On the podcast recently, @danielpunkass and I speculated that if WWDC 2020 is a “success”, Apple may never go back to a fully in-person conference. Too early to say, but a lot of this week is working well. Pre-recorded sessions have nice benefits like a great, edited transcript.
@danielpunkass Count me in that group. The keynote covered a lot and allowed many more presenters. It's not as exciting as being there in person, but most people can't be in the room anyway. Overall a win.
@manton The whole thing has been executed beautifully and aside from the accessibility/equal-access benefits, there has to be a significant improvement in environmental effects. Running digital technology for global live-streaming has its own material consequences for energy consumption, however it can't be as bad as international flights and thousands of boxed lunches...
@manton I feel like there’s still a lot of benefit to having Apple engineers interact with developers in person (even if on an extremely limited basis). And while I love the new format, I am missing that live “feel” in the presentations. I could see them doing some sort of hybrid approach, though. Maybe run many sessions as pre-filmed, but increase the lab times? No doubt, the conference will never be the same.
