What to expect at WWDC 2020
New iMacs, ARM announcement, iOS 14 and more
By the time you read this, Apple will have held its first virtual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC). The event on Monday 22 June is scheduled to deliver a week-long round of in-depth sessions on all aspects of Apple platforms, from the next major updates to macOS and iOS, to iPadOS, tvOS and watchOS. There’s also a strong possibility that an all-new iMac could finally be unveiled. And Apple is expected to announce the Mac transition to ARM CPUs too.
While a complete do-over of the iMac has long been expected, leaker Sonny Dickson added fuel to the fire in June by hinting that the new model will “use iPad Pro design language with Pro design-like bezels, T2 chip, AMD Navi GPU and no more Fusion Drive” on Twitter. This suggests that not only will the 2020 iMac come with an all-new chassis and potentially the rumoured 23.5inch screen on the base model, but that Apple will drop its wheezy 5,400rpm hard drives and Fusion Drives too. An update could also deliver much needed 10th-gen Intel silicon – the current 21.5-inch model still sports seventhgen CPUs, while even the 27-inch models make do with eighth-gen on the base and mid-range tiers, and a ninth-gen
CPU in the flagship. The
iMac Pro will presumably get a refresh too – it hasn’t been updated since it was introduced in December 2017.
Alongside an iMac refresh are more rumours about a switch away from Intel and toward ARM silicon for the Mac – especially since Apple has trailed WWDC with talk of “the future across all Apple platforms”. Bloomberg suggests that while Apple will announce the transition at this WWDC, the switch won’t begin until 2021 – with the MacBook Air being the first recipient of an Apple-designed 12-core ARM CPU, based on a 5nm process.
Most of the other pre-event buzz seems to revolve around iOS 14. We do know that Apple plans to make the update work on all the same devices iOS 13 does now – which means on the iPhone 6 or later. It’s the same story for iPadOS 14, which will work with iPad (fifth-gen or later), iPad Air (third-gen or later), iPad mini (fifth-gen or later) and the iPad Pro.
Chief among the expected features are welcome enhancements to Messages, which include the ability to retract previously sent messages, plus Slack-like mentions, which enable you to call out to some directly in a group chat by putting an ‘@’ in front of their name, eg @Tim. Other Messages goodies include animated dots in group chat icons that will enable you to see which one of the people in the chat is currently typing. And the ability to mark previously read messages as Unread, making them easier to find again later.
There’s also talk of a new Augmented Reality (AR) app, which will enable you to interact with the world around you. Codenamed ‘Gobi’, early previews of the app showed it contained Apple-designed QR tags that could be displayed in-store so visitors could take advantage of any AR features there. And that’s just the start. > Expect full coverage of WWDC 2020 in September issue’s 13-page superguide next issue, on sale 28 July.
We’re likely to hear about the transition toward ARM silicon