Apple's WWDCZzzz...

All eyes were on Apple for its biggest event of the year, and it delivered, basically, nothing. Seriously, nothing. The press naturally did their level best to wring every centimetre of column space and page count out of the thing, to justify having bothered to watch, but the effort this year was more profound than ever.

Of course, it was made more difficult by the apparent cancellation at short notice of Apple’s plans to announce a revamped Apple TV and ecosystem around it. That might have been genuinely exciting, given the highly competitive space that this has become, and sources familiar with the matter had been hinting it would be the cornerstone of this year’s conference. 

Then, a week before the keynote, sources familiar with the matter pulled the rug out. Well, they’d know. Being familiar with the matter and all.

What we were left with was Apple Music, a service founded by The Beatles in 1968 …

No, wait, I’m being told that’s not the case. (Picture me as a news anchor being fed info through an earpiece and that’s funnier.)

Apple Music is a revamped version of Beats Music and iTunes Radio rolled into one, with a dash of iTunes Match to spice it up. And that’s it, really. Cool enough for what it is, but not really enough to fill as much of the keynote as it was stretched to fill. Beats founder Jimmy Iovine gave every impression during his presentation of someone who had prepared about five minutes and been asked to pad it out to fifteen.

We have newish versions of OS X and iOS as usual and, as hoped, they are focused on fixing what’s wrong with Yosemite and iOS 8 rather than bundling in too much new stuff. This is a good thing — except, of course, that iOS 9 still will not allow me to create Groups in Contacts or send emails to said Groups. Only been waiting eight years, Tim. Get on it.

For that matter, if it’s just about fixes and performance improvements, why does it get a whole new number? Why not call it iOS 8.5 if there’s really nothing all that new? There’s a disconnect there between expectation and delivery, I think.

On the Mac side, there’s a really big marketing challenge. OS X 10.11 is to be named El Capitan after a rock formation in Yosemite National Park. You see, it’s like the old Lion > Mountain Lion, Leopard > Snow Leopard thing — the ‘stability’ release is a more-specific version of the ‘feature’ release. Clever.

Of course, El Capitan is quite a famous rock formation. You may know it as the rock face that Captain Kirk falls from in Star Trek V. In which case, you have my sympathy.

If you are familiar with it from other sources, or if you would care to look it up on some online source or other, you will find a fairly small set of adjectives used to describe it. Arduous. Challenging. Difficult. Steep. You may also find warnings not to climb near what is known as the ‘Texas Flake’ — a chunk of granite slowly being forced away from the face by El Capitan’s internal pressures.

Do these things make you think of a stable, user-friendly and intuitive experience? No, they do not. Not me, anyway. Plus there’s the whole Kirk thing.

If only Apple would look beyond California, it could call its next big ‘feature’ release Yellowstone, and the subsequent ‘stability’ release Old Faithful. What sounds more stable than that? But it’s in Wyoming, so there’s that.

Anyway, back to WWDC. There’s a new Watch OS that adds very little (so why is it 2.0 not 1.5?). There’s a tweaked version of the development environment Swift (nice enough) and there’s Metal for Mac — a set of graphics APIs that have already existed on iOS for a while but will now make it easier to develop specifically for Mac hardware without using OpenGL.

Makes sense on iOS, which is a popular handheld platform for which developers want to develop and optimise their code. Makes less sense on Mac, which is a platform long-neglected by game developers who can at least port things easily if they use OpenGL.

I’m sure someone familiar with the matter can explain. 

Matthew JC Powell is a technology commentator, philosopher and father of two, in no particular order