Now is the WWDC of our discontent.
As the Macalope detailed last week, Apple’s been having a bit of a year of it. It’s been a bad enough year for the company that it seemingly doesn’t even really want to talk about it with anyone. Or at least answer questions about it.
The Macalope gets it. Personally, he doesn’t like talking about the year 2000. You wake up in a dumpster behind an Arby’s once and you can shrug it off but when you wake up there twice you start to think maybe you’ve got a problem. It happens to all of us.
After 10 years of appearing on the Talk Show Live during the week of WWDC, this year Apple executives apparently have a previous appointment washing their hair that night (looking at you Craig). Longtime Apple blogger John Gruber says:
This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.
Apple posted a screenshot of a Notes entry talking about how it hopes everyone will respect its privacy during this difficult period and it really just wants to focus on being with its family.
Having previously heard that Apple won’t be talking much about Siri this year at WWDC, after being unable to deliver on its promise of a smarter, more conversational Siri and now seeing that the company is loathe to take questions, what can we expect?
Apple has teased the event as a “Sleek peek.”, featuring a glass-like Apple icon reflecting the shifting colors of the letters “WWDC” below. This has kicked off this year’s bout of Kremlinology, in which people try to interpret what the image says about Apple’s upcoming design changes for its operating systems. “Kremlinology”, of course, being named after Charles Kremlin of East Hoboken, NJ, who famously took every small clue he noticed way too seriously.
After spending a good part of 2007 mocking Windows Vista for transparent windows, it has been slightly frustrating to see Apple introduce the same effects in macOS and it’s always been one of the first things the Macalope turns off on a new Mac. If the company actually adds elements that reflect other elements, well… the Macalope will probably just turn that, off, too, and keep using macOS because what else is he gonna do?
IDG
For professionals in web development or any kind of visual work, those elements tend to be a distraction. When you’re working with colors and layout, you don’t want a blurred user experience with other colors bleeding through around the window with focus. Apple apparently thinks the eye candy is appealing to new users, though, and it makes the big bucks.
Despite the fever dreams of Charles Kremlin, it’s impossible to know at this point what Apple has in store for its operating systems visually. Rumors to date have indicated that the company is bringing back some depth to its OSes, finally eschewing the harsh, flat landscapes dictated by Jony Ive back in iOS 7, but we won’t know what it really looks like until we see it.
So. What. Else?
Apple is certainly not going to talk about any of its big problems like tariffs or its multitude of troubles with the guy in the White House. It’s not going to talk about its current sales woes in China. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says it doesn’t want to talk about Siri too much, either, having already put the verbal cart before the horse that is actually delivering software last time around. (You don’t get your software delivered by horseback?) It probably doesn’t want to talk about its loss on the App Store anti-steering provision and Fortnite’s subsequent triumphant return.
But this is a developers conference. It’s right there in the name.
Gurman further reports that Apple will be announcing a dedicated app for games; it even acquired game studio RAC7 Games to beef up its Arcade offering, so certainly it will tell developers about the many benefits of that. Whatever those are.
The real question is, what else will it tell developers? As the company doubles down on the anti-steering provision by appealing the court ruling against it, Apple’s message so far this year has been “We still believe its our way or the highway.” That’s not a great message at a time when the company is increasingly looked upon sourly. The Macalope has low hopes Apple will surprise us with more favorable terms for developers and any kind of admission that times have changed and so too must the App Store. Don’t expect the sun of Apple to make a glorious summer.
It’s a Shakespeare quote. Look it up.
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