At the wake of the Huawei ban, which places the second largest smartphone manufacturer with a questionable future, Apple, the former second largest smartphone manufacturer is set to host its World Wide Developer Conference 2019. Through the WWDC, Apple provides the overall direction of their products and services, their relationship with the development community and consumers. The WWDC keynote is scheduled to take place on June 3, 2019, 10 am Pacific time. But before that, we will provide you a sneak peek of what will be the eventual part of the announcement that CEO Tim Cook will carry-out in his keynote.
New Computers
Apple may announce the long-awaited refresh for the Mac Pro, the prosumer line of powerful MacOS workstations. It will be unthinkable for Apple to have the new Mac Pro to be similar with the 2013 Mac Pro (also known as the Trash can design). Apple enthusiast expects the new Mac Pro to look like a regular high-end server, moving away from the past design which was heavily criticized. Apple through the leadership of Tim Cook once again has proven the secrecy of the company, as nobody except Apple insiders knows the design of the 2019 Mac Pro. It is also being hoped by some parties that Apple adapts AMD or ARM processors instead of Intel, given the latter’s controversy regarding MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) processor security flaws.
Apple TV
Tim Cook and his team realized that Apple’s hardware-centric business is not sustainable. The new iPhones costing more than $1000 are competing not only against the competitive Android phone manufacturers but also against old iPhones. Many Apple-ecosystem users are keeping their iPhone 6, 6s and 7, install new batteries in order to remain in tip-top shape. It is very hard for the company to sell as many iPhones as in previous years, the higher prices are very prohibitive in further increasing its user-base. The only solution is for Apple to penetrate the service-business, which is what the company is doing with Apple TV. Service providers such as Netflix, HBO, and other video vendors will provide content to Apple TV as part of an agreement.
New MacOS
The journey of iOS integration with MacOS continues with macOS 10.15. At long last, the development of iOS and MacOS apps can be done using a unified application development environment. Time will come that iOS apps can directly run in macOS without any need to recompile or emulate the hardware. Integration of iOS to macOS started with Mojave, but with 10.15, iOS and MacOS backend will completely merge. From the point-of-view of an iOS app, MacOS hardware is iOS hardware. Of course, there will still be a certain level of emulation, given that Macs use x86 Intel processors, while iOS devices use Apple-designed ARM chips. But the emulation will be very smooth, as the iOS apps will run at full speed, unchanged performance between an iPhone and a Mac.
New iPad line
Though iPads are not an exciting product line anymore compared to previous years. Apple is expected to refresh the hardware once more. iOS 13 will be released, supporting both the iPhones and iPads, providing new features that are integrated regardless of the iOS device form factor. iOS 13’s underpinnings are similar to MacOS 10.15, with feature backend parity, developers making iOS apps can be guaranteed that their apps will also be compatible with MacOS 10.15 by default.
As we can imagine, Apple will continue to create more customers from existing customers. This time around, by not through sheer force of hardware upgrades, but rather a cloud and online services. We were already very far from the date when Apple was a trillion dollar company, in fact, its long time rival, Microsoft had that honor a few weeks ago. Cupertino needs to convert its hardware customers to the cloud and online services customers in order to secure its future in the marketplace.
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