This Is What Elevates Apple Into a League of Its Own

Apple (AAPL 0.54%) revealed some of its latest operating system updates at its 16th Worldwide Developer Conference on June 6.

In this clip from "The Virtual Opportunities Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on June 7, Motley Fool contributors Rachel Warren, Jose Najarro, and Travis Hoium discuss some of its most exciting updates, and how the tech giant has carved out its own lasting legacy.

Rachel Warren: It's kind of exciting. I was looking at some of the highlights from this conference and of course, everyone is really excited about the new M2 chip that's going to be in the latest and greatest MacBook Air. One of the things that struck me was Apple saying the new M2 chip delivers an 18% performance upgrade when compared to the M1. The computer I'm on now, my brand-new MacBook Air is on the M1 chip, and I've already noticed such a difference, again, anecdotally, but compared to my MacBook Air that I had gotten several years back, there's no fan, it works so much faster, it's so much lighter. When I'm envisioning this 18% performance enhancement with the latest MacBook Air, that is super exciting. For people that work remotely or just on their laptops a lot, this is huge.

So I thought that was really cool, and then, like I mentioned just again, personally so thrilled about the ability to be able to unsend and edit a text [laughs] because I'm someone that dictates a lot of text messages. You can dictate them and they're like, oh, wait that word is not what I said or I totally missed a whole series of punctuation, and so great, I'm pretty thrilled.

Jose Navarro: I do want to say sometimes as investors or consumers, we expect that every single year, we're going to get some revolutionary product. Even though maybe some of these aren't crazy, like Travis mentioned, I think he also mentioned, these are sometimes stepping stones for the next technology. Maybe this edit a text or this translation might not seem like a big deal right now, but maybe next year, this stepping stone accelerated the technology improvements that Apple can make next year.

Travis Hoium: The other thing I think is noteworthy with what they announced yesterday is how much stickier it makes Apple in general. They had a stat with the CarPlay announcement that it was 98% of vehicles include CarPlay now and 79%, I think, it was of buyers would only consider a vehicle with CarPlay. That tells you two things. One, the people that are buying vehicles are the same people who have iPhones, which I think makes sense, iPhone are typically a premium product, so people who are going to be buying new vehicles are probably going to be in that premium tier of smartphone products. But two, there's a ton of pull for an operating system that's better than what we have in the auto industry today. If you're Apple, that's great because it gives another sticky point for the business.

If you're an automaker, I would argue that that's actually fine because why do you want to be in the operating system business? Why don't you just want to integrate easily with all of your customers and take that pain point out of it? They've given up on making their own maps, which I remember was a thing for a while. We got a vehicle that didn't have the mapping system and we don't have CarPlay and it's annoying because [laughs] I've got to stick my phone to the car.

I think these are upgrades that really make the business a lot better long-term, make the cycle of the smartphone a lot longer, same thing with the HomeKit. I'm really interested to see if that's improved enough to make it a little more compelling, because I think that's been a pretty disappointing products for what has it been? Almost 10 years that that's been out. I have a few products that are connected to HomeKit and it's fine, but it's not great. I don't know, I think they're real nice incremental improvements overall. We're seeing similar stuff from Google by the way, so I think it's worth pointing out that these are the things that only these big tech giants can do.