San Francisco/New Delhi : Apple’s CEO Tim Cook on Monday morning came on to the stage in San Francisco to reveal the technology giant’s music service, OS X update El Capitan, iOS 9 and its Watch OS 2, reports IANS.
After being greeted by the crowd, Cook announced the ransom for a Cleveland Indians baseball player whose teammates are trying to shake him down for Apple products in exchange for a ball he wants to keep.
Soon after, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, announced the new updates. After saying that OS X Yosemite had the fastest adoption rate of any PC operating system in history, Craig announces that the new OS X 10 will be called ‘El Capitan’ and will come with advancements under the hood to aid smarter ways to do things.
The new features will include Spotlight, Split View, and window management. Spotlight will now be able to search for more places and provide more useful results, including weather and sports scores. Apple with this move seems to have prepared for the Windows 10 release and most of its intuitive menus seem to take a book from Windows’ play book and making it better.
He also introduced Metal, Apple’s graphics processing technology which will improve rendering by 50 percent and will scale up efficiency to 40 percent. Several gaming companies like Unity, 2K games are already adopting metal which uses Open CL, he added.
This announcement by Apple assumes significance as Apple has always been a bad platform for heavy games. This transition will allow the company to expand its sales in the world market. The new El Capitan will be available to developers from Monday. “There will be a public beta in July and it will be rolled out to everyone in autumn via a free upgrade,” Craig added.
As a part of the conference, Craig also revealed updates to the iOS 9 which will extend battery life, improve security and performance. He also showed advancements to Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant which will be more proactive after the update.
Apple devices will now be able to anticipate what a user wants to do next based on location, the time, apps opened, or content the user is connected to. “It can also offer suggestions based on upcoming meetings and communication patterns,” Craig said.
The event also saw Jennifer Bailey, a 10-year Apple veteran and vice president of internet services, announce Apple Pay which will be launched in Britain. Londoners can take advantage of it and pay for their transit on the bus using the app. With iOS 9, users will be able to add retail store cards and reward cards to Apple Pay.
A few updates on apps were also announced. The Notes app, which has been completely redesigned for iOS9, will allow users to add a checklist of to-do items and access camera app from Notes to add photos.
Maps, the app, will also get updated and will get a new Transit view. Maps will now include directions for public transportation like buses, trains, subways, and ferries. The service will be launched in London as well as Berlin, New York, Mecxico City, San Francisco, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Anirban Ghoshal
