What's with all the widgets?
iOS 17 gets a StandBy feature that turns your phone into a display and includes Live Activities, widgets, and Smart Stacks; the watchOS with its tiny screen and complications that kinda work like widgets is also getting widgets with the Smart Stack; iPad OS has interactive widgets on the homescreen now, and even the latest macOS Sonoma is getting widgets for the homescreen. In this case, the widgets were previously hidden in the notifications, but now you can drag them out to the desktop.
Widgets have made quite the pilgrimage on the Apple ecosystem and the only Apple OSs' that don't currently have widgets are tvOS and the newly launched visionOS with the Vision Pro mixed reality goggles.
Where can I get that phone stand?
StandBy is the new way to get glanceable information on your iPhone when it's on its side and charging. You have to bring up StandBy... by tapping the screen and if you have the iPhone 14 Pro, it's always available. We'll have to wait and see if it's useful for people without Always-On display iPhones since you have to get up and tap your phone to get glanceable information.
We're getting off-topic here—the stand. Where can we get the stand? It looks like an Apple-made wireless charger, but it's not, and most third-party stand chargers place the phone on an incline, not upright like the video. While we're at it, where do they get the magnetic stands they used in the Apple TV 4K Face Time demo?
We want that stand.
What can I do with the Vision Pro?
Yes, the RM16,000 mixed reality headsets that will either be the final nail in the Meta Quest coffin or another fun experiment like the Apple 2013
Aside from the creepy projected eyes, the Vision Pro has been praised by tech YouTubers who have tried it. The premier techtuber, MKBHD even called interfacing with the Vision Pro "magical". But, what can I really do with it? Or what problem does it solve today or in the future that I'd need a floating screen to fix?
Will it eventually replace my iPhone, Mac, or my TV since it can do some part of all those things? Meta would have you believe it's going to replace all 3, but we're not so sure.
Will the Mac finally fully support gaming?
MacOS Sonoma comes with many new features like the widgets, a brand-new Safari browser that turns webpages to apps, and a concerted effort to push for gaming on the Mac. The last time the Mac was pushed as a gaming device on such a big stage was in 1999 with the late Steve Jobs introducing Halo: Combat Evolved for Mac.
Skip 24 years later and we have auteur game designer Hideo Kojima on stage introducing Death Stranding for the Mac alongside a presention of Game Mode which is supposed to optimse games' access to the CPU and GPU of your computer and provide better performance. Though you can game on the Mac sparingly at the moment, this new announcement at WWDC may mean that more developers will be confident to port their games to the Mac.
We'd be happy to see Kaigan Games' Nullspace here in the future. Read more about these talented Malaysian videogame developers here.
Will custom watch faces ever come to Apple Watch?
So, like we said, WatchOS now comes with widgets and two brand new watch faces: palette that changes with the time of day and Snoopy that features popular Peanuts characters Snoopy and Woodstock. The palette watch face in particular looks primed to showcase the new widgets on Apple Watch.
That said, when are we going to be able to make custom watch faces? We wrote in our review of the Apple Watch Series 8 that while custom watch faces exist, they're a pain to install and they're glorified wallpapers at best. We manifested audio control for Fitness+ and that finally happened so we can definitely make this happen. C'mon custom watch faces! Give us that api Apple.