Watching Apple through the lens of public perception, it would be easy to buy into the idea that the company has been under siege of late. But even if that were the case, it’s clear that Apple isn’t buying the hype. Each of the executives who took to the stage on Monday conveyed, to a one, both excitement and confidence about the future direction of Apple—and they brought the announcements to prove it.

In 2011, my colleague Jason Snell likened Steve Jobs’s WWDC keynote to The Godfather, with Apple taking care of all old business. This year’s keynote wasn’t perhaps quite so dramatic, but with major revisions of OS X and iOS, a sneak peek at the new Mac Pro, speed-bumped MacBook Airs, a music-streaming service, and the future of iWork—all in a reasonably compact two hours—you’d be excused from a little bit of brain overload.

The best defense

All this, too, from an Apple that’s been largely silent since its last event in October. Meanwhile, the company has suffered, largely in silence, the slings and arrows from the public, pundits, Wall Street analysts, and even Congress. The company has been under fire for everything from the performance of its mapping software, to allegations of ebook price-fixing, to scrutiny over its tax practices.

The company’s latest announcements are unlikely to divert attention permanently—after all, the litigation over ebooks is ongoing, and it seems that questions over the tax issues have just gotten started.

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Apple on Monday updated the MacBook Air with Intel’s fouth generation Core processors, code named Haswell. Macworld Lab has the new MacBook Air and the results are interesting, to say the least—the 2012 and 2013 13-inch models received the same overall system performance score in Speedmark 8, but individual tests tell a different story.

There are four standard models of the MacBook Air, but all four share many of the same internal parts. Each MacBook Air comes with a 1.3GHz dual-core fourth generation Core i5 processor, capable of reaching speeds of 2.6GHz using Turbo Boost. Not mentioned in the marketing materials is that Hyper-Threading is supported on these i5 processors, allowing multi-threaded applications to address four virtual processing cores on these dual core systems. All of the standard MacBook Airs ship with 4GB of 1600MHz LPDDR memory and use Intel’s new HD Graphics 5000 integrated graphics.

As you’d expect, the new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs’ performance was practically identical. Just one Speedmark point separated the 13-inch and 11-inch models and the individual test results between them were similarly similar.

The new 11-inch MacBook Air was 9 percent faster overall than last year’s 11-inch 1.7GHz Core i5 Ivy Bridge model. The individual application tests (listed at the end of this story) show that many results were very close, with seven tests (including Photoshop and Aperture) within 3 percent of each other. The biggest differences were in graphics and storage tests. The Intel HD Graphics 5000 in the new system pushed 24 percent more frames per second in Cinebench’s Open GL test and produced an 8 percent higher frame rate in Portal 2. The faster flash storage in the new MacBook Air lived up to the hype, transferring 6GB of files and folders 51 percent faster than last year’s Air. We ran Black Magic’s Disk Speed Test on the two systems and found the read speeds for the new 11-inch model were 667.7 MBps, versus 141.1 MBps on the 2012 11-inch Air’s 64GB of flash storage. Write speeds on the new 11-inch model hit 726.8 MBps, compared to 393.7 MBps on the 2012 Air.

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As summer arrives, kids across the land are spending time with the family iPad. In today’s Macworld Video, Scholle Sawyer McFarland shares some tips for making the iPad safer and more kid-friendly.

Video transcript

Perhaps your family shares an iPad or iPod touch, or perhaps your kids have gotten lucky and scored their own. Either way, before you hand over an iOS device to a kid, it’s a good idea to do a little parental preparation.

Pick your restrictions

iOS devices offer basic parental controls. Tap Settings, tap General, and then tap Restrictions. When you tap Enable Restrictions, you’ll be prompted to enter a 4-digit code—this code will now be required to change the settings.

Most of your options are pretty black and white: Disable Safari, or leave it available. Nothing fancy like the ability to create whitelists of sites your kid is allowed to visit.

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Apple product releases may have been few and far between so far in 2013. But if Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on Monday is anything to go by, the company has put the time since its last major press event in October 2012 to good use.

The company unleashed a torrent of announcements Monday, starting with a preview of the latest version of OS X and wrapping up some two hours later with a look at a substantial overhaul of iOS. And while much of what Apple showed off won’t be available to the buying public until later in 2013—only the updated MacBook Air lineup and redesigned AirPort products shipped on Monday—the WWDC keynote was a reminder that the company has big plans for the rest of the year. It also served as a rebuttal to Apple critics who’ve made note of the company’s relative lack of product news in recent months.

“Can’t innovate any more, my ass,” Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller snarled when showing off a redesigned Mac Pro on Monday—a not-at-all subtle poke at an increasingly common critique of the company among the Internet’s chattering classes.

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As someone who makes a Mac app for tracking the differences between files, you’d expect developer Patrick Burleson to have some thoughts on the changes Apple has announced for its operating systems during this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference. So that’s what we talk to him about in our latest video chat with developers attending WWDC.

Burleson runs BitBQ, and he also works on Briefs, a Mac app for iOS prototyping. His Mac app for tracking differences between files, Changes, may well benefit from the changes coming in OS X Mavericks, the update to the Mac OS announced by Apple this week. And his iOS app Fitness Tracker will need some updating to look at home on the forthcoming iOS 7.

In this video, we talk to Burleson about his work on Briefs, his plans for his own apps, and his reactions to Apple’s recent announcements.

iOS 7's more than just a pretty face. Though the mobile operating system’s look and feel has gotten a significant overhaul in the newest version, that doesn’t mean Apple skimped on the features.

There are plenty of new enhancements and capabilities in iOS 7, and I run down just three of them in this video. For more, check out our FAQ on everything you need to know about Apple’s latest iOS update and our hands on impressions of iOS 7.

The new look in iOS 7 means some of your favorite iOS apps could be in line for a makeover. In our ongoing video chats with developers, we catch up with Paul Haddad, lead developer of Tapbots, to find out how his company’s apps—the popular Tweetbot client for Twitter, in particular—might be affected by iOS 7.

“Some things will take on an iOS 7 look, some things will have our custom look,” Haddad tells us, noting that much of Tweetbots is based on customized code.

In this video, Haddad also talks about future updates to Tweetbot and Calcbot.

If you work with audio, you’re probably familiar with Rogue Amoeba and Audio Hijack Pro, the Mac software maker’s flagship product. Get ready for a new Audio Hijack Pro, though: Rogue Amoeba is working on an update of the decade-old program that CEO Paul Kafasis says is “flipping [Audio Hijack] on its head.”

We caught up with Kafasis at this week’s Worldwide Developer Conference, and in this video, we talk about the new version of Audio Hijack Pro—due out before the end of the year—and how it will simplify the program while making it more powerful. We also talk about some of Rogue Amoeba’s other offerings and how the company came to specialize in audio software.

When Apple kicks off next week’s Worldwide Developers Conference with its annual keynote address, we know that the company will unveil new versions of iOS and Mac OS X. But we don’t yet know the specifics of what those updates will include, or what else will be announced—though, as always, the rumor mill is working overtime to suggest everything from updates to Apple’s existing products to Tim Cook’s announcement of an Apple toaster-fridge with new microwave functionality!

While we’ve already told you what we’d like to see in the next versions of OS X and iOS, as well as in a new Mac Pro, there are plenty of other Apple products and services that we might see mentioned during WWDC.

iCloud, iCloud, go away, come again some other day!

Remember: WWDC is a developer conference. And Apple wants developers to love iCloud—though, more often than not, they don’t. Given that iCloud—and especially its deficient data-syncing—is a source of major concern for developers, that should make it a major concern for Apple, too.

We’re optimistic that Apple will address the developers’ sinking syncing feelings. Expect not just announcements of low-level features (such as improved, more reliable, even rewritten APIs), but user-facing ones, as well: That could mean a revamped iCloud document-chooser interface or maybe—if we allow ourselves to dream a little—an iDisk-like iCloud app for both iOS and the Mac, which might bring a smidgen of Dropbox-like ubiquity to Apple’s online service.

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Calling the launch of iOS’s built-in Maps app “underwhelming” might be generous. While I’d argue that Apple’s mapping efforts aren’t as bad as many people think, Google has certainly provided some stiff competition in the form of its Google Maps app for iOS. It can match many—but not all—of the features of Apple Maps, and Google’s databases of location information are arguably superior. There’s a reason we put it on the list of our apps that can replace iOS’s defaults on your phone.

In the video above, I take you on a quick walkthrough of the basic features of Google Maps, including location searching, business information, and directions—including one of its distinguishing features: public transit directions. Note that while Google Maps is currently only available on the iPhone and iPod touch, Google

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