Apple's Mostly Virtual WWDC 2022 Keynote Is Set for June 6

Apple's Mostly Virtual WWDC 2022 Keynote Is Set for June 6

This story is part of WWDC 2022, CNET's complete coverage from and about Apple's annual developers conference.

What's happening

Apple's announced plans to hold a public keynote presentation for its annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, June 6, at 10 a.m. PT.

Why it matters

Apple typically uses its WWDC presentation to announce major software updates coming later in the year and sometimes to tease new hardware efforts as well.

What's next

CNET will be covering WWDC live, with analysis and perspective you can only get here.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC, was already set to begin on Monday, June 6. Now the company's confirmed it plans to kick off the event with a keynote address at 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET.

Similar to WWDC over the past two years, Apple plans to hold its annual developer confab online and "free for all developers to attend." The event will run from June 6 through June 10. 

This year, Apple's added plans for an in-person watch party for the keynote address at its Apple Park campus. Apple said it would choose a small group of developers to attend, and otherwise broadcast the event online.

Read more: What We Expect in iOS 16

Apple traditionally uses its WWDC keynote address to announce new features and major changes to its software in free updates typically made available the following fall. This year, those software updates are expected to include iOS 16, as well as updates to iPadOS, MacOS for the company's computers and likely WatchOS for the Apple Watch as well.

Apple's also increasingly rumored to be preparing new software supposedly called rOS, or "RealityOS," according to recent reporting by Bloomberg. The new software would help to power the company's eventual augmented reality and virtual reality headsets, which have reportedly been in development for years. In 2018, CNET reported on specifications of the device, such as dual-8K displays, which since has been supported by reporting from other outlets as well. Apple hasn't commented on the device's existence, but it's expected to be shown off at some point in the next year.

Aside from new hardware like the headset, Apple's also expected to announce the last in a series of redesigns it's performed on Mac computers over the past couple years. Among the changes, Apple has switched out the computer's microprocessing brains from those it relied on from Intel for more than a decade to new M-series chips designed by the teams creating chips powering the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

Apple has since remade its desktop computers, such as the Mac Mini desktop and iMac all-in-one, as well as its laptops, the MacBook and MacBook Pro, with positive response to each of the releases so far. It's also released a new desktop computer, called the Mac Studio, designed for video and audio editors.

The next major update, Apple has said, will likely include the Mac Pro, its highest-performance computer, which is designed with software programmers, digital artists and computer researchers in mind. Whether it'll be shown off at WWDC is yet to be seen. But regardless, the company's software updates will offer a hint of what Apple's planning for the coming year.

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Apple's iPad and M1 Mac Sales May Tell Us Whether the Chip Shortage Is Finally Ending

Apple's iPad and M1 Mac Sales May Tell Us Whether the Chip Shortage Is Finally Ending

Two years ago, Apple was one of the first companies to warn that the COVID-19 pandemic was impacting global manufacturing. Now the tech giant may offer the first signs that things are improving.

Apple will announce its earnings for its second fiscal quarter after market close Thursday. Usually, Apple executives who discuss the results with analysts on a public conference call like to talk about how popular its products are and how exciting the next ones will be. But over the past year, they've also increasingly warned that they're struggling to build enough iPads and Macs to meet demand, missing out on billions of dollars in potential sales.

Though Apple isn't providing forward-looking guidance during the pandemic, analysts on average expect the company to report $1.43 in profit per share on $93.9 billion in sales for the three months ended in March, according to surveys published by Yahoo Finance. That would amount to a 2% increase in profit per share from the same time a year ago and roughly 4% increase in sales.

Assuming Apple meets or beats those expectations, analysts say it's likely the iPhone and its associated accessories made the biggest difference. And that's even though demand for its Mac computers and iPad tablets has risen to record levels.

"We believe demand for the iPhone 13 held up better than expected through the end of the March quarter," Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty wrote in a note to investors last week. "iPhone data points out of China were notably strong in the face of broader market weakness."

The chip shortage has impacted a lot of companies, ranging from car makers to appliance manufacturers.

Scott Stein/CNET

Whatever Apple says will likely be seen as a bellwether for the tech industry, which has struggled with supply shortages, particularly as demand for computers, tablets and cameras and other technology jumped amid the pandemic.

The ongoing supply shortages have rippled throughout the global economy, slowing production of everything from cars to medical equipment. The constrained supplies have also pushed prices higher, contributing to inflation.

Apple and other tech companies have vowed to increase production in the US to help offset slowdowns in international shipping and manufacturing, but many of those projects are still years from completion. In the meantime, some supplies of chips have improved.

Analysts will likely be listening for any further signs from Apple on Thursday, particularly as the world struggles war started by Russia invading Ukraine. Lockdowns from another wave of rising COVID infections in China have shuttered ports In Shanghai and others cities, further contributing to shipping delays.

Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi said in a note to investors Monday that consumers appear to be slowing their spending binge that was a hallmark of the pandemic. "With slowing growth, high inflation and geopolitical uncertainty tied to the Russia-Ukraine conflict," he wrote, "consumer sentiment appears to be waning."

There are also signs that the manufacturing slowdowns may still impact financial results for the summer, particularly as Evercore ISI analyst Amit Daryanani noted that factories that make about 20% of iPhones were shut down this month amid rising health concerns. "Revenue growth will likely decelerate," he wrote in typical Wall Street lingo on Monday, adding that sales may drop more than even some analysts may be expecting.

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Apple's M2 MacBook Air Available for Preorder Starting July 8

Apple's M2 MacBook Air Available for Preorder Starting July 8

Apple's new MacBook Air with M2 chip will be available to order on Friday starting at 5 a.m. PT, the tech giant said on Wednesday. Orders are expected to start arriving at customers' locations on July 15. 

The M2 MacBook Air, which was unveiled in June at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, features the company's next-gen Apple Silicon chip, a fanless body in four color options and a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display. 

Apple said its M2 chip brings improved speed and efficiency to the new MacBook Air. The M2 makes "intensive workloads like editing complex timelines in Final Cut Pro" nearly 40% faster than the previous generation and applying "filters and effects in apps like Adobe Photoshop" up to 20% faster, Apple said. 

The M2 MacBook Air starts at $1,199 (£1,249, AU$1,899) with an eight-core CPU and eight-core GPU, 8GB of memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. There's also a $1,499 version with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU, 8GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. 

The redesigned laptop will be available to order on Apple's website and in the Apple Store app. It's available in available in four colors: silver, space gray, starlight and midnight.

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This story is part of WWDC 2022, CNET's complete coverage from and about Apple's annual developers conference.

Apple on Monday debuted the new M2 processor, a chip that improves core processing performance 18% over the M1 without hurting battery life in the company's new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro laptops.

The 18% speed boost comes from the M2's redesigned central processing units. The processor has four fast CPU cores and four efficient cores, a hybrid approach drawn from the smartphone world. By redesigning the graphics processing units and increasing their count up to a maximum of 10 instead of eight for the M1, GPU performance is 35% faster. Overall, the new MacBook Air is 20% faster at Photoshop image editing and 38% faster at Final Cut Pro video editing, Apple said.

"We continue to have a relentless focus on power-efficient performance," Johny Srouji, Apple hardware team leader, said at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Power efficiency is crucial to shrinking laptops since the biggest component is the battery. The new MacBook Airs take up 20% less volume but still have a long, 18-hour battery life, Apple said. The company also is using the M2 in a new 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Apple's M2 processor has large amounts of high-speed cache memory built onto the chip itself and up to 24MB of regular memory included in the chip package, two attributes that should boost performance over Apple's 2020-era M1.

Apple/Screenshots by Stephen Shankland/CNET

The M2 processor also has a significant memory boost, reaching up to 24GB instead of 16GB for the M1. Memory is important, especially as software gets bigger and laptops have years-long lifespans. M series chips build memory directly into the processor package for fast performance, but it's not upgradable.

Apple debuted the M1 at 2020's WWDC and began shipping it later that year in the earlier version of the MacBook Air. The M1, along with beefier successors called the M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra, struck an effective balance between performance and battery life and earned strong reviews.

The M2 doubles down on the same balanced approach, offering updated processing cores that are variants of the chips at the heart of newer iPhones. The new chips continue the gradual ejection of Intel processors from the Mac family of personal computers and could enable the last Intel-powered member, the Mac Pro, to switch to Apple chips.

Designing processors is an expensive, difficult undertaking. But with the M series chips, Apple takes advantage of the A series chip design work it already does for its iPhones and iPads, then pays Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to build the chips on its advanced product lines. 

The M2 is built on TSMC's 5nm (5 nanometer) manufacturing process, but it's an improved version to the one used for the M1. TSMC is working on a more advanced 3nm process that should let customers squeeze in somewhat more transistors, the core electronics elements that process data on a chip.

The M2 has 20 billion transistors, a 25% increase over the M1, Apple said.

One use of the new transistors is the increased GPU count. Another is an upgraded neural engine -- a chip block used to accelerate artificial intelligence workloads. The new 16-core neural engine can perform 15.8 trillion operations per second, Apple said, a 40% speed boost.

With its own chips, Apple gets more control over the technology foundation of its products -- a principle important to Chief Executive Tim Cook. That includes both the processor itself, with specific features like AI acceleration, video encoding, and security, and the software Apple writes to take advantage of those features.

Apple's M series and A series chips are members of the Arm processor family. UK-based Arm licenses designs that companies can customize to varying degrees. Arm chips from Qualcomm, Apple, MediaTek, Samsung, Google and others power just about every smartphone for sale.

The Apple M2 processor is significantly larger than the M1. That increases manufacturing costs. Apple raised prices for its M2-based MacBook Air laptops.

Apple/Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET

Intel has struggled over most of the last decade with problems advancing its manufacturing. That stalled its progress while Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia and other Intel rivals took advantage of TSMC's manufacturing progress.

Because Apple doesn't offer its chips to others, and because the majority of PCs use Intel processors, Intel is somewhat insulated from Apple's shift. Intel is working to modernize its manufacturing, spending tens of billions of dollars on new chipmaking fabs. Intel aims to reclaim its lead over rivals TSMC and Samsung in 2024.

Intel's newest PC processor, code-named Alder Lake, embraces the same mix of high-performance and high-efficiency CPU cores found in smartphone chips and Apple's M series chips. Future products are designed to improve GPU performance, in particular with Intel's renewed focus on high-end graphics that's designed to wean the company from reliance on AMD and Nvidia. That's important for one big market, gaming, where PCs with Intel and AMD processors are much more widely used than Macs.

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