Excitement for Apple's WWDC Is Fading

Apple kicks off its annual Wordwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday. Under the motto “Write code. Blow minds” thousands of developers will come together in San Jose, CA, to learn about the latest features on Apple’s platforms in hundreds of workshops, keynotes and networking events.

Apple is expected to unveil the latest versions of iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS in Monday’s opening keynote, while fans hoping to see new hardware today will probably be disappointed. Although WWDC is still one of the most important events of the year for Apple, its fans and the developer community, second only to the fall iPhone launch event, the excitement for the annual conference has been fading in recent years.

As updates to the mobile operating system iOS have become more incremental and less obvious over the years, and the smartphone market has cooled down a little, WWDC has lost some of the mass appeal it enjoyed during the peak years of the iPhone hype. As the following chart shows, public interest, as measured in Google searches for WWDC-related terms, peaked in 2012 and 2013, when iOS 6 and 7 were introduced. Since then, search interest gradually faded and is now close to pre-iPhone levels.