The world is beginning to recover from the coronavirus, but we’re still not quite there, and so WWDC is online and free again this year.
Last year was an interesting one for tech events. There was one — CES 2020 — and then the world largely shut up shop.
You probably know the reason why, and we don’t need to fill you in on the major events of the last year, but it affected global tech events on the whole. One by one, they started to drop off, either becoming cancelled or online only, with many heading to the latter.
As Australians couldn’t leave the country, it means local technology journalists across this nation couldn’t go to events that weren’t on, and so online events made a lot of sense. With Australia and other nations still doing the same thing right now, and Aussie journalists staying inside their borders, events in 2021 may largely follow suit.
This year, CES ran its first online-only edition — CES 2021 — and it appears Apple is doing the same, following on from its shift to that last year.
In 2021, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, also known as “WWDC”, is online again, offering a taste of what’s coming for Apple’s operating systems for free to developers from June 7 to June 11 in the US, which typically would translate to June 8 to June 12 in Australia.
Much like last year’s online WWDC, WWDC 2021 will be held online at the Apple website, allowing developers to learn about new tools and frameworks, and offering young developers a chance to demonstrate their skills with the Swift Student Challenge, which may see them awarded with a small prize if they submit a Swift project of their own making from Apple’s learner app, Swift Playgrounds. The deadline for this one is April 18, a couple of months before WWDC 2021 kicks off, with the prize being some merch from WWDC21, namely a pin and outerwear set.
For everyone else, WWDC is often an event where Apple previews what’s coming later, and even typically announces new hardware. At WWDC 2020, we found out what the now-current macOS Big Sur would look like, how iOS 14 would offer more control, what the next version of the Apple Watch operating system would look like, and that Apple would begin shifting to its own Apple Silicon later in the year, a move that produced some impressive computers in the 2020 M1 MacBook Air and the M1 MacBook Pro 13.
What will this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference turn up? We’ll find out in June, so stay tuned.
