DIMM028: WWDC25
Sooooo WWDC just happened!
I have been asking everyone I know if they're excited about this, and I got a resounding, "what is WWDC?"
Yeah no, even though this is like a big tech event from the biggest tech company on earth, only tech nerds care about it, so obviously that's why i'm talking about it. I use Apple devices every single day to get work done, I use an iPhone SE 2020, and I'm writing this on an M2 Macbook Air right now.
This one was actually shorter than the last two years by nearly half an hour, so that's good that I can get through it quicker.
They immediately got the uncomfortable stuff over with mentioning Apple Intelligence first. In case you don't remember, Apple was supposed to ship a bunch of AI features, including an LLM siri that could go inside of apps and execute tasks for you, remind you of stuff, learn who you are, what you do, and how you act, to be a true personal assistant. They did not deliver that and it has been officially delayed until 2026. How is apple going to acknowledge this?
In the usual apple way, they swept that under the rug and focussed on the AI features that they did give us since last WWDC. Which all boiled down to basically the same things that AI could do 2 years ago: basically just summarizing text and image creation. cool. Also now any app can reach into apple's global warming machine and use it themselves. cool. Anyways!
It's important to keep in mind that apple is updating the names of all of their operating systems to match the coming year, so instead of iOS 19 this year, we're getting iOS 26. As well as tvOS 26, visionOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and watchOS 26
There is also a big visual redesign in this coming sweep of updates, and the keyword, and the thing that they said a million times in the presentation, is "Liquid Glass".
It is exactly what it sounds like, everything in the OS's is going to be glassy and have liquid-y animations. I really like how it looks to be honest, it has the image distortion of glass and I think it is way less intrusive on what app you are on.
They added widgets to CarPlay, which is probably cool if you have a car with CarPlay.
You can now add backgrounds and polls to iMessage, which is really just them trying to be telegram, which is fine. You can also request money from an entire group chat at once which is actually really cool. There are so many times where someone bought dinner and they had to hound down that one mfer who always "forgets" to pay them back.
I watch the WVFRM podcast, and Ellis has been saying that live translation will never happen, and recently a lot of companies have been proving him wrong. But I do think that he wasn't wrong here. The "live" translation was easily the least impressive thing that they showed. Like google translate has been able to do this same thing for probably a decade at this point. It is no different than speech to text, translate, text to speech, it is so bad.
You can now pin your favorite playlist to the top of Apple Music which, wow I didn't know that that was not a thing. I don't use apple music as I mentioned before but even my third party music app abomination has favorites pinned.
Ok the Apple maps inside the airport is actually extremely useful. I don't fly very often but I like how much information you can get about it beforehand, that helps the obsessive planning part of my brain :3.
They had this kind of circle to search your screenshots feature that is maybe cool? I feel like these things didn't really work on the androids that they were copying, but I can't really be sure.
As per usual apple puts the real heat in the big board of features at the end of the section. I'm particularly interested in "Rich entry layout" for Journal, which I assume means that we will be able to bold and italic our text in Journal, and "Export notes to Markdown" for Notes, which is freaking amazing if you want to move off of Apple Notes.
Eugh god now it's the workout buddy. This thing is hard to listen to, it is so painfully AI generated, and feels kinda patronizing. Also in the ad they show someone like beating their personal best and they are skinny and amazing. But like what if you are genuinely doing bad that day? The AI is still going to try and say something positive, and that might make you feel even worse honestly.
You can now have multiple people suggest music on Apple Music on your Apple TV. This seems very specific, but I think that it would still be great (as long as all of your friends use Apple Music).
OK so the Mac now has colored folders with Emoji on them, and this is totally something that I didn't even know that I needed everywhere, but now I need it everywhere.
OH AND ALSO ON THE MAC WE GOT FUCKING AUTOMATION LETS GOOOOOOOOOO. I just recently found out that Mac does not have the ability to say, run this shortcut at 3pm every day. Which is kind baffling to me, but they finally added it. Thank the lord, I almost paid for a janky workaround app solution.
Vision Pro has widgets now, which honestly looks soooo cooooooool. You can place them on your wall, or even inset them into your wall, and they will stay there forever. You can replace your dumb stupid virgin real clock with the chad double digital clock. There were a lot of updates to visionOS that were just like the things that should have been there to begin with. Digital content will stay in the exact same spot after you take off the headset, you can watch movies with another person, you can connect PSVR controllers to the Vision Pro so that you can play games easier, personas look way better. Better late than never I suppose
Also the craziest thing was that websites can embed 3D objects into their pages that, in the ad, the person pulls out of the website, and puts on their floor, and it scales correctly! That is actually insanity that that is able to work. But then they said immediately afterwards, "this marks the beginning of the spatial web" and that just sounds so cringe.
Oh and if you are one of these people that think, iPadOS is not quite close enough to macOS for me, well you needn't wait any longer. iPad now has resizable windows and a menu bar, so its basically just a mac with a touchscreen. You can also pin a folder to your menu bar and it will fan out just like it does on macOS, which is awesome for creatives who might care a lot about having access to their files from anywhere. Oh also you can have an export going on in something like Final Cut and it will have a live activity at the top telling you how much time is left. As a video editor myself, that makes me extremely happy.
And uh yeah, those are my indistinct ramblings about WWDC, I hope you like it.
Also I'm basically done with this next script sooooooooo new video kinda soon. Anyways goodbye!