Apple execs decline “The Talk Show” invite, macOS 26 gets a (rumored) name
John Gruber, writing last Thursday at Daring Fireball:
Ever since I started doing these live shows from WWDC, I’ve kept the guest(s) secret, until showtime. I’m still doing that this year. But in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.
John Gruber has been one of the most prominent columnists covering Apple for the last twenty years. For the last decade plus, he’s hosted a live version of his semi-regular podcast “The Talk Show” at a venue in California on the second day of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, and most years, it’s featured two or three Apple executives with a crowd of Apple developers present. It’s not an official Apple-planned part of WWDC, but it’s become so regular that it may as well be. Gruber is a pretty friendly host to the Apple execs, so though it’s unscripted, it’s never been a hostile environment. But this year, Apple is not participating.
If they told Gruber the reason for declining (and my guess is they didn’t), he’s not sharing it. Many have speculated that it’s personal retribution toward Gruber for his recent scathing “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino” column dealing with the undelivered (and apparently untested) promises Apple made about Apple Intelligence at last year’s WWDC, particularly around announced advanced Siri features. But please circle that word “speculated.” We will likely never know the real reason why Apple declined, and I can think of some other possible answers. The header image above is the YouTube thumbnail from last year’s episode of the Talk Show, and features Apple’s head of software, Craig Federighi, in the middle in blue, with Apple’s head of AI and Machine Learning John Giannandrea to his left. Though I believe still unconfirmed by Apple, reporting suggests that Siri has been taken away from Giannandrea and given to Federighi. It’s entirely possible they just didn’t want to field questions from Gruber about the internal shuffle. There’s also increased scrutiny on Apple’s App Store business model in light of the recent court decision (which I wrote about here) that has allowed Epic Games to return Fortnite to the App Store and dealt Apple a severe PR blow. Apple’s head of Marketing, Greg Joswiak, sitting to Federighi’s right in the image above, may not have wanted to field a lot of questions on that front in an uncontrolled setting where some number of developers would likely cheer and boo at things Joswiak is uncomfortable with. My guess is those theories are more likely the reason for Apple’s absence from this year’s live episode of The Talk Show and not punishment for Gruber. Again, we can’t know.
Still, it’s going to be disappointing not to get Apple execs in that format this year. I’ll be curious to see what, if any, specific interviews are given by Federighi and others after the keynote next Monday.
macOS Tahoe?
Last Thursday, I wrote about a big shift rumored to come to Apple’s operating system branding: year-based operating system numbers. Instead of the previously expected iOS 19, we’ll get iOS 26. Instead of macOS 16, we’ll get macOS 26. In that column, I shared one little hope I had about this shift:
Personally, I hope this all coincides with getting rid of the marketing names for macOS (Big Sur, Sonoma, Sequoia, etc.) in favor of just numbers.
I didn’t put much stock in that hope, and indeed, over the weekend, those hopes were likely dashed by a rumor that Apple will give this year’s version of macOS the name “Tahoe,” after Northern California’s famous lake. And that’s okay since I was probably in the minority on that hope anyway. 😂
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