Following the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple executives Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak went into more detail about Monday’s announcements, including how the Mac Pro had to be ‘something special,’ and how iPadOS is less of a marketing ploy and more something that was needed for iPad as a platform.
Apple SVP Craig Federighi during the WWDC 2019 keynote.
Federighi and Joswiak spoke with Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on Tuesday in a special WWDC edition of “The Talk Show” podcast.
Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR
Probably the hottest topic of discussion from the WWDC keynote was the introduction of the Mac Pro and the Pro Display XDR. On the subject of the unique perforated case design that is also used on the display, Apple VP Greg Joswiak insisted “we knew we had to create something special.”
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The optional wheels for the Mac Pro were also raised as they were briefly mentioned during the keynote. Apple SVP Craig Federighi declined to state how much the wheels would cost, but joked the price would vary based on the number of wheels, and that there would be installment plans available for the add-on.
The Pro Display XDR also received some attention for considerably beating reference displays on price, with Joswiak highlighting how Apple’s version is better than a version that costs over $43,000.
The design decision to add a nanotexture to the screen of the Pro Display XDR was done as the normal matte processes used for such screens causes a sparkling effect. “This is a process unlike anybody’s done before,” insists Joswiak. “It handles the glare in a way that no one has done before, it’s an incredible process that we invented to do that. To make it clear, the standard display has industry leading anti-reflective coating, so it’s wonderful in the base config, but if you really want the matte, the nanotexture is just nuts.”
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iOS 13 and iPadOS
On the subject of the new operating system launches, Federighi’s main goal with iOS 13’s Photos app changes is to make it easier for users to see images for events and occasions in their life.
“You just never have these experiences in a sea of photos,” Federighi claims, advising of how the team behind the inner workings of the app have advanced over the years. “What’s the arc of a meaningful event for you? What were the big events that were important to you?”
The unveiling of iPadOS was unexpected, but Federighi explained it is more than just a “marketing thing,” with engineers feeling “very strongly” about its creation.
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“We’ve been on this trajectory for the iPad from the outset, codeveloping with this incredible hardware,” insists Federighi. “What do you want to do with a device that has these kinds of characteristics? Things like Split View and Slide Over and Apple Pencil, and then you start to see Apple and developers tailor the experience.”
The changes to gestures in iPadOS and how text is treated was due to it being “one of those areas in the past where we felt like this is harder than doing it on a Mac,” according to Federighi. The iPhone’s introduction of text selection, copy, paste, and undo was an extremely instructional interface by comparison to what Apple offers now in iPadOD.
“Getting to the right solution here, it’s something we have taken runs at for multiple years and came back and felt like we didn’t have it.” Federighi continued. “We wanted to get it right and it took a lot of care to craft it.”
“The iPad experience has to be one that everyone can understand,” he added, suggesting there could be a “depth” that users can find in the software. “You can become a pro and discover and really accelerate your work.”
Project Catalyst
Formerly known as “Marzipan,” Project Catalyst is an evolved form of Apple’s effort to make it easy for developers to port iOS apps to macOS, via changes to Xcode.
“It’s a fully native framework and we have an appropriate set of controls so you can build a really distinctive experience,” according to Federighi. “If you just push the Mac button you’ll get some degree of Mac-ification. You don’t have to rewrite all of the code to do that. You can have one code base and one team who understands one set of frameworks to do that work.”
Federighi defended the initial wave of Apple-produced apps that transferred from iOS to macOS last year, including Home and Apple News, noting some of the concerns “placed a certain amount on the technology that was really some design decisions we made.”
“So there were certainly some things that were underlying technology behaviors, but there were other just pure design choices about sizes of items in the sidebar and where was the search field and all of those kinds of things that were different design teams pushing the bounds of what is the right future for media oriented design on the Mac,” Federighi insisted. “I think we’re finding our balance now, pulling back in some areas there, and the underlying technology is much refined.”
Machine Learning and Privacy
The increase of machine learning on a mobile device is slowly becoming important for Apple’s competitors, especially Google, but they may have more difficulty in pulling it off due to the diversity of products on the market. “You’d be surprised to see they’ve started to say ‘on-device machine learning,” Federighi proposes. “They’re actually seeing the light on that topic.”
Federighi took the moment to poke at Google’s reliance of cloud servers for AI processing, and their track record on privacy. “Having your phone know you is cool. Having some cloud person know you is creepy,” he posits.
The competitors are disadvantaged in Federighi’s view as “part of what makes this possible is building this great hardware and the integration of hardware and software. Pulling this off between a random fleet of devices is really just impossible.”
In discussing Sign in with Apple, Josiwak highlighted users “want transparency and control” in the authentication process. “In the situation of these buttons, there’s no transparency. People had no idea the information flowing through that tap. We wanted to provide that transparency and control.”
Joswiak went on to underline Apple’s privacy credentials, boasting “We’ve been doing privacy since before it was popular.”
“If you look at some of these other companies, it’s not at the core of who they are. We’re building stuff that we would want for ourselves, our families, our children,” stated Joswiak. “I don’t want to be tracked. I don’t want my family to be tracked.”