What We Learned at Today’s Apple Event

Every year Apple holds its World Wide Developers Conference and every year it’s a platform for Apple to announce new products, features and get people excited for Apple all over again. It isn’t surprising that, as one of the largest companies in the world, Apples is able to put a lot of money into its conferences.

Today we learned quite a bit about the future of Apple. Although iOS 9, OSX, and watchOS didn’t get any dramatic updates, Apple still announced some pretty exciting news.

1. OSX El Capitan

Mac OSX gets a mild update including some new features that really just clean up Yosemite. El Capitan, which is the name of the new OS and also a rock formation in the Yosemite National Park, introduces mutable tabs that remove the headache of trying to find out where the sound is coming from and pinnable tabs that are almost like bookmarks but never close. You can pin windows as well and a newer more useful multitasking screen has also been introduced. Which comes this fall for free to all Mac OSX users.

2. Siri

Siri gets some wonderful upgrades including a smoother integration with other apps. She can add events to your calendar for you, remind you things based on your location or what you’re viewing online and she now has more context clues when being asked for information. In many ways people would say that Apple took note of Google’s assistant Google Now.

3. Apple Pay

Apple Pay adds loyalty cards, store credit cards and gets better Apple Watch integration. It uses your location to pull up cards when they’re relevant and is now integrated more into apps such as Pinterest which will have a buy feature soon. Discover comes to the list of cards available. Square launches a NFC reader to accept Apple pay at smaller vendors which allows more places to utilize NFC payments and ultimately attempts to take out the wallet, which is why Passbook has been renamed to Wallet.

4. Apps

Four apps were covered during the keynote today. The first was some new features being brought to Notes, such as dragging and dropping pictures, adding links and drawing. Apple created its very own news app that will compete with Flipboard and Feedly. Most importantly however they added Transit for Maps. Transit keeps track of public transportation, shows you routes and gives you step by step navigation for it.

5. iPad

The iPad releases a very cool new multitasking tool where you can slide apps into view from the side. You can use split screen features, and it even has a really cool pop out video feature!

6. watchOS

WatchOS adds new watch faces including one that sifts through your albums and shows you photos every time you lift your wrist and time-lapse which shows you the city you’re in and matches the time of day. While it’s not as nice to look at as a gold wrist watch like the ones linked here, Apple Watch gets better Siri integration and maps step by step navigation and Apple Pay loyalty cards integration. Siri can even be told to perform tasks via the watch through Homekit such as, “Siri dim the lights.”

7. Apple Music

The biggest announcement however was Apple Music. Apple Music is Apple’s very own music streaming service for $9.99 per month. It provides a platform for musicians to post exclusive content and hosts a wide variety of media such as music, videos and art. For $14.99 a month you can add up to 6 members to an account. The coolest feature of Apple Music however is that it’ll be launching the first ever world wide radio station broadcasting 24/7 called BeatsOne.

Special features included Drake and Weeknd appearances and a video introduction starring Bill Hader.

8. Swift

Swift adds a second rendition that makes coding easier. However the biggest and most important news, especially when in regards to Apple, is that swift is now open source. This means that more developers can create apps in swift language and more apps that tailor to the general public’s interest will be made.