Apple's WWDC 2026 and Why I'm Not Holding My Breath for Industrial Applications
Tim Cook's last keynote promises a smarter Siri, but those of us in manufacturing have heard this tune before.
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Zero. That's the number of times Apple has meaningfully addressed industrial automation at WWDC in the past decade. And yet here I am, watching the livestream again like some kind of optimist.
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off this morning, and according to TechCrunch, we're getting iOS 27, more Apple Intelligence features, and what they're calling a major Siri overhaul. This is also Tim Cook's final WWDC as CEO, which I suppose makes it historic for the consumer tech crowd.
Look, here's the thing. I've been watching Apple events since before the iPhone existed. When I was at Kuka, we had a running joke in the engineering department about whether Apple would ever notice that factories exist. Twelve years later, I'm still waiting for the punchline.
The Siri Question Nobody's Asking
The big news, apparently, is that Siri is getting smarter. More conversational. Better at understanding context. Fine. But I called my old colleague at Siemens last week, and he asked me something that stuck with me: when's the last time you saw a voice assistant that could handle the noise floor of a stamping plant?
The answer is never. And that's not changing this year either.
Now, I'll be honest, I'm not expecting Apple to pivot to manufacturing software. That's not their game and never has been. But there's this growing gap between what consumer AI can do and what we actually need on the factory floor. Every year the gap gets wider. Every year I watch these keynotes hoping someone at Apple has figured out that their chips, their ML frameworks, their edge computing capabilities could be genuinely useful in industrial settings.
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