As the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) wraps up for another year, Apple has shared its road map for the next 12 months. With a number of exciting changes announced, our team looks forward to helping you understand and prepare for the new features.
Privacy
Apple is bringing a renewed focus on user privacy, with a raft of features designed to keep your personal data safe. The new Mail Privacy Protection feature will prevent email senders from seeing whether you’ve opened their email, while Safari will now encrypt your internet data and hide your IP address.
Apple will also make Siri more private by taking it offline. Your audio will now be kept on your Apple device by default rather than transferred to a server. As a bonus, this means Siri can now respond to some commands without an internet connection, like setting your alarm.
Finally, the new App Privacy report will let you see how apps are using and accessing your data. Accessible via Settings, the new report can show how often apps use your camera, microphone, location, and contacts in the last 7 days.
New Operating Systems
Apple has released betas of macOS Monterey and iOS 15, the new Mac and iPad operating systems due in September. Our Apple team at CT has already begun testing the betas against the software you use and rely on to get your work done. While it’s early days in the beta, we like what we’re seeing, both as Apple users and Apple admins.
Please note that the betas are far too early to install on your devices! For the impatient among us, Apple will provide a stable public beta next month. Everyone else should wait until macOS Monterey and iOS 15 are released in September.
As a user, the last year has seen some welcome improvements to Apple hardware. The M1 powered MacBook Pro and MacBook Air are both incredibly powerful laptops with phenomenal battery life. The M1 Mac mini and iMac are just as powerful and great for the office or our new work from home reality. Apple’s transition from Intel to M1 has been remarkably smooth, a much easier transition than PowerPC to Intel. And Apple’s devices are communicating with each other better than ever, as any AirPods Pro owner knows.
Focus mode
Another exciting announcement was the introduction of Focus mode for iOS 15. Focus, as the name suggests, will let you concentrate on your work for designated periods at a time. It temporarily filters out distractions, stops unimportant notifications, and hides unnecessary apps.
“As a user, Focus mode for iOS and macOS is going to be great,’ CT Apple Engineer Matt Sanfilippo says. ‘To get notifications that matter at the right time, and to silence the ones that don’t matter — it’s probably the feature I’m looking forward to the most. As an admin, unified Managed OS Updates and the ability to add macOS devices with T2 or M1 to Apple Device Enrolment will make so many of our environments easier to manage.”
How we’ll help you
The last year has seen interesting challenges in the Apple admin space, particularly with M1 Macs and Big Sur software updates. Apple has addressed many of our concerns with its latest versions of macOS and iOS, and we’re looking forward to supporting both operating systems day one.
In the coming weeks, we’ll help all clients prepare their fleet for macOS Monterey and iOS 15. We’ll do an audit of any software, policies or configurations that may need updating as the betas mature, so you’ll know what changes to implement, and which users should wait before upgrading. And when the new software is released, we’ll provide simple user guides and automated workflows to help you upgrade your Macs and iPads.