All announced at WWDC26 – CNET

Tim Cook came out with a Farewell letter He booked his final appearance as CEO leading Apple Worldwide Developers Conference; Next year, barring unexpected problems, we will have John Ternus On stage in his new role. Despite announcing performance and display improvements across all device operating systems, which are always welcome, Apple was quick to roll them out to make room for Apple intelligence. The company also introduced a reformulation Controls and protection for children.

Whether you love it, hate it, or simply choose to ignore it, Apple’s intelligence (and its eyes, its visual intelligence, its words, Siri) is the focus of the company’s strategy in creating chatbot-slash-slash for MacOS 27 Golden Gate, ios 27, iPad OS 27, WatchOS 27 and VisionOS 27.

Originally announced on WWDC24 Then he was dramatically contacted again for a Slower rolloutthis year WWDCApple has elevated it to where it could have been – where everyone else’s AI is – if there had been no lag.

It wasn’t until I started writing, that I realized there was a lot here that was interesting, though not always flashy. Here are my highlights, which you can check out on CNET WWDC Live Blog For more details.

Liquid glass

When it launched last year, the Liquid Glass interface for all Apple devices was in need of improvements, as were operating system redesigns. In particular, some people found that the transparency of the icons made it more difficult to see than before (including me).

This year, we’ll be getting fine-grained control, via a slider, over opacity and color across the entire OS, along with some display improvements to make icons look sharper. This is in addition to some modifications to the appearance of the menus and sidebars. I’m an annoying person, but I don’t really care Corner radius consistency in macOSalthough it seems that some of my colleagues do.

What I’m still disappointed by, in this regard, is the lack of it Simplification in organizing settings Across all operating systems. For example, burying a lot of settings under Accessibility when you generally focus on appearance and behavior, such as motion behavior, makes it difficult to find them or even know that they are adjustable.

Of course, Apple may be relying on Apple Intelligence to find and fix settings, a trend I’ve increasingly noticed and had great experiences with in software.

Improve me

Performance improvements include better screen responsiveness, faster mobile app launch (including pre-caching), more robust file handling (import, copy, move), redesigned indexing for search (which means better results), smarter Wi-Fi switching when roaming and CPU scheduling improvements supported back through iPhone 11.

While speedups are always welcome, several specific updates and improvements are necessary to have a decent experience using the AI ​​features. For example, CPU scheduling juggles agents’ core processing resources with a range of other AI tasks. Without quick application loading and prior caching, accessing these capabilities in the background to integrate and act on all the necessary contextual information to provide detailed answers can take a long time.

Apple and Siri AI

Apple focused on cross-device, AI-driven features at the system level, with syncing via iCloud — the default 5GB seems insufficient at the moment — so there was less “this is what you can do on the iPhone,” than “this is what you can do.” (Siri has been replaced by Siri AIso you know it’s the new, amazing Siri and not the old, sad Siri.)

For context, our event script was:

• iOS system mentioned: 9
• MacOS mentions: 9
• iPadOS mentions: 4
• WatchOS mentions: 2
• TVOS mentions: 1
• Siri mentions: 102

And if a lot of the capabilities sound familiar to some people, that’s because they’re the same features that were first announced at WWDC 2024 and promoted by Google for its own platforms — though Apple had a less tone-deaf presentation than it had in Google I/Owith demos centered around splitting the bill versus arranging your next luxury vacation — and because Apple builds much of its intelligence by adapting Gemini Google Forms.

Apple has stressed that “Privacy first“, on-device and “private cloud computing” since day one, but what struck me in the keynote was the company’s mention of external auditing. This is a missing piece in many discussions of AI by big tech companies, which tend to present a much less believable self-surveillance strategy.

And if I understand correctly how the system works, I think it’s smart of Apple to separate the history and context of complex, cloud-based AI interactions, like chats, from basic interactions, like on-device search, in a separate Siri app. At the very least, it gives you an idea of ​​the data you live in.

Finally, you’ll be able to control the tempo and level of Siri’s voice — a plus for impatient, fast-talking New Yorkers.

Think about the children

Enforcement means everything for effective access controls when it comes to children. Apple did some things This at least sounds smart, although we won’t really know until they’re tested.

I think new capabilities, which allow for instant parental decisions on a case-by-case basis, are key: Ask to Browse notifies you when a child wants to visit a new website, and Ask to Buy does the same for downloading an app.

You’ll be able to approve new conversations, automatically blur out unwanted content in messages, set time allotments for apps based on categories like gaming, social media, and more. It sets default settings based on age, with more aggressive settings for children under 13.

Some of them appear to require specific support from app developers, so it will be interesting to see, for example, how reputable social media companies will cope with resisting controls like this.

It’s safari

I’m not a big Safari user, but I’m a big fan of tab organization, and the updated Safari coming in new operating systems will automatically group tabs by topic and add new tabs. In theory, that sounds great. In practice, unless you’re browsing between very different topics, I’m not sure how effective it is. I have tab groups for gaming laptops, data centers, and shortages, and unfortunately, they overlap a lot.

Another possibility that may be useful is to create a vibe extension – you will be able to quickly describe and create the extension. However, it is not clear exactly what types of extensions it includes.

If you’re a user of Apple’s Passwords app, your passwords will be able to update automatically. But it’s not clear what it will update to, or what control you have over how the decision is made.

Mac 27

For me, the most important change in macOS has not been mentioned. It inherits the iPhone’s Dynamic Island-type interface for Siri AI interaction, which you access by swiping down. beating. Maybe that bodes well Upcoming touch-screen MacBooks We expected.

Nice to have

There are some random new features that seemed useful to me across Apple’s apps. For example but not limited to:

• Photo playground Gets more types of patterns and realism.
• Expanding the capabilities of visual intelligence – This is what lets you ask about what you see or shop for, for example – like Siri mode in the iPhone camera app and in VisionOS 27.
• You will be able to receive a single notification for notifications of related extension activities in house Instead of multiple, also search recorded clips by content.
• The Photos app adds the ability to expand a photo’s background, supports collaboration on shared albums and improves the accuracy of removing unwanted elements in a photo. He also adds Spatial reformulationwhich allows you to adjust the viewing angle of the image, but in demos, it allows only minor adjustment.
• Health now includes Track perimenopause and menopause.
• There will be custom EQ adjustments Airpods.