Picking up from Part 1 of my WWDC Preview, let’s take a look at the Apple Watch. The Watch and watchOS have grown up quite a bit since their release in 2015. Four years have brought much more speed and stability, a better app experience, a smart focus on health and wellness features and even LTE and the ability to use an independent data connection.
Photo Source: 9to5Mac
Over the last week, 9to5Mac has let us know that the coming Apple Watch Series 4 will have both a little larger screen and a higher resolution. The new model’s screen is expected to be edge to edge and the resolution will jump significantly from 312 x 390 to 384 x 480. Both of these improvements will allow users to see more information at a glance (the watch face above is an excellent example), and should give developers more flexibility to create more useful apps for the platform.
Almost a week out from the WWDC Keynote, the reviews of Apple’s new software features and improvements are overwhelmingly positive. Their focus on performance and small details will benefit all users, not just those with the latest devices. Siri got what could turn out to be a huge boost from the new Shortcuts feature, which will be opened up for developers to finally get real access to Apple’s digital assistant. Apple also focused some well-deserved attention on macOS to round out a Keynote full of new goodies.
However, despite all of the welcomed additions, there were several things that people were ether hoping or expecting to see that we didn’t get on Monday. Let’s take a look back and some of the misses from WWDC.
Yesterday’s WWDC Keynote certainly wasn’t as exciting and feature packed as last year’s, especially thanks to the lack of new hardware announcements. However, it did bring us a pretty solid set of new software features and improvements. There were also some things that were oddly missing in action, but for this segment, I’m going to focus on the positives. Let’s take a quick look back at the Keynote.