Apple has really masterminded a new era in personal & interpersonal computing here. There's a couple tactics backing this overarching strategy, that all reinforce each other well. They have really pushed communications technology massively forward, which semi-coincidentally is one of their biggest & most effective moats. Another tactic that I thing is strongly helping them forward is in combining experiences & systems together.

The personalization starts super-visibly. Folks create their own contact "Posters" now, with the help of a nice flair-generator, that are highly visible across systems, such as the improved AirDrop, NameDrop. Personalization also is intrinsic too: Journal app could be incredibly interesting, as it seems to sort of assisted scrapbooker that pulls & clips your data & information as you open the journal, makes your journal more multimedia & characterful.

Personalization also is much more on display, now with StandBy, which cements your personality ambiently with an always-on display. Users can configure widgets & photos to provide a little information portal. The variety of widgets & configurability of the system seems like a class far beyond what Nest Hub and Pixel Tablet have, which feel like sterile consumer applications, rather than something of & for the user.

Groupware is where the real story is though. There's low hanging easy fruit, like Live Voicemail transcriptionsl; ingest only but a great adjustment to "workflow" we all deal with. AppleTV being able to work with the phone to do FaceTime gets them a much more respectable video position, oh and folks can now leave videomessages - so personal! AirPlay sharing does what Google Cast can do but none of their apps do do, letting people join & collaborate together while doing ubiquotous/pervasive computing... remember the Nexus Q? Apple shipped it. Youtube Music by compare still doesn't have a good shared/collaborative experience. Groupware keeps going and going today. CheckIn provides an incredibly useful way for trusted folks to be e-keepers for each other in the world. The "Bump" like contact sharing looks great & leverages that customization, and AirDrop being internet connected is a huge win. AirTags and browser passwords are both shareable with others. Notes is collaborative, and has FaceTime integration. Groupware radically evolved today on a lot of fronts.

By far the biggest changes in WWDC for me though were in iMessaging. Everything I've said so far is amazing & great adjustments, but iMessages is the crown jewel of Apple's world & it's never been on display like today. Apple is the social network overlord already, and they've really amped their game up incredibly. There's some really simple but powerful additions like being able to drop in locations, or again like with voicemail see live transcriptions of audio messages. CheckIn is integrated. These are more interesting & alive shared space Apple is creating, owning themselves, atop their already strong iMessage apps integrations. QoL is high, with less busy screen, shortcuts to get to where you were last in a convo. It's the emojis/Stickers though. Wow. Instead of being an append only stream, a chat is now a collaborative multiplayer experience, is a 1-dimensionally expanding whiteboard. And emoji/Stickers have a great creation tool! Taking existing photos & short clips & letting folks turn that into reusable stylized Stickers, that we can drop atop other folk's content creates a much richer hypermedia than what social networks have had so far. It's mind blowingly different to me.

That's it, then. Apple is never ever going to participate with the rest of the communications infrastructure of the rest of the planet. It's iMessages forever. They've stuck it to us, with Stickers. I'm not even joking. Text messaging is by far one of the most repeat & highest value things we have communication technology for, and Apple has seemingly found a way to mainstreamify a much more collaborative & interactive form of messaging.

My mostly-jest joke of today is that Vision Pro wouldn't have been launched except Apple needed to give people something else to talk about, other than how they are now far & away the most powerful social network on the planet. There's a ton of amazing personal & groupware things they've done, but the most important communication we have with each other is far more under lock by Apple than it was yesterday; the cry about Apple needing to support RCS & standards looks totally different today than it did yesterday. My hats off to Apple. The rest of the world has a lot more work to do to remain in good contact with one another than we did yesterday, and we didn't know it; thank you for moving the ball forward, amazing & as I said: awesome.

Please don't flag me this time for saying this, like my last go here. I think this is a well thought out idea & stance, & I'd gladly invite discussion & hate-mail, which I promise to be generous with here.