Since its small beginnings in 1983 and right up to the current slick video presentations, WWDC has been where Apple has made so many major announcements — and sometimes they were so major they were turning points for the company.
To be clear, the biggest single turning point for Apple must be the launch of the iPhone, and that didn’t happen at WWDC. Nor did the iPod before it. Nor the 1998 iMac that saved the company.
But apart from that… While WWDC has not always been so important to Apple’s future — and while it wasn’t always called the Worldwide Developers Conference — it has become so. Chiefly because it is a WWDC that so many Apple-changing announcements were made.
There is a lot to pick from. There’s 2007 when Apple Computer, Inc was renamed just Apple, Inc. Or 2011 and Steve Jobs‘s final year hosting WWDC, when he also announced iCloud.
Or 2013 when cat names were out and Mac OS X Mavericks was in. Or 2014 with the launch of Swift, 2015 with Apple News and Apple Music. Or 2016 when OS X was renamed macOS.
And there’s a case to be made for the worst WWDC moments. They’d have to include 1996’s OpenDoc, which you’ve forgotten, and the risible funeral for OS 9 in 2002.
Yet there are five WWDC events that were good, that were great, and which truly shaped Apple. Or at least, there are five so far. In chronological order, then:
1983 — A transition, teased
What was then called the Apple Independent Software Developers Conference (no one called it AISDC), launched with the announcement of the programming language, Apple Basic.
Apple Basic is long gone, and the Apple II computer it ran on is as well. But it was Apple’s first such developer conference, and the company was reaching out to developers at a time when such events were rare.
It was reaching out quite cautiously, though. While Apple clearly saw it needed to encourage developers, it still made them all sign non-disclosure agreements.
All these years later, attendees have still not revealed the details of what they were shown. Maybe NDAs were more strict then, or maybe there wasn’t a lot to see.
Except is known that the developers were shown the Apple Lisa. It can’t have been a shock to them since the conference was in August 1983, about eight months since the Apple Lisa was launched.
But if Apple wanted to convince developers of the benefits of a point-and-click image-based computer, it appears it was again cautious. Because the Macintosh wasn’t shown at this late 1983 conference, despite it being unveiled to journalists two months later.
Apple continued its annual conference, but from 1985, it tended to reserve its biggest announcements for the independent Macworld Expo. It wouldn’t be until 2008 that Apple announced it was pulling out of the event, and 2009 when it made its final appearance.
But even while Apple was officially making its main announcements at Macworld Expo, there were still key moments at developer’s conferences. And starting in 1990, the event was called WWDC, after various name changes from the Apple Independent Software Developers Conference, to Apple World Conference, to DevCon.
1997 — The return of Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was back. He’d actually spoken at the January 1997 Macworld Expo, so that was his first public speech after returning to Apple.
However, it was in that year’s WWDC that instead of a keynote, Jobs sat with developers to talk with them and answer questions. It’s become known as the fireside chat, but the fire was in the questions that angry developers demanded answers to.
Jobs was brutal, but he didn’t dodge any questions, and he didn’t try to spin things. Or at least, if he did, he span so well that you don’t notice.
Whereas at this distance of almost three decades, what you do notice is how prescient Jobs was. He wasn’t predicting the future so much as telling developers what it had already been like working at NeXT, but all these years later, we’re still inching toward what he describe on this day in 1997.
2005 — No more toasted bunny men
Ten years before the 2005 WWDC, Apple famously was punching up at Intel. You remember the campaign — Apple both had a Pentium II processor on the back of a snail, and then “Toasted” a clean-suited Intel worker.
A decade later, almost to the day, Steve Jobs revealed that Apple was moving its Macs from the old PowerPC processor, to Intel ones. Curiously little detail survives of the previous transition, from Motorola’s 68000 series to PowerPC, but that was because because Apple wasn’t such big news then.
Several AppleInsider staffers dealt with it professionally, though. It wasn’t as smooth as the PowerPC to Intel migration, which in itself was rocky, that’s for sure.
Anyway, that 68K to PPC transition happened while Steve Jobs was out of the company, and so Apple was on its way to becoming 90 days from bankruptcy. Or maybe it’s just because the move to PowerPC was led by then-CEO John Sculley, who reportedly didn’t believe in it.
And then that 2005 announcement was Jobs in full showmanship style, able to attract attention with his reality distortion field.
But it was probably mostly because the move was to Intel. After years of rivalry and of Jobs criticizing Intel, the whole company was now jumping ship and joining the enemy.
News reports such as those in the Mercury News said Apple was going to be making “Mactels”, as opposed to the common “Wintel” conflation of Windows and Intel. Others feared that Macs would now have to sport stickers saying “Intel Inside.”
That obviously never came to pass. Jobs wouldn’t let it.
2008 – App Store for iPhone surfaces
In 2007, Apple had launched the very first iPhone — though not at a WWDC event. Shortly afterwards, Steve Jobs asserted that developers should make web apps for the iPhone, that native apps were only to be made by Apple.
Come WWDC 2008, though, and that was all over. The App Store was launched, and it transformed the world. Even if now the world is doing its best to transform it again.
As well as the European Union fining Apple and requiring it to allow third-party App Stores, there’s also the US doing the same.
2020 — Apple Silicon, ten years in the making
Fifteen years on from Steve Jobs being so very persuasive about the move to Intel, it was time to move away from it. And this time it was Tim Cook taking us through announcing the move from Intel to Apple Silicon.
It’s fascinating to watch the two Apple CEOs announce transitions. Both of them manage to make it sound so transformative that it is essential, yet also not so big a deal that Apple is in danger.
And what’s more absorbing is how identical the two presentations are. Tim Cook unquestionably followed Steve Jobs’s play book for this WWDC.
They were both storytellers as well as businessmen. By the time each of them gets to the specifics of the move, you have been led down a road to where you completely buy how necessary this transition is.
Plus you also unthinkingly buy into the certainty that Apple will do it. The company was already much bigger than during the days of the transition to Intel, and so had much greater resources, yet the enormity of making any such change of processor architecture can’t be overstated.
Whereas it can be overlooked. The 2020 Tim Cook speech in which he promised wonders, was followed by such a successful transition that it seemed easy. It was, by far, the easiest transition that Apple had made, and it had done so twice before as we’ve talked about already.
Easy or hard, though, the move to developing its own Apple Silicon processors changed the company. It also changed the larger market — instead of a main shift to more transistors, and more power, Intel and AMD started thinking about battery life and power efficiency.
So, iPhone user or not, macOS user or not, every computer user everywhere is still benefiting from the shift, and Apple’s drive and priorities.
WWDC since Apple Silicon
Sometimes you can immediately see that a given WWDC is going to be remembered. Often you can’t, you just can’t see what will become significant later.
Then there are years were it seems like we just see minor updates to iOS, iPadOS, and so on.
But if there hasn’t been a year that you can yet be certain will mark a turning point for Apple, there has been at least one contender. In 2023, Apple used its WWDC event to announce the Apple Vision Pro.
Maybe the jury is going to stay out on that one for years, until the price and the size of the headset both shrink.
And in 2024, there was the launch of Apple Intelligence. That seems to be going well.
But perhaps we’ll come to regard the Apple Vision Pro in the same way we now do Universal Control. When it was launched in 2021, if you were near anyone watching the WWDC keynote video, you would hear a little gasp at the demo of Universal Control.
Four years on, however, we take it for granted that we can fling our Mac’s cursor over onto another device’s screen. We take it for granted that we just drag items between devices.
That transformed many people’s work, but it didn’t transform Apple. The Apple Vision Pro might, and Apple Intelligence might, but we won’t even have a chance to guess until Tim Cook closes out each annual WWDC event.
