WWDC26 Keynote Shows Apple’s Tacit Acknowledgment of External Pressures
Apple is not a company that admits weakness or mistakes in public, but the WWDC 2026 keynote made clear just how much external pressure Apple is under right now. Although a few of the announced features undoubtedly bubbled up internally, the three-part structure of the 75-minute-long keynote was clearly reactive. Apple focused on user and developer complaints, parental concerns about technology abuse, and the embarrassment surrounding Apple Intelligence and the “more personalized” Siri it had promised two years earlier. This was not the keynote of a company setting the direction of the industry.
But first, a few notes: I will continue my habit of referring to the full set of Apple’s platforms as OS 27. Although each platform remains distinct, with interaction approaches tailored to its individual hardware, Apple continues to focus on providing a consistent, unified experience across them all. Lending support to the idea that even Apple thinks of them as a unit is a new Overview page with the telling URL of https://www.apple.com/os/ and sub-pages with largely repetitive details about each operating system:
Missing from the keynote and that list is tvOS 27, which merited only the briefest mention in Apple’s press release, and any acknowledgment of the HomePod at all. Rumors suggest that Apple may release a new “homeOS” alongside a “HomePad” smart home hub that would combine a HomePod with a 7-inch screen and an A18 chip with enough power to support Apple Intelligence (and thus the revamped Siri). Hopefully, we’ll hear more details about the future of HomePods soon.
Nor were there any hardware announcements. Although it’s not uncommon for hardware to debut at WWDC, it’s by no means guaranteed and tends to connect more with platform-defining announcements like Apple silicon (see “Macs Make the Move to ARM with Apple Silicon,” 22 June 2020) and the Vision Pro (see “Apple Vision Pro Evokes Deep Ambivalence,” 12 June 2023). We’ll keep waiting for the M5 iMac, M5 and M5 Pro Mac mini, and M5 Max Mac Studio, and possibly even an M5 Ultra Mac Studio.
Finally, before we dive into the keynote announcements, Apple continued its playful tradition with macOS naming. Craig Federighi did a bit that started with 1960s animation reminiscent of the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine and ended with Apple marketers—I’m pretty sure it was Apple marketing chief Greg “Joz” Joswiak—revealing the name from a vintage VW Microbus while driving by. For the foreseeable future, we’ll all be talking about macOS 27 Golden Gate. Alas, no one in the spirited TidBITS Talk discussion of possible macOS names guessed correctly.
Another Year of the Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion
During the big cat era of macOS releases, Apple often used a tick-tock cycle: a “tick” release (Leopard, Lion) would debut new features, and the subsequent “tock” release (Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion) would focus on refining them. Apple marketed Snow Leopard with the promise of zero new features, focusing on stability after Leopard’s somewhat rocky move to 64-bit, Time Machine, and other under-the-hood changes (see “Mac OS X Snow Leopard to Focus on Performance, Not Features,” 9 June 2008). Mountain Lion was more about smoothing the rough edges in Lion and bringing over features from iOS like Notification Center, iMessage, and Reminders (see “OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Stalks iOS,” 16 February 2012).
Although there’s no obvious connection between the Tahoe and Golden Gate names to indicate a “tock” release, Apple devoted the first chunk of the WWDC keynote to how OS 27 will address user and developer complaints about OS 26. Liquid Glass isn’t going away, of course, but Apple came about as close as is conceivable to admitting that a lot of people don’t like it, with the presenter saying:
Like with all major design updates, there’s a natural process where we take a bold leap forward, and then we continue to iterate. Part of how we do this is by listening to users and developers. Our team really appreciates your feedback, and we considered it deeply as we refined the new design over the past year. Now, we’re making some additional refinements, starting with updating the foundations of how Liquid Glass is built.
A new slider will let users adjust Liquid Glass transparency from ultra-clear to fully tinted, though I’m withholding judgment until I see how it compares to the Reduce Transparency accessibility setting I’m accustomed to. macOS will feature a uniform toolbar across the top of apps, which may reduce illegibility caused by content flowing under controls. macOS sidebars will extend to the edges of windows (see below) and will regain the colored icons that make it easier to distinguish apps from one another. Although it seems we’re still stuck with the “squircle” icons, Apple has doubled down on the glassy look, so app icons can have additional Liquid Glass layers integrated into the artwork for sharper definition. I’m withholding judgment here too—see “BasicAppleGuy’s macOS Icon History,” 9 September 2025, and “Tahoe’s Terrible Icons, Another Take,” 5 November 2025.
Apple also made a big deal about performance improvements, smoothing system animations, launching iPhone and iPad apps up to 30% faster, displaying new photos in the Photo Library up to 70% faster, transferring files via AirDrop up to 80% faster, and moving files from an iPad to an external drive is up to 5x faster, so it compares with macOS transfer speeds. A new CPU Scheduler promises to improve iPhone performance even on older models back to the iPhone 11, which may encourage more people with older iPhones to upgrade.
Other changes relate more to the user experience. Apple reportedly improved network transitions between cellular and Wi-Fi, so your iPhone won’t switch to a nearby Wi-Fi network as you walk by or hold onto an airplane Wi-Fi network after you’ve deplaned. Apple also acknowledged that Spotlight often doesn’t find things you know are there, so it completely rearchitected the search index to be more stable, comprehensive, and responsive. Frankly, search in Apple products (and on the apple.com website) has often been weak, so I’m looking forward to seeing how well the new Spotlight architecture works in comparison.
This focus on refinement continues to new features in apps, such as better relevance ranking in Mail searches, allowing contributions to iCloud Shared Albums from Android and Windows users via icloud.com, perimenopause and menopause support in the Health app’s cycle tracking, custom EQ for AirPods, additional detail in the Flyover feature for select cities in Maps, and support for 4K video from HomeKit Secure Video cameras. On the Vision Pro, panoramas can be converted to spatial scenes and used as personal environments. None of these are earth-shaking, but some users will appreciate them.
A Focus on Child Safety
The second leg of Apple’s WWDC keynote focused on child safety and parental controls. Apple was treading very carefully here, emphasizing that parents are in the best position to decide what’s best for their children and that it is shaping child safety features based on expert health research. Apple name-dropped the American Academy of Pediatrics several times, and it seemed clear that Apple is trying both to respond to parental criticism of the addictiveness of its products (and the apps they enable) and to head off governmental regulation that might force undesired design directions.
For instance, when talking about parental controls surrounding app usage, Apple was particularly careful, saying:
When it comes to social media, we know parents are concerned. Experts recommend children under 13 don’t use social media and that parents carefully consider when their teen is ready. And because every child is unique, parents are in control and can always adjust any of the suggested allowances based on what’s best for their child.
The new child safety approach includes:
- Child accounts: The starting point for child safety is the Child Account, and parents can either create new Child Accounts or convert existing accounts. Once an account is designated as a Child Account, all the other parental controls become available.
- Content controls: A setup assistant walks parents through choosing what they want to allow their children to do and see. Parents can later expand those options.
- Ask to Browse: Apple’s parental controls have long included Ask to Buy, which enables parents to grant permission in Messages for which apps the child downloads or buys. New this year is Ask to Browse, which extends the approach to granting permission to new websites. Ask to Buy and Ask to Browse are on by default for kids under 13 and can be turned on for teens by parents.
- Communication controls: Similarly, communication controls allow parents to specify who children can talk to via their devices, starting with family. As kids want to talk with new people, parents must grant permission.
- Communication Safety expansion: Previously, Communication Safety warned kids about images or videos that might contain nudity and blurred them. Apple has now extended that protection to intervene before kids can see gore or violent content shared in images or videos.
- Time allowances and schedules: To help parents manage how long children spend on allowed apps, Apple has introduced time allowances. A daily time allowance spans entertainment, games, and social media, with each category having its own allowance. Time allowances can vary by time of day and day of week as well, to keep kids from using certain apps during school and to allow more flexibility on weekends.
- Redesigned Screen Time: Apple has redesigned the Screen Time app to provide an at-a-glance view of a child’s device usage and to let parents quickly adjust controls.
- Child safety website: Apple unveiled a dedicated website designed to document these controls. Given that many parents have little technical knowledge, a website like this could be invaluable. For now, its content feels more marketing than anything else, but it could evolve into a hub that would explain when and how to use parental controls.
The big question with these new parental controls is how easily children will be able to circumvent them. Because children always find a way.
Hey, Siri AI, What’s in Apple Intelligence?
The third and final section of the WWDC keynote was what we’ve been waiting to hear since 2024, when Apple introduced Apple Intelligence and promised a “more personalized” Siri, now called Siri AI. Apple is once again promising a lot, but it claims that the new version of Siri is in the developer betas available today, and Craig Federighi said that Apple would launch Siri AI in beta for customers “later this year,” albeit only in English to start. In other words, Siri AI might not ship with the next-generation iPhones in September, but it should be available before the end of the year.
Federighi also warned that Siri AI would not be available in the EU on iOS and iPadOS, presumably due to EU requirements that Apple believes (or is at least claiming) will endanger users’ privacy and security. Nor will Siri AI and other new Apple Intelligence features be available in China as Apple works through regulatory requirements. These delays are reminiscent of how Apple dealt with App Store fees (see “Apple Reduces Chinese App Store Fees Without the EU Drama,” 13 March 2026).
So what is Apple promising for this next generation of Apple Intelligence? First, Apple acknowledged that it is basing its new Apple Foundation Models on Google’s Gemini models, both for on-device usage and Private Cloud Compute. Different models provide varying levels of functionality, with models running on sufficiently capable Apple silicon devices offering speech understanding and generation, higher-accuracy dictation, and more expressive voices. Despite—or perhaps in part because of—the Google connection, Apple emphasized privacy more than ever. I suspect the only thing being shared with Google is a generous licensing fee, but the reliance on Google’s Gemini models remains a significant philosophical departure for Apple.
You can continue to invoke Siri in familiar ways. However, on the iPhone, you’ll also be able to swipe down from the Dynamic Island. On the Mac, Siri will be integrated into Spotlight, and contextual menu items will let you work directly on images, files, and text, with the conversation taking place in a draggable conversation window. A dedicated Siri app on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac will maintain and sync conversation history via iCloud. Siri AI will be available on watchOS, and visionOS will gain a 3D Siri visualization you can invoke by merely looking at it. You can even use Siri on CarPlay and AirPods, presumably because they’re relying on a more capable iPhone or another device. Again, the keynote omitted any mention of the HomePod or the Apple TV—a glaring oversight given the HomePod’s total reliance on Siri. Neither has sufficient processing power to run Apple Intelligence locally, so Apple would have to offload processing to another device or Private Cloud Compute. Or orphan them in favor of upgraded hardware.
Siri AI promises significant enhancements:
- Conversational depth: Where Siri has trouble maintaining a conversation beyond a simple response to a specific question (“Would you like to send that message?), Siri AI will allow conversations with rich, detailed responses. Conversation is table stakes—ChatGPT has been able to do this since 2022—so the question is if Siri AI will match up to today’s chatbots. I’m curious if Siri AI will allow any user customization or learn the user’s preferences over time, or if it will present the same personality to everyone.
- Personal context: The killer feature Apple led with in 2024 was that Siri would tailor its responses and actions based on your messages, emails, photos, and other data, without the user having to specify where to look. That promise remains on the table—we’ll see if Apple can deliver this time. I’m also curious whether those of us who don’t use Apple’s Mail will have to keep it running in the background so Siri AI can access email.
- On-screen awareness: Siri AI will understand what’s currently displayed on the screen and allow the user to ask questions or direct Siri to act on it. In some cases, you may need to make a selection to focus Siri on the particular content that interests you, much as you might drop a screenshot into a chatbot conversation now.
- World knowledge: Siri AI will be useful only if it can inform its responses with real-time information from the Web, and Apple claims it can do so. I have some trepidation here, since Apple has never been good at search, and the company is notably skittish about providing responses to anything that might be controversial or litigious. Today’s Visual Intelligence covers its ears and chants, “La la la, I can’t hear you” if you ask about health, politics, financial matters, or other potentially tricky topics (see “Visual Intelligence: Occasionally Useful, but Often Flawed,” 20 October 2025).
- App actions: Apple keeps emphasizing how much we’ll be able to control different apps through Siri. You’ll notice that all the examples below revolve around Apple’s apps; as with AppleScript, Automator, and Shortcuts, just how useful this capability proves will depend on the extent to which developers support it.
- Adjustable voice: If Siri has sounded too robotic for you in the past, you’ll appreciate the additional customization options of Siri AI’s voice. You can choose from more voices, tweak the speaking rate, and adjust expressivity.
- Improved system-wide dictation: Apple claims that dictation will benefit from a significant accuracy boost covering spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. With luck, it will be so good that we won’t have to resort to hacking Contacts for better responses (see “TipBITS: How Fake Contacts Can Fix Dictation’s Proper Noun Problems,” 15 May 2026).
Although Siri AI is the marquee feature of the new version of Apple Intelligence, Apple has dramatically improved many other Apple Intelligence features:
- Photos: The Clean Up tool was Apple Intelligence’s most useful feature in its initial release, and Apple says it now does a better job of removing distractions with more realistic infill in complex scenes. A new Extend feature expands images outward, adding a realistically generated background around the photo’s subject. Most impressive was Reframe, which lets you reposition the virtual camera after having taken a photo. You can use it to shift perspective or change the zoom, generating new content only for the shifted areas. We’ll see if it’s useful or just a gimmick for occasional use.
- Visual Intelligence: Apple has moved Visual Intelligence from the Camera Control to a mode within the Camera app, where you can tap the shutter button to analyze what the camera sees. Conversations initiated from Visual Intelligence are saved to the Siri app, where you can continue them beyond the in-Camera interface. In macOS, a keyboard shortcut invokes Visual Intelligence, and on the Vision Pro, you can gaze at objects to ask Siri about them.
- Writing Tools: Apple says we’ll be able to write with Siri anywhere text input is available, with Siri purportedly matching your tone to other messages or emails. Apple Intelligence automatically proofreads wherever you type, including in third-party apps. I’ll be curious to see how it compares with Grammarly, which has blown Apple Intelligence out of the water so far (see “Why Grammarly Beats Apple’s Writing Tools for Serious Writers,” 30 January 2025).
- Safari: Safari gains several Apple Intelligence-powered features that might be interesting. It can automatically organize tabs by topic, monitor pages for specific changes and notify you when they occur, and generate custom extensions based on natural language descriptions. In a related feature, the Passwords app can use Apple Intelligence to navigate websites and update weak or compromised passwords agentically.
- Communications: In Mail, Messages, and Phone, Apple Intelligence will provide context-aware one-tap suggestions for actions such as creating reminders, making notes, finding photos, or looking up information. The Phone app integration only knows who you’re calling, not what you’re saying—Apple gave the example of it looking up flight information when you’re calling an airline—so I have doubts it will prove useful regularly.
- Home app: One of the most impressive demonstrations of Apple Intelligence came in the Home app, which can leverage Apple Intelligence to analyze recorded video and generate natural-language summaries that can tell you that UPS has just dropped off a package. Of course, you’ll need a HomeKit-capable camera.
- Image Playground: Apple’s image generation tool was well-named, given how juvenile its output was. The company claims that Image Playground will be powered by new image-generation models on Private Cloud Compute, presumably based on Gemini’s popular Nano Banana model. It now supports photorealistic image generation, allows you to use multiple people from Photos, transforms images with natural-language descriptions, and generates images in multiple dimensions. Apple has integrated image-generation capabilities system-wide for generating Lock Screen wallpapers, contact posters, and Messages backgrounds. We’ll see if any of this is useful or just a fancier toy.
- Shortcuts: Those who have found shortcuts hard to write may appreciate the natural language shortcut creation enabled by Apple Intelligence. If you want to try something similar out now, Federico Viticci of MacStories has developed Shortcuts Playground, which lets you create shortcuts with Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex. Most things I’ve wanted to do in Shortcuts weren’t possible because of app limitations rather than Shortcuts itself, but perhaps that will improve as well.
All this sounds great, but we were also excited about the promise of Apple Intelligence back in 2024 (see “Examining Apple Intelligence,” 17 June 2024). Apple Intelligence features appeared slowly over many months, often to a lackluster response, and Siri never shipped at all. I think Apple knows it has to ship Siri AI this time, but how promptly will it and other features appear, and how well will they work when they do arrive?
Farewell, Tim Cook
Apple chose not to highlight incoming CEO John Ternus, instead having Tim Cook mark his final public appearance as CEO, which he closed out by saying:
On a personal note, some of the greatest highlights of my time as CEO have been events like this. Sharing powerful new tools with all of you and then seeing what you create with them has been a constant reminder that imagination has no limits. Over the years, you have helped people connect, create, learn, and experience the world in extraordinary new ways. And with the incredible capabilities we introduced today and so many more still to come, I truly believe the best is still ahead. At Apple, creating the best products in the world to deliver experiences that enrich people’s lives has always been our North Star. It’s been the honor of a lifetime to help advance that mission with teams whose creativity, care, and conviction continue to make a lasting difference in people’s lives.
Meh! The highlight was Craig’s intro about the MacOS version name. The rest was so dragging that I fell asleep! Did they finally give us a way to completely disable liquid glass?
I thought that the A.I./Siri details were very reasonable, even if they weren’t very exciting. I’d much rather see Apple take an incremental approach to A.I. than see them rush it.
On the other hand, Apple chose the image below to be the “hero image” on the iOS 27 page. Humility is not the problem with the Liquid Glass design team, that’s for sure.
I wonder if Photos search will improve. Recently I started taking advantage of a Google $4/month 1 TB drive offer and synced all my Apple Photos to Google Photos. Google Photos is better for sharing albums.
I also noticed after doing this that Google Photos is much better than Apple Photos for searching. For example, I wanted to find some photos from a visit to a zoo over 20 years ago with my former professor and his kids. So I searched for zoo in Apple Photos and came up with almost nothing.
But in Google Photos the visit the zoo came right up! Was able to select photos and add them to a new album and share the album easily.
I hope Apple Photos improves in that respect.
Adam, if you like scotch, you deserve a triple shot and a long day tomorrow doing nothing much to recover from writing this first-rate, complete, nuanced summary of today’s WWDC keynote so quickly. Just excellent.
I hadn’t thought of the keynote as being a reaction when watching it but you’re quite right. That said, I think it’s too easy to expect world-shaking things at every WWDC. When you’ve got a one billion+ client base it takes time to build things out properly no matter how wealthy you are. We English-speaking persons assume that of course silicon valley is going to bring new things to us instanter but forget that OS’s and apps have huge efforts ahead of them to bring those features to twenty- or a hundred-plus languages and cultures.
The parental controls things look great and are sorely needed but I wonder if the best solution is to auto-brick the phones save for emergencies until age 15.
The SiriAI stuff looks extremely impressive. If indeed they have pulled this off that’s wildly complex stuff and if viewers think that’s ho hum, well, they should review recent news items on the utter failure of these monstrously expensive AI systems to answer simple everyday questions. And that’s the crux of it. Yes, Claude Code et. al. are doing astonishing things and dedicated ML systems are creating possible drug formulations with such speed it’s mind-blowing but handling “simple” questions about daily life is wildly more complicated. (Yes it is.)
I’m not sure I need to be instructed how to find a best fit for my shopping errands or whether I should notify my best friend I’ll be passing by on the way to purchasing detergent but if they have actually constructed something that will do something like that, that’s pretty impressive.
Oh, and faster with fewer bugs is a nice thing to have.
Dave
Being a citizen of the EU, I’m sad to see that most of the AI features will not be available on iPhone and iPad here. The good part is that they will be available on Mac – this all according to both Federighi and Gemini.
The interesting part was that Gemini could give me the answer within minutes after the presentation ended – makes me wonder if Google had learned this before the Keynote.
To see exactly what features Gemini believes will be available, or not, in the EU: Ask Gemini yourself.
Two bits from curmudgeon-world…
Connection might be more hidden, yes, sort of Easter-eggy. We could start a new topic theorizing about it… Both Lake Tahoe and the Golden Gate (“GoGa”?) are, shall we say, Liquid Glassic ways to cross the California border, on opposite sides of the state, and in that way a tick and tock…
I thank @ace too for the excellent summary. I started watching the stream a bit late but could only take about 10 minutes, the language, gesturing, presenter environments, pre-recorded, it’s not something for me. Reading about the changes as presented above I find far better.
Alas I find myself now so close to the edge of my case, I’m in danger of falling off. About the only thing that sounds useful is the Liquid Glass slider. More about Rosetta’s retirement would have been good to read/hear.
My skepticism makes me feel these %s are meaningless marketing. What’s important is what we notice, how it feels, imho. If an app launches in 1/4 second instead of 1/2 second, that’s a large % but still to me a useless number.
possibly nice, but is that something the mass of iPad users are doing, and thus worth crowing about? Useful for me would be a way to back up and restore an iPad using an external drive. Where is the CCC/SuperDuper/Time Machine for iDevices?
The Child Safety stuff, ah, well, that’s really a societal question I suppose. As I’m not a parent I hardly qualify to comment on the details, but on the larger issue, a Big Tech firm deciding this stuff (instead of parents) seems odd, though without further research it’s hard to say, maybe this historically is common as new technologies reach society, maybe not.
Siri AI… Well I’m glad my iPhone can’t do AI, and I live in Europe. My M2 MBAir, though… I’ll need to read about how this all works when it comes out and if users can turn it off before it starts crunching through. I don’t want anything they are proposing and find it intrusive and icky.
Anyway, ‘nuff said from the edge, thanks again @ace for the excellent report!
That’s for sure. Wonder if Ternus being absent was, in part, it not being the introduction he needed to have.
CCC exists for iPadOS and I think for iOS as well. It is somewhat limited compared to macOS version though.
The hippy/stoner cliche really didn’t need being warmed up. Talk about being tone deaf. Next time Apple’s execs drive up the Peninsula for a $300 dinner in the City, they might want to stroll through the Loin to see what those hippies and their permissive attitude left behind. Just don’t step into human feces or needles on the way, Craig. I realize it might play well with some folks from afar (“they’re all wasted, LOL”), but for those of us who call this home, it’s long past funny.
That out of the way, I love that the next macOS will be named after the beautiful strait I see when I look out the window. And if they fix Spotlight search and speed up the whole thing, it will be worthy of carrying this great name IMHO.
Hey, if we want Apple to devote some of the system releases to bug-hunting rather than new features, we shouldn’t get critical when that’s exactly what they do. I’m extremely glad that they are taking a cycle to iterate on Liquid Glass and to squash bugs. More features can wait.
One thing of note. The more expressive voices and more advanced dictation are only coming to higher-end devices: 17 Pro/Air, iPad M4 and later, Mac with M3 and later (and there are minimum memory limits).
The villains of Yellow Submarine were the Blue Meanies, who fought the fine folks of Apple Corps / The Beatles. The name was adopted by the team that developed “Blue”, the codename for the OS later known as System 7.
That was a good OS. Maybe we should be rooting for the Meanies.
+1 for the praise for @ace’s summary of the keynote. Really fine work gleaning all of that information from the event!
An entirely fair point, and for the most part, I don’t find myself noticing slowdowns on any of my modern devices.
I think photographers may deal with this a lot, and it’s an important change to bring the iPad into speed parity with the Mac.
A good point—in many ways, this was a set of announcements that finish off Tim Cook’s era.
AFAIK, the only connections between the two actual landmarks are US 40/I-80 & US 50/I-80. As a Native Californian/Sacramentan, I don’t recall particular named geographic features for the routes they take that could have been used.
Right! So many details. What’s funny about those requirements is how Apple states the memory limitations: “with 12GB or more in memory.” What does that mean?
If you can cross the California border at the Golden Gate, I must have missed the turnoff. What’s the trick?
I’m glad to see all the parental controls. And I think they’re well designed - putting parents in complete control.
I assume (hopefully correctly) that this will also prohibit a device logged in to a child’s account to log-out without parental approval. Otherwise older kids will quickly figure out how to create their own account, with no restrictions, and switch their device over to it.
I also wonder how Apple is going to deal with various new laws (e.g., the one that recently took effect in Texas) requiring app stores to verify user ages. So it’s not going to be enough to just say “I paid for the phone, so I’m an adult”. These states are going to require uploading government ID information (which will eventually be stolen by identity thieves) to servers in order to prove you’re not a child.
If I understand the presentation correctly, this is due to legal regulation issues. Hopefully, Apple’s lawyers and the EU’s lawmakers can come to an agreement soon.
To date, you can disable Apple Intelligence. I see no reason to believe Apple will force it on people in the future.
Personally, I think Apple is doing it right - keeping as much ML processing as possible on-device, and using a secure system for keeping cloud-assisted processing private.
While there may be bugs, Apple is not known for lying about this sort of thing, so I’m willing to believe them until proven otherwise.
I have been waiting patiently for a refreshed Apple TV 4K since we installed an OLED screen at the beginning of 2025. At the time the current model (released in 2022) was being heralded as “about to be replaced” based on the average two year cycle for that box.
With the WWDC for 2026 now behind us, and both Apple TV and HomePod meriting scant notice, I’m beginning to think that the “hobby products” may be off the table of future releases. That they have been held so long because of Siri development made sense while it made sense, but this is either an abundance of caution on Apple’s part or a signal that maybe Apple TV (the box, not the service) has seen its last release.
And no mention of iPodOS 27.
Haha. I’m sure @TBTdn was speaking somewhat metaphorically, but you are technically correct. California’s official western border is 3 nautical miles west of the coastline.
Ternus’s current responsibilities are hardware so WWDC seems fine to me that he wasn’t showcased. I imagine the September introduction of new devices will use him a lot.
Righto @fischej (well, to clarify, I meant going thru the Golden Gate by water, not across the GG Bridge) , but I’m curious where the 3 nautical mile reference comes from. I’ve been away a while but thought coastal states only ‘own’ to where the land meets the sea, beyond which is federal up to some distance.
Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia page on geography of CA leaves out textually and illustratively, the western border. It also points out the Farallon Islands, part of SF, are 30 nm out.
Golly, gets more and more complicateder! :-) Anyway, back to the tech discussion!
Thanks @neil1 , the CCC tool for iOS is for:
Which is quite a ways from the kind of backup CCC does for a Mac. I suppose iMazing does backup for iDevices too, now that I’m thinking more about it, but to the Mac, which then has to be backed up itself. Maybe there are others besides Apple’s own local and cloud options.
Well, I was quoting ChatGPT. Don’t tell me she was hallucinating again? Or maybe smoking something that was being passed around in the VW microbus that drove by in the keynote?
Well, there you have it. Might be true, might not. I never used to trust Wikipedia but would take its info over any “AI” these days.
yeah good we haven’t figured out how to move smell thru the internet yet, at least not in a mass way (I vaguely recall something about this years ago that involved perfumes on one end digitzed, sent to a recipient device which tried to reproduce them…)
Sorry for the sidebar/digression.
Back on topic though, I have come across some other Keynote reports on other sites, some trying to decipher a slide full of words for what’s changing in 27, and found a few of the features worth having.
Originally national coastal territorial waters were set at 3 nautical miles (NM) (3.45 statute miles, 5.6 Km) because that was the distance of defensive artillery at the time. Late in the 20th Century, 12 NM became the norm for territorial control with an exclusive economic zone covering the area between the 12 NM out to 200 NM. The national governments can determine if sub-jurisdictions like state and provinces have authority locally. Most likely for these United States that is to the old 3 NM limit.
Speaking for myself, this is Good News. A “Snow Leopard” maintenance release would be welcome – particularly with many of Liquid Glass’ worst (IMO) excesses dialed back in macOS.
And the overhaul of Spotlight is something that really has my interest. Spotlight not being able to find files that I know are there – until I delete and then re-create the Spotlight index for a drive (release the mdworker processes!) – has been a significant problem for almost a decade. (Thank goodness for the Find Any File app.)
I’m still sticking to Sequoia for now; but once things shake out with Golden Gate (e.g., macOS 27.2 or so), leapfrogging Tahoe is is looking very attractive.
Thanks for the research, @romad ! I recall from aviation charts back in the 70s when I was learning to fly in northern CA that there were Air Defense Interception Zones (ADIZ) all along the coast. Don’t recall what their size was then but that they were expanded sounds familiar.
Back on Topic though, as I read blogs about the WWDC I see more and more UI tweaks and other things that sound good for me, so maybe later this year I’ll try it if I can find out more about stopping the new Spotlight/Siri. I find their push to index everything and invade all the apps with analysis, suggestions, and ‘AI’ tools extremely invasive and off putting and don’t want anything to do with it.
A very good summary of the WWDC this time around.
I just want Apple to fix iTunes. For instance, with shuffle, I have a 1000+ songs on my phone for Carplay. And in the years I’ve been using it, there are songs NEVER to have played, or songs played 300x!
The liquid Glass fiasco…ofcourse its Tacit. Think
DifferentShareholders. I just helped someone upgrade to Tahoe and she exclaimed, WTF is this childish look!! (from a 78yr old widow, that was very…amusing). Then proceeded to turn off the four recommended settings as much of it as I could.I use smart playlists to deal with this. For instance, make a list that contains only those songs not played in the last 30 days and shuffle that.
I agree, which is why I consider newer MacOS versions as being “downgrades” as more and more geek stuff is added making MacOS less & less “for the rest of us”.
“so your iPhone won’t switch to a nearby Wi-Fi network as you walk by”
Do people actually leave their Wi-Fi when they’re not using it?
“Apple has now extended that protection to intervene before kids can see gore or violent content”
That nudity would be considered a higher priority is an indication of the warped society in which they operate.
People turn their Wi-Fi off?
I have an uncle that turns his whole phone off (complete shutdown) in order to “save the battery.” You basically can’t call him.
But then neither can the spammers, so maybe he’s onto something.
I know one dad who would put the router in his car’s trunk when he headed to work.
Yes, all the time in this household! iPhone rarely has it on, cellular data is enough. The Mac and iPad WiFi is turned off when not in use. Some devices are kept in Airplane mode until internet is needed.
Good thoughts on WWDC26 from Jason Snell.
When I play more than one song from my phone, only the first song shows up as played on Apple Music. This has been the case for many years. So “song last played” smart playlists are useless for me.
(I’ve only ever had one Apple account, so the sync issues aren’t because of multiple account issues. I did talk with an Apple tech about the problem several years ago, but she kept trying to solve problems I don’t have, and eventually took off her headset and walked away from her desk. True story!)
I have no idea what Apple Music does - I don’t subscribe to it and I never stream content from any source.
I routinely play tracks from my Mac’s Music library (purchased or ripped) that I sync to my iPod Touch via USB. It does update the play count and last-played timestamp, and the values get updated in the Mac’s Music app at the next USB sync.
There is no way I’d be able to remember to toggle Wi-Fi on and off as I come and go. I’d end up accidentally using slower, more power-hungry cellular service all the time.
Moreover, wi-fi is used by Location Services to refine your position even when you’re not connected to a network.
iPhones also randomize the MAC address when you are passing by WiFi access points you haven’t already connected to deliberately, so there should be no privacy / tracking concern.
And FTR, the whole “Dub dub” thing is just plain embarrassing.
Nothing worse than a bunch of aging tech bros trying to come across as cool but trying too hard.
Which is exactly what we do.
If my teenager did that they’d lose their device privileges.
So all in all I’d say the problem is with the parent writing the article.
They’re both off and always have been on my phone unless I am actively using them. Mobile data because it is expensive and very limited, Wi-Fi because leaving it on wastes power.
I thought there is a Shortcuts Automation that will turn wifi on/off with reference to Significant Locations, but now I don’t see it as an option. There might be some automated way to do this, if you use those features and you have a fairly fixed routine.
Sounds like you have a specific situation that favors such behavior. My cell plan has unlimited data, so it doesn’t cost extra to use. And even still, I use very little since I’m usually at home, on my Wi-Fi network. Wi-Fi being on may consume slightly more power than when it’s disabled, but I don’t care as long as my iPhone doesn’t run out of power before the end of the day, which it never does.
Keep in mind if you have poor cell coverage (like me), cellular will use a lot more power trying to find and maintain a good signal, so Wi-Fi on prolongs battery life.
Maybe. If you enable (and your carrier supports) Wi-Fi calling. Otherwise, the cellular radio must remain on and active in order to handle non-IP traffic (e.g., voice calls, SMS text, etc.)
I have noticed much greater battery life disabling the cellular radio (via airplane mode) when spending a lot of time in a location without any signal (e.g., in below-ground ballrooms in conference hotels). But I don’t notice much additional drain if there is at least a weak signal available. (e.g., indoors at my home, I frequently see only 1 or 2 bars.)
I was on vacation the last two weeks but I was able to download the Youtube version of the keynote on my iPad so I could watch on the plane yesterday. One thing that I thought was very different was that there were no separate sections for what’s changed in all of the specific device versions, which seemed to be the usual presentation in the past.
But I guess what they really needed to do is get everyone ready for how Siri will change. I give credit to them for showing what seemed to be real-time performance for the different queries they did. Some of them took quite a while to return something. I think that the Apple before they messed up the Siri that was promised in 2024 would have shortened those sequences for the presentation.
Excellent article and it worries me they said nothing about HomePods as they are my only sound system! However, I manage to operate mine part ot the time without Siri. The Home app, on iOS (but not on macOS) lets me access a selection of recently played music, and I can juggle which HomePods play them, all without Siri. Plus, of course, I can cast sound to them from my Mac or iPhone.
Maybe not, but it’s good to know that they are focussed on their customers.
I started putting my secondary iPad (mostly used as a remote control) into airplane mode when not using it. Before that, I’d have to charge it daily, now it lasts about 5 days between charges.
I don’t really buy that. Ads in Maps and other subscription enshittification they’re pushing tells me they still value short-term cashflow more than they value their customers’ user experience and the long-term loyalty that renders.
I would say they don’t like bad press and in the case of Liquid Glass and their software QC they finally reached the point where even they couldn’t ignore the prevailing consensus. And I’m happy that has forced them to correct at least some wrongs. I look forward to seeing what else John Ternus will rectify.
Hate to be negative, but it is next to exactly zero that in the news presented here that I find in any way useful at all. The exception would be that somethings might get a bit faster and that maybe I can get rid of the annoying Grammarly to only use Apple (where I could maybe also add spellings when it of course cannot spell properly some words as usual). I really wished I could see one more example of something useful coming up, but there are no traces here … .
Out of curiousity, what sort of announcements were you looking forward to from WWDC?
Keep in mind that WWDC is focused on new/changed APIs for developers to use. The primary goal is to get the developers interested in new OS features, so their apps will be ready to use those features in six months, when the OS actually ships.
If you’re primarily interested in new hardware products, you’re probably not going to hear much about it at WWDC unless it’s a massive change (e.g., new processor architecture, or completely new kind of device) that they need to get in developers’ hands.
Hi Adam, I was not expecting much and I have come to expect less for each new macOS release, which I also think is natural and what to be expected as progress is not as “big” as it once used to be, when you really felt you had to get a new computer every time a new macOS was released. That said, AI might require a new computer now if you are on M2, like me. (I am working as Mac consultant since 2000.) Asking Siri to create a new note will take longer than just creating it … things like that. But, yes, also a bit frustrated that they might not focus on more important things like improving Mail, Contacts, Messages – which really would make me change my tune. Also the UI is not the best (but we agree there). Trying to think: maybe they could warn users of Safari tabs consuming too much memory and the most important thing I miss in Safari is date stamps with time for visited websites, just like one have in Chrome based browsers. Giving us an iCloud syncable Notes app that uses plain text (just like FSNotes, which is not working so well). Etc – mostly very many small annoyances. That said, I just noted that people on the same early M-macs seems to have less problems now than they used to do on the same Macs, so in general there is some progress. On the other hand, if you want to laugh at Apple’s incompetence, then try and migrate users between Macs remotely … ;-) – it is a bit fun seeing the exact same procedure can give different results … . Apple somehow also seem to think you can these days (or maybe they always thought so) could have Wi-Fi and Ethernet both connected at the same time…. oh well.
PS: If Apple could get Adam back to using Apple Mail, that would be real news! ;-)
(Mail problems still around, apart from corrupting databases etc): Column layout still sometimes change the column widths choosen. Being able to set the main mail window to open as default when clicking the Mail icon in dock instead of having to use cmd+0 all the time. Safari: Merging all tabs in some windows instead of all windows. Contacts: being able to drag more than one card after each other to a group without restarting the app (works intermittently). etc.)
I was struck in the keynote by the live demos, which did not hide the lag between initiating various AI tasks and getting the answer back. In the real world, I don’t think the lags are necessarily a problem, but they really stood out in a (pre-recorded) live demo when there was nothing but a guy standing there in silence waiting for a task to complete. I imagine Apple felt the pressure to show a real demo, rather than overpromising something that didn’t quite exist.
Related note: I found myself growing annoyed at Google a few times today when I entered straightforward searches that would have returned answers almost instantaneously a year or two ago, but today I needed to wait for the AI answer to appear first.
Yes, normal searches are often better. Still like the Gemini answers – I put Perplexity in another browser for search but mostly find myself switching to Safari for more normal searches. And even in Gemini I very often prefer to read the linked articles as they tell more about how reliable the info is. (DuckDuckGo let you avoid the AI, but it was not so good earlier so most often use Google anyway, even if it is not so good.) AI can be good but it often feels like it is needing more help than me.
I can’t speak to these particular things, but tweaking small stuff is quite a lot of what Apple talked about in the keynote. So hopefully you will get some of what you want!
As far as me using Mail, I suspect that ship has sailed. I’ve never liked it, and I doubt I ever will. It just doesn’t work the way I think.
Fair enough – I feel like I could not lead a meaningful life if I was forced to use Gmail web interface, so as it is.
Maybe this belongs in a new Topic (I searched “os27 EU” and no results were found here for one; @ace please move if so or tell and I’ll try to delete and start anew).
I find some of the hundreds of nips and tucks to be useful but most not. Was not considering updating to 27 at all until I heard the “AI” part is no being deployed in the EU, where I live.
But I wonder how that works? maybe it was clarified in a developer session? ie, how can they not deploy it geographically? I have US based and EU base Apple Accounts. I have a VPN service. Will the components, for instance, not be included in the update when connecting from either an EU Apple Account or an EU IP? Or will the GB of data be shoved thru the interwebs pipes and installed on my devices but not be usable when logged in to an EU based Apple Account, etc?
I was going to comment that you can use -ai to eliminate the ai blurb at the top of a google question, but apparently google patched that right out :(
I was fine with it for a while, but now I use Mimestream on the Mac. On the iPhone, the Gmail app is pretty good, though I’ve been testing Mimestream there too, along with other apps. There are many, many alternatives to Apple Mail these days.
There’s no way of knowing how Apple will prevent EU users from accessing some of the new AI tools until it happens. My suspicion is that it will hinge on the Apple Account specifying an EU country since Apple wouldn’t want to remove the feature from US users traveling to the EU.
Yes, now I remember I think you mentioned Mimestream before. I would likely use another app if it wasn’t that I need to know Apple Mail well as most of my customers use it. Maybe there is a scientific study out there, but believe something like 75-80% of Mac users use it. Then maybe 10% Outlook and 15% webmail and like 1-2% the other clients. I wish we had an outsider app like Eudora used to be that could really have made Apple work harder on their offering, but they have never worked too hard fending off contenders. Anyway it is good there are many options.
You can still do it, but you need to add
udm=14to the Google search query parameters. The easiest way to do that is by adding a customized search provider to your browser.In Safari, you’ll need an extension like Customize Search Engine or StopTheMadness.
If you’re using the Customize Search Engine extension, set the Search URL to
https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&client=safari&q=%sIf you have StopTheMadness, configure a Redirect replacement from
https://www.google.com/search?tohttps://www.google.com/search?udm=14&(You can also do this, without an extension in Firefox or Chromium browsers, but I don’t want to clutter this thread too much.)