Apple WWDC 2022 Keynote Highlights: iOS 16, M2 Chipset, New Macbooks

The keynote was nearly two hours long. If you don't plan on watching it, we've summarised all the key announcements.

Apple kicked off this year's Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC 22, with a slew of announcements about new products and features that users can expect in the near future.

The line-up includes iOS 16, new MacBooks, and Apple's own top-of-the-line M2 chipsets.

This year's conference began on Monday, 6 June, and is scheduled to go on till Friday, 10 June. The keynote was nearly two hours long and if you don't plan on watching the whole thing, we've summarised all the key announcements here.

iOS 16

Apple unveiled iOS16, which comes with several long awaited updates:

• The lock screen is getting reworked. It will be more customisable, with widgets and a new notification system. developers will be able to update notifications in real time, too.

• iMessage will now allow you to edit or unsend recent messages and even mark a thread as unread.

• SharePlay, which allows you to share experiences (watching movies, for example) over FaceTime, will now also work in iMessage.

• Apple is entering the 'buy now, pay later' arena with Apple Pay Later which will let you pay for purchases over four installments, without any interest.

• Apple is also adding a Live Text feature that will be able to translate and replace text in a photo, allowing you to do things like read through a menu in a different language.

• Apple News, Car Play, Family Sharing, and Apple's photo gallery are also getting updates in the near future.

New Macbooks & M2 Chips

Apple's abandoning it's signature wedge design for the newest generation of Macbook Air. Instead, both Air and Pro models will be flat this time around, with a thickness of just 11.3 mm.

The Air’s getting a built-in camera with twice the resolution (1080p) and an improvement in low-light performance. It is also getting a 13.6 inch liquid retina display with 500 nits of brightness and 1 billion colors.

TouchID will be built into the keyboard and the laptop will offer MagSafe and fast-charging support (50 percent in 30 minutes).

Both Air and Pro will get the M2 treatment. Apple says M2's CPU is 18 percent faster than that of the M1, while the GPU is 35 percent faster.

The faster performance cores are paired with a larger cache, while the efficiency cores have also been "significantly enhanced for even greater performance gains", according to Apple.

Both of these will ship next month at $1,199 and $1,299 respectively.

macOS

The next major release of macOS is here. Apple's calling it macOS Ventura.

• Ventura is getting a new window management feature called Stage Manager that lets you run multiple overlapping apps on screen at the same time. This is also coming to iPad OS.

• Spotlight search is getting a design refresh.

• The Mail app will finally support undo send, reminders, and scheduled emails.

• Apple will let you use your iPhone’s Camera for video calls on your mac, through an accessory which will clamp your iPhone onto your laptop. The feature is called Continuity Camera.

• Safari will now support passkey logins (using biometric authentication on your phone) instead of passwords.

Apple Watch

• Apple Watch is getting four new watch faces: Astronomy, Lunar, Play time, and Metropolitan.

• Banner notifications will no longer take over the whole screen.

• New running metrics, including vertical oscillation, stride length and ground contact time, will now be tracked by Apple Watch.

• Sleep tracking and heart rate monitoring is also getting more comprehensive. It will be able to track your “A-fib history” to help monitor heart arrhythmia.

• The Fitness app on iOS will now be available to iPhone users who don't have an Apple Watch.