Apple’s WWDC 2026 recap: What did Apple announce?

We are live at Apple Park. Hi, thanks for joining us

Richard Carey, Scott Stein. We just got out of watching the keynote. And there's a lot to process, a lot of Siri

There's a lot of Siri. And they changed the whole format. Because usually you get into the individual OS updates

Nope, none of that. Have a good show. So this was definitely AI, AI, AI

But they didn't say AI until like 30 minutes into it. Yeah, they were being very coy

They were trying to like, and then it was all AI. and how the new Siri, you've got how it's showing up in apps now

some of the new framework, how it shows up in shortcuts. But then not really clear how much any of the OS's on all the devices are really changing

and maybe that is the message. Maybe that's the answer is that they're not except for the Siri and AI layer

This was about what you can do more with what you already know. Like, it's not so much

I mean, there was a little talk about small interface design changes, But the focus was what can you do more

And what I found interesting about this whole format is that everyone criticizes like, where did the live show go

Where the live demos go? And we got kind of like a quasi in between live demo where like they were pre-recorded

but kind of trying to show you in real time how long it takes to get an answer when you're doing some of these Apple intelligence prompts

And I think it was interesting seeing the energy of the crowd

some things you got a lot of applause for or a lot of oohs and ahs for

especially with some of the visual intelligence photo-changing things. Yeah, spatial scene editing, which felt very Blade Runner

where you could kind of reframe things, which Apple's been doing anyhow, kind of understanding the 3D, kind of mocking the 3D feel of the photo

Let's explain that really quick. So basically, you take a photo we saw in a demo of, like, two kids in a wide background

like maybe they're on vacation, and then you want to maybe change the camera angle a little bit

it generates and fills in what maybe you didn't capture the first time you took the shot

And then you tilt it. Which you can already do when you do spatial scenes or if they've ever played around with the Vision Pro

they do stuff like that. But it's like they're using that sense of 3D, that generated sense of 3D to do a little bit more

I thought it was very interesting. Like, I'm going to connect the dots and say the person talking about Siri was Mike Rockwell

who is the one who was behind Vision Pro. And he took over Siri and AI things

And I don't think that's an accident. But when he was talking about the glue that connects all the OSs and that now you will hop between devices and continue the same Siri interaction, that did interest me because I sometimes feel like, oh, I want to start on the watch, move over to the Mac, do the iPad or whatever device you have

And I think they trying to create that seamless glue to the end of eventually maybe having more things like smart glasses that could work with whatever you using which for Apple has to be a cross push because they have the devices That my thought but that not now That like laying the groundwork for then which would be 2027 This is all for developers to kind of get excited about seeing what they can do with their apps to integrate with Siri

But the examples we saw were very like real world, not about spending money necessarily, but just getting work done, yzing a message you might have got in the past

So I think we finally got that example of the personalized Siri that everyone was long looking for

And the problem is, of course, with these types of demos, you never know how they're going to work in the real world

And a lot of the demos feel like demos you've seen before with AI. So there could be a point where you kind of might be rolling your eyes and going, oh, I've seen something like this before

I've seen something like this before. And then, you know, everything looks good on WWC Demo Day

And then in living your life, there are a lot of smart, connected things like pulling up information on a phone call that it would recognize or creating contextual calendar events or all of that stuff

would that feel as natural as Apple is promising? Or would you be like, turn it off, turn it off

Well, no, not all of this was that intrusive, I thought. I think a lot of AI examples I see have a little bit of the ick factor, I call it

You know, where maybe it feels a little bit like, why does it know so much about me? But here, you get a text message about something

and you might see a little bubble, add to calendar, you know, reminder. So that feels more subtle, like a little friendly

like, oh, it looks like you're talking about something that you want to put on your calendar. Not so much a, I remember everything you've ever said, Bridget

Even though it might. It might. And so I feel like, and also they were very much speaking about privacy and intentionality

And like you said, there are a lot of stuff that the devices have already been doing, like the spotlight search

So I think they're talking about, okay, we're building and knitting the stuff we already have

but re-knitting it so that it should hopefully work more like automagically to do all that stuff

and dot, dot, dot, live your life wonderfully, Siri is your best friend, et cetera

But I do think it's interesting what you said. Is this going to be less intrusive

Is it going to be more private? Is it going to feel more natural and less like

also hopefully less like you've hooked up all of your stuff to yet another thing that you didn't want to hook it up to

versus what you're already using? We saw some glimpses, I think, of where Apple's thinking about the future

Let's talk about visual intelligence. Let's talk about what the Vision Pro. So, okay, I was excited about that

And also because I covered this stuff. But yeah, so Vision Pro, visual intelligence is the idea of like using photos

And this has already been in AI, like photo-based recognition of things. You can look at a pair of boots and it knows it's the boots and it knows what brand it is

And Google has been doing this. The Samsung Galaxy R headset could recognize apps that you're using and things in the real world, which I thought was really cool

And now Apple is going to be doing that in Vision Pro. It's the most high-end version of visual intelligence where it looks like it's just going to automatically work when you ask

That's why they have the Gemini models. Part of it is to understand that

But if you understand what in the room and you understand the apps you using then you can get to AI that could live in all these glasses and do all these things and know what they doing That exactly what Google is doing with their glasses where they have the Samsung Google headset

then the glasses, but they're compressing it into one quick time on. Apple is like spreading it out, but I feel like they're going to take the same approach

You have to get the apps built now to be ready for that next step

To get the glue. And there was also a little bit of a taste of a future smart home discussion where you said

okay, let's say you already have Apple-compatible cameras. It's using the smarts to kind of stitch things together

kind of give you a better picture of maybe what's going on between multiple cameras instead of you manually hopping between all the feeds

So I look at that and I go, okay, what's next? Where's Apple going when it's thinking about the smart home if it ever gets into the camera space

But, yeah, once again, kind of making those baby steps now. Yeah. And I'm also curious, like they're talking about child safety

There's a whole separate thing. That was a big deal. It was a big thing. So they're very focused on improving both recommendations for screen time and for app usage and having deeper settings for that

but also for moderating out violence and having deeper awareness of what your child's doing, have a more evolutionary flow of that

So I'm curious about all that and how that plays out. that's different but also connected to some of what they're talking about, AI

But I also wonder about how you safely use AI and how that becomes part of the safety

not just for the safety of your child, but in terms of educational integrity

now that Siri can do a lot more free writing for you. That was kind of a digression, but yeah

I'm mic'd here. You can have the mic. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Thank you for sharing. Oh, yeah, no, of course

Okay, yeah, yeah. But we are both parents, right? So I wanted to get your take on the extra steps that they did

A lot of the conversation was about safety for parents to control and be able to see and monitor what their kids can do

I found it positive. I don't have my kids on an iPhone yet. But a lot of the controls were so minute that it was getting to like, do you want this web page allowed

Do you want this person, this contact allowed? But add a little bit of a reminder for me as someone who uses Nintendo products

like that extra layer of super protectiveness of who can even talk to my kids

Right. And, of course, my kids just aged out of the kid zone, kind of

They're now in the 13 and over. Thanks. I could have used this before. But I am thinking about it in terms of, yeah, like how I need to be more savvy about it

how it looks like they're giving you more monitoring and customization to find, to allow

the kids to kind of grow up using it, like to kind of allow them more content, but also see it

and set them like intelligent schedules. So I'm curious how that plays out versus just a

a purely hard monitored Okay this goes on this goes off They were suggesting a lot more a lot more fluidity in fluidity in that kind of setting set up with all those things And using smarts to block something if they did stumble or

receive something that they shouldn't have. Yeah, yeah. And I like the ask to buy thing is there

So the ask to browse made a lot of sense as an extension. Again, it's a flow any parents used to

already where I just got a ping for this app. It would make sense to get a ping for a site where

you go, wait, what are they looking at now? Like, no. I want that to work for YouTube

I guess it will, if it's browser-based. Well, that's what I was going to get into next. When they ended that whole discussion of what protections

they have, it still is hindered by how much the developers are willing to kind of play ball in this whole

conversation. So there was this tone of, and developers, we need you. And I would love to see

a future where everyone's kind of on board with this, but I didn't hear a lot of applause or

cheering in the crowd. I think the crowd's thinking, all right, how are we going to now

integrate all this? Nervously swallowing and going, yes, right. We have to do that. And then

Google has its own tools. And then the question of how all those tools work well together

because Apple's making its own research-based recommendations and do those all perfectly

sync up, but I don't know. Hopefully this makes it easier to be apparent. But I do think from the

AI perspective, we just looked at Google Books. I still find the name weird, but Google Books

and there's more AI in the high-end Chromebooks. And there is a sense now that Siri now will

a more capable Siri is on tap everywhere. And when they said, you know, does all your writing for you

which is not really a thing that Siri was being used for in Apple Intelligence. Apple Intelligence

was cleaning up your writing, but they weren't like full on generating writing

So now I wonder where does Apple fall in this space where everybody is worried about everyone

easily creating AI generated content with students, with MacBook Neo, wherever else

So maybe it's just inevitable and something we have to deal with, but it looks like Siri

also can write for you. And do photo real photos. The image playground, I'm curious to play around with that

No pun intended. just the name but because of how much more realistic it looked like my kids actually like

to have fun like being silly on there but now i'm seeing it like it could be more realistic

how slop will it be right how how how far down the slop well i actually used i used image playground

to make a birthday party invitation the other day so nice so there's there's real use for it

without it being kind of weird but can you make it hallucinatory we'll find out i so that's a lot

This still goes on for a few days. We're going to take a little bit of a closer look

So stay tuned to see that. We'll keep with more reports. Yeah, no new products

So there's that. And we'll find out more when we catch up and learn more about the OS's

This is about learning what we're all going to be doing now on our phones. So thanks for watching

Stay tuned as we get to play around a little bit more and get some questions answered