I am in Cupertino for Apple’s #WWDC24 conference. I’ve been coming for many years up until a few years back when I sold Fanatic Software. This year I’m representing myself to see what Apple has in store for consumers and developers and especially in the mobile AI field.
What does it mean I’m representing myself? It means that my history with mobile software is over 20 years deep and I’m not representing my current employer. I didn’t ask them to sponsor or pay for my trip, but instead am going as an IronCoffee, LLC owner/founder. My goal is to use this extraordinarily special time to learn more about iOS 18, Vision OS 2.0, Apple’s AI (Apple Intelligence?), and ideally to talk to people about their privacy-first approach to large language models on-device and the cloud.
I hope to take these learnings and apply them potentially to new endeavors for myself (obviously doing any kind of ethics check with my employer first) as well as my current employer. I find that Apple’s technical approach is often novel and interesting in areas like privacy and I’d really like to dig deeper in understanding how they plan to use cloud AI systems like OpenAI privacy centric. My current employer rivals Apple for it’s privacy focus so being able to learn from Apple – right here within the orchards of Apple Park – is an amazing blessing.
In the meantime, here are some photos of the kickoff of WWDC at Apple’s Infinite Loop.
Final thoughts for the day – it was a lot of fun getting to know new people and partying it up – but it did make me miss some of the old WWDC magic. I remember the times when developers could talk to Apple engineers about issues, ideas, and deep dives; when Apple used to host major artists for private concerts for the developers. One WWDC I remember walking up to Bertrand Serlet and asking him some technical questions about something (so long ago…I don’t remember what it was). I also remember some awesome Bare Naked Ladies or Vampire Weekend concerts. And while today was fun, it just didn’t have the je ne sais quoi of the old Apple.