Apple held the keynote for its 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California on Monday, announcing new features coming to AirPods, iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
While AI and the integration of ChatGPT into Siri was a big theme, the company also revealed smaller, quality-of-life improvements to AirPods, texting with Android users, and a long overdue built-in iPad calculator app.
With such a deluge of information, we’ve identified key takeaways that have the most potential impact on the average Apple user.
AirPods
AirPods Pro will begin utilizing head gestures — specifically, nodding up and down to answer a phone call, or shaking left and right to reject the call. AirPods Pro will also implement a new voice isolation feature that promises to remove loud background noise. Lastly, AirPods Pro is expanding spatial audio to include gaming.
ChatGPT in Siri
Thanks to a partnership with OpenAI, Apple is integrating ChatGPT for free in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15 Sequoia without requiring users to sign up for an account. This will allow Siri to pull from the chatbot’s knowledge base in order to provide more useful information.
ChatGPT will also be integrated into apps like Mail, Notes, and Pages to assist users with cleaning up their writing and generating content like images.
iPhone Personalization
Users will be better able to customize their home screens, such as arranging their apps in a particular order as to not cover a picture. For the first time, users will also be able to customize the controls on their lock screen, customizing the flashlight and camera icons. There are also new theme options for app icons.
Text Message Upgrades
Text messages changes include support for formatting options like bold, italics, underline, strike-through, and more. Messages can be sent via satellite when cellular and Wi-Fi connections aren’t available. Perhaps most exciting for night owls, messages will be able to be pre-scheduled in advanced.
Better Texting with Green Bubbles
Apple is finally adopting RCS support, a major upgrade for communication with Android users. This will allow for the sharing of high-res images and videos, typing indicators, and read receipts when texting between iPhone and Android devices.
iPhone Mirroring
With MacOS 15 Sequoia, Mac users will be able to access and control their iPhones from their computers, including audio. They’ll be able to see and respond to phone notifications on their Mac and drag and drop between the two devices — all while the iPhone remains locked.
iPad Calculator
More than 14 years after its launch, the iPad is finally getting a calculator app built into iPadOS 18. In addition to the basic features familiar to anyone who has owned an iPhone, the new app has support for Apple Pencil.
This will allow users to jot down math problems, which the app will solve with a feature called Math Notes.
