Apple Announces WWDC 2017, To Be Held in San Jose On June 5-9 (daringfireball.net)

Apple said today it will kick off this year's Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5. Much like every year, the developer conference is the place where we can expect to see what's coming to iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS later this year. This year, the event is being held in a different venue: the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, the original home of WWDC. John Gruber, writing for DaringFireball: First, announcing early really helps people who have to travel long distances to attend, particularly those from outside the U.S. The San Jose Convention Center is the original home of WWDC -- that's where it was held from 1988 through 2002. (WWDC 2002 was the year Steve Jobs held a funeral for Mac OS 9 during the keynote.) San Jose is way closer to Apple headquarters. San Francisco is about an hour drive from 1 Infinite Loop. The San Jose Convention Center is only five minutes away from Apple's new campus. Schiller emphasized to me that this is a big deal: more Apple employees from more teams will be present, simply because they won't have to devote an entire day to being there. (This could be a particular boon to WWDC's developer labs, where attendees can get precious face time with Apple's engineers.)

Comments

outside the US

[fermion]

Are people actually going to risk being detained at the airport for hours or being put in jail just to attend an Apple Conference. This is not snark. I am really interested if these kind of things held in the US are still viable. I expect to see more North American international conferences held in Canada. I know that most people attending the conference will be light skinned, but still...

I went to WWDC once.

[Anonymous Coward]

The best part about it was meeting other developers and partying with them afterwards.

Everything else was kinda meh. The keynote was sorta awkward and filled with self-congratulatory cruft. Without Steve Jobs, there was no magic to the presentation and it was all kinda lame. I got to see some new hardware before it was released, but the demonstrations were so tightly controlled that they might as well have been showing us a device playing back some pre-recorded movie, and most of the questions that were asked during the following Q&A session couldn't be answered or were sidestepped with marketing bullshit.

The so-called developer labs were hit and miss. Some guys seemed to genuinely care and were willing to discuss the technical side of the implementations behind a particular API, others took a sort of "we know best, trust us, our code is perfect, there's no other way this could possibly be done" stance and refused to discuss any of the inner workings of their particular area of responsibility. In the end, apart from a few notable interactions, I didn't really gleam much from them that I couldn't get from the API docs and 30 minutes on Google.

To be honest, I found it to be a bit of a waste of time and money. The best part of the whole trip was meeting other independent developers and partying with them afterwards. I later hooked up with a few and did some projects with them which was nice, and in retrospect, I suppose the opportunity to meet them was worth the price of admission. However, it's not like that sort of thing needs to be restricted to WWDC. I kinda feel like someone else should be putting on a less hyped up developer convention with a stronger focus on developers helping other developers. The core of WWDC felt like it existed solely to praise Apple and to ooh and aww at whatever they brought to show off, even though almost everything I saw was a huge letdown. I haven't gone back because of this- it was just too... dare I say religious?... for me. I've stayed in touch with most of the people I met there and they all agreed WWDC has been going downhill, and most of them didn't even bother signing up for a chance to get tickets last year, nor have they this year.

So I suppose if you're a hardcore Apple fanatic and developer, this is basically your yearly mecca. If you want to get fucking wasted and party with other developers, you can do that too, but it's not like WWDC is required to do that. Otherwise, it's all rather hyped up and I don't think it's worth the time and effort to attend. I'm told things were very, very different when Jobs was around (it was still hyped up to hell, but with good reason), but that's no longer the case. I really regret not having gone when he was alive- I always said I'd go to WWDC one year, and the year I did TC was already well in power, and it was kinda disappointing.