The anticipation surrounding Apple’s WWDC finally ended. Apple has announced its brochure of new software and hardware updates including the long-awaited Mac Pro refresh. The WWDC keynote announcements include the new Mac Pro, alongside the XDR Pro Display. For software, Apple also unveiled the new iOS 13, iPadOS and the new macOS Catalina. Here is a compilation of key Apple WWDC highlights.
Mac Pro 2019
Apple’s key highlight for WWDC is definitely the new modular Mac Pro. The last Mac Pro released back in 2013 with a trash can design and hadn’t been updated till now. The new Mac Pro offers a significant bump in processing power with an all-new design.
Mac Pro 2019 comes with a new stainless steel and aluminum design and uses a cheese grater design for ventilation purposes.
Mac Pro price starts at $6,000 for the base version that can be buffed with a 28-core Xeon processor from Intel. The whole deck also has the option to use 1.5TB of RAM and a 4TB SSD storage. Mac Pro graphics cards include two Radeon Pro Vega II GPUs from AMD along with a new custom Apple card named ‘Afterburner’.
Apple XDR Pro Display
The Pro Display XDR is a 6K reference-grade professional display meant for high-end color accurate work. It measures at 32-inches and has a native resolution of 6016×3384 pixels.
Even though it is an LCD display, it can light up to 1600 nits brightness and has up to 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. It also has an extensive P3 color gamut support along with the option to use 10-bit output.
The XDR Pro Display has a similar cheese grater design and costs $5,000. However, if you want the complete set, you have to pay $1,000 for its stand separately. This makes the XDR Pro display stand likely the most expensive ‘accessory’ from Apple.
iOS 13
iOS 13 update brings a slew of feature improvements including a two-times faster app launch speed and a 50% reduction in app download sizes. It has an updated share sheet along with new Memoji stickers and Memoji makeup features. Other Apple WWDC highlights include the new Quick Path which is a swipe-style keyboard for Apple like Fleksy for Android. Moreover, Apple has finally included a dark theme natively in iOS 13. Better late than never.
macOS Catalina
Catalina is the official name for macOS 10.15 version of Apple’s computer operating system. The new update introduces new apps like Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts, removing iTunes from macOS.
As for security, “Approve with Apple Watch lets users approve many security prompts by simply tapping the side button on their Apple Watch.” This is a handy little feature for using Apple Watch with Mac.
The new Sidecar feature now makes the use of an iPad as an extended display possible in Mac. With an Apple Pencil, now users can use the iPad to draw, sketch or write in any Mac app with support for stylus input.
A new nifty feature called Screen Time will also let users keep tabs on their notebook or desktop usage time in macOS.
All the updates from Apple have stirred the hardware scenario for the professional market. As windows based products dominated the market in the past, Apple has re-entered the market with a big bang bringing great hardware and software improvements.
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