Apple reveals iOS 16, M2 chip, and redesigned MacBook Air at WWDC 2022

Apple's annual developer conference arrived in early June with the kind of sweeping software updates that have become routine—and one hardware surprise that shifted the conversation. Across five operating systems, the company sketched out its vision for the next year: phones that bend to your preferences, watches that understand your body better, and computers that finally look like they belong in the same family.

The lock screen, that utilitarian gateway most people see dozens of times a day, became the centerpiece of iOS 16. Apple essentially rebuilt it from the ground up, letting users add widgets for weather, calendar, and fitness data directly to the lock screen itself. You can now customize the typeface and color of the time display, choose from a gallery of wallpapers, and—perhaps most usefully—prevent notifications from covering the entire screen. Instead, they roll up from the bottom, and you can hide them entirely if you want. The company also extended its Focus modes, which had previously just muted notifications, into actual app filters. Turn on Work Focus and Safari will hide all your non-work tabs. Turn on Sleep Focus and your Messages app shows only contacts you've designated as important.

The Messages app received three substantial upgrades: you can now edit messages after sending them, unsend them entirely, and mark conversations as unread to deal with later. Apple also added SharePlay capabilities to both Messages and FaceTime, letting groups watch videos or listen to music together. The dictation system now lets you switch seamlessly between typing and voice input, and it can apparently recognize when you're trying to say an emoji. On the camera side, Live Text lets you select and copy text directly from photos, get translations, or convert currencies. More impressively, the phone can now isolate a subject in a photo and lift it out as a sticker to paste anywhere else—a feature that required computational photography that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.

Apple Maps gained 3D views for nine major cities including New York, London, and Las Vegas. The Wallet app, at least in the United States, will soon hold state IDs and use them to verify age for purchases. Apple Pay is adding installment plans and order tracking. The Apple TV app will display live sports scores and play-by-play updates on your lock screen. And CarPlay, the company's in-car interface, received a major overhaul designed to work with any dashboard layout, letting drivers customize their instrument cluster with different colors and watch faces. Apple said vehicles with this new version would arrive by the end of 2023.

The M2 processor, Apple's second-generation chip for its own computers, arrived with the expected performance gains: 18 percent faster overall than the M1, with GPU performance up 25 percent. It supports up to 24 gigabytes of unified memory and can handle multiple streams of 8K and 4K video simultaneously. But the real story was the MacBook Air. Apple redesigned it completely, abandoning the wedge shape that had defined the line for years. The new version is 11 millimeters thick and weighs 1.2 kilograms, making it among the thinnest and lightest Macs ever built. The screen grew to 13.6 inches with 500 nits of brightness and support for a billion colors. There's a notch at the top—Apple's now-familiar design choice—that houses a 1080p camera. MagSafe charging returns, and the new power adapter supports fast charging to 80 percent in twenty minutes. The starting price is $1,199, arriving in July.

MacOS Ventura, the desktop operating system, introduced Stage Manager, a new window management system that automatically organizes your open apps into a single-window view, shifting everything to the left as you switch between programs. Spotlight search gained quick actions and richer results. Mail got reminders, unsend capability, and scheduled sending. Safari will let you share tabs with others and is moving toward biometric passwords instead of traditional ones. Metal 3, the graphics framework, uses AI to upscale low-resolution frames, essentially Apple's answer to Nvidia's DLSS technology—a potential game-changer for Mac gaming if it works as promised. The company demonstrated Resident Evil Village running on a MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. macOS will also let you use an iPhone as a webcam via continuity, and transfer FaceTime calls between devices without dropping the connection.

WatchOS 9 expanded the Workout app with three new running metrics—stride length, ground contact time, and form efficiency—tracked via the watch's accelerometer and gyroscope. There's a new triathlon mode that automatically switches between swimming, cycling, and running. The Sleep app now detects REM, core, and deep sleep stages. For people with atrial fibrillation, the watch can now track how much time their heart spends in A-fib, helping identify patterns throughout the day or week. iPadOS 16 focused on collaboration, introducing Freeform, a digital whiteboard where multiple users can share notes, images, PDFs, and Apple Pencil sketches. The company's productivity apps—Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Notes, Reminders, and Safari—all gained collaborative editing similar to Google Drive. Larger iPad models got a reference color mode for photo and video editing, and all M1 iPads gained a screen zoom feature. After sixteen versions, iPadOS finally got an official weather app.

What emerged from the conference was a picture of Apple's priorities: making its devices more customizable and interconnected, pushing computational photography and AI into everyday tasks, and trying to make gaming on Mac a real possibility. The M2 MacBook Air, arriving in July, will be the first tangible product from this vision.