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Did you spot Apple’s ‘top secret ideas for 2022’ in WWDC keynote?

Trevor Mogg
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Apple's Craig Federighi demonstrating Live Text for iPhone.
Apple

Despite Apple’s extremely serious approach to the business of making mountains of money, the tech giant still likes to have fun from time to time.

The latest laughs came during its WWDC 2021 keynote on Monday, 7 June, in which it unveiled all of the new features coming to the company’s various devices.

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Delivered via a 105-minute livestream, one of the best chuckles came when Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, unveiled a new feature coming to the iPhone called Live Text, which digitizes text in your photos and even lets you interact with it.

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Demonstrating Live Text, Federighi holds his iPhone up to notes that he scrawled on a whiteboard following “a meeting with the team.” The Apple executive makes no direct reference to the notes and so some viewers may have missed them entirely.

As you can see from the screengrab at the top of the page, the notes’ title reads, “Top secret features for WWDC 2022,” followed by a bunch of absurd ideas, their silliness quickly confirming that Apple hadn’t just committed the snafu of the century.

A couple of the listed suggestions focus on Federighi’s famously coiffured hair (his nickname at Apple is said to be Hair Force One). These include the “haircut reminder (use front-facing camera)” that presumably would use artificial intelligence smarts to work out when your head fluff needs taming, and an idea to incorporate a “personal stylist” into the iPhone’s software to ensure you always look your best. Just like Federighi.

The list also includes a “personal hologram (video call stand-in)” idea that would let you go off and do something more useful than have to endure yet another seemingly endless meeting (actually that would be pretty popular).

As for “Dog AirPods,” well, that’s probably already a Kickstarter project, but we can’t see Apple going for it.

“Autonomous phone retrieval (FindMe?)” sounds like some kind of robot that fetches your iPhone for you, while “scroll to recharge” would no doubt be a big hit with customers if only someone could find a way to make it work.

While Apple clearly has a lot of good stuff in the pipeline, it’s safe to say that none of the above will be launching in 2022, or ever for that matter (though Federighi will likely push for the “personal stylist” feature).

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