Things aren’t looking good for Apple holding a Worldwide Developer Conference this year. The Verge reports that companies based in Santa Clara County, California — which includes Cupertino, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Jose — should avoid travel and postpone or cancel mass gatherings, the county recommended on Thursday.
The recommendations come after six new cases of the coronavirus have been identified in the area, bringing the total number of people confirmed locally to have the disease to 20. The county’s guidance affects several major Silicon Valley employers. Apple, Google, Netflix, LinkedIn, Adobe, Intel, Nvidia, and perhaps Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, which also have offices, but not headquarters in the region.
In the (increasingly likely) scenario in which WWDC is canceled, what are Apple’s options? The most obvious course is to hold a streaming event with a small, vetted audience in which Apple unveils the next versions of macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS, as well as any new hardware, followed by press releases.
It’s the labs and hands-on sessions between Apple engineers and developers that will be the tricky part to replicate. However, writing for Macworld, Jason Snell has a good idea:
Perhaps there could be a way to sign up for “office hours” with Apple employees in certain categories, in which you’d get an appointment for a FaceTime call. Perhaps there could be live Q&A sessions where key members of various Apple teams field questions from an online audience of developers. Creating a way for developers to spend time with Apple people without overwhelming them is going to be hard, but it’s vitally important.
And who knows, maybe this event could lead to some cultural change inside Apple. If the company builds a system that allows developers to get time with Apple employees without making the trek to San Jose, maybe it could be used in other ways to facilitate the roll-out of new technologies and help developers who can’t attend pricey conferences get the most out of Apple’s stuff.
Apple usually announces the dates of its annual WWDC (held in June or July) in March or April, so we should know the company’s plans soon.
