Introducing Apple’s Homepod – will you be purchasing?

However, Apple didn’t just wade into the fray with a me-too product.

The iMac Pro was to begin shipping in December with a starting price of $4,999. It starts at $649 with a 64GB storage configuration. The company “can’t afford to yield valuable real-estate in the heart of people’s homes to Amazon, Google and others”, said Geoff Blaber, research analyst at CCS Insight. Six microphones allow the speaker to hear audio commands from across the room, even when loud music is playing, and Apple has expanded Siri’s vocabulary and intelligence to allow it to respond to a wide variety of music-related queries.

The HomePod is covered in cloth, which hides an array of speakers within – it plays music in all directions, but it’s aware of whatever space it’s in and directs sounds accordingly. Siri can also handle advanced searches within the music library, so users can ask questions like “Hey Siri, who’s the drummer in this?” or create a shared Up Next queue with everyone in the home.

The built-in “musicologist” works with Apple Music by drawing in music from the service and it remembers your playlists and your favourite artists.

Regardless of why Apple chose to focus more on the audio quality of the HomePod than its Siri-driven smarts, we won’t be able to evaluate how well it does at either until it ships, which Apple promised for December 2017 in the United States, UK, and Australia. The company said it will ship it to more worldwide markets in 2018. Amazon sells the main version of the Echo for $180; Google’s Home speaker goes for $130. (Many reviewers have suggested that the current incarnation of Apple’s assistant already trails competitors in key respects.) “This is the start of the AI wars”, he said.

Along the same lines, the iPad’s multitasking capabilities are also getting a major upgrade, thanks to the new App Switcher feature. Yet it isn’t as bulky as the 12.9-inch model.

Apple Inc AAPL.O on Monday introduced the HomePod, a voice-controlled speaker that can make music suggestions and adjust home temperatures, taking aim at Amazon.com Inc’s AMZN.O Alexa feature and Echo devices. It also enables the speaker to produces the deepest, most cleanest bass possible, and virtually no distortion. That isn’t to say Apple has built poor devices (it hasn’t), just that none of them have been an ideal home for its voice assistant.

The App Store has been redesigned for better navigation with a How To section for tips on how to use various apps.

Apple says its Safari browser on the Mac will try to guard your privacy by identifying and blocking data files that track you as you move from website to website.

“Intelligent tracking prevention”, which uses machine learning to prevent ads from following you around the web.

Their new announced MacBooks will jump to the Intel Kaby Lake series of processors. Filtering for faces and other images has been improved.

High Sierra will be released later this year as a free update, according to Federighi. In one demo, Apple executive Craig Federighi pointed a camera at a table on stage and added a virtual coffee cup and a lamp on the real table.