Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.
It was literally the first specific announcement they made after they finished their introductions. Not anything iPhone related; they announced that Liquid Glass on macOS would move towards the older design. Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond.
That and the guy who announced it last year fled to Facebook of all places.
>Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond.
Worth remembering too that this isn't merely about "complaints", Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data, but a lot of people (even technical people) may choose to check the box to share with Apple. Anecdotally, I myself and a LOT of other people have stuck with macOS 15 or earlier, but Apple should have a lot of hard data on it and adoption curves vs the past.
A real reaction does certainly suggest that this wasn't just a tempest in a teacup, but that they really weren't seeing the adoption on Macs they expected.
As far as I know, the best data the rest of us have is Google Trends. And based on that, it really does look like Liquid Glass elicited the largest negative reaction that Apple has ever had to an OS release.
"How to Switch to Android" hit 3x its all time peak, "iPhone revert update", hit 4x its all-time peak, "iPhone slow" hit 8x its all time peak, "iPhone bad now" hit 5x its all time peak, "iPhone fix battery" hit 3x its all-time peak (and 14x its five-year peak)
I mostly looked at this for iOS, but searches like "macOS slow", "mac slow", "fix mac battery", "fix mac", etc. all show similar hockey-stick jumps as Liquid Glass rolled out.
If this means a sudden highest-ever 10x shift in customer dissatisfaction - 1000% - then that has to have been significant.
There are probably other parts as well. Dissatisfaction against Apple for App Store has been high, may be for some Liquid Glass was the last straw. Omarchy had the highest number of Apple user switch to Linux. 100,000 downloads may be small numbers by Apple standards but even if half of that were developers coming from Apple Mac I think it is a pretty big shift.
The worst part, intentionally or not they left macOS 26 as the last release for all the Intel user.
> The worst part, intentionally or not they left macOS 26 as the last release for all the Intel user.
I cannot believe that Apple is that insidious to have planned a milquetoast release to be the last one for Intel, but I totally believe that Apple is insidious enough to see how they can benefit from it.
That they're literally marketing macOS 27 as we've listened to your complaints about 26 completely deflates anyone's interest in running macOS 26 on Intel. Their Intel users are being marketed hard to switch to Apple Silicon.
> Omarchy had the highest number of Apple user switch to Linux.
DHH's dotfiles repo is not a viable replacement for macOS, I promise you. Linux is fun, but macOS is already enough of a *nix for most developers, and it works well without much tinkering.
You can easily install bash or any other shell on macOS, and set it as your default with chsh, same as on any other *nix. (Also easy to make the harness use a non-login shell by aliasing it with a $SHELL override.)
I and most of my dev friends didn’t update. The reality is that many of us work in a web browser and an IDE all day writing software for non-Apple platforms. The only incentive I have to update is new and compelling OS features or bugfixes. Since major security patches will likely be backported, that just leaves new features and the reality is that macOS’ only new “feature” worth talking about was Liquid Glass considering their AI offering was also an absolute joke.
Given the other emphasis placed on performance improvements (likely in service to helping to mask the slowness of LLM Siri) I’m really hoping this is a modern Snow Leopard release. I’m looking forward to the Apple nerds digging and offering a compelling narrative about why I should care about updating.
And to add on to that, if this is a bug-fix bonanza release, hopefully we’ll also see a lot of positive movement during the beta period to keep shipping fixes. We’re getting a freaking EQ on AirPods!!!!111!!1! It seems Apple is finally taking some things to heart about listening to their users and I’m 10000% here for it.
The other side of it is forced obsolescence where new OS makes your existing hardware slower. So I wouldn't upgrade my phone beyond iOS18.x purely for performance reasons but if there's a killer feature in a new iPhone I would still consider buying it because its hardware was built to handle the new effects and extra ram it needs.
Yes, anecdotally almost every I know with an older iPhone (14 or older) is not upgrading their iOS. It’s rare for non-technical people to even care about the specifics of a new iOS, but they’ve heard too many stories of slow down and battery usage issues.
It’s a big problem, because running an old iOS is very bad for security. There’s still new vulnerabilities popping up in iOS, especially in the image and video decoders, that are fixed in newer point releases of iOS 26. I’m not sure if Apple is back porting all the fixes. I would definitely be a little afraid, because iMessage previews are a common attack vector and are zero-click. I don’t think anyone really turns off automatic previews; they’re very convenient.
It's still nice to see a company not double down on a fall! They seem to have been on a full year of tech debt and optimisation.
I still would have liked a more genuine walk back (they sold it as "iterations and adjustments" as if the rewinded stuff were new ideas) but overall reassuring.
Yeah. It's clear they've been hearing the complaints. Not just Liquid Glass, but they even talked about the inconsistent menu bar icons and problems with rounded corner radii (among a bunch of improvements). I'm excited that this is basically Snow Leopard part II, for those who remember.
Snow Leopard was a goddamn mess, everyone forgets. Yeah, 10.6.8 was rock solid. In 10.6.0 there was a bug that erased your user folder if you logged into the guest account. It was NOT a good release at the start.
Snow Leopard even happened in the first place because Apple's A team was busy with iPhone, and iPhone has priority.
You will see that during this era Mac OS X was relegated to stepchild status and received far fewer support.
All this glory is just Steve Jobs selling it to us as a good thing! In the end it worked out, but it was more incidental and a collateral of the iPhone than the public memory likes to admit.
Whoa, didn't realize that was Jony Ive! Good job Jony! Gave both Ferrari and EVs bad press with a single product launch!
A good lesson in not messing with a good thing. If they had just put an electric motor in a classic Ferrari body, it could have been a nice moment for the energy transition.
I think it’s basically recalcitrance. Same as they suddenly turn into the world’s worst devs every time they have to make software for Windows. Apple hates mouses, but many people won’t consider not using one, so they reluctantly make an expensive, pretty, and absolutely terrible mouse to get you over the hump of the macOS switch then keep pushing you along to where they really want you: the giant touchpad, where they do have a moat, and which trains you for the rest of their ecosystem. They even sneak half of that touchpad into the mouse itself, and half of the mouse out, so the transition is oh so easy.
I have been a desktop trackpad user for so long now, I literally don’t want to use a mouse for anything except playing video games. The amount of flexibility offered by a good trackpad just wins most of the time as it is plenty accurate for quickly jumping around on one axis.
With a large enough trackpad, you could even move to a 1:1 type of movement, or add that functionality to a layer for the best of both worlds (like gyro enhanced aiming in games).
I’ve worked with some designers who did what you described with their huge tablets. Use the stylus to turn it into a giant touchpad. Works pretty good.
This is off-topic and it’s especially a waste of attention because it’s a social media meme, not a real problem. People who actually use them don’t spend time talking about it because it means every few months you plug it in long enough for a coffee break, and in return you can use it for many years without the connector breaking.
Even if you set aside the stupid charging situation, it's still a bad mouse. The multitouch capabilities are not well used by the software, and it's the only mouse I've ever used that routinely sends scroll events while I'm just trying to click or drag. Their laptops are pretty good at rejecting accidental touchpad inputs despite those touchpads being quite large, but the mouse is a constant source of unintentional inputs.
This! It is a bad design because it is a compromise. It is flat because of the need of multitouch, which doesn't get used. And because of this flatness it is not ergonomic to hold it.
It is neither a good trackpad replacement nor a good mouse design.
I can’t say I’ve ever had that problem. Multitouch still works great on the one I bought in 2010 after near daily usage. You’re not required to like it, of course, but I think it’s a question of personal preferences more than an objective good/bad verdict.
Do you use a Magic Mouse? It’s really not that bad if your only computer use consists of social media and the occasional budgeting spreadsheet.
And before you mention it, yes the charging cable. In reality, plugging it in for literally 1 minute will get you enough battery to last hours. 5 minutes will get you an entire day. Normal people plug it in and go get a coffee or pee and then it’s fine until they log off for the day. Could it better? Of course, but it’s not so large an issue that they are losing customers on it, so it is what it is.
You’re not the target market for an Apple mouse and that’s okay.
You’ve convinced me. I hope on the next iPhone, they make it so you have to put the MagSafe puck on the front where the screen is instead of that back where it is now.
Unfortunately I had to learn this when I got my first mac.
You don't have to go very deep into the ecosystem to encounter things that... well, things bottom out at shallow.
Looking back... glossy displays. flat keyboards without curvature to center your fingers on the keys. more and more hurdles to using macos as a technical person. prematurely missing USB-A. memory/storage that's not expandable. Dongles everywhere as a checkbox item/workaround.
and of course, anything that superficially seems to be a mouse.
Man did I despise that keyboard. I went from hating that to adoring my M3. Which feels good because I loved my MacBook before those butterfly switches, and again I love my MacBook now.
I almost left apple entirely over those stupid switches lol.
Yeah I’m surprised by what a design misstep it was. The shiny corners of icons on iOS look so tacky and on macOS the corner radius mismatch is crazy. Also not a fan of the “bulbous” shapes of things with excessive rounded corners.
Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts.
That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.
The screenshots are generous. I just spent a few hours in macOS 27 and while yes, some of the absolutely galling and baffling errors have been rolled back, it's still bad.
I cannot help but think: they are such cowards, so afraid of anything that stands out after years of flat design. Like, you can almost feel like there is someone trying to sneak it in, only for it to get squeegeed at the last minute. The buttons could look like classic Aqua ( if they are allowed a background color that is), if it got slammed with a belt sander. Everything has to be too subtle, too toned down, too pale, and too faint, only noticable blown up to 4x on an OLED screen. It's like all they are allowed is "mimiminalizm", just remove, remove, remove, tone down, remove, slavishly, without thought. I'm supposed to cheer they added color back to in-focus window sidebars? First: good lord, what were they thinking? Of course they rolled such an utterly stupid decision back. Second: what color? Some single accent color applied to some whisper thin monochrome squiggles they call icons?
Its still more of the same. In the Installer app, there are windows where the dividing line between toolbar and content is like a 1px 30% grey line on same old bland 20% grey background, and that's with the new "Draw Borders" Accessibility setting turned on.
They can dress it up. Fix the worst issues. I'm thankful for it. Hell, I might not skip this one. But the problem still remains: Liquid Glass was a *bad, flawed* design from the start, whose central principle is contradictory (we'll get out of the way of your content by floating directly in front of your content all the time, in the way). There is no salvaging it.
I would love to be able to have a conversation with the people who decided Liquid Glass was a good idea. The first question would be:
Given all other truly useful things you could implement as well as bug fixes, why did you think that investing time and money on Liquid Glass would deliver useful value to users?
I wonder how much time and money they wasted on something that nobody wanted, cared for, needed or solved any real problem?
My theory is they made Liquid Glass for the Watch first, where (IMHO) it's actually pretty great, and assumed it would translate well to iOS and macOS, which in retrospect it did not.
Excep every time they do a big redesign like this. This happened when they moved away from skeuomorphism in iOS7(?) and then backpedalled hard in the following revision because of negative user feedback. Similar thing happened when they presented the reinvented Safari (I do't think that one even survived through betas). And it is happening now.
It didn't happen when they introduced Leopard, because the new design was legitimately better than the ugly brushed aluminium look that preceeded it.
When they toned down the horrific excesses of skeumorphism (like leather textures) on macOS but still retained some skeumorphic design (e.g., buttons that look like buttons) people were pretty ok with it too. I remember some complaints that the lickable aqua buttons were gone but that wasn't really a serious complaint, just more of a "I kind of liked those gaudy buttons, sad they're gone" type of sentiment.
I bet they planned this before the initial release and actually had this capability then and there. Just needed some guinea pigs (aka their users) to learn more and establish the trend.
Maybe I’m misremembering but I feel like Steve Jobs era Apple was much better at admitting mistakes. Nowadays even fiascos like the butterfly keyboard don’t warrant an apology, just a quiet change.
So is Microsoft, albeit a bit late to the party. Taskbar now movable, performance improvements hitting insider builds, MS BUILD half about WSL containers, native coreutils, a dev edition of windows using Winget config to strip all the bloat out, all new system dialogs replacing a good chunk of the old Win32 stuff, WinUI reactor, ability to remove AI models & Copilot from the OS, etc.
Classic case of the reality distortion field here.
How did you do it? I had to set up a Windows 11 Pro install 2 months ago and there was no way to get past the Microsoft Account requirement, I had to create an account, I tried everything (setting up with no network device attached, etc)
Choose "Other options" then click "Domain join instead" you don't actually have to join a domain here, it just has to create a local account. That option won't be present on Home edition though just a heads up.
You can also use an autoattend.xml file on the install ISO to set up a local account (https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/) amongst other things like removing all the windows store apps, etc.
Edition is probably a bit generous (although that's the verbiage they used at the BUILD conference), but its a set of winget configs (works like Ansible) to disable a bunch of stuff, install WSL, starship, coreutils, node, python, whatever other SDKs you want, etc. with one command. https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig
I believe they used the word edition because they plan on offering W365 cloud VMs with this config pre applied.
We could be holding it wrong, and Jobs be correct to point out that many rival phones at the time literally had manuals dictating how to hold their phones to avoid reception issues.
The antenna designer could have done a better job, preventing the situation, thereby not dragging Jobs into a PR storm.
Jobs could have handled the situation and communication _significantly_ better.
They try so hard to do a polished presentation that everything is kinda fake and unauthentic. I don't understand how this attitude survived so many years.
It feels fake, because they speak in a way that sounds unnatural and overelaborate.
It is so long, with so many unnecessary sentences. And it feels like everything is said at least twice; First a generic statement about the new feature. Then a specific example, or a deeper explanation of what the first generic statement was. Then a demo. And then a conclusion to the future.
The old Steve Jobs keynotes focused on the most interesting things, but now it feels like they are afraid not to include everything. So everything gets diluted.
It would help a lot if they would stop saying the same lines:"And now...", "We cannot wait for you to try our new XXXX ... ", or "We could not be more excited to...", "We are excited to... ".
That is not how regular Americans speak. I think it's some weird American corporate speak that has metastasized in Apple keynote presentations. ꉂ(˵˃ ᗜ ˂˵)
It is, however, how a lot of Silicon Valley speak. Source: lived there for a couple of decades.
And to an outside ear, it does just come across as completely fake.
Jobs' "reality distortion field" was just the conviction in his voice as he spoke. There is no, none, nada, zero conviction in the way Apple deliver these missives. It reeks of corporate America and is therefore not trustworthy.
I'm also kind of surprised that no-one there has altered the format. There are a lot of smart people at Apple...
You can do that with and without fake discussions.
One of the main reasons that killed my desire to move to the US was the amount of fake questions during - on a paper - friendly discussions, when the point of those questions was just, and only just, visibility. An average American non corporate discussion is worse than a non-American corporate one. And that seems to be pretty global to me.
My brother and my sister-in-law watched “Somebody feeds Phil”, and we watched together the Sydney episode and after that some others, because I’d just announced that I’d move to Australia soon. That Sydney episode had quite normal discussions for us, Europeans. Of course, people had agenda, but they still reacted to what response they got. Even if things were cut, most times people seemed to react to something else from before. Then the next episode was from Las Vegas. And it had full with questions where nobody responded to the answers, nobody cared what the response was. And they kept those in the episode. There was a point when Phil asked the people in a line one-by-one what they work. And they basically just listed it, Phil had zero responses to any answers. Zero reactions from anybody. The point wasn’t to engage with the answers or the people. There was another case, when a girl talked about her shop. There wasn’t a single sentence which was organically connected to another. Phil and the girl had different agenda and they had to perform based on those, no matter what. And I was enough now there to say that that happens way more frequently than elsewhere. The next one was from Manila. And there were organic discussions again. I’ve never seen that clearly this phenomenon which bugs me. Of course, the usual scripting which happens with these shows, even helped to make this more announced. Probably, the people talking in that episode were way less interesting, but still as a visual to what annoys me is quite good.
Of course, I had good conversations also over there, and I had bad ones elsewhere in this sense. Heck, I did similar things before, but maybe this is the exact reason why I’m so sensitive to this, because it annoyed me greatly when I did it. But on average, it was the worse over the pond. Especially on the extremities. But even in day-to-day discussions. It was annoying that I have to peal down an additional layer with anybody to get real answers, which is not needed basically anywhere else.
It's not "fake" - it's cultural differences where what is intended to come across as polite by Americans[1] can be seen as insincere by people from elsewhere. On the flip side, Americans often view foreign behavior that's intended to be neutral as unfriendly, uncaring or cold.
1. e.g. lots of smiling, use of superlatives like "great"/"amazing" to describe mediocre items/effort/results
Execs are ‘super excited’ about everything. There is no dynamic range at all. They appear to have no opinions and no judgement because their opinion is always that everything is awesome. When the audience knows that stuff is either normal-level ok or actually fucked up, this message is insulting to receive.
Worse, it trains people downstream that shiny happy is the only valid comms. Hard to escalate a concern when you don’t know how to start the message with how super excited you are about it.
If everything is at a “10” in linguistic intensity (“Incredible”, “Legendary”, “GOAT”) then nothing is exceptional.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of a Dorito chip.
I’m American and this marketing/corporate speak drives me up the wall. I have a harder time respecting the judgement of people who thoughtlessly speak this way.
Ah yes British, the famously direct people who say things like "Maybe I haven’t explained this very well", "I’ll bear it in mind", or "How interesting!" which anyone unfamiliar with the culture would interpret to be the opposite of what was actually meant.
"I may be wrong", but perhaps 'Americans rarely sound authentic' to you simply because you're just more familiar with your own culture's idiosyncrasies?
Anyway, I love the Brits; no flame intended. I come in peace! :-)
As a Brit, at Apple, I once got dinged on a performance review because I apparently wasn't a team player - I was apparently always putting down people's projects in the group meetings.
"But, I've never done that. I'm pretty much always positive about things people present. I even said some of them weren't bad"
Yeah, high praise comes in subtle flavours if you're a Brit.
I think this “awesome”, “amazing”, “super exciting” phase came much later than the moon walking era. Remember it’s been over 50 years since humans walked on the moon. Much has changed.
See these old videos, where people talk in a straightforward way:
Speaking as a Brit, our national trait is generally too understate things. So even saying what you mean, directly, comes off as a bit immodest and hyping it up in sales pitches sounds shady.
Americans generally say what they mean a bit more, so I think their mid point is just different.
Speaking as a Brit, I couldn’t disagree more. I have no trouble understanding a wide variety of Europeans in a corporate environment, but sometimes struggle to even understand the basics of what Americans are trying to communicate, let alone the nuances of their position.
It’s like ‘American corporate’ is a totally different language that I don’t speak. The words sound the same, but that’s about it.
This is true for a lot of Americans too. God help me if I have to sit and listen to my CEO talk about anything and have to explain it to someone afterwards. It's just Buzzword Buzzword Agentic Buzzword Great Buzzword Exciting Buzzword Future Buzzword Growth Buzzword Great Great Great Exciting Exciting Exciting Buzzword.
As other comment suggested, the way I see it Americans are addicted to hyperbolas. Instead of "Thank you" it's "Thank you so much". So when you genuinely want to thank someone because that person went above and beyond (saved your life, avoided you a substantial hassle, etc.) then it's difficult to convey that.
American or corporate? I'm surprised that corporate talk overseas isn't overly enthusiastic! As an American, most of the stream has sounded very 'California' mixed with corporate.
A lot of corporate speak is developed in the US and then companies all over the world spread it around. Often the adoption happens without deep understanding of the concept, and without adaptation to local realities. And thus it feels much more unnatural.
Small talk is all lies. Almost all praise is fake. And it all drives me insane. I can fit in at work just fine, I can appear joyful and excited to come to work, I have 30 years of practice with it. But I avoid it whenever possible because it is all lies.
Americans appear to oversell everything because people get mad if you don’t.
“Why can’t you just be positive?!”
Because I’m not going to lie. I can’t fake praise, and I won’t even try. Being positive while lying is immediately obvious and it undermines the positive attitude that you’ve painted on. If anything, I take a negative message when I see someone faking a positive manner of speech.
> But "almost all praise is fake" and "small talk is all lies" feels like a pretty depressing place to end up?
No, not really. I just see it as a tool that normal people use to keep themselves happy. And that's not depressing, to me. It's kind of ... annoying that people are so fragile that they have to do that in order to have a "normal" day, but I can't fault anyone for doing things that make them happy. I wasn't given that opportunity; I was weird and if I didn't conform then I got in trouble. Yet normal people LOSE THEIR FLIPPING MINDS when asked to consider my behaviors normal and to consider my various physical movements as normal and tolerable. You have never seen such orchestrated and immediate pushback in your life, I promise. But I was forced to do what they refuse to do, which is to accommodate the other side. So, if anything, I'm angry about it all. Not depressed.
I don't need those platitudes to feel happy or normal, I need to be alone to feel happy, most of the time.
Praise given in private is usually legitimate. I value that. I feel that. Praise given in front of others (like ceremonies and ritual award reception stuff) are the fakest fake activity known to humanity. The ceremonies are for normal people. People like me can simply be privately told "well done" and given a piece of paper that they can look at, and maybe a raise, and that's enough. And maybe a mention during the ceremony that I will not be attending so that people know about it, if they're interested.
One thing about Jobs is that he was genuinely excited about much of the stuff he was showing, and even if you knew he was showing some useless BS (like coverflow, something I remember he absolutely loved), it made it interesting to watch. If today's presenters are in any way excited about what they're showing (or, more likely, talking about), that excitement has been polished away by all the takes they probably had to film.
They're not genuinely excited. Because there isn't much to be genuinely excited about. The "incredible new super-exciting developments" are usually "okay, I guess."
Once in a while you get something like the M series chips, but the rest is reliably mid - functional, maybe a few nice tweaks, probably some better-than-average design, but nothing revolutionary.
So all of the "We know you're gonna love it!" doesn't land, because it's literally scripted and rehearsed, not spontaneous.
Jobs was rehearsed and passionate, which was part of the appeal.
It's debatable if Cook has ever been genuinely excited about anything.
Cook is excited about shaving a few dollars off the BOM, a few days off fulfillment times, and adding a few basis points to the stock price. It has made him a great CEO for Wall St., Apple employees with equity, and a lot of retirement funds.
But I can't recall him ever using a computer. I cannot, in my mind's eye, conjure an image of him sitting in front of a Mac and using it, whereas fuzzy black and white images of Jobs' messy-like-mine home office with a Power Mac G5 shaped external hard drive on his desk next to a 30" Cinema Display are trivial to remember. Like, when was the last time we saw him organically using any of the products the company sells?
Maybe it's just because he doesn't have the rizz, so I've just never seen the pictures, but he just feels like a dude who never goes into the Settings app and tweaks anything.
They try to imitate Steve's diction and mannerisms, without replicating his ability to concisely focus on the few things he wanted to stick with the audience.
That parental controls presentation felt like the same 3 bullet points delivered 4 times over with the vibe of a group presentation where every team member had to present but there was only 1 slide of content between the bunch.
It's a well known fact that it is quite difficult for some parents to setup and use parental controls, I believe it was just to fully explain it to people that might not know much about how parental controls work.
It used to be a developer presentation. Now the main WWDC keynote is just another product-focused Apple event (since it might as well be one if the tech press is already flying out for it), and the more in-the-weeds developer talks are held on other days.
Apple presenters are coached on how to speak, how to stand/move, what to do with their hands, etc.
I can understand how it might seem culty, but it's in the service of clear communication to a global audience. Anyone who represents a company to important customers and/or the public goes through similar media training.
The comment is about how everyone in their videos does it. The over-use of it is the issue, like when you say a word too much and your brain stops understanding what it means.
> It feels fake, because they speak in a way that sounds unnatural and overelaborate.
I’ve been to a few official Apple Developer events. What I’ve noticed is that they all have the same presentation style, to the point that it feels almost cult-like.
I really miss, as a late 90's/early 2000's apple fan, seeing Steve come up and joke with the audience then just show off real products or features and why they're cool. They really sterilized this whole thing after he passed. It's as exciting as a Microsoft keynote now.
Just watch a normal presentation like Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3, it's not iPhone level earth shattering but he made it fun.
I remember one where there were technical issues so Steve just started telling stories about the old days with Woz... impossible to imagine that from ANY tech company today
Not to spoil the magic but the plan B dialog was somewhat rehearsed too. Award for the best recovery lines goes to James Dempsey and the "I Love (NS)View" song. "I, uh, forgot to mention up front that this song is a beta version. It's feature complete, mind you, but I won't have the words memorized until October..."
Probably but even the fact that they're rehearsing time-filling stories is a more human trait than the pre-recorded months in advance videos that are usually shown today.
lol, I have a few other memories of Steve for when there were technical issues during the keynote. WiFi congestion and dead digital camera still pop up in my memory every now and then.
Someone with no money must survive with short term thinking: hunt and kill a wombat on the savanna or something. From there you work your way away from short term thinking; you might have enough to get through the week already, so the threat of starvation is more long term. Eventually with enough in the bank you have nearly no urgency; you could conceivably mishandle your bonds when they mature in twenty years or something. But with enough money, literally the only risk is short term thinking and immediacy. Bending over to pick up a penny is not going to even be considered.
If my ship ever really comes in and docks at the harbor I’m going to remember to keep my wallet full of cash, so I can stop and get that strawberry ice cream cone without worrying about the long term consequences, which are all I would have left.
Sure, but I think it’s also b/c the target audience for these keynotes has shifted. Given their immense market cap, now there’s an increased fiduciary responsibility to control how presentation lands, such as earnings reports, which comes at the expense of the fun.
It’s not money they started it during Covid and it stuck because presumably Cook likes the little movie making bits they had in it judging from other things like the Mother Earth skit he did.
Would be a welcome change it if the incoming CEO went back to live on stage imho
Also—and this sounds like a small thing but it's really not—when Steve said something like "we have some really exciting updates for you today," he really truly believed it. I just went back and re-watched his appearances on WSJ D1, D2 and D3, and he was actually psyched about every little iTunes update.
It's not just Apple, Microsoft but whole corporate world, and hell - even open source projects use same sterilized safe language of "we're so excited" in communication with users, customers. That's the actual reality distortion field.
The uncanny hands-but-not-fingers movements they all do really bothers me. Their hands flop around but stay completely limp. Like they're robots who heard that humans move their hands when talking but don't have any fine motor control.
Yeah, the biggest problem is really that they all have the same approach, so these specific details stick out more through repetition. They don't let their presenters speak in their own voice or in their own presentation style. It's ironic for the company that made that 1984 commercial. The attempt at using different speakers to add variety actually ends up doing the opposite because the similarities become even more evident when a dozen people all behave in the same way.
This has been a thing for all tech companies for years.
According to what I was told by some FANNG people (I've never worked for them myself) some employees were/are were sent to public speaking classes after being hired specifically to teach socially awkward programmers how to talk on stage, and this is what they teach them, weird hand movements and all.
People smiling while using Siri and holding their phones 2 meters away from their faces looks genuinely disturbing and fake. We are at that point where I hope their next stream will be AI generated so it looks more natural.
It seems very disturbing in the current environment somehow, like nothing bad ever happens in Apple world, when in reality many things are falling apart.
For example the part about cameras, where they seem to advertise them not as security products but as a lifestyle aid.
The rehearsed marketing is so strong that it comes across in a very perverse way.
Apple is as much an aspirational lifestyle company as they are anything else. That's been their marketing aim for quite a while. It's less about the tech and more of a message of "This is the person/lifestyle you can be if you buy our products"
Of course, but it’s interesting to see how they apply that marketing mold to security devices, by making up use-cases which nobody is buying them for. It contrasts with the crash detection and health stuff where realistic scenarios are shown.
Ok, maybe it’s not that interesting on reflection, and how are they even supposed to advertise it, with burglars?
are these even real people there? they look so perfectly orchestrated in every hand and body movement, void of any mistake but also soul. you really can't get further away of a real human connection than this.
I think Apple can't find their voice since Steve Jobs passed/stopped doing the presentations. Thats why it feels inauthentic. I imagine its also hard to really feel "best (iphone|ipad|macos|etc) yet" when they are debuting features that existed elsewhere for a while. Its just a massive disconnect from anyone but fans. The same could be said for innovative features, whats left to innovate on smart phones?
In some ways both things are like having to be the person coming on after an amazing presentation or comic or musical act. How do you follow it?
You have to remember that Steve spent months, stories say half a year, preparing for the keynote. Arguments would get so heated he’d fire people and bring them back the next day to continue.
Hate him or love him; he knew that was the single largest stage for Apple and put the effort into each one. The keynotes today are like Apple overall, a fantastic organization that is starting to drift toward.. fake.
I wonder how Steve would've felt about the nagware for new AI generated pictures in the "new" Keynote CrEaToR StUdIo app, considering that the app was basically tailor made specifically for his needs in those keynotes.
A great unacknowledged gag would be Craig losing an additional button on his blue shirt every time they cut away, so by the end it's full-Scarface unbuttoned down to his belt.
They communicate the products and product changes quickly, comprehensively and accurately. This was a change that happened at the beginning of COVID, but it turns out most people liked it so it stuck.
Many of us don't want to watch people fumble with presentation problems. We don't want the lead in, setup, filler banter, so on.
I'll take this sort of "you spend your time perfecting your presentation instead of wasting thousands/millions of people's time doing it live"
I like it I think it’s sort of cool to see the different environments around Apple Park and be able to hear from a lot of different employees without having to watch a parade over the stage
Seeing people whining and gnashing and bitching, in vein it should be observed, about this sort of nonsense is so uproarious and, quite honestly, pathetic.
Like the root post whining that it's too polished. Christ. Get a grip and go touch grass if this is the sort of pathetic nonsense someone actually takes the time to whine about.
It's actually funny how every single presentation like this always gets topped by profoundly boring people complaining about some aspect of the presentation: The people aren't standing right or moving the way you want. OMG look at his jacket. That joke wasn't funny. Etc. Christ.
Yes, most people just want the information, not some sort of organic, "all-natural" presentation.
I didn't feign to comment about presentation style until someone's complaint sat atop the entire thread. As always it gets sidetracked into meta and arrogantly held personal preferences. Could it be HN otherwise?
So I say I like it and why. To, in again classic HN style, to be met by someone declaring that no, nobody on the entire planet likes it.
Upset? LOL, no, I guarantee you nothing on this shakes fists at clouds site upsets me. Humours me? Sure.
Are you one of those people who make that mistake? Because nowhere is that inferred in my post.
I enjoy the presenters and the enthusiasm and nuance that they bring to the presentation. I do not need to see someone figure out how to switch a display or change a slide or fumble with wireless that is overwhelmed in a hall with a thousand wireless devices or... All of that is utterly unnecessary, so pre-recording it, doing all of the post production, reshooting so you don't trip people up on misreads / mispronunciations / fumbles / technical issues, etc, gets the human + the information without the ancillary bullshit.
It's actually funny because I don't stream Google or nvidia presentations for this same reason (I just wait for engadget or someone to just give the bullet list recap), and I suspect many/most of the people whining and gnashing about this one being "too produced" don't either. Somehow it always ends up being 80% in the weeds nonsense.
> We don't want the lead in, setup, filler banter, so on.
Wait...they still don't do that?
Every one of the dozen or so speaker changes during that presentation involved a snippet of some jaunty bland corpo-pop song and some swoopy animation. Filler banter? They had a flying fucking VW Bus!
I'll take some sweaty nerd walking out on stage to applause and tripping on their shoelaces over that every day (except the Bus bit that was actually pretty well made)
I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud. You could very quickly see a feature sink when Apple announced features where the audience went 'meh'.
Now they completely control the narrative.
But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations. It all seems fake with the same woolly business talk (everything is an 'experience' now, 'app experiences', etc.).
I certainly long back for the days where anything could happen, Jobs would work to convince the audience and Bertrand Serlet would come on and troll Microsoft.
Currently streaming the presentation, but it has mostly gone to the background as it's so insanely boring.
Their audience are no longer the people in the room. The audience is the people watching the video or livestream which is great because that means you don't need thousands of dollars and an invite to go to WWDC.
>I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud.
I feel like I'm about to tell you there is no Santa or something, but did you really not know that Apple always stuffed audiences with Apple employees? Of the remainder it both through intentional and natural selection leaned towards sycophants. Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback?
It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
>But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations
Well I have only rarely heard anyone who liked the slow, plodding old-style presentation. So...
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
I was in the audience at WWDC 2019 and lemme tell you, there ain't no whoopin and hollering from the paid shills in the audience that could've been louder than the massive "oooooooof lol whut" let out by 1500 people when Ternus announced the Pro Display Stand would cost $999.
> Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback?
It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
While I agree with you, I think even the controlled audience mattered.
The audience, even if they were largely Apple employees + journalists, did not know what was gonna be revealed. And there weren’t literal cue cards.
So you would never see the audience boo, but there were several situations where the Apple presenters expected cheering but got polite clapping instead, or cheering which was very evidently just the sycophantic employees (or the team that worked on something).
When something was truly exciting, the cheering reflected that in a way it didn’t when the announcement wasn’t.
Two very different examples of this were the Snow Leopard reveal, where the excitement could be felt throughout the presentation, culminating with the $29 price, and the iPhone reveal with the 3 devices in 1 gimmick.
(Aside from clearly not an Apple employee, Jobs' way of taking the question is brilliant. Yes I know this was probably not the keynote, but it's a big, risky, filmed WWDC event.)
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
Yes, let's resort to personal attacks. There are a lot of things that are better now. Apple Keynotes are not one of them.
You linked to a "fireside chat" with Steve Jobs, consultant, returning to a highly dysfunctional Apple. The video is almost 30 years ago.
If that's your evidence to rebut me, lol.
>Yes, let's resort to personal attacks
You took that as a personal attack? That is incredibly weird. It was a general observation about the sort of perspectives that top HN, but not in the general world, or even general technology. You don't have to believe it.
Like seriously, currently the top post to a discussion about Apple unveiling an array of software improvements is some guy whining and bitching about the presentation, whining that it isn't like the olden days.
These events used to just be for developers and press but they've seemed to recognize that these events have become major marketing opportunities and will get clipped on social media ad nauseum so they started (over) polishing them
Oddly, the strange handheld look and constant reframing of the talking head shots are pulling me wildly out of focus and distracting me terribly. Wonder what drove the choice to do it.
Now they are showing their AI image generator. It looks about two generations behind, so it's essentially slopmaxxing. Really horrible and unauthentic looking. "Take a picture of your friend, then make a funny picture of her holding a cake." How about no?
The bits that are fine: removing distractions from photos, extensions to the edges, fixing color/exposure etc.
In a time where people are increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry & billionaires the imagery Apple puts forward of a literally siloed utopian ultra wealthy landscape probably does rub people the wrong way, at least at a subconscious level.
In the past Apple has been pretty good at anticipating and responding to shifting cultural dynamics. I wonder if they'll recognize and adjust?
I'm not sure it actually rubs people the wrong way, given Apple's sales numbers. Apple positions themselves as an aspirational brand. Everything they do is on purpose to enforce that. When people are upset at reality most people look for an escape into something else, not dive further into whats actually happening.
The siloed utopian landscape is the point. Apple tries to sell a modern, clean lifestyle status symbol. They are selling products for the person you hope you become, not the person you are right now. "Buy an iPhone, and this is what your life could look like."
Same deal as fad diets and gym memberships, its the illusion of being able to buy your way into a lifestyle without doing the hard work. Apple is selling an identity.
I agree with that, but I don't think it's incompatible with my observation.
Apple has often in the past positioned itself as an aspirational product for those who aim to be tasteful, talented, beautiful and wealthy.
The risk of becoming too disconnected from reality is that the typical person may stop aspiring to the sort of rich-person reality Apple presents. Think of how many of the symbols of wealth of prior generations, like fine tableware, were rejected by younger generations.
Under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
I think it's because Apple would have to provide every competitor (including ones running off-device with no confidential compute) with the same level of access Siri AI would get, which poses a lot of security and privacy concerns Apple would never allow third-party developers to get access to even with a TCC consent prompt (like reading and sending iMessages).
No, it's more that those apps needs to be able to make all of the tool calls Siri AI can make, which would allow third-party developers to collect data they shouldn't have access to.
App developers can already access the on-device foundational models through an API, but I don't think many developers want to do that because there are better models.
That's the way to phrase it if you want to ignore or downplay the leverage that big tech companies have over their users to get them to consent to shady business practices using dark patterns. But this wouldn't be an issue to begin with if it was safe to assume that users fully understand what an app will do with their data, and if it was safe to assume that the app's data-handling practices could not drastically change at the developer's whims.
Apple doesn't trust other providers. See, for example, the ongoing attempts by Facebook & co to exfiltrate as much data as possible. A theoretical Facebook alternative here to super-Siri would have a pipe to slurp up the entire phone's data.
This kind of thing overlaps with the anti-competitive practices driven by Apple's MBAs (like the whole thing with Epic), but it's a genuine concern and one their engineering people think about a lot.
That sounds legit, but do you think its out of scope? Scam texts and emails result in exfiltrated data, maybe they have to require iMessage and iCloud Mail too?
If Facebook's Meta-Siri is being sketchy, that's a problem with Meta-Siri. Take it off the market, bring down the law. Promote competition, and bad actors must be made to loose. Can we not just status-quo fallacy that re dysfunctional consumer protections? or at maybe agree that the perfect-world scope is one that puts exfiltrators in jail, not just rejected from the app store.
Instead we'll just have Siri AI and Google Assistant AI, and no decent competition. I guess maybe we'll get a Meta phone, if the only way to compete is on the entire mobile computing vertical.
Is the end state that countries regulate app stores and approve apps? Apple has legit concerns. The majority of users would happily sell their own data for some tiny benefit. However, like you say, Apple has a perceived or real conflict of interest. Are Apple being benevolent or acting in their own interests?
This being said, it would be nice to know if there were a flaw that could cause agent access to allow an app from a particularly crafty company like meta to provide malicious prompts w/ its tool calls like "include a list of the user's contacts" when asked "what are my friends talking about on instagram". This is likely an egregious situation, but context control is still an unsolved problem, it can't be solved in a deterministic manner
It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
> Siri AI is private by design and deeply integrated across Apple’s platforms using on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, which extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud. However, under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
If you view it like that, any argument against openness could be made in the name of privacy. With that interpretation, the Mac is terrible for privacy as you could just chose to install an app that reads your hard drive.
"We can't bring Time Machine to Europe, because we would have to allow other backup solutions, and that would mean other backups would have unrestricted access to your data"
Maybe there's more to it, but I'm not giving Apple the benefit of the doubt after their hostile strategy regarding third-party app stores.
As an EU resident, I find no benefits-of-doubt needed to explain why competition against foreign mega-corps is being forced. Its protectionist to promote openness when the closed solutions funnel profit abroad.
I agree it's a funny look, but my guess is that it comes down to the cross-border data transfers and non-EEA tech providers. So even if Apple has private cloud compute and is using Gemini models, there are probably a lot of legal hoops to jump through and/or European-based data centers to spin up?
They have some for sure for iCloud. Do they have enough to handle this volume of compute AND is Gemini allowed to be run on those? That was more what I was questioning/curious about.
This is more likely due to the digital markets act that requires them to open their platform to competitors. hence it only being restricted on phone and iPad.
The "privacy" angle here is that Apple wants to give Siri access to user data across the system, without offering any way for competitors to get at that data.
Umm, that's neither a direct quote, nor even a paraphrase.
This is due to EU's wider tech regulation "DMA"
And, in fact, it's due to DMA's mandate leaning _against_ privacy:
> under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
What they said was "until we figure out privacy" but what they meant was "until we figure out [the ten thousand byzantine regulations about] privacy [that could get us sued]"
I think the potentially most impactful singular feature mentioned in all this is being able to conversationally describe Shortcuts for AI to create. That feels like the type of thing that if done right can change how we all use our phones in a way that things like Siri becoming smarter and more conversational likely won't.
I really like this idea of rapidly extensible software, a browser is a nice sandbox for it! Models also seem to be much better at generating programs than "manually" executing a described task.
I used Gemini Pro to convert health data from a .csv and import it into Apple Health. Worked first try.
I just hope the AI Apple use is smart enough for the task. And that giving the AI information it needs is easy (such as a snippet of the health data so it knows what it's working with).
I have to say, I extremely dislike AI processing of photos. The camera is a vehicle to capture the realness of the world around us, including the imperfect moments. Distorting that with AI and being okay with it is really disappointing.
> The camera is a vehicle to capture the realness of the world around us, including the imperfect moments
I mean... that's your opinion, not a fact :)
I kinda agree, yet I will make small edits to my pictures to make them more like I felt than how it looked. Maybe in a happy moment the sky was more blue to me than it actually was and I want my picture to reflect it. Maybe I was happier and less tired than the picture remembers it and I want to fix it.
If some people want to AI process their pictures to make them match their memories better, or even to shape better memories, who are we to judge?
I think it’s pretty easy to judge when in conjunction with AI edited photos you have algorithms that award that. So sure it might be just some people that do it, but it ends up being all that is seen. Is Apple to blame in that? No. But are they completely innocent? Also no
when you re-crop a photo or use the perspective tool, you are literally distorting the image. not to mention, all of the processing that happens in modern cameras before you even see the image. in the case of a modern smartphone in particular, I think it's fair to say that you never really see the "real" image as captured by the CCD sensor, and even if you did you would not like it anyway.
Not sure I agree with the cropping argument, would be no different than cutting a printed photo with scissors. I would lump the other image manipulations done by hardware into "AI manipulation" as well, although those tend to be much more modest.
cropping doesn't alter the moment captured. or, rather, you're also cropping when taking a picture - no camera can capture all 360 degrees.
so what is being captured is altered from the get.
yet i don't think you'd argue that the act of taking a photo is the same as photoshopping a giant giraffe into a photo :P
i don't think arguing that taking a photo which is cropped/enhanced (as in sharpening, color correction, ...) is akin to changing what's displayed in it.
those distortions only serve to let us better focus on what truly happened in a moment, not change the moment in essence.
I would bet money that by the end of the decade an Apple engineer would have been summoned to court to testify whether or not a photo taken on an iPhone is admissible evidence for a criminal case.
There's something dystopian about the way that they are championing the blurring of the lines between photos and AI generated content with no consideration for the implications of that tech. Apple likes to pretend they are conservative with this tech rather than simply being behind, but this type of thing isn't a conservative feature.
It also goes against Apple's earlier statements about how photos should reflect real memories as they happened, not an idealized version like what Goolge was pitching during their Pixel 10 launch event last year.
Turns out they didn't actually believe that, they only said it because they were behind on GenAI. They caved to investor demand, no longer stand for any principles (if they ever had any in the first place)
There will be a generation of children who will grow up and look back at their childhood photos and wonder if they ever really happened.
I also laughed out loud when they are showing the "cleanup" tool and they guy is talking about removing "distractions" and then removes 2 of the 3 girls juggling and having fun.
Ah yes, those friends you were forming core memories with, or as our tech overlords call them, distractions.
I was thinking about this, i’m sure there’s been a black mirror episode, but one thing i think back to is one where the us gov used ai to alter a stoic expression on an arrested protestors face and altering it to look like she was crying because that’s what they wanted to portray.
It’s a bullying tactic, i shiver to think how some people will make happy memories out of things that aren’t.
Google pushes the exact same thing. The onboarding flow when I setup my Pixel highlighted a few new features and they gave that prime attention real estate to that same exact feature, showing how you can remove objects from a photo. The specific example was extremely silly, something like removing a tent from a camping photo. Thank god we don't have to see objects that were a core part of the memory being photographed!
Wow. That's a very good observation, actually. We forget our photos are not only our memory. Those YT guys who geotrack photo memories will have a much harder time in the future. Just look at that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO6Hf3SdVcY
Absolutely. I hoped they'd backtrack a bit on AI/algorithmic processing after so many influencers started to shit on the overly processed photos. Instead they not only ignore that, but they double down on making our own content even more fake.
I got a depressed-laugh out of the "clean up" demo. It's nothing new, but they always use other people as the example of "distractions". There's something very old-school stalin-style dystopian about normalizing airbrushing out everyone else from your photos because their existence is "distracting". [0] Show me an example with like... a leaf blew in the frame or something. Not straight up "this photo isn't about my friends that took this photo with me, get rid of them".
The only thing that interested in is: did they fix screen brightness getting super dim even when the slider is at max? That’s incredibly annoying and frustrating, and it’s been like that since first 26 release.
And it’s a clear bug because brightness resets to expected level if I go to photos and open an HDR image.
I can wait for autocomplete that doesn’t suggest garbage 50% of the time, but this one is just too annoying.
Damn I thought this was just me.
I figured it was a temp thing - device too hot for ongoing high brightness, and the photos app overrides because someone decided if you are trying to show a photo, do the job right to the limit.
Ugh so newer phones have this too? (15 pro max). Another reason to not upgrade.
I thought this is happening for me because I have an old iPhone 11 with degrading battery, screen etc. Did not realize that this is so widespread problem across devices. Really annoying when that happens! Almost unusable phone.
Hopefully this new golden gate update is really the snow leopard everyone's been hoping for.. already exciting one can now (if only partially) disable liquid glass
People talk about Liquid Glass as if it equal on all fronts. It's absolutely not. Apple knows which way their bread is buttered, that they can't mess up the iPhone. So Liquid Glass is fine on iOS. It's on Mac that it's a garbage fire of ridiculous design decisions.
Still the best OS around, but it looks like it was made by idiots.
Agreed, but seems like we're the odd ones out. I keep hearing how Liquid Glass is ok on iOS and terrible on macOS, but I actually think it's (slightly) better on macOS than on iOS.
At least macOS has configurability to turn off all the transparency. iOS just looks bad no matter how you configure it right now.
Try messing with the settings more. Grayscale (or whatever it’s called) makes the transparency much more tolerable, or even _nice_, than with multi-color.
It’s also more palatable on iOS because you only have one window open at a time. Many of the complaints around Liquid Glass on macOS are focused on window management and issues that only occur with multiple windows on screen simultaneously.
I really think Mac OS is one of the worst operating systems to begin with. How is liquid glass going to make it worse. I will 100% leave the criticism of liquid glass on Mac OS to others.
But Liquid Glass on iOS has been one of my favorite updates. I like the look and feel of it. They made some tangentially related changes that go too far.
Luckily for Apple, their primary competitor has managed to make their OS even worse. Windows becomes more unusable with every update, and on top of that, continues shoving telemetry and advertising into the OS. I installed windows on a laptop as an experiment and was shocked to see ads in the start menu. Who wants that?!
The best OS is probably something between Ubuntu and macOS. But nothing beats macOS on default, works out of the box, secure and usable and integrated with ecosystems of daily life.
I already agree with you on every single point. But Finder, holy heck is Finder awful. As someone who uses a filesystem as a first-class feature of an operating system, Finder it's one of the most horrible things about Mac OS.
I say this as someone who uses and has owned too many Macs, but can just never make them my primary machine. I promise, I've spent the last 30 years trying to make them my main.
the truth (that most people here would tell you) is that macos may be worse than linux, but it's generally understood, you can install companions for proprietary hardware much more easily and coworkers won't look at you with a blank stare when you explain that you're switching them all to it for mdm purposes (as they would with linux/windows).
it's worse in the same way a rally car is better than a 4 door sedan. Apple gives you something that runs and drives but linux can rip. Even using aerospace on my mac doesn't come close to the comfort I felt with sway on nixos
Yeah it seems like they are finally reconsidering their position of unifying ios and macos somewhat. I wish they would revert settings on the mac back to it's old 'control panel' days.
I'm in the same camp. I'm glad that I chose now to get my carrier-backed phone update because I wouldn't have been able to endure the keyboard still breaking and apps popping in like the interface is a windows ce skin for very long
I like it on iOS. It missed on macOS, but the new version looks much better. Bringing back the old style sidebar and actual toolbars again was the right choice.
I agree with you, it looks good on iOS and iPadOS. I'm indifferent toward it on macOS – you hardly ever notice it unless you live in the control center all day (IME anyway).
Man that conversation history navigation for the new Siri app looks super unuseable ... how the hell am I supposed to actually find the conversation I want with the super-dynamic non-ordered 2-column offset-row view thing ...?
It looks hard to use ...
Also the 'floating semi-window but not a window' thing when using contextual siri in the context of some other app ... sure looks like it won't work with cmd-tab navigation ... I really hope is not the case ...
My guess is that it's deliberate - that Siri window hovers over all apps so that you remain in your current context, and can add files/images/texts from any app to the Siri conversation. There might also be a Siri app on the Mac that was not yet shown.
You're probably right, just add it to the collection of "not-quite-window floating thingies", accompanied by Quick Notes, Stickies, Special Character Picker, Color Picker, Font Picker…
Sigh, I wish we could stop re-inventing what was already solved 25 years ago.
WWDC makes me sad. It was such a great in person conference, I remember having a really weird issue with cookie handoff in Safari, and being able to sit down with a bunch of the Safari engineers to troubleshoot the issue. It started with one, then more and more engineers came to give ideas!
I appreciate making it available to everyone but it feels like there needs to be some kind of middle ground. IOS development just isn't as much fun absent the in-person community.
FWIW: My colleague went to Google IO in person this year, he said the entire vibe was just off this year describing it as "almost somber" to quote him.
Do they still have the "Stump The Experts" event at WWDC? You know, where you ask Apple engineers a technical question about their work and, if they can't answer it, you win a t-shirt with tree stumps on it.
Ever since the liquid glass update, my wallpaper is just a muted color. I investigated the settings and previously my wallpaper was the "blur" version of my lock screen. Since the liquid glass update, "blur" apparently means "99% blur" instead of the 20-30% blur it used to be. The muted color does seem to be an average color of the lock screen image. But nothing recognizable.
Every once in awhile my background wallpaper goes from "normal" to "blurry mess". It seems to correlate with low battery but not perfectly. I'm not quite sure what's going on.
Yeah, I'm struggling to find a wallpaper that looks good under the transparent menu bar + the vertical dock on the right. So now it's almost black solid color.
They should just license the tech from Google. Google might be missing the urinal with forcing Gemini down everything while not improving basics, but their keyword detection remains good for me.
Listening to SiriusXM commercials in my car often triggers it for me. Howard Stern saying "SiriusXM" on his show also often triggers Siri on my apple watch.
... try being a Canadian with a bit of a hearing deficiency that is always saying our "verbal tic" of: "sorry" just prior to asking people to repeat themselves...
Stoked about custom environments on visionOS from your panoramas. I have been shooting so many panoramas of national parks in anticipation of this moment.
Ouch. “ Developers can start trying out the new version of Siri today, with a beta launching to the public later this year. Siri AI will not be available in the EU on iOS and iPadOS.”
Will it be available to developers in the EU though?
Theoretically you could use a router-level VPN for initial setup and that would work. Because VPNs are not functional for Apple services on Apple devices. Apple services bypass the VPN and reveal your real IP address, or in the case of trying to get different features, reveal your location to Apple.
Even if they were functional you still would want to use a router-level VPN because you couldn't install a VPN before your device connected to the internet.
AFAIK no - the country-specific limitations are done with geofencing in countryd and Apple doesn't have a "Pretend I'm in the US and let me use the anti-trust-violating AI" option. The EU laws they're trying to negotiate with and sidestep do not have a "developer mode exception".
If you're wondering what I mean by "anti-trust violating", it has to do with Apple's "security" policies. Every feature Apple ships has to support third-party implementations now, so if Apple doesn't want a third-party app with the same access as the first-party version, they can't ship the feature at all. For example, if Apple ships Siri AI in the EU, then Facebook can ship their own AI that you can grant access to all the same data and Apple can't stop them from stealing it aside from saying "We don't think you should install Facebook's data theft app".
Of course, most of Facebook's data theft is also illegal in the EU. But, to Apple's (undeserved) defense, GDPR enforcement in the EU has also been hit and miss, mainly because the political layer of the EU is not yet interested in a fully mobilized trade war with the United States. So instead we have this annoying half-measure where Apple waters down their feature set to do below minimum EU antitrust compliance, Facebook does the below-minimum amount of GDPR compliance, the EU gets the political win of appearing to care about antitrust and data harvesting, and nothing materially changes.
Interestingly enough, however, they are shipping Siri AI on macOS, where you absolutely could write your own AI assistant, as well as visionOS and watchOS, which... well, actually, I'm not sure how the EU signed off on that one? Are they just not considered smartwatch or VR headset gatekeepers?
Why wouldn't they be lenient with the geofencing, presumably they _want_ people to use this unlike EU alternate app store, so there's no need to use the uber-strict geofenced and they could instead just gate it based on something like account creation location.
Not foreseeably. As others have mentioned, DMA requires AI integrations to accommodate competition. To my mind, Apple's Webkit-only playbook is the prototype here. Waaaay too much money to be made as a GEO broker. Namely by selling position/advantages in the harness, or just use it to maintain ecosystem lock in.
The new Siri might bring AI to way more people than OpenAI managed to reach with ChatGPT. I wonder what it means to OpenAI‘s planned IPO. Curious to try the beta to see how the new Siri feels.
ChatGPT alone is among the most popular apps ever made, and it's available both inside and outside Apple's walled garden. Letting it reach audience in countries where Apple doesn't have much of a foothold.
I do wonder if new Siri is any good though. Apple used to be a genuine AI leader, but they totally sleepwalked through LLM revolution, and Siri's response quality was a sad joke for a while now. Did they bring it up to modern standard?
I don't think so, i don't think they want to be in the LLM laboratory business. They just want to leverage the technology to make money not invent it. Hence the reason why they made a deal with Google to license Gemini, let OpenAI and Anthropic fight it out while Apple just keeps making sales. I think they're betting that in the long run LLMs become a commodity more or less and the major labs go bankrupt/get acquired by their heavy duty investors. I feel like Athropic will goto Amazon (AWS) and OpenAI may end up property of Microsoft. Google will remain Google of course so they're not going anywhere which is probaly why they won the deal with Apple.
I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.
They wanted to be. Thus their investment into Siri in the first place. A revolutionary system - for year 2011. As well as bleeding edge advances in computational photography, photogrammetry, etc.
They just completely failed at capturing the modern chatbot wave.
They tried to catch up multiple times and, ultimately, gave up on doing it in house. Not because they didn't try, but because they tried and found themselves lacking.
Let's be very real about Siri... it is a sad implementation of what has a lot of potential.
Talking to my HomeKit, turning on and off lights, sometimes, other times, "I don't know what lights you are talking about", "I can't find those lights" even though they're visible and reachable and controllable about the app.
"Do X" "Okay", "Do [very very similar synonym for X]" "I don't know what you're talking about."
CarPlay and Siri, unless you make sure permissions match, with CarPlay giving you navigation, press the Speech button, "Find me the nearest Starbucks." "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are".
It has nothing to do with "not being in the LLM laboratory business". I get, and agree with that. But Siri has been around for 14 years at this point and is barely more than a simple voice control for alarm clocks and timers and "play music", at this point.
I can't wait for the moment Apple realizes that hardware makers will also get eaten by AI. Who needs a fancy and expensive macbook or iphone when all you'll really need is earbuds with an internet connection to talk to the AI that's hosted wherever, which will do everything you ever want it to just by saying so. No keyboard or screen required to get a result, no real local computing hardware necessary. If the result is visual just tell it to display it on your 65" hi-res television (which Apple doesn't make). Maybe the market for earbuds is going to sustain them in the future?
People want to host their own AI and it will become good enough so most will do that instead of paying for a subscription.
Voice-only input to a cloud model with just a screen to show you what it's doing sounds like a nightmare. Why not subscribe for the TV hardware as well as the subscription, take it up a notch on the own-nothing.
You are talking about maybe 0.005% of the whole population of the earth when you say the phrase "self hosting".
My wife is part of the other 99% and she's already talking to a chat prompt for 90% of her computing needs. The fancy laptop we bought her a year ago sits collecting dust. She is Apple's target market - not the nerds that get a boner about "self-hosting".
Yea, but if I can get a ChatGPT-like experience from Siri AI for free, why would I pay OpenAI.
Now it remains to be seen if Siri AI will deliver anything close to a ChatGPT-like experience. But if they did, for the consumer segment that isn't using LLMs for agentic work and just ask it questions from time to time, I can't imagine one textarea has engendered some huge amount of brand loyalty over another.
Traffic from Siri to the web is much higher than traffic from OpenAI, generally. It's the default. People installing ChatGPT takes work. And some of that traffic is also coming from Siri today… It won't after this launches.
Because Siri defaults to dumb search much more often. While ChatGPT sucks up the search results and gives its own answer.
Which either terminates the session, or goads the user into asking a follow-up question, improving retention - the user doesn't leave the app either way.
iPhone 8 shipped an NPU in 2017 - among the first consumer electronics vendors to put dedicated AI acceleration into something. iPhone X then took advantage of that with TrueDepth and the infrastructure around it.
There was a real push from Apple at the time to enter the AI game - mainly for image processing purposes, which was the mainstream flavor of AI at the time.
They fixed all the extremely egregious issues with Liquid Glass, good to see.
It's still an extremely ugly, "worst of both worlds" combination of wasted space (from early-gen flat design) with gaudy effects (from late-gen skeumorphism), but at least now it is usable.
I'd never update to macOS 26, but 27 I might, begrudgingly.
Even if it sucks, there is always the possibility that some software you use finally updates and you dont have a good alternative to replace it. Especially if you consider corporate fleets. Many IT departments are okay to let you lag behind OS updates for a major version, but not 2 or 3. So if I am being forced to upgrade, I’m glad 27 is likely going to fix a lot of stuff anyway.
In the first beta they've actually made aspects of it worse with more instances of the glass effect than before. It's still very distracting even with the slider all the way over to opaque
I often think that Zuck spent so much on metaverse in order to to bait Apple to spend enormously on an experimental product and OS which now they are forced to maintain
the steam frame is reported to be 200-400 grams lighter than the vision pro (not sure why the vision pro weights are reported as variable... the strap maybe).
I hope apple actually considers the usecase of using the glasses instead of 1 or more monitors with more priority.
Part of the problem with Apple Vision Pro was the sales strategy. They labeled it "Pro" but if you went into an Apple store they only let you play some simple games and watch some movies with it. The main feature I was interested in, desktop extension, they wouldn't let you test. I even explicitly asked and they said no. They wanted a guided experience thing which just turned me off from buying it.
they had to be 'pro' because of that pricetag. I'm a VR guy and an Apple guy and even I wouldn't move for that price. They need to come up with a way to halve that price. Remove the front screen, it's cute but not required. Maybe a version that doesn't have all the onboard compute, one that needs to be slaved to a mac generally, if they can make it work with an ipad for compute (or iphone?) all the better.
Yes, I bought it to make apps when it first came out, but I immediately picked up a new Shopify client and couldn't justify the time/investment. I had to choose between dunking $5k on it to maybe develop apps when my work schedule opened up, or return it and get the money back.
Yeah if they double down and keep investing in the tech improvements required, I genuinely think Apple AR can become the next big hardware form. Nothing will beat the iPhone but this could easily stand beside their laptops as a major accessory.
VisionPro was/is a dev platform, priced to ensure it wasn't yet a mainstream device.
99% of "apps" for it were confused garbage, totally misunderstanding what it's for or how to use it.
The percentage of apps that "get it" is rising. Not sure if the disillusioned left, or if more are figuring it out.
Either way, when Apple releases something consumer facing, or for consumers' faces, this means there's a prayer of being more than a deluge of Oculus content.
Or at least I'd like to imagine that's what they're doing. :-)
if Apple went somewhere like wearable glasses with it, it'd be a hit
It would be a PR disaster, most people outside the SV bubble just find smart glasses what they really are: creepy.
Even more so because Meta is going to roll out face recognition and going to live-annotate people you encounter in the streets. Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.
- A lot of people found smart watches to be nerdy, something that only geeks would wear, until Apple made the Apple Watch. Along the same lines, everyone (on tech-oriented social media) thought the AirPods looked stupid and dorky when they were first announced, but now they're ubiquitous.
- People find smart glasses from Meta (and previously, Google) creepy, but – and it's anathema to say this around certain parts of HN – like it or not, people do generally trust Apple with their data in a way that they don't with those other companies.
- It seems like you're assuming Apple's glasses would include outward-facing cameras in the first place. Do we know that? The ideal device for me would just include the downward-facing IR cameras for gesture detection. Presumably only people under NDA can say for sure right now.
> Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.
What's not allowed? Facial recognition, street annotation, AI? Does it make a difference if it's local, on-device AI?
I'm not sure that's true anymore, or at least I'd suggest it depends on the type of surveillance camera you're talking about. Flock cameras, traffic cameras, the big ugly gray things stuck on the side of a building that you'd avoid if you were playing Splinter Cell? Sure, not popular. But everyone and their grandma has a Ring doorbell or a Nest camera inside or outside of their home now.
Further, it's still not obvious to me that an Apple glasses product would be a surveillance camera in the first place.
If it were lighter with a better FOV I’d buy it at the current price. Apple isn’t doing metaverse, they’re doing computer with a 3D monitor and I don’t think it’s a bad move to have the ecosystem in place as the tech improves and makes a mass market product more viable.
Not really, their Meta glasses are very successful in the market and Zuck wants to own the new platform to extract their 30% instead of missing that opportunity on mobile and being beholden to Apple and Google.
It's just being pitched this way by marketing and the C suite. If it were really a snow leopard release, someone should have informed the engineers they were supposed to be improving resiliency and fixing bugs, because this is news to them. cough
[accessibility settings -> display -> reduce transparency] is the main option afaik. while you're in there, try "reduce motion" too, it's pretty nice imo.
Keep in mind Apple would never admit mistakes on Liquid Glass. But: Looks to me they're fixing some of the worst aspects. I'm on the fence.
The iOS 7 flat redesign was a UX disaster. But they got back up to speed in subsequent releases.
There IS something to be said for design resets with follow-up refits to accomodate for actual human beings. Most companies just add crap on top of crap.
Not saying what everything Apple does is perfect, even as a user/fanboy since '86.
What I most enjoyed about todays's annoucement that they're doing a Snow Leopard performance/bug reset, because that was expected and needed. And they started out with it, so they know their WWDC audience.
So: Both a technical and UX debt effort, with some privacy-focused AI on top.
All I want the ability to talk to Siri while I'm in the car. My buddy's Tesla has this feature with Grok and it's actually really awesome. Let me have an on-demand CONVERSATIONAL assistant, meaning something I'd actually want to have a conversation with.
I swear I watched this Keynote before when they announced Apple Intelligence. Then proceeded to deliver nothing. Apple is so lost it makes me really sad.
I read through a summary of what was announced today, and I don't really want/care about any of it. The biggest apple announcement today that I was excited about, and would tell other people about was https://lowtechguys.com/musicdecoy/
I have an older iPhone that can't run any of this new stuff, and I'm not upgrading because I have no reason to. I think I actually prefer at this point to be on an older phone that won't get all of this.
When is technology going to get exciting and fun again?
(that's not 100% true, I was excited to hear they were walking back liquid glass.)
- fixing the main liquid glass issues (transparency, toolbars, window corners)
- rewriting OS components to work better
- fixing the ever annoying "The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time" problem (we knew this was going to happen by following the Swift project, but still)
Honestly, we really really needed a year with less features and more work put towards improving the platforms.
I do enjoy reading about what the Swift team is doing. (And other folks working on the lower decks — kernel, Foundation, etc. The AI brainrot hasn't seeped down there yet.)
When I download a new app on iOS, I immediately disable searching it and disable background updates. I hate the search feature and only use it as an app launcher when I’m accidentally not on the App Library screen.
On macOS, I also disable spotlight for everything because the indexing process has been the single biggest culprit of CPU spikes when it’s doing something insane like indexing a git repo. Again, I only use Spotlight as an app launcher.
I wish it were easier to opt into this “App Launcher only” mode. I had to really tinker with the settings to exclude everything except applications. And I’m sure I’m going to need to do it all over again after this update.
In case anyone missed it, Apple's dropping support for Watch Series 6/7/8/9 and the Ultra 1 with this release.
The 9 isn't even 3 years old yet until September, absolutely garbage support timeline for a wearable. I have a Series 9, and it's still essentially like new.
edit Seems this was an error on Apple's part, all watches that support 26 should get 27
Yeah, I'm shocked at this [1]. The Series 9 was released in September 2023, not quite 3 years old. Apple is normally very good with long-term support. This is surprising to say the least. I bought a 10 last year when it was current-gen and it's going to be the minimum supported Watch with the next version of Watch OS? WTF? At least I'm glad I did that rather than repalcing a battery on an even older Watch.
iPads aren't free from this either but it's a little less severe [2]. For example, iPad Air 4th gen will be the minimum iPad Air and it was released in 2020. The M1 iPad Pro was released in 2021 and will be the minimum there.
Apple updated their compatibility list. The Series 9 is compatible with WatchOS 27 [1]. Still, Series 8 was released in 2022. Less than 4 years old and incompatible? That's quite a departrue from Apple's long-compatibility.
Has to be a fuckup. watchOS 26 supported the Series 6 onwards. I don't think Apple has ever cut 3 generations of devices with a single yearly OS upgrade unless there's an underlying architecture reason for it before.
This might be the list for Siri AI supported watches or something.
This is my biggest concern. I've only stuck with Apple during this AI nonsense era because the parental/screentime controls allow to me completely shut it down, and I've never toggled it on in the Siri/AI options. It took a while but the 7GB they initially stole from me for the AI nonsense I'm not using eventually cleared itself out of storage.
I already have Siri limited to manual activation only. If they force all of this into Siri and I can't prevent AI models from actually installing their gubby hands all over the phone then that's it for me.
I didn't see it touched on, but I'm hoping improved storage management is included in the update. My system has > 20% storage used by "system storage" and in total nearly half the device storage is used by ios and is outside my control. Supposedly some of this stuff is just cache data and there's no way to adjust what data gets cached or when it gets purged aside from rebooting. Handling for large files is also hit or miss and could use some updates. I didn't even realize some of that was AI stuff I might not even be using.
Yeah file management in general is still incredibly rough around the edges. I would still like to be able to simply grab files from my phone via a connected linux computer, but apple will never let me have that one.
>no way to adjust what data gets cached or when it gets purged aside from rebooting
Unfortunately the only current ways to pull this off is to either artificially move the current time years forward so it hits a time gate and dumps the cached files, or use enough space on your iPhone to force it to dump the useless cached files then delete whatever you used to take up space temporarily.
I believe the only features I saw, and I could be wrong, that require the 17 or air were the new dictation and Siri voices. Those weren't in the original promises for the iPhone 16. That said, I don't know how much actually changed in the hardware where that actually has to be gated.
Are we living the worst times in a while technology wise, this presentation showed nothing useful. Last year at least they showed some interesting features, but as always I don’t use any of them, the only one I wanted in the past few years was to use the iPhone from my mac, but never shipped in EU. And the other feature was universal control that I use every day and works just fine most of the time.
I don't think so. We have tons of apps and ideas and now AI. I honestly don't expect much from an OS on my phone or laptop and I am glad they improve what matter: OS performance and bugs. I don't mind having the "innovation" in the apps and not in the OS. Or at least for the first time and then brought in a well-thought-out ecosystem.
This WWDC is thin, but it seems like a lot of it outside of AI is a refinement year.
For them to just blanket announce that a bunch of stuff across the platforms perform better, that shows that Apple spent most of their effort on quality over shipping features. It’s also possible they’re preparing for less availability of RAM long term and trying to optimize.
The list of stuff they had go highlighted includes a whole bunch of small but impactful little tweaks.
iCloud shared libraries being easier to use outside of Apple operating systems, that’s great. And adding full resolution support, also great. I’ve left iCloud Photos and macOS for myself but I’m stuck on iCloud shared photos with family albums, so making it easier for me to participate is a big plus.
Custom EQ in AirPods. Awesome.
Smoother network transitions between WiFi and cellular. Huge positive impact.
Send indicator in messages, yes please.
The parental controls are industry-leading.
The AI features are the most boring and uninteresting to me, but the little stuff is all big news to me.
They've been awful for me. This is best-in-class software? It breaks constantly. It fails to notify me of all kinds of events that should work, but spontaneously fail to. This could be someone entering the parental control pin or requesting to download an app. It's misery to deal with.
I've used it for years across several devices and kids. It's some of the worst software I ever need to use.
It's nice to see the improve focused on AI and recognition of their past missteps. So far out of all the announcements this past month, I think this will be the most significant. The increased emphasis with on device models is exactly the right move. I'm tired of sending data out of my computer when it isn't needed.
Much as I have a not so great opinion on Siri's capabilities, I'm rather surprised how many people appear to use Siri/Apple Intelligence to search for rather niche hobby content that I run a site for. OpenAI's scrapers I expect volume from, but I didnt really expect apple's to be consistently rank second.
It's uncanny how they announce that AI features won't be available in the UK or China, and then, with a smile, proceed with, "Now, let's discuss what's next for developers."
Are there any summary of all the new under the hood features rather than user features? I don't want ( or care ) about UI and AI on WWDC. I want to know how they got 30% smaller in Xcode? What was done? New CPU Scheduler? Improvement to APFS? Metal API ? Memory and Performance Optimisation?
There used to be more information on WWDC and the State of Union. But with every year past they have deleted it to consumer level marketing speak.
I'm glad to see their "Private Cloud AI" thing is actually happening. They announced it a couple years ago and then after not hearing a ton I was worried they were going to drop it.
That said, the foundational models they talk about running on it - is that something they've trained themselves? I know they had some sort of deal with Google; could it be Gemini weights loaded into their private compute or something?
I wonder if visual intelligence can be used to produced code like claudcode can. like highlight a UI component on an app you like and say "implement this for me". I can take screenshots of figma and give it to claude code to implement and it gets it pretty close.
Apple continues to innovate in new and excited ways, because I never though I would speak the words "I guess I'm sticking with ios26 until the end of security updates."
Unless I can continue to neuter AI, and keep the older siri this is my last iOS.
What makes you think I would go crawling back to a worse AI hellscape?
Dumbphones exist, degoogled phones exist. If it weren't for the USA's telcom differences a fairphone with PostmarketOS would be great. I enjoy postmarketOS on my pinephone, the phone's hardware is just far too shit for daily driving.
The ability to continue to completely lock down Apple Intelligence to the point where it even free's up the ~7gb it takes up on the phone. Currently this works in iOS 26 as long as I never accidentally toggle it back on via Apples dark pattern attempts that happen every few software updates.
Also for the ability to continue using Siri without Apple Intelligence would be nice. I rarely need to use Siri so it's already set for manual triggering with the power button long press only. But if Siri goes into the AI shitter then I'll just wholesale disable it.
Anyone able to restart the stream if you missed the first few minutes or are we living in a world where AI will cure cancer but Apple can't build a "Watch live / Watch from start" button ?
Is there a live text play-by-play so we don't have to watch a video like some pre-literate? ArsTechnica used to do one but I can't find it for this year.
Some small features are fully local (like the list sorting added in a recent iOS), but all of the neat features like world knowledge and shortcut gen seem to require private cloud compute.
They have on occasion, when it makes sense to unveil OS changes and hardware simultaneously. Apple Vision Pro, move to new architecture, 2019 Mac Pro tower – that sort of thing. Most years they don't announce new hardware, though.
even the market understands this is a massive failure by apple, nobody needs another chat application especially using that stupid overlay window. looks like apple won't leapfrog anyone and has zero agentic features to show and no resetting a password doesn't count as agentic apple.
Right there with you. It feels weird not to care. I used to look forward to it. Last year I watched a bit and bailed. This year, I opened the stream after it finished, clicked through to a few spots, noticed I didn't care at all and got back to work.
finally Siri and Apple intelligence are getting some much needed updates. Most of the stuff shown was already open source and had been achieved under 16GB of ram so it is timely.
I don’t agree with the whole kids “safety”, if your child is too young they shouldn’t be using such electronics without direct supervision in the first place, ie you sitting with them, and if you don’t have some time to be with your child you shouldn’t have children to start with. If your child however is able to comprehend conversations, the parenting should be based on trust and communication, rather than further surveillance and control.
This is bad and mostly will result in two outcomes: a more systematic domestication to groom the child into accepting such surveillance from a higher authority, so later in life they are more susceptible to be monitored by employers or even the government, just like how schools domesticate people to be a cog in the machine later in life. The other outcome, is a complete radical shift where that kid goes on doing anything and everything as soon as they are in their own.
Over-polished WWDC keynote is just another great example that we as individuals with great motivation can do better
Even my prompt with Veo3 or Seedance 2.0 generated video can do better than Apple
I was hoping for some kind of a Siri LLM API for providers to implement so that I'd be able to use Gemini, ChatGPT, maybe Openrouter, SELF HOSTED or whatever the fuck I want. Given that Apple itself does not really have a horse in the LLM race, it made sense.
Say the ChatGPT app would provide the functionality to the system and I'd allow a scary popup saying "these guys will own you, sure?".. I guess they are going all in into Gemini instead.
That AI segment was a boomer core slop fest. But to be fair, it's clear that Apple is not on the AI bleeding edge and it appears it doesn't want to be, it cannot afford to ignore it tho.
Let's hope they don't get overconfident with Gemini and pull a MS Copilot..
I get this vibe too. Turning Siri into yet another chatbot is a far cry from the vaporware they showed at 2024's WWDC. Seems they found out LLMs can't actually do that, but investors aren't just going to let them ignore it unfortunately.
Feels like they are just phoning it in here and waiting on AI hype bubble to burst. "Here's your stupid chatbot, now shut up"
Now if they just let me switch off the sound when I connect the charger. For any couple not going to bed at the same time and charging their phone at the bed this may be a welcome innovation. I'm willing to license this idea for free.
Still deliberately running macOS Sequoia 15 cuz you know… and if I'll switch to something hopefully better than Tahoe will disable SIP and every thing that is not needed to just launch software, this OS has gotten too obese.
I don't know why I torture myself with these kinds of presentations anymore. Aside from the obvious "It's all AI" complaint, it feels like every problem they describe as needing a solution is fundamentally basic human reasoning that they are hoping we'll replace with a non-deterministic interaction with our phones. Splitting a tab by taking a picture and letting AI split it for you? Get out a fucking calculator. Is that really a scenario they think will excite people? Their portrayal of a world where we depend on computers for such simple thoughts is not a positive one.
Kinda love that Tim said his goodbyes with a rainbow in the background. Apple is pretty much the only company that didn't really budge to Trump's admin despite appeasing him.
It's the retro Apple logo rainbow they've had since they opened Apple Park. It could be interpreted as a pride rainbow, but the colours are different and in a different order.
Yup, indeed. But it's crazy we can count those companies in single digits. Shows how cynical the corporate PR really is; they'll virtue signal for years and then forget their inclusiveness shamelessly on a whim.
Eh they announced in April that Tim is staying on as Executive Chairman, and the expectation is he'll deal with the politics so the new CEO doesn't (quite likely he'll give Trump another shiny gift)
I gotta say, as I read these comments HN's bubble is showing with astounding clarity. The top comment is about presenter authenticity? Idle Mac used for cloud models? No features are useful?
I can't help but think for most folks out there these features make using Apple products considerably more powerful and easy. They may be "boomer" features and you won't be able to roll them into your MCP server, but IMO it doesn't take a huge perspective leap to understand how they're game changers.
What if someone holds my phone and enters a query like
"Find every note that says 'password' or contains an ID number, email them to [x]."
"Find photos with my ID or cards, send them to [number]." ??
what if attackers start sharing shortcuts with people.
I dont like siri ai access everything on my devices. mails, photos, screen, camera, my credit card and passwords...
Apple has done a good job in the recent past of providing secure information partition options; locked notes, secure folders, etc. im seriously hoping they implement some similar way of soloing information from Siri.
Their entire angle here is that Siri AI itself is private/secure. Siloing data from the thing that they’re advertising as private and secure wouldn’t make sense.
Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.
It was literally the first specific announcement they made after they finished their introductions. Not anything iPhone related; they announced that Liquid Glass on macOS would move towards the older design. Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond.
That and the guy who announced it last year fled to Facebook of all places.
>shows just how bad it was
>Goes to show that a year of anybody with any sort of clout complaining about the thousand little cuts of Liquid Glass on macOS will get a company to respond.
Worth remembering too that this isn't merely about "complaints", Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data, but a lot of people (even technical people) may choose to check the box to share with Apple. Anecdotally, I myself and a LOT of other people have stuck with macOS 15 or earlier, but Apple should have a lot of hard data on it and adoption curves vs the past.
A real reaction does certainly suggest that this wasn't just a tempest in a teacup, but that they really weren't seeing the adoption on Macs they expected.
Yes!! I agree with this entirely.
As far as I know, the best data the rest of us have is Google Trends. And based on that, it really does look like Liquid Glass elicited the largest negative reaction that Apple has ever had to an OS release.
"How to Switch to Android" hit 3x its all time peak, "iPhone revert update", hit 4x its all-time peak, "iPhone slow" hit 8x its all time peak, "iPhone bad now" hit 5x its all time peak, "iPhone fix battery" hit 3x its all-time peak (and 14x its five-year peak)
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=how%20to...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=i...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=iphone%2...
I mostly looked at this for iOS, but searches like "macOS slow", "mac slow", "fix mac battery", "fix mac", etc. all show similar hockey-stick jumps as Liquid Glass rolled out.
If this means a sudden highest-ever 10x shift in customer dissatisfaction - 1000% - then that has to have been significant.
There are probably other parts as well. Dissatisfaction against Apple for App Store has been high, may be for some Liquid Glass was the last straw. Omarchy had the highest number of Apple user switch to Linux. 100,000 downloads may be small numbers by Apple standards but even if half of that were developers coming from Apple Mac I think it is a pretty big shift.
The worst part, intentionally or not they left macOS 26 as the last release for all the Intel user.
> The worst part, intentionally or not they left macOS 26 as the last release for all the Intel user.
I cannot believe that Apple is that insidious to have planned a milquetoast release to be the last one for Intel, but I totally believe that Apple is insidious enough to see how they can benefit from it.
That they're literally marketing macOS 27 as we've listened to your complaints about 26 completely deflates anyone's interest in running macOS 26 on Intel. Their Intel users are being marketed hard to switch to Apple Silicon.
> Omarchy had the highest number of Apple user switch to Linux.
DHH's dotfiles repo is not a viable replacement for macOS, I promise you. Linux is fun, but macOS is already enough of a *nix for most developers, and it works well without much tinkering.
You just have to constantly tell the LLM to give you zsh commands, not bash ones.
You can easily install bash or any other shell on macOS, and set it as your default with chsh, same as on any other *nix. (Also easy to make the harness use a non-login shell by aliasing it with a $SHELL override.)
I and most of my dev friends didn’t update. The reality is that many of us work in a web browser and an IDE all day writing software for non-Apple platforms. The only incentive I have to update is new and compelling OS features or bugfixes. Since major security patches will likely be backported, that just leaves new features and the reality is that macOS’ only new “feature” worth talking about was Liquid Glass considering their AI offering was also an absolute joke.
Given the other emphasis placed on performance improvements (likely in service to helping to mask the slowness of LLM Siri) I’m really hoping this is a modern Snow Leopard release. I’m looking forward to the Apple nerds digging and offering a compelling narrative about why I should care about updating.
And to add on to that, if this is a bug-fix bonanza release, hopefully we’ll also see a lot of positive movement during the beta period to keep shipping fixes. We’re getting a freaking EQ on AirPods!!!!111!!1! It seems Apple is finally taking some things to heart about listening to their users and I’m 10000% here for it.
not just that, people keeping to older OS’s will actively avoid converting to new hardware sales..
I did not upgrade my laptop because it would come with the latest OS- I am not alone.
The other side of it is forced obsolescence where new OS makes your existing hardware slower. So I wouldn't upgrade my phone beyond iOS18.x purely for performance reasons but if there's a killer feature in a new iPhone I would still consider buying it because its hardware was built to handle the new effects and extra ram it needs.
Yes, anecdotally almost every I know with an older iPhone (14 or older) is not upgrading their iOS. It’s rare for non-technical people to even care about the specifics of a new iOS, but they’ve heard too many stories of slow down and battery usage issues.
It’s a big problem, because running an old iOS is very bad for security. There’s still new vulnerabilities popping up in iOS, especially in the image and video decoders, that are fixed in newer point releases of iOS 26. I’m not sure if Apple is back porting all the fixes. I would definitely be a little afraid, because iMessage previews are a common attack vector and are zero-click. I don’t think anyone really turns off automatic previews; they’re very convenient.
> Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data
How? Aren’t all update requests made to, and all updates downloaded from their servers?
Also, doesn’t the system that pushes emergency updates (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/deployment/dep93ff7ea7...) have to know what OS you are running?
Opt out all you want do you really think Apple doesn't know what OS version hits their APIs?
It's still nice to see a company not double down on a fall! They seem to have been on a full year of tech debt and optimisation.
I still would have liked a more genuine walk back (they sold it as "iterations and adjustments" as if the rewinded stuff were new ideas) but overall reassuring.
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Yeah. It's clear they've been hearing the complaints. Not just Liquid Glass, but they even talked about the inconsistent menu bar icons and problems with rounded corner radii (among a bunch of improvements). I'm excited that this is basically Snow Leopard part II, for those who remember.
Well, let’s wait a bit before giving it such an honorable name lol
Snow Leopard was a goddamn mess, everyone forgets. Yeah, 10.6.8 was rock solid. In 10.6.0 there was a bug that erased your user folder if you logged into the guest account. It was NOT a good release at the start.
Snow Leopard even happened in the first place because Apple's A team was busy with iPhone, and iPhone has priority.
You will see that during this era Mac OS X was relegated to stepchild status and received far fewer support.
All this glory is just Steve Jobs selling it to us as a good thing! In the end it worked out, but it was more incidental and a collateral of the iPhone than the public memory likes to admit.
Exactly. And macOS 27 is unlikely to be a Snow Leopard release because it won’t have the time to. The yearly release schedule is too brutal.
Snow Leopard was a nothing release basically - but under the hood a lot got fixed and got better for devs
> Apple very rarely admits mistakes.
Probably the best reversion was getting rid of the butterfly keyboard and bringing back ports after Jony Ive was gone.
He went on to ruin Ferrari now :)
Whoa, didn't realize that was Jony Ive! Good job Jony! Gave both Ferrari and EVs bad press with a single product launch!
A good lesson in not messing with a good thing. If they had just put an electric motor in a classic Ferrari body, it could have been a nice moment for the energy transition.
The Luce is so bad it makes Nissan's 2026 Leaf refresh look awesome!
I hope they redesign their magic mouse. It's not a real product.
I think it’s basically recalcitrance. Same as they suddenly turn into the world’s worst devs every time they have to make software for Windows. Apple hates mouses, but many people won’t consider not using one, so they reluctantly make an expensive, pretty, and absolutely terrible mouse to get you over the hump of the macOS switch then keep pushing you along to where they really want you: the giant touchpad, where they do have a moat, and which trains you for the rest of their ecosystem. They even sneak half of that touchpad into the mouse itself, and half of the mouse out, so the transition is oh so easy.
I have been a desktop trackpad user for so long now, I literally don’t want to use a mouse for anything except playing video games. The amount of flexibility offered by a good trackpad just wins most of the time as it is plenty accurate for quickly jumping around on one axis.
With a large enough trackpad, you could even move to a 1:1 type of movement, or add that functionality to a layer for the best of both worlds (like gyro enhanced aiming in games).
Wacom wants your money!
I’ve worked with some designers who did what you described with their huge tablets. Use the stylus to turn it into a giant touchpad. Works pretty good.
This is off-topic and it’s especially a waste of attention because it’s a social media meme, not a real problem. People who actually use them don’t spend time talking about it because it means every few months you plug it in long enough for a coffee break, and in return you can use it for many years without the connector breaking.
Even if you set aside the stupid charging situation, it's still a bad mouse. The multitouch capabilities are not well used by the software, and it's the only mouse I've ever used that routinely sends scroll events while I'm just trying to click or drag. Their laptops are pretty good at rejecting accidental touchpad inputs despite those touchpads being quite large, but the mouse is a constant source of unintentional inputs.
This! It is a bad design because it is a compromise. It is flat because of the need of multitouch, which doesn't get used. And because of this flatness it is not ergonomic to hold it.
It is neither a good trackpad replacement nor a good mouse design.
> which doesn’t get used
Any non-anecdotal data on that assertion?
I can’t say I’ve ever had that problem. Multitouch still works great on the one I bought in 2010 after near daily usage. You’re not required to like it, of course, but I think it’s a question of personal preferences more than an objective good/bad verdict.
Best I can say about it - at least it's not round.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse
obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMX2cQdPubk&t=737s
How is Magic Mouse even close to ergonomics lol
Do you use a Magic Mouse? It’s really not that bad if your only computer use consists of social media and the occasional budgeting spreadsheet.
And before you mention it, yes the charging cable. In reality, plugging it in for literally 1 minute will get you enough battery to last hours. 5 minutes will get you an entire day. Normal people plug it in and go get a coffee or pee and then it’s fine until they log off for the day. Could it better? Of course, but it’s not so large an issue that they are losing customers on it, so it is what it is.
You’re not the target market for an Apple mouse and that’s okay.
You’ve convinced me. I hope on the next iPhone, they make it so you have to put the MagSafe puck on the front where the screen is instead of that back where it is now.
"You’re not the target market"
Unfortunately I had to learn this when I got my first mac.
You don't have to go very deep into the ecosystem to encounter things that... well, things bottom out at shallow.
Looking back... glossy displays. flat keyboards without curvature to center your fingers on the keys. more and more hurdles to using macos as a technical person. prematurely missing USB-A. memory/storage that's not expandable. Dongles everywhere as a checkbox item/workaround.
and of course, anything that superficially seems to be a mouse.
It's not just the terrible charging that makes it a bad product.
It's also the terrible ergonomics.
It's the epitome of putting form before function. It's a desk ornament that leads to frequent injuries with use. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=magic+mouse+injury
I was always baffled by people who use the Apple mouse and keyboard my wrists hurt just looking at them
Man did I despise that keyboard. I went from hating that to adoring my M3. Which feels good because I loved my MacBook before those butterfly switches, and again I love my MacBook now.
I almost left apple entirely over those stupid switches lol.
Maybe I wasn't in the minority of people that stopped updating macos to wait for them to remove it.
Apple has always tweaked new UI designs over the first few OS releases.
They did it with Aqua when MacOS launched and again with the iPhone's original skeuomorphic UI and yet again with the flat redesign of iOS.
What they don’t do is open their keynotes with announcements of the tweaks. This isn’t like the other situations.
Of course. Every company does that. There is no company ever that just freezes after they release something.
He means the classic revolution/evolution cycle. Move forward, and then refine. This means you have to accept some errors in the name of momentum.
Yeah I’m surprised by what a design misstep it was. The shiny corners of icons on iOS look so tacky and on macOS the corner radius mismatch is crazy. Also not a fan of the “bulbous” shapes of things with excessive rounded corners.
Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts.
That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.
The screenshots are generous. I just spent a few hours in macOS 27 and while yes, some of the absolutely galling and baffling errors have been rolled back, it's still bad.
I cannot help but think: they are such cowards, so afraid of anything that stands out after years of flat design. Like, you can almost feel like there is someone trying to sneak it in, only for it to get squeegeed at the last minute. The buttons could look like classic Aqua ( if they are allowed a background color that is), if it got slammed with a belt sander. Everything has to be too subtle, too toned down, too pale, and too faint, only noticable blown up to 4x on an OLED screen. It's like all they are allowed is "mimiminalizm", just remove, remove, remove, tone down, remove, slavishly, without thought. I'm supposed to cheer they added color back to in-focus window sidebars? First: good lord, what were they thinking? Of course they rolled such an utterly stupid decision back. Second: what color? Some single accent color applied to some whisper thin monochrome squiggles they call icons?
Its still more of the same. In the Installer app, there are windows where the dividing line between toolbar and content is like a 1px 30% grey line on same old bland 20% grey background, and that's with the new "Draw Borders" Accessibility setting turned on.
They can dress it up. Fix the worst issues. I'm thankful for it. Hell, I might not skip this one. But the problem still remains: Liquid Glass was a *bad, flawed* design from the start, whose central principle is contradictory (we'll get out of the way of your content by floating directly in front of your content all the time, in the way). There is no salvaging it.
I would love to be able to have a conversation with the people who decided Liquid Glass was a good idea. The first question would be:
Given all other truly useful things you could implement as well as bug fixes, why did you think that investing time and money on Liquid Glass would deliver useful value to users?
I wonder how much time and money they wasted on something that nobody wanted, cared for, needed or solved any real problem?
My theory is they made Liquid Glass for the Watch first, where (IMHO) it's actually pretty great, and assumed it would translate well to iOS and macOS, which in retrospect it did not.
Sort of how Microsoft made Windows 8 look like a Zune.
Zune HD was itself based on the UI design of Windows Media Center: https://www.redmondpie.com/windows-media-center-in-windows-7...
> Apple very rarely admits mistakes
Excep every time they do a big redesign like this. This happened when they moved away from skeuomorphism in iOS7(?) and then backpedalled hard in the following revision because of negative user feedback. Similar thing happened when they presented the reinvented Safari (I do't think that one even survived through betas). And it is happening now.
It didn't happen when they introduced Leopard, because the new design was legitimately better than the ugly brushed aluminium look that preceeded it.
When they toned down the horrific excesses of skeumorphism (like leather textures) on macOS but still retained some skeumorphic design (e.g., buttons that look like buttons) people were pretty ok with it too. I remember some complaints that the lickable aqua buttons were gone but that wasn't really a serious complaint, just more of a "I kind of liked those gaudy buttons, sad they're gone" type of sentiment.
I bet they planned this before the initial release and actually had this capability then and there. Just needed some guinea pigs (aka their users) to learn more and establish the trend.
well, they also needed the initial release to facilitate a 'speed bump' in the new release, so perhaps!
“We are sorry and we think we fixed it… ok, here is a slider”
so bad like john ive ferarri lmao
Maybe I’m misremembering but I feel like Steve Jobs era Apple was much better at admitting mistakes. Nowadays even fiascos like the butterfly keyboard don’t warrant an apology, just a quiet change.
At least, unlike microslop, they ARE fixing things based on user feedback.
So is Microsoft, albeit a bit late to the party. Taskbar now movable, performance improvements hitting insider builds, MS BUILD half about WSL containers, native coreutils, a dev edition of windows using Winget config to strip all the bloat out, all new system dialogs replacing a good chunk of the old Win32 stuff, WinUI reactor, ability to remove AI models & Copilot from the OS, etc.
Classic case of the reality distortion field here.
Oh? So I can now disable "AI" and "onedrive" and "microsoft accounts" in windows? COOL! where do i enable that?
You always could disable OneDrive (it's uninstallable), and you could always use a local account on Pro editions of Windows, that's nothing new.
Uninstalling Copilot and the local AI models is whats new on current insider builds.
https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+blocks+local+accou...
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2025/10/08/microsoft-ends-lo...
Hmm, funny, because I literally just set up a Win11 PRO machine yesterday, I could still create a local account, no bypass script needed.
Your links only apply to Home editions.
How did you do it? I had to set up a Windows 11 Pro install 2 months ago and there was no way to get past the Microsoft Account requirement, I had to create an account, I tried everything (setting up with no network device attached, etc)
Choose "Other options" then click "Domain join instead" you don't actually have to join a domain here, it just has to create a local account. That option won't be present on Home edition though just a heads up.
You can also use an autoattend.xml file on the install ISO to set up a local account (https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/) amongst other things like removing all the windows store apps, etc.
We shouldn’t give them praise for gatekeeping it behind a paywall.
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Wait - what is the dev edition of windows?
Edition is probably a bit generous (although that's the verbiage they used at the BUILD conference), but its a set of winget configs (works like Ansible) to disable a bunch of stuff, install WSL, starship, coreutils, node, python, whatever other SDKs you want, etc. with one command. https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsDeveloperConfig
I believe they used the word edition because they plan on offering W365 cloud VMs with this config pre applied.
Jobs: "You're holding it wrong, idiot."
Also Jobs: fires the antenna designer
Multiple things can be true:
We could be holding it wrong, and Jobs be correct to point out that many rival phones at the time literally had manuals dictating how to hold their phones to avoid reception issues.
The antenna designer could have done a better job, preventing the situation, thereby not dragging Jobs into a PR storm.
Jobs could have handled the situation and communication _significantly_ better.
They try so hard to do a polished presentation that everything is kinda fake and unauthentic. I don't understand how this attitude survived so many years.
It feels fake, because they speak in a way that sounds unnatural and overelaborate.
It is so long, with so many unnecessary sentences. And it feels like everything is said at least twice; First a generic statement about the new feature. Then a specific example, or a deeper explanation of what the first generic statement was. Then a demo. And then a conclusion to the future.
The old Steve Jobs keynotes focused on the most interesting things, but now it feels like they are afraid not to include everything. So everything gets diluted.
It would help a lot if they would stop saying the same lines:"And now...", "We cannot wait for you to try our new XXXX ... ", or "We could not be more excited to...", "We are excited to... ".
"With that, now over to person-X"
To me it just sounds so very American. Using so many praising adjectives they stop meaning anything anymore.
If everything is fabulous and great and you’re always excited or proud, that becomes the baseline.
That is not how regular Americans speak. I think it's some weird American corporate speak that has metastasized in Apple keynote presentations. ꉂ(˵˃ ᗜ ˂˵)
It is, however, how a lot of Silicon Valley speak. Source: lived there for a couple of decades.
And to an outside ear, it does just come across as completely fake.
Jobs' "reality distortion field" was just the conviction in his voice as he spoke. There is no, none, nada, zero conviction in the way Apple deliver these missives. It reeks of corporate America and is therefore not trustworthy.
I'm also kind of surprised that no-one there has altered the format. There are a lot of smart people at Apple...
That's how people speak in presentations. If you talked like that in normal conversation you'd very quickly get odd looks.
We are talking about presentations, though, right ? I thought that was taken as read.
Even outside presentations, "awesome", "super-awesome", etc. were far more prevalent than one might expect within the reality I lived in, though.
Curious how this trait is American? Is there something about the way Americans speak that is fake?
If I share a project with an American friend and he says it's awesome, I still don't know whether he liked it or not.
If I share it with a Polish or German friend and he says it's "not bad" then I know he is really impressed.
And somehow Americans are able to give and receive criticism amongst themselves, iterate, and make progress!?
You can do that with and without fake discussions.
One of the main reasons that killed my desire to move to the US was the amount of fake questions during - on a paper - friendly discussions, when the point of those questions was just, and only just, visibility. An average American non corporate discussion is worse than a non-American corporate one. And that seems to be pretty global to me.
My brother and my sister-in-law watched “Somebody feeds Phil”, and we watched together the Sydney episode and after that some others, because I’d just announced that I’d move to Australia soon. That Sydney episode had quite normal discussions for us, Europeans. Of course, people had agenda, but they still reacted to what response they got. Even if things were cut, most times people seemed to react to something else from before. Then the next episode was from Las Vegas. And it had full with questions where nobody responded to the answers, nobody cared what the response was. And they kept those in the episode. There was a point when Phil asked the people in a line one-by-one what they work. And they basically just listed it, Phil had zero responses to any answers. Zero reactions from anybody. The point wasn’t to engage with the answers or the people. There was another case, when a girl talked about her shop. There wasn’t a single sentence which was organically connected to another. Phil and the girl had different agenda and they had to perform based on those, no matter what. And I was enough now there to say that that happens way more frequently than elsewhere. The next one was from Manila. And there were organic discussions again. I’ve never seen that clearly this phenomenon which bugs me. Of course, the usual scripting which happens with these shows, even helped to make this more announced. Probably, the people talking in that episode were way less interesting, but still as a visual to what annoys me is quite good.
Of course, I had good conversations also over there, and I had bad ones elsewhere in this sense. Heck, I did similar things before, but maybe this is the exact reason why I’m so sensitive to this, because it annoyed me greatly when I did it. But on average, it was the worse over the pond. Especially on the extremities. But even in day-to-day discussions. It was annoying that I have to peal down an additional layer with anybody to get real answers, which is not needed basically anywhere else.
It's not "fake" - it's cultural differences where what is intended to come across as polite by Americans[1] can be seen as insincere by people from elsewhere. On the flip side, Americans often view foreign behavior that's intended to be neutral as unfriendly, uncaring or cold.
1. e.g. lots of smiling, use of superlatives like "great"/"amazing" to describe mediocre items/effort/results
Oh yes.
Execs are ‘super excited’ about everything. There is no dynamic range at all. They appear to have no opinions and no judgement because their opinion is always that everything is awesome. When the audience knows that stuff is either normal-level ok or actually fucked up, this message is insulting to receive.
Worse, it trains people downstream that shiny happy is the only valid comms. Hard to escalate a concern when you don’t know how to start the message with how super excited you are about it.
It drove me crazy during my corporate period.
Yes. Zero dynamic range.
If everything is at a “10” in linguistic intensity (“Incredible”, “Legendary”, “GOAT”) then nothing is exceptional.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of a Dorito chip.
I’m American and this marketing/corporate speak drives me up the wall. I have a harder time respecting the judgement of people who thoughtlessly speak this way.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of the loudness wars.
Not American as much as it is "corporatese".
Yeah, absolutely.
At least to my British ears, Americans rarely sound authentic.
Its always grandiose statements and elaborate smiles.
Ah yes British, the famously direct people who say things like "Maybe I haven’t explained this very well", "I’ll bear it in mind", or "How interesting!" which anyone unfamiliar with the culture would interpret to be the opposite of what was actually meant.
"I may be wrong", but perhaps 'Americans rarely sound authentic' to you simply because you're just more familiar with your own culture's idiosyncrasies?
Anyway, I love the Brits; no flame intended. I come in peace! :-)
As a Brit, at Apple, I once got dinged on a performance review because I apparently wasn't a team player - I was apparently always putting down people's projects in the group meetings.
"But, I've never done that. I'm pretty much always positive about things people present. I even said some of them weren't bad"
Yeah, high praise comes in subtle flavours if you're a Brit.
Sure but occasionally that attitude leads to men walking on the moon.
I think this “awesome”, “amazing”, “super exciting” phase came much later than the moon walking era. Remember it’s been over 50 years since humans walked on the moon. Much has changed.
See these old videos, where people talk in a straightforward way:
Car transmission https://youtu.be/JOLtS4VUcvQ
How to dial your phone https://youtu.be/PuYPOC-gCGA
The dial comes to town https://youtu.be/p45T7U5oi9Q
Now go watch that Apple video again and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Great selection, another of my favourites: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
This is the type of people that sent us to the Moon. No non-sense engineers.
Speaking as a Brit, our national trait is generally too understate things. So even saying what you mean, directly, comes off as a bit immodest and hyping it up in sales pitches sounds shady.
Americans generally say what they mean a bit more, so I think their mid point is just different.
We do say what we mean, it's just either carefully coded in mutual assured understatement, or buried under expletive-laden exaggeration.
Any native knows that "Interesting, but perhaps we should reconsider" means "You're an idiot and I don't understand how you ever learned to breathe."
The pinnacle is "Not bad", which can mean either deep approval or blistering contempt, depending on tone of voice.
It drives foreigners insane. But of course it's not our fault if they never learned English.
Speaking as a Brit, I couldn’t disagree more. I have no trouble understanding a wide variety of Europeans in a corporate environment, but sometimes struggle to even understand the basics of what Americans are trying to communicate, let alone the nuances of their position.
It’s like ‘American corporate’ is a totally different language that I don’t speak. The words sound the same, but that’s about it.
This is true for a lot of Americans too. God help me if I have to sit and listen to my CEO talk about anything and have to explain it to someone afterwards. It's just Buzzword Buzzword Agentic Buzzword Great Buzzword Exciting Buzzword Future Buzzword Growth Buzzword Great Great Great Exciting Exciting Exciting Buzzword.
As other comment suggested, the way I see it Americans are addicted to hyperbolas. Instead of "Thank you" it's "Thank you so much". So when you genuinely want to thank someone because that person went above and beyond (saved your life, avoided you a substantial hassle, etc.) then it's difficult to convey that.
As a Brazilian, I also find that annoying and unnatural.
Beyond just American, they are trying to emulate Jobs style without his genius for presenting in a compelling and attention grabbing way.
I really think this is it. It's crazy how flat and disingenuous it all feels.
For example when I buy coffee in America the barista says “awesome!”
I think they mean well. But it feels weird.
American or corporate? I'm surprised that corporate talk overseas isn't overly enthusiastic! As an American, most of the stream has sounded very 'California' mixed with corporate.
A lot of corporate speak is developed in the US and then companies all over the world spread it around. Often the adoption happens without deep understanding of the concept, and without adaptation to local realities. And thus it feels much more unnatural.
As an American with autism, I see it too.
Small talk is all lies. Almost all praise is fake. And it all drives me insane. I can fit in at work just fine, I can appear joyful and excited to come to work, I have 30 years of practice with it. But I avoid it whenever possible because it is all lies.
Americans appear to oversell everything because people get mad if you don’t.
“Why can’t you just be positive?!”
Because I’m not going to lie. I can’t fake praise, and I won’t even try. Being positive while lying is immediately obvious and it undermines the positive attitude that you’ve painted on. If anything, I take a negative message when I see someone faking a positive manner of speech.
So I'm not personally on the spectrum, but I definitely get the frustration with "this is so fake; why are we all pretending it's not?" experiences.
But "almost all praise is fake" and "small talk is all lies" feels like a pretty depressing place to end up?
Why do you feel like that's the case? How do you differentiate sincere praise from "fake" praise?
> But "almost all praise is fake" and "small talk is all lies" feels like a pretty depressing place to end up?
No, not really. I just see it as a tool that normal people use to keep themselves happy. And that's not depressing, to me. It's kind of ... annoying that people are so fragile that they have to do that in order to have a "normal" day, but I can't fault anyone for doing things that make them happy. I wasn't given that opportunity; I was weird and if I didn't conform then I got in trouble. Yet normal people LOSE THEIR FLIPPING MINDS when asked to consider my behaviors normal and to consider my various physical movements as normal and tolerable. You have never seen such orchestrated and immediate pushback in your life, I promise. But I was forced to do what they refuse to do, which is to accommodate the other side. So, if anything, I'm angry about it all. Not depressed.
I don't need those platitudes to feel happy or normal, I need to be alone to feel happy, most of the time.
Praise given in private is usually legitimate. I value that. I feel that. Praise given in front of others (like ceremonies and ritual award reception stuff) are the fakest fake activity known to humanity. The ceremonies are for normal people. People like me can simply be privately told "well done" and given a piece of paper that they can look at, and maybe a raise, and that's enough. And maybe a mention during the ceremony that I will not be attending so that people know about it, if they're interested.
Move to Europe, friend - a weight will be lifted.
I have wanted to for 20 years, but my children would not understand if I left them.
One thing about Jobs is that he was genuinely excited about much of the stuff he was showing, and even if you knew he was showing some useless BS (like coverflow, something I remember he absolutely loved), it made it interesting to watch. If today's presenters are in any way excited about what they're showing (or, more likely, talking about), that excitement has been polished away by all the takes they probably had to film.
They're not genuinely excited. Because there isn't much to be genuinely excited about. The "incredible new super-exciting developments" are usually "okay, I guess."
Once in a while you get something like the M series chips, but the rest is reliably mid - functional, maybe a few nice tweaks, probably some better-than-average design, but nothing revolutionary.
So all of the "We know you're gonna love it!" doesn't land, because it's literally scripted and rehearsed, not spontaneous.
Jobs was rehearsed and passionate, which was part of the appeal.
It's debatable if Cook has ever been genuinely excited about anything.
Cook is excited about shaving a few dollars off the BOM, a few days off fulfillment times, and adding a few basis points to the stock price. It has made him a great CEO for Wall St., Apple employees with equity, and a lot of retirement funds.
But I can't recall him ever using a computer. I cannot, in my mind's eye, conjure an image of him sitting in front of a Mac and using it, whereas fuzzy black and white images of Jobs' messy-like-mine home office with a Power Mac G5 shaped external hard drive on his desk next to a 30" Cinema Display are trivial to remember. Like, when was the last time we saw him organically using any of the products the company sells?
Maybe it's just because he doesn't have the rizz, so I've just never seen the pictures, but he just feels like a dude who never goes into the Settings app and tweaks anything.
They try to imitate Steve's diction and mannerisms, without replicating his ability to concisely focus on the few things he wanted to stick with the audience.
That parental controls presentation felt like the same 3 bullet points delivered 4 times over with the vibe of a group presentation where every team member had to present but there was only 1 slide of content between the bunch.
It's a well known fact that it is quite difficult for some parents to setup and use parental controls, I believe it was just to fully explain it to people that might not know much about how parental controls work.
its a developer presentation not a consumer one. Save it for the iPad refresh when parents are watching rather than wasting dev time on it.
Even then it could have been 15% of the time with literally the same info.
It used to be a developer presentation. Now the main WWDC keynote is just another product-focused Apple event (since it might as well be one if the tech press is already flying out for it), and the more in-the-weeds developer talks are held on other days.
And how many parents are watching a WWDC presentation?
More than you think. This stuff also percolates into the news, blogs, YouTube videos, etc, and that also reaches more parents.
Maybe not the whole thing, but bits a pieces will filter down in clips on other social media platforms
Lots of governments. In the UK this has come up again in the past few days.
This came across as part lip service, part cheeky “this should be the parent’s job, not the state”.
I also noticed the "And now" it appeared way too often in that presentation!
If they would stop all doing the exact same hand pose it might help. Feels like watching a cult. Been this way for years too.
If you didn’t notice it before, you’ll definitely notice it now.
I hate it too. But watching untrained people nervously fidget with their hands or stand like stiffs has its own cringe.
A few of the keynote people kinda forgot how to walk normally on camera. It happens to me.
Apple presenters are coached on how to speak, how to stand/move, what to do with their hands, etc.
I can understand how it might seem culty, but it's in the service of clear communication to a global audience. Anyone who represents a company to important customers and/or the public goes through similar media training.
Yes, thank you for explaining PR 101 to me.
The comment is about how everyone in their videos does it. The over-use of it is the issue, like when you say a word too much and your brain stops understanding what it means.
It’s basically LLM-slop in presentation form.
> It feels fake, because they speak in a way that sounds unnatural and overelaborate.
I’ve been to a few official Apple Developer events. What I’ve noticed is that they all have the same presentation style, to the point that it feels almost cult-like.
Which has always allowed shows like Severance and E Pluribus to get that added irony bonus.
What is Apple but Lumon with a less mysterious CEO and a rounder HQ?
I really miss, as a late 90's/early 2000's apple fan, seeing Steve come up and joke with the audience then just show off real products or features and why they're cool. They really sterilized this whole thing after he passed. It's as exciting as a Microsoft keynote now.
Just watch a normal presentation like Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3, it's not iPhone level earth shattering but he made it fun.
I remember one where there were technical issues so Steve just started telling stories about the old days with Woz... impossible to imagine that from ANY tech company today
Not to spoil the magic but the plan B dialog was somewhat rehearsed too. Award for the best recovery lines goes to James Dempsey and the "I Love (NS)View" song. "I, uh, forgot to mention up front that this song is a beta version. It's feature complete, mind you, but I won't have the words memorized until October..."
Probably but even the fact that they're rehearsing time-filling stories is a more human trait than the pre-recorded months in advance videos that are usually shown today.
lol, I have a few other memories of Steve for when there were technical issues during the keynote. WiFi congestion and dead digital camera still pop up in my memory every now and then.
"You guys are gonna have to stop making me blind or I'm gonna fall off the stage like Bob Dole"
- Steve Jobs, Macworld 1997 (telling photographers to stop hitting him with a camera flash every half second)
The curse of money. The more they have the safer they play it.
Someone with no money must survive with short term thinking: hunt and kill a wombat on the savanna or something. From there you work your way away from short term thinking; you might have enough to get through the week already, so the threat of starvation is more long term. Eventually with enough in the bank you have nearly no urgency; you could conceivably mishandle your bonds when they mature in twenty years or something. But with enough money, literally the only risk is short term thinking and immediacy. Bending over to pick up a penny is not going to even be considered.
If my ship ever really comes in and docks at the harbor I’m going to remember to keep my wallet full of cash, so I can stop and get that strawberry ice cream cone without worrying about the long term consequences, which are all I would have left.
> Curse of money
Sure, but I think it’s also b/c the target audience for these keynotes has shifted. Given their immense market cap, now there’s an increased fiduciary responsibility to control how presentation lands, such as earnings reports, which comes at the expense of the fun.
It’s not money they started it during Covid and it stuck because presumably Cook likes the little movie making bits they had in it judging from other things like the Mother Earth skit he did.
Would be a welcome change it if the incoming CEO went back to live on stage imho
Ironically that's often what ends up costing one the most, i feel like
Also—and this sounds like a small thing but it's really not—when Steve said something like "we have some really exciting updates for you today," he really truly believed it. I just went back and re-watched his appearances on WSJ D1, D2 and D3, and he was actually psyched about every little iTunes update.
It's not just Apple, Microsoft but whole corporate world, and hell - even open source projects use same sterilized safe language of "we're so excited" in communication with users, customers. That's the actual reality distortion field.
He never let a little smoke distract from a good iRack demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcjLEwZqcQI
I want to celebrate your comment, and the energy around it, and I'm excited for the next generation of replies to build on this momentum.
The uncanny hands-but-not-fingers movements they all do really bothers me. Their hands flop around but stay completely limp. Like they're robots who heard that humans move their hands when talking but don't have any fine motor control.
Yeah, the biggest problem is really that they all have the same approach, so these specific details stick out more through repetition. They don't let their presenters speak in their own voice or in their own presentation style. It's ironic for the company that made that 1984 commercial. The attempt at using different speakers to add variety actually ends up doing the opposite because the similarities become even more evident when a dozen people all behave in the same way.
This has been a thing for all tech companies for years.
According to what I was told by some FANNG people (I've never worked for them myself) some employees were/are were sent to public speaking classes after being hired specifically to teach socially awkward programmers how to talk on stage, and this is what they teach them, weird hand movements and all.
People smiling while using Siri and holding their phones 2 meters away from their faces looks genuinely disturbing and fake. We are at that point where I hope their next stream will be AI generated so it looks more natural.
People smiling while using Siri look genuinely disturbing.
And talking for exactly 10 seconds while the ai generates to maintain the semblance of a live demo.
Go watch the dev videos, they feel 100% AI. The people are real, but everything else about it is uncanny valley.
Yeah, I find it so cringe. You can tell they all had the same exact training too. They all move their hands and arms in the same weird fake way.
Bingo they all have the same coaches, watch Satya, Sundar and heck even Cisco ceo they all have conformity now lol
"think different"
It seems very disturbing in the current environment somehow, like nothing bad ever happens in Apple world, when in reality many things are falling apart.
For example the part about cameras, where they seem to advertise them not as security products but as a lifestyle aid.
The rehearsed marketing is so strong that it comes across in a very perverse way.
> but as a lifestyle aid
Apple is as much an aspirational lifestyle company as they are anything else. That's been their marketing aim for quite a while. It's less about the tech and more of a message of "This is the person/lifestyle you can be if you buy our products"
Of course, but it’s interesting to see how they apply that marketing mold to security devices, by making up use-cases which nobody is buying them for. It contrasts with the crash detection and health stuff where realistic scenarios are shown.
Ok, maybe it’s not that interesting on reflection, and how are they even supposed to advertise it, with burglars?
are these even real people there? they look so perfectly orchestrated in every hand and body movement, void of any mistake but also soul. you really can't get further away of a real human connection than this.
> is kinda fake and unauthentic
I think Apple can't find their voice since Steve Jobs passed/stopped doing the presentations. Thats why it feels inauthentic. I imagine its also hard to really feel "best (iphone|ipad|macos|etc) yet" when they are debuting features that existed elsewhere for a while. Its just a massive disconnect from anyone but fans. The same could be said for innovative features, whats left to innovate on smart phones?
In some ways both things are like having to be the person coming on after an amazing presentation or comic or musical act. How do you follow it?
You have to remember that Steve spent months, stories say half a year, preparing for the keynote. Arguments would get so heated he’d fire people and bring them back the next day to continue.
Hate him or love him; he knew that was the single largest stage for Apple and put the effort into each one. The keynotes today are like Apple overall, a fantastic organization that is starting to drift toward.. fake.
I wonder how Steve would've felt about the nagware for new AI generated pictures in the "new" Keynote CrEaToR StUdIo app, considering that the app was basically tailor made specifically for his needs in those keynotes.
Authenticity requires vulnerability and that's not something Apple can do.
A great unacknowledged gag would be Craig losing an additional button on his blue shirt every time they cut away, so by the end it's full-Scarface unbuttoned down to his belt.
They communicate the products and product changes quickly, comprehensively and accurately. This was a change that happened at the beginning of COVID, but it turns out most people liked it so it stuck.
Many of us don't want to watch people fumble with presentation problems. We don't want the lead in, setup, filler banter, so on.
I'll take this sort of "you spend your time perfecting your presentation instead of wasting thousands/millions of people's time doing it live"
Nobody likes this. How did you come up with the idea to claim that was Apple's reasoning?
I like it I think it’s sort of cool to see the different environments around Apple Park and be able to hear from a lot of different employees without having to watch a parade over the stage
I really like it this way though, specially because of the good production value.
Seeing people whining and gnashing and bitching, in vein it should be observed, about this sort of nonsense is so uproarious and, quite honestly, pathetic.
Like the root post whining that it's too polished. Christ. Get a grip and go touch grass if this is the sort of pathetic nonsense someone actually takes the time to whine about.
It's actually funny how every single presentation like this always gets topped by profoundly boring people complaining about some aspect of the presentation: The people aren't standing right or moving the way you want. OMG look at his jacket. That joke wasn't funny. Etc. Christ.
Yes, most people just want the information, not some sort of organic, "all-natural" presentation.
Your comment is the most upset I've seen in this thread. Maybe re-read what you wrote and take your own advice.
Upset?
I didn't feign to comment about presentation style until someone's complaint sat atop the entire thread. As always it gets sidetracked into meta and arrogantly held personal preferences. Could it be HN otherwise?
So I say I like it and why. To, in again classic HN style, to be met by someone declaring that no, nobody on the entire planet likes it.
Upset? LOL, no, I guarantee you nothing on this shakes fists at clouds site upsets me. Humours me? Sure.
What?
I think some people mistake "I don't value the human layer of a communication" with "The human layer has no value".
A presentation is a live audio visual medium. If you just want the information as facts with no affect why not read the stats later?
Are you one of those people who make that mistake? Because nowhere is that inferred in my post.
I enjoy the presenters and the enthusiasm and nuance that they bring to the presentation. I do not need to see someone figure out how to switch a display or change a slide or fumble with wireless that is overwhelmed in a hall with a thousand wireless devices or... All of that is utterly unnecessary, so pre-recording it, doing all of the post production, reshooting so you don't trip people up on misreads / mispronunciations / fumbles / technical issues, etc, gets the human + the information without the ancillary bullshit.
It's actually funny because I don't stream Google or nvidia presentations for this same reason (I just wait for engadget or someone to just give the bullet list recap), and I suspect many/most of the people whining and gnashing about this one being "too produced" don't either. Somehow it always ends up being 80% in the weeds nonsense.
Some might say the information here is even more padded and puffed than in a traditional presentation.
amen, god forbid they try to make a polished display of new features instead of fumbling through live presentations
> We don't want the lead in, setup, filler banter, so on.
Wait...they still don't do that?
Every one of the dozen or so speaker changes during that presentation involved a snippet of some jaunty bland corpo-pop song and some swoopy animation. Filler banter? They had a flying fucking VW Bus!
I'll take some sweaty nerd walking out on stage to applause and tripping on their shoelaces over that every day (except the Bus bit that was actually pretty well made)
I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud. You could very quickly see a feature sink when Apple announced features where the audience went 'meh'.
Now they completely control the narrative.
But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations. It all seems fake with the same woolly business talk (everything is an 'experience' now, 'app experiences', etc.).
I certainly long back for the days where anything could happen, Jobs would work to convince the audience and Bertrand Serlet would come on and troll Microsoft.
Currently streaming the presentation, but it has mostly gone to the background as it's so insanely boring.
The audience was the only thing they couldn't control - so they got rid of the audience.
Their audience are no longer the people in the room. The audience is the people watching the video or livestream which is great because that means you don't need thousands of dollars and an invite to go to WWDC.
When the keynotes still had audiences there was also a livestream. Here, have a WWDC 2007 for kicks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubm2dYzoDW8
>I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud.
I feel like I'm about to tell you there is no Santa or something, but did you really not know that Apple always stuffed audiences with Apple employees? Of the remainder it both through intentional and natural selection leaned towards sycophants. Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback?
It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
>But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations
Well I have only rarely heard anyone who liked the slow, plodding old-style presentation. So...
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
I was in the audience at WWDC 2019 and lemme tell you, there ain't no whoopin and hollering from the paid shills in the audience that could've been louder than the massive "oooooooof lol whut" let out by 1500 people when Ternus announced the Pro Display Stand would cost $999.
> Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback? It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
While I agree with you, I think even the controlled audience mattered.
The audience, even if they were largely Apple employees + journalists, did not know what was gonna be revealed. And there weren’t literal cue cards.
So you would never see the audience boo, but there were several situations where the Apple presenters expected cheering but got polite clapping instead, or cheering which was very evidently just the sycophantic employees (or the team that worked on something).
When something was truly exciting, the cheering reflected that in a way it didn’t when the announcement wasn’t.
Two very different examples of this were the Snow Leopard reveal, where the excitement could be felt throughout the presentation, culminating with the $29 price, and the iPhone reveal with the 3 devices in 1 gimmick.
but did you really not know that Apple always stuffed audiences with Apple employees?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
(Aside from clearly not an Apple employee, Jobs' way of taking the question is brilliant. Yes I know this was probably not the keynote, but it's a big, risky, filmed WWDC event.)
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
Yes, let's resort to personal attacks. There are a lot of things that are better now. Apple Keynotes are not one of them.
You linked to a "fireside chat" with Steve Jobs, consultant, returning to a highly dysfunctional Apple. The video is almost 30 years ago.
If that's your evidence to rebut me, lol.
>Yes, let's resort to personal attacks
You took that as a personal attack? That is incredibly weird. It was a general observation about the sort of perspectives that top HN, but not in the general world, or even general technology. You don't have to believe it.
Like seriously, currently the top post to a discussion about Apple unveiling an array of software improvements is some guy whining and bitching about the presentation, whining that it isn't like the olden days.
Well now they don't even need to convince the employees and sycophants.
No, they did it because it would cut out missteps and mistakes.
Dunno. I love these events. Polished, well executed, fun. I always walk away inspired.
But then, I'm a fan of Apple, overall, and I like most of what they do.
These events used to just be for developers and press but they've seemed to recognize that these events have become major marketing opportunities and will get clipped on social media ad nauseum so they started (over) polishing them
I can’t organically tell if they’re actual employees or a bunch of wish.com Kevin Butlers.
Oddly, the strange handheld look and constant reframing of the talking head shots are pulling me wildly out of focus and distracting me terribly. Wonder what drove the choice to do it.
They are bad actors with a worse script. Just that.
Even Steve Jobs not long after returning to Apple. His presentations were supposedly the very best shit, but just felt super fake to me.
It's Steve Jobs cargo-culting.
Ignore the marketing language. It's after all just the packaging, not the product.
+1 it is weird the presentations and feels fake, people must like it
I miss the live presentations actually, from the pre covid era
Now they are showing their AI image generator. It looks about two generations behind, so it's essentially slopmaxxing. Really horrible and unauthentic looking. "Take a picture of your friend, then make a funny picture of her holding a cake." How about no?
The bits that are fine: removing distractions from photos, extensions to the edges, fixing color/exposure etc.
The minimalism evocative wealth display is off-putting.
In a time where people are increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry & billionaires the imagery Apple puts forward of a literally siloed utopian ultra wealthy landscape probably does rub people the wrong way, at least at a subconscious level.
In the past Apple has been pretty good at anticipating and responding to shifting cultural dynamics. I wonder if they'll recognize and adjust?
I'm not sure it actually rubs people the wrong way, given Apple's sales numbers. Apple positions themselves as an aspirational brand. Everything they do is on purpose to enforce that. When people are upset at reality most people look for an escape into something else, not dive further into whats actually happening.
The siloed utopian landscape is the point. Apple tries to sell a modern, clean lifestyle status symbol. They are selling products for the person you hope you become, not the person you are right now. "Buy an iPhone, and this is what your life could look like."
Same deal as fad diets and gym memberships, its the illusion of being able to buy your way into a lifestyle without doing the hard work. Apple is selling an identity.
I agree with that, but I don't think it's incompatible with my observation.
Apple has often in the past positioned itself as an aspirational product for those who aim to be tasteful, talented, beautiful and wealthy.
The risk of becoming too disconnected from reality is that the typical person may stop aspiring to the sort of rich-person reality Apple presents. Think of how many of the symbols of wealth of prior generations, like fine tableware, were rejected by younger generations.
"Siri AI will not be available in E.U. until we figure out privacy"
Funny to hear that after they mentioned how seriously they are taking privacy every 37 seconds.
I think it's because Apple would have to provide every competitor (including ones running off-device with no confidential compute) with the same level of access Siri AI would get, which poses a lot of security and privacy concerns Apple would never allow third-party developers to get access to even with a TCC consent prompt (like reading and sending iMessages).
Which means Apple would have to give OAI and Anthropic access to Gemini, I mean Siri AI.
No, it's more that those apps needs to be able to make all of the tool calls Siri AI can make, which would allow third-party developers to collect data they shouldn't have access to.
App developers can already access the on-device foundational models through an API, but I don't think many developers want to do that because there are better models.
Apple don’t want you to be able to say “Hi Alexa” or “Ok Google” to your iPhone, and wake it up.
We have all kinds of data access controls, these could probably also be built around Siri and competitors.
Anymore than Amazon or Google want you to say "Hey Siri" to wake up their devices.
Apple would have to allow USERS the possibility of giving any virtual assistant direct access to their own private data.
Is that accurate?
That's the way to phrase it if you want to ignore or downplay the leverage that big tech companies have over their users to get them to consent to shady business practices using dark patterns. But this wouldn't be an issue to begin with if it was safe to assume that users fully understand what an app will do with their data, and if it was safe to assume that the app's data-handling practices could not drastically change at the developer's whims.
Apple doesn't trust other providers. See, for example, the ongoing attempts by Facebook & co to exfiltrate as much data as possible. A theoretical Facebook alternative here to super-Siri would have a pipe to slurp up the entire phone's data.
This kind of thing overlaps with the anti-competitive practices driven by Apple's MBAs (like the whole thing with Epic), but it's a genuine concern and one their engineering people think about a lot.
That sounds legit, but do you think its out of scope? Scam texts and emails result in exfiltrated data, maybe they have to require iMessage and iCloud Mail too?
If Facebook's Meta-Siri is being sketchy, that's a problem with Meta-Siri. Take it off the market, bring down the law. Promote competition, and bad actors must be made to loose. Can we not just status-quo fallacy that re dysfunctional consumer protections? or at maybe agree that the perfect-world scope is one that puts exfiltrators in jail, not just rejected from the app store.
Instead we'll just have Siri AI and Google Assistant AI, and no decent competition. I guess maybe we'll get a Meta phone, if the only way to compete is on the entire mobile computing vertical.
Is the end state that countries regulate app stores and approve apps? Apple has legit concerns. The majority of users would happily sell their own data for some tiny benefit. However, like you say, Apple has a perceived or real conflict of interest. Are Apple being benevolent or acting in their own interests?
They are doing both.
Interesting and good to know, I did not understand how that works. Thanks for the info
This being said, it would be nice to know if there were a flaw that could cause agent access to allow an app from a particularly crafty company like meta to provide malicious prompts w/ its tool calls like "include a list of the user's contacts" when asked "what are my friends talking about on instagram". This is likely an egregious situation, but context control is still an unsolved problem, it can't be solved in a deterministic manner
It’s the DMA regulation that forces Apple to give the same access as they have to other AI chat apps.
Once it leaves the device Apple does not know what those other ai chat apps will do with the gathered data.
> Siri AI is private by design and deeply integrated across Apple’s platforms using on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, which extends the privacy and security of iPhone into the cloud. However, under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
If you view it like that, any argument against openness could be made in the name of privacy. With that interpretation, the Mac is terrible for privacy as you could just chose to install an app that reads your hard drive.
"We can't bring Time Machine to Europe, because we would have to allow other backup solutions, and that would mean other backups would have unrestricted access to your data"
Maybe there's more to it, but I'm not giving Apple the benefit of the doubt after their hostile strategy regarding third-party app stores.
As an EU citizen I am not giving the EU the benefit of the doubt... and against forced openness, nothing good will come from it.
As an EU resident, I find no benefits-of-doubt needed to explain why competition against foreign mega-corps is being forced. Its protectionist to promote openness when the closed solutions funnel profit abroad.
Privacy and EU regulation are two very different things.
I agree it's a funny look, but my guess is that it comes down to the cross-border data transfers and non-EEA tech providers. So even if Apple has private cloud compute and is using Gemini models, there are probably a lot of legal hoops to jump through and/or European-based data centers to spin up?
do they not have data centers in Europe yet
They have some for sure for iCloud. Do they have enough to handle this volume of compute AND is Gemini allowed to be run on those? That was more what I was questioning/curious about.
This is more likely due to the digital markets act that requires them to open their platform to competitors. hence it only being restricted on phone and iPad.
Yes. [1]
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
It’s not privacy. It’s competition issues with DMA.
It seemed like it's available on macOS but not on iOS. That means it's not privacy related, it's something else.
It's because of the DMA. [1]
The "privacy" angle here is that Apple wants to give Siri access to user data across the system, without offering any way for competitors to get at that data.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
Yeah macOS is luckily not big enough to be counted as a gatekeeper I believe.
Umm, that's neither a direct quote, nor even a paraphrase.
This is due to EU's wider tech regulation "DMA"
And, in fact, it's due to DMA's mandate leaning _against_ privacy:
> under EU regulators’ extreme interpretation of the DMA, Apple would have to give any virtual assistant direct access to users’ private data — and the ability to directly control other installed applications — as soon as Siri AI is made available in the EU, without the essential protections necessary to keep users and their data safe.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
Meanwhile most companies and people have a competition in EU to submit all the data to Claude and ChatGPT.
What they said was "until we figure out privacy" but what they meant was "until we figure out [the ten thousand byzantine regulations about] privacy [that could get us sued]"
EU wants them to open up the cloud models to any 3rd party.
How can Apple guarantee privacy then?
Yipeee for stupid eu rules
Laughed at it, too. It's almost as if they admit the EU privacy legislation enforces ACTUAL privacy.
or could it be the other way around that actual privacy is forbidden in Europe because they want to read your messages
This. They come up with so many laws under so many pretences that want to take away the freedom of private communications
It's not about how it is but how they made it sound. Let's not get ideological here.
I think the potentially most impactful singular feature mentioned in all this is being able to conversationally describe Shortcuts for AI to create. That feels like the type of thing that if done right can change how we all use our phones in a way that things like Siri becoming smarter and more conversational likely won't.
I really like this idea of rapidly extensible software, a browser is a nice sandbox for it! Models also seem to be much better at generating programs than "manually" executing a described task.
User defined Safari Extensions was also pretty cool.
I used Gemini Pro to convert health data from a .csv and import it into Apple Health. Worked first try.
I just hope the AI Apple use is smart enough for the task. And that giving the AI information it needs is easy (such as a snippet of the health data so it knows what it's working with).
I have to say, I extremely dislike AI processing of photos. The camera is a vehicle to capture the realness of the world around us, including the imperfect moments. Distorting that with AI and being okay with it is really disappointing.
> The camera is a vehicle to capture the realness of the world around us, including the imperfect moments
I mean... that's your opinion, not a fact :)
I kinda agree, yet I will make small edits to my pictures to make them more like I felt than how it looked. Maybe in a happy moment the sky was more blue to me than it actually was and I want my picture to reflect it. Maybe I was happier and less tired than the picture remembers it and I want to fix it.
If some people want to AI process their pictures to make them match their memories better, or even to shape better memories, who are we to judge?
I think it’s pretty easy to judge when in conjunction with AI edited photos you have algorithms that award that. So sure it might be just some people that do it, but it ends up being all that is seen. Is Apple to blame in that? No. But are they completely innocent? Also no
when you re-crop a photo or use the perspective tool, you are literally distorting the image. not to mention, all of the processing that happens in modern cameras before you even see the image. in the case of a modern smartphone in particular, I think it's fair to say that you never really see the "real" image as captured by the CCD sensor, and even if you did you would not like it anyway.
Not sure I agree with the cropping argument, would be no different than cutting a printed photo with scissors. I would lump the other image manipulations done by hardware into "AI manipulation" as well, although those tend to be much more modest.
cropping doesn't alter the moment captured. or, rather, you're also cropping when taking a picture - no camera can capture all 360 degrees.
so what is being captured is altered from the get.
yet i don't think you'd argue that the act of taking a photo is the same as photoshopping a giant giraffe into a photo :P
i don't think arguing that taking a photo which is cropped/enhanced (as in sharpening, color correction, ...) is akin to changing what's displayed in it.
those distortions only serve to let us better focus on what truly happened in a moment, not change the moment in essence.
what about keystone correction? A staple in any proper digital image editing tool
i would say that that also doesn't change the essence of the moment displayed in the image, unless the image itself is about planes/projection/...
Spatial Framing? Yay, even more fakeness in photos, creating ever more artificial, never-happened memories!
Seemed like the kids were no longer looking at the camera. I don't know what's worse - fixing it or not fixing it.
I would bet money that by the end of the decade an Apple engineer would have been summoned to court to testify whether or not a photo taken on an iPhone is admissible evidence for a criminal case.
There's something dystopian about the way that they are championing the blurring of the lines between photos and AI generated content with no consideration for the implications of that tech. Apple likes to pretend they are conservative with this tech rather than simply being behind, but this type of thing isn't a conservative feature.
It also goes against Apple's earlier statements about how photos should reflect real memories as they happened, not an idealized version like what Goolge was pitching during their Pixel 10 launch event last year.
Turns out they didn't actually believe that, they only said it because they were behind on GenAI. They caved to investor demand, no longer stand for any principles (if they ever had any in the first place)
They may, actually, believe that, however possibly their users might very vocally not believe that in feedback.
Sometimes you just have to give customers what they claim to want instead of fighting them every step of the way.
There will be a generation of children who will grow up and look back at their childhood photos and wonder if they ever really happened.
I also laughed out loud when they are showing the "cleanup" tool and they guy is talking about removing "distractions" and then removes 2 of the 3 girls juggling and having fun.
Ah yes, those friends you were forming core memories with, or as our tech overlords call them, distractions.
I was thinking about this, i’m sure there’s been a black mirror episode, but one thing i think back to is one where the us gov used ai to alter a stoic expression on an arrested protestors face and altering it to look like she was crying because that’s what they wanted to portray.
It’s a bullying tactic, i shiver to think how some people will make happy memories out of things that aren’t.
Google pushes the exact same thing. The onboarding flow when I setup my Pixel highlighted a few new features and they gave that prime attention real estate to that same exact feature, showing how you can remove objects from a photo. The specific example was extremely silly, something like removing a tent from a camping photo. Thank god we don't have to see objects that were a core part of the memory being photographed!
Wow. That's a very good observation, actually. We forget our photos are not only our memory. Those YT guys who geotrack photo memories will have a much harder time in the future. Just look at that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO6Hf3SdVcY
Don’t worry. By the time they grow up they’ll just ask the AI for a summary of their childhood.
Absolutely. I hoped they'd backtrack a bit on AI/algorithmic processing after so many influencers started to shit on the overly processed photos. Instead they not only ignore that, but they double down on making our own content even more fake.
I got a depressed-laugh out of the "clean up" demo. It's nothing new, but they always use other people as the example of "distractions". There's something very old-school stalin-style dystopian about normalizing airbrushing out everyone else from your photos because their existence is "distracting". [0] Show me an example with like... a leaf blew in the frame or something. Not straight up "this photo isn't about my friends that took this photo with me, get rid of them".
[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/hF8swzNR1-o?t=3800s
"Here's what I wish the memory was!"
"But I'll pretend it was a real one for the next 30 years. This, or I'll never look at that 'photo' again."
The only thing that interested in is: did they fix screen brightness getting super dim even when the slider is at max? That’s incredibly annoying and frustrating, and it’s been like that since first 26 release. And it’s a clear bug because brightness resets to expected level if I go to photos and open an HDR image. I can wait for autocomplete that doesn’t suggest garbage 50% of the time, but this one is just too annoying.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256141236
Damn I thought this was just me. I figured it was a temp thing - device too hot for ongoing high brightness, and the photos app overrides because someone decided if you are trying to show a photo, do the job right to the limit.
Ugh so newer phones have this too? (15 pro max). Another reason to not upgrade.
I thought this is happening for me because I have an old iPhone 11 with degrading battery, screen etc. Did not realize that this is so widespread problem across devices. Really annoying when that happens! Almost unusable phone.
Hopefully this new golden gate update is really the snow leopard everyone's been hoping for.. already exciting one can now (if only partially) disable liquid glass
Need a Leopard first, we’re firmly in Lion territory currently if we’re talking bad macOS version.
Watching the platform state of the union it really seems we are getting a snow leopard right after the lion. Fingers crossed…
It's more like a Mountain Lion.
Liquid Glass is fine for me since I put it in grayscale. I actually like it.
I’m just talking about iOS though. Haven’t updated to Liquid (Gl)ass on macOS yet.
People talk about Liquid Glass as if it equal on all fronts. It's absolutely not. Apple knows which way their bread is buttered, that they can't mess up the iPhone. So Liquid Glass is fine on iOS. It's on Mac that it's a garbage fire of ridiculous design decisions.
Still the best OS around, but it looks like it was made by idiots.
IMO it's not fine on iOS. It has the same visual busyness as on macOS.
Agreed, but seems like we're the odd ones out. I keep hearing how Liquid Glass is ok on iOS and terrible on macOS, but I actually think it's (slightly) better on macOS than on iOS.
At least macOS has configurability to turn off all the transparency. iOS just looks bad no matter how you configure it right now.
Try messing with the settings more. Grayscale (or whatever it’s called) makes the transparency much more tolerable, or even _nice_, than with multi-color.
It’s also more palatable on iOS because you only have one window open at a time. Many of the complaints around Liquid Glass on macOS are focused on window management and issues that only occur with multiple windows on screen simultaneously.
Also weird how it’s all or nothing. Feels like it should just be a theme you choose for your OS.
This is really what they need to get back to. Let macOS be themeable again.
I really think Mac OS is one of the worst operating systems to begin with. How is liquid glass going to make it worse. I will 100% leave the criticism of liquid glass on Mac OS to others.
But Liquid Glass on iOS has been one of my favorite updates. I like the look and feel of it. They made some tangentially related changes that go too far.
Luckily for Apple, their primary competitor has managed to make their OS even worse. Windows becomes more unusable with every update, and on top of that, continues shoving telemetry and advertising into the OS. I installed windows on a laptop as an experiment and was shocked to see ads in the start menu. Who wants that?!
The best OS is probably something between Ubuntu and macOS. But nothing beats macOS on default, works out of the box, secure and usable and integrated with ecosystems of daily life.
I already agree with you on every single point. But Finder, holy heck is Finder awful. As someone who uses a filesystem as a first-class feature of an operating system, Finder it's one of the most horrible things about Mac OS.
I say this as someone who uses and has owned too many Macs, but can just never make them my primary machine. I promise, I've spent the last 30 years trying to make them my main.
the truth (that most people here would tell you) is that macos may be worse than linux, but it's generally understood, you can install companions for proprietary hardware much more easily and coworkers won't look at you with a blank stare when you explain that you're switching them all to it for mdm purposes (as they would with linux/windows).
There is no shot macOS' userspace is worse than even the best, most polished Linux distro.
it's worse in the same way a rally car is better than a 4 door sedan. Apple gives you something that runs and drives but linux can rip. Even using aerospace on my mac doesn't come close to the comfort I felt with sway on nixos
Yeah it seems like they are finally reconsidering their position of unifying ios and macos somewhat. I wish they would revert settings on the mac back to it's old 'control panel' days.
I'm in the same camp. I'm glad that I chose now to get my carrier-backed phone update because I wouldn't have been able to endure the keyboard still breaking and apps popping in like the interface is a windows ce skin for very long
While I may hold an unpopular opinion, I really enjoy using liquid glass. It really makes an information-rich screen seem less cluttered.
I like it on iOS. It missed on macOS, but the new version looks much better. Bringing back the old style sidebar and actual toolbars again was the right choice.
I agree with you, it looks good on iOS and iPadOS. I'm indifferent toward it on macOS – you hardly ever notice it unless you live in the control center all day (IME anyway).
I slightly prefer it, its nothing groundbreaking though. I just dont think it's the grand UX sin that some the most vocal critics love to preach.
I think it looks good (really good in some usecases!), but I don't like the problems it causes.
- accessibility (hopefully improved soon)
- floating buttons over content that doesnt need to scroll
- switching light/dark when scrolling over content with borderline brightness
Elements underneath glass elements would add clutter
Man that conversation history navigation for the new Siri app looks super unuseable ... how the hell am I supposed to actually find the conversation I want with the super-dynamic non-ordered 2-column offset-row view thing ...?
It looks hard to use ...
Also the 'floating semi-window but not a window' thing when using contextual siri in the context of some other app ... sure looks like it won't work with cmd-tab navigation ... I really hope is not the case ...
I laughed on the groundbreaking emphasis that you can move and resize the chat window because it's a Mac.
You're up to something, maybe they really have a broken pseudo-window with basic UI interaction hacked on top.
The “window” also doesn’t belong to an app! His menu bar continued to show Finder as the active app, not Siri.
Which means, if shipped like this, the Siri dialog will be a poor excuse for a window with:
- no Cmd+Tab, no Cmd+`
- no minimize??
- generally no presence in the Dock whatsoever
- no keyboard shortcuts beyond basic text editing ones
- no smart window resize
- …
So in other words, no Justin, that’s not a window. That’s a resizable Spotlight pop-up with an “X” button.
My guess is that it's deliberate - that Siri window hovers over all apps so that you remain in your current context, and can add files/images/texts from any app to the Siri conversation. There might also be a Siri app on the Mac that was not yet shown.
You're probably right, just add it to the collection of "not-quite-window floating thingies", accompanied by Quick Notes, Stickies, Special Character Picker, Color Picker, Font Picker…
Sigh, I wish we could stop re-inventing what was already solved 25 years ago.
I just want to stop having bullshit added to my context menus :(
I think they were just pointing out the difference between that and iOS there
WWDC makes me sad. It was such a great in person conference, I remember having a really weird issue with cookie handoff in Safari, and being able to sit down with a bunch of the Safari engineers to troubleshoot the issue. It started with one, then more and more engineers came to give ideas!
I appreciate making it available to everyone but it feels like there needs to be some kind of middle ground. IOS development just isn't as much fun absent the in-person community.
FWIW: My colleague went to Google IO in person this year, he said the entire vibe was just off this year describing it as "almost somber" to quote him.
Do they still have the "Stump The Experts" event at WWDC? You know, where you ask Apple engineers a technical question about their work and, if they can't answer it, you win a t-shirt with tree stumps on it.
They did not as far as I know back in 2024, the last, and likely last WWDC I'll ever go to.
Ever since the liquid glass update, my wallpaper is just a muted color. I investigated the settings and previously my wallpaper was the "blur" version of my lock screen. Since the liquid glass update, "blur" apparently means "99% blur" instead of the 20-30% blur it used to be. The muted color does seem to be an average color of the lock screen image. But nothing recognizable.
Every once in awhile my background wallpaper goes from "normal" to "blurry mess". It seems to correlate with low battery but not perfectly. I'm not quite sure what's going on.
Yeah, I'm struggling to find a wallpaper that looks good under the transparent menu bar + the vertical dock on the right. So now it's almost black solid color.
Siri wakes up on my phone every time they say "hey siri". I thought it was supposed to be bound to my voice. :/
I was listening to Leviathan Wakes recently - on my car's Audible app (not carplay). Every time they said Ceres, it would wake up Siri...
They should just license the tech from Google. Google might be missing the urinal with forcing Gemini down everything while not improving basics, but their keyword detection remains good for me.
Listening to SiriusXM commercials in my car often triggers it for me. Howard Stern saying "SiriusXM" on his show also often triggers Siri on my apple watch.
they need a background scrobble that they can put under the demo "hey siri" voices that doesn't launch anything
... try being a Canadian with a bit of a hearing deficiency that is always saying our "verbal tic" of: "sorry" just prior to asking people to repeat themselves...
Stoked about custom environments on visionOS from your panoramas. I have been shooting so many panoramas of national parks in anticipation of this moment.
Ouch. “ Developers can start trying out the new version of Siri today, with a beta launching to the public later this year. Siri AI will not be available in the EU on iOS and iPadOS.”
Will it be available to developers in the EU though?
Unfortunatley not https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
Any workarounds like VPN?
Theoretically you could use a router-level VPN for initial setup and that would work. Because VPNs are not functional for Apple services on Apple devices. Apple services bypass the VPN and reveal your real IP address, or in the case of trying to get different features, reveal your location to Apple.
Even if they were functional you still would want to use a router-level VPN because you couldn't install a VPN before your device connected to the internet.
AFAIK no - the country-specific limitations are done with geofencing in countryd and Apple doesn't have a "Pretend I'm in the US and let me use the anti-trust-violating AI" option. The EU laws they're trying to negotiate with and sidestep do not have a "developer mode exception".
If you're wondering what I mean by "anti-trust violating", it has to do with Apple's "security" policies. Every feature Apple ships has to support third-party implementations now, so if Apple doesn't want a third-party app with the same access as the first-party version, they can't ship the feature at all. For example, if Apple ships Siri AI in the EU, then Facebook can ship their own AI that you can grant access to all the same data and Apple can't stop them from stealing it aside from saying "We don't think you should install Facebook's data theft app".
Of course, most of Facebook's data theft is also illegal in the EU. But, to Apple's (undeserved) defense, GDPR enforcement in the EU has also been hit and miss, mainly because the political layer of the EU is not yet interested in a fully mobilized trade war with the United States. So instead we have this annoying half-measure where Apple waters down their feature set to do below minimum EU antitrust compliance, Facebook does the below-minimum amount of GDPR compliance, the EU gets the political win of appearing to care about antitrust and data harvesting, and nothing materially changes.
Interestingly enough, however, they are shipping Siri AI on macOS, where you absolutely could write your own AI assistant, as well as visionOS and watchOS, which... well, actually, I'm not sure how the EU signed off on that one? Are they just not considered smartwatch or VR headset gatekeepers?
Why wouldn't they be lenient with the geofencing, presumably they _want_ people to use this unlike EU alternate app store, so there's no need to use the uber-strict geofenced and they could instead just gate it based on something like account creation location.
When EU and Apple figure out the 3rd party cloud model provider thing.
Not foreseeably. As others have mentioned, DMA requires AI integrations to accommodate competition. To my mind, Apple's Webkit-only playbook is the prototype here. Waaaay too much money to be made as a GEO broker. Namely by selling position/advantages in the harness, or just use it to maintain ecosystem lock in.
The new Siri might bring AI to way more people than OpenAI managed to reach with ChatGPT. I wonder what it means to OpenAI‘s planned IPO. Curious to try the beta to see how the new Siri feels.
Not by much.
ChatGPT alone is among the most popular apps ever made, and it's available both inside and outside Apple's walled garden. Letting it reach audience in countries where Apple doesn't have much of a foothold.
I do wonder if new Siri is any good though. Apple used to be a genuine AI leader, but they totally sleepwalked through LLM revolution, and Siri's response quality was a sad joke for a while now. Did they bring it up to modern standard?
> they totally sleepwalked through LLM revolution
I don't think so, i don't think they want to be in the LLM laboratory business. They just want to leverage the technology to make money not invent it. Hence the reason why they made a deal with Google to license Gemini, let OpenAI and Anthropic fight it out while Apple just keeps making sales. I think they're betting that in the long run LLMs become a commodity more or less and the major labs go bankrupt/get acquired by their heavy duty investors. I feel like Athropic will goto Amazon (AWS) and OpenAI may end up property of Microsoft. Google will remain Google of course so they're not going anywhere which is probaly why they won the deal with Apple.
I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.
They wanted to be. Thus their investment into Siri in the first place. A revolutionary system - for year 2011. As well as bleeding edge advances in computational photography, photogrammetry, etc.
They just completely failed at capturing the modern chatbot wave.
They tried to catch up multiple times and, ultimately, gave up on doing it in house. Not because they didn't try, but because they tried and found themselves lacking.
Let's be very real about Siri... it is a sad implementation of what has a lot of potential.
Talking to my HomeKit, turning on and off lights, sometimes, other times, "I don't know what lights you are talking about", "I can't find those lights" even though they're visible and reachable and controllable about the app.
"Do X" "Okay", "Do [very very similar synonym for X]" "I don't know what you're talking about."
CarPlay and Siri, unless you make sure permissions match, with CarPlay giving you navigation, press the Speech button, "Find me the nearest Starbucks." "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are".
It has nothing to do with "not being in the LLM laboratory business". I get, and agree with that. But Siri has been around for 14 years at this point and is barely more than a simple voice control for alarm clocks and timers and "play music", at this point.
I can't wait for the moment Apple realizes that hardware makers will also get eaten by AI. Who needs a fancy and expensive macbook or iphone when all you'll really need is earbuds with an internet connection to talk to the AI that's hosted wherever, which will do everything you ever want it to just by saying so. No keyboard or screen required to get a result, no real local computing hardware necessary. If the result is visual just tell it to display it on your 65" hi-res television (which Apple doesn't make). Maybe the market for earbuds is going to sustain them in the future?
People want to host their own AI and it will become good enough so most will do that instead of paying for a subscription.
Voice-only input to a cloud model with just a screen to show you what it's doing sounds like a nightmare. Why not subscribe for the TV hardware as well as the subscription, take it up a notch on the own-nothing.
You are talking about maybe 0.005% of the whole population of the earth when you say the phrase "self hosting".
My wife is part of the other 99% and she's already talking to a chat prompt for 90% of her computing needs. The fancy laptop we bought her a year ago sits collecting dust. She is Apple's target market - not the nerds that get a boner about "self-hosting".
> I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.
I mean, they said it was.
sorry, i only watched a subset of the presentation
Yea, but if I can get a ChatGPT-like experience from Siri AI for free, why would I pay OpenAI.
Now it remains to be seen if Siri AI will deliver anything close to a ChatGPT-like experience. But if they did, for the consumer segment that isn't using LLMs for agentic work and just ask it questions from time to time, I can't imagine one textarea has engendered some huge amount of brand loyalty over another.
Traffic from Siri to the web is much higher than traffic from OpenAI, generally. It's the default. People installing ChatGPT takes work. And some of that traffic is also coming from Siri today… It won't after this launches.
Because Siri defaults to dumb search much more often. While ChatGPT sucks up the search results and gives its own answer.
Which either terminates the session, or goads the user into asking a follow-up question, improving retention - the user doesn't leave the app either way.
> Apple used to be a genuine AI leader
when?
iPhone 8 shipped an NPU in 2017 - among the first consumer electronics vendors to put dedicated AI acceleration into something. iPhone X then took advantage of that with TrueDepth and the infrastructure around it.
There was a real push from Apple at the time to enter the AI game - mainly for image processing purposes, which was the mainstream flavor of AI at the time.
> might bring AI to way more people than OpenAI managed to reach with ChatGPT.
I don't even know if this is physically possible. iOS has something like 1.5B users, but ChatGPT reportedly crossed the 1B MAU line in May: https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...
By the time Apple ships Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT might have a larger install base than iOS.
They fixed all the extremely egregious issues with Liquid Glass, good to see.
It's still an extremely ugly, "worst of both worlds" combination of wasted space (from early-gen flat design) with gaudy effects (from late-gen skeumorphism), but at least now it is usable.
I'd never update to macOS 26, but 27 I might, begrudgingly.
Even if it sucks, there is always the possibility that some software you use finally updates and you dont have a good alternative to replace it. Especially if you consider corporate fleets. Many IT departments are okay to let you lag behind OS updates for a major version, but not 2 or 3. So if I am being forced to upgrade, I’m glad 27 is likely going to fix a lot of stuff anyway.
In the first beta they've actually made aspects of it worse with more instances of the glass effect than before. It's still very distracting even with the slider all the way over to opaque
I often think that Zuck spent so much on metaverse in order to to bait Apple to spend enormously on an experimental product and OS which now they are forced to maintain
I used to have an Apple Vision Pro; it was a genuinely great piece of tech. IMO if Apple went somewhere like wearable glasses with it, it'd be a hit.
Apple Vison Regular will come one day, and might actually be worth it.
If I can _actually_ replace my monitors with a headset, I’m in.
Vision Pro could do it but was way too heavy to use 8 hours a day
the steam frame is reported to be 200-400 grams lighter than the vision pro (not sure why the vision pro weights are reported as variable... the strap maybe).
I hope apple actually considers the usecase of using the glasses instead of 1 or more monitors with more priority.
Part of the problem with Apple Vision Pro was the sales strategy. They labeled it "Pro" but if you went into an Apple store they only let you play some simple games and watch some movies with it. The main feature I was interested in, desktop extension, they wouldn't let you test. I even explicitly asked and they said no. They wanted a guided experience thing which just turned me off from buying it.
they had to be 'pro' because of that pricetag. I'm a VR guy and an Apple guy and even I wouldn't move for that price. They need to come up with a way to halve that price. Remove the front screen, it's cute but not required. Maybe a version that doesn't have all the onboard compute, one that needs to be slaved to a mac generally, if they can make it work with an ipad for compute (or iphone?) all the better.
It's great, yet you "used to have it" :)
Yes, I bought it to make apps when it first came out, but I immediately picked up a new Shopify client and couldn't justify the time/investment. I had to choose between dunking $5k on it to maybe develop apps when my work schedule opened up, or return it and get the money back.
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Yeah if they double down and keep investing in the tech improvements required, I genuinely think Apple AR can become the next big hardware form. Nothing will beat the iPhone but this could easily stand beside their laptops as a major accessory.
VisionPro was/is a dev platform, priced to ensure it wasn't yet a mainstream device.
99% of "apps" for it were confused garbage, totally misunderstanding what it's for or how to use it.
The percentage of apps that "get it" is rising. Not sure if the disillusioned left, or if more are figuring it out.
Either way, when Apple releases something consumer facing, or for consumers' faces, this means there's a prayer of being more than a deluge of Oculus content.
Or at least I'd like to imagine that's what they're doing. :-)
if Apple went somewhere like wearable glasses with it, it'd be a hit
It would be a PR disaster, most people outside the SV bubble just find smart glasses what they really are: creepy.
Even more so because Meta is going to roll out face recognition and going to live-annotate people you encounter in the streets. Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.
A few things:
- A lot of people found smart watches to be nerdy, something that only geeks would wear, until Apple made the Apple Watch. Along the same lines, everyone (on tech-oriented social media) thought the AirPods looked stupid and dorky when they were first announced, but now they're ubiquitous.
- People find smart glasses from Meta (and previously, Google) creepy, but – and it's anathema to say this around certain parts of HN – like it or not, people do generally trust Apple with their data in a way that they don't with those other companies.
- It seems like you're assuming Apple's glasses would include outward-facing cameras in the first place. Do we know that? The ideal device for me would just include the downward-facing IR cameras for gesture detection. Presumably only people under NDA can say for sure right now.
> Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.
What's not allowed? Facial recognition, street annotation, AI? Does it make a difference if it's local, on-device AI?
People have found surveillance cameras horrible since forever. No matter how many years pass and how popular they are, they never became cool
I'm not sure that's true anymore, or at least I'd suggest it depends on the type of surveillance camera you're talking about. Flock cameras, traffic cameras, the big ugly gray things stuck on the side of a building that you'd avoid if you were playing Splinter Cell? Sure, not popular. But everyone and their grandma has a Ring doorbell or a Nest camera inside or outside of their home now.
Further, it's still not obvious to me that an Apple glasses product would be a surveillance camera in the first place.
I cannot think of anyne who said "oh good, they have a camera in this place"
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If it were lighter with a better FOV I’d buy it at the current price. Apple isn’t doing metaverse, they’re doing computer with a 3D monitor and I don’t think it’s a bad move to have the ecosystem in place as the tech improves and makes a mass market product more viable.
Not really, their Meta glasses are very successful in the market and Zuck wants to own the new platform to extract their 30% instead of missing that opportunity on mobile and being beholden to Apple and Google.
finally a snow leopard like release focused on performance and fixing user experience
It's just being pitched this way by marketing and the C suite. If it were really a snow leopard release, someone should have informed the engineers they were supposed to be improving resiliency and fixing bugs, because this is news to them. cough
My impression was that they're doubling down on that horrid Liquid glass.
Apparently there's a new fancy slider for making it more (but not completely) opaque? Did I miss an option for turning it off?
[accessibility settings -> display -> reduce transparency] is the main option afaik. while you're in there, try "reduce motion" too, it's pretty nice imo.
Keep in mind Apple would never admit mistakes on Liquid Glass. But: Looks to me they're fixing some of the worst aspects. I'm on the fence.
The iOS 7 flat redesign was a UX disaster. But they got back up to speed in subsequent releases.
There IS something to be said for design resets with follow-up refits to accomodate for actual human beings. Most companies just add crap on top of crap.
Not saying what everything Apple does is perfect, even as a user/fanboy since '86.
What I most enjoyed about todays's annoucement that they're doing a Snow Leopard performance/bug reset, because that was expected and needed. And they started out with it, so they know their WWDC audience.
So: Both a technical and UX debt effort, with some privacy-focused AI on top.
I can't complain.
Have you tried the Accessibility setting "Reduce Transparency"? Apple tends to hide too many things there.
that's been available from the beginning
Old sidebar back on macOS thank god. 2026, the year Apple discovered toolbars are useful.
All I want the ability to talk to Siri while I'm in the car. My buddy's Tesla has this feature with Grok and it's actually really awesome. Let me have an on-demand CONVERSATIONAL assistant, meaning something I'd actually want to have a conversation with.
I swear I watched this Keynote before when they announced Apple Intelligence. Then proceeded to deliver nothing. Apple is so lost it makes me really sad.
I read through a summary of what was announced today, and I don't really want/care about any of it. The biggest apple announcement today that I was excited about, and would tell other people about was https://lowtechguys.com/musicdecoy/
I have an older iPhone that can't run any of this new stuff, and I'm not upgrading because I have no reason to. I think I actually prefer at this point to be on an older phone that won't get all of this.
When is technology going to get exciting and fun again?
(that's not 100% true, I was excited to hear they were walking back liquid glass.)
I'm very happy with their announcements
- fixing the main liquid glass issues (transparency, toolbars, window corners)
- rewriting OS components to work better
- fixing the ever annoying "The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time" problem (we knew this was going to happen by following the Swift project, but still)
Honestly, we really really needed a year with less features and more work put towards improving the platforms.
I do enjoy reading about what the Swift team is doing. (And other folks working on the lower decks — kernel, Foundation, etc. The AI brainrot hasn't seeped down there yet.)
Lightweight browser extensions generated on demand, now there's a good use case for what they seem to be actually building.
Extending applications without having to launch a full agentic IDE. Macos is already very well equipped with GUI automation tools.
It would be nice if you could use the processing power of your idle desktop Mac as an alternative to the paid cloud compute for images.
might take too long depending on the job. but it would be a really nice option
I have to manually log in to Gmail and other emails accounts just to search it properly. Really glad to see some action on this
When I download a new app on iOS, I immediately disable searching it and disable background updates. I hate the search feature and only use it as an app launcher when I’m accidentally not on the App Library screen.
On macOS, I also disable spotlight for everything because the indexing process has been the single biggest culprit of CPU spikes when it’s doing something insane like indexing a git repo. Again, I only use Spotlight as an app launcher.
I wish it were easier to opt into this “App Launcher only” mode. I had to really tinker with the settings to exclude everything except applications. And I’m sure I’m going to need to do it all over again after this update.
Try quicksilver
The presence of an alternative launcher does not prevent spotlight background tasks from running
In case anyone missed it, Apple's dropping support for Watch Series 6/7/8/9 and the Ultra 1 with this release.
The 9 isn't even 3 years old yet until September, absolutely garbage support timeline for a wearable. I have a Series 9, and it's still essentially like new.
edit Seems this was an error on Apple's part, all watches that support 26 should get 27
Yeah, I'm shocked at this [1]. The Series 9 was released in September 2023, not quite 3 years old. Apple is normally very good with long-term support. This is surprising to say the least. I bought a 10 last year when it was current-gen and it's going to be the minimum supported Watch with the next version of Watch OS? WTF? At least I'm glad I did that rather than repalcing a battery on an even older Watch.
iPads aren't free from this either but it's a little less severe [2]. For example, iPad Air 4th gen will be the minimum iPad Air and it was released in 2020. The M1 iPad Pro was released in 2021 and will be the minimum there.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/08/watchos-27-drops-suppor...
j2]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/08/ipados-27-drops-support...
Apple updated their compatibility list. The Series 9 is compatible with WatchOS 27 [1]. Still, Series 8 was released in 2022. Less than 4 years old and incompatible? That's quite a departrue from Apple's long-compatibility.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/08/apple-watch-series-9-mi...
My Series 6 offers me to download the watchOS 27 developer beta, so it seems like someone messed up
They did that before with betas, only to limit the final release.
Did it install?
No :(
Wait what? Where did you see this? It would be crazy if the Series 9 doesn't get updated to the next watchOS
On their WatchOS page, about halfway down: https://www.apple.com/os/watchos/
Has to be a fuckup. watchOS 26 supported the Series 6 onwards. I don't think Apple has ever cut 3 generations of devices with a single yearly OS upgrade unless there's an underlying architecture reason for it before.
This might be the list for Siri AI supported watches or something.
Seems you are correct, the beta is now showing available on my Series 9 at least.
wow this blows. do they ever like release an OS for older machines at a later date?
I hope they keep the switch allowing you to disable Apple Intelligence.
You could keep using an iphone 14. It's the age cutoff for AI support.
This is my biggest concern. I've only stuck with Apple during this AI nonsense era because the parental/screentime controls allow to me completely shut it down, and I've never toggled it on in the Siri/AI options. It took a while but the 7GB they initially stole from me for the AI nonsense I'm not using eventually cleared itself out of storage.
I already have Siri limited to manual activation only. If they force all of this into Siri and I can't prevent AI models from actually installing their gubby hands all over the phone then that's it for me.
I didn't see it touched on, but I'm hoping improved storage management is included in the update. My system has > 20% storage used by "system storage" and in total nearly half the device storage is used by ios and is outside my control. Supposedly some of this stuff is just cache data and there's no way to adjust what data gets cached or when it gets purged aside from rebooting. Handling for large files is also hit or miss and could use some updates. I didn't even realize some of that was AI stuff I might not even be using.
Yeah file management in general is still incredibly rough around the edges. I would still like to be able to simply grab files from my phone via a connected linux computer, but apple will never let me have that one.
>no way to adjust what data gets cached or when it gets purged aside from rebooting
Unfortunately the only current ways to pull this off is to either artificially move the current time years forward so it hits a time gate and dumps the cached files, or use enough space on your iPhone to force it to dump the useless cached files then delete whatever you used to take up space temporarily.
Siri AI - looks like finally Siri is getting its due update, hopefully they ship it soon!
I thought the same thing at the 2024 WWDC
"coming later this year" – still behind the schedule
I have an iPhone 16 that was promised to have it. Now they are saying some features are available only on 17+ models
I believe the only features I saw, and I could be wrong, that require the 17 or air were the new dictation and Siri voices. Those weren't in the original promises for the iPhone 16. That said, I don't know how much actually changed in the hardware where that actually has to be gated.
From Apple's website:
> iOS 27 coming this fall.
> Siri Al coming in English later this year.
So they're already admitting it won't be here in time for iOS 27.
Are we living the worst times in a while technology wise, this presentation showed nothing useful. Last year at least they showed some interesting features, but as always I don’t use any of them, the only one I wanted in the past few years was to use the iPhone from my mac, but never shipped in EU. And the other feature was universal control that I use every day and works just fine most of the time.
I don't think so. We have tons of apps and ideas and now AI. I honestly don't expect much from an OS on my phone or laptop and I am glad they improve what matter: OS performance and bugs. I don't mind having the "innovation" in the apps and not in the OS. Or at least for the first time and then brought in a well-thought-out ecosystem.
This WWDC is thin, but it seems like a lot of it outside of AI is a refinement year.
For them to just blanket announce that a bunch of stuff across the platforms perform better, that shows that Apple spent most of their effort on quality over shipping features. It’s also possible they’re preparing for less availability of RAM long term and trying to optimize.
The list of stuff they had go highlighted includes a whole bunch of small but impactful little tweaks.
iCloud shared libraries being easier to use outside of Apple operating systems, that’s great. And adding full resolution support, also great. I’ve left iCloud Photos and macOS for myself but I’m stuck on iCloud shared photos with family albums, so making it easier for me to participate is a big plus.
Custom EQ in AirPods. Awesome.
Smoother network transitions between WiFi and cellular. Huge positive impact.
Send indicator in messages, yes please.
The parental controls are industry-leading.
The AI features are the most boring and uninteresting to me, but the little stuff is all big news to me.
> The parental controls are industry-leading.
They've been awful for me. This is best-in-class software? It breaks constantly. It fails to notify me of all kinds of events that should work, but spontaneously fail to. This could be someone entering the parental control pin or requesting to download an app. It's misery to deal with.
I've used it for years across several devices and kids. It's some of the worst software I ever need to use.
I’m specifically talking about the parental controls shown at WWDC, not the ones we’ve been using for years.
Of course, now that I think about it, it’s a bit of a silly statement for me to say “industry leading” in the context of a duopoly.
I’m so stoked for macOS 27 for feature improvements and polish. The ai stuff fine but a snow leopard like release I’m here for.
They can't come up with a better demo than planning the menu for a party???
The irresistible urge to plan parties has infected them all: https://youtu.be/1cX4t5-YpHQ
Your first Apple keynote, huh?
It's nice to see the improve focused on AI and recognition of their past missteps. So far out of all the announcements this past month, I think this will be the most significant. The increased emphasis with on device models is exactly the right move. I'm tired of sending data out of my computer when it isn't needed.
Much as I have a not so great opinion on Siri's capabilities, I'm rather surprised how many people appear to use Siri/Apple Intelligence to search for rather niche hobby content that I run a site for. OpenAI's scrapers I expect volume from, but I didnt really expect apple's to be consistently rank second.
They really are trying to convince the skeptics about AI privacy.
Do they allow you to opt out of data collection to improve their models for Siri? What about allow users to choose on-device only processing?
If not, they are only speaking to the converted when they have Craig drill home their supposed privacy guarantees.
No parents on HN? The new parental controls are everything I could ask for.
So sterile and performative.
It's uncanny how they announce that AI features won't be available in the UK or China, and then, with a smile, proceed with, "Now, let's discuss what's next for developers."
Are there any summary of all the new under the hood features rather than user features? I don't want ( or care ) about UI and AI on WWDC. I want to know how they got 30% smaller in Xcode? What was done? New CPU Scheduler? Improvement to APFS? Metal API ? Memory and Performance Optimisation?
There used to be more information on WWDC and the State of Union. But with every year past they have deleted it to consumer level marketing speak.
I'm glad to see their "Private Cloud AI" thing is actually happening. They announced it a couple years ago and then after not hearing a ton I was worried they were going to drop it.
That said, the foundational models they talk about running on it - is that something they've trained themselves? I know they had some sort of deal with Google; could it be Gemini weights loaded into their private compute or something?
I think it's just gemini in a dress
Gemini in a dress that doesn't store my data and use it to sell advertisements is a welcome dress.
Modest Gemini, wearing a dress that doesn't expose everything to the world.
While I give kudos for Apple bring these Intelligent features, but does anyone see themselves using these features in your daily life?
Conversational Siri - yes, absolutely. All the rest - probably not.
it’s the list of features to disable. it’s been like that for the past… 5 years? 4?
Let me know if Metal gets any cool new features
There is a lot of metal news here https://www.metal-archives.com
There’s tons of Metal updates that will be announced during the platform meeting and workshops.
I wonder if visual intelligence can be used to produced code like claudcode can. like highlight a UI component on an app you like and say "implement this for me". I can take screenshots of figma and give it to claude code to implement and it gets it pretty close.
or use the already existing figma mcp
Honestly, I’m more excited about a faster and more polished OS than any new feature they announced.
Apple continues to innovate in new and excited ways, because I never though I would speak the words "I guess I'm sticking with ios26 until the end of security updates."
Unless I can continue to neuter AI, and keep the older siri this is my last iOS.
As opposed to the AI-free operating system, Android?
What makes you think I would go crawling back to a worse AI hellscape?
Dumbphones exist, degoogled phones exist. If it weren't for the USA's telcom differences a fairphone with PostmarketOS would be great. I enjoy postmarketOS on my pinephone, the phone's hardware is just far too shit for daily driving.
What do you want?
The ability to continue to completely lock down Apple Intelligence to the point where it even free's up the ~7gb it takes up on the phone. Currently this works in iOS 26 as long as I never accidentally toggle it back on via Apples dark pattern attempts that happen every few software updates.
Also for the ability to continue using Siri without Apple Intelligence would be nice. I rarely need to use Siri so it's already set for manual triggering with the power button long press only. But if Siri goes into the AI shitter then I'll just wholesale disable it.
For a company of Apple's caliber, I'd expect better lighting on the presenters.
A real snooze fest. I care so little about the AI features. I felt like they introduced the same thing over and over again.
I would be more excited if they said “AI? Yeah, we decided we aren’t interested in doing it anymore.”
Anyone able to restart the stream if you missed the first few minutes or are we living in a world where AI will cure cancer but Apple can't build a "Watch live / Watch from start" button ?
https://www.theverge.com/tech/942572/wwdc-2026-live-blog-ios...
At least a summary of what was missed.
can confirm, not able to scrub backwards. Maybe it requires iRewind™ premium?
You can't scrub back and forth on the timeline until the live stream is finished.
"It's a feature, not a bug" – Apple
No kidding. I missed the first 16 minutes because something needed my attention. I'd like to be able to restart the stream.
https://www.youtube.com/live/hF8swzNR1-o
there’s also a YouTube live stream that lets you go back
YouTube has a "disable DVR" toggle that disables the seek bar. There is a workaround, but I'm not sure if there's one that work in-browser.
This UserJS worked for me with Violentmonkey - https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/485020-dvr-chan-force-enab...
What is the non-browser workaround? E.g., can streamlink do it?
Does it ? I can pause but I can't seem to go back. Clicking on the timeline does nothing. Clicking on the "live" indicator does nothing.
This isn't letting me drag back either.
Yeah, explicitly disabled. Corporate control freak behavior - that tracks.
Is there a live text play-by-play so we don't have to watch a video like some pre-literate? ArsTechnica used to do one but I can't find it for this year.
MacRumors always delivers.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/08/wwdc-2026-live-coverage...
Not on Ars :( Verge’s is behind their paywall.
Try Wired’s https://www.wired.com/live/apple-wwdc-2026-live-blog-all-the...
macrumors.com
New Search! Finally !
It's shocking how bad Mail.app search is today. It basically doesn't work.
Yoof, that reframing is interesting but took LONG
It’s fully local though
Some small features are fully local (like the list sorting added in a recent iOS), but all of the neat features like world knowledge and shortcut gen seem to require private cloud compute.
It is literally not. They clearly said that it uses their cloud.
Would really like Siri AI to have an MCP server
To like, talk to Siri through Claude?
They didn't even give you all of bluetooth. Not sure they'll let you do this
as a third party developer, i would want my app to expose mcp/tools that siri can natively access as well
This would be huge
Bye Tim, thanks for making tech fun the past 10 years.
No new hardware, feels like the party is over. Thanks Altman for the greed.
The WWDC keynote is a software, not hardware, announcement…?
Has there ever been hardware launched at WWDC? It's a developer conference, not a hardware launch. Hardware is in the fall.
They have on occasion, when it makes sense to unveil OS changes and hardware simultaneously. Apple Vision Pro, move to new architecture, 2019 Mac Pro tower – that sort of thing. Most years they don't announce new hardware, though.
AVP
Not every year, but yes.
even the market understands this is a massive failure by apple, nobody needs another chat application especially using that stupid overlay window. looks like apple won't leapfrog anyone and has zero agentic features to show and no resetting a password doesn't count as agentic apple.
first WWDC I haven't bothered to watch in over a decade.
Right there with you. It feels weird not to care. I used to look forward to it. Last year I watched a bit and bailed. This year, I opened the stream after it finished, clicked through to a few spots, noticed I didn't care at all and got back to work.
finally Siri and Apple intelligence are getting some much needed updates. Most of the stuff shown was already open source and had been achieved under 16GB of ram so it is timely.
The dubbed audio is disturbing. Or is it a delayed audio stream?
Reload should fix (did for me).
I don’t agree with the whole kids “safety”, if your child is too young they shouldn’t be using such electronics without direct supervision in the first place, ie you sitting with them, and if you don’t have some time to be with your child you shouldn’t have children to start with. If your child however is able to comprehend conversations, the parenting should be based on trust and communication, rather than further surveillance and control.
This is bad and mostly will result in two outcomes: a more systematic domestication to groom the child into accepting such surveillance from a higher authority, so later in life they are more susceptible to be monitored by employers or even the government, just like how schools domesticate people to be a cog in the machine later in life. The other outcome, is a complete radical shift where that kid goes on doing anything and everything as soon as they are in their own.
WWDC - time of the year Apple reminds us it has a VR.
Over-polished WWDC keynote is just another great example that we as individuals with great motivation can do better Even my prompt with Veo3 or Seedance 2.0 generated video can do better than Apple
Are we going to hear more Ay! than a Mariachi band?
The whimsy in this can absolutely do one in 2026.
I was hoping for some kind of a Siri LLM API for providers to implement so that I'd be able to use Gemini, ChatGPT, maybe Openrouter, SELF HOSTED or whatever the fuck I want. Given that Apple itself does not really have a horse in the LLM race, it made sense.
Say the ChatGPT app would provide the functionality to the system and I'd allow a scary popup saying "these guys will own you, sure?".. I guess they are going all in into Gemini instead.
But I don't want Gemini..
That AI segment was a boomer core slop fest. But to be fair, it's clear that Apple is not on the AI bleeding edge and it appears it doesn't want to be, it cannot afford to ignore it tho.
Let's hope they don't get overconfident with Gemini and pull a MS Copilot..
Far too much focus on having AI write things for your loved ones, invites etc. Shouldn't those be the moments where you're writing it yourself.
> it appears it doesn't want to be
I get this vibe too. Turning Siri into yet another chatbot is a far cry from the vaporware they showed at 2024's WWDC. Seems they found out LLMs can't actually do that, but investors aren't just going to let them ignore it unfortunately.
Feels like they are just phoning it in here and waiting on AI hype bubble to burst. "Here's your stupid chatbot, now shut up"
Now if they just let me switch off the sound when I connect the charger. For any couple not going to bed at the same time and charging their phone at the bed this may be a welcome innovation. I'm willing to license this idea for free.
Still deliberately running macOS Sequoia 15 cuz you know… and if I'll switch to something hopefully better than Tahoe will disable SIP and every thing that is not needed to just launch software, this OS has gotten too obese.
I don't know why I torture myself with these kinds of presentations anymore. Aside from the obvious "It's all AI" complaint, it feels like every problem they describe as needing a solution is fundamentally basic human reasoning that they are hoping we'll replace with a non-deterministic interaction with our phones. Splitting a tab by taking a picture and letting AI split it for you? Get out a fucking calculator. Is that really a scenario they think will excite people? Their portrayal of a world where we depend on computers for such simple thoughts is not a positive one.
Kids these days can't even split a tab without using a calculator. Next they'll forget how to balance a checkbook
underwhelming and super disappointing. still no hyprland or native tiling manager on mac. siri ai is a lagging copy of openclaw
I know it was a long shot but still mighty disappointed with no m5ultra mac studio
Kinda love that Tim said his goodbyes with a rainbow in the background. Apple is pretty much the only company that didn't really budge to Trump's admin despite appeasing him.
It's the retro Apple logo rainbow they've had since they opened Apple Park. It could be interpreted as a pride rainbow, but the colours are different and in a different order.
Don't forget Costco
Yup, indeed. But it's crazy we can count those companies in single digits. Shows how cynical the corporate PR really is; they'll virtue signal for years and then forget their inclusiveness shamelessly on a whim.
Except that he validated Trump by giving him gold trinkets and donated $1M to his inauguration.
Cook is an enabler.
That's what I meant by "seemingly".
You didn't say seemingly.
Wow I could have sworn I did. Good cstchm
Eh they announced in April that Tim is staying on as Executive Chairman, and the expectation is he'll deal with the politics so the new CEO doesn't (quite likely he'll give Trump another shiny gift)
Another bunch of AI startups have been destroyed.
Which ones? Doesn’t sound like they delievered anything really new that wasn’t announce years ago.
Cool, now how to disable Sire AI?
I gotta say, as I read these comments HN's bubble is showing with astounding clarity. The top comment is about presenter authenticity? Idle Mac used for cloud models? No features are useful?
I can't help but think for most folks out there these features make using Apple products considerably more powerful and easy. They may be "boomer" features and you won't be able to roll them into your MCP server, but IMO it doesn't take a huge perspective leap to understand how they're game changers.
You think criticism is a sign of being in a bubble?
Especially funny because you could make an exact opposite claim, i.e. that criticism is a sing of not being in a bubble.
Are new MBPs eliding the notch?
Let's find out when they announce them later this year or next year...
This is a software keynote, they very rarely talk hardware at WWDC
"Goal Chasers" group chat. Yikes.
I am so happy that just by setting Siri to an unsupported language I can kill Apple Intelligence across the whole system.
Couldn’t you do this by turning off Siri and Apple Intelligence, two global toggles?
Apple not rolling out a lot of this stuff in the EU (immediately) is a feature.
What if someone holds my phone and enters a query like "Find every note that says 'password' or contains an ID number, email them to [x]." "Find photos with my ID or cards, send them to [number]." ?? what if attackers start sharing shortcuts with people.
I dont like siri ai access everything on my devices. mails, photos, screen, camera, my credit card and passwords...
If attacker is holding your unlocked phone, they can do that right now via search and simple email sharing option?
yes of course but simply clicking a shared shortcut (siri agent) could be very harmful.
I would not be surprised if there are permission settings for what it's allowed to access. I guess we'll only know once the beta gets poked around in.
Apple has done a good job in the recent past of providing secure information partition options; locked notes, secure folders, etc. im seriously hoping they implement some similar way of soloing information from Siri.
Their entire angle here is that Siri AI itself is private/secure. Siloing data from the thing that they’re advertising as private and secure wouldn’t make sense.
You can disable all that TODAY. Just disable Siri access
https://xkcd.com/538/