It was originally for developers and press but it’s mostly for investors and press now. They practically never talk about APIs and tooling anymore.
The place users are expected to learn about the products are in ads, on the website, their favorite news outlet, or the apple store. No regular customer even bothers sitting through a 3 hour presentation.
??? The keynote is immediately followed by sessions covering the APIs mostly for the features they just announced. It absolutely is for the developers as much as it is for the press and regular users to learn about what’s coming.
Back in the day the whole presentation was about it though. Now says they don’t talk about the toolkits and stuff in the actual presentations with demos and examples like they used to. Infact it was the job of most tech journalist to pull out the relevant information to the user because the focus was almost entirely developer focused.
They did announce hardware at the very beginning though. It was often followed by statistics on how many developers were actively developing for the platform and the revenue developers made as a whole so on and so forth.
I remember them explaining push notifications, how it works, what you might want to implement it for and tried to sell the fact it didn’t really hit battery life much because it was pushed from apples servers etc. the whole presentation that was an hour long on technologies like coco demonstrating the fluidity and speed of the new tools and how they dramatically reduced the install size while improving stability etc. there was a 20 minute section on how apples iad’s were going to make developers more money while reducing overhead and had a downloadable demo in the app store.