Apple unveils updates to all of its devices – as it happened

… to The Independent’s live coverage of WWDC 2021. We’ll have all the latest news, rumours, speculation – and everything else besides.

We’ll get a load of software updates, of course, but what might they be? And what else?

This year’s Worldwide Developers Conference comes at a time when relations between Apple and its developers – big and small – are more frayed than they might ever have been.

That has now been going on for months, and has led to spectacles including Tim Cook giving evidence in a US court. Relations between the two companies – and others who are involved – do not appear to be getting any better.

Apple has become fairly flexible about where you watch its events in recent years – and probably best among them is YouTube. As well as offering a fairly seamless experience when actually watching, it lets you set a reminder so that you’ll be alerted when it’s due to start.

You can find the company’s official YouTube stream here:

The enigmatic leaker known as l0vetodream has posted what seems to be a suggestion that we’re not getting hardware products today after all.

(That translates to “I feel no”, according to Google translate.)

And they posted another tweet that specificallly suggests all that talk about new MacBook Pros might be too soon:

(That’s “I feel that 14-inch and 16-inch should not be so fast”, according to Google Translate.)

MacRumors’ Joe Rossignol points out that the Apple Store is yet to go down, potentially further suggesting that there won’t be any hardware revealed today, and therefore there’s nothing to actually go down for.

It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it might.

Hours before the start of WWDC, Apple has turned all of the pictures on its “Executive Profiles” page into Memoji. You can finally see what it might be like being in an iMessage conversation with the most powerful people at the company.

As well as the novelty, though, it does suggest something about what might be coming today – not least because Memoji have also featured very heavily in all the marketing around today’s event. Presumably that means they’re likely to get an update, or at least be involved in some new features, perhaps as part of a broader iMessage rejig.

Here are all of those faces:

Mark Zuckerberg has made the interestingly timed announcement that Facebook won’t be taking any revenue from creators on its platforms until 2023. And even when that does happen, that will be less than 30 per cent, he said, calling out Apple for the cut it takes when people make payments through its systems.

The announcement, in a Facebook post on his personal page, comes very soon before the event begins in an hour or so. And this WWDC takes place amid strained relationships between Apple and developers, who argue that it is not fair for Apple to take such a hefty cut and not allow them to take payments through other systems.

“To help more creators make a living on our platforms, we’re going to keep paid online events, fan subscriptions, badges, and our upcoming independent news products free for creators until 2023,” Mr Zuckerberg wrote in the post. “And when we do introduce a revenue share, it will be less than the 30% that Apple and others take.”

(Google also takes 30 per cent – as Apple has repeatedly pointed out during the ongoing antitrust investigations – so Mr Zuckerberg’s mention of Apple does seem pointed.)