Apple may really cancel WWDC 2020 due to coronavirus outbreak considerations

In the past week, the outbreak of the new coronavirus remains the focus of worldwide attention. More and more people have contracted the disease in the United States. At the time of writing, more than 225 cases have been diagnosed across the United States, and the number of deaths has risen to 14.

Johns Hopkins University estimates that more than 100,000 patients worldwide have been infected with the virus, and US President Trump has signed an $8.3 billion emergency spending bill to fight the epidemic on Friday morning.

In addition to directly affecting people’s physical health, the epidemic has also had a significant impact on the world’s economy. For example, many companies have now canceled business trips, meetings, and interviews due to epidemic considerations.

In Santa Clara County where tech giants are gathered, which is Apple’s headquarters, the local county government has just released the latest guidelines, which are designed to urge local companies to minimize the number of large-scale events to be held, or preferably cancel directly.

The guidelines clearly state that local companies should avoid holding large offline events while encouraging companies to suspend non-essential employees’ business trips, and use telecommuting more to avoid employees working close to each other.

Since the guidelines do not explicitly state the date when the guidelines will end, we speculate that the guidelines may not end in the short term. Earlier, companies such as Google and Facebook have canceled some large-scale meetings this year, so now everyone is looking at this top technology giant, Apple, to see if it will cancel this year’s WWDC conference.

The annual WWDC conference is arguably one of Apple’s most important events each year. Every year, Apple delivers many keynotes and many software updates at the conference. Apple usually announces the date of the WWDC conference that year.

Apple has already done many related measures in response to this epidemic, such as temporarily closing all Apple Stores in mainland China in January. It is not surprising if Apple intends to turn the conference online, because there are already many technologies Companies have changed their product launches to be held online.

Apple previously stated that due to the impact of this epidemic, many Apple Stores were closed and offline customer traffic for mobile phones plummeted, so it may not meet the previously set revenue target for the quarter.

Via: The Verge