based on their descriptions in three styles: Sketch, illustration, and animation. Users can send or save the images they create.
This image creation functionality, in addition to being integrated into its dedicated app, will be directly integrated into the Messages, Pages, Keynote, Freeform, Notes and other apps.
More Intelligent and Contextual Siri
Siri has been profoundly enhanced with Apple Intelligence, becoming more capable of understanding and acting according to our specific context. The AI enables Siri to better interpret requests, personalize responses, and perform more complex actions directly from the home screen or within specific apps.
Additionally, artificial intelligence has endowed Siri with a more natural and fluid conversational capability, allowing users to interact with it as if they were speaking with a real person. This includes the ability to correct errors in voice requests and modify commands in real-time.
With deeper integration into the system, Siri can now access and search information across all device applications, providing responses and actions that are relevant to each context. For example, Siri can take an address mentioned in a message and automatically add it to a contact card, or search for specific information within photos. Moreover, artificial intelligence allows Siri to perform predictive tasks based on the user's activity, such as remembering to send a scheduled message or starting a music playlist at a specific time of day.
Furthermore, GPT is integrated with Siri and the entire operating system. We can now use external models like ChatGPT-4o in Siri, which will ask for our permission before sending queries. Queries can also include images, and the "Compose" feature allows us to write and draft using GPT as a helper anywhere in the system. All this is free, without the need for an account, and without using data to train models. Plus subscribers can connect their account to access additional features.
Facilitating Work with Documents and Texts
Apple Intelligence extends its functionality to applications like Pages and Reminders. In Pages, for instance, AI can help correct grammar and style, suggest improvements in writing, and more advancedly, summarize long documents to quickly capture key points. In Reminders, artificial intelligence helps organize tasks and suggest reminders based on location or user activity, ensuring nothing important is forgotten.
Privacy and Security
Despite its deep integration and advanced capabilities, Apple has ensured that our privacy remains a priority in Apple Intelligence. All AI-related processing is done locally on the device, meaning personal data does not need to be sent to the cloud for analysis. And, for cases where greater processing power is needed, Apple uses a private cloud computing system where information is handled securely and never stored permanently.
Apple Intelligence in iOS 18 and across the rest of the Apple ecosystem not only represents an improvement in functionality and interaction but redefines how smart devices can assist, understand, and anticipate user needs, all while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and security.
Release Date
All operating system updates were released yesterday in a beta version for developers. A public beta will be available in about a month, around July. However, the official version will arrive in the fall. As for Apple Intelligence, it will be available globally in the fall.
With this impressive wave of updates, Apple radically transforms the functionality of its devices, optimizes the interaction between the user and the hardware, and offers a more cohesive and personalized experience. These innovations not only enhance current performance but also set a new standard for what intelligent devices should be capable of achieving in the future.
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