Major Apple announcements from its annual developers conference the past two years heralded big changes — which, so far, have largely fallen flat. This year, the tech company badly needs to deliver a win.
Apple’s weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference, teased with the tagline “on the horizon,” kicks off with a keynote at 1 pm ET on Monday from its headquarters in Cupertino, California. The annual event is where the company announces updates to the software that runs on billions of Apple devices used worldwide.
The iPhone maker is expected to announce relatively modest updates to its Apple Intelligence suite of AI features, such as new translation capabilities, as well as changes that will affect iPhones, AirPods, Apple Watches and more.
The big announcements of the prior two years — the Vision Pro headset and Apple Intelligence AI tools — failed to live up to the hype. Although Apple tried to sell its headset as the future of computing, the Vision Pro remains an expensive, niche product since hitting shelves last year. Apple Intelligence features, widely seen as reactive to competitors’ offerings, were slow to reach devices after the iPhone 16 launch, and the AI-enhanced Siri heralded at last year’s WWDC has been delayed indefinitely.
In the meantime, rivals have surged ahead on AI. Google, for example, announced a flurry of updates last month, including more advanced AI search, shopping and productivity capabilities. And steep AI competition aside, Apple is still having a rough year, with ongoing slow iPhone sales growth and a trade war threatening to force the company to raise prices.
The iPhone maker has a large installed base — that is, people using its products, which currently totals more than 2 billion active devices. That means even if Apple isn’t first to roll out a software innovation, loads of people will still use wind up using their version. But after having delayed the launch of its AI-enhanced Siri, some skeptics worry that consumers could start to look toward other companies’ devices for more powerful AI features.
