Every other year Apple releases an “S” version of the iPhone. Later this year, we’ll see the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus. The “S” models generally deliver modest improvements — better cameras, better networking, faster chips. But the basic design remains the same. The “S” suffix means the same, but better.
And so it goes with this Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. In terms of announcements of import, WWDC 2015’s kickoff was an “S” upgrade. It built on the spectacular announcements of last year, but didn’t break huge new ground.
And that’s OK. “S” upgrades are often underrated.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
It’s a tall order to top last year’s conference, when there was a real sense of big plans being made. Apple laid the foundations for an ambitious future of mobile payments, health monitoring and the smart home. As we said at the time: “Apple’s trajectory is clear: It’s getting into some very big things.”
This year’s announcements were more prosaic, but they’ll have a big impact anyway.
Take all the machine intelligence added to iOS 9 and Siri. Stuff like personalized intelligent search has the potential to be a big game changer — if it works as well as Google Now, which is pretty great.
Siri, too, finally appears to be coming into its own. Apple’s AI has been learning in leaps and bounds, vastly improving its speech recognition. I’ve found it pretty reliable recently. It’s fast becoming the interface of choice for my Apple Watch.
No one gets very excited about new software features, but they have as big an impact on user experience as new hardware, if not more, because they are longer lasting.
Take, for example, the split-screen view in OS X El Capitan, which allows you to work in two apps side by side. I already do this on my Mac when I’m working in two different apps. I shrink the windows to take up half the screen and switch between them. It’ll soon be a lot easier, and I can see it being used a lot.
Likewise split-screen multitasking on the iPad; this will totally change how you work on iOS. Spotlight’s new deep search, which can surface info buried deep in apps without launching them, also has the potential to radically change how you do things.
Even small things, like guessing caller IDs for unknown numbers (the system will base its guesses on numbers found in email, for example) will make the experience so much better — fewer mystery calls. The new battery-saving tech in iOS 9 is totally boring, but there’ll be occasions when you’re glad it’s there.
Of course, there is some big stuff too. The Apple Watch’s native apps are a big deal. This will turn the Watch into a true standalone device, leading to better software and new functionality.
The new Apple Music app looks pretty great too. And I have high, high hopes for Beats 1 radio.
A lot of the things Apple announced this week were incremental upgrades. But that’s OK, because this is exactly how Apple works. Apple has a reputation for sparking revolutions, for making big breakthroughs, but the company’s real MO is making smaller, incremental upgrades.
That slow, steady drumbeat of making things better really advances technology as much as the big occasional breakthroughs. I’ll take it all.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
4 responses to “This year’s WWDC keynote was a mere ‘S’ upgrade, but that’s OK”
I very much enjoyed watching the keynote and am excited for the new features. It didn’t have to be huge because I really want Apple to focus on stability and polish, work on bugs, etc. Get OS X and iOS back to being as rock solid as they were a few years ago before the deluge of great features, which always bring bugs with them.
That being said, there was plenty to be happy about like the new Search screen and proactive Siri stuff making the home grid of icons become less relevant, the OS level split screen multitasking allowing all apps to automatically be compatible (not even Android has this, on Galaxys this is a TouchWiz layer feature so not all apps are even compatible), all the general improvements to Siri, and Swift becoming open source, which could be game changing. And of course, Apple Music, which is big because it’s not just streaming music, it almost seems like they are trying to cut out the record labels.
Still wish they’d update the ugly Safari icon on iOS though. :)
Ok you guys homework time.. go watch the Google I/O a couple weeks ago and then go back to the apple keynote and then tell me what you think. I thought the keynote was great and there’s a lot to look forward too. I had to cut off the Google one cuz it was putting me to sleep. I mean what the heck were you Guys expecting?? There’s NOT a lot left to do besides tweaks on the software end of things.
It is an “S” year afterall. iPhone 6S. iPhone 7. iPhone 7S.
First off these WWDC and Google iO annual developer conference aren’t for our entertainment purposes in the first place. They aren’t even meant to be for fans and users in the first place. They are for DEVELOPERS! …..as the names imply!
So what if they are boring to us? So what if the earth doesn’t shake in ecstasy at the mere mention of Apple WWDC or Google iO? And furthermore it’s not about which one better entertained us or did anything near a Moon Shot or showed off massive lines of people buying anything at all in Apple Store!
Fact is the only ones that should be judging these at all are DEVELOPERS!!!