predictions

Mac Event Predictions

I comfort-ordered a white HomePod mini this morning. When I’m feeling stressed, I tend to buy things and eat a lot of cheese, and hoo-boy that 18-count mega box of Kraft mac and cheese from Costco is emptying at an alarming rate. Lucky for me and my cheese stash, another opportunity to therapeutically buy stuff is right around the corner, with Apple’s “One More Thing” event just 3 days and 20 hours away, according to my Scriptable widget.

I will admit to not knowing much about computer processors, and what features/outcomes certain types of processors can enable. That’s why I’m the perfect person to write a hilariously specific prediction post for next week’s event. For this, I’m going to pretend I have an inside source (I don’t) and make some confident statements about what to expect. Why am I doing this? Because my kids are napping and I literally cannot concentrate on anything else I am supposed to be doing right now.

Okay, here goes.

MacBook Air

Apple is going to announce a brand new 13-inch MacBook Air that runs on a variant of the A14 chip. This Air will be the same thickness as previous models with the same tapered design, but will be fanless, with FaceID but no TouchBar. It’ll have two USB-C ports, a headphone jack, and come in 5 different colors. It’ll boast up to 13 hours of battery life.

MacBook Pros

Apple is going to announce new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. These will run on a different chip (maybe M14?) and won’t be fanless. They’ll have a TouchBar, FaceID, four USB-C ports, a headphone jack, speaker and microphone improvements, higher resolution mini-LED displays, and up to 12 hours of battery life. Their GPU performance will be bananas-good. They’ll come in the usual colors, along with one wildcard…my guess is black or blue.

All 3 laptop models will gain an upgraded 1080p HD camera and the FaceID sensor will mean support for Animoji/Memoji in video chats. I’m torn on whether or not they’ll bring back the light-up Apple logo. Maybe I’ll make this bold prediction: the Airs will have Apple’s classic rainbow logo on the back, but it will not light up. The MacBook Pros will have a white Apple logo that does light up.

Other Stuff

How about those AirTags, amiright? Actually, I think if Apple adds anything to this event, it will either be headphones or a Mac mini. There will undoubtedly be some demos of iOS and legacy apps running on Apple Silicon and Big Sur, including a game demo.

So, there you have it: my expert predictions for the Apple Silicon Mac event. Honestly, the only thing I really want out of this event is MacBooks in different colors, and I probably won’t get it. A girl can dream though, right?

WWDC 2019 Developer Wishlist and Keynote Predictions

WWDC is now just two weeks away, so I thought I’d share what I’m hoping for in the way of developer tools/APIs.

UIKit Updates

  • A standard system font picker
  • A standard system color picker
  • An easier way to implement multi-column layouts that doesn’t involve nesting UISplitViewControllers
  • A keyboard navigation system for iOS that would allow users to navigate table views and collection views using the arrow keys
  • Greater variety of stock UI components and customization options for components on iOS (i.e. stop making us reimplement an expanding table view cell with a rotating arrow, or a circular progress indicator, or write dumb hacks like adding a blank UIImage as a navigation bar’s “shadow” just to get rid of that line beneath it)
  • More standard system icons that can be used both inside and outside of tool bars and navigation bars (like, on regular UIButtons)
  • A visual redesign of all current stock components on iOS, which, in general, are boring, ugly, and inaccessible
  • More Apple frameworks classes should be made Codable-compliant (i.e. UIColor).
  • I want to be able to force a dark appearance for all elements in my app. Snapthread’s never going to have a “light mode,” but I want to make use of iOS 13’s dark mode appearance for things like action sheets, pop ups, picker views, switches, etc regardless of the user’s display setting.
  • A cleaner way to check if a device is in landscape orientation than checking the orientation of the status bar
  • Support for rearrangeable buttons in a toolbar/nav bar on iOS

Xcode Improvements

  • Interface Builder improvements: basically, every visual customization that is possible for a UI component should be editable in Interface Builder. This includes layer customizations like corner radius, border, and drop shadow.
  • There should be more information than just a progress bar when uploading to App Store Connect from Xcode. At least Application Loader tells you the upload speed and how many MBs are left.
  • Closing the new Music app should not be a requirement for installing Xcode.
  • A way to hide/dismiss warnings in Xcode

Photo and Video

  • Developer access to the more recent Apple-made Core Image filters, such as Silvertone, Dramatic, Vivid, etc
  • A “What’s New in AVFoundation” session…there hasn’t been one since 2016
  • There are rumors that Apple will enable developers to train machine learning models on device. I’d like to see examples of that applied in photo/video contexts.

These are just my wishes… now for a few predictions.

WWDC Keynote Predictions

There are rumors that Apple is planning to grant developers access to its real-time document collaboration API. I think this is going to be a big talking point, along with the ability for apps to have multiple “instances” open at the same time (i.e. being able to compare two Microsoft Word documents in split view on iPad). I’m guessing there’s going to be more than one demo showing off these features, and so my prediction is that Microsoft is going to demo a new Office update, and Adobe will be there to show off real-time collaboration in XD or something like that (somebody’s gotta compete with Figma, right?). Or Affinity maybe? I imagine some sort of photo editor or design/drawing app will at least be shown to demo the new floating panels on iPad.

I have no doubt that Tim Cook, or whoever is doing the watchOS presentation, will mention Apple’s ECG app—how it’s already saved lives and will continue to roll out to more countries. None of the new rumored health apps seem demo-worthy, but there’s rumors of new Siri intents, and I’m betting at least some of those are going to get demoed on the watch—event ticketing, flight/gate information, etc.

I have no clue what third party Marzipan apps we’ll see onstage. Darkroom seems like a good candidate for Mac, as well as Ferrite and LumaFusion. Some weather apps might be interesting, but not that interesting. I’m stumped. Instagram? Instagram for iPad and Mac? (lololol) Games don’t make much sense because engines like Unity already enable devs to make cross-platform games.

Perhaps the biggest mystery of all is how Apple is going to fit all of this into a ~2 hour keynote. Close your eyes for a moment and think these words in Tim Cook’s voice: “iOS 13, with a gorgeous new dark mode…” I mean, you know they’re going to want to spend 15 minutes just talking about dark mode. Judging by Bloomberg and 9to5Mac’s rumor dumps, they’re only going to have about two. There’s just too much to cover. Apple has shown that they can put together a really tight keynote though, so my prediction is that we’ll see another fast-paced, throw-a-bunch-of-features-on-a-slide-and-move-on presentation.

What about you? What are your predictions? Feel free to share your own thoughts/blog posts with me on Twitter @bhansmeyer, or Micro.blog @becky.