Apple Worldview? Everyone's Fit & Creative, But JoblessApple Worldview? Everyone's Fit & Creative, But Jobless
Apple may not have forgotten business users entirely, but enterprise requirements weren't on the agenda at WWDC.
June 6, 2018
Apple once again used the kick-off keynote at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC18) to unveil its plans and visions, showcasing the required complement of gee-whiz features but virtually nothing of relevance to enterprise users.
I'd hope to find some of interest to enterprise buyers as I listened in on Apple CEO Tim Cook and Craig Federighi, VP of software engineering, deliver their presentations. But even after perusing the nine pages of notes I took, I could find only slight traces of an enterprise play in Apple's WWDC announcements. So, next time you're on vacation, here's what you can look forward to from Apple.
Screen Time
You've probably read about this feature in the general media -- it's getting a lot of coverage. Screen Time, a capability being added in iOS 12 (coming this fall), will allow you to monitor how much time you spend on your device, tell you what applications you're using the most, and let you set limits. Those of us who actually have lives and aren't addicted to our smartphones may not have use for Screen Time, but some might find the parental control function helpful in keeping children from falling into that trap.
Integrating AR objects with usdz
While enterprises might find Screen Time useful for measuring user adoption of various applications, given the sensitive nature of personal app usage, that information isn't likely to be accessible by mobile device management systems.
Augmented Reality (AR)
If you're going to do gee-whiz today, AR is the ticket. In conjunction with Pixar, Apple has developed an open AR objects file format, called usdz, for integrating AR throughout iOS and to make AR objects available across Apple apps. Again, how useful this will be for enterprise developers is questionable. Over the years industry watchers have talked about enterprises using AR to develop training aids for challenging hands-on tasks, but the cost and effort of doing so has left the idea stranded at the concept demo phase.
But a related "Measure" might have some enterprise utility. With this Measure tool, users will be able to capture real-world objects with the camera, then click and drag them to virtual spaces. They can outline dimensions and get accurate measurements, which are key to rendering virtual objects in real space. This capability could provide a great alternative to tape measures for some workers, but we'll have to see how flexible (and accurate) the final version is.
WatchOS: Dick Tracey Realized
The mark of a true Apple aficionado is an Apple Watch, strapped on to the person's wrist and monitoring activity goals. When available this fall, WatchOS 5 will allow wearers to engage in competitions with their fellow overly-fit friends. (I suppose you could also set goals for sitting on the couch and eating Cheetos -- no competitors required.)
The one neat thing Apple is adding is a walkie-talkie function (operates over Wi-Fi or cellular). Once your correspondent accepts your invitation, you can have push-to-talk (PTT) voice communications between two Apple Watches, just like Dick Tracy and Sam Ketcham did with their two-way wrist radios.
Nextel failed miserably at trying to create a wider enterprise need for PTT, but vendors like Kodiak Networks developed PTT over cellular (POC) to fill what need there was. In short, moving the capability from a smartphone to a wearable won't likely have much impact on PTT.
Continue to Page 2: Siri, Safari, MacOS, and more
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Siri Shortcuts
Natural language processing is the most important technical area in which Apple has fallen seriously behind. To be clear, Siri is no match for Alexa or the rest of the competition -- even if it's the "most used" digital assistant, as software engineering VP Federighi, noted during his keynote presentation. (I'm not sure he took into account the fact that you have to ask Siri the same thing six times to get an answer!) iOS 12 will add a Shortcuts app to Siri that will allow you to program regular activities Siri can help with. Sounds like Apple's solution for making Siri better is to make users work harder to overcome its shortcomings. "Hey Siri, get lost!"
Safari
Apple does take personal information security seriously, and it announced an enhancement to its already formidable Web tracking deterrence. Safari will now limit the information it provides to the Web in an effort to thwart "fingerprinting" devices from identifying users.
MacOS: the Mojave Desert
Apple will be delivering MacOS 12, designated Mojave, later this year. The new OS will have an attractive Dark Mode display option, but the biggest announcement seemed to relegate MacOS to its continued subservient position to iOS. The sneak peek at the future of Mac was Apple's plan to have Mac run iOS apps. Apple is currently in phase one of this migration, testing how Apple-developed iOS apps translate to the Mac environment, with third-party apps to be added later.
What this says to me is that Apple is still struggling to come up with a rationale for having two completely independent (though integrated) platforms, one of which is a market driver (iOS) and one that's a perennial also-ran (MacOS). It's now kicked the can further down the road.
Group FaceTime
Odds & Ends
The Apple keynoters announced a bunch of other things, none of which seemed to amount to much. A quick recap:
Car Play -- Apple is finally giving other apps access to Car Play, its in-vehicle extension of iOS. Now, rather than having to put up with Apple Maps for navigation, Car Play would allow drivers to use Waze and Google Maps.
Personalized Animojis -- For the uninitiated, animojis are emojis that mimic your facial movements; added in iOS 11. Now, people with copious time on their hands can create their own personalized animojis that best resemble their actual appearance -- it's kind of like the composite drawing stuff the police use. I can see corporate productivity leaping as a result of this one.
Group FaceTime -- With iOS 12, FaceTime will support group calls along with one-to-one connections. The screen organization is overlapping tiles, with speech recognition that brings the active speaker's tile to the fore. If all we did at a business meeting was talk, this might be useful.
AppleTV -- Apple did something. Nobody cares.
Conclusion
As I described in my Apple in the Enterprise session at Enterprise Connect '18, Apple is still a shaping force in the tech industry, but cracks in its product strategy and execution are starting to show. The company has been enormously successful at delivering premium products with trend-setting user interface features that command premium prices. While competitors like Samsung are successfully copying all of Apple's individual features, they're still struggling to clone the total Apple experience.
The battle continues, but from what we can see from Apple's WWDC, it's still being fought on the consumer front.
Follow Michael Finneran on Twitter. 
@dBrnWireless
