Today is the first day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which means that a group of mostly male Apple executives will stand on a stage and give some speeches about some gadgets. Much of it will be boring. They will likely talk about numbers. They will show a video of chief design officer Jony Ive looking contemplative. Watchbands will spin around in midair. Maybe they’ll bring in a mediocre band to play some mediocre music. You will get bored. But if you watch for anything, watch for Craig Federighi: the low-key star of these annual presentations and a bona fide Californian dreamboat.
Who is Craig Federighi, you ask? Craig is a cold glass of kombucha after a tough Bikram yoga class. Craig is the high you get when you catch the perfect wave and just carve it. Craig is ceramic hors d’oeuvres bowls that just came out of the kiln perfectly glazed. Craig is the grilled cheese on the In-N-Out Secret Menu. Craig is the open parking spot on a sunny day at the bottom of Mount Tamalpais. Craig is a long, cold shower after a weekend at Burning Man. Craig is avocado toast on the porch as the sun rises.
Craig is also, technically, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. But when he’s onstage talking about the latest version of iOS, he transcends all space, time, and titles. Part of this is due to his hair, which is tastefully silver and endlessly voluminous. But here are a few other things you should know about Craig:
- His nickname at Apple is “Hair Force One,” but CEO Tim Cook calls him “Superman.”
- As a rule, his shirts must have two or three buttons undone at all times.
- He has earned a good reputation among employees as the Apple exec who replies to “emails promptly.”
- His interests, according to his presentations, are surfing, camping, and karaoke. (Same, actually.)
- The Wall Street Journal once described him as lanky but I’d prefer to describe him as angular.
- He was born in 1969 (Nice.)
- He went to UC Berkeley and I’m 95 percent sure he was stoned a lot there.
- He’s a fan of “the awesome Canadian rock trio” Rush, which is dorky but in a hot dad way. (Plus I hear Rush’s drummer is arguably the greatest drummer of all time. So, sure, I get it.)
- There’s literally no evidence of this, but I bet he’s pretty woke.
Craig has only been presenting at Apple events since 2013, but he’s clearly much better than Cook, Phil Schiller, or Eddy Cue. Do those dudes have random YouTubers making supercuts of their jokes onstage? (The answer is no, they don’t even have jokes.)
It’s hard to choose Craig’s best onstage moment since his premiere, but here are a few:
- When he said the word “yurts” on the stage at least three times
- When he took an “emergency selfie” onstage and his eyebrows were on point
- When he talked shit about the old, skeuomorphic Game Center app by saying Apple had to update it because it “completely ran out of green felt and wood”
- When he introduced Apple’s new “Metal” processing system by throwing up devil horns and giving the audience of developers an IDGAF smirk
- When he Rickrolled the entire WWDC 2015 audience
- When he simultaneously made a graph joke/threw shade at Microsoft’s pathetic new operating system adoption rate
So, if you’re planning to stream WWDC this year, watch for Craig. He’s like the Silicon Valley version of Joe Biden’s Onion character, and easily the most metal thing about this boring tech conference.