Ernie Smith (via Hacker News):
And today, we learned that Apple is finally ending its 20-year run of Intel-based Macs.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that they gave the public one more year of new versions, along with the promise of potential security fixes, avoiding an uncomfortable rug-pull like the one that many PowerPC users experienced with Snow Leopard in 2009.
Andrew Cunningham (Hacker News):
Apple will provide additional security updates for Tahoe until fall 2028, two years after it is replaced with macOS 27.
[…]
Apple is also planning changes to Rosetta 2, the Intel-to-Arm app translation technology created to ease the transition between the Intel and Apple Silicon eras. Rosetta will continue to work as a general-purpose app translation tool in both macOS 26 and macOS 27.
But after that, Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps—specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers.
I don’t really understand this last bit. They’re going to keep shipping Intel versions of all the frameworks, but only certain chosen games can use them? Apple still maintains the code, it still takes up space on everyone’s Mac, but users don’t get to use it to run old apps? I could see Apple just killing Rosetta, and I could also see a case for fully supporting it for longer. This middle ground seems weird.
Miles Wolbe:
With Rosetta 2 support winding down, time to revisit backing up the installer for offline use. This update addresses batch downloading RosettaUpdateAuto.pkg for all macOS versions from 11 through 26 beta, comprising 472 files totaling just under 150MB.
Rosetta 2 itself has always been small, so the fact that it was a separate download seemed like a political or licensing decision. It’s the system frameworks that take up most of the space.
Previously:
Update (2025-06-11): Rich Trouton:
Apple has not described what will happen with Rosetta 2 beyond macOS 27, beyond stating that they will be keeping a subset of Rosetta functionality available to support certain Intel-based frameworks. The goal of the support for these not-yet specified Intel-based frameworks is to allow older unmaintained gaming titles to run on macOS past macOS 27.
Matt Sephton:
The just-announced Containerization stuff also uses Rosetta 2, potentially in their own data centres, so I can’t see them discontinuing it any time soon.
See also: MacRumors.
Update (2025-06-12): John Gruber:
With the 68K–PowerPC transition, they supported 68K Macs through Mac OS 8.1, which was released in January 1998. With the PowerPC–Intel transition, they only supported PowerPC Macs for two Mac OS X versions, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (which initially shipped PowerPC-only in 2005) and 10.5 Leopard in October 2007. The next release, 10.6 Snow Leopard in August 2009, was Intel-only. (Mac OS X dropped to a roughly two-year big-release schedule during the initial years after the iPhone, when the company prioritized engineering resources on iOS. It’s easy to take for granted that today’s Apple has every single platform on an annual cadence.)
“Take for granted” isn’t quite the phrase I would choose.
Game Intel Mac macOS Tahoe 26 Rosetta Sunset
Apple (preview, Hacker News, Reddit):
With the new design, iconic elements of macOS will feel more expressive, delightful, and personal while remaining instantly familiar, including the desktop, Dock, in-app navigation, and toolbars. Users can further personalize the experience with an updated Control Center and new color options for folders, app icons, and widgets. Continuity gets even better with the Phone app arriving on Mac, so users can access familiar features from iPhone — including Recents, Contacts, and Voicemails — and new ones like Call Screening and Hold Assist. And with Live Activities from iPhone, users can stay on top of things happening in real time, like an upcoming flight, right on their Mac. Spotlight gets its biggest update ever, allowing users to now directly execute hundreds of actions — like sending an email or creating a note — and take advantage of all-new browsing experiences to get to content faster.
[…]
The Dock, sidebars, and toolbars have been refined, bringing greater focus to a user’s content. The menu bar is now completely transparent, making the display feel even larger. There are more ways to customize what controls appear in the menu bar and Control Center, along with how they’re laid out. The new design also unlocks more personalization on the Mac. App icons come to life in light or dark appearances, colorful new light and dark tints, as well as an elegant new clear look. Users can also change the colors of folders and add a symbol or emoji to give them a unique identity.
[…]
Spotlight, the central place to search for things on Mac, makes finding what users are looking for easier than ever, and provides users with all-new ways to take action. During a search, all results — including files, folders, events, apps, messages, and more — are now listed together and ranked intelligently based on relevance to the user. New filtering options rapidly narrow searches to exactly what a user is looking for, like PDFs or Mail messages. Spotlight can also surface results for documents stored on third-party cloud drives. And when a user doesn’t know exactly what they’re searching for, Spotlight’s new browse views make it easy to scan through their apps, files, clipboard history, and more.
Users can now take hundreds of actions directly from Spotlight — like sending an email, creating a note, or playing a podcast — without jumping between apps. Users can take actions from both Apple apps and apps built by developers, because any app can provide actions to Spotlight using the App Intents API. Users can also run shortcuts and perform actions from the menu bar in the app they’re currently working in, all without lifting their hands off the keyboard. Spotlight learns from users’ routines across the system and surfaces personalized actions, such as sending a message to a colleague a user regularly talks to. Additionally, Spotlight introduces quick keys, which are short strings of characters that get users right to the action they’re looking for.
It looks like there are some good features here, but I really don’t like the new design. Most of it just looks ugly, particularly the toolbars and sidebars. You can still turn off much of the transparency (including the menu bar) with the accessibility setting, and this also makes the sidebars look better, but none of the settings seem to get rid of the huge shadows in the toolbars. The alerts are kind of a mess with a mix of different font sizes and a left-aligned layout that I guess is better than the narrow, iOS-inspired one, but I prefer the classic, wider design.
Craig Hockenberry:
So is it macOS Tahoe, macOS 26, or macOS Tahoe 26, or macOS 26 Tahoe?
Jeff Johnson:
How do I install the macOS Taco beta on an empty APFS volume? Can I do that through Software Update?
I don’t see it in softwareupdate --list-full-installers
Mr. Macintosh has a link to the full installer. There’s no IPSW yet.
• • •
Kyle Howells:
I guess the terrible Settings.app style UI is now the standard we should expect across macOS.
It was nice having dedicated desktop UI designs for a while. I guess now macOS lives on iOS and iPadOS leftovers?
Craig Grannell:
The menu bar is now completely transparent. ARRGGGHHHH
Joachim:
Why is a completely transparent menu bar good on macOS? Didn’t we try this before 10-20 years ago and then dialed it back a lot again? Why would it work this time?
Jeff Johnson:
Why would you want this transparency???
And why are there icons for every built-in menu item?
Miguel Arroz:
It’s impossible to read the title of that Acorn window. In the keynote. We’re not even in the real world yet. They made macOS horrendous.
• • •
Rui Carmo:
The (apparent) fixing of Spotlight and effective return of Quicksilver almost two decades later and in almost every respect including parameters and menu navigation. This is a huge win for power users and a long-overdue update to the macOS experience. That it took Apple this long to do it is a bit sad, but at least they appear to be doing it right.
Joachim:
Ok, using Spotlight to search through the menu items of an app (like the Help menu did for ages) is a great idea!
Guy English:
The Spotlight Command Line seems cool.
Brian Webster:
OK I’m calling it, built-in clipboard history is the official WWDC winner feature.
• • •
Colin Cornaby:
I feel like we just need to rip off the bandaid and go back to wide alerts. Stacking the image on top of the text isn’t helping here. (I’m not picking on the checkbox misalignment in since this is a beta.)
Adam Bell:
Ok these “Thing is running in the background, is that OK?” alerts in macOS Tahoe absolutely need to go lol
• • •
Josh Avraham:
On macOS Tahoe notarized apps are exempt from a first launch malware scan, making the launch incredibly fast 🚀
Josh Long:
Odd decision. Apple has been notarizing malware ever since notarizing became a thing.
I hope Apple at least gives an option to re-enable that safety feature (even if it’s just via a Terminal command) for users who want a more hardened macOS.
• • •
Mario Guzmán:
In #macOSTahoe, if your Mac app icons stick out of the squircle, they’re now put inside a gray squircle for you. You can no longer have elements stick out.
Truly the end of an era where you could have free-shaped icons. :(
Adam Bell:
I will miss having icons in the macOS dock that break out of the squircle though.
They still made the Mac feel special and distinct.
I really liked that, too, and I’m not happy about having to redo my icons again, after Apple specifically allowed this style before (and did it with their own apps).
• • •
John Siracusa:
New Finder icon: 🤮
Stephen Hackett (Hacker News):
Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed.
[…]
The Finder logo has changed over the years, but the dark side has been on the left forever.
John Gruber:
I’m obviously joking about this being the biggest news of the day, but it really does feel just plain wrong to swap the dark/light sides. The Finder icon is more than an icon, it’s a logo, a brand.
Previously:
Update (2025-06-11): Tim Hardwick (ArsTechnica, MacStories, 9to5Mac):
Apple has announced macOS Tahoe 26 at WWDC 2025, introducing a striking visual redesign alongside expanded Apple Intelligence capabilities and new Continuity features that further integrate Mac and iPhone workflows.
Howard Oakley:
Although those Intel models will be able to use many of the new features in Tahoe, they continue to be unable to access any Apple Intelligence.
This means that Tahoe will continue to be a large Universal binary, and could in theory be supported by OCLP, although that’s likely to be more challenging.
Juli Clover:
macOS Tahoe does away with the Launchpad feature that’s designed to show you all of the apps on your Mac, instead replacing it with a new “Applications” interface that’s similar to the App Library on the iPhone and iPad.
Hartley Charlton:
Apple today announced the biggest-ever update to Spotlight in macOS, introducing context-aware actions, app integration via App Intents, and powerful new productivity features.
Tim Hardwick:
Now in the hands of developers, macOS Tahoe introduces a long list of new features – some were showcased at Apple’s WWDC keynote, while others were quietly added behind the scenes. We’ve rounded up a selection of smaller but still useful changes you’ll find in the update.
• • •
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Big year for universal apps; Apple didn’t mention it, but the new Journal, Phone, and upgraded FaceTime apps in macOS 26 are all Mac Catalyst.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
I’m not the only one questioning the continued value of tailoring my Mac Catalyst UIs to the Mac — Apple has thrown out its own NSToolbars too. It’s getting really hard to tell where the UIKit ends and the AppKit begins, throughout the OS.
The macOS and iPadOS system apps are so similar now in 26, it starts to raise the ugly question yet again of… why are you writing all this stuff twice?
Why are there two apps with completely different codebases that look the same and have basically the same functions, all over the OS. And why do you need four versions of a declarative framework to paper over the platform differences when there no longer are any meaningful platform differences? 😅
• • •
Jeff Johnson:
Yet seven years later at WWDC 2025, Apple’s plans appear more transparent than ever (yes, that’s a pun about Liquid Glass): the critics were correct that iOS and macOS are merging. The latest evidence of this merger is the appearance of app icons in the macOS 26 Tahoe developer beta. All Mac app icons are now forced into iOS-style squircles. This change affects not only Apple’s own apps but also third-party apps; if an app icon is not already a squircle, macOS automatically draws it inside a gray squircle.
John Siracusa calls this Squircle Jail.
The most bizarre phenomenon on Tahoe, though, is that newer app icons are automatically applied to older apps.
The Iconfactory:
We’re gonna miss breaking out of the box on macOS. All app icons will be the same squircle, and any app without updated resources gets put in a grey penalty box.
Mario Guzmán:
And yes… Apple will mess with your squircle icon for your Mac apps… I did not have this lighting effect around the top before.
Colin Cornaby:
Hot take on the macOS icons becoming full squircle
I really love Mac icons. I was super bummed when they all became circles. I thought the icon overflowing the squircle was at least a decent compromise.
But after working on a few apps that run on both iOS and Mac? I get it. It’s an annoying speed bump and the icon systems were completely different requiring completely different assets. Especially if you were doing modern iOS icons.
I can only imagine how much it annoyed less Mac focused devs.
• • •
Mr. Macintosh:
Finder evolution 1996-2025
Stephen Hackett:
Looks like Finder isn’t the only Mac application to see big icon changes in macOS Tahoe. Poor Otto had his arms, legs, and pipe taken away[…]
Brian Webster:
When I was designing the icon for iPhoto Library Manager (with the awesome @Iconfactory), which was inspired by the original Automator icon, the initial drafts had the robot looking straight toward the “camera”. Everyone I showed it to universally deemed it “creepy af”. As a result, both iPLM and PowerPhotos have the robot looking off center. Did Apple show this to any human beings?
Jeff Johnson:
The new Tahoe app icons are awful.
Here’s Preview.
QuickTime Player
TextEdit
Automator is just fucking scary.
[…]
Disk Utility
Thomas Clement:
Many Tahoe icons look blurry to me. Am I the only one?
• • •
Brent Simmons:
It occurs to me that Liquid Glass will make Electron apps on the Mac look far more different from native apps than they currently do — seems like it would be very difficult, to the point of not worth trying, to replicate LG in Electron.
Mario Guzmán:
So Apple has officially moved to left-aligned titles in titlebars. I don’t think they considered this would look awful (or broken) in About windows. lol
Jeff Johnson:
The transparency of the share sheet in Safari is ridiculous.
Jeff Johnson:
Why would anyone want this???
Marco Arment:
Notifications on Tahoe are FAR less legible if there’s anything behind them. (Sequoia version shown for comparison.)
(There appear to be no other UI changes to Mac notifications, so they remain clunky and finicky, too.)
Andrew Abernathy:
On macOS 26, high-contrast Settings and Finder (column mode)[…]
Pierre Igot:
It really is hard to believe that someone is so blind to the evils of translucency that they have chosen THIS picture as a good example of what it brings to macOS.
I mean, the Forward and Backward buttons actually look like two buttons in two different states! That’s EXACTLY what makes translucency evil from a usability perspective.
Jeff Johnson:
Is this… a toolbar?
Craig Grannell:
The toolbar icons feel like they’re on a different plane from everything else. They visibly sit in front of window content and headings. Apple said this redesign was about focus, minimising distraction and UI getting out of the way of content. Elements like this, over the top transparency and refraction do the precise opposite. It’s like they had a brief and they have the buzzwords but the Apple execs haven’t seen or understood the implementation.
Jonathan Wight:
The toolbar on Tahoe is just weird. it does weird things.
And all the content i can see below it just darkens and muddies the toolbar.
“sooty” or “dirty” is the only way to explain it. This is not usable content and it’s not attractive UI. It’s just mud.
Some of the weird behaviour bugs can be fixed of course but the liquid glass mud effect will be permanent and i’ll have to opt out of the default behaviour to make my toolbar at all usable.
Jeff Johnson:
The corner radius of every window on Tahoe. Ugh.
Craig Grannell:
macOS 26 installed. Good grief. Finder is hideous at this point. The rounded windows are almost comical. But the worst bit is window toolbar buttons, which have an insane drop shadow that makes them the most visually prominent part of any window. Background windows look weird too, with odd shapes. I found you can at least bring back a menu bar background by turning off transparency (which is how I have my iMac).
Lots and lots of work to do. This cannot be how this will ship, otherwise YIKES.
Ezekiel Elin:
I do NOT like the menu bar changes on macOS. They feel like they’re spilling outside the window
Mario Guzmán:
Now that Apple has blurred the lines even more when it comes to layouts, such as no longer having a concrete divider between sidebars and the details view… interactions as simple as widening the sidebar now produce odd and unexpected behavior. Behavior that you wouldn’t get if you just had a hard line between the sidebar and the details view.
This is most noticeable in Music.
What is wrong with compartmentalization in layouts, Apple?!
Mario Guzmán:
Some of the Small and Mini controls in AppKit have been made taller in #macOSTahoe which unfortunately make Xcode 26 a bit more annoying to use on 14" MacBook Pros. The UI is bigger and bolder which means less space for your code editor. I have both sidebars as thin as they can be without collapsing.
The Mac was always great (before) because it embraced UI density.
I want to make my pixels work for me -- not the white space you think the app should have.
Nathan Manceaux-Panot:
Wait, they’ve updated the mouse cursor! In macOS!
This is the first time they’ve changed it since the Retina transition in 2018, or arguably since the first Mac OS X itself, 24 years ago. Dang!
Miguel Arroz:
I really want to believe Apple is still going to improve the macOS liquid glass UI a lot before shipping. Because I installed the beta and it looks even worse than it seemed on the keynote. The sidebar looks like another window, and is much more prominent than the window content, and those toolbars are god damn awful. I see round rects everywhere not just distracting me from the content, but it’s even hard to tell windows and window sections apart. What a mess.
Update (2025-06-12): Mario Guzmán:
I knew there was something oddly familiar about the new Finder. I’m sure this was not intentional but the flattened the forehead and mouth parts so they reminded me a lot about the icons in Users & Groups in System 7-Mac OS 8/9-ish time frames.
Mario Guzmán:
I don’t like the new Finder icon, but not for reasons you’d think. It’s a decent, modern interpretation.
I haven’t liked the Finder since 2014 when they gave it the brighter colors in OS X Yosemite. It just didn’t feel like Finder anymore.
App Intents Apple Event Apple Intelligence Apple Software Announcement Catalyst (Marzipan) Continuity Control Center Icons Journal Launchpad Live Activities Mac macOS Release macOS Tahoe 26 Notarization Pasteboard Phone.app Shortcuts Spotlight WWDC
Apple (preview):
On the Lock Screen, the time fluidly adapts to the available space in an image, and spatial scenes bring wallpapers to life with a 3D effect when users move iPhone. Updated design elements also deliver fresh experiences in apps. A simplified, streamlined Camera layout helps users keep their attention on the moment they’re capturing, and the Photos app is updated to feature separate tabs for Library and Collections views. In Safari, web pages flow from the top edge to the bottom of the screen, enabling users to see more of the page while maintaining access to frequently used actions like refresh and search. In Apple Music, News, and Podcasts, the tab bar is redesigned to float above users’ content, dynamically shrink when users are browsing to put content front and center, and then expand when they scroll back up.
[…]
Live Translation is integrated into Messages, FaceTime, and Phone to help users communicate across languages, translating text and audio on the fly.
[…]
Fundamental to the iPhone experience, the Phone app now offers a unified layout that combines Favorites, Recents, and Voicemails all in one place. Call Screening builds on Live Voicemail and helps eliminate interruptions by gathering information from the caller and giving users the details they need to decide if they want to pick up or ignore the call. And for the times when a user is stuck on hold, Hold Assist notifies the user when a live agent is available.
In Messages, users can now screen messages from unknown senders, giving them more control over who appears in their conversation list. Messages from unknown senders will appear in a dedicated folder where users can then mark the number as known, ask for more information, or delete. These messages will remain silenced until a user accepts them.
I’m not crazy about Liquid Glass—especially the transparency and floating toolbar—but I’m intrigued by the new Camera and CarPlay stuff, and it looks like there’s a solid list of new Phone and Messages features that will actually be useful.
Kyle Howells:
That iMessage interface looks horrible, I can barely read the messages.
Jeff Johnson:
So the purpose of Messages backgrounds is… to make the messages hard to read, I have to assume.
Sebastiaan de With:
I’d like to… opt out of iMessage backgrounds please
Saagar Jha:
Oh god you can just unilaterally change chat backgrounds? If you do this to my chats I will block you
• • •
Craig Grannell:
Oh my at the Home Screen with glass icons. Why not just make everything fully transparent, so you can’t read anything at all.
I can only assume someone set fire to the HIG.
Jeff Johnson:
They just made the HIG transparent so that nobody can read it anymore.
Kyle Howells:
Am I the only one who thinks this new iOS design looks horrible.
That concept post from a week or two ago was actually quite pretty and useable.
This looks like a poorly thought through concept from a sci-fi film that didn’t have enough time.
Thomas Cannon:
The truly astounding part of WWDC is that they made my nostalgic for iOS 7.0’s readability.
Simon B. Støvring:
iOS 7: I DON’T KNOW IF THIS IS A BUTTON
iOS 26: I CAN’T READ THE TEXT
Jesse Squires:
Liquid Glass seems nice and cool -- but it really seems like the transparency will make everything difficult to read.
Is there enough contrast? I can’t tell…
But honestly, I’m happy that buttons seem to look like buttons again. That’s really great.
Kaveh:
Genuinely curious why anyone on Apple’s design team thinks this looks like good UX
Craig Grannell:
JFC Apple. This is outrageous. Does no-one at Apple care about legibility anymore?
Craig Grannell:
iOS 26 is going to be an absolute nightmare for anyone with a vestibular disorder or who has issues with legibility/contrast. There is no way in hell Apple will have tested most of this with Reduce Motion. (There are still major problems with last year’s stuff, let alone this.)
Bruno Rocha:
Happy with the new iOS redesign. Although not as crazy as the 2000s era design, finally we have something that is actually kind of fun and not some usability-focused sterile and boring slop
Adam Overholtzer:
The Phone app’s tab bar is an unreadable mess in the Keynote where they’ve tried to make everything unrealistically beautiful. 🤦🏻♂️
CM Harrington:
The reason actions were at the bottom was because phones are tall and you can use the sheet one handed. Now not so much. =(
Steven Curtis:
It’s the news that alerts will no longer take over the whole screen.
Ryan Jones:
15 GB holy hell
Previously:
Update (2025-06-11): Tim Hardwick:
To make things easier in iOS 26, you no longer have to start the rightward swipe at the very edge of the screen. Now you can start the gesture from anywhere, like the middle of the display. Providing you’re not thumbing an interactive UI element, the swipe-to-go-back gesture will still be triggered.
Tim Hardwick:
Apple’s first iOS 26 beta includes a new “Keep Audio in Headphones” setting that addresses a common frustration for iPhone users juggling multiple audio devices.
Juli Clover:
In iOS 26, Apple updated the Battery section of the Settings app to provide a much more in-depth look at how your iPhone usage impacts battery life and how much battery apps are draining, plus there are new battery management tools.
Tim Hardwick:
Apple in iOS 26 has introduced a third display appearance option called “Clear Look,” expanding beyond the traditional Light and Dark Mode choices that have defined the iPhone experience in recent iOS versions.
Joe Rossignol:
iOS 26 allows users to set custom backgrounds in conversations, and it introduces the ability to create polls for voting.
In the Messages app, users can now screen messages from unknown senders. Apple says messages from unknown senders will appear in a dedicated folder, where users can mark the phone number as known, ask for more information, or delete it. These messages will remain silenced until a user accepts them.
Juli Clover:
We’ve rounded up some of the smaller changes but still useful changes that have been introduced in the update.
Rebecca Owen:
the thicker List items are going to take a little getting used to (admittedly I haven’t tried this on a real device yet)
Interesting to see the search bar moved to the bottom
Sean Heber:
They say the new UI is supposed to allow you to see more content, but at the same time it feels like all the UI has gotten bigger so... I don’t know if that claim is gonna hold up. 😛
Marco Arment:
A hallmark of iOS 26 design seems to be the consolidation of what was previously multiple toolbar buttons into a “…” button that shows a menu.
Apple Event Apple Intelligence Apple Software Announcement Camera CarPlay Genmoji Image Playground iOS iOS 26 iOS Release Lock Screen Messages.app Natural Language Translation Phone.app Photos.app WWDC
Apple (preview, Slashdot):
While maintaining the simplicity of iPad, iPadOS 26 introduces an entirely new powerful and intuitive windowing system with new features that help users control, organize, and switch between apps. Apple Intelligence becomes even more capable and integrated across iPadOS 26, with new features that help users communicate, express themselves, and get things done, including Live Translation, new ways to create with Genmoji and Image Playground, and intelligent actions with Shortcuts. The supercharged Files app offers new ways to organize files and customize folders. And with Folders in the dock, users can conveniently access downloads, documents, and more from anywhere. The Preview app comes to iPad, giving users a dedicated app to view and edit PDFs, with powerful features like Apple Pencil Markup and AutoFill built in. And with Background Tasks, audio input selection, and Local capture, iPadOS 26 unlocks new capabilities for creative pros working with audio and video.
[…]
The new windowing system lets users fluidly resize app windows, place them exactly where they want, and open even more windows at once.
Familiar window controls allow users to seamlessly close, minimize, resize, or tile their windows. Window tiling is designed for the unique capabilities of iPad, and enables users to arrange their windows with a simple flick. If a user previously resized an app, it opens back in the exact same size and position when they open it again. With Exposé, users can quickly see all their open windows spread out, helping them easily switch to the one they need.
[…]
With a new menu bar, users can access the commands available in an app with a simple swipe down from the top of the display, or by moving their cursor to the top. Users can quickly find a specific feature or related tips in an app by using search in the menu bar.
Did they finally nail iPadOS multitasking? I haven’t tried it yet, but based on the demo this is the most optimistic I’ve been about iPadOS in a long time. I kind of don’t know whether to be happy that they did the obvious things people have been asking for or upset that so much time was wasted failing to reinvent the wheel. This reminds me of the quest to get rid of the file system, where they also essentially admitted that they didn’t actually have a better idea. There are still three separate modes (windowing, full screen, and Stage Manager), like on the Mac, but I guess that’s OK.
Rui Carmo:
The iPad’s (creeping) convergence towards macOS, which is something regular people will value highly. Although we are not getting hypervisor support (or any sort of terminal), at least Stage Manager is now an option and not the default, and windows behave in a mostly sane way (including a proper tiling mode).
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Hot take on iPadOS 26: they… did it? They fixed windowing and multitasking?
Joe Rosensteel:
… all these years of aborted multitasking and the answer was just to make a cursor and windows with Expose????????? All of that nonsense for no reason????
Craig Grannell:
“We held the iPad back for years and are now turning the iPad into a Mac. We hope you’re fucking happy now.” – Craig F.
John Siracusa:
Turns out the Mac had some pretty good ideas when it comes to multitasking.
Brent Simmons:
On the iPadOS changes — it’s as if Apple suddenly realized that Mac is pretty fucking good and a great model for the future of computing.
Brian Webster:
Arbitrarily resizable and overlapping windows with close, minimize, and full screen buttons on iPad!?
Can’t innovate anymore my ass!
OK at least Craig gave the snarky wink and nod at just copying the Mac after 15 years of dead ends on the iPad.
Peter Witham:
IMO this years winner is iPadOS 26 with multitasking that we always wanted.
Jesse Squires:
Is iPadOS 26 going to finally solve the windowing system?
Dave Mark:
I am a fan of the new windowing scheme for iPadOS 26.
Definitely brings me back to the early days when the Mac first got the ability to handle multiple windows. A game changer then, certainly a step up today.
Really like the addition of Exposé. Very Mac-like.
Manton Reece:
iPad windowing looks good. Funny we were so worried the Mac would become too much like iOS, but sort of the opposite has happened to the iPad over the years. Files app also becoming a little more like the Finder.
Kuba Suder:
And Preview app! And better background tasks!
Man, they’re gonna sell sooo many M5 iPad Pros
Felix Schwarz:
Maybe it’s not so bad when seen on device & in person, but from this screenshot iPadOS’ new tool-/title-/sidebar look really pains my eye. At just a blink I see:
- the radius of sidebar and window don’t match
- the small traffic light icons just look really off next to the show/hide toolbar icon
- that icon itself also looks off next to the free-floating toolbar icons
Riley Testut :
They actually did it!! They added traffic controls to windows!!
Riccardo Mori:
These look like “More…” menus, but they’re actually semaphore controls for each window. facepalm
Come on.
Benjamin Mayo:
This looks way better than their previous attempts at a window multitasking UI on iPad. It feels like a cohesive system rather than a bunch of separate systems that can layer on top of each other.
Craig Grannell:
So here’s a thing: I liked the original iPad windowing system. Split View. Slide Over. It worked. It was simple. What I also wanted was better external display support. But Apple pushed back against that for years, crapped out Stage Manager, and now we’ve got baby macOS on iPad. Not sure how this will play out.
Sebastiaan de With:
Legitimately great iPadOS update leaning into complexity without oversimplifying. Real windowing, a menu bar, great tools for files. Might have to get an iPad again.
Ethan J. A. Schoonover:
I’m sure these are all documented nicely somewhere and maybe this was around before, but THE GESTURE you want on iPadOS26 is double-tap on the top of the window to jump back and forth between window mode and full screen.
Previously:
Update (2025-06-11): Hartley Charlton:
The centerpiece of the multitasking improvements is a new macOS-style windowing system. Apps still launch in full-screen by default, preserving the familiar iPad experience, but users can now resize apps into windows using a new grab handle. If an app was previously used in a windowed state, it will remember that layout and reopen the same way next time.
Intuitive window tiling allows users to simply flick a window toward the edge of the screen to automatically tile it into place. To make managing multiple apps easier, Expose—a feature familiar to Mac users—comes to iPad , offering a clear overview of all open windows, allowing quick switching.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
The more I use iPadOS 26, the more I wish the window traffic lights were just visible all the time in their maximized state. Make it so that I have to design my app around them, sure, but just stop hiding them. They’re fine, they make it easier to use, and having to tap them twice every time gets annoying fast
Ethan J. A. Schoonover:
On iPadOS 26 the red close button now FULLY closes an app & the yellow just backgrounds it.
This is weird in situations like Music where the red button on macOS just backgrounds the app (expected, desired). Even more weird is that iPad ctrl-W behavior is now “red button” matched, killing Music.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
The limit is 12, on an M4 iPad. Further windows get pushed into the recents carousel instead, but they return at the saved window size when you tap them
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Some of my criticism of Stage Manager was that there were no APIs, and iPad ignored all the window management APIs that UIKit did have for Mac/visionOS — like sizing & positioning windows, setting their frame limits, click-to-drag, etc.
iPadOS 26 appears to make no changes in that regard; there are no APIs for these or any of the new windowing features. You cannot programmatically place or resize a window, or make auxiliary panels. And the systemwide ‘new window’ button is still non-negotiable.
Felix Schwarz:
Good and bad news after watching “Finish tasks in the background”:
The good: unlike what I initially believed after watching the keynote, the new background capabilities also come to iOS.
The bad: if you were hoping that iPadOS now supports permanently running background tasks, you’ll be disappointed. It’s now easier to continue user-initiated, longer running tasks in the background - but they need to come to an end eventually - or will be killed.
Casey Liss:
Really fascinating conversation with Federighi about the technical limitations/motivations behind the many many cuts at iPadOS multitasking.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
These new tab bars sure are something. I imagine the opacity is going to change dramatically over the beta period. And these pure black glyphs probably will get some glass effect instead.
Apple Event Apple Software Announcement Dock Files.app iOS Multitasking iPadOS iPadOS Release Journal Preview.app Stage Manager WWDC
Apple (preview):
Everyday interactions become more immersive and personal, with widgets that integrate into a user’s space, spatial scenes that use generative AI to add stunning lifelike depth to photos, striking enhancements that make Personas feel more natural and familiar, and shared spatial experiences for Vision Pro users in the same room.
visionOS 26 also adds support for 180-degree, 360-degree, and wide field-of-view content from Insta360, GoPro, and Canon, while new enterprise APIs allow organizations to create spatial experiences unique to visionOS. And with support for PlayStation VR2 Sense controllers, players can enjoy a new class of games on Apple Vision Pro.
[…]
Users can select spatial browsing to transform articles on Safari, hide distractions, and reveal spatial scenes that come alive as they scroll. Web developers have the ability to embed 3D models directly into web pages, letting users shop and browse with depth and dimension, and see and manipulate 3D objects and models right in Safari.
Matthew Bischoff:
These are almost all updates to visionOS that folks have wanted from the beginning and I’m really glad that Apple hasn’t given up on the platform.
Previously:
Update (2025-06-11): Samuel Axon:
All told, the updates planned for visionOS 26 aren’t going to fundamentally transform Vision Pro or make it a breakthrough mainstream device—the price of the Vision Pro precludes that. Instead, most of them promise to refine the experience by adding features that are typical for other mixed-reality platforms and refocusing on the wins the platform has had, de-emphasizing the misses.
Update (2025-06-12): Jason Snell:
Spatial Personas are now the default, and there’s an entirely new Persona engine that makes them look remarkably better. The old Personas looked good straight on, but from a bit of an angle, they looked like a face tacked on to a flat piece of cardboard or something. These new Personas capture more of the side of the head, capture hair and eyelashes better, and do an incredible job of capturing skin details. Unfortunately, while beards look better, they still limit a Persona’s mouth movement.
Another drive forward is geographic persistence. In the long run, assuming AR glasses are a thing (which is what we’re all assuming here, because that’s why this whole project exists), you’ll want to be able to place an item somewhere and have it appear there when you come back to it later. In previous versions of visionOS, there was basically no item persistence at all—if you rebooted the Vision Pro, all your windows were closed, and you needed to set them up again.
visionOS 26 fixes all of that. Now you can leave items in one place and they’ll appear when you enter that space, even if the Vision Pro has rebooted or shut down in the interim. Windows are always where you left them. It’s great for short-term reusability, and a must if you take the long view.
Apple Event Apple Software Announcement Safari visionOS visionOS 26 visionOS Release WWDC
Apple (Apple Design, Hacker News, MacRumors, Slashdot):
Apple today previewed a beautiful new software design that makes apps and system experiences more expressive and delightful while being instantly familiar. It’s crafted with a new material called Liquid Glass. This translucent material reflects and refracts its surroundings, while dynamically transforming to help bring greater focus to content, delivering a new level of vitality across controls, navigation, app icons, widgets, and more. For the very first time, the new design extends across platforms — iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, watchOS 26, and tvOS 26 — to establish even more harmony while maintaining the distinct qualities that make each unique.
Sebastiaan de With (Hacker News):
If you’re a designer, don’t miss the “Meet Living Glass” session on the WWDC Developer app. Incredible.
If we put aside the functionality, such as the return of the bottom toolbar in Safari, I think most of the iOS changes look pretty good. I like the icons. I like that buttons look more like buttons. The main problem is that there’s far too much transparency. I don’t know why we have to keep going through this cycle where Apple makes the text hard to read, then gradually fixes most of it, then makes it bad all over again.
Somehow, I don’t think any of this really works on macOS. The glass look just doesn’t seem to translate well. I think the sidebars and the heavily shadowed toolbars look ridiculous. I don’t like the corner radii or the icons in the menus. It’s by far the least attractive version of macOS, in my opinion, and I say that as someone who was not fond of the Big Sur redesign.
• • •
Adam Overholtzer:
It is interesting (and bad) that after the iOS 7 and Big Sur redesigns worked to thin or eliminate borders, these new designs for iOS and macOS have the thickest, heaviest borders those platforms have ever seen. They may say it’s insets and padding and depth and shadows, but big fat borders is what they are.
I don’t understand how removing borders and chrome (in the previous redesign) and adding them back both bring “greater focus to a user’s content.”
• • •
Steve Troughton-Smith:
The visionOS design language was gorgeous. This… this is something entirely different
Tomas Kafka:
I am not excited about the rumored iOS redesign - current iOS seems fine, and it takes
@apple
3+ years to stabilize a design change and fix the papercuts they accidentally introduced by attempting to do too much.
Busywork exercise for both Apple and 3rd party devs.
Writing this because I actually like iOS, and I think the current design is strong enough to support everything the next decade years can bring, and those developer-decades are needed elsewhere …
Craig Grannell:
While I’m more writer than designer these days, I was trained in the visual arts. I was always taught that clarity and legibility should be at the forefront of anyone’s mind when designing. Surely, that’s even more the case when creating an operating system for many millions of users. Yet even in Apple’s press release, linked earlier, there are multiple screenshots where key interface components are, at best, very difficult to read. That is the new foundational point for Apple design. And those screenshots will have been designed to show the best of things.
Marques Brownlee:
I’m a bit concerned with readability
Mishaal Rahman:
I’m glad Google decided to heavily blur the background with Android’s Material 3 Expressive redesign.
Had they decided to make things more transparent, it would’ve looked worse! iOS 26 suffers from having too much transparency, IMO.
Marcel:
This might be good graphic design but I’m not convinced this is good software design. Apparently an unpopular opinion in Apple HQ: Text should be readable.
Marco Arment:
This looks awesome as long as you don’t need to read any of the text in the glass blobs with stuff behind them
Tom Warren:
can’t wait to not be able to read anything on my iPhone
Kirk McElhearn:
First impressions of Apple‘s new design: they’re sacrificing usability for bling. And android’s new redesign looks a whole lot better.
Ryan Jones:
Feels exactly like iOS 7 – way too far at first.
Kyle Howells:
This is awesome! For a few minutes.
I do not want this enabled constantly on my phone though!
Josh Puckett:
I love that we’re back to ‘ok but which of these toggles is on and which is off’?! in iOS
Adam Bell:
I genuinely love how much more depth iOS’ icons have now.
The Camera icon is night and day better.
So much more charm than the flat, simpler ones.
Benjamin Mayo:
Time is a flat circle, something something.
Saagar Jha:
“Thoughtfully designed groups of controls free up space for your content”
Guys we invented hamburger menus
Felix Schwarz:
Maybe it’s not so bad when seen on device, but from this screenshot iPadOS’ new look really pains my eye:
- the radius of sidebar & window don’t match
- the small traffic light icons just look really off next to the toolbar icon
- that icon also looks off next to the free-floating toolbar icons
• • •
Sebastiaan de With:
This is a whole new macOS.
Jonathan Deutsch:
Apple just made a nano-texture display on its hardware to reduce the issues with using glass. Then they added all the flaws of glass back via software…
…The call is coming from inside the house! 😱
Tina Debove Nigro:
Just installed macOS Tahoe and I have very mixed feelings. It feels very cluttered, so many effects and shadows and overlays and my brain does not like it
John Gruber:
There’s some stuff in MacOS 26 Tahoe I already don’t like, like putting needless icons next to almost every single menu item. But overall my first impression of Liquid Glass on MacOS is good too.
Mario Guzmán:
Check out the cool animations folders have when you drag a file over them… they open up. Then if they’re filled, the folder shows papers in them, otherwise they don’t. They also have an animation for when the file does actually move into it.
This was in Mac OS X even in the Tiger days but nice they bring back some charm. I also like these folders more than the one we previously had with Big Sur to Sequoia. They look far less childish.
Nathan Manceaux-Panot
:
The disconnect is strange: Apple keeps talking about putting the focus on content rather than chrome; but the new UI elements are literally the most prominent thing in the new design. Raised sidebar, raised toolbar buttons—aesthetically these are nice, but they’re so attention-grabbing?!
Benjamin Mayo:
How to update your app for the new design: cornerRadius * 5
Peter Steinberger:
The shadow is way too harsh.
CM Harrington:
I’m so glad my cooooonnnntteeeeeeennnnt has more room!
(which is also a lie, because they made the UI chrome like, way bigger, and added insets inside of insets inside of insets).
Dave Nanian:
Because it’s just so readable!
Felix Schwarz:
I really hope Apple will improve the contrast of the new UI on macOS before release.
Looking at Finder, f.ex., as it is right now, everything looks like it’s bleeding together - with barely identifiable boundaries between sidebar and content.
Turn on the Status Bar and Path Bar at the bottom and it looks really off, highlighting the challenges text-rich and information-dense UIs will run into when adopting the “extend content below the sidebar” concept of Liquid Glass.
Craig Hockenberry:
I’m getting pinstripe flashbacks.
Uli Kusterer:
The glass look demos exactly like the first stab at Aqua did. Looking forward to everyone turning off glass in accessibility, and the default transparency getting more opaque each year like Aqua did.
Previously:
Update (2025-06-11): Linda Dong:
Here are the tools we’ve got for you to design with Liquid Glass and the new design system.
Xor:
I am a graphics programmer, and here’s my feedback on Apple’s Liquid Glass beta. The idea is cool, but it’s difficult to work with from a UX perspective.
Meek Geek:
Shiny things always look great at the store, and this looks like it was designed to look sexy at the Apple Store. It’s an obvious artifact of the Alan Dye UI design factory, with an obsession for how things look (in UI mockups) rather than how they work (in the real world).
Joe Rosensteel:
Unfortunately, I strongly disagree with the design choices that Alan Dye, and his team, have made with Liquid Glass. Some of it is the material quality of the elements, but a large part of my disagreement is the construction and arrangement of the elements themselves.
juan:
i can’t believe apple shipped the UI microsoft only ever shows in their ads
Riccardo Mori:
Yes, folks, I too hope that Apple will dial down the orgy of glass effects and transparency in future betas, but Jesus Fucking Christ this is not a 2-year-old startup. This is one of the richest companies in the world, with resources and (supposedly) 40+ years of experience in UI/UX design. Has nobody at Apple — at any stage of design development — noticed all the issues we’ve been noticing since the Liquid Glass reveal yesterday? And if they have and greenlit them, isn’t that worrying?
CM Harrington:
It’s especially egregious because Sure, this is the first dev beta. But it’s also 30 days before a public beta. Considering their cadence for releasing a new OS every year (ugh), they really can’t just pop something like this out in a half-baked state, as there are fundamental issues with the premise that need to be fixed… and won’t be before it ships ‘for real’.
Francisco Tolmasky:
All the legibility stuff is not a bug. It’s literally the design language. Look at this logo. White on white. This is what they’re going for. They didn’t repeatedly choose the worst background combo to show stuff, they chose each and every one of those. I think they’re actually really into this.
Nick Lockwood:
It was the same with iOS 7, and IMO that set back the industry for years working on redesigns rather than new features, and almost every single app looked worse after the transition
Kyle Howells:
Ever since iOS 7 I can’t watch Apple’s design videos without thinking they are built from a completely incorrect starting premise and goals.
“UI gets out of the way of your content”
”hides when not needed”
”only appears when the user needs them”
The details hardly matter when listening it feels like all of this has completely the wrong goals from the start.
Greg Pierce:
I feel like Liquid Glass is another iPhone first design that is being shoe-horned onto iPad and Mac. Its core showy feature is the dynamic highlight, which only makes sense on a device you hold in your hand and moves around a lot.
Aleen Simms:
What has surprised me this year is the number of times I’ve seen people encouraging others to hold their complaints until Apple finalizes the <platform>OS 26 releases in the fall.
“Things will change, these are not the final designs! Just wait,” they’ve been saying.
I’m telling you, unequivocally, that these people are wrong.
Now is the time to tell the folks at Apple where their design needs improvement. Their operating systems are in the earliest of early betas, when feedback is both expected and appreciated. This is when large changes to the way things look will be possible. In fact, now is probably the only time this will be possible for many design decisions.
[…]
While I agree that people should use the official route to submit suggestions and bug reports, I have had far better luck in resolving issues when I’ve been vocal about them on social media.
Jeff Johnson:
It’s interesting that people are claiming “It’s just a beta” and at the same time celebrating left-aligned text in alerts, where the centered text was introduced FIVE YEARS AGO.
There’s a lot of faith in Apple changing course, but my god, how long does that take?
Anyway, most of the crap from Big Sur is still here. When do we get back enabled keyboard shortcuts in menus?
Update (2025-06-12): Juli Clover:
Apple has multiple Accessibility options that are designed to customize iOS for different visual needs, and one of these options is Reduce Transparency. Toggling on Reduce Transparency adds a darker background to translucent areas like the Control Center, app icons, and app folders, improving contrast.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
My biggest issue with Liquid Glass isn’t the lensing or the contrast, it’s that the layering just doesn’t make any sense. The design elevates the visual z order of layers almost in reverse order to how they’re actually placed down in the app. Sliders, tabs and segmented controls lift up even further than that on touch, and turn to liquid (for some reason), then drop back down when you let go
Adam Overholtzer:
They keep saying their goal is to “elevate your content” but this design does the literal opposite. On macOS, the “chrome” casts deep shadows over your content. It’s weird.
Andrew Abernathy:
I just fundamentally feel that overlaying chrome on content rarely really succeeds in deferring to the content, but instead interrupts it, and is often harder to tune out. Translucency can only reduce the overall perception of conflict in the scene, and the legibility and contrast issues have not really been solved. (Transient controls are the main exception that I can think of, which I don’t need to be translucent.) I guess many people are more bothered by dedicated control/nav space than I am.
Pierre Igot:
Why does it seem to be so hard for Apple to realize that translucency is making things harder to read? In these images promoting Liquid Glass, it’s obvious to me that the light text on the left is made harder to read by the blurry light-coloured dog leg visible underneath it, and that the dark text in the address bar on the right is made harder to read by the blurry dark-coloured flower arrangement visible underneath it.
Are we just all resigned to our eye-straining fate as users at this point?
Michael Flarup:
New camera icon is a huge improvement.
Benjamin Mayo:
A lot of chat about contrast issues distracts from other changes that are worth discussing. E.G here they removed all the separators between items and decreased font size, and perceptively I feel less confident that I can tap on the right one.
Pierre Igot:
The background for the “Search” field does not look like “glass”, liquid or otherwise. It just looks like blurry splotches that make the gray text harder to read.
The “Search” field doesn’t look like a field at all. It just looks like what Apple over the years has FORCED us to see as a field — except that it’s even worse now.
To top it all off, the “field” makes the text and icon below/“underneath” it blurry as well.
Riccardo Mori:
Those notifications look like transparent stickers applied over a window pane. The distance between background and foreground elements appears minimal exactly because these are glass effects with too much transparency and very little opacity and contrast. The separation is very faint.
In iOS 6, depth was achieved through ‘material’ textures and by visibly blurring or obscuring the elements that had to lose focus, in a sort of exaggerated camera depth-of-field effect. Look what happens when I select a folder in iOS 6 — you can clearly see what’s in focus and what is not. You can easily distinguish the hierarchy of layers. You can perceive depth. It’s almost tangible.
In Mac OS, Liquid Glass does an even worse job at conveying depth. For starters, Finder windows look amorphous, the differentiation between active (in focus) and inactive (not in focus) windows is barely noticeable, and some details are still rough around the edges (no pun intended)[…]
[…]
The visual hierarchy is muddled: why have a seemingly 3D toolbar, but the three semaphore controls on the left keep being flat and 2D? Here, it seems that the sidebar area of the window is flat, and the area on the right with the toolbar and the window’s contents is 3D and layered, while the area on the far right, with the additional info on the selected item, has thin layers that make it appear as a sort of intermediate state between 2D and 3D[…]
Dan Counsell:
Can we please have the macOS X Lion UI back? 😍
This post has a lot of likes.
Adam Bell:
I still do not understand why these sidebars are floating on macOS Tahoe.
It really doesn’t add anything other than arbitrary discontinuities and weird banding problems.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
Podcasts and Music on macOS 26 are a pretty extreme indicator of where this design is going. Relevant to me, of course, because my own @broadcastsapp strived to match the system Podcasts app from day one, six years ago. But now? 😅 It’s impossible not to look at some of the Liquid Glass experiences in macOS and worry
Mr. Macintosh:
Want to disable liquid glass and bring back the old menubar in macOS Tahoe?
Tyler Hall:
Liquid Glass, in Apple’s 2026 operating systems, feels like an attempt to reassert control over third-party app branding — forcing others to become a subset of the larger iOS brand and look and feel.
It also strikes me as a defense against the continued growth of cross-platform frameworks by furthering the distance between what’s a “real” iOS app versus a cross-platform app — or even against apps that try to meet in the middle of both platforms design-wise. It will be more challenging to build an app that feels at home on iOS with limited development and design budgets.
Put another way: three days after the WWDC keynote, Liquid Glass feels just as much a strategic business move as it does a design solution in search of a problem.
Accessibility Apple Event Design iOS iOS 26 iPadOS iPadOS 26 Mac macOS Tahoe 26 tvOS tvOS 26 visionOS visionOS 26 watchOS watchOS 26 WWDC
Apple (YouTube, MacRumors live blog, Adam Engst, Lobsters, Mac Power Users Talk):
Watch the WWDC25 keynote introducing our broadest design update ever and a more helpful Apple Intelligence. You’ll also learn about exciting features coming with iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, visionOS 26, and tvOS 26.
• • •
Marques Brownlee:
I asked Siri if there’s an Apple event today… she has no idea 😅
Dave Wood:
Zero mention of #siri or #homeKit. So much for the new home controller that was rumoured.
Geoff Duncan:
I don’t think I’ve cringed at a WWDC presentation harder than “I’ll use visual intelligence to determine what instrument this is,” followed by using Apple Intelligence for “What rock songs use this instrument.”
Joe Rossignol:
During the WWDC 2025 keynote today, Apple’s software engineering chief Craig Federighi said that the company will share more details about the personalized Siri features in the coming year, signaling that they are still not ready.
• • •
Rui Carmo:
If you discount the completely over the top book-ending (the F1 cameo featuring Craig’s hair and the weird app review medley at the end), there were a few actual surprises in the keynote.
[…]
Direct access to Apple’s AI models via both APIs and Shortcuts, which is a game-changer for app developers and something that should have been done in the first place (I have been doing almost exactly what they demoed for over a year now with custom Shortcut actions that invoke Azure services, so I am glad they are finally catching up). But having that (and all the privacy-preserving components of their confidential computing platform) available to app developers is a huge win, and I hope they will also make it easier to use custom models in the future.
• • •
Helge Heß:
The new version numbers tell regular customers when they are supposed to actually install the software.
Like when iOS 26 is released in September 25, everyone now knows that one should better wait for January. Until all the most glaring bugs got ironed out by early adopters.
Steven Woolier:
I can’t wait to see what the dev version API looks like. My guess is it will not report 26.
Blacktop:
Wait so there WILL be an iOS19? 🤔
• • •
Marco Arment:
I didn’t expect anything remotely resembling an apology for any part of developer relations or Apple Intelligence.
I expected a cheerful demo of the new design, and a bunch of really cool new features, most of which were unrelated to what’s going on in AI elsewhere.
And that’s exactly what we got!
James Thomson:
To me, the main thing Apple needed to fix this WWDC was their relationship with developers, and this keynote suggests they think otherwise.
• • •
Marco Arment:
I actually liked that unhinged piano video
When I got to 6 out of 5 ⭐️, I almost just closed the window, but it kind of grew on me.
Previously:
Update (2025-06-11): Joe Rossignol:
In this WWDC 2025 edition of our Rumor Report Card, we have reflected on some of the bigger hits and misses leading into Apple’s annual developer conference.
Gui Rambo:
Apps built before the iOS 26 SDK get “19.0” as the system version from ProcessInfo. Once built with the iOS 26 SDK, the version then becomes “26.0”.
This is powered by a “SystemVersionCompat.plist” file in /System/Library/CoreServices
Stephen Hackett:
WWDC25: The Bento Boxes
Joe Rosensteel:
I wasn’t satisfied with Apple, and Tim Cook, going into WWDC this year, and I remain dissatisfied after the fact. I don’t have the warm fuzzies when I see Craig on screen. There’s a distinct lack of new ideas in how the event is put together, and in many things in the event itself, despite all prior criticism about these very tame presentations lacking an air of sincerity and feeling incredibly “produced”.
Juli Clover:
Apple’s event lasted for an hour and a half, but we’ve recapped all of the announcements in a 10 minute video, just in case you don’t want to sit through the entire spiel. We’ve also rounded up all of our coverage below, so you can dive deeper into any of the new features.
Apple Event Apple Intelligence Apple Software Announcement Design iOS iPadOS Mac Shortcuts Siri tvOS visionOS watchOS WWDC
