Apple’s Big Reveal At WWDC Is A New Smart Speaker - The HomePod

Amazon's Echo and Google's Home smart speakers now have new, serious, competition.

Apple has unveiled a new smart speaker, called the HomePod.

It comes in white and space grey, is under 7-inch tall, comes packed with 7 tweeters, precision acoustic horns and a 4-inch upward-facing woofer.

It runs on a Apple A8 chip, the same as the latest iPhone. It does real-time acoustic modeling, audio beam-forming, multi-channel echo cancellation and automatically detects the size of your room.

With six in-built microphone you can beckon Siri to play your favourite songs on Apple Music. It also acts as a home assistant, give you news and sports updates, monitor stocks, get traffic updates, set reminders, and messages, set timers and make general queries.

Priced at $349. Global launch by next year.

The new iPad Pro features a 10.5 inch display, 40% smaller bezels and weighs only 1 pound. Bigger True Tone display has a wider color gamut and 600 nits of brightness (50% brighter). The bigger screen size now allows for a fullscreen keyboard. The new ProMotion display has a 120Hz refresh rate and lower latency, which means smoother animations. The display will automatically adjust its refresh rate based on what you’re looking at, which Apple says, helps to improve battery life.

The new iPad will now ship with a six-core A10X Fusion CPU, which is atleast 30 percent faster than the existing A9x.

Apple demoed by designing a movie poster on the new iPad which could mean that the focus is on graphic designers now. This is similar to what Microsoft had done with their new Surface Pro 4.

It is expected to have a battery life of around 10 hours. All this will come with a 12 megapixel rear camera, and a 7 megapixel rear camera. The base model's storage is now up to 64GB.

The new 10.5 inch iPad Pro will start at $649, with the 12.9 incher starting at $799

iOS11 for iPad now features a dock, supports better multitasking and the keyboard allows you to flick up on keys to access punctuation and numbers. A new files app has been integrated which supports nested folders, spring loading and works with apps like iCloud, Dropbox and OneDrive.

Apple demoed the augmented reality framework called the ARKit.

Remember Pokemon Go? That was AR!

In the demo, Craig Federighi of Apple, brings up a view of the camera. The camera recognizes the surface of a table in front of him. He adds a tea cup on the table, then a lamp and then a vase. All of it, perfectly sized, and the cup's shadow changed angles when he moved it corresponding to the lamp's light.

This is still in developmental phase though.

The App Store, which turns 9 this year, has been redesigned visually and functionally.

Apart from the visual overhaul, the new App Store will have a ‘Today’ tab that will feature new applications, and stories about the developers who made them.

Games now finally have a dedicated, and separate tab. The tab will also feature in-app purchases that are released in the downloaded games.

Like games, applications too have a separate tab.

The much awaited iOS 11 for the Apple iPhone has been unveiled.

Apple has redesigned the keyboard app and sticker drawer within messages so it’s not so hidden. It claims to offer better syncing across devices and features end-to-end encryption. Also, now you can use Apple Pay to pay another person using iMessage.

Siri now sounds more natural and is now multilingual - support for instant translation from English to Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish has been integrated. Siri also has a new voice, voices actually, both male and female.

Videos shot in iOS 11 will be encoded in the HEVC format, which means the size will be almost halved without a dip in quality.

For photos too, Apple has implemented HEIF, which is like HEVC for pictures. Meaning pictures will too be half the size without compromising quality. Live photos can now be trimmed.

The control center, which you swipe up to put on the airplane mode, is getting a visual makeover too. Everything's been compressed to a single page now.

Siri's context sensitivity has been improved further. So if you're reading about, say Iceland, then the News app will have Iceland-related news. By the way, Google Assistant and Google Now already have this feature.

Apple Maps is getting an indoor navigation support for places like malls and airports. (Not for India yet, duh)

iOS 11 will have a Do Not Disturb while Driving mode which will detect when the user is driving and hide incoming alerts and auto respond.

Apple Music will now show what music your friends are listening to.

Apple unveiled the iMac Pro, what it calls the most powerful Mac it has ever built. Tim Cook called it "badass".

The new iMac Pro, starting at $4999, will have a workstation like performance thanks to its 8-core Xeon processor. It will feature Radeon Vega graphics support up to 16GB of virtual RAM and a memory bandwidth of 400GB per second. It will feature 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports, 10GB ethernet, and a built in error correcting memory up to 128GB.

It will also have up to 4TB of memory in a solid-state drive.

If that you’re not a techie, let us simplify - It is pretty powerful.

Yes, Apple’s virtual reality content creation demo for its new iMac featured the much-loved Darth Vader from the Star Wars series.

The new updated iMac models will 7th generation Intel core processors with higher memory capacity.

The 21.5 inch variant will have up to 32Gb RAM, while the 27 incher will have up to 64 Gb. The iMacs will be 80 percent faster in its graphics performance. The push has been for virtual reality content creation, Apple said.

For Geeks: New iMacs will have brighter displays that are 43% brighter (500 nits) and can produce up to a billion colors. They will be powered by the latest Radeon Pro 555 & 560 GPUs and the seventh-generation Kaby Lake processors. Fusion drives come standard on 27-inch iMacs. SSD performance up by 50% faster and available up to 2TB. Will feature two USB connectors with Thunderbolt 3.

A new 4K iMac has been unveiled, starting at $1299.

Apple File System will become the modern replacement for the default Hierarchical File System (HFS). The new file system will support native encryption and more excitingly, instant file and directory cloning.

Apple has named its new macOS as High Sierra. It is all about deep technology, Apple said.

With High Sierra, the new Safari browser will be 80 percent faster than Google Chrome, making it the fastest browser, Apple claims.

The new Safari for Mac can now block autoplay videos and features privacy enhancements.

The Apple watch can now communicate with gym equipment. Apple is partnering with multiple gym equipment manufacturers. Apple Watch will be able to get data about workout directly from the gym equipment.

A new redesigned music app for Apple watch has been unveiled which supports multiple playlists. The watchOS 4 supports playlists that automatically start with your workout.

The watchOS 4 will now also use core Bluetooth to work directly with other gadgets like glucose monitors and surfboards and give real-time data.

Apple has unveiled the latest watchOS 4, for Apple Watch, with a new Siri-powered watchface which will give smarter updates.

The new OS will also have a ‘Kaleidoscope’ face.

Pixar's Toy Story characters like Woody and Buzz Lightyear have also featured on a new Toy Story watchface with some comic animations.

Amazon Prime Video will come to tvOS by the end of this year, Cook says.

Chief executive officer Tim Cook opened the WWDC elaborating on how Apple has the most vibrant developers.

This year, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference won’t be limited to the standard slew of software updates to iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS. The yearly conference, aimed at developers, could see release of new hardware including an updated Macbook and iPad, along with new versions of the operating systems for those devices

If that’s not enough, there’s also the launch of the Siri-driven smart speaker to look forward to. Will it give Amazon’s Echo and Google Home a run for its money? Is Siri, which has been lagging behind Alexa and Google Assistant, about to get smarter?

Find out answers to all those questions as we bring you live updates from Apple’s San Jose event starting 10:30 pm IST.

Also Read: Apple to Software Developers: We Have New Hardware for Your Apps