Apple Unleashed: WWDC 2024's Biggest Reveals & What They Mean for You

Summary

During the WWDC conference, Apple announced several new features and updates across their products. They focused on privacy and customization, introducing AI-powered features and enhancements. Notable updates include customizable home screens on iOS 18, the addition of a calculator app on iPadOS 18, and the introduction of RCS for improved messaging with Android users. Apple also unveiled Vision Pro, which offers spatial video and photo experiences, and AI features under Apple Intelligence. Other updates include enhancements to AirPods, Apple TV, and WatchOS.

Keywords

WWDC conference, Apple, features, updates, privacy, customization, AI-powered features, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, RCS, Vision Pro, Apple Intelligence, AirPods, Apple TV, WatchOS

Takeaways

Apple is focusing on privacy and customization with their new feature updates.
iOS 18 introduces customizable home screens and the ability to schedule text messages.
iPadOS 18 finally includes a calculator app.
RCS enables improved messaging with Android users.
Vision Pro offers spatial video and photo experiences.
Apple is introducing AI features under Apple Intelligence.
AirPods now have head gesture controls and enhanced voice isolation.
Apple TV allows for information overlay and voice audio boosting.
WatchOS includes a training mode and Siri improvements.

Sound Bites

"Apple is adding features that enable users to mess up their home screen or customize it however they want."
"You can now schedule text messages, ensuring you never forget to send an important message."
"Apple is finally embracing RCS, allowing for better messaging with Android users."

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Overview
03:01 Privacy, Customization, and AI-Powered Features
08:17 iPadOS 18: Finally, a Calculator App
12:29 Apple Intelligence: On-Device Processing and User Privacy
23:53 Unveiling Apple's AI-Powered Features with Apple Intelligence
33:39 Redefining the Visual Experience with Vision Pro
37:49 Conclusion and Next Steps

Creators & Guests

Host

Dalton Anderson

I like to explore and build stuff.

What is Venture Step?

Venture Step Podcast: Dive into the boundless journey of entrepreneurship and the richness of life with "Venture Step Podcast," where we unravel the essence of creating, innovating, and living freely. This show is your gateway to exploring the multifaceted world of entrepreneurship, not just as a career path but as a lifestyle that embraces life's full spectrum of experiences. Each episode of "Venture Step Podcast" invites you to explore new horizons, challenge conventional wisdom, and discover the unlimited potential within and around you.

Dalton Anderson (00:00)
Welcome to VentureStep podcast where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. Today, we're going to discuss a whole bunch of features Apple just dropped during their WWDC 2024 conference. We're going to break it all down from customizable iPhones to AI features that frankly long awaited AI features. And one of the biggest drops Apple has ever

Done. Do do do do do iPad calculator. You heard it. iPad is getting a calculator. Huge. So we're going to discuss everything, but before we dive in, I'm your host Dalton Anderson. My background is a bit of a mix of programming, data science, insurance offline. You can find me running, building my side business or loss in a good book. You can listen to this podcast and video or audio format on YouTube.

If audio is more your thing, you can find the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Okay. So during this conference, a couple of things were announced and this is today's agenda. We have iOS 18. We have vision pro updates, iPad, OS 18, Mac OS Soma.

Apple Intelligence.

AirPos, Apple TV, WatchOS, and some key takeaways. All right, so for the iPhone, which would be iOS 18, a lot of the features that they are...

or that were created were actually things that, and I have to point it out, that Android has had for a very long time. And so there's a lot of excitement from Apple users, but for people who don't use Apple, they're a bit confused because like some of these things, like one of the feature updates was you could freely place icons wherever you want on your home screen now.

I remember being like 12 when I had like a Samsung when I was really young, maybe 13 and I could do that then. That's a while ago, unfortunately. They're doing something to where I would say majority of the features enable customization of your iPhone. So if you want to make your

your home screen, a certain color, all your apps, a certain color. If you want to place certain icons wherever you want, you can do that now, which is basically, I would, I would think of it at this way. Like Apple has a very streamlined, clean operating system for all of their products. Android was kind of wild west ish. Like there was no right or wrong way to do something. You can do whatever you want.

but at the same time, like things might not work as well if you're doing all this wacky stuff. And so over the last say eight years, Android has been cleaning up their act and they're, they've been coming more Apple like I would say, like they're cleaning up streamlining their, their software, making it easier for many users to use, not just like technical users.

And Apple is going the other route where they have a really clean software, but they want to add more features. Android already has a lot of features built out and they're just cleaning everything up. So it's interesting the parallels, but for Apple, they're adding these features that enable users to mess up their home screen or customize it wherever they want, however they want. When I say mess up, because they have this theme engine that's similar to

Apple, not Apple, Android's Material U theme engine, Material U where the apps have to opt in to having their icons changed for their app. And so the big apps would do it for the most part. There's some big companies that just like, I'm not doing that. And it messes up your whole look and feel of your apps. For me, it's quite frustrating because I use Material U.

And basically material use like it takes your home screen and whatever the color hue is on your home screen, it changes all your apps and everything, all the accent colors on your phone to match your home screen. And it will pull out a couple of color hues for you. It's not just like, here it is. Like this is the only color hue. Like it picks out a couple, like maybe you might have seven or so that you can choose from. And you just pick the one that you really jive with. And so my home screens.

the satellite live updating video of the world. And so I could see the weather and like where the sun is at hitting, hitting the earth. But obviously it's a lot of green blues, stuff like that. So it's got a nice theme. With that being said, there's some apps that just refuse to use material. You and material you has been out for a long time and I just, I can't have them on my home screen or have them anywhere. I don't want to see them. So I just put them.

I just remove them with Apple's theme engine approach. You can actually, I would, I would say like color cast or like overlay the color over the icons. So the developer doesn't actually have to opt in to this app engine or theme engine. They don't need to make any changes to whereas material you, the developer group,

for the app needed to opt in and allow material to change their icon. This just overlays the colors of the app.

to where you can change it to whatever you want. The caveat is sometimes when you're doing this forceful color change of the icons, they become unreadable. And so there's been some reviews of that where people are messing around with it. They had early access and sometimes the apps are just, they're not legible anymore.

There is this other option, which is super sus. That I'll discuss one right now, I guess, is you can hide your apps from the, not from the home screen, but you can now have hidden apps on your home screen. So you can have like these app folders, they said folders, to where you can have these hidden apps, which is suspect in itself and all sorts of trust issues.

going on there? What are you? I don't know what hidden apps you would need to have. The only thing I could really think of is like if you had a girlfriend or partner, wife, husband, and you're doing stuff that you don't want them to see, which is probably bad. Like I could see them having a separate messaging app to where they message some, some person that they're having an affair with.

or have a dating app hidden on their phone to where like you can't find it. So basically if like you search for that app, like, okay, I'm searching to see if my partner has Tinder on their phone or whatever, you wouldn't be able to know because it wouldn't show up in the search. You'd only be able to find it if you knew that they had a hidden, hidden app. So very sketchy.

And I guess my only advice is if you feel the need to go through your partner's phone to see if they have some hidden messaging app or dating app, you should probably just let them go. OK, anyways. You can now customize your control center. Across multiple pages, apparently, and it's been a while since I've used Apple, but I remember when I was like 13 years old, I could do that on my Samsung back in the day.

So yeah, I mean, it's nice to have. I'm just, I'm just trying to put things in perspective where you're like, Whoa, wow. I can customize my, my control center. And during the conference, maybe the people are paid to clap, but there was some serious applauding for being able to customize your control center, which is, I don't.

pod. You can now schedule text messages. And so this is a feature where if you know you're going to be really busy and you want to make sure that you send your friend or family member happy birthday, you can schedule it the next day and say, okay, like write out your nice note, schedule it for the next day, whatever time you want to send it. And you can make sure.

that you get your message out when you need to instead of potentially time getting away from you and you're not getting to it and you forget to send your message that you wanted to send or maybe someone asks you to message them at a certain time. You can do that. No problem. And when I think one of the biggest things that they announced for communication enhancements was you can now.

message with Android users without any of the caveats. So if you're listening and you're not in America, there's a whole big green bubble, blue bubble. And basically it's because people use the native messaging apps in America and they don't use, they don't use WhatsApp or any of these third party messaging apps, which isn't very, let's say.

normal outside of the US. And if you're a US speaker, like US listener, like, yeah, other people outside of the US, they don't use their native apps. They use third party apps. And the reasoning was like back in the day, SMS was super expensive to do. So then that's why the SMS is like the messaging format was super expensive. So the workaround was to have these third party apps and then you could just use like Internet.

and or your Wi -Fi to send the messages once you had it hooked up to your phone, like your phone number. So there's a way around to get away from these expensive fees. With SMS, but now SMS is like normal, but it's more of a I would say ingrained in the culture now, like there's no reason to switch over if everyone uses it and there's no issues with whoever. You're speaking with, but in America it's a big it's a big hoot.

And there's some pressure. There's definitely some. I wouldn't say as much as when you're an adult, but there's definitely some serious peer pressure when you're a kid, like middle school, elementary school. I wouldn't say elementary as much because you probably shouldn't have an iPhone, but middle school and high school, there's some serious pressure like. You know, you're not included in the group chats, you can't be included because they don't want you in there. It's a whole thing.

you'll get not necessarily picked on, but they'll kind of nag on you for it. I know that because that's what happened when I was younger. Anyways, and it's still a thing too. I asked my little step brother. Okay, so the big feature that they're dropping is this thing called RCS, which is I think like rich, man, I'm blanking out.

Rich, customized, support, I don't know. I don't know what RCS stands for. I can look it up.

Meaning? rich communication services. So I was, I was way off, but so RCS is a messaging format that is kind of the new SMS. So RCS is able to support photos, videos, and more data.

as well as being encrypted on both sides. And so it's more secure. It's more feature rich and it's just overall much better than SMS. SMS was created a long time ago. Phones weren't as capable. People didn't communicate them on them as much via texting. And so it was a different world when SMS was created. RCS is for the new generation of phones and the new way of communicating. And RCS was built by Google.

Okay. With that background, Google has been putting a lot of pressure on Apple for years on getting RCS put together. Like, okay, like you need to, we'll even help you do it. We'll do everything in our power to help out. Apple didn't want to do it because if they allowed proper communication between Android and Apple, there isn't like the societal pressure.

in America to have an iPhone. And once again, it's not as big of a deal when you're an adult. I mean, there's like your friends will nag on you for messing up the group chats, but it's it's like serious pressure when you're like middle school and high school.

And obviously kids want to fit in. So basically what they're doing is they're they're peer pressuring kids to have iPhones. And then when they grow up, they're just used to iPhones and then that's what they'll use.

Apple's been getting a lot of pressure from Europe with their regulatory bodies, regulatory bodies about just different issues they have. And one of which was kind of pushed pretty hard onto Apple where like they had to change their charging port. So Apple used to have the lightning port and make people buy a proprietary charging type.

Europe was like, hey, everyone uses USB -C. Why can't you? And they're like, we don't want to. Europe was like, okay, you either do it or you pay this crazy fine. Apple was like, okay, fine, I'll change it. And then they were getting additional pressure about this whole messaging thing, because there's a whole bunch of studies coming out about how kids feel really pressured in America to have an iPhone versus not have an iPhone.

And I think the conversation was brought up briefly to them. Obviously, I don't know exactly because I wasn't there. But basically, Apple chose to get ahead of it. And they're like, we're also working on RCS. We want to include Android into communication. And so they did this on their own accord, but with a lot of pressure from Google and I would say potential pressure from regulatory bodies. Like basically,

They saw the shadow and they acted right before they were told they had to do like, you know, look at me. I'm an, I'm, I'm acting in good faith, but really what it was, it was just like,

they were just like two steps before what they're doing, like something two steps before they were told to do it.

With that being said, you can now, once you update to iOS 18, you should be able to enable RCS on your phone. And so when you're texting your friends that have Android, you'll be able to send a video to them and they'll be able to send a video to you and it won't look like a potato.

filmed it. It won't be all blurry and compressed. It will look like a normal video and it'll be the same quality of what you sent it. So it's really nice and it's great. They did say that you're going to stay green and blue. They're going to keep the green and blue thing, but it just won't matter because you'll be able to communicate properly, which is really nice. Okay. Switching over to Vision Pro. Vision Pro came out with their Vision 2 .0.

software. I don't necessarily think it is feature rich enough for it to be 2 .0. I think maybe like more of a 1 .01. My opinion, the two big things that they came out with was spatial photos and videos. So you can take photos on your iPhone or other devices, upload them to your iCloud.

open that up in your Vision Pro and from there you'll be able to turn your photo or video into a spatial video which is pretty cool and spatial will be like I guess... What do you explain it? Like 3D -ish? It's like you're there. I don't know. I don't have a good analogy for that one on the fly.

Sorry. Okay. But it's nice. I don't know how well it's going to work. It's there's been limited access to these things and I don't have a vision pro, which would be nice, but they're like $2 ,000. So I'm all right. I'll get a, I'll get an Oculus. They have improved Mac mirroring and Mac mirroring is when you use your compute on your Mac.

and then you can display windows via vision pro and apparently you can do double resolution than what you used to be able to do which is great i think that's really nice i think spatial space maybe spatial displays i would say spatial displaying of information is so much better from a work standpoint

or workflow standpoint, then buying that same hardware to display. Like when I say hardware, like monitors and such hardware to display that information. Like you could have six screens on your vision pro or like one massive, like 80 inch, a hundred inch screen with all your stuff on there with different windows. That would cost a lot more obviously if you're buying a monitor. So it's a very interesting,

future, like where, how people might work. I've talked about it before and people aren't receptive as much to it, but I would really embrace it. So I hope it, I hope it comes soon. I still am concerned about new vision pros future if they don't open source their software because Oculus or Metta met as

or I guess not called Oculus anymore. That was the acquire company met as quest quest.

VR headsets are an open source software and that allows other developers to develop apps and make hardware on their own without them. So why is that a big deal? If Meta is the leading hardware provider, the leading software provider with many other large tech companies,

making hardware and developing on there. A developer that wants to make an app could make one app that goes to just Vision Pro users, or they could make one app that goes to, I don't know, 10, 15 different user bases.

So you have to make sure that the developer ecosystem is there. But if the amount of users is low compared to this other user base and they have many other companies you could reach, it's a hard value proposition for your time. So I think it's concerning unless Vision Pro is gonna be fully supported by Apple like nonstop. I think it might be niche if they don't.

figure out what they're doing. iPadOS, so iPadOS 18, once you update to iPadOS 18, you will get the long awaited calculator app. I think...

Apple released their iPad in 2010. So in 2010, I think April, April, 2010, I looked it up previously for the call, but I knew it was like somewhere around those lines. I don't know the exact date, but 2010 and 2010 it was launched without a calculator app. And for years they've been making lots of memes about how Apple just chooses not to.

add a calculator app for some mysterious reason. They just wouldn't do it. I mean, they're a big company calculator apps, pretty easy to do. No big deal. Just add it. It's such an inconvenience to not have a calculator on your iPad. They've done it. They added the calculator app. One thing that they did that's a little different is you can take out your stylus and go to

this other app called Math Notes, and you can draw out equations and change the variables on the fly, and it will change the result, which is really cool. I thought it was sick. I thought it was super cool. And obviously that's used by AI to convert your handwriting, to read it, then to...

do the calculations to the output back into your handwriting. There's a whole bunch of stuff going on over there to make math notes work the way that it needs to, which is really cool. And apparently that's done by one of their models.

Apple has been pretty silent about their AI positions. So.

They haven't mentioned AI yet in this conference. Mac OS, their update is gonna get some video conferencing enhancements. So you'll have built -in backgrounds for virtual meetings. And then you'll have iPhone mirroring, which you can mirror your iPhone at all times. I'm not sure how that would be that useful.

I mean, maybe you could use it for like tech support. Like if you're, if you're Nana or your grandma or granddad or someone like that was having issues getting something on their phone, you could ask them to connect to your phone and or their phone to your computer and then you can help them if you weren't in the same house as them, I guess. I think you have to be close though. So I don't know. I don't know how it's super useful.

but it's there and it's a feature. Okay. So for a while now, Apple's been very silent on AI and they haven't said much about it. During this conference, they didn't talk about AI and during other conferences, they've avoided using the word AI. They'll use other things like neural net, machine learning, all of these other phrases that are related to AI.

but they just won't say the word AI. Now they are saying AI and they are launching their AI unveiling with their own proprietary models, which is great. They're branding AI as their own brand called Apple intelligence, which is interesting.

AI, Apple intelligence or yeah, it's a good play on words like a play on a phrase to make it Apple branded. So they're gonna have on device processing.

for, I'll say, easy tasks, easy things. They're going to have some generated models. They'll have some LLMs. They'll have a various slew of models that will be able to do different things for you. It will be launched on the highest grade, I don't know what to say, the highest version of the iPhones. So if you're like on a pro or something like that, and then for,

Mac, you will get the information, not the information, these features, the AI features, Apple intelligence features, if you have a pro. And so they said from anywhere from like M1 to M4, I don't think they have M4 yet, but M3, you would have these features. So a couple of things that they showed is like on device processing for things like.

typing up an email, changing what you said, changing the tone, going through and, and figuring out like what your schedule is and, and things like that. If you want more complex things, you'll be handled off device using what they called Apple cloud compute, which sends your complex prompt to Apple cloud.

Infrastructure.

everything is handled anonymously and it's never saved apparently and then it's sent back to your phone. If.

your task that you have or prompt isn't something that Apple can handle. Chat GPT will take take over. And so this is kind of sketchy, I think. And we'll see. Apparently, it's anonymized and never stored.

But we've heard that's kind of stuff before many times. So I don't know if it will fall for it, but Apple is really good about privacy. So maybe it's not an issue, but it is kind of sketchy in my opinion. basically if your task is task or prompt is complex, then you'll get a prompt on your phone saying, Hey, are you all right with us sending this to you?

open how to use Chat GPT. And every time that you want to use or every time that Apple thinks that your prompt's better suited to be handled by Chat GPT, it will ask you like, hey, are you all right with this? And you have to press yes every time. And if you don't care, that's probably gonna be really annoying. If you do care, you might, that's very nice. So I'm not sure if there's a setting where you can just take it off and say like, remember my selections or something.

I'm not sure. They're also launching a cleanup tool in photos. So it's similar to Android's magic eraser. It will allow you to remove unwanted elements from your photo. So that could be like, maybe you took a photo with your partner and it's got these beers in there and you just want to, you just want to crop that out. You don't want that in there, but you really liked the photo in the background or whatever you could.

use almost like magic eraser. You could use cleanup to remove those beverages that you don't want. Or if you took these special photos with your family and someone is in the background just doing whatever, you can remove them from the photo, which is really nice. And what it will do is when it removes it, it will just take this stuff that's nearby and auto fill it.

And so there's some scenarios this works well. If the background that you're doing these cleanups with is somewhat same texture slash color, then it'll do just fine. But if you're in some festival like place with many different colors and things going on, it's going to have some issues.

In my experience, especially with magic eraser, I mean, they get better over time. I'm sure five years from now, it's going to be crazy good. But right now, if you have a background that you're trying to generate after you remove your subject that you don't want it and if it's got a whole bunch of things it needs to do like different texture, different colors, different depths, different lightings, it's not going to do that well.

Okay. They're also, and this is pretty cool. They're doing JIT emojis, Jinmojis. Jinmojis are, you guessed it, personalized emojis for your text prompts, using text prompts. And so the way it was demoed is you go into maybe a separate area and put a prompt in and then it makes an emoji for you.

In my experience using Google messages and WhatsApp, there's these things called like, I don't know, AI, they call them AI stickers. I think WhatsApp calls them AI stickers. I don't know what Google calls them. Everyone's got their own little name. It's hard to keep up with it, but basically they're AI stickers. So if you type something like this morning, I typed my friend, happy birthday, like happy birthday, blah, blah, blah. It made this cake with a smiley face and some other animation stuff related to it. It was pretty cool. So I used it.

WhatsApp says their AI stickers are used pretty often. I think it's definitely more of a younger thing. I don't think like 40 year old people are like, yeah, this AI stickers so sick. But they could be, I don't know. But I don't really use them that much either. But apparently there's a big want for these things. And WhatsApp during, I think Meta's AI.

kind of conference thing that they had, they talked about how often these AI stickers are used. And I don't want to quote the numbers, but it was like a lot per day. It was in the millions plus like maybe like three digit millions, but I'm not going to say it because I want to avoid fake news. So I don't know for sure. And I try to look it up, but it was difficult to find. And I didn't want to go back through and comb through their video. OK. So the JIT.

Genmojis, you can make these personalized emojis for yourself. They have Siri improvements. So Siri will become more proactive and more natural voice. And they're slowly leading it into becoming more agent -like, where it can act on your behalf and open apps and do stuff for you, which is really nice. That's the direction that other companies are going in with their AI assistants, open AI.

Gemini, Claude.

all of these companies, they want to.

And Metta, Metta has agents, they have 31 live agents right now on social media, and WhatsApp. I think they're in WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. So it's not just Apple that has this kind of potential direction that they want to take things. It seems like many companies want to go in the same direction regarding this agent -like interactions.

AirPods. So AirPods couple updates that I think the most interesting one was head gesture controls where you can answer calls or respond to prompts, text prompts with a no or yes. So the AirPods would know if you're shaking your head yes or no to answer the question.

that it's asking. So like, do you want this call? No. All right. Fine. Move on. Enhance voice isolation in noisy areas, spatial audio for gaming so you can immerse yourself in these gaming soundscapes. Apple TV. One thing I thought was really nice was what I'm going to call like information overlay. When you swipe down on the remote, you can see in that present picture,

the actors and actresses and the music that's playing, which is nice. Previously on Apple TV, when you went to a show, you could see the actors in the show. But if you were on the screen and you're like, who's this person? Like, I really liked them. You couldn't see them. You'd have to exit the TV or not the TV, but exit your show that you're on. Go to the show and look at the actors and try to find the actor that looks like the person you wanted to learn about.

Now all you have to do is swipe down and it will show you everything in that picture, which is pretty cool. They also have another feature where you could boost the voice audio over the sound or music. So basically, if you're in a show and you're having difficulty listening to what the actors and actresses are saying, you can now.

increase their volume while decreasing the gain on the background music.

WatchOS, there wasn't that many updates. They have a training mode which will show your workout trends and your progress over time and the workouts that you're doing, how hard it could have been if you did certain things or if you exerted yourself a little bit more, like how far could you put yourself if you wanted to. Okay, so we have the key takeaways. We have, I think, Apple continues.

to focus on privacy and customization.

and they're doing so now with AI powered features, which is very nice. Apple Pro Vision or Apple Vision Pro is.

aims to redefine how we experience videos and photos.

iOS 18 brings long awaited features and communication improvements. Apple intelligence prioritizes on device processing and user privacy. What do you think about these feature updates for Apple products? Any thoughts about these feature drops? If so, please leave a comment. And if you like the content, if you want.

And only if you want to, you can subscribe. I wouldn't mind it. Next week, and I keep talking about it like every week, I'm like, okay, this week is the week that we'll have a guest on the show. And it's been we've been having difficulty scheduling everything. And it's a little more complicated when you have to schedule something with someone else and they've got stuff going on. You've got stuff going on. So.

Next week, I will be publishing an episode with a guest. And to be great, we're going to talk about branding. She is a serial entrepreneur and she's had a couple of exits and she's very excited and I'm very excited to talk about and listen to branding. If you can see the video, I'm smiling ear to ear.

But I have in a scheduled episode.

with the guests later this week. So we should get that taken care of and get that recorded. Next week, we'll be presenting the content, which would be great. It'd be awesome to have a guest on the show. And that's something I want to become more of a regular thing.

It just, I was taking some time to practice and become a better podcaster because it takes a little bit of effort to do so. It's not so simple. And I wanted to make sure that when I'm asking for someone's time, that they knew that I was serious and this isn't something that I'm just doing once in a while, or this is some kind of.

Interest that I'll have for a couple weeks and then drop off. This is something I've been doing weekend week out for weeks now And I'm also behind on my book readings Sorry about that book reviews coming Hopefully soon I have to finish the book and I've been busy last couple weekends and during the week unfortunately is as Some things come up, but I am continuously pushing through Getting in that next spot

Get in the next couple of pages. Couple of pages at a time adds up, right?

That's what I got going on next week. Be excited for the episode that's going to publish on Tuesday.

In a couple of weeks, we'll have the next book review. I'm a little bit behind, sorry. And of course, wherever you are in this world, good morning, good night, good day, good afternoon, and see you next week. Thanks for listening, bye.