If you follow Apple at all, you’ve likely heard the news: Apple’s skipping John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live at WWDC this year. For a decade, it’s been tradition for Apple executives to join John on stage at the annual conference to recap the the keynote and dive deeper into the announcements. It is one of my favorite parts of that week, something I look forward to every year.

John has an uncanny ability to get Apple executives to just be human for a bit. It often sounds like a couple of guys just out for a beer, which is the exact context I want to hear folks like Craig Federighi in.

But this year is different. No one from Apple is showing up—not Craig, not Joz, not Phil, not JG, not Mike Rockwell. This all follows John’s timely, astute, and deeply appreciated piece “Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.” One can’t help but think that Apple seems uninterested in letting anyone hold their feet to the fire.

It’s not entirely surprising that Apple doesn’t want to participate, but I had held out hope they wouldn’t retreat into defensiveness, or worse, pettiness. I had hoped that instead of hiding, they would take the hits, own up to their failures over the past year, and try to offer some hope to developers and fans.

After all, this part of WWDC week is really for the fans.

Apple refusing to participate feels like more than just snubbing Gruber, it’s a missed chance to engage with the very community that cares the most.

I’m not even directly involved, and I still feel burned by this decision.

Even without Apple executives participating, I am still excited for The Talk Show Live. I’m hoping we get a fun cast of familiar characters. Though I still think that it would be absolutely epic for Sam Altman and Jony Ive to roll up and steal the spotlight.

P.S. This situation reminds me of the first time Phil Schiller went on The Talk Show Live in 2015. Instead of shying away from criticism about Apple software quality written by folks like Marco Arment, he addressed them head-on and even made light of the situation while seriously addressing the claims. It was a masterclass. Why can’t Joz or Craig address the AI problem this way? I’m not sure the company is capable of acting like that anymore.