Apple WWDC 2013 Live Blog: All The News As It Happened

It’s that time of year again! We were up at 3am this morning as we hit the keyboards and coffee machines to bring you our live blog — the best live coverage of Apple’s WWDC keynote with a distinctly Australian perspective. Apple had so many announcements to share, including new MacBook Airs, an awesome new Mac Pro as well as iOS 7 and the long awaited iTunes Radio streaming service! Come with us as we stroll through the announcements.

We have ordered the live blog in chronological order with plenty of pictures from the conference stage in San Francisco. Each announcement is organised by sub-heading. Scroll down to navigate through the news.

The News

Apple iOS 7: Everything You Need To Know

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iTunes Radio Is Finally Here

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Apple OS X Mavericks: Everything You Need To Know

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Apple Is Making Badass New Mac Pros

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The New MacBook Air Comes With Intel’s Awesome New Processor

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Apple Just Fixed The Single Dumbest Thing About OS X

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iCloud Finally Looks Like It’s Useful

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Live Blog

Monday, 8:30pm
WWDC is but hours away! We’re getting all our favourite caffeinated beverages ready for the morning.

In the meantime, check out our WWDC 2013 predictions.

What do you want to see from WWDC 2013?

Live Stream

Tuesday, 2:45am

We’ve just put up this story saying that Apple will live stream the WWDC keynote to iOS, Apple TV and Safari users! Exciting for an event that has never really had a stream before.

Here’s a quick look inside the conference center there at Moscone as we wait to get underway.

2:55am
There’s the usual mix of trendy music so far. We’ve had Trying To Be Cool by Phoenix and Fragments Of Time by Daft Punk so far as standouts. There’s also been a brief sighting of Steve “Woz” Wozniak!

3:00am
We just got the “switch devices to silent” warning. It’s happening!

3:02am
Here we go!

We start off with a video featuring lots of dots about the future of design.

“What do we want people to feel?” it asks.

The video closes with “Designed by Apple in California”.

Tim Cook’s Update

3:04

Enter Tim Cook.

Demand for WWDC has never been greater. 6 million developers sold out the show in 71 seconds. That’s crazy!

3:06

The Apple retail stores has over 1 million visitors per day, says Tim Cook.

There are 407 stores around the world now, including this gorgeous one in Berlin.

Cue a video about the store opening.

3:10

And now, some facts.

There are 375,000 iPad apps, compared to “just a few from those other guys”.

Apple now has a whopping 575,000,000 iTunes Store accounts!

Apple has now paid developers $US10 billion since the opening of the App Store.

3:12

This is interesting. Tim Cook has just introduced us to some robotics guys from a company called ANKI to talk about how they’re using iOS devices for development.

These cars are driving themselves around the track, running logic algorithms via the app ANKI built.

Uh-oh. Few technical hiccups going on here. The joys of live demos.

Each car now must try and block the faster one. This is incredible stuff.

ANKI Drive is coming to Apple Stores in a few weeks, and the ANKI Drive app that was demoed is coming to the App Store today.

3:17
Tim Cook is back, this time with a big thanks to all the developers making great apps. We’d like to thank you, also!

3:18
“Now I’d like to talk about the Mac”

3:19

Tim Cook is talking about numbers that show that the MacBook Pro is the most popular laptop in the US, and the new iMac is the number one laptop in the US, too!

28 million copies of Mountain Lion have shipped so far.

Mac OS X “Mavericks

3:20

We’re talking more about OS X now as Craig Federighi takes the stage.

“We do not want to be delayed by a dwindling supply of cats,” he says. Looks like there aren’t any big cat releases anymore.

How about OS X Sea Lion?

Nope!

Instead, they’re going to be named after places in California. They want it to carry on for the next 10 years. So the next version of OS X is called Mavericks.

Craig is showing off a bunch of stuff now, including Finder Tabs. Finally.

3:24

Now Mac OS X is going to support multiple displays better. Thank GOD.

Full Screen apps that don’t mess with the other display. Independent Spaces, multiple Docks, AirPlay separate displays. This is getting big cheers.

Now time for a live demo of Mavericks.

You can also give documents Tags now so you don’t lose stuff. Those Tags appear in your OS X Sidebar now.

The Mavericks default wallpaper is a big blue-green wave, obviously taken from Mavericks in California. That’s really going to show off the Retina displays Apple has. Hopefully we get more of those.

Multiple Display support is now really powerful. Power users are really going to get a kick outta this, I think. I know it’s going to make my work easier.

Apple TVs are also now fully powered displays. You don’t have to settle for just AirPlay Mirroring anymore.

Apple also has a bunch of “Advanced Technology” to increase battery life.

Here’s just a few:

Apple is now talking about Timer Coalescing. That’s about how it’s going to optimise CPU usage. Apple promises up to 72 per cent less CPU activity. All sounds very Intel 4th Generation Core (aka Haswell) to me…we can has Haswell now?

3:33

We’re now talking about Safari.

Oh look. A new flat sidebar appears. One you can directly browse bookmarks from…

…as well as your links from social networks

“Big improvements to JavaScript”

3:37

And now for a Safari demo.

That’s curious. Reading List now has a bunch of new features, including one-click bookmarking and infinite scrolling. Get to the bottom of your Reading List on Mavericks and it just scrolls down to the next article. Nifty.

3:39

Apple introduces iCloud Keychain: it remembers website logins, credit card numbers, Wi-Fi networks and they feature 256-bit AES encryption, and Safari now has a random password generator that automatically saves stuff into your iCloud keychain.

Notifications have been enhanced, with reply-in-notification now enabled among other things.

Apps will now update in the background, too.

Calendar now. Inspector now is aware of Apple Maps, so it routes you around and the Facebook calendar syncs by default.

Mac users are getting Maps on the desktop now. Among other things, routes now can be sent directly to your iPhone from the desktop now.

So much new stuff!

iBooks are also coming to the Mac now.

3:46

Phew! So many screenshots to show you! We’re now getting a live demo of all the new stuff, starting with Maps on desktop.

3:51

We’re now getting a wrap-up of Mavericks. There’s a preview edition of the new OS available for devs today, and final release comes in the US Fall, meaning in a few months.

New MacBook Air

3:52

Phil Schiller is here, talking about the MacBook Air. Ooooooh.

New MacBook Airs coming, says Phil.

“All-day battery life” is being promised. We’ll see about that…

It’s all based on the new Haswell processor. Woohoo!

3:53

Apple is making a lot of battery life promises. The 11-inch will go from 5-hour battery life to 9-hours, and the 13-inch will go from 7-hours to 12-hours.

It also has 10-hour iTunes playback, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi is supported. Better upgrade those routers, folks. There’s a new AirPort base station coming to support that stuff. The new AirPort base stations also support AirPort Time Machine.

Here are the prices for the new MacBook Airs. They start shipping today.

We’ll update those prices when we get them from Apple.

New Mac Pro

3:56

New Mac Pros are being worked on!

Engineers have taken so long because they wanted to come up with a really great Mac Pro.

Schiller is pretty excited about this. We’re getting a “grand introduction” of the product. We’re now watching a video about it…at least I think it’s a video.

Holy crap. It’s circular! Standing ovation time.

Here are some more sexy design shots from that teaser video:




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3:59

“Can’t innovate anymore, my ass.” Schiller says, cheekily.

These are insane numbers. Super-fast Intel Xeon processors, new fast flash memory, Thunderbolt 2 and this is the first Mac that comes standard with dual FirePro AMD Graphics.

You can run up to three 4K displays from this machine, and there’s a Final Cut Pro 10 version coming to support all this.

Just look at it!

And here’s the I/O:

It’s coming later this year and it’s built in the USA.

4:04

Tim Cook is back, talking about iCloud and iTunes in the Cloud. Music service incoming?

iCloud has sent 7.4 trillion notifications out so far. Crikey.

iWork For iCloud

4:06

We’re now hearing from Roger Rosner about how Apple will integrate iCloud into the new version of iWork. Long time no hear, iWork!

4:07

iWork for iCloud is coming later this year. Looks to be a full-version of iWork running in the browser.

We’re now taking a look at iWork — Pages, Keynote and Numbers — all working in Safari. Awesome.

Apple also just showed off iWork for iCloud working on Windows via Chrome. Very nice.

There’s a pubic beta coming later this year, but a developer preview of iWork for iCloud is coming today.

iOS 7

4:13

Alright. iOS time! We’ve been told this is going to rustle some jimmies. Bring it on!

Tim Cook is saying that there are over 600 million devices sold running iOS.

Experian stats show that Apple users use their devices 50 per cent more than Android users use their devices. iOS is 2.5x Android on the Mobile Web, and iPad has 82 per cent of the tablet web market share.

iOS has more satisfied users, too.

Here’s Apple’s latest “we’re making fun of Android fragmentation” slide.

4:18

Ok. iOS 7 time. It’s the biggest change to iOS since the introduction.

Time for a video. Cue the Jony Ive voice over.

4:26

This really is the biggest change since the introduction of iOS. No more felt. No more wood.

Even more exciting: the iPhone now tracks your eye movement and reconfigures the display icons to help you see behind it.

Here are a bunch of screenshots. So much design sexiness.




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4:35

Ok, so there are a bunch of new features, too.

Control Center is a quick toggle to let you turn stuff on and off real-quick. About time for that one. It’s available from anywhere, including the Lock Screen.

Multitasking is also getting a big update. iOS 7 is built on UNIX, but Apple has always been careful about exposing that to the processor because of battery usage. In iOS 7, multitasking will now work for all apps with a promise to preserve battery life.

Say an app like Facebook for example gets checked all the time. Now iOS 7 notices that and assigns it background permissions all the time. News apps that get checked in the morning, get timed cycles for intelligent updating.

Network cycles also affect it: good coverage = new background updates. Push Notifications are also a trigger to give applications updates in the background.

4:37

We’re now getting a demo of new Safari.

4:38

And now a demo of multitasking and Control Center.

Everything seems to be running on Cards, very similar to webOS. We love that.

4:39

Airdrop is here!

Finally. We’re looking forward to this on iOS.

You can share stuff via a Share Sheet on iOS for things like a photo, and you can do it without sharing via NFC. “No need to wander around bumping your phone with others,” Apple jokes. There are a lot of Samsung jibes here.

It supports iPhone 5, 4th Gen iPad, iPad Mini and 5th Gen iPod Touch.

4:40

Camera time!

You can now swipe between the modes, and you can now also swipe between the filters which all come up live in the grid.

Photos are now automatically organised into what are called “Moments”. Because the OS knows exactly where and when they were taken, it’s easy to sort.

4:47

Eddy Cue is now showing off new improvements to Siri…and it looks like we’re having video trouble. Update you in a sec!

4:48

And we’re back. Talking about Siri integration with cars. The punchline? A lot of car manufacturers are doing it.

iTunes Radio

4:50

Looks like Apple is introducing the new Apple Radio service!

It’s called iTunes Radio.

There are a bunch of stations, including stuff you’re going to hear this week at WWDC.

Once you find a station you like, you can share it with friends or create a new station you like based entirely on that tune.

The music team is also creating a bunch of stations based on great artists like The Rolling Stones and Led Zepplin.

4:54

iTunes Radio also keeps track of all the stuff you’re listening to across all of your devices.

4:55

It’s on iPod, iPhone, Mac and Apple TV. It’s free with ads, completely ad-free for iTunes Match subscribers. So that’s about $40 per year.

It starts in the US, and other countries “over time”. Sad face for Aussies, but keen to test it out.

Plenty More Features

4:56

Here’s a bunch of stuff Apple didn’t get to talk about.

4:57

We’re now talking about Find My iPhone and a new feature called Activation Lock. If someone nicks your phone and shuts it off, you can brick the device to only respond to your iCloud login. That’s a pretty powerful theft deterrent.

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There are also 1500 new APIs. Lots of “oooohs” in the audience.

4:58

iOS 7 is available in beta to developers today. Everyone else will get it in the US Fall, so in our Spring. Supports iPhone 4 and later, iPad 2 and later, iPad Mini and the 5th Generation iPod touch.

4:59
And here’s Tim Cook wrapping up everything we’ve seen today. It’s a crazy list of stuff as long as your arm.

Tim Cook gives a big thanks to all of the employees working at Apple, as well as a reminder: “we want to make the best products”.

We close with an ad about how Apple feels about the phrase “Designed in California”.

5:03

And with that, we’re out!

Thanks for joining us for our WWDC live blog coverage!


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