New M2, MacBook Air, macOS Ventura and More at WWDC 2022

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at all the new announcements from today's Worldwide Developer Conference Keynote. 

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So at today's Worldwide Developers Conference Keynote Apple announced the new M2 chips for Mac, a new MacBook Air, a 13 inch MacBook Pro and they also told us about the new features coming to iOS and iPad OS 16, and macOS 13 Ventura.

First let's start by talking about the new Macs. There are going to be two new Macs released next month. One will be a completely redesigned MacBook Air. So gone is the tapered look. It's going to look more like a compact MacBook Pro. It will come in four colors and have a bigger screen, 13.6", with a notch at the top. So the screen is going to go all the way to the top except where the camera is located. The camera is going to be a 1080p camera. It's going to have a MagSafe adapter. It's even going to include an audio jack and it is going to come in at $1199 for the base model. This is going to include the new M2 processor that Apple announced today so it is going to have better performance than the previous MacBook Air. This is going to be 20% smaller at only 2.7 lbs in weight. This will come out next month with the base model being priced at $1199 and I'm sure there will be more expensive options for more storage and more memory. 

There's also going to be a new 13" MacBook Pro model that looks like the same as the current 13" MacBook Pro model except it is also going to have the M2 chip in it. One thing of note is that it appears that the 13" MacBook Pro will still include the TouchBar probably because the design isn't being changed at all. So we're going to have a new Mac model with the TouchBar even though the more powerful MacBook Pros, that came out before, don't have it. 

Now how about this new processor? So today Apple announced the new M2 processor. So the successor to the M1. Now Apple has a whole range of M1 processors going all the way up to the M1 ultra. This M2 is a step above the M1 but it has nowhere near the number of processors on the M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra. So we've got this low end M2 processor now that will be in the new MacBook Air and the 13" MacBook Pro. It's going to have better performance across the boards. So higher performance in CPU, GPU's as well. Neural engine and all of that. It also supports up to 24G of RAM. The M1 only supports 16G of RAM.

So what about the new version of macOS? Well, macOS 13 will be called Ventura and the developer version will be available today. There will be a public beta in July and, of course, we will have the regular release in the Fall as we do every year. There are a lot of little things in Ventura that will make a lot of people happy. For instance, in the Mail App there's going to be an Undo Send and also a Scheduled Send feature and a revamped Search. Safari is going to have sharable Tab Groups. So you can have a group of Tabs and share it Live with others if you want to collaborate and browse the web together. It's also going to have support for Passkeys which will be the successor to Passwords. Now a lot of these features are actually across all of the different operating systems. So, for instance, the new Mail search is probably going to be on the  iPhone, the iPad, and on the Mac as well as new things like in FaceTime being able to handoff across devices. So you bring your iPhone that you're using FaceTime with near your Mac and have the opportunity to switch the call to your Mac. 

Another great feature is going to be in Photos across all of the devices. That's going to be a great new iCloud Sharing Option where you can share photos across with your family. So you can mark photos as either personal or shared with your family group. You can have a group of 5 people and then at any time that you take photos and share them with the family everybody sees them. So you can finally have all of your family photos shared by everybody without having to create a special shared album.

A feature I'm really excited about in macOS is the ability to use your iPhone's camera, the good camera on the back, as a webcam with your Mac. So you're going to be able to put your iPhone wherever you want or mount it on the top of your Mac with a holder and then use that good camera as the webcam. So you have a really high quality webcam. It's going to use all the different features like Centerstage and will even have a view where the camera, even though it's on your Mac pointed at you, it's going to be able to show the Desktop, so where your hands are and all below as another view. But it's going to be great to see what we can do finally having those very powerful iPhone cameras available as a webcam on a Mac. 

Now jumping over to the iPhone, in iOS 16 there are going to be a lot of new features starting with a Lock Screen. So the lock screens are going to kind of resemble the faces on an Apple watch. You can highly customize them. So not only can you place pictures on them like you want but things like maybe the date can appear behind subjects but in front of the background. You can customize the fonts and colors and all used for what is displayed on the lock screen. You can have different widgets from different apps appear as part of the lock screen. Notifications moved down to the bottom so they won't cover things up. There's going to be all sorts of cool ways that you can customize the lock screens and create multiple customized lock screens and switch between them. It works with Focus modes as well. So you might see different lock screens depending upon the Focus mode you're in and conversely when you switch lock screens it could switch Focus modes as well. Focus modes will have the ability to work on content inside of apps. So, for instance, in Safari when you're in certain Focus modes some of your tabs may be hidden so you can focus on others. The same thing in Messages. Some conversations may not be there depending upon the Focus mode you're in. The Messages App is going to have the ability to allow you to Unsend a message and to edit a message. I assume Unsending has to happen fairly quickly after you originally send it. Also you'll be able to use Share Play in Messages so you can share things inside of a message conversation like your screen or the screen of an app. You'll also be able to use better dictation features including having the keyboard on the screen at the same time as using dictation so you can kind of correct things and make changes either using your voice or the keyboard or both in any combination. 

Lots of other things. In Maps you're going to be able to have multiple stops in a route. There's going to be new Parental Controls including the ability for the child to ask for more time via the Messages app and then you can grant it. A new safety feature called Privacy Check where you can quickly review who you're sharing things like location with and change those very quickly. Quick Notes is coming to the iPhone. There's going to be more emoji customization.

Now one thing I didn't mention that's new to the Mac that's also coming to the iPad is something called Stage Manager. So this is going to be a new multitasking feature and it's interesting that Apple is going to be using it for both the Mac and for iPad. What it basically does is it puts the apps that you are currently using, or at least some of them, on the left side. You can see which windows are open and then you can have one big window on the right side and easily switch between them. But you can also group them together. So you can have several apps on the right and have them as part of a group that's on the left and switch between them. It looks like it should definitely make it easier to multitask on the iPad while at the same time giving you a new multitasking method on the Mac that matches that. 

There are also going to be a lot of small updates to iPad OS including new features in the Files app, new customizable Tool Bars like we have on Mac. The Weather App is finally coming to the iPad and it looks like it's going to be an enhanced large screen version of the Weather App. There's also going to be a new app. There's also going to be a new app, it's not clear whether it's going to be out before or after iPad OS 16, that will allow you to actually collaborate on a document while you're using FaceTime. It looks like a Notes--like document. It's called Freeform. You can draw and add things and do all sorts of stuff together with whomever you're FaceTiming with.

So there's lots of new, exciting things coming to all the new operating systems. A lot of them are crossing over. I can tell Apple is having a hard time now dividing up what's coming to Mac, what's coming to the iPhone, and what's coming to iPad because so many of the things are coming across all three at the same time that it's hard to group them like that now. As the beta matures over the next few months I'll be doing some videos on how some of these new features work. Then, of course, we'll have all of these new features in the Fall. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.