Apple WWDC 2025

Production value of these intro segments have obviously reached a new peak. This feels like Craig’s fantasy.

Impressions:

New Design

• VP of Human Design Alan Dye sits in a room full of colorful glass panes and moves them over each other all day. What do you do for work?
• Launching on all platforms
• Liquid Glass – Aqua is back!
  • Animated transitions and light refraction – combo of dynamic island, iPadOS cursor, and Aqua
  • ngl the animations are pretty slick

iOS 26

• Moving to year based numbering – Apple not too worried about what happens after 2099
• Lock Screen
  • Dynamic scaling time on lock screen that shifts around as notifications come in
  • ML generated spacial 3D effect on when you move – good use of the Vision OS Spacial Photo upscaling
  • Animated album art
• Camera App – Simplified interface with swipe controls
• Photos App – Minor UI refresh with spacial photos
• Safari tab bar now shrunk smaller into animated Liquid Glass bubbles
• CarPlay redesign, updated interface and widgets
  • CarPlay Ultra also updated to Liquid Glass for those Bentley drivers out there dying for an update after checks Apple Watch, one month!
• Phone App – unified layout for favorites, recents, voicemail
  • Automatic call screening answering calls in background – Pixel had this for a while and its good to see iOS adding this finally
  • Hold Assist to help keep spot in line without listening to hold music
• Messages App
  • Animated backgrounds
  • Polls
  • Apple Cash request and sending in groups
  • Typing indicators in group chats
  • Spam Screening to sweep away unknown senders
• Emojis can be combined into new emojis – FINALLY OUR LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE IS OVER, you can make a sloth that sings karaoke
• Live translate text as you type, and in FaceTime
• Apple Music
  • Lyrics translation
  • lyrics pronunciation – big day for the annoying kpop fan in your life
  • Automix between songs to flow between music
  • Pin favorite music to top of library
• Maps – The mockup is unrealistic. Living in Presidio, school at Palace of Fine Arts, and working at Ft Mason Park? Who has this lifestyle?
• Wallet
  • Increased CarKey and Driver License adoption
  • Digital ID with US Passport for domestic travel – Cant wait for Airports to support this but not actually allow it
  • Refreshed boarding passes with indoor maps, Find My, and shareable live activities – neat!
  • Order Tracking
• Games App – Central App to manage apps, friend leaderboards
• Visual Intelligence can see your screen now when you screenshot to do things like search for products, create calendar events, answer questions
• Whew! Big update this year!

watchOS 26

• You know the gym is staged because they have good form and aren’t slamming weights
• Workout Buddy – Gathers all the data from workouts and “identifies meaningful insights”
  • Jumps in with AI generated encouragement and status updates
  • Mine is going to say “Wow you got 5 hours of sleep, your worst yet, go get it king!”
• Notification sounds are dimmed in quiet settings
• Wrist flick to dismiss notifications
• Context based actions in Messages like surfacing sharing location
• Notes App

tvOS 26

• Cinematic Poster Art
• AppleTV has lots of shows coming
• Use iPhone as karaoke mic

macOS 26 – Tahoe

• Craig Federighi carrying the Apple humor entirely on his back
• Redesign allows you to make macOS as ugly as you desire, even all pink!
• Live Activities from iPhone
• Shortcuts can call AI models as part of a shortcut
• Spotlight
  • Can issue commands and take action directly in spotlight even within apps
  • Short Keys to keybind letters to actions
• New: Phone App, Games App, Journal App

visionOS 26

• Spacial widgets to decorate spaces – You can do things simply not possible in the real world like putting a clock on the wall or hanging a picture!
• Improved Spacial Photos with better 3D
• Safari Spacial Browsing: like a reader mode but for VR, look to scroll
• Improved Personas – disembodied horrors of our own making!
• Shared Spacial experiences in the same room so you can now watch the same movie not on a TV but on everyone’s own personal Vision Pro, the future is here!
• Support for PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers
• Support for 180-degree, 360-degree, and wide field-of-view content from Insta360, GoPro, and Canon
• Unlock phone while wearing Vision Pro – big day for looking at a blurry iPhone screen through my headset
• Better sharing, now my friends don’t need to redo set up before trampling through the OS like they’ve never used a UI before
• Folders on home screen – technology has finally progressed to allow this to happen

ipadOS 26

• We macOS now, bois!
  • macOS style window controls and tiling
  • MacOS style regular mouse pointer and trackpad gestures
  • MacOS Style menu bar for apps
  • Available for all iPads, big day for the iPad Pro Mini crowd
• Updated Files App
  • Updated list view
  • Set a default app for opening specific file types
  • Folders in dock
• Preview App – Dedicated app for opening files and marking up PDFs
• Background Tasks – keep tasks running in background. – Now what will the iPad-as-production-tool community complain about? Oh, right, lack of audio input controls!
• New audio Input control on an app by app basis
• Other: Reed pen, 3D graphing in calculator, import/export notes in markdown, accessibility reader

Other

• AirPods
  • Improved recording quality
  • Control camera by pressing stem
• Vibe coding in XCode
• Apple Intelligence
  • Model Refinements, Expansion to more languages
  • New API to access on-device model

That was probably my longest one yet. The sheer volume of info they can cram in and still shave off half an hour vs the old live events is insane. Anyways, here’s your AI break so enjoy it before next year when we get an hour of Apple Intelligence 2.