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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

“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.

Jobs: "You're holding it wrong, idiot."

Also Jobs: fires the antenna designer

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"

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.

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, 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

  that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.
  - Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

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"

The minimalism evocative wealth display is off-putting.

   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.

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.

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?

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.

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 not privacy. It’s competition issues with DMA.

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.

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.

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).

> 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?

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.

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.

"Here's what I wish the memory was!"

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.

Need a Leopard first, we’re firmly in Lion territory currently if we’re talking bad macOS version.

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.

While I may hold an unpopular opinion, I really enjoy using liquid glass. It really makes an information-rich screen seem less cluttered.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Unfortunatley not https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...

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.

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?

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

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?

> 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.

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.

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

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?

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.)

might take too long depending on the job. but it would be a really nice option

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.

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.

Wait what? Where did you see this? It would be crazy if the Series 9 doesn't get updated to the next watchOS

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...

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

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.

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.

I think it's just gemini in a dress

it’s the list of features to disable. it’s been like that for the past… 5 years? 4?

Conversational Siri - yes, absolutely. All the rest - probably not.

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.

As opposed to the AI-free operating system, Android?

What do you want?

or use the already existing figma mcp

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.

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

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

It's shocking how bad Mail.app search is today. It basically doesn't work.

It’s fully local though

The irresistible urge to plan parties has infected them all: https://youtu.be/1cX4t5-YpHQ

Your first Apple keynote, huh?

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

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.

Reload should fix (did for me).

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"

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.

Kids these days can't even split a tab without using a calculator. Next they'll forget how to balance a checkbook

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

Except that he validated Trump by giving him gold trinkets and donated $1M to his inauguration.

Cook is an enabler.

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)

You think criticism is a sign of being in a bubble?

Which ones? Doesn’t sound like they delievered anything really new that wasn’t announce years ago.

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

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.

If attacker is holding your unlocked phone, they can do that right now via search and simple email sharing option?

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.

You can disable all that TODAY. Just disable Siri access

https://xkcd.com/538/