Hi, folks. I’m sad this week because Michael Hawley died of cancer at 58. He was a key figure at MIT’s Media Lab, a world-class pianist, an amazing conference impresario, collaborator on Steve Jobs’ famous commencement speech, and a terrific person. What a crappy year this is.
The Plain View
Rather than going the Zoom route, Tim Cook began Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this week as kind of a human ghost light. He spoke from the stage of an empty Steve Jobs Theater, his back turned toward the empty rows of seats where an exuberant crowd might once have greeted him. Other executives then spoke from other eerily depopulated areas of Apple’s shiny $5 billion headquarters: the theater lobby, the fitness center, the walkway around the futuristic ring of the main structure, and a research lab “at an undisclosed location.” The presentation had the feel of those witty airplane safety videos where the flight attendants are whisked to exotic locations to demonstrate seat belts and oxygen masks. Once you got past how sad it was that those locations were lacking the buzz of a busy workplace, you could appreciate Apple’s subtle acknowledgement of our shared plight.
The keynote focused on the Macintosh, specifically its new operating system, called Big Sur, and the news—leaked before the event, like all recent major developments at the company—that Apple was bailing out of its long collaboration with Intel and would begin making its own chips to power a new generation of Macs. Those “Apple Silicon” chips will be the same as the ones that drive Apple’s iOS mobile devices. (The transition will take place over two years, something for buyers to take note of when considering when to replace their current machines.) All of this is a continuation of a trend over the past decade where behaviors from Apple’s center of gravity—the wildly successful mobile franchise—move to its legacy desktop products.
The most striking news was tucked into the presentation around 102 minutes in, as the show was nearing its end. After explaining how current Mac applications will run on the new chips, Apple’s VP of tools and frameworks, Andreas Wendker, mentioned almost as an afterthought that new Macs with Apple-designed chips would be able to run iPhone and iPad apps natively. Without modifications.
This was a bombshell. He quickly ran through a few examples of apps written for iPhone or iMac that Apple was running on prototypes of the next-gen Macs, including a game, a guita
