Apple is Settling All Debts 

I won’t go into too much detail on the announcements coming out of WWDC. That’s been done better and more thoroughly by many others. I will say that this feels like Apple settling all the debts they’ve accrued over the past few years.

“Oh, you wanted apps to be able to talk to each other? Here you go.”

“Widgets on your notification screen? Yep. You got it.”

“You wanted apps to use the TouchID? Ok.”

“That whole ‘I should be able to move files around in iCloud’ thing? All set now.”

“Objective-C not modern enough for ya? Meet Swift.”

There were a bunch more announcements that basically amounted to “We told you to chill while we put in place the way to do these things safely, securely, and without trashing your battery. Here they are.”

And I think that’s a big part of what iOS 8 and Mac OS 10.10 are: the culmination of a few years worth of groundwork and infrastructure building that came together and bloomed all at once. It’s going to allow for almost everything people have asked for, and more, and to top it off, Apple brought out things like Continuity where you devices simply act as logical extension of one other. It’s a simple, powerful feature that will be hard for other companies to duplicate.

(All of this assumes Apple’s cloud services continue to get better … which seems likely given I’m not sure they could get much worse.)

John Gruber has a very nice take on it.