This year’s WWDC keynote will be must-see Apple TV

If we go by the usual schedule, we’re probably a little under three months out from this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference—chances are it’ll be announced before the end of this very month.

It promises to be quite the event.

That’s in no small part because Apple’s found itself in an unusual position this year: the company has already copped to the fact that some of the most impressive features from last year’s WWDC keynote–Siri’s ability to use personal context and take action in various apps–will not arrive on time, and we don’t know exactly when they might ship, if ever.

So, at this year’s WWDC when Tim Cook greets the in-person crowd and fires up the keynote video, what exactly are we going to see, and how’s it going to play?

No feature left behind*

Back in 2012, Apple made a bold move and replaced Google Maps as the provider of its built-in mapping software with a homegrown solution in iOS 6. That was, to put it politely, a debacle: for millions of users, the Apple map app went from robust to untrustworthy overnight, and the company (rightfully) earned itself a black eye. The situation was so bad, in fact, that Tim Cook, only a year into his tenure as CEO, took to Apple’s website with an apology, writing, “We will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.”

Granted, the situation with these Apple Intelligence features is a little different. Yes, the company demoed them at WWDC and subsequently used them as the basis for an iPhone advertising campaign in the fall, but unlike with Maps, it’s not as if their absence has made customers’ phones less useful than before.

Still, this kind of overpromising, while far from unheard of in the tech industry, isn’t the way that Apple tends to conduct itself. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen; the company has gotten over its skis in the past, such as when it pre-announced a wireless charging mat that it would never be able to ship. Embarrassing as that was, a hardware accessory is hardly critical to the company’s success; Cook certainly didn’t put out a public mea culpa about it. Instead, like the announcement of the Apple Intelligence delay, the news on AirPower came via a Friday press statement.

That said, I’m of the opinion that a miss of the level of Apple Intelligence probably should involve a public apology–if not Tim Cook writing on Apple.com, then at least a sit-down explanation with some of the press. But so far that hasn’t seemed to be forthcoming, which raises the question: will the company acknowledge it at WWDC?

Ignore and override

This year’s keynote is sure to be jam-packed, with the company demoing new features across the half-dozen platforms it maintains. It’s certainly easy to imagine Apple bulling ahead, confident in the power of its fabled reality distortion field, pretending nothing untoward has happened and that everything is fine in Cupertino.

But if this year’s announcements include, as is not unlikely, another crop of Apple Intelligence features, well, that becomes a trickier proposition. How do you build on features that didn’t ship? It’s hard to make the argument that you’re bringing the second-generation of Apple Intelligence features when the first never finished shipping. Or do you blithely re-introduce those capabilities like Bullwinkle trying to pull a rabbit out of his hat?

More to the point, how do you expect developers, customers, and the media to treat any such announcement? The virtue of being up on stage, especially with a pre-recorded video, may mean that everybody has to listen to what you have to say, but you can bet that it’s going to be greeted with a whole lot more scrutiny and skepticism after the fact.

Quiet professionals

Here’s the thing: it didn’t have to be this way. Apple’s playbook has long been to sit tight on a project until it’s ready to ship–or, more importantly, until you know it’s not going to ship. This is the company that spent ten years looking at building a car and killed that project off without ever so much as acknowledging it, much less releasing an actual product. But you can’t be mad at the company for not shipping something it never said it would ship. (Well, you can, but that seems a little unreasonable.)

The Vision Pro is another good example. By all indications, plans for the company’s headset date back as far as 2008, no doubt well before the product was technologically feasible. If anything, you could argue that the company maybe should have sat on it longer to get the price down, but there’s certainly no argument that the Vision Pro technology works as demonstrated.

General consensus seems to be that Apple was caught flat-footed by the intense success of generative AI and had to scramble to catch up. It certainly seems like the company acted out of fear to try and not look like it was irrelevant, but from this vantage it seems like that decision may have backfired. Now, instead of simply looking out of touch, Apple looks, worse, like it can’t get the job done.