While the rest of the world has already ushered in the new year, in the Apple world the year starts on Monday of WWDC week, when Apple opens its annual Worldwide Developers Conference and sets its agenda for the next year. Get the champagne and fireworks ready, because next Monday, the great cycle of Apple begins again.
A singular event
The center of the Apple universe used to be Macworld Expo. Every January, the public would gather in San Francisco, and Apple would make major announcements on stage to kick off the weeklong trade show. Developers, journalists, and Apple employees swarmed the streets. But as Macworld Expo withered and died after Apple pulled out in 2008, the community lost its focus.
As I wrote back in 2015, WWDC ended up replacing Macworld Expo as the heart of the Apple world’s calendar. I’ve been going to WWDC since the late 1990s, and while it was once a sleepy affair in San Jose, in the mid-2010s it had been moved to San Francisco and managed to become a pretty decent replacement for Macworld Expo.
Not perfect, of course. Literally anyone could buy a ticket for Macworld Expo, and if you lined up early enough, you might even be able to be present at a Steve Jobs keynote. WWDC, in contrast, was always an expensive ticket available only to registered Apple developers–and in the later years, you had to win a lottery to even get a chance to buy that ticket. Still, the streets of San Francisco (and, in later years, San Jose) were full of members of the Apple community, creating ancillary events and just hanging out, even if they didn’t have WWDC badges.
Foundry
Unfortunately, COVID put an end to all that. The modern WWDC is vastly more efficient, catering to the 99 percent of people who could never be there in person and offering an in-person video viewing to a few lucky lottery winners and journalists. It’s still the biggest event the community can muster. If you wander the streets of Cupertino outside of Apple Park next week, you’ll run into developers and writers and YouTubers and podcasters aplenty. Still, it’s mostly just a scaled-up Apple Media Event now.
But it still matters
That all said, the most important fact about WWDC for the last couple of decades remains intact: Apple has settled on an annual cycle for all of its operating systems, and Monday is the day that it takes the lid off of those announcements. For developers, it’s the start of a summer-long process to get up to speed with new developments. For users, it’s a preview of the stuff they’re going to be using in the fall and throughout the next year. Learn all the details about WWDC.
Given last year’s AI-motivated act of overpromising and underdelivering, I suspect Apple will be a bit more conservative with its promises this year. But even so, this is Apple’s moment to explain its vision for the future of its many operating systems, stretching from now through next June’s WWDC. We’ll learn what features Apple is prioritizing and which ones it’s ignoring–and people will be able to celebrate their victories and commiserate over their losses.
Also, here’s a secret: If you take advantage of Apple’s wide-open Public Beta process, you can make the greatest impact on Apple software possible. The first few weeks of operating-system betas are the point at which Apple is the most open to change, poised to listen to feedback sent via the Feedback Assistant utility, and motivated to fix stuff that doesn’t work right. A summer of bugs can lead, in ideal circumstances, to a fall and winter with all of those annoyances squashed.
Apple’s imagery for WWDC seems to indicate that the rumored UI design change is happening.
Apple
This year, things might be especially fluid because Apple is likely to introduce a redesign of its operating systems. We’ve seen in the fact that Apple sometimes responds rapidly to criticism of its new design language, which proves the point that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy (or in this case, people outside of Apple).
I hope that Apple largely stands on its principles when it comes to the redesign, though. Every redesign is initially rejected because it changes things, and people hate change. Even positive change is disliked and rejected! So Apple needs to walk a careful balance between listening to solid feedback about areas where it’s miscalculating things and rolling back good ideas because beta testers are reflexively pushing away something new and challenging.
Don’t expect an apology
My big question for this year’s WWDC is: Will Apple apologize, or even acknowledge, the fact that it announced numerous AI features at this same event last year that are still not shipping? Even after having attended a couple of dozen WWDCs, I really don’t know which way Apple will go.
Apple is a very proud company. It doesn’t like to admit mistakes, preferring to remain positive and announce the fixes to those mistakes as bold leaps forward. But the overreach of last year’s Apple Intelligence roll-out is going to be in everyone’s minds. My best guess is that Apple will gently acknowledge that a few features it promised won’t be out until the fall–turning that failure into a new promise–and then move on with things.
We’ll all know the answer on Monday. Until then, Happy New Year, everyone!
