Apple prepares San Francisco venues for WWDC 2016

As it does every year, Apple on Friday began to decorate the two main San Francisco venues that will host this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, installing banners, flags, utility equipment and more.

San Francisco locals and visitors in town for WWDC 2016 are posting photos of Apple's building preparations to social media outlets like Instagram and Twitter, some of which show exterior work at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium is nearly complete. Apple will kick off this year's event at the 7,000-seat auditorium on Monday.

The building is dressed with flags and signage bearing Apple logos — in a rainbow of colors to match WWDC 2016's theme — including a massive 15-foot version borrowed from last year's iPhone event. Photos of what appears to be a large, portable commercial HVAC apparatus positioned outside Bill Graham, seen below, are also circulating around the web. It seems Apple is expecting a big turnout.

Source: Franck BillÃ© via Instagram

Following this past week's work at Bill Graham Auditorium, contractors started preparing the nearby Moscone West building on Friday. In years past, the site was WWDC central, playing host to Apple's keynote presentation, developer sessions and closing bash. It last saw a WWDC keynote in 2014.

Like last year's conference, Moscone West will act as the hub of operations for developers. There, attendees can take part in informational sessions and hands-on labs run by Apple engineers, consultations with key Apple personnel, special guest speaker presentations and get togethers with colleagues.

Apple logo goes up at Moscone West. | Source: User "flightresponse" via Instagram

WWDC 2016 kicks off on Monday, June 13 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern, and concludes with a free concert for guests on Thursday, June 16. Apple is expected to detail the future of its major software platforms — iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS — throughout the conference, while rumors suggest the company might take the opportunity to announce new MacBook hardware and Apple Pay for websites.

AppleInsider will be on the scene with live coverage of events, announcements and goings on starting with Monday's keynote.

13 Comments

wizard69 13358 comments · 21 Years

About 8 years ago

That apparent air conditioning unit is something else. Hard to believe the air conditioning system is that undersized at this venue.In any event I'm actually expecting a lot of new stuff, both hardware and software. Some of it will be pretty obvious some are just guesses. Here are a few that come to mind:

New operating systems - an easy one.
Siri. Also on the Mac with hopefully a good amount of AI done locally.
New XCode and Swift, this is all public knowledge but I'm thinking Swift 3 will come at the same time as the new OS releases.
New networking hardware.
New laptops.
New iMacs
A replacement for the Mac Mini that better meets the needs of users that want a monitor free desktop solution that isn't an expensive Mac Pro
New Mac Pro, announced but maybe not shipping. The problem here is GPU cards, they really need 14 nm pro cards. Unless AMD and Apple have a project here to deliver suitable cards early I don't see an updated Mac Pro shipping until late this year.
New iOS devices.
Mac Book Air by the way will be completely refactored to lower price well below $1000, possibly aiming for $750 or less. The goal is to win back much of the eduction market they have lost due to not having a suitable laptop. This could very well be an ARM based laptop.
Apple will start to take AI seriously on the Mac. This will be partly demonstrated by Siri for the Mac. SDK's will be coming.
Apple transitions to Python 3 as the default Python install. {Well we can hope}
Instead of #12 above Apple pushes scripting with Swift.
Scripting comes to all platforms with Swift scripting support to be built into Apple apps with OS support for third party apps. Yes scriptable iOS apps!
Latest OpenCL adoption. Apple really needs to stand behind OpenCL for those professionals using GPU compute.
Significantly enhanced graphics drivers. It is embarrassing to realize that open source Linux GPU drivers perform better. Apple might finally address this.
Mac OS is enhanced for performance finally killing the unexplained beach balls.
Apple officially supports external GPUs. The market dies though because of outlandish pricing.
All of the new Macs will contain an ARM coprocessor. This to enable always on SIRI and to prep for an ARM transition. The ARM processor will be capable of running apps but Apple will highlight it as an enabler for SIRI on the Mac. All voice commands and Siri interaction will be handled by the ARM chip thus affording the Mac a very low power always aware Siri - Hey Siri.
New Apple Swag. Including Apple flip flops for the Southern California NUDIST.

There you go an easy 20. A little over two days to go now, we will soon know how foolish these 20 are.

iqatedo 1811 comments · 21 Years

About 8 years ago

I'd like to see Apple work closely with new-found friend, IBM, to significantly develop Watson's capability with SIRI perhaps providing increasingly capable, natural language access.

http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/watson/

I too would like a new Apple Swag...

quinney 2527 comments · 18 Years

About 8 years ago