We arrive at this year’s WWDC in a bit of an unfamiliar place. Apple has been in the news a lot over the last 6 months, but unusually for them not because of its products. Apple has however become a bit of a pawn in a tariff war. as well as having its own on going spat with the EU regarding the DMA around Apple’s resistance to complying with both the letter and the spirit of the regulations. Moreover in terms of products, the majority of AI features that was announced at last years WWDC have yet to be released.

Hopefully Apple use this year’s WWDC as a bit of a reset, and as engineers and users alike we can get excited about what will be coming to our devices later in the year.

AI

AI continues to be at the forefront of all tech announcements this year, with Jony Ive and the ex Shortcuts (Workflow team) getting in on the act in the last few weeks.

As aforementioned one of the most interesting things will be to see how Apple addresses all of the features they announced last year and didn’t ship. Other than a possible small nod to dejavu, I expect Apple to just re-announce everything that is ready to be released as if last year didn’t happen and ignore everything that won’t be ready this year.

There are a lot of rumours that Apple will make available to third party apps the AI models that powers features such as notification summaries and image playgrounds. If the models are good enough to be reused and re-purposed by other apps this will not only reduce the burden on developers training their own models, but also means that apps won’t be downloading their own models and in-turn quickly using up storage space on everyones devices. Given the pace of AI innovation at the moment, Apple would have to update these models more regularly than the annual OS release cadence to maintain any form of competitiveness.

The more interesting rumour is that Apple will allow apps, with a per type permission model akin to Apple Health, to get access to a vast array of on device data in textural form, such as emails, notes, messages etc. This would see Apple become the platform for AI rather than having the class leading AI capabilities itself, but given that this is reality at the moment taking this approach for the time being makes a lot of sense.

Apple hinted as soon as the ChatGPT integration was announced last year, that other integrations where on the cards. This naturally led everyone to expect to see Google Gemini being made available, but this has yet to materialise. I would expect to see this change at WWDC, and possibley the avaliatibity of other platforms especially for intergrating with developer tools which is an area that repaidly Apple is falling behind on and is low hanging fruit in the grand scheme of AI intergrations.

OS Versions

The most recent rumor regarding this years OS updates is that they will align their version numbers based on the year … well next year, with iOS, macOS, iPadOS, visionOS, tvOS are all set to make the jump to version 26.

I am supportive of aligning the version numbers as with the amount of OSs that Apple support continues to increase, its hard to keep track of all the corresponding version numbers, but I can’t help but think a double digit version number doesn’t look that great either.

Unified Redesign

Inconjunction with the OS versions aligning, so are the UIs across all of Apple’s platforms.

The redesign will be less dramatic than the iOS 6 to 7 transition, with a move towards the look and feel of visionOS. This will see macOS and iPadOS gain subtile window frosting, and macOS, iOS and iPadOS will move to circular app icons which are already the case on visionOS and watchOS. The other more noticeable change will be having UI elements such as buttons and tab bars move to a floating look, rather than being snapped to the edges of content.

Hardware

The chances of seeing new hardware annonced at WWDC this year look to be slim. The rumored home control device (HomePad?), which would have been a great to platform to announce this year appears to have missed the boat because of issues with Siri. Moreover the M5 Series of Chips isn’t ready for a MacBook Pro update, so the only other hadware update that could realistically be announced would be a Mac Pro, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.