Apple on Tuesday announced it will host its 2021 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) June 7 through 11, in an all-online virtual format for the second straight year (due to the COVID-19 response). Free for all developers, WWDC21 will offer unique insight into the future of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Building on the record-breaking participation and learnings from last year’s online conference, WWDC21 is an opportunity for developers to learn about the new technologies, tools, and frameworks they rely on to build innovative and platform-differentiating apps and games.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
On Tuesday, Apple Inc. announced what will be at least its fifth virtual product launch in a row and one of its most important events of the year: the June 2021 Worldwide Developers Conference… For the second year in a row, the event will be a very different scene from WWDCs of yore, when attendees would fly in from all over the globe to pack auditoriums small and large to learn about the newest Apple features. There will be no nighttime bar crawl, or parties in San Jose and San Francisco.
But I believe that internally, Apple hopes that WWDC 2021 will be its last developer conference in a purely digital format—and that the return to in-person media events will begin by early next year. The company makes hardware: It wants attendees, as well as more of its employees, back in-person to use, test and develop those products…
Sometime in the next several months, the company is poised to announce a mixed reality headset, its first major new device since 2015. If possible, Apple won’t want to make such a critical announcement at an online event. It wants employees, the media, its partners and developers in the room.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s learned a lot during COVID about what works virtually and what doesn’t, so we expect the company to weave in more virtual announcements into the year while adding additional, more fully-featured remote calls to established in-person events like WWDC, too.