Along with the second beta of iOS 17, Apple this week released the very first beta visionOS, giving developers who weren’t lucky enough to try Vision Pro at WWDC their first glimpse of the company’s mixed-reality vision of the future. (Without wishing to repeat the F word too often, Apple describes the software as its “first spatial operating system.”) You don’t need an actual Vision Pro headset to explore the software, which is fortunate since they won’t go on sale until sometime next year. You only need the latest Xcode beta.

It’s still early days, but a few interesting titbits have emerged already. For instance, there are several Environments present in the beta, which can be used to shut out the outside world by turning the headset’s Digital Crown. “Environments let you transform the space around you, so apps can extend beyond the dimensions of your room,” Apple says on its website. “Choose from a selection of beautiful landscapes, or magically replace your ceiling with a clear, open sky.”

There are 13 Environments so far, ranging from the beach to the moon and including several generic locations: the beach, moon, sky, white sands, and winter, fall, summer, and spring light. Additionally, there are several real-world views:

• Haleakala National Park in Maui, Hawaii
• Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California
• Lake Vrangla in Drammen, Buskerud, Norway
• Mt Hood National Forest in Oregon
• Yosemite National Park in California

As noted by Macrumors, there’s also a Visual Search feature that allows the wearer to interact with items and text in the world, and translate text between more than a dozen languages. That’s more of a real-world AR feature than Apple demoed, so it’s possible Vision Pro has more functionality by the time it arrives in customers’ hands next year.

Apple has also outlined a few app categories that don’t fit on visionOS, including movement-based apps that follow location changes or offer turn-by-turn directions or navigation, and photography apps, despite Vision Pro having a dozen cameras on board.

As fascinating as it is, the beta (official name visionOS‌ 1.0 Developer Beta) isn’t intended for the use of members of the public. As the name suggests, it’s for app developers to work on. Devs can download the software development kit, and read about some of visionOS’s features, on Apple’s developer portal. It’s doubtful Apple has a public beta before visionOS 2.0 arrives.

Apple Inc, Virtual Reality

Along with the second beta of iOS 17, Apple this week released the very first beta visionOS, giving developers who weren’t lucky enough to try Vision Pro at WWDC their first glimpse of the company’s mixed-reality vision of the future. (Without wishing to repeat the F word too often, Apple describes the software as its “first spatial operating system.”) You don’t need an actual Vision Pro headset to explore the software, which is fortunate since they won’t go on sale until sometime next year. You only need the latest Xcode beta.

It’s still early days, but a few interesting titbits have emerged already. For instance, there are several Environments present in the beta, which can be used to shut out the outside world by turning the headset’s Digital Crown. “Environments let you transform the space around you, so apps can extend beyond the dimensions of your room,” Apple says on its website. “Choose from a selection of beautiful landscapes, or magically replace your ceiling with a clear, open sky.”

There are 13 Environments so far, ranging from the beach to the moon and including several generic locations: the beach, moon, sky, white sands, and winter, fall, summer, and spring light. Additionally, there are several real-world views:

• Haleakala National Park in Maui, Hawaii
• Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California
• Lake Vrangla in Drammen, Buskerud, Norway
• Mt Hood National Forest in Oregon
• Yosemite National Park in California

As noted by Macrumors, there’s also a Visual Search feature that allows the wearer to interact with items and text in the world, and translate text between more than a dozen languages. That’s more of a real-world AR feature than Apple demoed, so it’s possible Vision Pro has more functionality by the time it arrives in customers’ hands next year.

As fascinating as it is, the beta (official name visionOS‌ 1.0 Developer Beta) isn’t intended for the use of members of the public. As the name suggests, it’s for app developers to work on. Devs can download the software development kit, and read about some of visionOS’s features, on Apple’s developer portal. It’s doubtful Apple has a public beta before visionOS 2.0 arrives.

Apple Inc, Virtual Reality

You might think that connecting anonymously to a public Wi-Fi network doesn’t reveal much about you. You might be using a VPN (virtual private network) to protect everything you do. But even if you aren’t, the vast majority of websites and email servers (and pretty much all those run by companies) use client-to-server encryption. But what if you could be tracked anyway?

Apple has a solution for this as it does for many tracking systems. The company’s trick lies in how Wi-Fi (and ethernet) adapters identify themselves over a local network when connecting wirelessly or via an ethernet cable. Every network adapter has a factory-assigned unique address baked in at the time of manufacture. It’s called a Media (or Medium) Access Control address; the abbreviation is MAC, confusingly enough, but it has nothing to do with Macintoshes.

Where an IP (Internet Protocol) address defines your machine’s location on the internet, a MAC address defines it on your local area network (LAN). The MAC is in part how devices on a LAN all communicate with one another, whether over Wi-Fi or ethernet.

Apple recognized that any fixed identifier could be used to track someone if it were tied to records captured beyond the local network. When you connect to a wireless hotspot, your Wi-Fi MAC address gets transmitted because it’s part of that connection. If that MAC address doesn’t change over time, the backend of a hotspot portal could build up a profile of you (or your device) using a variety of clues that includes any Bluetooth broadcasts, credit cards you use at a retail location, and other network and broadcast identifiers that only prove trackable when paired with a fixed network ID.

While a MAC address is factory assigned, it’s not necessarily immutable. For instance, you may have had the experience of connecting to a Wi-Fi gateway and seeing an option buried in advanced settings to modify the MAC address. (This can sometimes be helpful when you’re replacing a router, and your ISP’s broadband modem or adapter is registered to that older device’s MAC address.)

The ability for a MAC to change and the potential for a fixed Mac to be tracked is why Apple introduced Private Wi-Fi Address as a feature nearly three years ago in iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and watchOS 7. It’s enabled by default. You can view the setting only for individual networks:

• On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Wi-Fi and tap the i (info) icon for the active network. Starting in iOS 16/iPadOS 16, you can also tap Edit at the top of Wi-Fi settings and tap the i icon to view or change the Private Wi-Fi Address option for that network.
• On a Watch, go to Settings > Wi-Fi, tap the name of the network, and the Private Address setting appears.

With Private Wi-Fi Address enabled, your operating system invents a MAC address for every network you join and uses that address for that network unless and until:

• Six weeks has passed since the last time you joined the network with that device.
• You rejoin a network more than two weeks after you used the Forget This Network option for that network.
• You erase the device’s settings to reset your network settings (in iOS 15 or later: Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone/iPad > Reset > Reset Network Settings; in iOS 14 or earlier: Settings > General > Reset > Reset Network Settings.)

(You might ask: what if Apple generates a MAC address already in use? The number of possible addresses is vast–over 280 trillion possibilities–and unlike a global IP address, it only needs to be unique on the local network.)

There’s no particular reason to disable this privacy feature unless you want to have a persistent MAC address for a personal or work network; some networks control access or assign IP addresses based on a MAC address, and ensuring the MAC address remains static could be helpful. You might also disable it if you think you’re experiencing problems with a hotspot network that keeps losing your login. I’ve seen this with airplane Wi-Fi and haven’t yet diagnosed whether it’s an issue with the airplane’s authentication system or private MAC addressing.

This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by a Macworld reader.

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Internet, iOS, MacOS

Hardware was by no means in short supply at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Not only did Apple launch three new Macs but there was also that little matter of a revolutionary spatial computer. But just as the company uses its annual gathering to show off what software features are coming down the road for its platforms, it turns out that it’s also the ideal occasion for Apple prognosticators to read between the lines and see what additional hardware devices might lie just beyond the horizon.

This year, more than most, shed some light on a few places that Apple might be looking to expand its footprint–notably in the home. That’s a market where Apple has staked a few meager claims in the past, but hasn’t really invested in expanding over the past several years. But if this year’s software news is any indication, that may be about to change.

StandBy for launch

It’s not every day that Apple launches a novel interface for its most popular device, but the company managed to slip one in while dishing about iOS 17. The new StandBy mode takes a page from the Apple Watch’s Nightstand feature. When your iPhone is charging and in landscape, it can display information in a large, glanceable format. That could be as simple as a clock, or as complex as a Smart Stack of widgets.

This feature made me sit up in my seat at the keynote, because it sure seems as though this would be the ideal way to present information on a HomePod with a screen. Apple’s competitors in this market, Amazon and Google, have offered their own takes on that kind of device over the past few years, but Apple has stuck steadfastly to the utterly display-less HomePod and HomePod mini, despite recurrent rumors that the company is working on a version with a screen.

Foundry

Adding a display to the HomePod opens up a ton of possibilities, especially with two key features that Apple’s implementing: support for Live Activities, which can offer proactive and timely information (such as viewable timers or sports scores), and—best of all—the ability for Siri to display query results onscreen. To every HomePod owner who’s been repeatedly frustrated by having Apple’s voice assistant report that it sent more information to your iPhone, this seems to finally deliver on the idea of an ambient computing platform that truly lets you go hands-free.

Maintaining Continuity

The last few revisions to the Apple TV have been fairly minor, but with tvOS 17, Apple is also hinting at a potentially bigger move to come. The company’s announcement of Continuity Camera support for its set-top box finally transforms the device into a usable appliance for video calls, by allowing people to use their iPhone or iPad as a camera and microphone.

As someone who has weekly Zoom calls in their living room, this is welcome news. There have been reports over the years that Apple is working on an Apple TV with a camera for just such a purpose, and while I’d welcome such a device, the implementation of this feature has me wondering whether or not there’s a need for it. I’d wager most Apple TV owners already have an iPhone or iPad; the idea that Apple would build a camera and mic directly into an Apple TV seems odd: where would it go? Would that even make sense with where most people put their set-top boxes? It seems even more unlikely that the company would build an external camera and microphone unit for you to place somewhere else.

Then again, this might be an opportunity for Apple to see whether such a device would get any traction in the marketplace. The company will no doubt be able to see how many users take advantage of this feature for both FaceTime and third-party video conferencing options; if it’s a hit, then maybe another hardware device could be in Apple’s future.

Apple

Preparing for DockKit

Speaking of videoconferencing appliances, there was one other interesting tidbit that didn’t garner keynote time but could play a major role in an Apple product for the home: DockKit. This development framework allows apps to work in concert with motorized iPhone docks, enabling them to track the subject of a video around a room. Similar technology has existed in products like Meta’s Portal videoconferencing device.

Apple, of course, doesn’t make a motorized iPhone dock of its own, but whenever it opens opportunities like this to third parties, it’s generally worthwhile to ask whether there’s a first-party reason for the technology. In this case, it’s not hard to imagine a future Apple videoconferencing device that can follow you around the room–a hardware version of the company’s Center Stage feature. (Why go through the trouble of building hardware if Center Stage already exists? For one thing, a motorized dock supports 360 degrees of panning, while Center Stage is limited to whatever direction the device’s camera is facing.)

Now, bear with me as I go out on a limb: maybe these aren’t separate devices, but rather a single new device with a movable camera for videoconferencing and a display for status information. With Siri onboard you have yourself an ambient computing device that can handle a ton of different tasks that users might otherwise have needed to pull out their iPhone or iPad to do. Maybe, at long last, Apple can really justify putting that “home” in “HomePod.”

HomePod, iOS