Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.
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.
>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.
Worth remembering too that this isn't merely about "complaints", Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data, but a lot of people (even technical people) may choose to check the box to share with Apple. Anecdotally, I myself and a LOT of other people have stuck with macOS 15 or earlier, but Apple should have a lot of hard data on it and adoption curves vs the past.
A real reaction does certainly suggest that this wasn't just a tempest in a teacup, but that they really weren't seeing the adoption on Macs they expected.
I and most of my dev friends didn’t update. The reality is that many of us work in a web browser and an IDE all day writing software for non-Apple platforms. The only incentive I have to update is new and compelling OS features or bugfixes. Since major security patches will likely be backported, that just leaves new features and the reality is that macOS’ only new “feature” worth talking about was Liquid Glass considering their AI offering was also an absolute joke.
Given the other emphasis placed on performance improvements (likely in service to helping to mask the slowness of LLM Siri) I’m really hoping this is a modern Snow Leopard release. I’m looking forward to the Apple nerds digging and offering a compelling narrative about why I should care about updating.
And to add on to that, if this is a bug-fix bonanza release, hopefully we’ll also see a lot of positive movement during the beta period to keep shipping fixes. We’re getting a freaking EQ on AirPods!!!!111!!1! It seems Apple is finally taking some things to heart about listening to their users and I’m 10000% here for it.
It's still nice to see a company not double down on a fall! They seem to have been on a full year of tech debt and optimisation.
I still would have liked a more genuine walk back (they sold it as "iterations and adjustments" as if the rewinded stuff were new ideas) but overall reassuring.
Whoa, didn't realize that was Jony Ive! Good job Jony! Gave both Ferrari and EVs bad press with a single product launch!
A good lesson in not messing with a good thing. If they had just put an electric motor in a classic Ferrari body, it could have been a nice moment for the energy transition.
I think it’s basically recalcitrance. Same as they suddenly turn into the world’s worst devs every time they have to make software for Windows. Apple hates mouses, but many people won’t consider not using one, so they reluctantly make an expensive, pretty, and absolutely terrible mouse to get you over the hump of the macOS switch then keep pushing you along to where they really want you: the giant touchpad, where they do have a moat, and which trains you for the rest of their ecosystem. They even sneak half of that touchpad into the mouse itself, and half of the mouse out, so the transition is oh so easy.
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.
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.
So is Microsoft, albeit a bit late to the party. Taskbar now movable, performance improvements hitting insider builds, MS BUILD half about WSL containers, native coreutils, a dev edition of windows using Winget config to strip all the bloat out, all new system dialogs replacing a good chunk of the old Win32 stuff, WinUI reactor, ability to remove AI models & Copilot from the OS, etc.
Classic case of the reality distortion field here.
We could be holding it wrong, and Jobs be correct to point out that many rival phones at the time literally had manuals dictating how to hold their phones to avoid reception issues.
The antenna designer could have done a better job, preventing the situation, thereby not dragging Jobs into a PR storm.
Jobs could have handled the situation and communication _significantly_ better.
They try so hard to do a polished presentation that everything is kinda fake and unauthentic. I don't understand how this attitude survived so many years.
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... ".
American or corporate? I'm surprised that corporate talk overseas isn't overly enthusiastic! As an American, most of the stream has sounded very 'California' mixed with corporate.
It's not "fake" - it's cultural differences where what is intended to come across as polite by Americans[1] can be seen as insincere by people from elsewhere. On the flip side, Americans often view foreign behavior that's intended to be neutral as unfriendly, uncaring or cold.
1. e.g. lots of smiling, use of superlatives like "great"/"amazing" to describe mediocre items/effort/results
Execs are ‘super excited’ about everything. There is no dynamic range at all. They appear to have no opinions and no judgement because their opinion is always that everything is awesome. When the audience knows that stuff is either normal-level ok or actually fucked up, this message is insulting to receive.
Worse, it trains people downstream that shiny happy is the only valid comms. Hard to escalate a concern when you don’t know how to start the message with how super excited you are about it.
If everything is at a “10” in linguistic intensity (“Incredible”, “Legendary”, “GOAT”) then nothing is exceptional.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of a Dorito chip.
I’m American and this marketing/corporate speak drives me up the wall. I have a harder time respecting the judgement of people who thoughtlessly speak this way.
As other comment suggested, the way I see it Americans are addicted to hyperbolas. Instead of "Thank you" it's "Thank you so much". So when you genuinely want to thank someone because that person went above and beyond (saved your life, avoided you a substantial hassle, etc.) then it's difficult to convey that.
Speaking as a Brit, our national trait is generally too understate things. So even saying what you mean, directly, comes off as a bit immodest and hyping it up in sales pitches sounds shady.
Americans generally say what they mean a bit more, so I think their mid point is just different.
Small talk is all lies. Almost all praise is fake. And it all drives me insane. I can fit in at work just fine, I can appear joyful and excited to come to work, I have 30 years of practice with it. But I avoid it whenever possible because it is all lies.
Americans appear to oversell everything because people get mad if you don’t.
“Why can’t you just be positive?!”
Because I’m not going to lie. I can’t fake praise, and I won’t even try. Being positive while lying is immediately obvious and it undermines the positive attitude that you’ve painted on. If anything, I take a negative message when I see someone faking a positive manner of speech.
One thing about Jobs is that he was genuinely excited about much of the stuff he was showing, and even if you knew he was showing some useless BS (like coverflow, something I remember he absolutely loved), it made it interesting to watch. If today's presenters are in any way excited about what they're showing (or, more likely, talking about), that excitement has been polished away by all the takes they probably had to film.
They're not genuinely excited. Because there isn't much to be genuinely excited about. The "incredible new super-exciting developments" are usually "okay, I guess."
Once in a while you get something like the M series chips, but the rest is reliably mid - functional, maybe a few nice tweaks, probably some better-than-average design, but nothing revolutionary.
So all of the "We know you're gonna love it!" doesn't land, because it's literally scripted and rehearsed, not spontaneous.
Jobs was rehearsed and passionate, which was part of the appeal.
It's debatable if Cook has ever been genuinely excited about anything.
They try to imitate Steve's diction and mannerisms, without replicating his ability to concisely focus on the few things he wanted to stick with the audience.
That parental controls presentation felt like the same 3 bullet points delivered 4 times over with the vibe of a group presentation where every team member had to present but there was only 1 slide of content between the bunch.
It's a well known fact that it is quite difficult for some parents to setup and use parental controls, I believe it was just to fully explain it to people that might not know much about how parental controls work.
Apple presenters are coached on how to speak, how to stand/move, what to do with their hands, etc.
I can understand how it might seem culty, but it's in the service of clear communication to a global audience. Anyone who represents a company to important customers and/or the public goes through similar media training.
The comment is about how everyone in their videos does it. The over-use of it is the issue, like when you say a word too much and your brain stops understanding what it means.
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.
I remember one where there were technical issues so Steve just started telling stories about the old days with Woz... impossible to imagine that from ANY tech company today
Not to spoil the magic but the plan B dialog was somewhat rehearsed too. Award for the best recovery lines goes to James Dempsey and the "I Love (NS)View" song. "I, uh, forgot to mention up front that this song is a beta version. It's feature complete, mind you, but I won't have the words memorized until October..."
Probably but even the fact that they're rehearsing time-filling stories is a more human trait than the pre-recorded months in advance videos that are usually shown today.
lol, I have a few other memories of Steve for when there were technical issues during the keynote. WiFi congestion and dead digital camera still pop up in my memory every now and then.
Someone with no money must survive with short term thinking: hunt and kill a wombat on the savanna or something. From there you work your way away from short term thinking; you might have enough to get through the week already, so the threat of starvation is more long term. Eventually with enough in the bank you have nearly no urgency; you could conceivably mishandle your bonds when they mature in twenty years or something. But with enough money, literally the only risk is short term thinking and immediacy. Bending over to pick up a penny is not going to even be considered.
If my ship ever really comes in and docks at the harbor I’m going to remember to keep my wallet full of cash, so I can stop and get that strawberry ice cream cone without worrying about the long term consequences, which are all I would have left.
Sure, but I think it’s also b/c the target audience for these keynotes has shifted. Given their immense market cap, now there’s an increased fiduciary responsibility to control how presentation lands, such as earnings reports, which comes at the expense of the fun.
It’s not money they started it during Covid and it stuck because presumably Cook likes the little movie making bits they had in it judging from other things like the Mother Earth skit he did.
Would be a welcome change it if the incoming CEO went back to live on stage imho
Also—and this sounds like a small thing but it's really not—when Steve said something like "we have some really exciting updates for you today," he really truly believed it. I just went back and re-watched his appearances on WSJ D1, D2 and D3, and he was actually psyched about every little iTunes update.
It's not just Apple, Microsoft but whole corporate world, and hell - even open source projects use same sterilized safe language of "we're so excited" in communication with users, customers. That's the actual reality distortion field.
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, the biggest problem is really that they all have the same approach, so these specific details stick out more through repetition. They don't let their presenters speak in their own voice or in their own presentation style. It's ironic for the company that made that 1984 commercial. The attempt at using different speakers to add variety actually ends up doing the opposite because the similarities become even more evident when a dozen people all behave in the same way.
This has been a thing for all tech companies for years.
According to what I was told by some FANNG people (I've never worked for them myself) some employees were/are were sent to public speaking classes after being hired specifically to teach socially awkward programmers how to talk on stage, and this is what they teach them, weird hand movements and all.
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.
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.
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.
Apple is as much an aspirational lifestyle company as they are anything else. That's been their marketing aim for quite a while. It's less about the tech and more of a message of "This is the person/lifestyle you can be if you buy our products"
Of course, but it’s interesting to see how they apply that marketing mold to security devices, by making up use-cases which nobody is buying them for. It contrasts with the crash detection and health stuff where realistic scenarios are shown.
Ok, maybe it’s not that interesting on reflection, and how are they even supposed to advertise it, with burglars?
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.
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.
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.
In a time where people are increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry & billionaires the imagery Apple puts forward of a literally siloed utopian ultra wealthy landscape probably does rub people the wrong way, at least at a subconscious level.
In the past Apple has been pretty good at anticipating and responding to shifting cultural dynamics. I wonder if they'll recognize and adjust?
I'm not sure it actually rubs people the wrong way, given Apple's sales numbers. Apple positions themselves as an aspirational brand. Everything they do is on purpose to enforce that. When people are upset at reality most people look for an escape into something else, not dive further into whats actually happening.
The siloed utopian landscape is the point. Apple tries to sell a modern, clean lifestyle status symbol. They are selling products for the person you hope you become, not the person you are right now. "Buy an iPhone, and this is what your life could look like."
Same deal as fad diets and gym memberships, its the illusion of being able to buy your way into a lifestyle without doing the hard work. Apple is selling an identity.
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"
I like it I think it’s sort of cool to see the different environments around Apple Park and be able to hear from a lot of different employees without having to watch a parade over the stage
Seeing people whining and gnashing and bitching, in vein it should be observed, about this sort of nonsense is so uproarious and, quite honestly, pathetic.
Like the root post whining that it's too polished. Christ. Get a grip and go touch grass if this is the sort of pathetic nonsense someone actually takes the time to whine about.
It's actually funny how every single presentation like this always gets topped by profoundly boring people complaining about some aspect of the presentation: The people aren't standing right or moving the way you want. OMG look at his jacket. That joke wasn't funny. Etc. Christ.
Yes, most people just want the information, not some sort of organic, "all-natural" presentation.
Are you one of those people who make that mistake? Because nowhere is that inferred in my post.
I enjoy the presenters and the enthusiasm and nuance that they bring to the presentation. I do not need to see someone figure out how to switch a display or change a slide or fumble with wireless that is overwhelmed in a hall with a thousand wireless devices or... All of that is utterly unnecessary, so pre-recording it, doing all of the post production, reshooting so you don't trip people up on misreads / mispronunciations / fumbles / technical issues, etc, gets the human + the information without the ancillary bullshit.
It's actually funny because I don't stream Google or nvidia presentations for this same reason (I just wait for engadget or someone to just give the bullet list recap), and I suspect many/most of the people whining and gnashing about this one being "too produced" don't either. Somehow it always ends up being 80% in the weeds nonsense.
I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud. You could very quickly see a feature sink when Apple announced features where the audience went 'meh'.
Now they completely control the narrative.
But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations. It all seems fake with the same woolly business talk (everything is an 'experience' now, 'app experiences', etc.).
I certainly long back for the days where anything could happen, Jobs would work to convince the audience and Bertrand Serlet would come on and troll Microsoft.
Currently streaming the presentation, but it has mostly gone to the background as it's so insanely boring.
Their audience are no longer the people in the room. The audience is the people watching the video or livestream which is great because that means you don't need thousands of dollars and an invite to go to WWDC.
>I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud.
I feel like I'm about to tell you there is no Santa or something, but did you really not know that Apple always stuffed audiences with Apple employees? Of the remainder it both through intentional and natural selection leaned towards sycophants. Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback?
It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
>But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations
Well I have only rarely heard anyone who liked the slow, plodding old-style presentation. So...
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
> Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback?
It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
While I agree with you, I think even the controlled audience mattered.
The audience, even if they were largely Apple employees + journalists, did not know what was gonna be revealed. And there weren’t literal cue cards.
So you would never see the audience boo, but there were several situations where the Apple presenters expected cheering but got polite clapping instead, or cheering which was very evidently just the sycophantic employees (or the team that worked on something).
When something was truly exciting, the cheering reflected that in a way it didn’t when the announcement wasn’t.
Two very different examples of this were the Snow Leopard reveal, where the excitement could be felt throughout the presentation, culminating with the $29 price, and the iPhone reveal with the 3 devices in 1 gimmick.
(Aside from clearly not an Apple employee, Jobs' way of taking the question is brilliant. Yes I know this was probably not the keynote, but it's a big, risky, filmed WWDC event.)
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
Yes, let's resort to personal attacks. There are a lot of things that are better now. Apple Keynotes are not one of them.
You linked to a "fireside chat" with Steve Jobs, consultant, returning to a highly dysfunctional Apple. The video is almost 30 years ago.
If that's your evidence to rebut me, lol.
>Yes, let's resort to personal attacks
You took that as a personal attack? That is incredibly weird. It was a general observation about the sort of perspectives that top HN, but not in the general world, or even general technology. You don't have to believe it.
Like seriously, currently the top post to a discussion about Apple unveiling an array of software improvements is some guy whining and bitching about the presentation, whining that it isn't like the olden days.
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.
I think it's because Apple would have to provide every competitor (including ones running off-device with no confidential compute) with the same level of access Siri AI would get, which poses a lot of security and privacy concerns Apple would never allow third-party developers to get access to even with a TCC consent prompt (like reading and sending iMessages).
No, it's more that those apps needs to be able to make all of the tool calls Siri AI can make, which would allow third-party developers to collect data they shouldn't have access to.
App developers can already access the on-device foundational models through an API, but I don't think many developers want to do that because there are better models.
That's the way to phrase it if you want to ignore or downplay the leverage that big tech companies have over their users to get them to consent to shady business practices using dark patterns. But this wouldn't be an issue to begin with if it was safe to assume that users fully understand what an app will do with their data, and if it was safe to assume that the app's data-handling practices could not drastically change at the developer's whims.
Apple doesn't trust other providers. See, for example, the ongoing attempts by Facebook & co to exfiltrate as much data as possible. A theoretical Facebook alternative here to super-Siri would have a pipe to slurp up the entire phone's data.
This kind of thing overlaps with the anti-competitive practices driven by Apple's MBAs (like the whole thing with Epic), but it's a genuine concern and one their engineering people think about a lot.
That sounds legit, but do you think its out of scope? Scam texts and emails result in exfiltrated data, maybe they have to require iMessage and iCloud Mail too?
If Facebook's Meta-Siri is being sketchy, that's a problem with Meta-Siri. Take it off the market, bring down the law. Promote competition, and bad actors must be made to loose. Can we not just status-quo fallacy that re dysfunctional consumer protections? or at maybe agree that the perfect-world scope is one that puts exfiltrators in jail, not just rejected from the app store.
Instead we'll just have Siri AI and Google Assistant AI, and no decent competition. I guess maybe we'll get a Meta phone, if the only way to compete is on the entire mobile computing vertical.
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.
If you view it like that, any argument against openness could be made in the name of privacy. With that interpretation, the Mac is terrible for privacy as you could just chose to install an app that reads your hard drive.
"We can't bring Time Machine to Europe, because we would have to allow other backup solutions, and that would mean other backups would have unrestricted access to your data"
Maybe there's more to it, but I'm not giving Apple the benefit of the doubt after their hostile strategy regarding third-party app stores.
As an EU resident, I find no benefits-of-doubt needed to explain why competition against foreign mega-corps is being forced. Its protectionist to promote openness when the closed solutions funnel profit abroad.
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?
They have some for sure for iCloud. Do they have enough to handle this volume of compute AND is Gemini allowed to be run on those? That was more what I was questioning/curious about.
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.
The "privacy" angle here is that Apple wants to give Siri access to user data across the system, without offering any way for competitors to get at that data.
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.
I think the potentially most impactful singular feature mentioned in all this is being able to conversationally describe Shortcuts for AI to create. That feels like the type of thing that if done right can change how we all use our phones in a way that things like Siri becoming smarter and more conversational likely won't.
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.
The only thing that interested in is: did they fix screen brightness getting super dim even when the slider is at max? That’s incredibly annoying and frustrating, and it’s been like that since first 26 release.
And it’s a clear bug because brightness resets to expected level if I go to photos and open an HDR image.
I can wait for autocomplete that doesn’t suggest garbage 50% of the time, but this one is just too annoying.
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.
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.
It also goes against Apple's earlier statements about how photos should reflect real memories as they happened, not an idealized version like what Goolge was pitching during their Pixel 10 launch event last year.
Turns out they didn't actually believe that, they only said it because they were behind on GenAI. They caved to investor demand, no longer stand for any principles (if they ever had any in the first place)
There will be a generation of children who will grow up and look back at their childhood photos and wonder if they ever really happened.
I also laughed out loud when they are showing the "cleanup" tool and they guy is talking about removing "distractions" and then removes 2 of the 3 girls juggling and having fun.
Ah yes, those friends you were forming core memories with, or as our tech overlords call them, distractions.
Wow. That's a very good observation, actually. We forget our photos are not only our memory. Those YT guys who geotrack photo memories will have a much harder time in the future. Just look at that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO6Hf3SdVcY
I was thinking about this, i’m sure there’s been a black mirror episode, but one thing i think back to is one where the us gov used ai to alter a stoic expression on an arrested protestors face and altering it to look like she was crying because that’s what they wanted to portray.
It’s a bullying tactic, i shiver to think how some people will make happy memories out of things that aren’t.
Absolutely. I hoped they'd backtrack a bit on AI/algorithmic processing after so many influencers started to shit on the overly processed photos. Instead they not only ignore that, but they double down on making our own content even more fake.
They fixed all the extremely egregious issues with Liquid Glass, good to see.
It's still an extremely ugly, "worst of both worlds" combination of wasted space (from early-gen flat design) with gaudy effects (from late-gen skeumorphism), but at least now it is usable.
I'd never update to macOS 26, but 27 I might, begrudgingly.
I have to say, I extremely dislike AI processing of photos. The camera is a vehicle to capture the realness of the world around us, including the imperfect moments. Distorting that with AI and being okay with it is really disappointing.
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.
Not sure I agree with the cropping argument, would be no different than cutting a printed photo with scissors. I would lump the other image manipulations done by hardware into "AI manipulation" as well, although those tend to be much more modest.
Hopefully this new golden gate update is really the snow leopard everyone's been hoping for.. already exciting one can now (if only partially) disable liquid glass
People talk about Liquid Glass as if it equal on all fronts. It's absolutely not. Apple knows which way their bread is buttered, that they can't mess up the iPhone. So Liquid Glass is fine on iOS. It's on Mac that it's a garbage fire of ridiculous design decisions.
Still the best OS around, but it looks like it was made by idiots.
Agreed, but seems like we're the odd ones out. I keep hearing how Liquid Glass is ok on iOS and terrible on macOS, but I actually think it's (slightly) better on macOS than on iOS.
At least macOS has configurability to turn off all the transparency. iOS just looks bad no matter how you configure it right now.
Try messing with the settings more. Grayscale (or whatever it’s called) makes the transparency much more tolerable, or even _nice_, than with multi-color.
It’s also more palatable on iOS because you only have one window open at a time. Many of the complaints around Liquid Glass on macOS are focused on window management and issues that only occur with multiple windows on screen simultaneously.
Yeah it seems like they are finally reconsidering their position of unifying ios and macos somewhat. I wish they would revert settings on the mac back to it's old 'control panel' days.
I really think Mac OS is one of the worst operating systems to begin with. How is liquid glass going to make it worse. I will 100% leave the criticism of liquid glass on Mac OS to others.
But Liquid Glass on iOS has been one of my favorite updates. I like the look and feel of it. They made some tangentially related changes that go too far.
Luckily for Apple, their primary competitor has managed to make their OS even worse. Windows becomes more unusable with every update, and on top of that, continues shoving telemetry and advertising into the OS. I installed windows on a laptop as an experiment and was shocked to see ads in the start menu. Who wants that?!
The best OS is probably something between Ubuntu and macOS. But nothing beats macOS on default, works out of the box, secure and usable and integrated with ecosystems of daily life.
I like it on iOS. It missed on macOS, but the new version looks much better. Bringing back the old style sidebar and actual toolbars again was the right choice.
I agree with you, it looks good on iOS and iPadOS. I'm indifferent toward it on macOS – you hardly ever notice it unless you live in the control center all day (IME anyway).
Man that conversation history navigation for the new Siri app looks super unuseable ... how the hell am I supposed to actually find the conversation I want with the super-dynamic non-ordered 2-column offset-row view thing ...?
It looks hard to use ...
Also the 'floating semi-window but not a window' thing when using contextual siri in the context of some other app ... sure looks like it won't work with cmd-tab navigation ... I really hope is not the case ...
My guess is that it's deliberate - that Siri window hovers over all apps so that you remain in your current context, and can add files/images/texts from any app to the Siri conversation. There might also be a Siri app on the Mac that was not yet shown.
You're probably right, just add it to the collection of "not-quite-window floating thingies", accompanied by Quick Notes, Stickies, Special Character Picker, Color Picker, Font Picker…
Sigh, I wish we could stop re-inventing what was already solved 25 years ago.
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.
... 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.
Ouch. “ Developers can start trying out the new version of Siri today, with a beta launching to the public later this year. Siri AI will not be available in the EU on iOS and iPadOS.”
Will it be available to developers in the EU though?
Theoretically you could use a router-level VPN for initial setup and that would work. Because VPNs are not functional for Apple services on Apple devices. Apple services bypass the VPN and reveal your real IP address, or in the case of trying to get different features, reveal your location to Apple.
Even if they were functional you still would want to use a router-level VPN because you couldn't install a VPN before your device connected to the internet.
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?
The new Siri might bring AI to way more people than OpenAI managed to reach with ChatGPT. I wonder what it means to OpenAI‘s planned IPO. Curious to try the beta to see how the new Siri feels.
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?
I don't think so, i don't think they want to be in the LLM laboratory business. They just want to leverage the technology to make money not invent it. Hence the reason why they made a deal with Google to license Gemini, let OpenAI and Anthropic fight it out while Apple just keeps making sales. I think they're betting that in the long run LLMs become a commodity more or less and the major labs go bankrupt/get acquired by their heavy duty investors. I feel like Athropic will goto Amazon (AWS) and OpenAI may end up property of Microsoft. Google will remain Google of course so they're not going anywhere which is probaly why they won the deal with Apple.
I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.
They wanted to be. Thus their investment into Siri in the first place. A revolutionary system - for year 2011. As well as bleeding edge advances in computational photography, photogrammetry, etc.
They just completely failed at capturing the modern chatbot wave.
They tried to catch up multiple times and, ultimately, gave up on doing it in house. Not because they didn't try, but because they tried and found themselves lacking.
I can't wait for the moment Apple realizes that hardware makers will also get eaten by AI. Who needs a fancy and expensive macbook or iphone when all you'll really need is earbuds with an internet connection to talk to the AI that's hosted wherever, which will do everything you ever want it to just by saying so. No keyboard or screen required to get a result, no real local computing hardware necessary. If the result is visual just tell it to display it on your 65" hi-res television (which Apple doesn't make). Maybe the market for earbuds is going to sustain them in the future?
People want to host their own AI and it will become good enough so most will do that instead of paying for a subscription.
Voice-only input to a cloud model with just a screen to show you what it's doing sounds like a nightmare. Why not subscribe for the TV hardware as well as the subscription, take it up a notch on the own-nothing.
You are talking about maybe 0.005% of the whole population of the earth when you say the phrase "self hosting".
My wife is part of the other 99% and she's already talking to a chat prompt for 90% of her computing needs. The fancy laptop we bought her a year ago sits collecting dust. She is Apple's target market - not the nerds that get a boner about "self-hosting".
Yea, but if I can get a ChatGPT-like experience from Siri AI for free, why would I pay OpenAI.
Now it remains to be seen if Siri AI will deliver anything close to a ChatGPT-like experience. But if they did, for the consumer segment that isn't using LLMs for agentic work and just ask it questions from time to time, I can't imagine one textarea has engendered some huge amount of brand loyalty over another.
Traffic from Siri to the web is much higher than traffic from OpenAI, generally. It's the default. People installing ChatGPT takes work. And some of that traffic is also coming from Siri today… It won't after this launches.
Because Siri defaults to dumb search much more often. While ChatGPT sucks up the search results and gives its own answer.
Which either terminates the session, or goads the user into asking a follow-up question, improving retention - the user doesn't leave the app either way.
I often think that Zuck spent so much on metaverse in order to to bait Apple to spend enormously on an experimental product and OS which now they are forced to maintain
Yeah if they double down and keep investing in the tech improvements required, I genuinely think Apple AR can become the next big hardware form. Nothing will beat the iPhone but this could easily stand beside their laptops as a major accessory.
Yes, I bought it to make apps when it first came out, but I immediately picked up a new Shopify client and couldn't justify the time/investment. I had to choose between dunking $5k on it to maybe develop apps when my work schedule opened up, or return it and get the money back.
if Apple went somewhere like wearable glasses with it, it'd be a hit
It would be a PR disaster, most people outside the SV bubble just find smart glasses what they really are: creepy.
Even more so because Meta is going to roll out face recognition and going to live-annotate people you encounter in the streets. Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.
- A lot of people found smart watches to be nerdy, something that only geeks would wear, until Apple made the Apple Watch. Along the same lines, everyone (on tech-oriented social media) thought the AirPods looked stupid and dorky when they were first announced, but now they're ubiquitous.
- People find smart glasses from Meta (and previously, Google) creepy, but – and it's anathema to say this around certain parts of HN – like it or not, people do generally trust Apple with their data in a way that they don't with those other companies.
- It seems like you're assuming Apple's glasses would include outward-facing cameras in the first place. Do we know that? The ideal device for me would just include the downward-facing IR cameras for gesture detection. Presumably only people under NDA can say for sure right now.
> Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.
What's not allowed? Facial recognition, street annotation, AI? Does it make a difference if it's local, on-device AI?
Part of the problem with Apple Vision Pro was the sales strategy. They labeled it "Pro" but if you went into an Apple store they only let you play some simple games and watch some movies with it. The main feature I was interested in, desktop extension, they wouldn't let you test. I even explicitly asked and they said no. They wanted a guided experience thing which just turned me off from buying it.
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.
Stoked about custom environments on visionOS from your panoramas. I have been shooting so many panoramas of national parks in anticipation of this moment.
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
[accessibility settings -> display -> reduce transparency] is the main option afaik. while you're in there, try "reduce motion" too, it's pretty nice imo.
Keep in mind Apple would never admit mistakes on Liquid Glass. But: Looks to me they're fixing some of the worst aspects. I'm on the fence.
The iOS 7 flat redesign was a UX disaster. But they got back up to speed in subsequent releases.
There IS something to be said for design resets with follow-up refits to accomodate for actual human beings. Most companies just add crap on top of crap.
Not saying what everything Apple does is perfect, even as a user/fanboy since '86.
What I most enjoyed about todays's annoucement that they're doing a Snow Leopard performance/bug reset, because that was expected and needed. And they started out with it, so they know their WWDC audience.
So: Both a technical and UX debt effort, with some privacy-focused AI on top.
Ever since the liquid glass update, my wallpaper is just a muted color. I investigated the settings and previously my wallpaper was the "blur" version of my lock screen. Since the liquid glass update, "blur" apparently means "99% blur" instead of the 20-30% blur it used to be. The muted color does seem to be an average color of the lock screen image. But nothing recognizable.
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.
Apple continues to innovate in new and excited ways, because I never though I would speak the words "I guess I'm sticking with ios26 until the end of security updates."
Unless I can continue to neuter AI, and keep the older siri this is my last iOS.
The ability to continue to completely lock down Apple Intelligence to the point where it even free's up the ~7gb it takes up on the phone. Currently this works in iOS 26 as long as I never accidentally toggle it back on via Apples dark pattern attempts that happen every few software updates.
Also for the ability to continue using Siri without Apple Intelligence would be nice. I rarely need to use Siri so it's already set for manual triggering with the power button long press only. But if Siri goes into the AI shitter then I'll just wholesale disable it.
It's nice to see the improve focused on AI and recognition of their past missteps. So far out of all the announcements this past month, I think this will be the most significant. The increased emphasis with on device models is exactly the right move. I'm tired of sending data out of my computer when it isn't needed.
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.
In case anyone missed it, Apple's dropping support for Watch Series 6/7/8/9 and the Ultra 1 with this release.
The 9 isn't even 3 years old yet until September, absolutely garbage support timeline for a wearable. I have a Series 9, and it's still essentially like new.
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.
I believe the only features I saw, and I could be wrong, that require the 17 or air were the new dictation and Siri voices. Those weren't in the original promises for the iPhone 16. That said, I don't know how much actually changed in the hardware where that actually has to be gated.
Much as I have a not so great opinion on Siri's capabilities, I'm rather surprised how many people appear to use Siri/Apple Intelligence to search for rather niche hobby content that I run a site for. OpenAI's scrapers I expect volume from, but I didnt really expect apple's to be consistently rank second.
It's uncanny how they announce that AI features won't be available in the UK or China, and then, with a smile, proceed with, "Now, let's discuss what's next for developers."
Are we living the worst times in a while technology wise, this presentation showed nothing useful. Last year at least they showed some interesting features, but as always I don’t use any of them, the only one I wanted in the past few years was to use the iPhone from my mac, but never shipped in EU. And the other feature was universal control that I use every day and works just fine most of the time.
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.
I'm glad to see their "Private Cloud AI" thing is actually happening. They announced it a couple years ago and then after not hearing a ton I was worried they were going to drop it.
That said, the foundational models they talk about running on it - is that something they've trained themselves? I know they had some sort of deal with Google; could it be Gemini weights loaded into their private compute or something?
I wonder if visual intelligence can be used to produced code like claudcode can. like highlight a UI component on an app you like and say "implement this for me". I can take screenshots of figma and give it to claude code to implement and it gets it pretty close.
Some small features are fully local (like the list sorting added in a recent iOS), but all of the neat features like world knowledge and shortcut gen seem to require private cloud compute.
Is there a live text play-by-play so we don't have to watch a video like some pre-literate? ArsTechnica used to do one but I can't find it for this year.
Anyone able to restart the stream if you missed the first few minutes or are we living in a world where AI will cure cancer but Apple can't build a "Watch live / Watch from start" button ?
All I want the ability to talk to Siri while I'm in the car. My buddy's Tesla has this feature with Grok and it's actually really awesome. Let me have an on-demand CONVERSATIONAL assistant, meaning something I'd actually want to have a conversation with.
finally Siri and Apple intelligence are getting some much needed updates. Most of the stuff shown was already open source and had been achieved under 16GB of ram so it is timely.
Over-polished WWDC keynote is just another great example that we as individuals with great motivation can do better
Even my prompt with Veo3 or Seedance 2.0 generated video can do better than Apple
Now if they just let me switch off the sound when I connect the charger. For any couple not going to bed at the same time and charging their phone at the bed this may be a welcome innovation. I'm willing to license this idea for free.
even the market understands this is a massive failure by apple, nobody needs another chat application especially using that stupid overlay window. looks like apple won't leapfrog anyone and has zero agentic features to show and no resetting a password doesn't count as agentic apple.
They have on occasion, when it makes sense to unveil OS changes and hardware simultaneously. Apple Vision Pro, move to new architecture, 2019 Mac Pro tower – that sort of thing. Most years they don't announce new hardware, though.
I was hoping for some kind of a Siri LLM API for providers to implement so that I'd be able to use Gemini, ChatGPT, maybe Openrouter, SELF HOSTED or whatever the fuck I want. Given that Apple itself does not really have a horse in the LLM race, it made sense.
Say the ChatGPT app would provide the functionality to the system and I'd allow a scary popup saying "these guys will own you, sure?".. I guess they are going all in into Gemini instead.
That AI segment was a boomer core slop fest. But to be fair, it's clear that Apple is not on the AI bleeding edge and it appears it doesn't want to be, it cannot afford to ignore it tho.
Let's hope they don't get overconfident with Gemini and pull a MS Copilot..
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"
I don't know why I torture myself with these kinds of presentations anymore. Aside from the obvious "It's all AI" complaint, it feels like every problem they describe as needing a solution is fundamentally basic human reasoning that they are hoping we'll replace with a non-deterministic interaction with our phones. Splitting a tab by taking a picture and letting AI split it for you? Get out a fucking calculator. Is that really a scenario they think will excite people? Their portrayal of a world where we depend on computers for such simple thoughts is not a positive one.
Kinda love that Tim said his goodbyes with a rainbow in the background. Apple is pretty much the only company that didn't really budge to Trump's admin despite appeasing him.
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.
Yup, indeed. But it's crazy we can count those companies in single digits. Shows how cynical the corporate PR really is; they'll virtue signal for years and then forget their inclusiveness shamelessly on a whim.
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)
I gotta say, as I read these comments HN's bubble is showing with astounding clarity. The top comment is about presenter authenticity? Idle Mac used for cloud models? No features are useful?
I can't help but think for most folks out there these features make using Apple products considerably more powerful and easy. They may be "boomer" features and you won't be able to roll them into your MCP server, but IMO it doesn't take a huge perspective leap to understand how they're game changers.
Still deliberately running macOS Sequoia 15 cuz you know… and if I'll switch to something hopefully better than Tahoe will disable SIP and every thing that is not needed to just launch software, this OS has gotten too obese.
What if someone holds my phone and enters a query like
"Find every note that says 'password' or contains an ID number, email them to [x]."
"Find photos with my ID or cards, send them to [number]." ??
what if attackers start sharing shortcuts with people.
I dont like siri ai access everything on my devices. mails, photos, screen, camera, my credit card and passwords...
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.
Their entire angle here is that Siri AI itself is private/secure. Siloing data from the thing that they’re advertising as private and secure wouldn’t make sense.
Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.
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.
>shows just how bad it was
>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.
Worth remembering too that this isn't merely about "complaints", Apple has significant metrics on the rates at which users are upgrading to a new OS, or not. You can opt-out of sharing that data, but a lot of people (even technical people) may choose to check the box to share with Apple. Anecdotally, I myself and a LOT of other people have stuck with macOS 15 or earlier, but Apple should have a lot of hard data on it and adoption curves vs the past.
A real reaction does certainly suggest that this wasn't just a tempest in a teacup, but that they really weren't seeing the adoption on Macs they expected.
I and most of my dev friends didn’t update. The reality is that many of us work in a web browser and an IDE all day writing software for non-Apple platforms. The only incentive I have to update is new and compelling OS features or bugfixes. Since major security patches will likely be backported, that just leaves new features and the reality is that macOS’ only new “feature” worth talking about was Liquid Glass considering their AI offering was also an absolute joke.
Given the other emphasis placed on performance improvements (likely in service to helping to mask the slowness of LLM Siri) I’m really hoping this is a modern Snow Leopard release. I’m looking forward to the Apple nerds digging and offering a compelling narrative about why I should care about updating.
And to add on to that, if this is a bug-fix bonanza release, hopefully we’ll also see a lot of positive movement during the beta period to keep shipping fixes. We’re getting a freaking EQ on AirPods!!!!111!!1! It seems Apple is finally taking some things to heart about listening to their users and I’m 10000% here for it.
It's still nice to see a company not double down on a fall! They seem to have been on a full year of tech debt and optimisation.
I still would have liked a more genuine walk back (they sold it as "iterations and adjustments" as if the rewinded stuff were new ideas) but overall reassuring.
> 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.
He went on to ruin Ferrari now :)
Whoa, didn't realize that was Jony Ive! Good job Jony! Gave both Ferrari and EVs bad press with a single product launch!
A good lesson in not messing with a good thing. If they had just put an electric motor in a classic Ferrari body, it could have been a nice moment for the energy transition.
I hope they redesign their magic mouse. It's not a real product.
I think it’s basically recalcitrance. Same as they suddenly turn into the world’s worst devs every time they have to make software for Windows. Apple hates mouses, but many people won’t consider not using one, so they reluctantly make an expensive, pretty, and absolutely terrible mouse to get you over the hump of the macOS switch then keep pushing you along to where they really want you: the giant touchpad, where they do have a moat, and which trains you for the rest of their ecosystem. They even sneak half of that touchpad into the mouse itself, and half of the mouse out, so the transition is oh so easy.
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.
Well, let’s wait a bit before giving it such an honorable name lol
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.
What they don’t do is open their keynotes with announcements of the tweaks. This isn’t like the other situations.
Of course. Every company does that. There is no company ever that just freezes after they release something.
He means the classic revolution/evolution cycle. Move forward, and then refine. This means you have to accept some errors in the name of momentum.
Maybe I wasn't in the minority of people that stopped updating macos to wait for them to remove it.
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.
At least, unlike microslop, they ARE fixing things based on user feedback.
So is Microsoft, albeit a bit late to the party. Taskbar now movable, performance improvements hitting insider builds, MS BUILD half about WSL containers, native coreutils, a dev edition of windows using Winget config to strip all the bloat out, all new system dialogs replacing a good chunk of the old Win32 stuff, WinUI reactor, ability to remove AI models & Copilot from the OS, etc.
Classic case of the reality distortion field here.
Oh? So I can now disable "AI" and "onedrive" and "microsoft accounts" in windows? COOL! where do i enable that?
You always could disable OneDrive (it's uninstallable), and you could always use a local account on Pro editions of Windows, that's nothing new.
Uninstalling Copilot and the local AI models is whats new on current insider builds.
https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+blocks+local+accou...
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2025/10/08/microsoft-ends-lo...
Hmm, funny, because I literally just set up a Win11 PRO machine yesterday, I could still create a local account, no bypass script needed.
Your links only apply to Home editions.
We shouldn’t give them praise for gatekeeping it behind a paywall.
so bad like john ive ferarri lmao
Jobs: "You're holding it wrong, idiot."
Also Jobs: fires the antenna designer
Multiple things can be true:
We could be holding it wrong, and Jobs be correct to point out that many rival phones at the time literally had manuals dictating how to hold their phones to avoid reception issues.
The antenna designer could have done a better job, preventing the situation, thereby not dragging Jobs into a PR storm.
Jobs could have handled the situation and communication _significantly_ better.
They try so hard to do a polished presentation that everything is kinda fake and unauthentic. I don't understand how this attitude survived so many years.
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"
To me it just sounds so very American. Using so many praising adjectives they stop meaning anything anymore.
If everything is fabulous and great and you’re always excited or proud, that becomes the baseline.
American or corporate? I'm surprised that corporate talk overseas isn't overly enthusiastic! As an American, most of the stream has sounded very 'California' mixed with corporate.
Curious how this trait is American? Is there something about the way Americans speak that is fake?
If I share a project with an American friend and he says it's awesome, I still don't know whether he liked it or not.
If I share it with a Polish or German friend and he says it's "not bad" then I know he is really impressed.
It's not "fake" - it's cultural differences where what is intended to come across as polite by Americans[1] can be seen as insincere by people from elsewhere. On the flip side, Americans often view foreign behavior that's intended to be neutral as unfriendly, uncaring or cold.
1. e.g. lots of smiling, use of superlatives like "great"/"amazing" to describe mediocre items/effort/results
Oh yes.
Execs are ‘super excited’ about everything. There is no dynamic range at all. They appear to have no opinions and no judgement because their opinion is always that everything is awesome. When the audience knows that stuff is either normal-level ok or actually fucked up, this message is insulting to receive.
Worse, it trains people downstream that shiny happy is the only valid comms. Hard to escalate a concern when you don’t know how to start the message with how super excited you are about it.
It drove me crazy during my corporate period.
Yes. Zero dynamic range.
If everything is at a “10” in linguistic intensity (“Incredible”, “Legendary”, “GOAT”) then nothing is exceptional.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of a Dorito chip.
I’m American and this marketing/corporate speak drives me up the wall. I have a harder time respecting the judgement of people who thoughtlessly speak this way.
Not American as much as it is "corporatese".
Yeah, absolutely.
At least to my British ears, Americans rarely sound authentic.
Its always grandiose statements and elaborate smiles.
Sure but occasionally that attitude leads to men walking on the moon.
As other comment suggested, the way I see it Americans are addicted to hyperbolas. Instead of "Thank you" it's "Thank you so much". So when you genuinely want to thank someone because that person went above and beyond (saved your life, avoided you a substantial hassle, etc.) then it's difficult to convey that.
Speaking as a Brit, our national trait is generally too understate things. So even saying what you mean, directly, comes off as a bit immodest and hyping it up in sales pitches sounds shady.
Americans generally say what they mean a bit more, so I think their mid point is just different.
We do say what we mean, it's just either carefully coded in mutual assured understatement, or buried under expletive-laden exaggeration.
Any native knows that "Interesting, but perhaps we should reconsider" means "You're an idiot and I don't understand how you ever learned to breathe."
The pinnacle is "Not bad", which can mean either deep approval or blistering contempt, depending on tone of voice.
It drives foreigners insane. But of course it's not our fault if they never learned English.
Beyond just American, they are trying to emulate Jobs style without his genius for presenting in a compelling and attention grabbing way.
As a Brazilian, I also find that annoying and unnatural.
As an American with autism, I see it too.
Small talk is all lies. Almost all praise is fake. And it all drives me insane. I can fit in at work just fine, I can appear joyful and excited to come to work, I have 30 years of practice with it. But I avoid it whenever possible because it is all lies.
Americans appear to oversell everything because people get mad if you don’t.
“Why can’t you just be positive?!”
Because I’m not going to lie. I can’t fake praise, and I won’t even try. Being positive while lying is immediately obvious and it undermines the positive attitude that you’ve painted on. If anything, I take a negative message when I see someone faking a positive manner of speech.
One thing about Jobs is that he was genuinely excited about much of the stuff he was showing, and even if you knew he was showing some useless BS (like coverflow, something I remember he absolutely loved), it made it interesting to watch. If today's presenters are in any way excited about what they're showing (or, more likely, talking about), that excitement has been polished away by all the takes they probably had to film.
They're not genuinely excited. Because there isn't much to be genuinely excited about. The "incredible new super-exciting developments" are usually "okay, I guess."
Once in a while you get something like the M series chips, but the rest is reliably mid - functional, maybe a few nice tweaks, probably some better-than-average design, but nothing revolutionary.
So all of the "We know you're gonna love it!" doesn't land, because it's literally scripted and rehearsed, not spontaneous.
Jobs was rehearsed and passionate, which was part of the appeal.
It's debatable if Cook has ever been genuinely excited about anything.
They try to imitate Steve's diction and mannerisms, without replicating his ability to concisely focus on the few things he wanted to stick with the audience.
That parental controls presentation felt like the same 3 bullet points delivered 4 times over with the vibe of a group presentation where every team member had to present but there was only 1 slide of content between the bunch.
It's a well known fact that it is quite difficult for some parents to setup and use parental controls, I believe it was just to fully explain it to people that might not know much about how parental controls work.
I also noticed the "And now" it appeared way too often in that presentation!
If they would stop all doing the exact same hand pose it might help. Feels like watching a cult. Been this way for years too.
If you didn’t notice it before, you’ll definitely notice it now.
Apple presenters are coached on how to speak, how to stand/move, what to do with their hands, etc.
I can understand how it might seem culty, but it's in the service of clear communication to a global audience. Anyone who represents a company to important customers and/or the public goes through similar media training.
Yes, thank you for explaining PR 101 to me.
The comment is about how everyone in their videos does it. The over-use of it is the issue, like when you say a word too much and your brain stops understanding what it means.
I hate it too. But watching untrained people nervously fidget with their hands or stand like stiffs has its own cringe.
A few of the keynote people kinda forgot how to walk normally on camera. It happens to me.
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.
I remember one where there were technical issues so Steve just started telling stories about the old days with Woz... impossible to imagine that from ANY tech company today
Not to spoil the magic but the plan B dialog was somewhat rehearsed too. Award for the best recovery lines goes to James Dempsey and the "I Love (NS)View" song. "I, uh, forgot to mention up front that this song is a beta version. It's feature complete, mind you, but I won't have the words memorized until October..."
Probably but even the fact that they're rehearsing time-filling stories is a more human trait than the pre-recorded months in advance videos that are usually shown today.
lol, I have a few other memories of Steve for when there were technical issues during the keynote. WiFi congestion and dead digital camera still pop up in my memory every now and then.
The curse of money. The more they have the safer they play it.
Someone with no money must survive with short term thinking: hunt and kill a wombat on the savanna or something. From there you work your way away from short term thinking; you might have enough to get through the week already, so the threat of starvation is more long term. Eventually with enough in the bank you have nearly no urgency; you could conceivably mishandle your bonds when they mature in twenty years or something. But with enough money, literally the only risk is short term thinking and immediacy. Bending over to pick up a penny is not going to even be considered.
If my ship ever really comes in and docks at the harbor I’m going to remember to keep my wallet full of cash, so I can stop and get that strawberry ice cream cone without worrying about the long term consequences, which are all I would have left.
> Curse of money
Sure, but I think it’s also b/c the target audience for these keynotes has shifted. Given their immense market cap, now there’s an increased fiduciary responsibility to control how presentation lands, such as earnings reports, which comes at the expense of the fun.
It’s not money they started it during Covid and it stuck because presumably Cook likes the little movie making bits they had in it judging from other things like the Mother Earth skit he did.
Would be a welcome change it if the incoming CEO went back to live on stage imho
Ironically that's often what ends up costing one the most, i feel like
Also—and this sounds like a small thing but it's really not—when Steve said something like "we have some really exciting updates for you today," he really truly believed it. I just went back and re-watched his appearances on WSJ D1, D2 and D3, and he was actually psyched about every little iTunes update.
It's not just Apple, Microsoft but whole corporate world, and hell - even open source projects use same sterilized safe language of "we're so excited" in communication with users, customers. That's the actual reality distortion field.
I want to celebrate your comment, and the energy around it, and I'm excited for the next generation of replies to build on this momentum.
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, the biggest problem is really that they all have the same approach, so these specific details stick out more through repetition. They don't let their presenters speak in their own voice or in their own presentation style. It's ironic for the company that made that 1984 commercial. The attempt at using different speakers to add variety actually ends up doing the opposite because the similarities become even more evident when a dozen people all behave in the same way.
This has been a thing for all tech companies for years.
According to what I was told by some FANNG people (I've never worked for them myself) some employees were/are were sent to public speaking classes after being hired specifically to teach socially awkward programmers how to talk on stage, and this is what they teach them, weird hand movements and all.
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.
Bingo they all have the same coaches, watch Satya, Sundar and heck even Cisco ceo they all have conformity now lol
"think different"
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.
People smiling while using Siri look genuinely disturbing.
And talking for exactly 10 seconds while the ai generates to maintain the semblance of a live demo.
It's Steve Jobs cargo-culting.
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.
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.
> but as a lifestyle aid
Apple is as much an aspirational lifestyle company as they are anything else. That's been their marketing aim for quite a while. It's less about the tech and more of a message of "This is the person/lifestyle you can be if you buy our products"
Of course, but it’s interesting to see how they apply that marketing mold to security devices, by making up use-cases which nobody is buying them for. It contrasts with the crash detection and health stuff where realistic scenarios are shown.
Ok, maybe it’s not that interesting on reflection, and how are they even supposed to advertise it, with burglars?
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.
Authenticity requires vulnerability and that's not something Apple can do.
I miss the live presentations actually, from the pre covid era
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.
I can’t organically tell if they’re actual employees or a bunch of wish.com Kevin Butlers.
+1 it is weird the presentations and feels fake, people must like it
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.
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.
Ignore the marketing language. It's after all just the packaging, not the product.
Even Steve Jobs not long after returning to Apple. His presentations were supposedly the very best shit, but just felt super fake to me.
They are bad actors with a worse script. Just that.
The minimalism evocative wealth display is off-putting.
In a time where people are increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry & billionaires the imagery Apple puts forward of a literally siloed utopian ultra wealthy landscape probably does rub people the wrong way, at least at a subconscious level.
In the past Apple has been pretty good at anticipating and responding to shifting cultural dynamics. I wonder if they'll recognize and adjust?
I'm not sure it actually rubs people the wrong way, given Apple's sales numbers. Apple positions themselves as an aspirational brand. Everything they do is on purpose to enforce that. When people are upset at reality most people look for an escape into something else, not dive further into whats actually happening.
The siloed utopian landscape is the point. Apple tries to sell a modern, clean lifestyle status symbol. They are selling products for the person you hope you become, not the person you are right now. "Buy an iPhone, and this is what your life could look like."
Same deal as fad diets and gym memberships, its the illusion of being able to buy your way into a lifestyle without doing the hard work. Apple is selling an identity.
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"
Nobody likes this. How did you come up with the idea to claim that was Apple's reasoning?
I like it I think it’s sort of cool to see the different environments around Apple Park and be able to hear from a lot of different employees without having to watch a parade over the stage
I really like it this way though, specially because of the good production value.
Seeing people whining and gnashing and bitching, in vein it should be observed, about this sort of nonsense is so uproarious and, quite honestly, pathetic.
Like the root post whining that it's too polished. Christ. Get a grip and go touch grass if this is the sort of pathetic nonsense someone actually takes the time to whine about.
It's actually funny how every single presentation like this always gets topped by profoundly boring people complaining about some aspect of the presentation: The people aren't standing right or moving the way you want. OMG look at his jacket. That joke wasn't funny. Etc. Christ.
Yes, most people just want the information, not some sort of organic, "all-natural" presentation.
Your comment is the most upset I've seen in this thread. Maybe re-read what you wrote and take your own advice.
I think some people mistake "I don't value the human layer of a communication" with "The human layer has no value".
A presentation is a live audio visual medium. If you just want the information as facts with no affect why not read the stats later?
Are you one of those people who make that mistake? Because nowhere is that inferred in my post.
I enjoy the presenters and the enthusiasm and nuance that they bring to the presentation. I do not need to see someone figure out how to switch a display or change a slide or fumble with wireless that is overwhelmed in a hall with a thousand wireless devices or... All of that is utterly unnecessary, so pre-recording it, doing all of the post production, reshooting so you don't trip people up on misreads / mispronunciations / fumbles / technical issues, etc, gets the human + the information without the ancillary bullshit.
It's actually funny because I don't stream Google or nvidia presentations for this same reason (I just wait for engadget or someone to just give the bullet list recap), and I suspect many/most of the people whining and gnashing about this one being "too produced" don't either. Somehow it always ends up being 80% in the weeds nonsense.
Some might say the information here is even more padded and puffed than in a traditional presentation.
amen, god forbid they try to make a polished display of new features instead of fumbling through live presentations
I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud. You could very quickly see a feature sink when Apple announced features where the audience went 'meh'.
Now they completely control the narrative.
But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations. It all seems fake with the same woolly business talk (everything is an 'experience' now, 'app experiences', etc.).
I certainly long back for the days where anything could happen, Jobs would work to convince the audience and Bertrand Serlet would come on and troll Microsoft.
Currently streaming the presentation, but it has mostly gone to the background as it's so insanely boring.
The audience was the only thing they couldn't control - so they got rid of the audience.
Their audience are no longer the people in the room. The audience is the people watching the video or livestream which is great because that means you don't need thousands of dollars and an invite to go to WWDC.
When the keynotes still had audiences there was also a livestream. Here, have a WWDC 2007 for kicks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubm2dYzoDW8
>I think it is more that axing the audience feedback was convenient for them. In the old WWDC keynotes they had to get the audience to 'wow' and applaud.
I feel like I'm about to tell you there is no Santa or something, but did you really not know that Apple always stuffed audiences with Apple employees? Of the remainder it both through intentional and natural selection leaned towards sycophants. Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback?
It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
>But I have only rarely heard anyone who liking the new-style presentations
Well I have only rarely heard anyone who liked the slow, plodding old-style presentation. So...
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
> Did you really think the roaring response were organic feedback? It was always controlled. Personally I'm happy to be done with the on-cue tumultuous cheering and whooping.
While I agree with you, I think even the controlled audience mattered.
The audience, even if they were largely Apple employees + journalists, did not know what was gonna be revealed. And there weren’t literal cue cards.
So you would never see the audience boo, but there were several situations where the Apple presenters expected cheering but got polite clapping instead, or cheering which was very evidently just the sycophantic employees (or the team that worked on something).
When something was truly exciting, the cheering reflected that in a way it didn’t when the announcement wasn’t.
Two very different examples of this were the Snow Leopard reveal, where the excitement could be felt throughout the presentation, culminating with the $29 price, and the iPhone reveal with the 3 devices in 1 gimmick.
Well now they don't even need to convince the employees and sycophants.
but did you really not know that Apple always stuffed audiences with Apple employees?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
(Aside from clearly not an Apple employee, Jobs' way of taking the question is brilliant. Yes I know this was probably not the keynote, but it's a big, risky, filmed WWDC event.)
But yes, HN is overwhelming filled with angry, shakes-fist-at-clouds "it ain't like the olden days!" sorts now. So if you really think this place represents the norm...
Yes, let's resort to personal attacks. There are a lot of things that are better now. Apple Keynotes are not one of them.
You linked to a "fireside chat" with Steve Jobs, consultant, returning to a highly dysfunctional Apple. The video is almost 30 years ago.
If that's your evidence to rebut me, lol.
>Yes, let's resort to personal attacks
You took that as a personal attack? That is incredibly weird. It was a general observation about the sort of perspectives that top HN, but not in the general world, or even general technology. You don't have to believe it.
Like seriously, currently the top post to a discussion about Apple unveiling an array of software improvements is some guy whining and bitching about the presentation, whining that it isn't like the olden days.
"Siri AI will not be available in E.U. until we figure out privacy"
Funny to hear that after they mentioned how seriously they are taking privacy every 37 seconds.
I think it's because Apple would have to provide every competitor (including ones running off-device with no confidential compute) with the same level of access Siri AI would get, which poses a lot of security and privacy concerns Apple would never allow third-party developers to get access to even with a TCC consent prompt (like reading and sending iMessages).
Which means Apple would have to give OAI and Anthropic access to Gemini, I mean Siri AI.
No, it's more that those apps needs to be able to make all of the tool calls Siri AI can make, which would allow third-party developers to collect data they shouldn't have access to.
App developers can already access the on-device foundational models through an API, but I don't think many developers want to do that because there are better models.
Apple don’t want you to be able to say “Hi Alexa” or “Ok Google” to your iPhone, and wake it up.
We have all kinds of data access controls, these could probably also be built around Siri and competitors.
Apple would have to allow USERS the possibility of giving any virtual assistant direct access to their own private data.
Is that accurate?
That's the way to phrase it if you want to ignore or downplay the leverage that big tech companies have over their users to get them to consent to shady business practices using dark patterns. But this wouldn't be an issue to begin with if it was safe to assume that users fully understand what an app will do with their data, and if it was safe to assume that the app's data-handling practices could not drastically change at the developer's whims.
Apple doesn't trust other providers. See, for example, the ongoing attempts by Facebook & co to exfiltrate as much data as possible. A theoretical Facebook alternative here to super-Siri would have a pipe to slurp up the entire phone's data.
This kind of thing overlaps with the anti-competitive practices driven by Apple's MBAs (like the whole thing with Epic), but it's a genuine concern and one their engineering people think about a lot.
That sounds legit, but do you think its out of scope? Scam texts and emails result in exfiltrated data, maybe they have to require iMessage and iCloud Mail too?
If Facebook's Meta-Siri is being sketchy, that's a problem with Meta-Siri. Take it off the market, bring down the law. Promote competition, and bad actors must be made to loose. Can we not just status-quo fallacy that re dysfunctional consumer protections? or at maybe agree that the perfect-world scope is one that puts exfiltrators in jail, not just rejected from the app store.
Instead we'll just have Siri AI and Google Assistant AI, and no decent competition. I guess maybe we'll get a Meta phone, if the only way to compete is on the entire mobile computing vertical.
Interesting and good to know, I did not understand how that works. Thanks for the info
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.
If you view it like that, any argument against openness could be made in the name of privacy. With that interpretation, the Mac is terrible for privacy as you could just chose to install an app that reads your hard drive.
"We can't bring Time Machine to Europe, because we would have to allow other backup solutions, and that would mean other backups would have unrestricted access to your data"
Maybe there's more to it, but I'm not giving Apple the benefit of the doubt after their hostile strategy regarding third-party app stores.
As an EU citizen I am not giving the EU the benefit of the doubt... and against forced openness, nothing good will come from it.
As an EU resident, I find no benefits-of-doubt needed to explain why competition against foreign mega-corps is being forced. Its protectionist to promote openness when the closed solutions funnel profit abroad.
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?
do they not have data centers in Europe yet
They have some for sure for iCloud. Do they have enough to handle this volume of compute AND is Gemini allowed to be run on those? That was more what I was questioning/curious about.
Privacy and EU regulation are two very different things.
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.
Yes. [1]
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
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 because of the DMA. [1]
The "privacy" angle here is that Apple wants to give Siri access to user data across the system, without offering any way for competitors to get at that data.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
Yeah macOS is luckily not big enough to be counted as a gatekeeper I believe.
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...
Laughed at it, too. It's almost as if they admit the EU privacy legislation enforces ACTUAL privacy.
or could it be the other way around that actual privacy is forbidden in Europe because they want to read your messages
This. They come up with so many laws under so many pretences that want to take away the freedom of private communications
It's not about how it is but how they made it sound. Let's not get ideological here.
EU wants them to open up the cloud models to any 3rd party.
How can Apple guarantee privacy then?
Meanwhile most companies and people have a competition in EU to submit all the data to Claude and ChatGPT.
Yipeee for stupid eu rules
I think the potentially most impactful singular feature mentioned in all this is being able to conversationally describe Shortcuts for AI to create. That feels like the type of thing that if done right can change how we all use our phones in a way that things like Siri becoming smarter and more conversational likely won't.
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.
The only thing that interested in is: did they fix screen brightness getting super dim even when the slider is at max? That’s incredibly annoying and frustrating, and it’s been like that since first 26 release. And it’s a clear bug because brightness resets to expected level if I go to photos and open an HDR image. I can wait for autocomplete that doesn’t suggest garbage 50% of the time, but this one is just too annoying.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256141236
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.
Spatial Framing? Yay, even more fakeness in photos, creating ever more artificial, never-happened memories!
Seemed like the kids were no longer looking at the camera. I don't know what's worse - fixing it or not fixing it.
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.
It also goes against Apple's earlier statements about how photos should reflect real memories as they happened, not an idealized version like what Goolge was pitching during their Pixel 10 launch event last year.
Turns out they didn't actually believe that, they only said it because they were behind on GenAI. They caved to investor demand, no longer stand for any principles (if they ever had any in the first place)
They may, actually, believe that, however possibly their users might very vocally not believe that in feedback.
Sometimes you just have to give customers what they claim to want instead of fighting them every step of the way.
There will be a generation of children who will grow up and look back at their childhood photos and wonder if they ever really happened.
I also laughed out loud when they are showing the "cleanup" tool and they guy is talking about removing "distractions" and then removes 2 of the 3 girls juggling and having fun.
Ah yes, those friends you were forming core memories with, or as our tech overlords call them, distractions.
Wow. That's a very good observation, actually. We forget our photos are not only our memory. Those YT guys who geotrack photo memories will have a much harder time in the future. Just look at that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO6Hf3SdVcY
I was thinking about this, i’m sure there’s been a black mirror episode, but one thing i think back to is one where the us gov used ai to alter a stoic expression on an arrested protestors face and altering it to look like she was crying because that’s what they wanted to portray.
It’s a bullying tactic, i shiver to think how some people will make happy memories out of things that aren’t.
Don’t worry. By the time they grow up they’ll just ask the AI for a summary of their childhood.
Absolutely. I hoped they'd backtrack a bit on AI/algorithmic processing after so many influencers started to shit on the overly processed photos. Instead they not only ignore that, but they double down on making our own content even more fake.
"Here's what I wish the memory was!"
"But I'll pretend it was a real one for the next 30 years. This, or I'll never look at that 'photo' again."
They fixed all the extremely egregious issues with Liquid Glass, good to see.
It's still an extremely ugly, "worst of both worlds" combination of wasted space (from early-gen flat design) with gaudy effects (from late-gen skeumorphism), but at least now it is usable.
I'd never update to macOS 26, but 27 I might, begrudgingly.
I have to say, I extremely dislike AI processing of photos. The camera is a vehicle to capture the realness of the world around us, including the imperfect moments. Distorting that with AI and being okay with it is really disappointing.
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.
Not sure I agree with the cropping argument, would be no different than cutting a printed photo with scissors. I would lump the other image manipulations done by hardware into "AI manipulation" as well, although those tend to be much more modest.
Hopefully this new golden gate update is really the snow leopard everyone's been hoping for.. already exciting one can now (if only partially) disable liquid glass
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.
People talk about Liquid Glass as if it equal on all fronts. It's absolutely not. Apple knows which way their bread is buttered, that they can't mess up the iPhone. So Liquid Glass is fine on iOS. It's on Mac that it's a garbage fire of ridiculous design decisions.
Still the best OS around, but it looks like it was made by idiots.
IMO it's not fine on iOS. It has the same visual busyness as on macOS.
Agreed, but seems like we're the odd ones out. I keep hearing how Liquid Glass is ok on iOS and terrible on macOS, but I actually think it's (slightly) better on macOS than on iOS.
At least macOS has configurability to turn off all the transparency. iOS just looks bad no matter how you configure it right now.
Try messing with the settings more. Grayscale (or whatever it’s called) makes the transparency much more tolerable, or even _nice_, than with multi-color.
It’s also more palatable on iOS because you only have one window open at a time. Many of the complaints around Liquid Glass on macOS are focused on window management and issues that only occur with multiple windows on screen simultaneously.
Also weird how it’s all or nothing. Feels like it should just be a theme you choose for your OS.
This is really what they need to get back to. Let macOS be themeable again.
Yeah it seems like they are finally reconsidering their position of unifying ios and macos somewhat. I wish they would revert settings on the mac back to it's old 'control panel' days.
I really think Mac OS is one of the worst operating systems to begin with. How is liquid glass going to make it worse. I will 100% leave the criticism of liquid glass on Mac OS to others.
But Liquid Glass on iOS has been one of my favorite updates. I like the look and feel of it. They made some tangentially related changes that go too far.
Luckily for Apple, their primary competitor has managed to make their OS even worse. Windows becomes more unusable with every update, and on top of that, continues shoving telemetry and advertising into the OS. I installed windows on a laptop as an experiment and was shocked to see ads in the start menu. Who wants that?!
The best OS is probably something between Ubuntu and macOS. But nothing beats macOS on default, works out of the box, secure and usable and integrated with ecosystems of daily life.
While I may hold an unpopular opinion, I really enjoy using liquid glass. It really makes an information-rich screen seem less cluttered.
I like it on iOS. It missed on macOS, but the new version looks much better. Bringing back the old style sidebar and actual toolbars again was the right choice.
I agree with you, it looks good on iOS and iPadOS. I'm indifferent toward it on macOS – you hardly ever notice it unless you live in the control center all day (IME anyway).
I slightly prefer it, its nothing groundbreaking though. I just dont think it's the grand UX sin that some the most vocal critics love to preach.
Elements underneath glass elements would add clutter
Man that conversation history navigation for the new Siri app looks super unuseable ... how the hell am I supposed to actually find the conversation I want with the super-dynamic non-ordered 2-column offset-row view thing ...?
It looks hard to use ...
Also the 'floating semi-window but not a window' thing when using contextual siri in the context of some other app ... sure looks like it won't work with cmd-tab navigation ... I really hope is not the case ...
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.
The “window” also doesn’t belong to an app! His menu bar continued to show Finder as the active app, not Siri.
Which means, if shipped like this, the Siri dialog will be a poor excuse for a window with:
- no Cmd+Tab, no Cmd+`
- no minimize??
- generally no presence in the Dock whatsoever
- no keyboard shortcuts beyond basic text editing ones
- no smart window resize
- …
So in other words, no Justin, that’s not a window. That’s a resizable Spotlight pop-up with an “X” button.
My guess is that it's deliberate - that Siri window hovers over all apps so that you remain in your current context, and can add files/images/texts from any app to the Siri conversation. There might also be a Siri app on the Mac that was not yet shown.
You're probably right, just add it to the collection of "not-quite-window floating thingies", accompanied by Quick Notes, Stickies, Special Character Picker, Color Picker, Font Picker…
Sigh, I wish we could stop re-inventing what was already solved 25 years ago.
I think they were just pointing out the difference between that and iOS there
Siri wakes up on my phone every time they say "hey siri". I thought it was supposed to be bound to my voice. :/
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.
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 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.
Ouch. “ Developers can start trying out the new version of Siri today, with a beta launching to the public later this year. Siri AI will not be available in the EU on iOS and iPadOS.”
Will it be available to developers in the EU though?
Unfortunatley not https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/due-to-dma-siri-ai-de...
Any workarounds like VPN?
Theoretically you could use a router-level VPN for initial setup and that would work. Because VPNs are not functional for Apple services on Apple devices. Apple services bypass the VPN and reveal your real IP address, or in the case of trying to get different features, reveal your location to Apple.
Even if they were functional you still would want to use a router-level VPN because you couldn't install a VPN before your device connected to the internet.
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?
The new Siri might bring AI to way more people than OpenAI managed to reach with ChatGPT. I wonder what it means to OpenAI‘s planned IPO. Curious to try the beta to see how the new Siri feels.
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?
> they totally sleepwalked through LLM revolution
I don't think so, i don't think they want to be in the LLM laboratory business. They just want to leverage the technology to make money not invent it. Hence the reason why they made a deal with Google to license Gemini, let OpenAI and Anthropic fight it out while Apple just keeps making sales. I think they're betting that in the long run LLMs become a commodity more or less and the major labs go bankrupt/get acquired by their heavy duty investors. I feel like Athropic will goto Amazon (AWS) and OpenAI may end up property of Microsoft. Google will remain Google of course so they're not going anywhere which is probaly why they won the deal with Apple.
I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.
They wanted to be. Thus their investment into Siri in the first place. A revolutionary system - for year 2011. As well as bleeding edge advances in computational photography, photogrammetry, etc.
They just completely failed at capturing the modern chatbot wave.
They tried to catch up multiple times and, ultimately, gave up on doing it in house. Not because they didn't try, but because they tried and found themselves lacking.
I can't wait for the moment Apple realizes that hardware makers will also get eaten by AI. Who needs a fancy and expensive macbook or iphone when all you'll really need is earbuds with an internet connection to talk to the AI that's hosted wherever, which will do everything you ever want it to just by saying so. No keyboard or screen required to get a result, no real local computing hardware necessary. If the result is visual just tell it to display it on your 65" hi-res television (which Apple doesn't make). Maybe the market for earbuds is going to sustain them in the future?
People want to host their own AI and it will become good enough so most will do that instead of paying for a subscription.
Voice-only input to a cloud model with just a screen to show you what it's doing sounds like a nightmare. Why not subscribe for the TV hardware as well as the subscription, take it up a notch on the own-nothing.
You are talking about maybe 0.005% of the whole population of the earth when you say the phrase "self hosting".
My wife is part of the other 99% and she's already talking to a chat prompt for 90% of her computing needs. The fancy laptop we bought her a year ago sits collecting dust. She is Apple's target market - not the nerds that get a boner about "self-hosting".
> I'm pretty confident it's Gemini behind the curtain for Siri.
I mean, they said it was.
sorry, i only watched a subset of the presentation
Yea, but if I can get a ChatGPT-like experience from Siri AI for free, why would I pay OpenAI.
Now it remains to be seen if Siri AI will deliver anything close to a ChatGPT-like experience. But if they did, for the consumer segment that isn't using LLMs for agentic work and just ask it questions from time to time, I can't imagine one textarea has engendered some huge amount of brand loyalty over another.
> Apple used to be a genuine AI leader
when?
Traffic from Siri to the web is much higher than traffic from OpenAI, generally. It's the default. People installing ChatGPT takes work. And some of that traffic is also coming from Siri today… It won't after this launches.
Because Siri defaults to dumb search much more often. While ChatGPT sucks up the search results and gives its own answer.
Which either terminates the session, or goads the user into asking a follow-up question, improving retention - the user doesn't leave the app either way.
> 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 often think that Zuck spent so much on metaverse in order to to bait Apple to spend enormously on an experimental product and OS which now they are forced to maintain
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.
Apple Vison Regular will come one day, and might actually be worth it.
If I can _actually_ replace my monitors with a headset, I’m in.
Vision Pro could do it but was way too heavy to use 8 hours a day
Yeah if they double down and keep investing in the tech improvements required, I genuinely think Apple AR can become the next big hardware form. Nothing will beat the iPhone but this could easily stand beside their laptops as a major accessory.
It's great, yet you "used to have it" :)
Yes, I bought it to make apps when it first came out, but I immediately picked up a new Shopify client and couldn't justify the time/investment. I had to choose between dunking $5k on it to maybe develop apps when my work schedule opened up, or return it and get the money back.
if Apple went somewhere like wearable glasses with it, it'd be a hit
It would be a PR disaster, most people outside the SV bubble just find smart glasses what they really are: creepy.
Even more so because Meta is going to roll out face recognition and going to live-annotate people you encounter in the streets. Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.
A few things:
- A lot of people found smart watches to be nerdy, something that only geeks would wear, until Apple made the Apple Watch. Along the same lines, everyone (on tech-oriented social media) thought the AirPods looked stupid and dorky when they were first announced, but now they're ubiquitous.
- People find smart glasses from Meta (and previously, Google) creepy, but – and it's anathema to say this around certain parts of HN – like it or not, people do generally trust Apple with their data in a way that they don't with those other companies.
- It seems like you're assuming Apple's glasses would include outward-facing cameras in the first place. Do we know that? The ideal device for me would just include the downward-facing IR cameras for gesture detection. Presumably only people under NDA can say for sure right now.
> Luckily that shit is not allowed in the EU.
What's not allowed? Facial recognition, street annotation, AI? Does it make a difference if it's local, on-device AI?
People have found surveillance cameras horrible since forever. No matter how many years pass and how popular they are, they never became cool
Part of the problem with Apple Vision Pro was the sales strategy. They labeled it "Pro" but if you went into an Apple store they only let you play some simple games and watch some movies with it. The main feature I was interested in, desktop extension, they wouldn't let you test. I even explicitly asked and they said no. They wanted a guided experience thing which just turned me off from buying it.
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.
Stoked about custom environments on visionOS from your panoramas. I have been shooting so many panoramas of national parks in anticipation of this moment.
finally a snow leopard like release focused on performance and fixing user experience
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?
[accessibility settings -> display -> reduce transparency] is the main option afaik. while you're in there, try "reduce motion" too, it's pretty nice imo.
Keep in mind Apple would never admit mistakes on Liquid Glass. But: Looks to me they're fixing some of the worst aspects. I'm on the fence.
The iOS 7 flat redesign was a UX disaster. But they got back up to speed in subsequent releases.
There IS something to be said for design resets with follow-up refits to accomodate for actual human beings. Most companies just add crap on top of crap.
Not saying what everything Apple does is perfect, even as a user/fanboy since '86.
What I most enjoyed about todays's annoucement that they're doing a Snow Leopard performance/bug reset, because that was expected and needed. And they started out with it, so they know their WWDC audience.
So: Both a technical and UX debt effort, with some privacy-focused AI on top.
I can't complain.
Have you tried the Accessibility setting "Reduce Transparency"? Apple tends to hide too many things there.
that's been available from the beginning
Ever since the liquid glass update, my wallpaper is just a muted color. I investigated the settings and previously my wallpaper was the "blur" version of my lock screen. Since the liquid glass update, "blur" apparently means "99% blur" instead of the 20-30% blur it used to be. The muted color does seem to be an average color of the lock screen image. But nothing recognizable.
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.
Old sidebar back on macOS thank god. 2026, the year Apple discovered toolbars are useful.
Apple continues to innovate in new and excited ways, because I never though I would speak the words "I guess I'm sticking with ios26 until the end of security updates."
Unless I can continue to neuter AI, and keep the older siri this is my last iOS.
As opposed to the AI-free operating system, Android?
What do you want?
The ability to continue to completely lock down Apple Intelligence to the point where it even free's up the ~7gb it takes up on the phone. Currently this works in iOS 26 as long as I never accidentally toggle it back on via Apples dark pattern attempts that happen every few software updates.
Also for the ability to continue using Siri without Apple Intelligence would be nice. I rarely need to use Siri so it's already set for manual triggering with the power button long press only. But if Siri goes into the AI shitter then I'll just wholesale disable it.
It's nice to see the improve focused on AI and recognition of their past missteps. So far out of all the announcements this past month, I think this will be the most significant. The increased emphasis with on device models is exactly the right move. I'm tired of sending data out of my computer when it isn't needed.
I hope they keep the switch allowing you to disable Apple Intelligence.
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.
Lightweight browser extensions generated on demand, now there's a good use case for what they seem to be actually building.
Extending applications without having to launch a full agentic IDE. Macos is already very well equipped with GUI automation tools.
In case anyone missed it, Apple's dropping support for Watch Series 6/7/8/9 and the Ultra 1 with this release.
The 9 isn't even 3 years old yet until September, absolutely garbage support timeline for a wearable. I have a Series 9, and it's still essentially like new.
Wait what? Where did you see this? It would be crazy if the Series 9 doesn't get updated to the next watchOS
On their WatchOS page, about halfway down: https://www.apple.com/os/watchos/
[delayed]
I have to manually log in to Gmail and other emails accounts just to search it properly. Really glad to see some action on this
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.
Try quicksilver
It would be nice if you could use the processing power of your idle desktop Mac as an alternative to the paid cloud compute for images.
Siri AI - looks like finally Siri is getting its due update, hopefully they ship it soon!
I thought the same thing at the 2024 WWDC
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.
"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
I believe the only features I saw, and I could be wrong, that require the 17 or air were the new dictation and Siri voices. Those weren't in the original promises for the iPhone 16. That said, I don't know how much actually changed in the hardware where that actually has to be gated.
Much as I have a not so great opinion on Siri's capabilities, I'm rather surprised how many people appear to use Siri/Apple Intelligence to search for rather niche hobby content that I run a site for. OpenAI's scrapers I expect volume from, but I didnt really expect apple's to be consistently rank second.
They really are trying to convince the skeptics about AI privacy.
Do they allow you to opt out of data collection to improve their models for Siri? What about allow users to choose on-device only processing?
If not, they are only speaking to the converted when they have Craig drill home their supposed privacy guarantees.
It's uncanny how they announce that AI features won't be available in the UK or China, and then, with a smile, proceed with, "Now, let's discuss what's next for developers."
Are we living the worst times in a while technology wise, this presentation showed nothing useful. Last year at least they showed some interesting features, but as always I don’t use any of them, the only one I wanted in the past few years was to use the iPhone from my mac, but never shipped in EU. And the other feature was universal control that I use every day and works just fine most of the time.
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.
I'm glad to see their "Private Cloud AI" thing is actually happening. They announced it a couple years ago and then after not hearing a ton I was worried they were going to drop it.
That said, the foundational models they talk about running on it - is that something they've trained themselves? I know they had some sort of deal with Google; could it be Gemini weights loaded into their private compute or something?
I think it's just gemini in a dress
Gemini in a dress that doesn't store my data and use it to sell advertisements is a welcome dress.
Modest Gemini, wearing a dress that doesn't expose everything to the world.
While I give kudos for Apple bring these Intelligent features, but does anyone see themselves using these features in your daily life?
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.
A real snooze fest. I care so little about the AI features. I felt like they introduced the same thing over and over again.
I would be more excited if they said “AI? Yeah, we decided we aren’t interested in doing it anymore.”
I wonder if visual intelligence can be used to produced code like claudcode can. like highlight a UI component on an app you like and say "implement this for me". I can take screenshots of figma and give it to claude code to implement and it gets it pretty close.
Let me know if Metal gets any cool new features
There’s tons of Metal updates that will be announced during the platform meeting and workshops.
There is a lot of metal news here https://www.metal-archives.com
For a company of Apple's caliber, I'd expect better lighting on the presenters.
So sterile and performative.
Yoof, that reframing is interesting but took LONG
It’s fully local though
Some small features are fully local (like the list sorting added in a recent iOS), but all of the neat features like world knowledge and shortcut gen seem to require private cloud compute.
It is literally not. They clearly said that it uses their cloud.
Honestly, I’m more excited about a faster and more polished OS than any new feature they announced.
Is there a live text play-by-play so we don't have to watch a video like some pre-literate? ArsTechnica used to do one but I can't find it for this year.
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
Anyone able to restart the stream if you missed the first few minutes or are we living in a world where AI will cure cancer but Apple can't build a "Watch live / Watch from start" button ?
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.
"It's a feature, not a bug" – Apple
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
YouTube has a "disable DVR" toggle that disables the seek bar. There is a workaround, but I'm not sure if there's one that work in-browser.
This UserJS worked for me with Violentmonkey - https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/485020-dvr-chan-force-enab...
What is the non-browser workaround? E.g., can streamlink do it?
Does it ? I can pause but I can't seem to go back. Clicking on the timeline does nothing. Clicking on the "live" indicator does nothing.
This isn't letting me drag back either.
Yeah, explicitly disabled. Corporate control freak behavior - that tracks.
All I want the ability to talk to Siri while I'm in the car. My buddy's Tesla has this feature with Grok and it's actually really awesome. Let me have an on-demand CONVERSATIONAL assistant, meaning something I'd actually want to have a conversation with.
Would really like Siri AI to have an MCP server
They didn't even give you all of bluetooth. Not sure they'll let you do this
To like, talk to Siri through Claude?
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
They can't come up with a better demo than planning the menu for a party???
The irresistible urge to plan parties has infected them all: https://youtu.be/1cX4t5-YpHQ
Your first Apple keynote, huh?
New Search! Finally !
It's shocking how bad Mail.app search is today. It basically doesn't work.
finally Siri and Apple intelligence are getting some much needed updates. Most of the stuff shown was already open source and had been achieved under 16GB of ram so it is timely.
Are we going to hear more Ay! than a Mariachi band?
Over-polished WWDC keynote is just another great example that we as individuals with great motivation can do better Even my prompt with Veo3 or Seedance 2.0 generated video can do better than Apple
Now if they just let me switch off the sound when I connect the charger. For any couple not going to bed at the same time and charging their phone at the bed this may be a welcome innovation. I'm willing to license this idea for free.
The dubbed audio is disturbing. Or is it a delayed audio stream?
Reload should fix (did for me).
even the market understands this is a massive failure by apple, nobody needs another chat application especially using that stupid overlay window. looks like apple won't leapfrog anyone and has zero agentic features to show and no resetting a password doesn't count as agentic apple.
Bye Tim, thanks for making tech fun the past 10 years.
No new hardware, feels like the party is over. Thanks Altman for the greed.
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.
They have on occasion, when it makes sense to unveil OS changes and hardware simultaneously. Apple Vision Pro, move to new architecture, 2019 Mac Pro tower – that sort of thing. Most years they don't announce new hardware, though.
AVP
Not every year, but yes.
I was hoping for some kind of a Siri LLM API for providers to implement so that I'd be able to use Gemini, ChatGPT, maybe Openrouter, SELF HOSTED or whatever the fuck I want. Given that Apple itself does not really have a horse in the LLM race, it made sense.
Say the ChatGPT app would provide the functionality to the system and I'd allow a scary popup saying "these guys will own you, sure?".. I guess they are going all in into Gemini instead.
But I don't want Gemini..
That AI segment was a boomer core slop fest. But to be fair, it's clear that Apple is not on the AI bleeding edge and it appears it doesn't want to be, it cannot afford to ignore it tho.
Let's hope they don't get overconfident with Gemini and pull a MS Copilot..
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 whimsy in this can absolutely do one in 2026.
I don't know why I torture myself with these kinds of presentations anymore. Aside from the obvious "It's all AI" complaint, it feels like every problem they describe as needing a solution is fundamentally basic human reasoning that they are hoping we'll replace with a non-deterministic interaction with our phones. Splitting a tab by taking a picture and letting AI split it for you? Get out a fucking calculator. Is that really a scenario they think will excite people? Their portrayal of a world where we depend on computers for such simple thoughts is not a positive one.
Kids these days can't even split a tab without using a calculator. Next they'll forget how to balance a checkbook
Kinda love that Tim said his goodbyes with a rainbow in the background. Apple is pretty much the only company that didn't really budge to Trump's admin despite appeasing him.
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
Yup, indeed. But it's crazy we can count those companies in single digits. Shows how cynical the corporate PR really is; they'll virtue signal for years and then forget their inclusiveness shamelessly on a whim.
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)
Except that he validated Trump by giving him gold trinkets and donated $1M to his inauguration.
Cook is an enabler.
That's what I meant by "seemingly".
You didn't say seemingly.
I gotta say, as I read these comments HN's bubble is showing with astounding clarity. The top comment is about presenter authenticity? Idle Mac used for cloud models? No features are useful?
I can't help but think for most folks out there these features make using Apple products considerably more powerful and easy. They may be "boomer" features and you won't be able to roll them into your MCP server, but IMO it doesn't take a huge perspective leap to understand how they're game changers.
You think criticism is a sign of being in a bubble?
Cool, now how to disable Sire AI?
Still deliberately running macOS Sequoia 15 cuz you know… and if I'll switch to something hopefully better than Tahoe will disable SIP and every thing that is not needed to just launch software, this OS has gotten too obese.
Another bunch of AI startups have been destroyed.
Which ones? Doesn’t sound like they delievered anything really new that wasn’t announce years ago.
Are new MBPs eliding the notch?
This is a software keynote, they very rarely talk hardware at WWDC
"Goal Chasers" group chat. Yikes.
I am so happy that just by setting Siri to an unsupported language I can kill Apple Intelligence across the whole system.
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.
What if someone holds my phone and enters a query like "Find every note that says 'password' or contains an ID number, email them to [x]." "Find photos with my ID or cards, send them to [number]." ?? what if attackers start sharing shortcuts with people.
I dont like siri ai access everything on my devices. mails, photos, screen, camera, my credit card and passwords...
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.
Their entire angle here is that Siri AI itself is private/secure. Siloing data from the thing that they’re advertising as private and secure wouldn’t make sense.
You can disable all that TODAY. Just disable Siri access
https://xkcd.com/538/