WWDC 2015: Reactions To Apple Music, Women In Tech and iOS 9

Apple has unveiled a whole host of new products and features at its annual WWDC conference in San Francisco.

Among the announcements was the debut of its music streaming service, Apple Music, which will cost $9.99 a month and feature radio DJs 24/7, the unveiling of IOS 9, the next iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system, claiming to offer extended battery life and Siri improvements, as well as updates to Apple Pay and the introduction of News, a news reading app.

Below are a selection of comments from critics and tech influencers from around the web. Do you agree with them?

Joshua Brustein, Bloomberg:

“Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, appeared before the crowd of software developers and journalists on Monday to discuss progress in mobile payments. A second woman, Susan Prescott, gave the pitch for Apple’s forthcoming News app. It marks the first time female executives have made an on-stage appearance during an Apple keynote presentation since 2010, when Zynga’s Jen Herman gave a demonstration of  the game Farmville.

“Like its competitors, Apple wants to be seen as working against the image of Silicon Valley as a male-dominated industry. Over the weekend, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, acknowledged that the industry needs to do a better job on gender issues.”

Farhad Manjoo, NYTimes:

“We didn’t see anything surprising at W.W.D.C., and not much innovative, either. Pretty much every feature Apple showed off for its computers and phones can be found on competing devices. And I’m still dumbfounded by the music service — it looks like a mess of services and interfaces crammed into a single screen, though perhaps just the demo, and not the product, was to blame.

“Still, even if little of it was new, there were some pretty useful features on display here. I’m most interested in the predictive assistant on iOS 9. I’d love for my iPhone to anticipate my needs and suggest information to me when it would be most useful. If Apple can pull off such a system, it would make up for the iPhone’s only real shortcoming against Google’s Android. We’ll have to wait till the fall, when the new OS is released, to see how well it does.”

David Pierce, WIRED:

“If you want to understand how important Apple Music is to Apple, you need to know two things. One, that it was a “one more thing” announcement, the last of which was the big-deal Apple Watch. The other is that Drake, one of the hottest artists in the world, showed up.”

Kyle Russell, TechCrunch:

“The Apple Watch wasn’t neglected today either. Apple demonstrated its new native app SDK, which will let developers create applications that run on the Watch itself rather than in the background on a paired phone. Developers will be able to work with new features like video playback, as well as access to the heart rate sensor, microphone, Digital Crown, and Taptic Engine, opening the door for more complex apps than what we saw on the Watch at launch.”

Dennis Keohane, Pando:

“One tidbit of information from Apple’s WWDC event today that you may have missed was the announcement that Apple Pay would be made available for iPhone 6 and Apple Watch users in the United Kingdom. Apple said that it had partnerships in place with the major UK banks, and that Apple Pay would be accepted by merchants starting in July.

“Not to be outdone, moments later, Braintree/Paypal released an announcement that they were bringing their recently announced One Touch for Web service to Canada and the UK, starting tomorrow.

“The timing of the news may be a coincidence, but I highly doubt it. Not only is it expanding to the UK as well, PayPal is making its move in the next 24 hours, something that it — and not Apple — has the capability to do because so many retailers already use PayPal’s various payments products.”

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