As we enter the 2nd week of June, we find that WWDC is upon us once again, and as it has been the case since 2024 it is Apple’s second keynote of the year. This year’s WWDC carries extra significance as it marks the end of the Tim Cook era, with this being his last keynote before he hands over the CEO position to John Ternus just in time for the iPhone event in September.

Cook is Apple’s longest serving CEO, having held the role for 15 years after taking over from Steve Jobs in August 2011. During his tenure he has overseen the introduction of the Apple Watch and AirPods, arguably Apple’s most culturally relevant products in their line up after the iPhone itself, as well as the Vision Pro, which despite its technical prowess hasn’t caught on as well as Apple and I am sure Tim would of hoped. He is handing over the reigns with Apple in a great position, the company is worth over 10 times the market capitalisation compared to when he took over as CEO in 2011, and the Mac’s transitions from Intel to Apple Silicon has breathed new life into a platform that appeared to be fading away in the late 2010s, which is set to see have an advantage over their competitors for at least a few more years.

It will be interesting to see whether the CEO transition is acknowledged during the event, but I suspect Apple will stay true to form and only allude to it at most, possibly during the now customary opening sketch, and keep the presentation focused firmly on Apple, and ironically the area Apple has fallen behind on, AI.

Siri and AI

Despite AI (Artificial Intelligence) being the focus of the entire tech industry for the last 2 years, and Apple announcing a plethora of AI (Apple Intelligence) features at WWDC 2024, Apple find themselves behind, with the majority of the features that they announced never seeing the light of day. This means that this years WWDC is as much about Apple regaining trust in its ability to deliver, as it is actually releasing AI powered functionality that will benefit its users day to day.

Third-Party Integrations

Since iOS 18, users have been able to hand off requests to ChatGPT when Siri reaches the limits of its on-device models. This year I expect Apple to allow users to pick what AI agent they want to hand over requests too, with at least Google Gemini and Claude being additional out of the box options. There’s also a chance this could be made available to any app that meets the requirements for the relevant entitlements, which would see Apple seed that it makes more sense for them to be the consumer platform of choice for AI, rather than trying to follow their regular playbook of controlling the whole experience end to end.

Chat Interface

Despite historically dismissing chat-based interactions for AI, Apple is finally going to bite the bullet and make textual conversations a primary input method to Siri alongside voice. Leveraging local on-device models, I’d expect Siri to have access to the full breadth of data available on device — emails, calendars, messages, health data etc, while still handing off to a third party agent for broader world knowledge where needed.

Photos and Wallpaper

Given how central the camera is to people’s phone purchasing decisions, photos is an obvious area that Apple can look to improve with AI. Apple already has a number of image enhancement tools in the Photo app, but I think we are likely to see user friendly implementations of features that would have been previous only found in image editing apps such as Pixelmator, which Apple acquired back in late 2024. The iPhone and iPad Lock screen has seen an number of improvements over the last few years, so adjusting images so they are suitable for wallpapers is an obvious candidate for AI enhancements, such as extending images so the subject is in the middle of the image and not obscured by the clock and complications. I would also expect to see the ability to adjust and enhance images that were taken in poor light, as well as smart removal tools.

Onscreen Awareness

The 27 OSs are set to bring awareness of what’s actually on screen. Rather than Siri operating in isolation from what you’re looking at (unless exposed by an app using user activities), it will be able to use visual intelligence as well as accessibility labels to gain additional context and carry out actions for you.

Writing Tools

Apple did manage to ship AI writing tools as part of iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1, but its rewriting and summarising capabilities remain limited, and offer no ability to leverage the users natural writing style or reference any additional context. Written text is where LLMs excel, so I expect writing tools to be enhanced with more options and a deeper level of integration with the context available on device.

Shortcuts

One of the main drivers of AI adoption has been because of increased productivity through automating repetitive tasks. Apple is best placed to tap into this using Shortcuts, and I would expect to see support to build workflows using natural language as well as a number of steps that utilise both local and cloud compute models.

Hardware

Hardware announcements at WWDC are few and far between, and this year will probably be no different. That said, a hardware announcement would give John Ternus the opportunity to appear in a software-focused keynote, while still sticking to the unwritten rule about only having people that have been involved in projects talk about them during keynotes. The only hardware that appears to be on the table is an M5 Mac Mini and Mac Studio, but given the RAM shortages the industry is currently facing I think even this is unlikely.

Liquid Glass

Last year Apple overhauled the design language across all of its platforms with Liquid Glass, and the reception, particularly on macOS, hasn’t exactly been universally positive. A small but vocal contingent of long-standing Apple users have refused to update their OSs entirely, which would of been unthinkable in the early days of OS X and iPhone OS. Apple won’t acknowledge any of that of course, but I do expect Liquid Glass to quietly evolve this year, particularly around contrast and legibility, in a way that addresses the most common criticisms without Apple ever having to admit that there was a problem in the first place.