Apple was LATE on AI… It was Worth the Wait - WWDC '26

[00:00] WWDC26 was a short one, but Apple passed a lot into it. Some things were a little light on the details. How exactly do live-coded Safari extensions work? And how does my kid's phone detect nudes and then notify me?

[00:14] But in other ways, Apple laid out a much clearer vision for the future than we've seen before. And that's especially true for Siri AI. Now Apple's going to have to forgive me for being a little skeptical that they're going to actually ship this on time.

[00:26] But if everything they showed off is in full working order come false, not only does the competition have some catching up to do on features that really matter day to day, but also on addressing valid concerns around AI, like privacy and safety,

[00:40] both of which Apple seems to be taking seriously. Apple also talks about non-AI stuff, including improvements to both liquid glass and performance across all of their devices.

[00:52] And I was really into their advancements in parental controls, that at first seemed like, all right, now Google's had this for a while. Then quickly turned into, wow, Google should add that. But that's the Apple way, right? Take a little bit longer to copy a good feature

[01:05] and blow it away when you finally introduce it. Now to blow away this segue to our sponsor, Delete.me. Delete.me is a low-effort subscription service

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[01:34] Let's get the quick stuff out of the way before we dive into Siri AI. The show was broken up into three sections, starting with platform improvements. Liquid Glass is getting some small tweaks across the board to help with legibility and with consistency.

[01:47] I've already seen Apple taking some slack about this for not sticking to their guns on this bold design choice. Dogs wouldn't have allowed a transparency slider, but that is an objectively terrible take.

[01:59] User choice is a good thing. Congratulations, Apple. Also, finally, all the clients in my windows will be the same. Yay! Another welcome surprise was the optimization that Apple has done seemingly across their entire device portfolio,

[02:12] even the devices nobody owns. apps launch up to 30% faster on mobile, which includes third-party apps, AirDrop is faster, photos process faster, and apparently browsing files on iPadOS is five times faster.

[02:25] I'm not sure exactly what that means, but any improvements to overall system responsiveness and navigability are going to be welcome ones. I can't wait to see it in action. Oh, and this one too. AirPods are getting a more custom and updated equalizer.

[02:39] Now, I doubt as an Android poor, I'm going to be able to use it, But wherever Apple leads, the rest of the industry tends to follow, and a custom EQ is a huge part of getting the best experience out of your personal audio products.

[02:51] Or a huge part of just undoing the crappier tuning on the most recent AirPods Pros. You told me they were a bit worse. You didn't tell me they were that much worse. F***. What is getting cross-platform support, though, is shared photo albums.

[03:06] Finally, a quick and painless way to share full-quality photos with your poor... Sorry excuse me I mean financially disadvantaged friends on Android and Windows And while you talking with them you can rub in that iOS and macOS have also got their searching indexes updated to allow for faster more accurate searching Although this might go

[03:27] mostly unused if Siri AI is as good as they say it is. More on that later. The biggest news related to platform improvements is that all of this is going to be coming to devices as old as the iPhone 11, which puts Apple way ahead of companies like Samsung and Google, who have stepped up their game

[03:43] lately, but guaranteed only five years of OS updates for their 2019-era devices. On to trust and safety. Apple spent this entire section talking about improved parental controls for kids and teens.

[03:55] A lot of it was stuff that I already had in Google Family Link, but Apple just finds a way to put their own spin on things. So you can monitor and manage screen time according to the time of day, on a product basis, or, this is it, grouped by categories.

[04:10] Apple now also allows kids to request certain apps for content, and one that I thought was quite innovative was a notification if they start texting an unrecognized number. And this goes outside just iMessage.

[04:22] If my kid is playing Roblox and they get a DM from someone, in order for them to start talking, I would get a notification to approve of that, or more likely, deny it, because it's probably an app steamer.

[04:34] Apple has committed to holding third-party developers to this standard when it comes to publishing an app on the App Store. Another standout feature is smart blurring and notifying the parents if your kid is sending or receiving a message

[04:46] that might be, let's just say, something they shouldn't be sending or receiving at their age. Through checkout messages on WAN Show or even just in my daily life, I talked to a lot of parents about parental management tools

[04:58] and for years I felt like Apple, and iOS in particular, was really lacking in this area compared to Google's ongoing advancement. So I'm really pleased that the Apple equipped parents to help their kids make good choices.

[05:10] Because while it was easy to say, parents should just supervise their kids, guys, these are souls we're talking about. It was already hard enough for my parents to keep me off of the desktop computer. And that was right next to the kitchen.

[05:22] Never mind a device that I could hide under my pillow. Anyway, let's pivot and talk about artificial intelligence. Sorry, sorry. Apple intelligence, specifically Siri AI. Apple's first announced Siri, but now with AI, back in 2024, and then went radio-style

[05:40] on it after it failed to live up to their promises. Well, that's over, and I've got a bold new set of promise capabilities for their updated models that were built in collaboration with Google's Gemini team. And the biggest, most exciting part of all of this for me is how much is, apparently,

[05:57] going to be handled on device. Local models promise to integrate with everything, from your apps to your messages, to whatever's on your screen. And according to Apple, the only time they ever need to go to their private, secure servers

[06:11] is when Siri needs access to broad world knowledge. Part of this transition is going to be moving Siri to her own dedicated app, which will store past conversations in case you ever need to access them again.

[06:23] And they even showed off a live demo of what interacting with Siri could look like later this year. You ask Siri about an upcoming concert, ask to remind you when tickets go on sale and hey since we on the subject and since sponsor tickets are so unaffordable anyway why not just play some of the music on my phone right now Another example was can you show me some photos for my trip last week Okay perfect But can you only show me the photos of these select people

[06:50] Rude, but definitely useful. To facilitate these kinds of natural interactions, Siri will now talk back to you. And while Apple seems pretty happy about the quality of the voice, I think I'll let you be the judge. At the next stop sign, turn right.

[07:03] Okay, that's not fair. Apple was turning the pace way down to show off their new voice customization. Let me try this one out. You have one new message. Yeah, see, now at least she sounds a little less like your drunk ex on the phone.

[07:17] Which is important if she's going to be used to compare documents and then reference past text messages and emails to help you make informed decisions. Say, for example, about the shed you want to install in your backyard.

[07:29] Okay, that demo was legitimately cool. but as someone who spends a significant amount of my week double-checking the work of others, I can tell you that sometimes it's just faster to do the research for yourself

[07:41] rather than blindly trusting that somebody did it perfectly on their first try, especially an AI assistant. However, as Elijah noted when he was writing this video, this is going to be a game-changer for people who just want to turn their brains off

[07:53] and not think at all. Speaking of things that nobody thinks about, Vision OS was mentioned during the theory section. If you have a Vision Pro, good for you. Siri is going to show up as a little orb that might look a little too familiar to the N64 kids right there.

[08:09] And this is cool. Siri will know that you are talking to it by using Gaze Detection. Which, by the way, happy Pride Month, everyone. The last update for Siri AI is Visual Intelligence,

[08:21] which lets Siri give you information about what's on the screen. Whether that's screenshotting on macOS and asking to add that information to a calendar, or asking Siri to talk about the clothes trans-wearing so you can buy the same ones.

[08:34] This combination of all of your local data, occasionally asking for broad-world knowledge and knowing what you're looking at, could lead to an incredibly powerful combination if it can work as seamlessly as they claim

[08:46] and if you can educate the user on how to use it to its fullest potential. Apps, both first-party and third-party, are also getting access to Siri AI benefits. Siri can create new shortcuts on your phone with natural language, which is pretty cool.

[09:01] Safari can bundle tabs together based on what it thinks is related. And you can even describe an extension to add it to your toolbar. I wonder if I could ask it to create a shortcut to buy the latest LTSource product whenever it comes down.

[09:15] I mean, maybe, because you can ask it to monitor websites and tabs in the background if you don't want them cluttering things up, and then send you a ping when a condition is met. The call app will bring up relevant information, depending on who you're calling.

[09:27] Message dictation is getting improvements to make it so you don't have to talk like a robot to be understood. And the home app is going to try to bundle notifications together to prevent you from seeing a bunch of similar things over and over and over and over again.

[09:41] All of which sounds great, in theory. But it is moments like this that I miss the real live demos, so I can also understand why nobody does them anymore. The last big AI topic from Apple was around images.

[09:54] The cleanup tool seems to be getting improvements and does a really good job at removing even large sections of the photo and replacing them Image extends extends which is extended I guess And then finally there spatial reframing

[10:09] Were you ever the parent that was forced to stand to the side, you know, when everyone was taking a picture of a group, and then now your kids are actually looking directly into your camera? No? Well, now you can be that parent after the fact.

[10:23] It uses a combination of local AI to help with the initial framing and setup, and then cloud computing to help fill in the dead spaces in the final image. This is one of those things that I can definitely see the utility of,

[10:35] but to hear Apple say things like, enhance their images in ways that respect the original moment, feels a little ironic because anything that was generated, like, that wasn't your yard, brother.

[10:47] One thing it does feel like Apple respected, though, was privacy. At pretty much every opportunity, Apple threw shade at other AI providers People are boasted about how secure and safe their use of AI was.

[10:59] I mean, considering the bar was way down here. Any talk of privacy and taking it seriously is appreciated, but only time will tell how carefully Apple's in the trend here. So, when do you get access to all of this?

[11:13] Well, this is where it's a bit confusing. If you're in the EU, tough luck. No news for now, and same goes for China. And then some of the Apple intelligence stuff It's going to be coming to devices that have it already,

[11:25] but some of the newer, more powerful on-device models are only going to be available for some of the latest Apple devices. Public data started in July, with public release beginning this fall. While pretty much the entire show was dominated by AI,

[11:38] I do think it's important to highlight what Apple has done here. They took their time, too much time according to them, built around real use cases that people want, and it seems they kept people's safety and privacy in mind,

[11:50] If all of that comes true, the rest of the industry could be forced to think about why they're innovating on AI, rather than just ending in just because. Just like I need to question why I segue to our sponsors, instead of just segueing to our sponsors.

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[13:14] If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out our most interesting Switch to Apple video. More of our Apple-chirious users stayed on the iPhone than I initially expected.