WWDC: Two Features Taken Away
Apple Pulls All Mention of HDR10+ from Software Update Sites
13 JUNE 2022 - Two bits of weirdness after last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference, both of which could be in the “Apple giveth and Apple taketh away” category.
Reports last week indicated that the first beta of tvOS 16 brought support for HDR10+. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know what HDR10+ is. Or I didn’t until I went to Wikipedia, which explains:
HDR10+ is a high dynamic range (HDR) video technology that adds dynamic metadata to HDR10 source files. The dynamic metadata are used to adjust and optimize each frame of the HDR video to the consumer display's capabilities in a way based on the content creator's intents.
According to a piece from iDownloadBlog, the preview pages for macOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16, and iPadOS 16 initially promised HDR10+ support. By the end of the week though, the site says all mentions of the format had been removed from all of the preview pages.
That the format will be supported someday seems a given. How soon is another story. If it was likely in the upcoming updates, iDownloadBlog seems to think that Apple would have kept the feature listed as “coming this Fall” or “Coming in 2023.” The piece points out that there is currently no Apple TV that can output the format. Maybe Apple is not listing it as supported because it doesn’t want to tip its hand on upcoming hardware? Whatever the case, iDownloadBlog sees the format’s inclusion in iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, and macOS 14 as a safe bet.
iPad Not Supported as Home Hub on iPadOS 16
As for the other thing that’s gone missing - you know how you can set up an iPad as a Home hub? Not for much longer, it seems. Another piece from iDownloadBlog says with the arrival of this fall’s updates, only Apple TV or HomePod will be supported as Home hubs. While iPad still shows up as an option in the first beta of iPadOS 16, the piece says “toggling it on does absolutely nothing in terms of setting up your iPad as a home hub.”
As for why the iPad functionality is being removed, iDownloadBlog thinks it may have to do with Matter. The site describes Matter as “a new industry standard created to make smart home devices and platforms even smarter and interoperable.” iDownloadBlog thinks it’s possible that a hub supporting Matter may need an always on (or at least always powered) device. HomePod and Apple TV are always plugged in. iPad is not, quite often. Though it’s only speculation on the site’s part, battery powered versus plugged in is the only reason iDownloadBlog can fathom for pulling Apple’s tablet out of the loop.
