WWDC 2013 Recap: iOS 7, New MacBook Airs, OS X Mavericks & More!

Aside from an initial awkward start to the show that featured malfunctioning robotic cards, WWDC 2013 turned out to be one of Apple’s busiest event in years and featured some of the biggest updates.

The Cupertino company wasn’t very hesitant to remind us how much richer they are getting to begin their keynote; showing bar graphs, growth charts and then the good stuff begins.

This time around, Apple decided to ditch the “OS named after cats trend” and continued their legacy by naming the software after the things that inspire them to create; which is the great state of California.

The new OS is dubbed “OSX Mavericks”. It’s essentially a fined tuned version of the current OS with fixes to things like multi-monitor support, tabbed finder menus and also system wide tagging.

Diving a little deeper into the features, you can tag anything you want and also search by location of where the file was created. What I find really cool is that you can now tag which photo or any other file as a draft, in progress or as final which I can imagine will be really helpful for everyone. One of the biggest frustrations with Mountain Lion is the lack of multi-display support which now works flawlessly and you can dock and use the menu bar on both screens simultaneously. When you enter into full screen mode, one display does not become useless anymore so now both screens can be used to its full advantage. And for whoever owns an Apple TV, you’d love hear that now you display your computer screen wirelessly through that little black box. I, personally have been wanting this for months now and wondered why it wasn’t possible in the first place.

Apple also introduced its new iOS 7 update with an extremely overdue design change that the team over at Apple have been working really hard on and seems to have succeeded due to its recent staff change that has made Jony Ive the head honcho on the iOS design team. The new iOS has a simple, yet corky design standpoint but it somehow just makes you like it. It isn’t too far off from the old design but it has changed just enough so that we can be satisfied for the time being. But under the new fancy look of iOS is a very different machine in and of its self. Everything beyond the homescreen has been completely redesigned from the notification bar to the multi-taker selector. Icons are so minimal and beautiful. I am very excited to see more of iOS 7 in the new few months.

With the new arrival of the Haswell chips, Apple obviously needed to take advantage and incorporate them into their systems. The first product to receive this benefit is the Macbook Air. The Macbook Air line is now powered by Haswell using its ULT chipset. This move has now increased the Macbook Air battery life dramatically up to 12 hours of battery life! Apple says we could see a 40 percent boost in graphic speeds. The computer itself will still not be able to compete with computers with dedicated graphics of course but it would be that far behind.

Seems like a lot so far right? Even with all that news, quite possibly the biggest news of the event must be the oddly, fully complete, much needed Mac Pro refresh. The new Mac Pro looks like a black trash can or what some people are describing it as the Darth Vader helmet. The system itself looks totally un-upgradeable seeing as it has a super small form factor with such power components.

I get sudden nostalgia for a similarly exciting power machine such as the Retina display Macbook but was totally un-customizable without going through Apple themselves. The computer itself is said to be double as powerful as its predecessors. Its flash storage is 10 times as fast as any hard drive which will be running at 1.2Gbps for reading and 1 Gpbs for writing. The Mac Pro is running on a Intel Xeon chipset with up to 12 core configuration option. It can also support up to 3 4K monitors and output seven teraflops of graphical computing power with OpenCL. The Mac Pro will be out later this year and will be assembled entire in the United States.

Most noticeably was the absence of a MacBook Pro refresh which some speculated would be announced alongside the new MacBook Airs ala last year’s conference, but it looks like we’ll have to wait a bit for now. With Apple’s falling stock, do you think they pushed out enough to impress investors and put them back on track? If you’ve grown tired of iOS and were anxiously waiting for iOS 7, what are your thoughts now that it’s said and done? We’ve hit the halfway point through the tech year and still haven’t seen updates to the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac Mini or MacBook Pros as mentioned earlier, so along side those and more info on the redesigned Mac Pro, Apple still has quite a bit in store for us.

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