Is WWDC Even Real?
It’s WWDC week this week. That’s Apple’s developer conference, where they tell us what they have planned in the world of Apple.
This year? A boring UI redesign and Apple continuing to play catch-up in the world of AI. It’s so uninteresting that the content of the presentation isn’t the topic of this article. The Topic? It’s the presentation.
Image: Apple
That’s because WWDC this year felt less like a tech conference and more like a fever dream produced by a Silicon Valley AI trying to simulate what humans find “inspiring”. It’s dire, unintentionally amusing, fails to be amusing all at the same time.
When Polish is Bad
Imagine a tech conference so overproduced, so dripping with money that it looks like the presenters might glitch mid-sentence. Welcome to the reality of WWDC in 2025.
Image: Apple
Watching the presentation is so sterile. It’s like the entire event was shot inside an Apple Store, hermetically sealed against reality.
Where are the normal human quirks? Where are the engineers who look like they’ve been debugging memory leaks for 72 hours straight? Instead, we got people who looked like they just stepped out of a computer-generated stock video of “Happy Productive Tech Workers”.
I’ve been at conferences at work. People who really can’t speak to an audience. I remember one time the speaker bored to such an extent that half the audience left. That type of thing just doesn’t happen at WWDC and is all the worse for it.
Image: Apple
It makes me wonder.
Is that what is happening?
Apple NPCs
Like walking against a crowd of people heading to a Beyonce concert, it can sometimes feel like we are living in a world of NPCs.
Now we know what Apple-branded NPCs look like. Smiling inanely. Nodding with eerie synchrony. Telling us stories about how some app changed their lives while I’m still trying to get someone to answer a Slack message. It’s not just uncanny. It’s iCanny Valley™.
Image: Apple
People are in houses that nobody lives in. It’s polished demos that feel like you accidentally clicked into a corporate wellness ad. Everyone’s thriving. Everyone’s journaling. Everyone’s somehow deeply fulfilled by Calendar invites. It’s not just fake, it’s offensive to real people.
Is This Apple AI?
Maybe Tim Cook isn’t real. I certainly don’t think anyone who wakes at 5am is a true member of the human race.
At work AI is being pushed hard and people are worried about their jobs. The thing is, AI isn’t able to reason in the way the human brain does. It’s model-free reasoning, and if you don’t know what that means, then simply understand this: it’s a different thing entirely.
Image: Apple
The thing is, there doesn’t seem to be much thought over at Apple HQ. Could it be because they’ve been taken over by a super intelligent AI? I think so.
Conclusion
I don’t know what it all means, but I found myself watching the keynote, mouth slightly open, thinking: where did all the humans go?
You?