Apple prepares San Francisco venues for WWDC 2016
As it does every year, Apple on Friday began to decorate the two main San Francisco venues that will host this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, installing banners, flags, utility equipment and more.
San Francisco locals and visitors in town for WWDC 2016 are posting photos of Apple's building preparations to social media outlets like Instagram and Twitter, some of which show exterior work at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium is nearly complete. Apple will kick off this year's event at the 7,000-seat auditorium on Monday.
The building is dressed with flags and signage bearing Apple logos -- in a rainbow of colors to match WWDC 2016's theme -- including a massive 15-foot version borrowed from last year's iPhone event. Photos of what appears to be a large, portable commercial HVAC apparatus positioned outside Bill Graham, seen below, are also circulating around the web. It seems Apple is expecting a big turnout.
Following this past week's work at Bill Graham Auditorium, contractors started preparing the nearby Moscone West building on Friday. In years past, the site was WWDC central, playing host to Apple's keynote presentation, developer sessions and closing bash. It last saw a WWDC keynote in 2014.
Like last year's conference, Moscone West will act as the hub of operations for developers. There, attendees can take part in informational sessions and hands-on labs run by Apple engineers, consultations with key Apple personnel, special guest speaker presentations and get togethers with colleagues.
WWDC 2016 kicks off on Monday, June 13 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern, and concludes with a free concert for guests on Thursday, June 16. Apple is expected to detail the future of its major software platforms -- iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS -- throughout the conference, while rumors suggest the company might take the opportunity to announce new MacBook hardware and Apple Pay for websites.
AppleInsider will be on the scene with live coverage of events, announcements and goings on starting with Monday's keynote.
San Francisco locals and visitors in town for WWDC 2016 are posting photos of Apple's building preparations to social media outlets like Instagram and Twitter, some of which show exterior work at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium is nearly complete. Apple will kick off this year's event at the 7,000-seat auditorium on Monday.
The building is dressed with flags and signage bearing Apple logos -- in a rainbow of colors to match WWDC 2016's theme -- including a massive 15-foot version borrowed from last year's iPhone event. Photos of what appears to be a large, portable commercial HVAC apparatus positioned outside Bill Graham, seen below, are also circulating around the web. It seems Apple is expecting a big turnout.
Following this past week's work at Bill Graham Auditorium, contractors started preparing the nearby Moscone West building on Friday. In years past, the site was WWDC central, playing host to Apple's keynote presentation, developer sessions and closing bash. It last saw a WWDC keynote in 2014.
Like last year's conference, Moscone West will act as the hub of operations for developers. There, attendees can take part in informational sessions and hands-on labs run by Apple engineers, consultations with key Apple personnel, special guest speaker presentations and get togethers with colleagues.
WWDC 2016 kicks off on Monday, June 13 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern, and concludes with a free concert for guests on Thursday, June 16. Apple is expected to detail the future of its major software platforms -- iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS -- throughout the conference, while rumors suggest the company might take the opportunity to announce new MacBook hardware and Apple Pay for websites.
AppleInsider will be on the scene with live coverage of events, announcements and goings on starting with Monday's keynote.
Comments
In any event I'm actually expecting a lot of new stuff, both hardware and software. Some of it will be pretty obvious some are just guesses. Here are a few that come to mind:
There you go an easy 20. A little over two days to go now, we will soon know how foolish these 20 are.
http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/watson/
I too would like a new Apple Swag...
I wouldn't bet on 90% of what you said....
I was disappointed when Apple axed the Xserve and Xserve RAID. I think they both had a lot of potential for office environments and design studios, and they were scalable as a business grew. The Mac Pro looks "cool", but it's overly priced and is not scalable. $3000 for the base model, and up to $10,000 for the maxed out version, plus extra for displays and storage makes it incapable of competing with Linux and Windows machines. I predict that the Mac Pro will go the way of the Cube after not too long; cool looking, but ultimately not worth the price, or the cost of Apple's investment.
Apple should bring back the Xserve and RAID, price them competitively, and they'll get a lot of support from the business and pro markets. Imagine a base Xserve for, say, $1500, and a maxed out model for around $4,000, and a RAID starting out at $1,000 (6 TB) and maxed out at $5,000 (36 or 48 TB). A company could then build its own cloud for all its employees' iPhones, iPads, iMacs, MacBooks, etc., that could then be further backed up by a secure, encrypted corporate iCloud account.
It's great that the iPhone has become the huge success that it has; its put Apple at the top of the tech industry. But it's disappointing that Apple as all but abandoned the pro market in the process—e.g. killing Aperture, "simplifying" Final Cut Pro X, etc. Apple is a big enough company that they can invest the R & D necessary to satisfy consumers and professionals.
The Xserve was dropped due to lack of demand...basically it wasn't a big seller. It wasn't worth their time and money to continue developing the Xserve platform. And Xserve's weren't cheap either. They started at $3,000 and went up near $20,000 depending on how you configured it. You don't need to develop an Xserve to have your own cloud. You can do that with any hardware.
If Apple would actually put forth some effort in the MacPro instead of releasing something in Sept 2013 and neglecting it I think it would get more recognition.
I'm not a professional, but I would agree that I bet 99% of professionals could just get away with using a high end custom configured 5K iMac. Its a great machine with a killer display, decent graphics, and can be configured with very fast flash storage (up to 1TB) , 32GB of RAM, and a reasonably fast Core i7 CPU. Plus, it still has Thunderbolt 2 so you can still connect to expansion chassis just like the Mac Pro.
If you're on the go, then just get a high-end 15" MacBook Pro Retina and thats the best you can do for mobile professional users.