WWDC 2021: Keynote Overview and Reactions 
In today’s first special WWDC 2021 episode, Federico and John cover the highlights of Apple’s keynote, including iOS and iPadOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8.
On AppStories+, Federico and John explain how they deal with the flood of information from the first day of WWDC and how Federico is saving research materials during WWDC.
Our watchOS 8 and tvOS 15 Wishes
This week, Federico and John are joined by MacStories editor and senior developer Alex Guyot to conclude their WWDC wish list series with a look at tvOS and watchOS.
On AppStories+, we welcome Alex Guyot to the show to talk about how he started writing at MacStories as a high school senior and his favorite feature of Calliope, the web app he built to run Club MacStories and AppStories+.
Rebuilding Our HomeKit Setup Around Thread Earlier today, Apple officially opened their new flagship retail store in Rome, Italy. Located on the popular Via del Corso street in the city’s historical center, the new store – which we previously covered here – is located in the historic Palazzo Marignoli, a 19th century building that has been renovated by Apple and painstakingly restored to its former glory.
I, along with our designer and photographer Silvia Gatta, was able to visit the Via del Corso store yesterday ahead of its grand opening to the public. Coincidentally, the occasion also marked the first time Silvia and I were able to visit the center of Rome free of red-zone restrictions since October 2019, when we took an amazing tour of Rome to demonstrate the iPhone 11’s camera capabilities before the pandemic hit our country in early 2020.
Besides the underlying sense of euphoria for seeing the Spanish Steps again and being around tourists for the first time in nearly 18 months, we came away impressed with what Apple has accomplished with its new Rome retail store. The Via del Corso store is an outstanding exercise in blending Rome’s rich architectural history with the modern reality of Apple’s computers and wearable devices – a challenge that the company didn’t take upon lightly, and which has, in fact, shaped the overall identity of the Via del Corso store.
Let’s take a look.
Our iPadOS 15 Wishes This week, Federico and John jump back into their pre-WWDC wishlist series with a look at iPadOS and the sorts of OS improvements that are needed for apps to take advantage of the iPad Pro’s new M1 chip.
On AppStories+, Federico gets locked out of the house, John ships fancy wire to Rome, we discuss the Apple TV 4K and original HomePod’s support for ARC, and John teases an upcoming series about audio solutions.
Listening to Lossless Music on iPhone and iPad with an External DAC
Federico’s 2021 iPad Pro Review: Step into the Capture Zone
For this special bonus episode, Federico and John dig into Federico’s review of the 2021 iPad Pro to talk about its Liquid Retina XDR display, Thunderbolt, the gap between the iPad Pro’s hardware and its software, the M1 chip, Center Stage, and more.
On AppStories+, we kick off bonus content with a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Federico’s iPad Pro review.
In recent years, the narrative surrounding the iPad platform, and particularly its more advanced Pro line, has largely focused on the great divide between the iPad’s hardware and software. It’s a story we’ve had to grapple with for a while now: it was clear with the original iPad Pro in 2015 that its software – still called iOS at the time – needed to take better advantage of the 12.9” display, but we had to wait until 2017’s iOS 11 to receive drag and drop between apps; similarly, the iPad Pro was redesigned in late 2018 with the Liquid Retina Display and a gesture-based interaction system, but it was only in 2019 that Apple relaunched the iPad’s software as a standalone platform parallel to iOS but optimized for iPad.
The perception since the iPad Pro’s introduction is that its hardware has consistently leapfrogged its software, leaving many to wonder about the untapped potential of iPadOS and a third-party app ecosystem that could have been vastly richer and more powerful if only iPadOS allowed developers to write more complex apps. Effectively, “too good for its software” has long been the iPad Pro’s hardware mantra.
The 2021 iPad Pro, launching publicly this Friday, doesn’t alter that public perception at all. If anything, this new iPad Pro, which I’ve been testing in the high-end 12.9” flavor with 2 TB of storage for the past week, only widens the chasm between its hardware and software: it’s an absolute marvel of engineering featuring the Apple-designed M1 chip, a brand new Liquid Retina XDR display, and 16 GB of RAM1 that hints at a powerful, exciting future for its software that just isn’t here yet.
I say this as someone who’s been using the iPad as his main computer for nearly a decade at this point: from a mere hardware standpoint, the new iPad Pro is everything I could have possibly dreamed of this year, but it leaves me wanting for so many other iPadOS features I’d love to see Apple address at its developer conference next month.
The new 12.9” iPad Pro hits all the right notes as a modular computer that can be a tablet with an amazing display, a powerful laptop, and an extensible workstation; its hardware is a remarkable blend of tablet-first features and technologies first seen on Apple’s line of desktop computers. It’s hard to believe the company was able to deliver all of it in a device that is only 6.4mm thin. However, the new iPad Pro’s more powerful nature doesn’t fundamentally change my daily workflow. At least not with its current version of iPadOS that will (likely) be obsolete in two weeks.
Let’s dive in.
Our iOS 15 Wishes 
John
