Apple announces new iphone features and its most powerful computer to date

4 June 2019

Apple has announced a number of new products and features relevant to photographers at its annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC).

A new phone operating system, iOS 13, introduces more options to control the direction and intensity of the camera's Portrait Lighting effects, while a new high-key effect has been added to the growing list of Portrait Mode options. Apple says the new lighting effects allow you to virtually, "move the light closer to your subject — to smooth skin, sharpen eyes, and brighten facial features – or move it away – for a subtle, refined look."

Apple iOS13

The photo editing interface has also been updated and you can now rotate, crop, increase exposure, and apply filters to videos. iOS 13 is expected to be available in Spring 2019.

For iPad users, Apple has introducing a new iPadOS, which adds support for external drives for the first time. For photographers, this will make it easier to access and share images to external drives, as well as importing images from SD cards, USB drives and directly from cameras.

On the hardware front, Apple announced a completely redesigned Mac Pro workstation and companion professional display, the Apple Pro Display XDR.

The Mac Pro features Xeon processors up to 28 cores, a high-performance memory system with 1.5TB capacity, eight PCIe expansion slots and a graphics architecture that features what Apple claims is the world’s most powerful graphics card. Thanks to a new accelerator card, Apple Afterburner, Apple says the new computer will be able to playback of three streams of 8K ProRes RAW video simultaneously.

Key specs on the new 32-inch Pro Display XDR include P3 wide and 10-bit colour, 1,600 nits of peak brightness, 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio and an 89° viewing angle.

Both products are aimed at the professional market, with the Mac Pro starting at US$5,999 with an eight-core Intel Xeon processor and the Mac Pro Display XDR priced at US$4999 (without stand) or US $5999 (with stand). They are expected to be available in Spring 2019.