I was unusually concerned heading into this year’s WWDC, fully prepared to be disappointed. I feared that Apple would continue to be on weak footing after the Apple Intelligence failures of the past year. To my surprise, I feel very differently post-keynote. I worried that they wouldn’t acknowledge what happened last year, but Craig addressed it right out of the gate. While the acknowledgement itself is appreciated, we still have to wait quite a long time for the new Siri to rear its face… or voice, I guess? Fortunately, Apple did deliver a combination of new AI features that are sprinkled throughout their new operating systems. I am largely relieved, albeit still slightly on edge for reasons we’ll get into later. Over the course of the keynote, I began to relax as they subtly and intentionally introduced an array of practical AI use cases one by one. I am actually quite excited about some of these, but none of them compare to the triumph that is Apple’s new universal design language: liquid glass.

Liquid Glass is Apple’s Best Work in Years

Alan Dye has stolen my heart with his new digital material. I’ve never seen software quite this beautiful. At least since the same company murdered my beloved skeuomorphism in cold blood with iOS 7, though thankfully it seems to be making a return no-less thanks to Airbnb which ironically happens to be a client of Jony Ive’s LoveFrom. Put all of that aside though. Not only is liquid glass beautiful to look at, it’s a delight to use. It’s playful and joyous in a way that makes it feel alive. In some ways it actually feels more like water that’s attempting to hold its shape, but that’s a good thing. It’s bubbly, not in a cute way but in a sophisticated one. The way elements reflect light and color is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in user interface design. It’s so striking upon first use that you almost can’t believe they pulled it off.

This redesign comes after decades of various attempts at pulling off transparent or translucent interfaces that feel like a real reflection of glass. It’s honestly insulting to compare liquid glass to Windows Aero and it’s nothing like the early versions of iOS 7 that had extreme blur effects. Liquid glass is in a class of its own and I can’t wait to watch other manufactures attempt to clone it. I suspect that part of the ethos behind liquid glass was to envision something that couldn’t be easily ripped off by the many Chinese companies that ship countless iPhone clones running Android skins that look terrifyingly close to the real thing. Unlike the iOS 7 redesign, which was clearly thrown together in just a few months and was incredibly easy to replicate, iOS 26 feels like it’s been in the works for years. They refreshed every element and I have yet to see anything that hasn’t been touched by it in some way. It instantly makes any Apple device feel new and fresh.

If You Didn’t See AI, You Weren’t Paying Attention

I hope that they put as much thought into making iOS agentic using large language models as they did crafting liquid glass. It’s cohesive, it’s everywhere, and not one element feels like an afterthought. From a functional standpoint, and as I mentioned above, Apple did in fact layer in AI throughout these new operating systems. They did so in a very thoughtful way, so much so that you really need to look closely to see the bigger picture. While there aren’t any fancy new features on par with Gemini Live or the Perplexity Assistant, a variety of Apple apps have gotten supercharged thanks to improvements to Apple’s local AI models.

There are largely five areas of focus this year: chat in Xcode, new Shortcuts actions, systemwide live translation, the new Workout buddy on Apple Watch, and ChatGPT integrations. Xcode 26 is the first version of Apple’s IDE to feature a chatbot powered by OpenAI. You can vibe code directly inside of a project without the need for the ChatGPT Mac app. If you’re a real pro, you can even plug in an API key from another provider like Anthropic. That alone would be a massive update to Xcode, but it also includes AI-powered automatic build error fixes. Together they have made Xcode exponentially better and tangibly so.

If the updates to Xcode are focused on giving developers new ways to use large language models, then Shortcuts is the consumer side of that coin. Shortcuts now features several Apple Intelligence actions that can be built into your shortcuts. It’s not even on the rails, you can prompt it to do just about anything. And it’s not limited to the on-device model, you can prompt private cloud compute and ChatGPT as well. This is all to say that users can create new automations that use AI all on their own, in effect creating all sorts of new practical use cases we haven’t even thought of yet. You can summarize just about anything, generate text in concert with your other apps, and so on. I imagine that it will be less popular to create these actions as Shortcuts can be kind of a confusing product for folks, but I can certainly see people downloading them en masse the way they do apps.

Systemwide live translation is a great addition to Apple’s platforms, but it’s not anything new. It’s been offered by Google for some time now and while I do think a lot of people are gonna get mileage out of it, we need to wait and see just how good it is in practice. Despite being included in the Apple Intelligence bucket, I think this one could’ve stood on its own. Workout buddy is in a similar space, it’s branded Apple Intelligence but it is largely a voice assistant that talks to you during workouts offering encouragement based on the data it has on you. It’s not an agent, you can’t prompt it. But it is a small addition that will probably be enjoyed by lots of Apple Watch users.

Last but certainly not least are the many new ChatGPT integrations that appear across the system. Apple’s expanded its reliance on ChatGPT in a variety of places including some mentioned above. Xcode and Shortcuts are two of these places. But Image Playgrounds and screenshots have gotten powerful ChatGPT enhancements as well. It’s clear to me that Apple knew the results from its own image model weren’t any good. They’ve opted to add ChatGPT image generation with a few preset styles. It’s much better than what they used to have and it means that the image playground API is much more valuable to developers. Screenshots is where ChatGPT really shines though in iOS 26. Yes, visual intelligence already offered the ability to ask ChatGPT about something around you but now you can ask it about what you see on screen. It’s something I’ve wanted on my iPhone for a long time. I constantly found myself taking screenshots and asking ChatGPT about them, but now I can just tap the ask button in the bottom left, ask my question, and delete the screenshot. It’s effortless.

While those are five key areas of focus, they’re not the only AI updates. One new feature that I particularly appreciate is package tracking in the Wallet app, which now pulls shipping information from the Mail app. There’s also a revamped Maps app that’s supposed to better learn your frequent routes and visited places.

Crowd Pleasers for Every Platform

Outside of liquid glass and Apple Intelligence, the company delivered some long requested updates. I suspected that this might be the year that they delivered some serious crowd pleasers and I was correct. iPadOS 26 has just about anything and everything I could’ve asked for. The new windowing system is exactly what it should have been a few years ago, but I will forgive them if it means they are finally done thinking they need to reinvent every traditional computing paradigm simply because they’re on an iPad and not a Mac. Windowing would’ve been a great change on its own, but they also brought the menu bar, professional audio controls, the Preview app, and many other things to the iPad that I have desperately wanted for years. Other updates I really appreciate are things like widgets on visionOS that are clearly laying the foundation for future glasses to provide more persistent and ambient information, the new Spotlight that supercharges Mac workflows, the Notes app finally coming to watchOS, among many other niceties. Heck, they even added new karaoke features to Apple TV and Apple Music.

Better Off Than You Might Think

All of this is to say that yes, Apple had a decent AI story this year that’s simply clouded by hauntings from 2024. The future is agentic, your iPhone needs to be able to simply do complex things for you with a simple prompt via text or voice. I hope the new Siri can deliver on this at least to some degree of success. But I do worry that Apple isn’t fully understanding just how big this moment is. If you watch the interviews that Craig and Joz did at WWDC, you get a sense that they have grown a bit resistant to this idea that chat is a powerful new UI paradigm or that ambient computing is going to be valuable at all for that matter. I don’t want to believe that Apple has failed to grasp the value of these new paradigms and I hope that they are thinking bigger than a few new features sprinkled throughout existing apps. I am holding out hope that they are pulling a classic Steve Jobs move and that they’re pretending they don’t value AI quite as much as others until they can also produce an offering on par with ChatGPT and Gemini without the help of a partner that is almost certainly also a competitor. I was pleasantly surprised that they were willing to let anyone, let alone someone as good as Joanna Stern, grill them about last year’s announcements. The WSJ interview is fantastic and a must-watch. I encourage you to make your own judgments about it. Just watch closely, not just for what they say but how they act.

Ultimately, I am happy with WWDC 2025. The announcements were better than I anticipated. And at this current moment, where consumer AI usage is still in the early stages, it’s hard to argue that Apple truly is as far behind as we thought before the conference. They’ve cleverly integrated ChatGPT into weak spots where they absolutely need to be strong, opened up their own models to be used in almost any way, and come up with practical solutions to existing user problems that use just enough AI to be flashy. Are their models still not as good as the competition? Sure. But the actual consumer offering, the thing you can go out and download is really good. It wasn’t all catch up, there are some genuinely new and good ideas here. I may be done saying Apple is “behind” and might start simply considering them to be “off to the side” doing their own thing. If they can ship the new Siri before next year’s WWDC and it successfully delivers on the promises Apple made last year, then they won’t be behind at all anymore from a product standpoint. At the end of the day, they’ve always been a product company not a technology one. I’m still disappointed with how they handled things over the past year, but they’ve largely redeemed themselves. They’re not resting on their laurels. They’re where they’ve always been, at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology while their competition has driven all the way down technology street.