iOS 18, Vision OS 2 announced

Apple shared new updates to watchOS.

• Customize the summary tab.

Apple announced some improvements to its Audio products and Home platform.

Here’s what’s new with AirPods:

• Siri with AirPods: AirPods can now detect head motions to answer or reject phone calls (nodding to answer, shaking a head to reject it.)
• Voice Isolation: AirPods Pro will now be able to isolate out your voice, even with noisy background audio.

And here’s what’s new on tvOS:

• Insight: A new feature that will give you information about what’s playing on your TV, including on your iPhone.
• Audio enhancements: Apple TVs will now be able to enhance and isolate spoken audio, and will have improved subtitle timing that will automatically show up when appropriate.
• Projector support: Apple TVs will now support 21 x 9 projectors.
• New screensavers: Apple is adding support for Portrait photos as Apple TV screensavers, as well as allowing users to select their preferred screensavers.

— Rohan Goswami

Apple announced iOS 18 with lots of personalization features. Here’s what’s new:

• Customizations for home screen. Users can arrange their apps in new ways, change the colors, and adjust the darkness of their apps. For instance, people can arrange their apps around the photo they have set as their background so it doesn’t cover it up.
• Control Center has a new look. Users can group controls so they are easier to use, and developers can include controls from their apps. Apple is introducing a controls API for developers

• Privacy updates. Users can lock apps, so others wont be able to see or access information without authentication. Users can control which contacts are available to different apps.
• New ways to use messages. Users can add new effects to their texts, and tap react with new emojis.
• Messages via satellite. Users will be able to send iMessage and SMS messages via satellite.
• New organization for the Mail app. Users will be able to filter their emails by categories, and the feature will be available later this year.
• Tap to cash. A quick and private way to pay another person just by holding phones together.
• New look for event tickets. Apple is also introducing an event guide, and support features like venue maps so you can find your seat more easily.
• Gaming on iOS 18 will minimize background activity, and support improvement with wireless controllers and AirPods.

• Photos. It will be easier for users to search through their photos. The grid will appear at the top, and a theme, like time, people or trips, is displayed below. A new filter button shows specific types of content so you can, for example, filter out screenshots.

–Ashley Capoot

Apple Vice President Mike Rockwell announced the next iteration of Apple’s OS for its Vision Pro, VisionOS 2, four months after it first launched VisionOS. Rockwell also said that there were 2,000 apps ready for use on the Vision Pro.

Vision Pro will also be available in China, Japan and Singapore as of June 28. It will roll out to Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the U.K. on July 12.

Here’s some of what’s new:

• Photos: VisionOS 2 will use artificial intelligence to transform regular photos into Spatial photos that are compatible with the Vision Pro.
• New gestures: VisionOS 2 will also debut new gesture-driven controls.
• Ultrawide display: Vision Pro will now support an ultrawide display that Apple says is equivalent to two side-by-side 4K monitors.
• Train support for Travel mode: Apple is adding train support to its Travel Mode. It previously only supported planes.

We’re seated. Tim Cook briefly said hello in the prerecorded video, then kicked it off to Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. Cook said it will be action-packed and memorable. He also said Apple will announce “profound new intelligence capabilities.” It’s a little strange he didn’t say “artificial intelligence.”

“Speaking of special, we are incredibly excited … this is a big one … no silly gags, no ridiculous props,” Federighi said.

— Kif Leswing

Here’s a tweet from Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak teasing an artificial intelligence announcement. He says tuning in to the event is the “intelligent thing to do!” No surprise there, as everyone is expecting AI today.

— Todd Haselton

This is a very important event for Apple. The company is facing pressure to show off its artificial intelligence technology and how it folds into its products and software. The company long avoided using the acronym “AI” when talking about it, instead preferring to say machine learning. But companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta have popularized the term and are racing to add AI to core services, mostly to the benefit of Nvidia, which powers it.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has teased “big plans,” a change of approach for a company that does not like to talk about products before they are released. We will learn about those plans today.

— Kif Leswing

Here’s a peep at what Apple stock is doing leading into the event. It remains the third-largest U.S. company behind Nvidia and Microsoft. Nvidia passed Apple to become the second-largest company on June 5, as the stock continues to rip on the back of the artificial intelligence boom.

Also, check out its performance compared to Microsoft and Nvidia over the past year:

No surprise, but it looks like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is here, per this tweet. Bloomberg had reported that Apple is partnering with OpenAI to provide some of its artificial intelligence capabilities. Altman has been there in the past, too. In 2008, he was on stage showing off his app Loopt.

— Todd Haselton

I just got to my seat. People are mulling around and waiting for the event to start. The audience will watch a prerecorded video of the event, so don’t expect much live commentary from Apple executives. Based on the conference scheduling, it looks like this event is going to last about two hours.

Also, check this out. Apple opens up a huge door at its headquarters so people can sit inside and outside and see the screen:

There are a lot of big announcements expected on Monday. I’m most excited to hear about iOS 18 and what new changes are coming to the iPhone, and specifically, how artificial intelligence will play into iOS 18. I’m curious if Apple will use a partnership with OpenAI to create a chatbot, or if it will specifically focus on using AI for other tasks, such as summarizing notes, offering live translations and recording voice memos.

But aside from iOS 18, I’m also interested in what kind of changes Apple will make to iPadOS, which is still awfully similar to Apple’s iPhone software. The new iPads Pro have Apple’s latest M4 chip and it seems like Apple should use that extra power to make the tablet’s software more like a MacBook. It probably won’t happen, but I can dream.

— Todd Haselton

Apple CEO Tim Cook will almost certainly open and close the keynote, as is standard. And, similar to most recent events, this is prerecorded, so he won’t be live on stage like he used to be. Instead, everyone will watch the same video you can tune into on YouTube above. Cook will typically say a few words, toss to a quick teaser video and then introduce another executive to break into other topics, such as iOS 18, the new version of macOS, updates to the iPad software or something else.

— Todd Haselton

CNBC Tech Correspondent Steve Kovach arrived at the Steve Jobs Theater super early this morning to get ready for CNBC’s live TV coverage from the event. Kovach snapped this picture before droves of developers and press arrived.

— Todd Haselton