Apple did all what was expected at its 24th Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)-- no Apple TV or iWatch were announced, but the company did unveil a handful of PCs together with at times surprising refreshes on the OS X and iOS platforms.
It also got around to do a bit of gloating, as it is customary at such an event. CEO Tim Cook took the stage to give updates on the newest Berlin Apple Store (housed inside an admittedly gorgeous historic Kurfürstendamm theatre building), the state of the App Store (5 years old, 5 billion app downloads to date), iOS device sales (600 million) and MacBook growth (100% CAGR over the past 5 years in the US).
Stealing the show is the new Mac Pro-- a high-power desktop computer inside a sinister-looking black cylinder. Introduced via rumbling bass and James Bond intro-style brass, it looks like something out of Darth Vader's office and packs the latest Intel Xeon chip (up to 12-core), ECC memory, PCIe Flash storage and dual workstation GPUs as standard.
Apple claims graphics performance is 2.5x faster than the previous Mac Pro generation, with 7 teraflops of compute power pushing visuals to as many as three 4K displays.
Meanwhile the MacBook Air family gets a pair of additions-- an 11-inch model with a 128GB SSD and a 13-inch model with 128/256GB SSD. Both feature Intel Haswell CPUs and promise 12 hours of battery life on a single charge.
Powering the new Apple PCs is the latest OS X version, 10.9 aka Mavericks (sorry cat fans, the big feline-related nomenclature is no more), with improved energy efficiency (Apple claims it uses -72% less CPU activity), built-in multiple display support and a slew of app updates.
Left for last is the seventh iteration of iOS, one Tim Cook describes as “the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of iPhone." Featuring an extensive visual redesign led by Sir Jony Ive, iOS 7 drops the leather and fabric textures in favour of flat colours, skinny typography and translucent effects reminiscent of webOS and Android. Like OS X Mavericks iOS 7 also includes updates to the more familiar Apple apps, such as Safari, Mail, Weather and Game Centre.
Go Apple
