My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of products at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think Different” ad campaign, there was nothing.

Apple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to trust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill Gates—Bill Gates, of all people!—to help him instill belief in the world that Apple would find a way to survive.

The world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what job I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business. The magazine I had worked at for four years, MacUser, had been folded, and some of us had been transferred over to our rival, Macworld, presumably to publish issues until Apple finally gave up the ghost and died. We existed to minimize the loss exposure of our respective publishing companies.

1997 was weird, folks. And that’s how my tenure at Macworld started.

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The last two years at WWDC, Apple has felt like it’s been in a hurry. In 2024, in a hurry to catch the AI wave before it entirely passed them by. (They didn’t catch that wave—they wiped out, lost their surfboard, and may have been partially gnawed on by a shark.) Then last year it felt like it was trying to cover up its embarrassment about AI failures by rushing out a new design scheme that felt ill conceived, especially when it came to the Mac.

This year feels different. Apple is unveiling a second take on its AI plans, but it feels like they’ve spent the intervening two years trying to make sure that this time, it sticks. And when it comes to almost every other announcement at WWDC 2026, it feels like the company is taking stock, measuring twice, and cutting once. As famed basketball coach John Wooden warned his young charges, it’s important to be quick—but not to hurry.

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