The OS Updates Apple Announced At WWDC 2018

Happy Worldwide Developers Conference — the highest of Apple Inc. AAPL holidays.

“What’s going to be said at WWDC is vastly more important than any sort of hardware upgrade that comes out in September,” Loup Ventures managing partner Gene Munster told Benzinga in April.

This year, Apple kicked off the conference with the new iOS 12, Watch OS 5, Apple TV OS and Mac OS.

iOS 12 boasts the following features:

• Group Facetime sessions supporting 32 channels;
• Built-in features to limit distractions;
• New shared AR experiences;
• An app to measure objects through augmented reality;
• Siri shortcut customization; and
• New “memojis” and “animojis.”

The Apple Watch, which posted 60-percent growth last year, has the following updated features with OS 5:

• Yoga and hiking workouts and new running features;
• Automatic workout detection to provide retroactive workout credit;
• Tracked workout competitions between Watch wearers;
• A Watch-to-Watch walkie-talkie connection;
• Interactive notifications;
• Integrated student ID cards; and
• An Apple podcast app.

Apple TV, which has grown 50 percent year-over-year since its debut, will see the following updates through TVOS:

• Free upgrades to 4K-HDR and Dolby Atmos compatibility for all movie offerings;
• Live news and sports offerings in a portfolio of more than 100 video channels; and
• Zero sign-on through Charter Spectrum.

Through the new MacOS Mojave, Macs will see:

• Mac support for external GPUs;
• A modified App Store;
• News for Macs; and
• Security features including shutting down cookies and digital fingerprint tracking.

Apple CarPlay is also getting third-party navigation apps, such as Waze and Google Maps.

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Photo courtesy of Apple.