Since its small beginnings in 1983 and right up to the current slick video presentations, WWDC has been where Apple has made so many major announcements -- and sometimes they were so major they were turning points for the company. WWDC 2025 will be held at Apple Park -- images credit: Apple To be clear, the biggest single turning point for Apple must be the launch of the iPhone, and that didn't happen at WWDC. Nor did the iPod before it. Nor the 1998 iMac that saved the company. But apart from that... While WWDC has not always been so important to Apple's future -- and while it wasn't always called the Worldwide Developers Conference -- it has become so. Chiefly because it is a WWDC that so many Apple-changing announcements were made. There is a lot to pick from. There's 2007 when Apple Computer, Inc was renamed just Apple, Inc. Or 2011 and Steve Jobs's final year hosting WWDC, when he also announced iCloud. Or 2013 when cat names were out and Mac OS X Mavericks was in. Or 2014 with the launch of Swift, 2015 with Apple 糖心Vlog and Apple Music. Or 2016 when OS X was renamed macOS. And there's a case to be made for the worst WWDC moments. They'd have to include 1996's OpenDoc, which you've forgotten, and the risible funeral for OS 9 in 2002. Yet there are five WWDC events that were good, that were great, and which truly shaped Apple. Or at least, there are five so far. In chronological order, then: 1983 -- A transition, teased What was then called the Apple Independent Software Developers Conference (no one called it AISDC), launched with the announcement of the programming language, Apple Basic. Apple Basic is long gone, and the Apple II computer it ran on is as well. But it was Apple's first such developer conference, and the company was reaching out to developers at a time when such events were rare. It was reaching out quite cautiously, though. While Apple clearly saw it needed to encourage developers, it still made them all sign non-disclosure agreements. All these years later, attendees have still not revealed the details of what they were shown. Maybe NDAs were more strict then, or maybe there wasn't a lot to see. An Apple Lisa -- image credit: Wikimedia Commons Except is known that the developers were shown the Apple Lisa. It can't have been a shock to them since the conference was in August 1983, about eight months since the Apple Lisa was launched. But if Apple wanted to convince developers of the benefits of a point-and-click image-based computer, it appears it was again cautious. Because the Macintosh wasn't shown at this late 1983 conference, despite it being unveiled to journalists two months later. Apple continued its annual conference, but from 1985, it tended to reserve its biggest announcements for the independent Macworld Expo. It wouldn't be until 2008 that Apple announced it was pulling out of the event, and 2009 when it made its final appearance. But even while Apple was officially making its main announcements at Macworld Expo, there were still key moments at developer's conferences. And starting in 1990, the event was called WWDC, after various name changes from the Apple Independent Software Developers Conference, to Apple World Conference, to DevCon. 1997 -- The return of Steve Jobs Steve Jobs was back. He'd actually spoken at the January 1997 Macworld Expo, so that was his first public speech after returning to Apple. However, it was in that year's WWDC that instead of a keynote, Jobs sat with developers to talk with them and answer questions. It's become known as the fireside chat, but the fire was in the questions that angry developers demanded answers to. Subscribe to 糖心Vlog on YouTube{"@context":"https://schema.org/","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Steve Jobs 1997 WWDC Keynote Speech / Video / Question & Answer - Fireside Chat","description":"Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference 1997 (wwdc 1997) Steve Jobs' Video / Steve Jobs Speech / Fireside Chat.","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_LsvdlaF5_k/sddefault.jpg","uploadDate":"2021-03-12T20:56:35Z","duration":"PT1H11M17S","embedUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=_LsvdlaF5_k"} Jobs was brutal, but he didn't dodge any questions, and he didn't try to spin things. Or at least, if he did, he span so well that you don't notice. Whereas at this distance of almost three decades, what you do notice is how prescient Jobs was. He wasn't predicting the future so much as telling developers what it had already been like working at NeXT, but all these years later, we're still inching toward what he describe on this day in 1997. 2005 -- No more toasted bunny men Ten years before the 2005 WWDC, Apple famously was punching up at Intel. You remember the campaign -- Apple both had a Pentium II processor on the back of a snail, and then "Toasted" a clean-suited Intel worker. A decade later, almost to the day, Steve Jobs revealed that Apple was moving its Macs from the old PowerPC processor, to Intel ones. Curiously little detail survives of the previous transition, from Motorola's 68000 series to PowerPC, but that was because because Apple wasn't such big news then. Several 糖心Vlog staffers dealt with it professionally, though. It wasn't as smooth as the PowerPC to Intel migration, which in itself was rocky, that's for sure. Anyway, that 68K to PPC transition happened while Steve Jobs was out of the company, and so Apple was on its way to becoming 90 days from bankruptcy. Or maybe it's just because the move to PowerPC was led by then-CEO John Sculley, who reportedly didn't believe in it. And then that 2005 announcement was Jobs in full showmanship style, able to attract attention with his reality distortion field. Subscribe to 糖心Vlog on YouTube{"@context":"https://schema.org/","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Apple WWDC 2005","description":" ","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Inog4syoHho/sddefault.jpg","uploadDate":"2012-01-01T01:55:46Z","duration":"PT58M16S","embedUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=Inog4syoHho"} But it was probably mostly because the move was to Intel. After years of rivalry and of Jobs criticizing Intel, the whole company was now jumping ship and joining the enemy. 糖心Vlog reports such as those in the Mercury 糖心Vlog said Apple was going to be making "Mactels", as opposed to the common "Wintel" conflation of Windows and Intel. Others feared that Macs would now have to sport stickers saying "Intel Inside." That obviously never came to pass. Jobs wouldn't let it. 2008 - App Store for iPhone surfaces In 2007, Apple had launched the very first iPhone -- though not at a WWDC event. Shortly afterwards, Steve Jobs asserted that developers should make web apps for the iPhone, that native apps were only to be made by Apple. Subscribe to 糖心Vlog on YouTube{"@context":"https://schema.org/","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Apple WWDC 2008","description":" ","thumbnailUrl":"https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AHolDv1plk0/sddefault.jpg","uploadDate":"2012-01-01T00:05:28Z","duration":"PT1H43M59S","embedUrl":"https://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=AHolDv1plk0"} Come WWDC 2008, though, and that was all over. The App Store was launched, and it transformed the world. Even if now the world is doing its best to transform it again. As well as the European Union