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While Apple is trying to convince its employees to return to the office, it’s also that time of year when the fruits of their labor are shared with the rest of the world. This year, there is a special event: the unveiling of the Developer Center. This may be a sign that next year that the event will be in person, but, I think that outside of the talks (those can still be prerecorded), Apple should focus on having the week just be labs and hands on time with their engineers so that those who cannot afford the trip can still enjoy what has been a good conference experience remotely (thanks COVID)....

The time has finally come. After years of removing features and reducing the overall value of the product, Apple has finally discontinued macOS Server. Going forward, it appears that the Server app will not function with the next release of macOS and users leveraging the last two features (Profile Manager and Open Directory) will need to move to other implementations. For Profile Manager, you’ll need to invest in a MDM vendor for Zero Touch configuration....

Yesterday was the launch of the iPhone 13 and I was participating in it as my last upgrade was 3 years ago. The preorder process went smoothly since the Apple Store app lets you pre-preorder, so I was able to get the model and color I wanted at 7:02am on 9/17 and it arrived in the afternoon on 9/24. Using the Quick Start (device-to-device) transfer, I was able to get everything moved over in about 15 minutes....

Continuing the with the very high production value, this year’s virtual WWDC was very good. This year included collaborative lounges (in Slack) where lots of Apple engineers could answer whatever question you might have. If WWDC continues to be virtual, I think this is a good way of reconstructing the lab experience so long as the questions and answers get archived publicly. watchOS The watch got a very small update this year with support for keys and IDs being brought to the Wallet app and a fully updated Mindfulness app....

Unlike last year’s WWDC where the development was interrupted by the pandemic, this year’s development was done entirely during the pandemic, so it should be interesting to see whether or not things are going to be scaled down. Well, the production of the conference will not be scaled down as Apple has demonstrated that they will spare no expense for their virtual events over the past year. tvOS Since the new Apple TV remote does not have the hardware for gaming, I’m not sure if there is going to be an Apple Arcade push for the TV this year....