Commenting on CNNE about WWDC - What will Apple announce?

Coro was invited to comment about  WWDC this morning on CNNE. This is one of the most important events for the company ever year where the company announces directly or indirectly the route they are taking in the next few months by releasing guidance and software to their most important group of collaborators, their worldwide developer community.

Think about it, Apple can code away all they want but without the support of their developers, there would not be a vibrant app marketplace with over a million apps for iOS, just to cite one example.

Since iOS is a known guest to this conversation, Apple will be releasing to developers the new iOS 8. This change will be more evolutionary than revolutionary since iOS 7 took care of the revolutionary part, accompanied by the exuberant love, hate and tears of both users and critics alike. The new version is anticipated to humanize the sterile operating room, microbial-free cleanliness of iOS 7 and should make it more usable for common human beings that inhabit the Earth, not just design royalty like Jony Ive.

Apple is also expected to use their proven ability to make a chaotic ecosystem more cohesive by entering the connected or smart home space. They did this in the music and app world and the smart home of the future desperately needs it. Right now, with the revolution of the internet of things, all the devices that previously had little to no “intelligence” are starting to acquire it through the incorporation of computers, sensors, apps and wireless connections. However, instead of being a concert like approach where the instruments sound in unison, it has been more of a shouting match with all sorts of devices, with proprietary interfaces, talking at, not to each other.

There are three standards to connect the internet of things to come: Z-wave, Zigbee and Insteon. But in the end, none of this matters to the consumer, they just want these things to be controlled centrally in a simple manner, for them to talk to each other and for the setup process to require less than a triple PHD from Stanford. Apple can offer this and their entrance to this space can transform it from the internet of chaotic things, to the organized and user friendly internet of things. This is not going to come without some harsh dictatorial mandates from the computer fruit masters but the industry desperately needs a leader.

What else could Apple talk about? The usual new hardware like the long overdue retina MacBook Air, the new version of OS X with flatter design to match the sterile iOS 7 look and feel, improvements to Siri, updated maps and perhaps what they are planning to do with their 3 billion dollar acquisition of Beats.

It would be surprising if they announce the iWatch or even the iPhone 6 since these products are more Christmas shopping season friendly and are better positioned to be presented in the fall, right when they are ripe for the marketplace and competitors have little to no time to copy their features. The iPhone 6 is going to be a defining moment for Tim Cook’s administration and to the future of Apple and will most likely get its own show.