Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference, its largest and most closely watched annual event, begins Monday and runs through Friday in San Jose, Calif.
Apple continues to be one of the most secretive large companies on the planet. That success in turn has sprouted a cottage industry of leak-hunting and prognostication that naturally goes into overdrive before a big event like WWDC.
Below is a roundup of key expectations, educated guesses, and speculative Hail Marys for this year’s conference. The biggest announcements will actually come in CEO Tim Cook’s opening keynote, scheduled for 10 a.m. Pacific on Monday.
Siri Upgrades
Apple’s pioneering voice assistant seems to be losing ground to Amazon’s popular and ubiquitous Alexa, but Apple won’t take such news lying down. It’s now rumored that Siri may spread to iMessage and iCloud. The voice service could also see more third-party app integration—a key part of Alexa’s success—and improved predictive algorithms that could help it better compete with similar services from rivals like Google.
Most dramatically, there has been sustained speculation that Apple’s first completely new hardware product in years will be a Siri speaker not unlike Amazon’s Alexa-enabled Echo. It remains unclear that such a product would be unveiled at WWDC, a software-centric event.
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IOS 11
In addition to Siri upgrades, rumors are swirling that the new version of Apple’s mobile interface could include new video features in support of an increased push behind Apple Music, its Spotify-like streaming music service. FaceTime, Apple’s video chat service, may also see an upgrade to support up to five users per call. And there’s hope for a battery- and eye-saving “dark mode,” for which users have been clamoring for years.
MacOS and Apple TV
Apple will have ample time to discuss changes large and small across its myriad platforms. Among a welter of rumors about its desktop and television platforms—macOS and Apple TV, respectively—are upgrades to file management and video support in macOS 10.13 and smart-home controls and better streaming channel integration in tvOS 11.
MacBook and iPad
Observers predict that Apple will announce new top-end MacBook Pro models that integrate Intel’s newest Kaby Lake processors, which boast performance improvements of up to 20% over current-generation chips. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo also predicts the arrival of a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro.
Augmented Reality Glasses
Take this rumor with an extra grain of salt. Someone claiming to be a Foxconn insider—that is, someone who works at the Taiwanese partner that assembles Apple products—took to Reddit yesterday to dish on topics including Apple connected eyewear supposedly dubbed “Project Mirrorshades.” Leaked documents have previously hinted at an augmented reality project at Apple.
The sketchy Foxconn source said the project might never see the light of day, but one optimist spotted a possible “Easter egg” in the program for WWDC itself. “Sorry to be shady about this,” said the name of one session on Tuesday, June 6. The title also included emoji for sunglasses and the phrase “to be announced.”
Did anybody else spot this?! #Apple#AR#SmartGlasses 😎😎😎 session during #WWDC#wwdc2017#wwdc17!!!! Pic.twitter.com/LnCjvSgJYr
— Kris Kolo (@kriskolodziej) June 3, 2017
All of that, of course, is just the tip of what will be a five-day iceberg for one of the largest technology companies in the world. Other significant announcements are likely to include a streamlining of iTunes and a new Apple Watch OS.
If the rumor mill has you on the edge of your seat, you can tune in to Apple’s livestream of the conference in just a few hours. And don’t forget to return to coins2day.com for coverage of the event.