Enlarge / The logo for WWDC24. (credit: Apple)

Apple has announced dates for this year's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). WWDC24 will run from June 10 through June 14 at the company's Cupertino headquarters, but everything will be streamed online.

Apple posted about the event with the following generic copy :

Join us online for the biggest developer event of the year. Be there for the unveiling of the latest Apple platforms, technologies, and tools. Learn how to create and elevate your apps and games. Engage with Apple designers and engineers and connect with the worldwide developer community. All online and at no cost.

As always, the conference will kick off with a keynote presentation on the first day, which is Monday, June 10. You can be sure Apple will use that event to at least announce the key features of its next round of annual software updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, visionOS, and tvOS.

Enlarge / Someone scans their face using Apple's "most advanced machine learning techniques" with the Apple Vision Pro during a WWDC 2023 keynote demo reel. (credit: Apple)

Amid notable new products like the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and the Apple Vision Pro revealed at Monday's WWDC 2023 keynote event , Apple presenters never once mentioned the term "AI," a notable omission given that its competitors like Microsoft and Google have been heavily focusing on generative AI at the moment. Still, AI was a part of Apple's presentation, just by other names.

While "AI" is a very ambiguous term these days, surrounded by both astounding advancements and extreme hype, Apple chose to avoid that association and instead focused on terms like "machine learning" and "ML." For example, during the iOS 17 demo, SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi talked about improvements to autocorrect and dictation:

Autocorrect is powered by on-device machine learning, and over the years, we've continued to advance these models. The keyboard now leverages a transformer language model, which is state of the art for word prediction, making autocorrect more accurate than ever. And with the power of Apple Silicon, iPhone can run this model every time you tap a key.

Notably, Apple mentioned the AI term "transformer" in an Apple keynote. The company specifically talked about a "transformer language model," which means its AI model uses the transformer architecture that has been powering many recent generative AI innovations, such as the DALL-E image generator and the ChatGPT chatbot.

Enlarge / Apple's first promotional image for WWDC 2023. (credit: Apple)

Apple will host its 34th annual Worldwide Developers Conference at its Cupertino, California, headquarters from Monday, June 5 through Friday, June 9, the company announced on Wednesday.

The conference will kick off with "a special all-day event," inclusive of the customary keynote presentation and the platform State of the Union talks. The language on Apple's website suggests that like last year, some or all of those will be presented in prerecorded video form rather than as a live on-stage presentation.

After that first day, Apple will likely host various panels on how developers can work with the company's developer toolkits and APIs to support new and old features across the various Apple platforms.

Enlarge / MetalFX Upscaling, as visually described by Apple at WWDC 2022. (credit: Apple)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—At this year's WWDC, Apple announced a surprising new system coming to its Metal 3 gaming API that may sound familiar to PC gamers: MetalFX Upscaling.

The system will leverage Apple's custom silicon to reconstruct video game graphics using lower-resolution source images so that games can run more efficiently at lower resolutions while looking higher-res. This "temporal reconstruction" system sounds similar to existing offerings from AMD ( FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 ) and Nvidia (Deep Learning Super-Sampling), along with an upcoming " XeSS " system from Intel. Based on how the system is described, it will more closely resemble AMD's system, since M1 and M2 silicon do not include dedicated AI processing cores like Nvidia's RTX series of graphics cards .

By announcing this functionality for some of the world's most popular processors, Apple is arguably letting more game developers build their games and engines with image reconstruction—even if MetalFX Upscaling isn't open source, unlike AMD's FSR 2.0 system. Still, these image reconstruction systems typically have temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in common. So long as game devs keep that kind of anti-aliasing in mind with their games and engines, they'll be more likely to take advantage and thus run more efficiently on a wide range of consoles, computers, and smartphones.

Enlarge / The image Apple shared alongside the WWDC 2022 announcement. (credit: Apple )

June 6 marks the beginning of Apple's annual developer conference, WWDC. The week-long event will kick off with a keynote at 10 am PST on Monday loaded with announcements about new software features across Apple's various platforms.

For the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic started, there will be a significant in-person audience for WWDC, too. And there will be countless sessions during the week on programming APIs, Swift features, and so on. But for most people around the world, new operating systems and hardware announcements are the main draw—and we'll see a few of those during the keynote on Monday.

It's important to note that WWDC isn't typically focused on product announcements for consumers. It's a place where Apple introduces new technologies and tools to developers.