What could be more fun thank talking to iMore’s awesome managing editor, Lory Gil about the fun things that were announced at WWDC? Last time she was on, we made a date to get back together after the WWDC announcements. She had said she loves WWDC because “Everything old is new again!” because we don’t have to buy new hardware because so much fun comes to our existing devices.
Here’s the outline we used for our discussion:
Who gets to play on Big Sur?
The latest Mac operating system will run on the following devices:
- MacBook (2015 or newer) ? all of the 12″ MacBook nothings
- MacBook Air (2013 or newer)
- MacBook Pro (Late 2013 or newer)
- Mac mini (2014 or newer)
- iMac (2014 or newer)
- iMac Pro (2017 or newer) ? Confused me at first, but the first model was 2017
- Mac Pro (2013 or newer) ? Trashcan to current
Who gets to play on iOS 14?
- iOS 14: Release date, New features, compatible devices, etc – 9to5Mac
- As old as iPhone SE 1st gen (2016)
- iPod touch 7th gen ? 2019 which is curious
Who gets to play on watchOS?
- As old as Apple Watch Series 3 (not all features of course) (2017 introduction)
Compatibility
It’s tempting to hit the big topics but those have been pretty well covered so far. I’d like to dig into a few concepts and areas that I haven’t heard highly covered. macOS Big Sur comes with two important capabilities I was hoping we could talk about. Both of these technologies will help us to make our old devices new again.
Can you explain Rosetta 2 vs Universal?
- Rosetta 2 is emulation for non-Apple Silicon apps
- Takes native Intel instructions and translates them into native ARM instructions
- If you distribute via the Mac App Store, translated as installed
- If not, translated on first launch
- Universal means one app can run on either Intel or Apple Silicon
- They also talked about virtualization?
macOS vs iOS
Apple announced that iOS apps would be coming to the Mac. Apple pundits seem to be constantly wringing their hands worrying that macOS is going to go away.
Is this some danger to macOS or is it just awesome?
Quotes from Platform State of the Union:
- “Macs will stay Macs the way you know and love them.”
- Still be able to create multiple volumes with different operating system versions
- Still be able to Boot externally
- Macs will still be amazing UNIX machines for devs running any software they like
In the State of the Union they talked about how iOS apps would be able to run – it sounded like by default all iOS apps would show in the Mac App Store under Purchased Items, but there was increased functionality if an app was using Catalyst. I didn’t follow what exactly that meant for developers or users.
Accessibility
- Headphone accommodations
- Sound recognition
- FaceTime Sign Language Recognition
- RTT Notifications
- Hearing health upgrades – is this watchOS only, do you know why not iOS? Apple Watch Series 4 and up.
- VoiceOver recognition
- Image recognition enhancements
- Recognizing more than buttons in a UI
- Swift Blind Preview
- Back Tap
- Interesting that this is in accessibility. Wonder if Apple put it there first so those with mobility impairments know it’s there or to make currently-abled people aware of accessibility?
- Magnifier
- Mobility enhancements
Filing “Radars”
- A lot more people are playing with betas now, what should people do if/when they find bugs?
- How to send feedback to Apple about iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS betas | iMore
- How to send feedback to Apple about macOS betas | iMore
Changes to Recovery Mode with Apple Silicon?
- Recovery mode redo coming to Apple Silicon Macs | iMore
- There are currently 13 different things you can do when you restart your Mac, but each one of those things requires a keyboard shortcut. This new boot process will, instead, offer these options on a list.
- Hold down power to get to the options
- Mac Sharing mode replaces Target Disk Mode – turns it into an SMB file server
- Reduced security mode
Follow Lory on Twitter @appaholik and/or email her at [email protected]