My Knee-Jerk Reaction to WWDC24

11 Jun 2024 | ~2 minute read

I watched the WWDC24 event from Apple last night. Here’s my thoughts on some of the announcements.

It was an interesting event that didn't really contain many surprises, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the whole thing. Because, you know, that's what people do, right?

Passwords app - this sounds interesting and it's about time they made a separate app. I've been having some issues with Bitwarden the last few months, so I'm gonna be testing this out. Having all my eggs in Apple's basket does concern me though.

Apple Mail inbox categories - Yeah, fuck that. I'm capable of managing my own inbox, thank you very much. I hope this can be disabled.

Custom emojis - This seems silly to me, but could be a laugh I suppose. I'd assume they'll only be supported on Apple devices though, as "real emojis" are basically a unicode under the hood. I'd assume these custom emojis are just little 24px images that are generated on the fly. Talking of which...

AI image generation - Like, WFT? Why would I want to send my mum an AI generated picture of herself dressed as an astronaut for her birthday?

New Photos app - Meh. They made a big deal of this being a "completely re-written app" but it looked like nothing more than a few updates to the UI/UX.

AI transcription - This looked like it could be useful for proofreading posts that I write, but that's about it.

ChatGPT integration - People are losing their shit over this, but looking at the demo, it appears to ask before sending anything to ChatGPT. If people wanna use it, then whatever. It'll fuck Apple's "green" targets though, I think.

Window Snapping - Jesus Christ, how is this even a feature worthy of being mentioned? Is it 2002?

Custom icon colours - They looked shit to me. Personally, I like icons to look different from one another so I can easily spot them. If they're all black with a coloured accent, it would annoy me to no end. Some people might like it though. 🤷‍♂️

Remote iPhone window - I literally can't think of a single use case for this. Just go an pick up your phone. Maybe you left your phone at home? But you get iMessages and phone calls to your Mac already. Can people really not go a few hours without their phone?

All in all, I came away feeling a little meh about the whole thing. The AI transcription is the only thing I may find useful, but the whole AI image generation shite seems plain stupid to me.

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