Looking back to last week’s WWDC keynote and also my last blog post (as well as the pre-WWDC TUAW Talkcast), the one thing that struck me besides being completely and utterly blown away was the fact that almost all predictions and wishes were totally wrong. Mine almost certainly were!
Granted, I didn’t expect to be right, but even the things I really, really thought would happen, didn’t happen after all. And even our wildest guesses, things we thought very likely wouldn’t happen, were just minor bullet-points on the long list of really amazing announcements.

All of this is really exciting to me.

Why? Because it really means two things:

1. Despite its scale, Apple is still able to keep things secret.
2. Apple is, after all these years, still able to surprise us.

Whether you’ve been an Apple aficionado since the 70s or since the mid-2000s (like me), whether you’re working as a developer, a tech journalist or you’re just a fan. Your guess as to what Apple will do next is as good as mine. And that’s how it should be!
I really missed the times where we didn’t know what was coming until Steve went on stage to release it. The times when every Apple event, every keynote, felt like christmas morning back when you were 5. It made things just so much more exciting, being able to just enjoy the released product instead of having months and months in advance to overanalyze what we were sure would happen. Feeling the pure, almost child-like delight only a complete surprise announcement can give you.
And, judging by the way people have reacted to Apple’s announcements on monday morning, that’s exactly what happened. People were simply blown away by not only the sheer amount of things Apple has announced, or the meaning for the Apple ecosystem (in fact the whole industry), but also by the fact that so much of it was unexpected.

Tim Cook himself said it best: {% blockquote Tim Cook, WWDC 2014 %} And if we ended the keynote now, it would be a giant release. But there’s a lot more! {% endblockquote %} And right after that, they basically blew the doors wide open. Almost everything people have been talking about in the past week, happened in this third act of the keynote. Things like CloudKit, App Previews, Extensibility, 3rd-party keyboards, Swift and so much more. Almost none of it was even rumored to be in the works!
This really speaks volumes on the secrecy that Apple has been able to achieve despite it’s massive and global scale. Being able to develop a completely new programming language over the course of 4 years without anyone(!) even hearing a single word about it is really an achievement. The same thing goes for almost any other feature Apple has shown and we didn’t know about.

If this last WWDC is any indication on what to expect from Apple this Fall: Take a seat, buckle up, and prepare for a hell of a ride. It’s gonna be mind-shattering!!!

I really, really hope that this is the new (post Steve Jobs) Apple. Confident, funny, super intelligent and a little bit crazy.

Here’s to the crazy ones….

P.S.: If you haven’t watched the WWDC 2014 keynote yet, you definitely should! It was funny, exciting and just so, so good. You can download it from iTunes or watch it on Youtube.