WWDC 2026 Thoughts
Catching up on this post that I have had sitting in drafts for the last few weeks. Life, uh, got in the way. After watching the keynote (Mastodon thread) and the Platforms SOTU (thread), I was overall pleasantly surprised by what they presented. It sounds like the 27 OSes are going to be a lot of clean up, a Snow Leopard year, “sweating the details”.
Wishlist
First, a quick review of how my wishlist did.
Hardware
Nope.
Photos
I didn’t get my Shared Library features, but full resolution photos in Shared Photo Streams will be really nice when exchanging event photos with local extended family. The search improvements, especially around video indexing, sound like exactly the kinds of ML features I want for my photos. Proposing tags or other metadata, especially for older photos, would also be interesting. All of the other speed improvements will be great too, even if more subtle.
Also my moderately popular workaround post from two years ago on extracting a video frame is now officially Sherlocked, which is great.
I didn’t get anything I hoped for in terms of power user editing; instead it’s a bunch of Apple Intelligence nonsense. I get that most phone photos are to capture a moment, and later remember that moment, but idealizing it by inventing large swathes of pixels that weren’t there goes too far for me. A small Cleanup seems okay, but a big Extend or Reframe seem like they’re just making things that weren’t there.
Liquid Glass
In general bringing in a transparency slider will do a lot of good to get people what they want out of an interface that “gets out of the way”. The toolbar improvements sound aligned with what I was wishing for, and they made a lot of little visual tweaks around things that had been driving me nuts on my updated work laptop (including window corners and sidebar spacing).
Games
Lol nope.
There’s an updated version of GPTK but that’s still intended for developers, not players. It feels like there’s a world where Valve and Apple collaborate on Proton to make Apple Silicon one of the best places to play Steam games but for whatever reason it’s not a priority.
Grab Bag
There was a huge slide of improvements but I don’t think anything on my list was there that I saw.
Improvements
Performance
I’m pleasantly surprised by how much they emphasized little performance improvements across the board. Our computers are more powerful than they’ve ever been and yet often feel slower because they’re being asked to do so much, very little of which is what the user asked for. I’m excited to see this improved responsiveness.
Siri AI
It sounds like they’re finally delivering on the local model and personal context promises made two years ago. Currently I don’t use AI models personally at all, for a number of reasons that go beyond the scope of this post. We do use current Siri a little but only for the canned template requests we know it can (mostly) handle like turning on our AC or playing music.
If this is as well thought out as they’ve described, especially the semantic local search, I can see myself using it for that. I don’t imagine I’d do much world knowledge search; most of the time jumping to Wikipedia is more than sufficient, and more accurate. However as I noted two years ago, now that we know these are distilled from Google’s foundational models, the many many ethical issues are still inherited and papered over with no commentary from Apple on how they’re addressing it outside of the privacy angle and a little bit the local model efficiency angle.
I have zero interest in any generative use case involving text or images. I will make shitty memes myself, as they should be, and I will write myself, because that’s fun and right to do, and I know for certain that my words are my own and not a slurry of stolen content.
Parental Controls
Screen Time on Apple products and other services is a topic I’ve posted about a few times. Overall I find these tools really useful as a parent, but the implementation is often a bit lackluster. I’m really glad to see some basic quality of life improvements (like making requests more reliable)
Our child is 12, and has access to a personal phone (for being out and about with friends and taking photos), an iPad (for a mix of digital art and math lessons), and a laptop (used for games, writing, and rare homework). We already had them set up with a child account in our iCloud Family and over time have slowly relaxed the hard restrictions as he’s grown. Soon he’ll hit 13 and potentially start getting access to more online accounts.
There are two main areas we need help with: helping him manage reasonable screen limits and avoid temptation (he sometimes regrets zoning out for too long) and avoiding content that’s too intense for him (this could be scary imagery, even in an App Store ad, or more likely some kind of emotional intensity that he is sensitive too). We talk about content he’s enjoying, what he and his friends text about, but we don’t inspect the details at all.
For contacts we want to gate that so he tells us who a given number belongs to, although that’s getting harder with middle school and some very large group texts. (Seems the pattern is “create a chat with everyone whose phone number you have”.)
We also talk a lot of about good and effective search results, which are a mess right now, and I think some of the Ask to Browse features will help here. I think it should also make it easier to allowlist certain Progressive Web Apps during Downtime, or the school homework portals.
One really important concern I’ve seen raised repeatedly is that these tools give non-accepting parents even more control over what content and communities their queer kids might use for support. I don’t know how to give some guardrails to be used wisely by parents, in discussion with their kids, without also creating a potential vector for abuse for other parents. At the very least the kid would always know that their device/account is being managed, and could seek alternatives… but still not great. Something I’m still thinking about especially as age verification seems to be getting pushed everywhere.
Waiting
Overall a solid slate of improvements for the platforms I use many hours every day; it’s almost all positive sounding except for several AI features to disable or avoid. We’ll see how it all works more broadly this fall!
#apple #generativeAi #macos #parenting #wwdc