WWDC 2025 Likely 'Smaller-Scale' Than Past Two WWDCs, Here's Why

[nt5672]

I'm liking the sounds of this WWDC more & more. Focus on what you're good at & can actually deliver! What a concept.

So all you're really looking for are new emoji.

 

[TruthAboveAllElse]

That’s the definition of what a CEO does, of course Tim does this by keeping his customers happy (excluding the MaxRumors doom crowd obviously)… 😉

It's starting to catch up with them now.

I'm not a doom and gloom person. I've been an Apple fan for decades. This is the first time I have felt this way.

Might take a few more years to fully catch up.

Might not.

They might adjust enough to avoid it. But there are serious problems right now.

 

[fatTribble]

I find it amusing the leaks report a new UI for standard "i" devices. Swap millions of device's UI for one based a headset that probably sold less than 500,000. All for the sake of change and a new "shiny"?! I can hope they simply make as few UI changes as possible and work on squashing bugs. I'm not seeing the appeal of AI either! But as they say, wish in one hand...!

It’s more likely they developed the new UI and the Vision Pro was just the first to get it.

 

[AppleTree01]

Good. They are behind on AI so anymore promises would only continue to degrade the expectation that Apple delivers software that ‘just works’. They need to put their heads down and do the work to catch up and deliver something polished or wait until they can unless they want to harm their reputation further.

That aside, I just want to say I am incredibly disappointed about Apple giving any thought to telecoms feelings when it came to making a satellite venture. I have been hoping Apple would liberate us from the current telecom status quo for something less worse. Tim do you have any good ideas for humanity that weren’t Steve’s? Making the shareholders more money certainly does not count

 

[Attirex]

This year's WWDC will go down in Apple history as the moment when tech was moving to AI en masse and Apple was still touting the benefits of pretty buttons and window menu bars. How embarrassing.

 

[mxrider88]

macOS Millenium Edition, in short.

 

[Siliconguy]

They need to put their heads down and do the work to catch up and deliver something polished or wait until they can unless they want to harm their reputation further.

Or they could just buyout this bunch.

Shortcuts Creators Debut Sky, an AI Helper That Understands Everything on Your Mac's Screen

The creators of Shortcuts, an app that was acquired by Apple and deeply integrated into iOS and macOS, today unveiled their latest project, Sky. Sky...

www.macrumors.com

Isn't this what Apple promised and failed to deliver?

 

[Siliconguy]

Am I the only one who literally not only doesnt care about getting more of the current mainstream generative “AI” (as opposed to the more traditional targeted use machine learning uses Apple’s been doing for ages) but actively would prefer not to have it?

No.
I love simple questions with definitive answers.

 

[chfilm]

Well, I’m not gonna like when I say I will enjoy a more modern redesign with a unified look across the operating systems BUT, I agree, seeing what’s happening at Apple right now, maybe we should prepare ourselves for disappointment or, at least, a few years of bugs and glitches until everything is polished up.

Hopefully we’re wrong and Apple does it’s magic, delivering a clean, functional, reliable, fast and light interface. But at this point that sounds like a fantasy.

Could anyone here that uses visionOS tell us how’s that new operating system? Does it work fast and reliable with little bugs?

Having the Vision Pro I can say that the OS is absolutely fine and a great piece of software magic in general. So that gives hope- but since the vision experience overall is kind of limited it’s hard to tell how that would translate to other devices.

 

[Johnny907]

When it's been a year of embarrassing software, and things aren't likely to get better anytime soon, what do you expect?

 

[coolfactor]

Apple is a platform provider first. Hardware platforms. Software platforms. They have a great opportunity to spin Apple Intelligence as a "secure, safe gateway to AI", while leveraging the broad range of AI services in the marketplace. Why try to compete with them all? Embrace them openly, while finding a way to maintain user privacy.

"Google Gemini... best on a Mac!"

 

[Siliconguy]

The Music app which is impossible to use if you own a large legal collection of CDs and DVDs.

Every update forcing on iCloud usage.

The only way I use Music is with MY music. No streaming. It works like iTunes always has including its determination that a duet on one song on an album counts as separate album. Turn off the "Let music organize your music library" option or you will go crazy.

I don't use iCloud at all and haven't noticed it being forced on. I tried iCloud and it made a mess of things so I turned it off for good. Aside, I wonder if the files that I did have there are still there? Will Apple eventually delete them out of boredom?

 

[ChrisA]

So the exciting new thing for consumers this year will be that Apple will make some minor changes to the color of some user interface components. (Assuming that we can call "clear" a color)


But who cares? WWDC was always about developer education, not products.

 

[Ctrlos]

It needs saying more but what analysts think Apple should do and the reason the general public buy their devices are two different things.

I can imagine YouTubers blowing their tops at Apple continuing to not build an answer to Gemini whilst ignoring the fact that they never built their own Google.

I and I imagine lots of other users will be excited at a raft of non-AI features.

The new Games app means Apple may have licenced/paid for more high end ports. Horizon: Call of the Mountain is likely coming to Vision Pro alongside the PSVR2 controllers. Might we see some more PlayStation ports? They’re on Steam after all….

The Pixelmator acquisition will either be new editing options in Photos or a whole new Pro app, likely a resurrection of Aperture letting photographers everywhere free themselves from the tyranny of Adobe.

A UI refresh across the board gives owners the feeling of a whole new device. Honestly I don’t know why people bemoan hardware staying the same but remain ignorant of the infinite canvas of software.

It’s exciting!

 

[nickf]

Beating a fossilised horse, but I'd like to see 'Save As' restored as system preference without needing the option key modifier.

Apple's 'Modern Document Model' has been around forever, but I still find it counterintuitive. (Particularly with things like renaming files).

 

[smulji]

Developers building an app with rich-text editing functionality may be able to build it faster. Theoretically, if enough developers use it, it could make rich-text editing more consistent across apps. Only minor user benefit overall. It’s more that SwiftUI is still a bit restricted in its feature set compared to what is possible outside of SwiftUI, so this is one point where they are improving it.

What was wrong with using UIKit & AppKit. SwifUI feels like it brings a whole bunch of unnecessary issues.

 

[smulji]

change for the sake of change is always a bad idea

I agree but change for the sake of a consistent UI across all platforms is a good thing.

 

[canyonblue737]

“iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, tvOS 26, and watchOS 26…”

This is not the way to refer to this year’s crop in the aggregate.

Better is: “2026 iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS”.

Please update your style book accordingly.

Certainly, that would be easier to read.

But if Apple’s new convention is to name the OS as “iOS 26,” “macOS 26,” etc., then the correct shorthand would be:

“iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS 26”

which is treating “26” as the version number that applies across all. Saying “2026 iOS” implies the year rather than the version, which doesn’t match how Apple is naming these releases exactly.

 

[iPhoneFan5349]

I'm guessing they are reducing the surface area for complaints.

And "all rumored to have a new visionOS-inspired, glass-like design " is not at all what we want.

Cook's shallow quote of the day, "When you can't get things to work, just put some lipstick on it and everyone will be happy."

That’s what people complain about

Good. They are behind on AI so anymore promises would only continue to degrade the expectation that Apple delivers software that ‘just works’. They need to put their heads down and do the work to catch up and deliver something polished or wait until they can unless they want to harm their reputation further.

That aside, I just want to say I am incredibly disappointed about Apple giving any thought to telecoms feelings when it came to making a satellite venture. I have been hoping Apple would liberate us from the current telecom status quo for something less worse. Tim do you have any good ideas for humanity that weren’t Steve’s? Making the shareholders more money certainly does not count

this is not good at all lol. One year later and nothing to show? Tim Cook is done

 

[i_bit_the_apple]

Tim Cook is taking home millions and driving Apple into the ground at the same time.

Rip Apple, you became the latest BlackBerry.

 

[Frankied22]

What’s called “computer use” will be a big trend. Instead of operating apps directly, you will be telling the AI what you want to have done within the apps available. For example, “create an album named $name in Photos and add all pictures from yesterday’s hike to it”. Or “list all my MacRumors comments from the last five years relating to $topic, with links to each comment”. Or “initiate a return of the monitor stand I ordered last week on Amazon and send me a copy of the QR code by email”. The point is that apps won’t have to provide AI functionality or special hooks themselves, but that the AI will be capable of using apps (including web browsers) in the same way a human can, and you’ll be able to instruct it to perform tasks in that way.

I don’t know why anyone would want this AI assistant dystopian future. It sounds incredibly boring. Where is the fun in just talking to an AI bot that does everything? The fun is in actually USING the tech devices and software. I don’t know about you but I actually enjoy using technology and interacting with software and UI/UX design. If it’s all going to just be done via voice and an AI “helper”, who gives a ****. Sounds like we will finally reach mass adoption for normies. The voice assistants and speakers with voice assistants were the beginning of it, now AI helpers used by voice interaction will be the next phase.

BOOORRRIIINNGGG


Also, how lazy are we? Oh no, it’s too cumbersome to do a task on my iPhone with my own fingers and brain. Can’t the AI just do it for me!?

 

[johnsawyercjs]

No one has moved away from the “old” paradigm. AI is very interesting, but the overwhelming majority of customers still use a visual UI. I think that’s because, even if LLMs are impressive, chatbots are not the best way to interact with a phone for the majority of tasks — traditional UIs are faster and provide a better feedback loop.

I agree, but that might only be the current state of things. I could see AI on these platforms eventually evolving to the point where using AI text prompts and voice to interact with our devices, to do some of the things we currently do using the traditional visual interface, becomes easier and thus more common. But this might involve a fairly long teething process.

 

[rp2011]

I hope to god that they just stick with Mac OS, iOS, TV OS, etc and in small text somewhere *version 26.01 or whatever in a small font but not a huge part of the marketing such as something cheesy like Windows 95.
To me, that sounds the most Apple and elegant way to handle it.

 

[alexonline]

Good, we need more stable software and less gimmicky hardware

This is Snow L2op6rd… hopefully.

 

[johnsawyercjs]

Yep, I've turned off Translucency everyplace I can. Just because something can be done, does not mean it should be done.

Same here. I've tried to think of interfaces, apps, etc. where translucency presented something better than an opaque interface, but I couldn't come up with anything. If you're looking at an area of the screen where you want to be able to see what you're looking at clearly, why have what's behind that area bleed through and make the area you actually want to look at more busy and confusing? The only areas onscreen where translucency seems to have a place are those areas that, at least at the moment, don't contain anything you need to look at, and so translucency there can add a kind of graphic flair at the periphery of your focus. Maybe there are situations where making an area translucent to allow items behind it to bleed through offers useful information, but I can't think of any at the moment.