Michael Gartenberg spent three years as Apple’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, reporting directly to Senior VP Phil Schiller. In his fourth encore appearance on Background Mode, Michael and I chat about expectations for Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) to be held June 4-8, 2018. We delved into potential improvements to HomePod, the state-of-the-art of Siri, the competition with Amazon’s Alexa, possible changes to iOS and watchOS, the state of the Mac, the much anticipated Mac Pro, what we’d like from macOS 10.14, Apple’s recent issue with premature product announcements, and the MacBook evolution (and its keyboard). We also discussed Apple’s discontinuation of AirPort products, and why that’s something Apple may or may not need to be involved with anymore.