This year was very out of the ordinary for Apple, at least in my mind. It started when the page went live on www.apple.com. The image was completely different, it was colourful, vivid. It used a light font. It screamed “this is new”. Rampant speculation occurs. Then WWDC rolls around.

I’ll start with Mac. Mavericks came out, starting a new line of names because they ran out of cats. In my mind, as I type this on Mavericks B1, this is a very major behind the scenes update, without much of a surface change. The battery life got a major upgrade, which should go hand in hand with some of the stuff that I’ll talk about later. iBooks for Mac is also great for a student like me. Maps is kind of unneeded, but also a nice addition.

Then they announced the new Macbook Air. Apple has been very slowly iterating on the leading ultrabook and all around laptop on the planet, and this year is a huge one. Intel’s new Haswell processors push the battery life up to a claimed 12 hours, but early testing shows that the battery actually far exceeds that, with The Verge gettings 13.5 hours and PCMag almost hitting 16. This is definitely a nice upgrade, especially when it goes hand in hand with Mavericks. Then they announced the new Mac Pro, which is an amazing feat of engineering even if it does look a bit like a trashcan.

Then, iOS 7. This is what everyone was waiting to see and boy did Apple deliver. In a mere 7 months they completely redesigned the OS from the ground up and threw in a few new features to boot. It is still very unfinished, as you can see from the icons on the homescreen, but it is a huge update that the Apple team working under design guru Jony Ive should be proud of. Let’s hope they keep working on it to make it even better. As an Android user it is tempting me to switch, even though it is apparent where some of the new design features came from (Android).

Overall, this was a great WWDC – one I think that Apple, for once, over-delivered on the hype. I’m looking forward to see how all of these products do in the real world, especially iOS 7. Who knows, I might get an iPhone 5S.