SOFT STUFF

IOS 11

Forget Christmas – WWDC is the real annual treat for idevice owners, and for one reason: it means new IOS software. Sure, you can’t wrap updates in pretty paper, but that’ll soon be forgotten when IOS 11 hits devices later this year, bringing with it a raft of revisions. Siri, Apple Maps and the App Store have all been back to school, coming home with more natural speech, lane guidance and a redesign respectively. In fact, it seems Siri has been properly at the textbooks, as she’ll now do language translations and serve up better suggestions.

MACOS High Sierra

Make a wishlist of must-have Mac features and it’s unlikely that ‘new file system’ will sit at the top. But the thing is, moving and making documents is the nitty-gritty of computing, which is why Apple’s launching a new 64-bit file system that’ll shave time off every copy/paste. It’s not life-changing, but life-improving. Safari will be slicker too, thanks to in-built autoplay detection to stop your secret Facebook sessions being revealed to the office, while Mail users will find their experience sweetened by a new split-screen view.

Watchos 4

One day, Siri will be real. We won’t own gadgets or even use screens – we’ll simply know a person called Siri, to whom we’ll bow down and surrender all of our information. Until that day, it’s simply a case of watching Siri gradually dominate all of our devices. Watchos 4 doesn’t break that trend, supplying a new Siri face for your Apple Watch that displays suggestions and information based around you and your routine thanks to machine learning smarts. There’s also a raft of other new faces, including a trippy kaleidoscope.