WWDC 2018 Idle Thoughts

Let’s see if I can do a Dave Pell style post.

  1. I actually liked Snow Leopard more than Leopard, so a year of improvements is just fine by me.
  2. 2018 feels like the year of “sorry we ruined your family life” from Apple.
  3. I still don’t want a HomePod
  4. I actually kind of want a pair of HomePods.
  5. I wouldn’t say no to a series-3 Watch but I’m also not saying yes until I see Overcast for Apple Watch
  6. Siri actions will enable the most productive, dumbest assistant I’ve ever worked with
  7. Great, now I need to pretend I don’t know how to do group FaceTime just like I pretend I don’t know how to do group messaging
  8. Please, oh please don’t let game makers use tongue detection. Some of us have to take public transit.
  9. If they don’t have a paper bag MeMoji, they failed us kids from the 70s.
  10. If piles are such a good way to organize stuff, why can’t I convince my wife I know how to fold clothes?
  11. I feel much better about the iMac Pro I bought. I think the Mac is a continuing product after this week.
  12. I am NOT buying Transmit and BBEdit for a second time this year.
  13. I lied about #12
  14. I’ll complain about the AppleTV while I watch my AppleTV. It’s the TV I deserve.
  15. In 2018 it’s going to be way easier to add dick-pics to your Keynote presentations.

In all truth, I feel much better about my status as an Apple fan after the 2018 keynote. In many ways, it felt like an acknowledgement of two major categories of buyers: The young and the old. It’s fine to joke about MeMoji and the silliness of 32 person FaceTime parties but that’s the stuff that will pull in younger users. There are very few 11 year olds that want sudo access to their shell. But then we get things like dark mode and audio APIs for the watch. That’s clearly targeting us old crusty folks that like to shake sticks at things.

The changes to Siri are both exciting and disappointing. It seems as though Apple is targeting actions more than information. Or at least that’s the part they revealed. I’d love for Siri to be more useful to me for executing on an idea, but first it needs to be smart enough to give me the right definition for an english vocabulary word. And, it needs to be core to every Apple device including the HomePod. My fear is that I will have a bumbling idiot of an assistant with Siri that dutifully executes a series of tasks without regard for context or information content.

There was no mention of AirPods, which is one of my favorite new Apple products. With all of the talk about Siri, I’d expect AirPods to be a tentpole in the new strategy. What’s more personal than a piece of plastic jammed in your earhole? I’d like AirPods to work without tapping or touching. I hope the AirPods team hasn’t been moved to the HomePod cubicle farm.