The Morning After: Everything important from WWDC 2022
And yes, Elon Musk’s Twitter saga takes another turn.
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, an event you should, out of principle, refuse to call Dub Dub, has kicked off. The show started with the customary lengthy keynote showing off all the new software and hardware Apple wants you to get excited about. Including the launch of Apple’s second-generation of homegrown silicon, the M2.
The M2 is very much an evolution of its immediate predecessor, designed to address some of the performance issues from the original vanilla M1. Memory bandwidth has been increased by half, and you can now spec the unit with up to 24GB “unified memory,” more than the maximum cap of 16GB on that first groundbreaking system-on-chip. Apple’s still sure it won’t be beaten on efficiency, claiming the M2 is 18 percent faster than the M1 while drawing the same amount of power.
— Daniel Cooper
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MacBook Air M2 hands-on: Bye-bye wedge
New colors, and MagSafe is back!
Of course, with a new chip should come new computers to sit around it, and Apple has finally redesigned the MacBook Air for the Apple Silicon age. Gone is that elongated wedge in favor of a more MacBook Pro-esque body, albeit even smaller. You’ll also get a full-size row of function keys this time around and a bigger 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display that’s brighter than the previous model and has a webcam notch up top. Alas, it’s also $200 more than the M1 MacBook Air, but hopefully we’ll see plenty of retailer discounts in the coming weeks and months. You’ll also find the new M2 in an updated 13-inch MacBook Pro, but there’s no glossy redesign here to get all excited about.
iOS 16 brings big updates to the lock screen
While iPadOS 16 gets overlapping windows.
Of course, the point of WWDC is to talk about software, and Apple had plenty to share about iOS and iPadOS 16. The biggest change for the former is a revamped lock screen that’ll give you a choice of fonts, accent colors and layouts for you to customize. You’ll be able to add widgets up front, too, enabling you to check vital data without unlocking your phone. (Sounds like the sort of thing that would be really useful if your phone had an always-on screen, too, doesn’t it?) iPadOS, meanwhile, will let you use overlapping windows just like a real computer, and Apple is even bringing the Weather app to the humble slate, just 12 years after the first model was released.
macOS Ventura offers new tools for efficient multitasking
Is this the end of multiple-window syndrome?
The next version of macOS, meanwhile, is dubbed Ventura, and the headline feature is the ability to better sort and organize your open applications. Stage Manager will enable you to group windows to the side of your desktop, organizing them by app, letting you switch between each group in turn. You’ll also find incremental updates to Spotlight, gain the ability to search for text in photos and notice long-overdue refreshes to Safari and Mail. But the most exciting feature might be the ability to use your iPhone as a webcam, giving you one fewer excuse to hide your face during those interminable work Zoom calls.
Elon Musk threatens to back out of Twitter deal over bot estimates
But it might not be that easy for Musk to back out.
Let’s be honest, who hasn’t publicly pledged to do something, made a big show and dance about following through, then got cold feet? It’s something Elon Musk might be feeling right now after he filed paperwork with the SEC to claim Twitter has committed a “material breach” of its deal terms. The Tesla CEO is claiming Twitter is refusing to disclose detailed data about the amount of fake, spam and bot accounts in its user figures. And that it has nothing to do with both Twitter and Tesla’s valuations dropping in recent months, making the deal a lot less enticing (for Musk) than it was when he started the process. For its part, Twitter says it has, and will, continue to share information with the billionaire, and that it fully intends to “close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”
