And now Microsoft's Cortana is headed toward iOS owners. A Cortana companion app will roll out to Android phones at the end of June and to iPhones later this year. Cortana can remind you of meetings, air flights and other activities in your schedule, something Siri can't do. Some of those who use and grow to like Cortana on a desktop or laptop might just be persuaded to buy a Windows Phone handset equipped with Cortana. So this is the ideal time for Siri to start supporting reminders. Siri has quietly become more popular, according to Apple, serving over a billion requests a week. Over the past year, Siri has seen a 40 percent reduction in word error rates to 5 percent. And Siri is now 40 percent faster at responding, said Federighi.

The company on Monday showed off the newest updates to the software running on its iPhones and iPads, Macs and Apple Watches, One of the key characteristics of Apple's operating system releases over the past customize a iphone case couple years -- including iOS 9 and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan revealed Monday at its developer conference -- is how well the software makes its devices work together, Last year's debut of Continuity and Handoff tied the iPhone and Mac computer more closely together, letting people start an email on their smartphone and finish it on their computer or even answer phone calls on their Macs, This year, Apple showed more ways it will extend its reach into our homes and cars, as well as how we listen to music and how we pay for goods..

It looks like Apple is bringing a whole new level of interconnectivity to our lives. But here's the catch: if you really want everything to work seamlessly, you'll have to go all in on the Apple ecosystem. And that doesn't just mean buying an iPhone and MacBook. You'll have to look for smart-home products that work with its HomeKit software, drive a CarPlay-compatible automobile and even choose its Apple Music streaming service. The company's message is clear: it's Apple's world; you're just living in it.

With Apple, "you're either all in or you're all out," said Eric Shapiro, a former Apple executive and current CEO of ArcTouch, a San Francisco app development studio that counts NBC's "Today Show" and Disney among its clients, "Where Apple customize a iphone case will fail is if it doesn't work and if it's too hard to use."As the battle for the control of your connected life heats up, Apple's strategy stands in contrast with the other tech giants, While Apple is rallying behind its own products, software and services, Google and Microsoft have embraced a cross-platform world where their services work on virtually anything, That Apple can get away with such a siloed approach is testament to the strength of its early decision to control both the hardware and software aspects of its products and services..

And for Apple, everything it does in software goes back to selling more of its devices -- those iPhones, iPads, Macs and now Apple Watches that have made it the most profitable public company ever. The company declined to comment for this report. Not everything about Apple is locked into its own ecosystem. The biggest news from Apple's keynote Monday was a subscription music service re-emerging after last year's $3 billion acquisition of Beats. Apple changed how consumers bought music with the launch of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, and it hopes to do it again with Apple Music, a $10-a-month subscription streaming service much like Spotify.