Rui CarmoMy takeaway from the WWDC 2015 keynote is pretty straightforward: feature parity.
The pragmatist in me says it’s with Google (some bits were like a mirror image of what we got in I/O a couple of weeks ago), the cynicist says it’s to align with user expectations.
Either way it’s a good thing, even though I really wish the product naming was a little less US-centric (“El Capitan”, seriously?).
OSX gets a little more surface polish, a fair amount of optimization (the writing has been on the wall for OpenGL and Quartz for a while) and iOS-like features, Siri gets Google Now-like context awareness while emphasizing privacy, the watch gets native apps and iOS multitasking is finally acknowledged as something indispensable on (some) iPads. It only took three years…
(I’m going to have to save up for a new one to be able to enjoy these new features, but there is only so much you can do in terms of performance tweaks anyway.)
I’m not going to go into the Swift announcements - I simply haven’t had any time to pay much attention to Swift (other than poring over the books), so unlike most people I won’t express an opinion on it being open-sourced until I have an actual use for it.
There is one thing about it I’m very interested in, which is to be able to build and test apps on my own devices without having to pay for a Developer Program subscription. That seems to finally be possible with Xcode 7, and brings it into parity with Android development - you can now get started and do in-house prototyping without signing up, which is extremely nice.
Not being in the US, I’m also going to wait and see what Apple News turns out. Apple Music, on the other hand, might well become Apple’s biggest cash cow yet. As much as I find streaming to be sub-optimal (especially on flaky networks) it’s clearly here to stay, and the catalogue seems unbeatable.
Only time will tell, of course, but I’m curious as to what it will mean for other music services - not just on iOS, but also on Android (and wasn’t that a surprise, huh?). Apple, doing Android apps.
Fun times we live in.