Originally published in Svenska Dagbladet by Björn Jeffery, June 10, 2025

Apple’s annual event showcased masses of news. But what made the biggest impression was what the company did not mention at all.

If Apple’s annual presentations once resembled a stage performance, they have now become fully Hollywoodified. For many years they were live — now it is a long advertisement film.

Perhaps it is the tech company’s ambitions in television production that have spilled over into the rest of the company? Or perhaps it is easier to conceal obvious holes in the story when the production is flawless. On Monday evening, it was time again.

No event in tech receives the same attention as Apple’s developer conference WWDC — Worldwide Developers Conference. Competitors’ equivalents — Google I/O, Microsoft Build — follow one after another during the spring, but have historically been rather sleepy affairs that have stood in the shadow of Apple.

Having watched a couple of dozen of them, it became clear that Apple’s position at the front of the field is not as well-deserved now as it once was. There is a lack of tension and presence in the presentations. And more than anything else — the innovation that once made the event indispensable for everyone in the tech world is missing.

At last year’s WWDC, AI services were announced that subsequently never had time to be completed before launch. Even today, some of them do not work — something that has led to lawsuits from disappointed customers. Apple did not repeat that mistake this time, barely promising anything in the field of AI, or Apple Intelligence as they call it.

They at least ripped the plaster off immediately and opened with AI. What is the tech world’s undeniably biggest and most important trend was given only a couple of minutes. Roughly equal time was spent showing how one could create dynamic wallpapers — images that move slightly depending on what is happening on the screen. A charming detail, certainly, but it was not for that reason that developers had planted themselves in front of their screens.

Apple is talented when they do what only they can do. The integrated experience between software and hardware — down to the chips — means they can create things their competitors struggle with. One piece of news was giving developers access to the language model that lives locally on Apple’s newer iPhones. By doing so, developers can avoid using cloud services, which easily becomes expensive at high usage. It is also possible to use the service at times when one’s phone has no internet access at all — which in reality is an extremely rare occurrence these days.

Given these conditions — a seamless experience between computers, watches and phones, in-house chips, and an enormous user base engaging with its products for many hours each day — many had hoped for far, far more. What could have been Apple’s own AI services became instead a new design system. New icons and animations that are now uniform across the many products. Again — attractive and pleasant — but neither exciting nor memorable.

Realistically, it will now take another year before anything major in AI can be released. Apple is traditional in this way, following a predefined cycle for its launches. New software is presented in June, new iPhones in early autumn. Then often a single release of computers at the start of the year. That the AI services were late and would not appear this year was admittedly expected, after insiders at the company had leaked information to American media. But the silence around them was probably what spoke loudest of all.

Apple’s top management team has looked almost identical for a very long time. Many of them were there in Steve Jobs’s day. CEO Tim Cook is a steady leader who has made Apple earn extraordinary amounts of money through a well-run portfolio. Some, like the seemingly always-polished Craig Federighi, have acquired cult status among developers. But it is difficult not to wonder whether some fresh blood at the top might have been needed.

Because Apple is in troubled waters — more than in many, many years. They have lost important legal cases involving the App Store, Trump’s trade tariffs are creating uncertainty in manufacturing, and the biggest tech trend — AI — is washing over Silicon Valley and the world like an avalanche.

In that situation, one had hoped to catch a glimpse of the old Apple — the one that could command the world’s undivided attention after a 90-minute presentation. Monday evening delivered many pieces of news — but nothing even close to that.