WWDC 2026 Impressions: Yeah, That's About Right

[00:00] I was told to make my bed before making a hotel room video because it makes it feel more put together. So, alright, I am out here in California because today was Apple's WWDC, their Worldwide Developer Conference 2026.

[00:19] And every year this is where we expect all the announcements for all their latest in software. iOS, macOS, watchOS, etc. And this year they did some of that, but they actually mostly breezed through that stuff pretty quick

[00:31] and then got down to, like, the two main new topics, which were trust and safety for kids and Apple Intelligence and the new Siri. Now, the breeze-through updates part I actually liked because that was actually,

[00:44] instead of being just, like, new feature, new feature, new feature, visual overhaul, liquid glass, all this fun, random new stuff, it was actually a little bit more of a holistic, like combing through some of the stuff that's been needing attention

[00:57] that hasn't been getting it lately, the smaller details. A lot of the recent updates with liquid glass and all these pretty visual dramatic updates have been, you know, I think it would be lying if we said they didn't feel a little sloppy sometimes.

[01:09] We've all seen the stories about battery life going down or performance segregation getting kind of weird or just bugs here and there with things like readability. So through all of our operating systems, iOS 27, iPad OS 27, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS,

[01:23] which the new one is now called Golden Gate. They'll mostly look roughly the same, but we'll have a lot of the under-the-hood stuff that's actually improved. So things like smoothness of animation, apps opening faster,

[01:35] and they drop some other banners like tweaked app icons and matching corner radiuses, sidebar icons getting their color back, and adding a slider now for how transparent or tinted you want liquid glass to actually be.

[01:49] They actually will let you make it even more clear, which I swear no one asked for. But, yeah, there's a slider there now. But, yeah, faster app launching, more smooth system animations, more complete and thorough indexing for Spotlight, 80% faster airdrops, which I saw that on the slide, and I was like, that sounds amazing,

[02:05] as long as you can also make airdrops work more of the time. I think it's the attention-to-detail stuff like that that we should see improvements with. Some other highlights. Vision Pro.

[02:17] You'll be able to use panorama shots you've taken now as environments. So before it was just like a handful of Apple-provided ones, like Mars, I think it was, and Yosemite and Mount Hood, etc. Now you can have your own, finally.

[02:31] And my personal favorite is that they did add custom EQ for AirPods, which, okay, great, finally, I'll take it. It feels like this is a grab bag of things that they kind of wanted to throw in to make sure they had some real stuff to announce because it was mostly the AI,

[02:44] but if that means we get EQ finally in the world's most popular earbuds, when everyone else has had it for years, then I'll take it. So there's good stuff, much needed in my opinion, lots of little details, and I'm sure we'll find much more stuff when we actually use these that weren't announced in the keynote.

[02:59] I plan on downloading these betas and getting to test them and reviewing them, of course, so I'm sure you get subscribed here to see those reviews first when they do come out. So then they got to trust and safety. This is the whole middle section of the keynote,

[03:12] and it was basically them going down this rabbit hole, I guess you could say, of trying to tell people that the best experience that your kids can have is with their own device that is controlled by their parents.

[03:25] You can probably see where this is going. So they talked through a ton of child safety features, stuff like a dedicated child account so that the parent account can control which apps they can download and which websites they're allowed to visit and who they're allowed to talk to, obvious stuff.

[03:39] There's new, more granular screen time features so you can see how they spent their day, and then use a scheduler to adjust when they're allowed to spend more or less time in certain types of apps. Like, obviously, watching a movie on the weekend is cool,

[03:51] but scrolling Instagram for three hours when they're supposed to be in school will have a no-go. So the upside here is, obviously, much better safety and control for parents that directly addresses the concerns that they might have about the websites and the content and the apps that their kids have had access to And the cynical read is also get your kid an iPhone

[04:15] You remember get your mom an iPhone? Now, it's also get your kid an iPhone because trust us, it's the best one. Like we've talked about this before, we already know how dominant Apple is with iPhones, especially with younger people in the U.S.,

[04:27] and getting them on an iPhone as young as possible makes them much more likely to have an iPhone and use it in their adult life. And so this is like the lowest common denominator version of that, which is the best possible. Porempic controls means the youngest possible iPhone users,

[04:41] which means more iPhones in the future. Yeah, makes sense. But the big thing we all expected them to talk about here, which they finally got to, was the new Apple Intelligence and the new Siri. And they did, they got to all of that. And I would say the new Siri is exactly what we were expecting.

[04:58] Like, in terms of capability, pretty much straight down Broadway, like, no dramatic surprises, nothing that they announced that made us go, oh my god, that's crazy. No letdowns either, which is great, but yeah, it's about what we expected.

[05:11] The basics are, you'll now be able to trigger the new Siri on the iPhone by either swiping down from the dynamic island, or holding down that power button while you talk to it. It has a slightly new animation, and this general new look,

[05:23] plus a new, more expressive voice. And then it launches you into a conversational chat that pulls from Apple's new broad world knowledge base, sites its sources when it has some of those, and lets you click through to that, which I tried.

[05:35] That is nice. And then it syncs your conversation history inside a new Siri app, and that syncs across your whole ecosystem. So your Mac, your iPad, your iPhone. It doesn't remember every single thing you ask Siri, but it definitely saves the more interesting conversational things it thinks you might want to come back to.

[05:52] So here's the angle. Here's the thing, right? We already know people have lots of other great AI models to choose from. People have the Chash GPT app on their phone. They have Gemini. They have Claude already. The way that Apple, every single time, the way Apple jumps into a new product category,

[06:07] which I think this is, is they make it the best one to work with the iPhone. So Claude and Gemini and GPT are really good at other things, but Apple's series is going to be the one that can plug into all of the knowledge of what it has on your device,

[06:23] indexing everything that's actually on your iPhone. Now, I am planning on doing an entire separate video, like I said, reviewing this, demoing it, showing exactly what it's capable of, because it does have some quirks already, some interesting things that it is

[06:35] not doing that I expected, like showing a transcription as you're talking instead of when you're done. Little stuff like that. Again, stay tuned for the full review, but I think they just basically played it extremely safe. They did the stuff that you'd expect Apple to do, and nothing more. It's kind of funny that through this whole keynote,

[06:51] There are a ton of live demos, almost as if to say, yeah, we know a lot of you are rightfully skeptical, and we learned our lesson from last time, so here we go. This time it's definitely working for real, and we're showing you exactly what it can do.

[07:05] So, yeah, what can it do? It can look through your messages, through your photos, your calendar, and pull answers to questions from that stuff. And it can take actions inside these apps. So it can send messages, add stuff to your calendar, set reminders, all the most basic stuff.

[07:21] And that's why I say it's about right. Like, it's straight down the middle. It's not going all the way to doing, like, this insane, agentic stuff that Google is showing on stage with Gemini just a couple weeks ago at IO. Like, I had those concerns about asking Gemini to take a picture of a concert poster and it buys tickets for you.

[07:39] Like, I don't know. Is it going to get that right? Is it going to spend too much money? Is it going to get the right seats or the right dates? Is it going to hallucinate something weird? I don't know. but this Apple one is just going to stop short and it's just going to add it to your calendar.

[07:53] Just do the safe thing. But unlike the other stuff, it has the advantage of knowing what's in your iPhone. So if you use an iPhone, GPT can't pull from your messages. Claude can't pull from your Apple calendar.

[08:06] Gemini doesn't see this stuff. It Siri that will actually be most helpful with the context of all the personal information that never leaves your device Siri can also pull from what on your screen too and they added a new camera mode literally

[08:19] inside the camera app that's just an updated version of the visual intelligence stuff we've seen. So just definitely surfacing it to a lot more people this way. So, you know, people are going to be taking pictures of stuff and then identifying it with visual intelligence. You

[08:32] could also see how this would be particularly useful if you were making smart glasses at some point. But now my number one concern watching all of this was what about third-party apps, right? Like obviously, okay, Siri, of course it should be able to pull conveniently from that

[08:46] iMessage conversation that I had. It knows my contacts, but what about that workstop conversation that I had? Or what about pulling from my Google calendar instead of my Apple calendar? What about sending something to, I don't know, a separate notes app that I like to use instead of Apple

[09:00] Notes? What about all that? And I plan on digging into this way more when I actually get my hands on with the OS's, but it seems like the answer is as long as the developer has enabled app intents and the app store knows what type of app it is, then it can be summoned intentionally

[09:17] by the user. It doesn't seem like it can be a default, but you can decide to use other apps if you tell it to do that. By default, if you ask it, hey, Siri, remind me of that podcast that Greg recommended me

[09:29] and play it. it will, of course, if it's an iMessage conversation, find it, and then start playing it in Apple Podcasts. But if you don't want to, you could say, play it in Spotify or Pocket Casts,

[09:41] and then it would know that that's also a podcast player, and it would do the app stuff and do the same action in that app for you. So as long as you tell it you want to use a third-party app, you can. But I definitely need to push this to see how far it goes.

[09:53] Like, is it going to be able to do geofence recurring tasks in TickTick, my Apple choice instead of Apple Reminders? Maybe. I don't know. Is it going to be able to pull from WhatsApp group chat

[10:05] if it has, like, the same set of contacts as iMessage? TBD. We'll see. But here it is. Here's the most disappointing slide from the whole keynote. This is a list of every device that supports the newest, most powerful Siri on-device models.

[10:17] So, yeah, the only iPhones that will run it are the iPhone Air and 17 Pro, because those are the ones with 12 gigs of RAM. Kind of hilarious, considering the iPhone 16 was built from the ground up for Apple intelligence, and is already outdated before that stuff is even coming out.

[10:31] But I'm told that the only difference between the most advanced on-device models and the ones that all the other iPhones will be getting, like the 16, is the new Siri voice and the updated dictation features.

[10:45] Also, fun fact, in Vision Pro, Siri is just this little floating orb in your space, and when you want to activate it, you literally just look at the orb and start talking. And since there's eye tracking, it knows and responds. Clever.

[10:57] So you can ask it about, you know, the windows you have open or even any of the objects around you in your real space. Reminds me a lot of Circle to Search on the Galaxy XR headset. Remember that demo? You can just sort of point at something and Google it in real life.

[11:10] Very useful. But then there's also some new Apple intelligence things that they talked about that aren't part of the new series. Like if you have a ton of Safari tabs open, it can automatically arrange them into groups for you based on topics

[11:22] and then automatically keep them sorted. And then you can also describe a Safari extension, with natural language, and it'll just build it, which is really cool for especially things like the most ultra-niche thing

[11:34] that you want your web browser to do. Or even better, you can describe a Siri shortcut with natural language, and it will build that Siri shortcut for you and let you edit it after the fact with the full-on editor. So this is a great way to make that sort of stuff much more accessible,

[11:48] exact same thing Google just did with their home automations. Just describe the automation. It'll build it. Then you can edit it later. Speaking of home, the update where those 15 notifications you might get in a row all get summarized and consolidated into one updating notification from Apple Home,

[12:04] finally, that is long overdue and much welcome. Plus, you can search through your footage to find clips of anything like a package delivery. There also the new photo editing tools which will now not just do cleanups but it will also now offer to extend the outer edges of your image by up to 25 And the demos I seen seem to work really well extending in all directions

[12:28] And it immediately makes me wonder if I can just take that finished image and then extend it again and again and again. I don't know. How far can I go? And then there's also spatial reframing, which is quite literally turning the image using

[12:44] what it can figure out with AI about depth to work out what should be in the new background with new perspective. This is really the closest they've ever gotten to bending the definition of what is a photo. Very technically impressive party trick, but I think maybe still a party trick.

[13:03] It's weird. I don't see people doing this a lot, but it is crazy if it works. There's also one of the things that they have to mention will have limited daily use if you want to update your total use because this uses their more powerful cloud models. If you want more usage, then you

[13:17] have to update your iCloud subscription to get more. Oh, and then maybe the most Apple thing ever is the new passwords app will be able to identify, first of all, if you have a compromised password

[13:29] or a weak password. And then the feature is it will be able to agentically go to that website, log in with your weak password, go through the menus and change it to a more secure password for you and then save and remember that secure password.

[13:45] Super, super clever. Very convenient. And that also basically means you're locking yourself a little bit more into that password app because that's now the one that knows your new password. In fact, that might have been the theme for this whole event. The irony is not lost on me that they named the newest version of macOS Golden Gate.

[14:03] Because when the walls of that walled garden are golden gates, it's like maybe it's not so bad in there anyway, right? Maybe if you use iMessage and Apple Calendar and Safari and all of their services, it's kind of nice.

[14:18] Unless you're a HomePod user. There was no mention of the HomePod for the entire keynote, the entire event. You remember the HomePod, that little Siri box with nice speakers in it?

[14:30] Yeah, I don't know what's going on with that one. Oh, and then one more sneaky reference at the end. So if you were still paying attention an hour in with like 10 minutes left in the keynote, there was a slide. They showed some new developer tools that would help you build your app to resize dynamically to different aspect ratios, which is interesting.

[14:46] What kind of device would have multiple aspect ratios that you need your app to? Ah. Right. Tell me you have a foldable comment without telling me you have a foldable comment. Anyway, get subscribed for those full reviews.

[14:59] And make sure to leave a comment below if there's something specific that you want to see tested when I get my hands on all that beta software. And also make sure to get shopping for Father's Day with the sponsor of this video, Ridge. So reminder, Father's Day is coming up.

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[16:22] Peace.