This year's WWDC is highly anticipated. Based on Things I've Seen™ and some of my own wild guessing, I'm going to make a few predictions for what we'll see this coming week:
- New iPhone
- New release of iOS
- New iPad model(s)
- Refreshed Mac laptops
In general, everybody will be very disappointed for the following reasons:
- The new iPhone will be 50% faster than the old one and have better everything, except it will not switch to USB Type C cabling and will still have no headphone port.
- The new release of iOS will feel uninspired and will introduce bugs that will make the iPhone completely unusable for a small looking portion of the community that will feel extremely huge once they start complaining. It will not sufficiently transform the iPad Pro into a laptop replacement.
- The new iPad will be 50% faster than its predecessor but the new release of iOS won't make that horsepower meaningfully usable for applications that can use that type of horsepower. A low memory ceiling will make web browsing on it painful compared to 2018's new iPad models, despite it being good enough in every other way.
- The new Mac laptops will have Kaby Lake processors, but will otherwise be identical to the olde models. They might not even update the chipset to a new model. Prices will not meaningfully budge. Apple will discontinue the 2016 lineup but keep the 2015 lineup on sale. There's a non-zero chance the MD101LL/A will be re-introduced.
We'll see how my predictions do. I think that there will be a loud contingent who congratulates Apple on whatever they do. Notably absent will be any mention of the replacement for the Mac Pro, any update for the now-ancient Mac mini, and the supposed pro-focused iMac.
There's a lot of excitement about an iOS concept video that was shown off on one of the Apple blogs. The idea was to make the iPad more productive by introducing functions such as system-wide drag and drop, a finder, and a few other nice things. It would be nice, but I question whether Apple will be able to save the iPad from its sales decline. People who want to do "productivity" are now trending toward Macs again and people who want to do consumption on the go are fine with a big iPhone.
I still see the iPhone and the iPad as different products, but I think most of the people who can get away with using an iPad as their main computer do not strictly need or want the horsepower and cost of something like the iPad Pro. The people who want to use an iPad Pro to prove a point need iOS to be a little more capable, and people who need that functionality today are just buying Macs and Surfaces.
There's lots of rumors about a Siri speaker and I think it'll be interesting. I don't use Siri an awful lot so I don't really know what using it will be like. It's likely to be a lot better for privacy than anything from Google or Amazon, and I bet there will be people who buy them as airplay speakers. I would consider it, especially if Apple makes it compatible with Windows and Macs and with other audio sources.
One item I personally hope for is an updated iPhone SE. The platform that phone is based on is now a few generations old and we're looking forward to either an iPhone 7S or iPhone 8 coming out this year. I believe an updated SE would do well with what appears to be a pretty dedicated fan base for that form factor.
I think the particular era we're in with Apple is that they've just discovered that maybe they don't always get it right, even in the modern era, and that at least one, probably more, of their products doesn't meet their customers' needs in a big way. The other trouble with the Mac line is that the majority of the models on sale are over two years old. I've seen more than one post in "non-techie" corners of the Internet from people who bought a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro or Mac mini and were surprised to find out that it was from 2013, 2014, or 2015.
It's possible, albeit unlikely, that we will see a new MacBook Pro family that reflects this reality, but I think that what will really happen is that Apple, having recognized this issue in late 2016 and discussed it in 2017, will announce a few products that address the problems in 2018. New models will help a lot, and I think Apple needs to take a long hard look at their product family and address what might cause problems for customers. I don't think Apple is selling bad computers, but I do think it's possible that some of the models are needlessly compromised in ways that make the experience or configuration worse for people who buy them.