Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2020

When Steve Jobs was still running the show at Apple, I used to watch a lot of his keynote presentations at Macworld Expo, Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), and other special events. These “Stevenote” presentations were masterful speeches that not only featured compelling product announcements but were accompanied by slick audiovisuals, message clarity, and showmanship. Since Steve Jobs’ passing, I have been less interested in watching keynote presentations. After all, without the blue jeans, black turtlenecks, and “One more thing” announcements, they’ve simply been less interesting to watch because Steve Jobs set the bar so high.

However, I did watch parts of the Apple WWDC keynote presentation which took place this past week. Part of what drew me to this session was that I wanted to see what an all-virtual presentation would look like, as the coronavirus pandemic has forced all companies to either cancel events or transition to virtual formats. I thought that it worked really well, if not better than other events. Since I’ve never attended an Apple presentation in person, I’ve only watched them online, and it made no difference to me that there was no audience reacting to the presentations. It also looks like the presentations may have been pre-recorded and that some presenters might have used teleprompters (I’m not sure), but that was fine too, and in fact I found all the presentations to be pretty polished. I most appreciated the fact that Apple inserted chapter markers into the video so you could jump straight to the a section of interest: introduction, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, privacy, tvOS, macOS, and Mac. These chapter markers are embedded into the above link as well as the YouTube version of the presentation. For more videos, visit this site.

Perhaps the biggest news of the conference was Apple’s announcement that it would transition its processors from Intel to Apple silicon. It was a little skimpy on details, but presumably they will be powerful and energy-efficient chips that will begin shipping in Macs before the end of 2020. They didn’t say which Macs would sport the new processor first, but they did say that all Macs will eventually transition to Apple silicon over the next 2 years. This is not the first time Apple has made such a big change in its Machintosh processors. When the original Macintosh was introduced in 1984, it used Motorola 68000 series processors. In 1994, the Mac transitioned to PowerPC processors which were a 3-way alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. At WWDC 2005, Apple announced another transition, this time to Intel processors. But alas, rumor has it that Apple’s decision to make its own processors was driven largely by a number bugs with Intel’s Skylake architecture. Apple claims that the transition should be relatively easy for developers to accommodate.

Hopefully the transition to Apple silicon will be painless for end users too. Namely, I am most concerned about the ability to run Windows on my Mac. It currently sounds like Windows will not be available through Bootcamp on Apple silicon machines. However, it also sounds like Windows virtualization through apps like Parallels Desktop will continue to be supported. I look forward to seeing how Apple silicon will benefit Mac users over the long run.