Every year at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the company reveals how its expanding the capabilities of its software and applications, and that often includes new features and functionality that feel eerily similar to existing apps from third-party developers and other companies. It’s a way for Apple to let other know it likes what they’ve been doing, but thinks it could do better.
Welcome to Gizmodo’s ninth annual post-WWDC roundup of everything Apple is trying to kill.
Apple, along with many other companies, have been trying to kill passwords for years now through alternate authentication methods including fingerprints, facial recognition, and other biometrics. With macOS Ventura and iOS 16, Apple also wants to rid the world of password managers: useful apps that make it easy to use highly-secure but impossible to memorize passwords.
Apple describes its new Passkeys as “unique digital keys that stay on device and are never stored on a web server, so hackers can’t leak them or trick users into sharing” and are as easy to create as pressing a finger to a MacBook’s Touch ID fingerprint sensor. They sync across multiple Apple devices without the user ever having to think up and document a unique password for a site or service, and even work with non-Apple devices for iPhone users. LastPass and 1Password’s days might be numbered.
A quick search for “medications” in the App Store reveals hundreds of solutions for keeping tabs on when meds should be taken, but when watchOS 9 arrives this fall, it will include a new Medications app that tracks everything from prescriptions to vitamins to supplements. Users can simply add a medication to the app by photographing its bottle’s label using the iPhone’s camera, and from there they can set up schedules and reminders, view additional information about what they’re taking (including potential side effects with other drugs), and log when a pill has been taken, to help prevent accidental double-dosages.
Everyone kind of assumed that webcams would die off once laptops and computer screens started shipping with tiny cameras built right into the bezels, and they almost did. But then a pandemic arrived a few years ago, everyone was forced to work from home, and we all realized that the quality of built-in webcams just wasn’t up to to snuff for daily meetings. It spawned a renewed demand for webcams, but now that macOS Ventura is going to easily let Apple users use the excellent cameras on their iPhones as webcams without the need for any cord-wrangling, dedicated webcams may finally be doomed.
Even if you’re not a fan of everything Apple does, you still have to admit the company has a knack for making beautiful and intuitive software. (A generation of boomers easily taking to the iPad is proof of that.) And while most car makers are good at making things that drive around on four wheels, they’re usually quite awful at designing software and user interfaces for in-vehicle screens: a big problem as more and more vehicles are replacing analogue gauges with digital displays.
Today Apple gave a sneak peek at the future of CarPlay, which is currently an easy way to put your iPhone’s screen on your car’s infotainment display, but next year will potentially expand across the entire dashboard, replacing instrument clusters and other vehicle metrics on cars that opt for large screens wrapping around the driver. Customizing the look of your vehicle’s dashboard will be as easy to do thanks to your iPhone, letting you add informational widgets and change the layout of various virtual gauges.