It’s not just about e-mail, stupid

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Your humble Equity team is pretty tired but in good spirits, as there was a lot to talk about this week. But, first, three things to start us off:

• First: Read this piece from TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey about Juneteenth and tech companies. This podcast is going out on Juneteenth, so before you hit play, please take a minute to learn more about the day and its significance.
• Second: Danny and Arman from the TechCrunch team have finally launched TechCrunch List, a huge effort to determine which investors are really willing to write early checks. You can find out more here.
• Third: Equity is now on Twitter. Follow us here or understand that you are not cool.

All that said, here’s what we talked about on the show:

• Epic Games is looking to raise a huge stack of cash (Bloomberg, VentureBeat) at a new, higher valuation. We were curious about how its lower-cut store could help it gain inroads with developers big and small. That part of the chat, the take-rate of the Fortnite parent company on the work of others was very cogent to the other main topic of the day:
• Apple vs. DHH. So Hey launched this week, and the new spin on email quickly overshadowed its product launch by getting into a spat with Apple about whether it needs to add the ability to sign up for the paid service on iOS, thus giving Apple a cut of its revenue. DHH and crew do not agree. Apple is under fire for anti-competitive practices at home and abroad — of varying intensity, and from different sources — making this all the more spicy.
• Upgrade raises $40 million for its credit-focused neobank.
• Degreed raises $32 million for its upskilling platform.
• And, at the end, our take on the current health of the startup market. There have been a sheaf of reports lately about what is going on in startup land. We gave our take.

And that’s that. Have a lovely weekend and catch up on some sleep.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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How Reliance Jio Platforms became India’s biggest telecom network

It’s raised $5.7 billion from Facebook. It’s taken $1.5 billion from KKR, another $1.5 billion from Vista Equity Partners, $1.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, $1.35 billion from Silver Lake, $1.2 billion from Mubadala, $870 million from General Atlantic, $750 million from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, $600 million from TPG, and $250 million from L Catterton.

And it’s done all that in just nine weeks.

India’s Reliance Jio Platforms is the world’s most ambitious tech company. Founder Mukesh Ambani has made it his dream to provide every Indian with access to affordable and comprehensive telecommunications services, and Jio has so far proven successful, attracting nearly 400 million subscribers in just a few years.

The unparalleled growth of Reliance Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of India’s most-valued firm (Reliance Industries), has shocked rivals and spooked foreign tech companies such as Google and Amazon, both of which are now reportedly eyeing a slice of one of the world’s largest telecom markets.

What can we learn from Reliance Jio Platforms’s growth? What does the future hold for Jio and for India’s tech startup ecosystem in general?

Through a series of reports, Extra Crunch is going to investigate those questions. We previously profiled Mukesh Ambani himself, and in today’s installment, we are going to look at how Reliance Jio went from a telco upstart to the dominant tech company in four years.

India’s richest man built a telecom operator everyone wants a piece of

The birth of a new empire

Months after India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, launched his telecom network Reliance Jio, Sunil Mittal of Airtel — his chief rival — was struggling in public to contain his frustration.

That Ambani would try to win over subscribers by offering them free voice calling wasn’t a surprise, Mittal said at the World Economic Forum in January 2017. But making voice calls and the bulk of 4G mobile data completely free for seven months clearly “meant that they have not gotten the attention they wanted,” he said, hopeful the local regulator would soon intervene.

This wasn’t the first time Ambani and Mittal were competing directly against each other: in 2002, Ambani had launched a telecommunications company and sought to win the market by distributing free handsets.

In India, carrier lock-in is not popular as people prefer pay-as-you-go voice and data plans. But luckily for Mittal in their first go around, Ambani’s journey was cut short due to a family feud with his brother — read more about that here.

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Daily Crunch: Twitter rolls out audio tweets

Twitter tries to make audio tweets a thing, the U.K. backtracks on its contact-tracing app and Apple’s App Store revenue share is at the center of a new controversy.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 18, 2020.

1. Twitter begins rolling out audio tweets on iOS

Twitter is rolling out audio tweets, which do exactly what you’d expect — allow users to share thoughts in audio form. The feature will only be available to some iOS users for now, though the company says all iOS users should have access “in the coming weeks.” (No word on an Android or web rollout yet.)

This feature potentially allows for much longer thoughts than a 280-character tweet. Individual audio clips will be limited to 140 seconds, but if you exceed the limit, a new tweet will be threaded beneath the original.

2. UK gives up on centralized coronavirus contacts-tracing app — switches to testing model backed by Apple and Google

The U.K.’s move to abandon the centralized approach and adopt a decentralized model is hardly surprising, but the time it’s taken the government to arrive at the obvious conclusion does raise some major questions over its competence at handling technology projects.

3. Apple doubles down on its right to profit from other businesses

Apple this week is getting publicly dragged for digging in its heels over its right to take a cut of subscription-based transactions that flow through its App Store. This is not a new complaint, but one that came to a head this week over Apple’s decision to reject app updates from Basecamp’s newly launched subscription-based email app called Hey.

4. Payfone raises $100M for its mobile phone-based digital verification and ID platform

Payfone has built a platform to identify and verify people using data (but not personal data) gleaned from your mobile phone. CEO Rodger Desai said the plan for the funding is to build more machine learning into the company’s algorithms, expand to 35 more geographies and to make strategic acquisitions to expand its technology stack.

5. Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra says recession is the ‘perfect time’ to be aggressive for well-capitalized startups

We had an extensive conversation with Vohra as part of Extra Crunch Live, also covering why the email app still has more than 275,000 people on its wait list. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Stockwell, the AI-vending machine startup formerly known as Bodega, is shutting down July 1

Founded in 2017 by ex-Googlers, the AI vending machine startup formerly known as Bodega first raised blood pressures — people hated how it was referenced and poorly “disrupted” mom-and-pop shops in one fell swoop — and then raised a lot of money. But ultimately, it was no match for COVID-19 and how it reshaped our lifestyles.

7. Apply for the Startup Battlefield

With TechCrunch Disrupt going virtual, this is your chance to get featured in front of our largest audience ever. The post says you’ve only got 72 hours left, but the clock has been ticking since then — the deadline is 11:59pm Pacific tomorrow, June 19. So get on it!

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Interview: Apple’s Schiller says position on Hey app is unchanged and no rules changes are imminent

In a brief call today about Basecamp’s Hey email app from the iOS App Store, Apple’s Phil Schiller told me that there would currently be no changes to its rules that would allow the app to continue to be offered.

“Sitting here today, there’s not any changes to the rules that we are considering,” Schiller said. “There are many things that they could do to make the app work within the rules that we have. We would love for them to do that.”

The call came after several days of public scrutiny of Apple’s handling of the Hey app. After an initial approval, the developers at Basecamp, including two of its founders, David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried, took to Twitter to note that an update had been repeatedly rejected, with the core of the argument being that they were not offering an in-app purchase for the full service in addition to offering it on the Hey website.

The current experience of the Hey app as a user downloading it from the App Store is that it does nothing. It is an app that requires you to subscribe to the Hey service on the web before it becomes useful.

“You download the app and it doesn’t work, that’s not what we want on the store,” says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.

To be clear, this is against the App Store rules for most apps. The exceptions here are apps that are viewed as “readers” that only display external content of certain types, like music, books and movies — and apps that only offer bulk pricing options that are paid for by institutions or corporations rather than the end user.

Schiller is clear on our call that Hey does not fit these rules.

“We didn’t extend these exceptions to all software,” he notes about the “reader” type apps — examples of which include Netflix. “Email is not and has never been an exception included in this rule.”

In fact, Hey’s Mac App was rejected for the exact behavior for which the iOS app is being targeted. Schiller says that the iOS app’s original version was approved in error, and should never have shipped to the store.

The questions, then, really center around whether this should be the case, rather than is there some sort of arcane vision of the current App Store rules that would allow the Hey app to continue to be on the store.

I asked Schiller if this meant Apple felt entitled to a portion of the revenue of every business that had an app, regardless of whether that business was an iOS-first.

“I get why there’s a question here,” he says. “But that’s not what we’re doing.”

Schiller says that there are a number of decisions about how to charge customers that Basecamp could have made to make the app acceptable under current rules. He lists several, including charging different prices in the app and on the web, and offering a free version with additional functions.

But, he says, if you’re going to charge for it and it is a digital service, then Apple wants developers to use the in-app purchase mechanic and Apple payment system to ensure that users have a good experience in the app and that the payment system is secured.

One way that Hey could have gone, Schiller says, is to offer a free or paid version of the app with basic email reading features on the App Store, then separately offered an upgraded email service that worked with the Hey app on iOS on its own website. Schiller gives one more example: an RSS app that reads any feed, but also reads an upgraded feed that could be charged for on a separate site. In both cases, the apps would have functionality when downloaded on the store.

Other options are more familiar to many users, which includes a completely free app with an upsell that is also an in-app purchase.

Unfortunately, of course, the current rules would prevent Hey from advertising or even mentioning any upgraded service, and that would have to be marketed through off-app channels.

The ongoing debate around the issue is summed up well by Sarah Perez on TechCrunch yesterday and I encourage you to read that if you’re not up to date. And just today a story in the Times landed about Facebook’s gaming app having been rejected for rules five times. All of this brewing a perfect storm in advance of Apple’s WWDC conference aimed at developers and nearly day and date with the launch of an EU antitrust investigation.

I’ve been thinking hard about it myself, as someone who covers Apple extensively and has often been witness to the behind-the-scenes anxiety that developers have about whether Apple will reject an app from one moment to the next because of a personal interpretation of the App Store rules.

I think that, for me, it boils down to some simple observations. The fact is that Hey violates app store rules. Which means that the question is not “how can we contort those rules or squint enough to justify it” but instead “should those be the rules”?

As far as to why Apple would look at a situation like this and not see an obvious minefield, I believe that it internally thinks that it is doing the right and just thing. It built the platform, it deserves to profit from that platform which does contribute enormous economic impact to both digital and physical sectors. And there are indisputable security and privacy benefits to Apple controlling the payments platform.

And for those that would say “but surely it sees the optics!” I think that those people often underestimate the power of scale. Apple approves some 100,000 apps every week and the vast majority of rejections are for minor issues quickly fixed. That kind of scale can often bend perception on behalf of an organization and its guiding forces, because they see a vast calm sea with a few breakers — where the media is focused on the breakers alone.

Here’s how I feel about that, though, and where the blind spots may lie here.

1. There may be (and my back channel, and other people’s back channels, indicate that there is) a large ground swell of resentment and irritation with the App Store that goes un-expressed because people are afraid and need it to survive.
2. Sometimes the source of the criticism matters — Hansson may be annoying and vociferous and take a worst-motivations stance in his public comms, but change and self examination do not always originate with people who we consider to be our friends or allies. And it is twice as hard to apply the change that comes from people who are angry and seemingly unkind — but maybe right.

Call me naive, but I do feel that there is a superset of genuine, core values that Apple does apply to its business in a way that is genuinely unique among big corporations. I’m sure some people will disagree (read: many) but I’ve seen it first-hand in covering the company and in discussions (official and personal) with many, many, many of its executives and rank and file employees over the years. Much like John Gruber I find it hard to square the circle with finding a way forward here that sets aside “we are doing what is right” for “what is the right thing to do”?

Shortly before publishing this interview, Apple provided a letter to TechCrunch that was also sent to Fried and Hey.

The letter reiterates the reasons Apple says that Hey does not comply with current App Store policy. It reads, in part:

“Thank you for being an iOS app developer. We understand that Basecamp has developed a number of apps and many subsequent versions for the App Store for many years, and that the App Store has distributed millions of these apps to iOS users. These apps do not offer in-app purchase — and, consequently, have not contributed any revenue to the App Store over the last eight years. We are happy to continue to support you in your app business and offer you the solutions to provide your services for free — so long as you follow and respect the same App Store Review Guidelines and terms that all developers must follow.”

So for now, no thawing.

Full letter follows:

Hello Jason,

We are writing to let you know the appeal results for your app, HEY Email.

The App Review Board evaluated your app and determined that the rejection was valid. Your app does not comply with the App Store Review Guidelines detailed below. As you are aware, this is the reason your Hey Email app was rejected when it was submitted to the Mac App Store on June 11, 2020.

The HEY Email app is marketed as an email app on the App Store, but when users download your app, it does not work. Users cannot use the app to access email or perform any useful function until after they go to the Basecamp website for Hey Email and purchase a license to use the HEY Email app. This violates the following App Store Review Guidelines:

Guideline 3.1.1 – Business – Payments – In-App Purchase

If you want to unlock features or functionality within your app, you must use in-app purchase. Your app requires customers to purchase content, subscriptions, or features outside of the app, but those items are not available as in-app purchases within the app as required by the App Store Review Guidelines.

Guideline 3.1.3(a) – Business – Payments – “Reader” Apps

Reader apps may allow users to access previously purchased content and content subscriptions. Your mail app is not one of the content types allowed under this guideline for “Reader” apps (specifically: magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video, access to professional databases, VOIP, cloud storage, or approved services such as classroom management apps). Therefore, customers must be given the option to purchase access to features or functionality in your app using in-app purchase.

Guideline 3.1.3(b) – Business – Payments – Multiplatform Services

Apps that operate services across multiple platforms may allow users to access content, subscriptions, or features they have acquired in your app on other platforms or on your website, provided those items are also available as in-app purchases within the app. Your HEY Email app does not offer access to content, subscriptions, or features as in-app purchases within the app. In fact, the app does not function as an email app or for any purpose until the user goes to the Basecamp Hey Email website to start a free trial or purchase a separate license to use the app for its intended purpose.

Next Steps

To resolve this issue, please revise your app such that it does not violate any of the App Store Review Guidelines and terms.

There are a number of ways that you could revise your app or service to adhere to the App Store Review Guidelines. Customers who have previously purchased access to content, subscriptions, or features elsewhere may continue to access these items in your app, as long as new iOS customers are given the option to purchase access using in-app purchase as required by the App Store Review Guidelines.

If you would prefer not to offer users the option of in-app purchases, you could consider having the app function as marketed — an email client that works with standard IMAP and POP email accounts, where customers can optionally configure the Hey Email service as their preferred email service provider. This would allow the app to function as an email client without requiring an additional payment to use its features and functionality. Under this approach, what you sell on your website is clearly an email service separate from the function of your app as distributed on the App Store.

We are here as a resource as you explore these or other ideas to bring the Hey Email app within compliance of the App Store Review Guidelines and terms.

Thank you for being an iOS app developer. We understand that Basecamp has developed a number of apps and many subsequent versions for the App Store for many years, and that the App Store has distributed millions of these apps to iOS users. These apps do not offer in-app purchase — and, consequently, have not contributed any revenue to the App Store over the last eight years. We are happy to continue to support you in your app business and offer you the solutions to provide your services for free — so long as you follow and respect the same App Store Review Guidelines and terms that all developers must follow.

We hope to assist you in offering the Hey Email app on the App Store.

Sincerely,

App Review Board

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Daily Crunch: Twitter rolls out audio tweets

Twitter tries to make audio tweets a thing, the U.K. backtracks on its contact-tracing app and Apple’s App Store revenue share is at the center of a new controversy.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 18, 2020.

1. Twitter begins rolling out audio tweets on iOS

Twitter is rolling out audio tweets, which do exactly what you’d expect — allow users to share thoughts in audio form. The feature will only be available to some iOS users for now, though the company says all iOS users should have access “in the coming weeks.” (No word on an Android or web rollout yet.)

This feature potentially allows for much longer thoughts than a 280-character tweet. Individual audio clips will be limited to 140 seconds, but if you exceed the limit, a new tweet will be threaded beneath the original.

2. UK gives up on centralized coronavirus contacts-tracing app — switches to testing model backed by Apple and Google

The U.K.’s move to abandon the centralized approach and adopt a decentralized model is hardly surprising, but the time it’s taken the government to arrive at the obvious conclusion does raise some major questions over its competence at handling technology projects.

3. Apple doubles down on its right to profit from other businesses

Apple this week is getting publicly dragged for digging in its heels over its right to take a cut of subscription-based transactions that flow through its App Store. This is not a new complaint, but one that came to a head this week over Apple’s decision to reject app updates from Basecamp’s newly launched subscription-based email app called Hey.

4. Payfone raises $100M for its mobile phone-based digital verification and ID platform

Payfone has built a platform to identify and verify people using data (but not personal data) gleaned from your mobile phone. CEO Rodger Desai said the plan for the funding is to build more machine learning into the company’s algorithms, expand to 35 more geographies and to make strategic acquisitions to expand its technology stack.

5. Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra says recession is the ‘perfect time’ to be aggressive for well-capitalized startups

We had an extensive conversation with Vohra as part of Extra Crunch Live, also covering why the email app still has more than 275,000 people on its wait list. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Stockwell, the AI-vending machine startup formerly known as Bodega, is shutting down July 1

Founded in 2017 by ex-Googlers, the AI vending machine startup formerly known as Bodega first raised blood pressures — people hated how it was referenced and poorly “disrupted” mom-and-pop shops in one fell swoop — and then raised a lot of money. But ultimately, it was no match for COVID-19 and how it reshaped our lifestyles.

7. Apply for the Startup Battlefield

With TechCrunch Disrupt going virtual, this is your chance to get featured in front of our largest audience ever. The post says you’ve only got 72 hours left, but the clock has been ticking since then — the deadline is 11:59pm Pacific tomorrow, June 19. So get on it!

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Affirming the position of tech advocates, Supreme Court overturns Trump’s termination of DACA

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that President Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully ended the federal policy providing temporary legal status for immigrants who came to the country as children.

The decision, issued Thursday, called the termination of the Obama-era policy known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals “arbitrary and capricious.” As a result of its ruling, nearly 640,000 people living in the United States are now temporarily protected from deportation.

While a blow to the Trump Administration, the ruling is sure to be hailed nearly unanimously by the tech industry and its leaders, who had come out strongly in favor of the policy in the days leading up to its termination by the current President and his advisors.

Tech leaders respond as the Trump administration announces plans to end DACA

At the beginning of 2018, many of tech’s most prominent executives, including the CEOs of Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google, joined more than 100 American business leaders in signing an open letter asking Congress to take action on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program before it expired in March.

Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai who made a full throated defense of the policy and pleaded with Congress to pass legislation ensuring that Dreamers, or undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children and were granted approval by the program, can continue to live and work in the country without risk of deportation.

At the time, those executives said the decision to end the program could potentially cost the U.S. economy as much as $215 billion.

In a 2017 tweet, Tim Cook noted that Apple employed roughly 250 of the company’s employees were “Dreamers”.

250 of my Apple coworkers are #Dreamers. I stand with them. They deserve our respect as equals and a solution rooted in American values.

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) September 3, 2017

The list of tech executives who came out to support the DACA initiative is long. It included: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty; Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer of Microsoft; Hewlett-Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman; and CEOs or other leading executives of AT&T, Dropbox, Upwork, Cisco Systems, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn, Intel, Warby Parker, Uber, Airbnb, Slack, Box, Twitter, PayPal, Code.org, Lyft, Etsy, AdRoll, eBay, StitchCrew, SurveyMonkey, DoorDash, Verizon (the parent company of Verizon Media Group, which owns TechCrunch).

At the heart of the court’s ruling is the majority view that Department of Homeland Security officials didn’t provide a strong enough reason to terminate the program in September 2017. Now, the issue of immigration status gets punted back to the White House and Congress to address.

As the Boston Globe noted in a recent article, the majority decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts did not determine whether the Obama-era policy or its revocation were correct, just that the DHS didn’t make a strong enough case to end the policy.

“We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action,” Roberts wrote. 

While the ruling from the Supreme Court is some good news for the population of “dreamers,” the question of their citizenship status in the country is far from settled. And the U.S. government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has basically consisted of freezing as much of the nation’s immigration apparatus as possible.

An Executive Order in late April froze the green card process for would-be immigrants, and the administration was rumored to be considering a ban on temporary workers under H1-B visas as well.

The President has, indeed, ramped up the crackdown with strict border control policies and other measures to curb both legal and illegal immigration. 

More than 800,000 people joined the workforce as a result of the 2012 program crafted by the Obama administration. DACA allows anyone under 30 to apply for protection from deportation or legal action on their immigration cases if they were younger than 16 when they were brought to the US, had not committed a crime, and were either working or in school.

In response to the Supreme Court decision, the President tweeted “Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?”

Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn’t like me?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2020

 

 

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What to expect from Apple’s WWDC 2020

Okay, so, first and foremost, this is going to be a weird one. Mostly because it’s 2020 and everything is just weird now and we have to deal with that until the next, weirder thing comes along. But while an online-only World Wide Developer Conference is certainly unprecedented for Apple, there’s some recent online precedent from the competition that should give us a preview of what’s to come.

Microsoft’s Build was something of a mixed bag as the bellwether for company-hosted online-only developer conferences (Google notably skipped I/O altogether). CEO Satya Nadella’s bits were pretty much what they should have been: straightforward developer news delivered in a straightforward manner. The event was awkwardly anchored by a pair of employees serving as a kind of throughline for the multi-day show. Goofy developer humor was sprinkled in. It was sometimes painful, but largely benign.

Apple makes WWDC online-only, amid COVID-19 concerns

Celebrity video cameos have become a kind of staple for Apple’s events in recent years, so it seems likely to expect that they’ll remain here. In fact, between the launch of Apple TV+ and a general impulse to break up the monotony of a pre-packaged event, the company may lean into that content even further.

Truth is, the thing is going to feel weird regardless. Between staffers and developers, these sorts of things are designed to be an annual bit of cheerleading. Things will feel strange without an audience. Go back and watch later episodes of MASH on Netflix. There’s a weird transition as the producers began tamping down the laugh track slowly overtime. It’s not about one method being better than the other, it’s just difficult for our brains to process these sorts of transitions.

Of course, the opening of Apple’s event is even more tailored to consumers than Microsoft’s. Before venturing into the weeds, the company uses Tim Cook’s keynote as one of a handful of key platforms for announcing new products. As a rule, the news generally revolves around updates to Apple’s various operating systems (this is still a developer conference, mind), but more often than not, hardware has a way of sneaking in there as well. Given a recent update to the 16-inch MacBook Pro and a new system for upgrading Mac Pro’s storage, there’s a decent chance that Apple is making room for bigger announcements at the event.

I’m a hardware guy, so I’m going to start there. The biggest rumor leading up to the event so far is the long-rumored shift to its own in-house ARM processors, making a shift away from a decade+ dependence on Intel chips. The move to a Mac ARM (not to be confused with Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm) would mark another key move toward silicon independence for the company, which has made great strides on that front over on the mobile side.

Beyond letting Apple own a bigger slice of the stack (and all that entails), the new chips have some decided benefits, including better power efficiency and thinner and lighter laptops. Notably, the actual arrival of such ARM-based Macs isn’t likely to happen until next year. Rather, the intent here is to outline the roadmap in order to give developers in attendance a chance to begin tailoring software for their imminent arrival.

Ahead of WWDC, Apple’s Developer app adds Mac support, new features, iMessage stickers

Other rumored hardware includes a redesigned version of Apple’s popular all-in-one desktop. An update is certainly long overdue on this front. The iMac’s design language has been largely unchanged since 2012 (which was a relatively minor change over earlier unibody designs). Aesthetically, the redesigned system is expected to be more in line with the iPad Pro up top, coupled with much thinner bezels (the desktop is one of the last vestiges of Apple’s bezel-friendly past). The T2 chip is said to finally be making its way into the line, as well.

Other feasible hardware rumors include the arrival of Apple’s Tile-style hardware tracker, AirTags. That one’s reportedly been in the works for a while, though things have been heating up lately, courtesy of leaks and Tile’s complaints to the EU about alleged anticompetitive action from Apple. Another rumor that’s been bubbling up quite a bit: AirPods Studio. Apple will reportedly launch over-ear competitors to its own successful Beats brand. High-end noise cancellation premium sound is on the docket, along with modular, magnetic components. Also potentially on the list are refreshes to a couple of iPads, as well as a long-awaited update to the HomePod, or possibly the addition of a smaller, cheaper version of the smart speaker.

Apple reveals its virtual WWDC lineup, including its special keynote planned for June 22

As for those ever-important operating systems, it’s a no-brainer that we’ll get a good look at iOS 14/iPadOS 14. Key updates include a new automatically sortable home screen, including a list view that makes it possible to sort alphabetically, by unread notifications and a number other different methods. Other rumors for the operating system include the adoption of iPad-style multitasking. Obviously the smaller screen size makes execution trickier than it would on a tablet, but a similar feature has already been demonstrated on Android devices. Also rumored to be on the docket are new augmented reality and fitness apps.

In addition, macOS is shaping up to be a relatively light update to 10.16 — at least if the rumors are correct. Top of the list here are more ported iOS apps, courtesy of the catalyst program, along with developer customizable Siri (which would also be an iOS update, mind). Car Key, meanwhile, could be coming to both watchOS in addition to iOS, bringing with it the ability to unlock a car door via Apple hardware. A kid-friendly mode and improved sleep tracking are also rumored to be in the works.

The keynote kicks off June 22 at 10AM ET/1PM PT. Online events will follow for the rest of the week. It’s going to be different than any years prior — and there’s a decent chance Apple will never embrace it exactly the same way again. Enjoy the weirdness. 

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