Clarifying information on future MacPro computers.

Well, Steve Jobs may be gone. But to the extent that Apple can keep alive the format and excitement of his onstage new-feature presentations, Apple is doing it.

On Monday morning in San Francisco, I watched the new Apple C.E.O., Tim Cook, give brief remarks at the beginning and the end of the keynote presentation at the Worldwide Developers Conference, which will apparently become what the old Macworld Expo used to be: a place for Apple to take the wraps off its latest inventions. He handed off the actual announcements to his lieutenants.

First, laptops: starting today, the new MacBook Airs are faster, they store more, they have combination USB 2/USB 3 jacks, and they cost $100 less than before.

There’s also a new, top-of-the-line super laptop, the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display ($2,200 and up). It’s very thin and light (0.7 inch, 4.5 pounds), has two microphones for better speech recognition — and, yes, it has a Retina display.

In other words, it has a screen composed of many more, much tinier dots than conventional laptops; at 2,880 by 1,800 pixels, it’s the highest-resolution screen ever to appear on a laptop. Apple notes that when videos are edited in Final Cut, you can see every single dot of a 1080p hi-def video you’re editing — and still have three million pixels of screen left over for your toolbars and timelines.

The next realm of news was Mountain Lion, the next version of Mac OS X. Apple had already demonstrated most of the new features, but there were some surprises. To me, the big one was dictation. After all of these years — after text-to-speech came to the iPhone and the iPad, after Windows has had dictation for years — you can now type by speaking to your Mac, in any program. (To make the Dictation button appear, you tap the Fn key twice.)

It’s the same technology that’s on the iPhone: behind the scenes, your utterances are sent to Nuance for processing and conversion to text, which is sent back to your Mac in seconds. In other words, no training is required — but an Internet connection is. No Internet, no dictation. I can’t wait to try it.

Apple also revealed Power Nap, a Mountain Lion feature for the new laptops announced Monday. It lets the Mac keep updating Internet data even while it’s closed and asleep. It keeps getting mail, calendar updates, Photo Stream updates, software updates and so on. The worry here, of course, is battery life, but Apple says it’s a minimal penalty.

On Monday, Apple also announced the timing for Mountain Lion — “next month” — and the price: $20. You can install that one copy on as many Macs as you own, without serial numbers or copy protection. You can upgrade from previous Mac OS X versions as old as Snow Leopard.

Finally, Apple showed what’s new in iOS 6 — the software for iPhones and iPads — which is coming this fall. (It will run on the iPhone 3GS and later, iPad 2 and 3, and iPod Touch fourth generation.)

The juiciest, best features were all saved for this software.

Siri, the voice-controlled virtual assistant that everybody loves or hates, has sprouted a lot more capability. Now you can ask about restaurants, and the results screen lists, for each restaurant, the average price, type of food, and so on. It’s integrated with the OpenTable app so you can make a reservation on the spot, and with the Yelp app so you can read reviews of each place.

You can also ask about movies ( “What movies are playing at the Metreon?” or “Show me movies starring Tom Cruise”) or sports (“What was the score of last night’s Yankees game?” “What is Buster Posey’s batting average?” “What are the National League standings?” “Who is taller: LeBron or Kobe?”).

And Siri will open apps. Yay! (“Open Angry Birds.”)

Apple also mentioned that a dozen carmakers (including General Motors, BMW, Toyota, Audi, Mercedes, Honda, Jaguar) have all agreed to add a Siri button to their steering wheels. This feature, called Eyes Free, lets you get information and operate Siri by voice as you drive — and the iPhone’s screen doesn’t even light up.

Finally, you can now speak to Siri in new languages like Spanish, Italian, French, German, Korean, Mandarin. Oh — and Siri’s voice-command feature is finally coming to the latest iPad.

You know how you’re in a meeting or a movie, and someone calls? Now, the Answer screen offers an icon that offers two new options: “Reply with Message” (sends the caller a canned text message like, “In a meeting — I’ll get back to you”) or “Remind Me Later.” That feature makes the phone use its GPS to remind you to return the call “When I get home,” for example, or “When I get back.”

Similarly, the new Do Not Disturb switch, in Settings, lets you tell the phone not to bother you with texts or calls or push notifications. They’ll still arrive, but won’t make the phone ring or buzz — unless they’re from certain special people you’ve designated.

Yes, some of these features have been available on Treo phones and others, but it’s great to have them on the iPhone.

Maps may be the gem of iOS 6. Apple felt that it was time to stop depending on its licensing deal with Google and other mapping companies. It therefore wrote its own Maps app from the ground up. It covers the whole world, and knows about 100 million businesses.

It has real-time traffic information — and where does it come from? Other iPhone owners. Crowdsourced traffic data is sent by them, in real time and anonymously, to Apple, so that it knows exactly where the traffic jams are. (You even get to see icons that indicate what is causing the traffic: construction, accident or whatever.)

For the first time, Maps now gives you spoken turn-by-turn directions, just like a windshield GPS unit, but smarter and better-looking. Siri is built right in; you can say, for example, “Take me to the Empire State Building” or “Where can I get gas?” or “Are we there yet?” (In that case, Siri responds: “Relax. You’ll be there in 14 minutes.”)

If you zoom into the map enough, you see the outlines of individual buildings. If you tilt the map, it goes into an amazing 3-D view — and in Satellite view, that even includes aerial videos of prominent landmarks. (Apple says that it’s spent the last couple of years filming Flyover scenes in helicopters.)

What else is on iOS 6?

• Facetime over cellular. Now you won’t be stuck in Wi-Fi hot spots when you want to make a video call from one iPhone/iPad/Touch/Mac to another.

• Shared Photo Stream. Now you can choose certain photos and share them with certain friends. Those photos appear in the friends’ Shared Photo Stream albums — in the Photos app (iPhone/iPad), iPhoto, Aperture, Apple TV or (on Windows machines) on a special Web page. You can even comment on them.

• Mail. As in Mountain Lion, you can now designate special contacts as V.I.P.’s. Their messages alone appear on the iPhone’s lock screen, and they collect in a special Inbox folder; basically, they cut through the clutter of messages. And at last, you can attach a photo or a video right from the Compose Message screen. (Until now, you had to start in the Photos app to send a picture to someone by e-mail.)

• Passbook. This new app keeps all of your electronic tickets/barcodes in one place: airplane boarding passes, movie tickets, store cards and so on. (These apps have to be rewritten to exploit Passbook.) When you get to the movie theater or the airport, you no longer have to find the app and then find the barcode within the app; the iPhone’s GPS figures out that you’ve arrived, and displays the correct pass automatically. (The best part may be the shredder-machine animation that appears when you delete a used pass.)

• Guided access. This new mode is something like kiosk mode. It prevents you from leaving the app you’re in — you can’t go back to the Home screen, for example. Apple points out that it’s great for children with autism, teachers who want to administer a test but block the ability to search Google for answers, or museums that want to create walking tours.

By the way, Apple made two other changes that didn’t make the cut for the keynote. First, new versions of Apple’s two photo programs, Aperture and iPhoto, will use the same database. That is, the same photos show up in both programs, with the same categories, tags, ratings, edits and so on, so you can flip back and forth as needed.

Second, there’s a new Airport Express (a pocket-size Wi-Fi base station). This one looks like a white Apple TV — a tiny square — that doubles the network speed and permits more simultaneous connections.

It’s clear that Apple intends to take certain new directions — that the rest of the industry, most likely, will follow:

• Discs are gone. Apple has killed off iDVD, its DVD-design program, and now it’s phasing CD/DVD drives out of its laptops, including the new 15-incher. (An external DVD drive is available, though.) The future, Apple thinks, is all online.

• Ethernet is gone. The new laptop doesn’t have an Ethernet jack for networking (although an adapter is available). It’s all Wi-Fi now, baby.

• Hard drives are gone. Hard drives may become last moving part on a computer. (There is also the fan.) The solid-state ones in the Airs and Apple’s new laptop are faster, bump-proof, quieter, stingier with power — and more expensive. But that, surely, will change.

• Speech is in. Siri is slowly growing in power and in compatibility with Apple’s products, and built-in dictation is just arriving on the Mac. Clearly, Apple isn’t finished with it yet.

Many Apple observers also wonder if Apple thinks that desktop computers are dead, since not a word was said about the iMac and Mac Pro. An executive did assure me, however, that new MacPro designs are under way, probably for release in 2013.

Over all, the presentation Monday morning was dizzying. There were many, many truly ingenious features revealed, some that played catch-up, and a lot to look forward to. None of it proves whether or not Tim Cook and his team can dream up entirely new product categories, the way Steve Jobs did. But for now, they’re doing an excellent job of keeping excitement alive in Apple’s current suite of machines.