Apple announced a SLEW of new stuff this week: some cool, some useful.
Before we get to the new stuff:
Many of us received a slightly alarming email from Apple about the retirement of Photostream on July 26th. (Photostream was the precursor to iCloud Photos, and most people switched over long ago). You can probably ignore it, but to be 100% sure you won’t lose anything, check out this article.
What’s New
Apple announced a long list of new hardware and features on Monday. Here are a few highlights.
Hardware:
The big news was the launch of Apple’s first Augmented Reality headset, the Vision Pro (out next year, $3499). In typical Apple fashion, they weren’t first (remember Google Glasses?), but they’ve significantly raised the bar. It’s worth a few minutes to watch the demo video, here.
However, the “use case” for these headsets remains obscure. Would it be fun? Sure! Useful? Maybe. Necessary? Not yet, for most of us.
Back in the real world, there’s a new larger 15″ Macbook Air (M2 chip); older models (13″, M1 chip) saw a small price drop. They also updated the Mac Studio and Mac Pro (mostly for professionals), but no larger iMac this round.
Software:
There were a number of interesting new features announced (not out yet):
- Live voicemail transcription so you can let a call go to voicemail, see what’s being recorded, and pick up if it’s important–like we used to do with answering machines!;
- NameDrop (share a digital contact card from your iPhone or Apple Watch);
- Check In, which will let you alert loved ones that you’ve arrived safely;
- Second-factor authentication codes will now autofill from Mail as well as from texts (and can be deleted automatically, yay!).
Our website got a refresh
After a long gestation, our website is finally updated. All newsletters are accessible on the Blog page, our YouTube videos are on the Videos page, and everything is searchable.
Hope everyone is breathing okay in the smoke!
Alison Holtzschue
and the computers dot mom team
