The keynote that opened Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference Monday unveiled an Apple Store’s worth of new software, but its core message was the same as every other WWDC: inevitability.
This event and its equivalents at other companies, such as Google’s I/O conference last month, aims to sell developers and users on the unstoppable progress of its products and the assured growth of its markets.
So it’s useful to remember that a splashy WWDC debut does not a consumer success make. Witness these earlier stars of Apple’s stage over the last five years:
2015: Apple Music
The rambling introduction of Apple’s attempted Spotify killer was our first warning of what a mess Apple Music would be. As Yahoo’s David Pogue wrote in his dismissive review of the service’s cluttered, confusing interface: “It seems Apple has forgotten how to say ‘No.’”
Longtime music critic Bob Lefsetz was a little harsher in a post explaining why he wouldn’t pay for Apple Music once its trial ended: “How could they get it so wrong? They have public betas of iOS 9 and El Capitan and they throw this half-baked software at the public?”
Maybe that’s why this year’s Apple Music pitch began with Apple’s Eddy Cue touting it as “all new” and “redesigned from the ground up.”
2014: iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite
These updates to Apple’s mobile operating system and desktop OS — renamed in Monday’s keynote from “OS X” to “macOS”— were supposed to reward Apple users who switched from iPad to iPhone to Mac with “continuity” features to ease that device-to-device handoff.
But the bugs in those two releases started with AirDrop file-sharing and kept going, leading such longtime Mac users as Marco Arment and Craig Hockenberry to wonder how Apple could have gone so far astray.
Yosemite came with an unwanted bonus feature: the most bossy and annoying auto-correct system I can remember using, which I finally shut off in frustration last year.
2013: iTunes Radio
Apple’s earlier attempt at shipping a Pandora killer was less of a mess than Apple Music but also did little to distinguish itself from its larger, older competitor, as reviewers like USA Today’s Jefferson Graham found. “Like Pandora, but available only on Apple devices” just wasn’t a compelling sales pitch.
2012: Apple Maps
Apple’s would-be Google Maps killer looked sharp in its introduction at 2012’s WWDC. But when it shipped that September… oof.
I personally observed it suggest directions to Dulles International Airport that ended with my walking across an active runway. Six months later, Apple had fixed that but not obsolete navigation data that would have sent me down a long-closed section of freeway in Washington.