Apple’s WWDC 2016 Keynote was a Home Run

I wasn’t expecting to see a new MacBook Pro with an OLED touch bar, but it would have been pretty awesome, right?
Apple announced a lot of things today. The company made a change for OS X, renaming it macOS and bringing it more in line with its other platforms. We also got a look at how tvOS 10 will make it easier to sign into accounts and watch live TV, plus more. iOS 10 got ten new features, some of which are pretty fantastic. watchOS 3 brings faster apps and more.
Apple managed the event well, too. It went along at a steady pace, even with some technical hiccups that held up the iMessages announcement. The features were all pretty exciting, even if we’ve seen some of them on competing platforms. I don’t mind when companies launch features and hardware that’s similar to another’s. As long as it makes the user experience better, I’m all for it.
So we’ve got upgrades to Photos, and iMessage, and now we can copy content on our iPhone and/or iPad and paste it on our Macs. I’ll be perfectly honest with you here: That last feature, the ability to copy and paste between platforms thanks to Continuity, is huge for me. I’ve run into that as an issue so often lately that I was hoping, some way or another, that there’d be a “fix” coming at some point.
I’d give WWDC 2016 a win in my book. Everything that Apple added to iOS 10, macOS, watchOS 3, and tvOS 10 are certainly good enough to extend each platform’s life for another year, easily. And there’s even better things that the company didn’t even talk about on stage!
That begins with the most obvious: in iOS 10 you’ll be able to remove built-in iOS apps. That means no more Stocks app, or Tips! If that’s not reason enough to love iOS 10, I don’t know what is.
Well, maybe I do. The other big addition, for me especially, is the ability to send read receipts to only specific contacts in certain conversations. It’s no longer a blanket feature, just on or off. Add these two features together and iOS 10 is already giving to customers what people have been requesting for quite some time.
In the end, this was a pretty impressive WWDC and I can’t wait to get my hands on iOS 10 and macOS Sierra, especially. I may even reconsider picking up an Apple Watch — even an Apple Watch 2, thanks to the additions to watchOS 3. But what about you? What did you think of WWDC 2016’s keynote?
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