This year's WWDC keynote was jam-packed with new products from the technology giant. But the company's biggest new development wasn't in hardware or software.
Craig Federighi, Apple Senior Vice President, Software Engineering, with a man in a racing suit, demonstrates Racer OS X during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco. (Stephen Lam/Reuters)
Apple may have just had the most eventful keynote in recent memory. Among the changes: a major hardware facelift to the Macbook Pro; the addition of useful new features in Mac OS X Mountain Lion, such as desktop notifications and the ability to share anything from any application with a click; a new version of iOS, Apple's mobile operating system; and big new plans for Siri, including iPad and automobile integration.
All these new goodies will give tech journalists a lot of fodder to chew on for the next few weeks. But something else intriguing happened today: The company repeatedly went out of its way to mention China. In the midst of unveiling Mountain Lion, Senior VP for Mac OS X Craig Federighi stopped to give Chinese-language features their very own chapter in the demo. He showed off a revamped character input method, and a new Chinese dictionary. In a major move, Safari now has built-in support for Baidu, mainland China's biggest search engine, and you can share content to video-hosting sites Tudou and Youku -- services that many Americans associate with pirated movies and TV shows but to the average Chinese are merely the local flavor of YouTube.