Core Foundation is a framework that provides fundamental software services useful to application services, application environments, and to applications themselves. Core Foundation also provides abstractions for common data types, facilitates internationalization with Unicode string storage, and offers a suite of utilities such as plug-in support, XML property lists, URL resource access, and preferences.

The Core Graphics framework is based on the Quartz advanced drawing engine. It provides low-level, lightweight 2D rendering with unmatched output fidelity. You use this framework to handle path-based drawing, transformations, color management, offscreen rendering, patterns, gradients and shadings, image data management, image creation, and image masking, as well as PDF document creation, display, and parsing.

Core Image is an image processing and analysis technology that provides high-performance processing for still and video images. Use the many built-in image filters to process images and build complex effects by chaining filters.

The Core Media framework defines the media pipeline used by AVFoundation and other high-level media frameworks found on Apple platforms. Use Core Media's low-level data types and interfaces to efficiently process media samples and manage queues of media data.

The Foundation framework provides a base layer of functionality for apps and frameworks, including data storage and persistence, text processing, date and time calculations, sorting and filtering, and networking. The classes, protocols, and data types defined by Foundation are used throughout the macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS SDKs.

macOS Launch Services is an API that enables a running app to open other apps or their document files, similar to the Finder or the Dock.Launch Services eliminates apps having to query the Finder to open an app, document, or URL for them. The macOS Finder itself uses Launch Services to perform such tasks. Because the Finder performs no additional processing beyond calling Launch Services, any client using Launch Services for these purposes behaves identically to the Finder.

Render advanced 3D graphics and perform data-parallel computations. Get fine-grained access to the GPU while minimizing CPU overhead. The Metal Framework provides extremely low-overhead access to the GPU, enabling incredibly high performance for your sophisticated graphics rendering and computational tasks. Metal eliminates many performance bottlenecks—such as costly state validation—that are found in traditional graphics APIs. Metal moves all expensive state translation and compilation operations out of the critical path of your most performance sensitive rendering code. It provides precompiled shaders, state objects, and explicit command scheduling to ensure that your application achieves the highest possible performance and efficiency. Graphics, compute, and blit commands can be used together seamlessly and efficiently. Metal is specifically designed to exploit modern architectural considerations, such as multiprocessing and shared memory, to make it easy to parallelize the creation of GPU commands.

Allow users to browse, edit, and save images, using slideshows and Core Image filters.The Quartz Composer API supports processing and rendering graphical data and allows developers to create custom patches for the Quartz Composer developer tool. ImageKit provides user interface support for browsing, editing, and saving images, showing slideshows, and browsing and previewing Core Image filters. PDFKit is a technology that allows applications to display and manipulate PDF documents.

The powerful programming language that is also easy to learn. Swift is a powerful and intuitive programming language for macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS. Writing Swift code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and Swift includes modern features developers love. Swift code is safe by design, yet also produces software that runs lightning-fast.

The UIKit framework (UIKit.framework) provides the crucial infrastructure needed to construct and manage iOS apps. This framework provides the window and view architecture needed to manage an app’s user interface, the event handling infrastructure needed to respond to user input, and the app model needed to drive the main run loop and interact with the system.