Apple’s road not taken

In the aftermath of WWDC 21, I can’t help but wonder what Apple would have announced this year in a world where COVID didn’t happen.

In his famous “broken window fallacy,” Frederic Bastiat teases out the economic principle of “the seen and the unseen.” Suppose someone suffers a broken window at their house or shop. Some people are often tempted to laud such an act as stimulating economic activity because they can see the owner hire a glassier to repair the broken window. The glassier then is able to spend that money with someone else, who spends it with someone else and so on. This economic activity is easy to see. What isn’t seen is what the owner of the broken window would have spent his money on had he not suffered the broken window. Perhaps he would have bought new tools for his shop. And the tool retailer would have spend that money with someone else, and so on. And with the new tools the shop owner could have created more goods to sell. So rather than a world in which the broken window has created new prosperity, all it has done is shifted the money’s direction and the world now has one more broken window.

Likewise while we saw what Apple announced two weeks ago at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, I can’t help but wonder about the unseen: all of the hardware and software progress Apple would have made had it not had to divert so much of its attention and resources to adapting to COVID.

2020 was one of those years where you could just look around and imagine the world as it might have been otherwise, had COVID not happened. There were people who left jobs or moved cities who otherwise wouldn’t have. Politicians made choices that either tanked or improved their standing with the public. And businesses shifted their focus and priorities to adapt to a world in which more and more people were dramatically changing their behaviors around shopping, working, and traveling. So in the aftermath of WWDC 21, I can’t help but wonder what Apple would have announced this year in a world where COVID didn’t happen.

Last year Apple launched a COVID screening website and app early in the pandemic and also published mobility data sourced from Apple Maps that showed the effect COVID was having on travel. They eventually added the ability to find COVID testing centers in Apple Maps, designed their own face shields and masks, and earlier this year made it possible for your Apple Watch to assist you in unlocking your iPhone in the event that you were wearing a face mask (which had previously rendered Face ID useless). Apple switched its events from its traditional onstage, in-person format to a pre-recorded and slickly produced television program style event. It completely revamped the way it operated its retail stores (and for much of the year, closed them entirely).

And at this year’s WWDC a lot of the announcements were focused around COVID adjustments. FaceTime got Zoom-like features including a grid view, links, and the ability to participate in a FaceTime call from non-Apple devices. Apple also debuted SharePlay, a new way to use FaceTime to remotely watch a movie or listen to music with other people.

Frankly, most of these announcements felt a year too late, though that’s not surprising given how long it takes to develop and deliver major new software features. All of those features would have been big news in June 2020. But the world is (thankfully) starting to return to normal, so I wonder just how much use people are going to make of SharePlay.

So over on Earth-2 where COVID never happened, what did Apple announce at WWDC 2021? What would Apple have announced at this year’s event here in our reality if they hadn’t spent the last sixteen months refocused on responding to COVID? Would iPadOS have received a bigger leap toward becoming a true Mac replacement? Would macOS Monterey have felt less like a modestly updated Big Sur? Would Apple have actually delivered that gaming-focused Apple TV I’ve been hoping for?

Of course we’ll never know, but it’s interesting to muse on. COVID was certainly a major distraction for Apple (as it was for almost every company), and it clearly set it back on several projects it had in development. Don’t get me wrong though: Apple delivered some major home runs during COVID, including the M1 chip and the biggest redesign of macOS in two decades in macOS Big Sur. But a lot of that was borne off the back of work that was well underway before the pandemic. I think this year’s WWDC showed us just how much of a progress hit Apple took after the world radically changed last year.