Apple Announces macOS Catalina

Apple announced a new version of its macOS operating system, macOS Catalina, at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California today. It will likely show up this fall.

Apple senior vice president of engineering Craig Federighi broke the big news: iTunes is going away on the Mac, breaking it up into Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV.

Syncing is gone from iTunes. Now, iPhone syncing has moved to the finder.

In podcasts, there's a new, improved searcher powered by machine learning. The new TV app will play back in HDR and Dolby Atmos on recent MacBooks. 

SideCar

Apple also revealed a way to use an iPad as a second screen, including using touch. It will be available wired or wireless and be compatible with a number of creative apps.

Voice Control

For accessibility, people can now control their entire Mac with their voice, including switching fields, scrolling, turning apps into grids to highlight areas, type and send messages. This is done locally, and no voice clips are sent to Apple.

Find My

Find My has been upgraded to include offline devices, like Macs that are sleeping and lost. A feature called Activation Lock uses the T2 chip to make the device useless until you put in your credentials.

Project Catalyst

This is Apple's way of bringing iPad apps to the Mac. We've seen this before for News, Stocks, Voice Memos and Home in macOS Mojave (we previously believed this to be codenamed Marzipan). Now, it's open to developers, starting today in macOS Catalina. iPad developers can check a Mac box in xCode to add most of the features automatically.

Apple named Asphalt 9: Legends and a new native Twitter app as examples of how it could work. Atlassian took to the stage to announce Jira on the Mac as a native app, coming later this year.