Apple’s WWDC conference was this week, and thus, it was the biggest week of the year for Apple announcements. Apple gave us months and months of topics to discuss: the new Liquid Glass interface, a major upgrade to the iPad, great AI announcements, and a ton of little changes to improve all of Apple’s products. Because some folks have already installed the first developer beta versions of the software—the public beta comes out in July—we also have some real-world feedback on some of these new features. So let’s get to it, the news of note from the past week:
- Liquid Glass—the new look—will be the most noticeable new feature in all of the upcoming operating system updates. Harry McCracken of Fast Company says that it looks “cool in a way that’s classically Apple, and which the Apple of recent years had deemphasized.”
- I use a PC at work and a Mac at home, but a ton of my work is done on an iPad. Thus, I’m particularly excited about all of the power user features added to the iPad. Yes, many of them are copied from the Mac, but since they work well, that makes perfect sense. In an article on Six Colors, Jason Snell says that “whatever dogma” Apple had “about not letting the iPad feel Mac-like has dropped away, replaced with an acceptance that the Mac is pretty great at a lot of things—and if the iPad is also great when it does those things, it should just do those things. It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad.”
- Riley Hill of SlatePad says that he hopes that the iPad doesn’t become so much like the Mac that it loses what makes the iPad special. I appreciate where he is coming from, but I don’t share that concern. The iPad is my favorite device to carry around to get work done, and I see nothing but upside in being able to do more things with an iPad that used to require a computer. There is still so much unique to the iPad that I don’t see any risk of the iPad losing its soul as a result of improvements like the ones coming in iPadOS 26.
- One of the interesting new features for Apple Music is called AutoMix. As Juli Clover of MacRumors explains, it works like a DJ to transition from one song to the next one at the perfect moment in a seamless way so the music just keeps going. Clover notes that many people say that this is one of the best-implemented features of iOS 26.
- Airline boarding passes will be better with iOS 26. The Wallet app will automatically update your flight details, you’ll be able to keep track of your flight by looking at Live Activity on your lock screen (something that you can only do now if you pay for a third-party service like the Flighty app), and the boarding pass will give you easy access to a detailed airport map and the Find My app for tracking your luggage. Joe Rossignol of MacRumors notes that numerous airlines have already announced support for these features including Air Canada, American Airlines, Delta, JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, United, Jetstar, Lufthansa, Qantas, and Virgin Australia.
- Andrew O’Hara of AppleInsider shows off the new CarPlay features in iOS 26. I’m particularly interested in what you can do with widgets, and O’Hara says that even though it is early in the beta process, there are already “a ton of widgets to choose from.”
- Joe Rossignol of MacRumors reports that the next version of CarPlay will let you watch a video on the screen in your car. It will only work when your vehicle is parked, and it will only work with cars that support AirPlay, but it is interesting to me that it will work at all.
- Not all iPhones will get all the cool new features in iOS 26. Ryan Christoffel of 9to5 identifies the features that will require a newer iPhone.
- The Camera app is much more streamlined in iOS 26, as Marcus Mendes of 9to5Mac explains.
- Many apps will have a new interface in iOS 26, but as Dan Moren of Six Colors notes, many built-in apps will give you a choice on how the interface looks.
- Jonathan Reed of MacStories describes the major new features coming in watchOS 26: Workout Buddy and new options for customizing workouts, Smart Stack links on the bottom of the watch face, Live Translation in Messages, and a new gesture—flick your wrist away from you—to dismiss notifications and calls, silence timers and alarms, and return to the main watch face.
- At WWDC 24, Apple promissed a lot of Apple Intelligence features that it was unable to deliver in iOS 18. For example, the brand new version of Siri that uses Apple Intelligence is now expected to ship in 2026. As a result, Apple was more subdued on its AI announcements this week. But as Jason Snell of Six Colors notes, there were still lots of interesting Apple Intelligence announcements at WWDC 25. The one that interests me the most is the announcement that app developers can use an on-device AI model so that apps can use AI to power new features without the app developer needing to pay for AI tools. Better yet, because the AI model lives on your iPhone, it is private and secure. You don’t need to worry about something from your iPhone being used to train an AI model on the Internet.
- Here’s something fun that I’m surprised that Apple hasn’t done before. As Lewis Wallace of Cult of Mac explains, Apple released a trailer for its upcoming F1 movie that uses the Taptic Engine of the iPhone to provide haptic feedback as you are watching the trailer. So when the car engines rev up, you don’t just hear it; you feel it. Sure, it is a gimmick, but it is a fun gimmick. Tap this link on your iPhone to try it out.
- Cynthia Littleton of Variety interviewed Apple CEO Tim Cook (and Formula 1 racer Lewis Hamilton) and wrote an interesting article about not only the upcoming F1 movie but also about what Apple is doing with Apple TV+.
- Season 2 of the Apple TV+ show Presumed Innocent will be about a completely different crime story, and this time, the star will be Rachel Brosnahan (who was fantastic in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), as reported by Ryan Christoffel of 9to5Mac. I like the idea of this show becoming an anthology because there are always interesting legal thriller stories to tell.
- It seems silly to talk about screen savers, but the aerial screen savers on the Apple TV are noteworthy because they are really good. But what if there is a specific screen saver that doesn’t appeal to you? Christoffel reports that in tvOS 26, you can enable and disable individual screensavers.
- When the next version of visionOS is released, we will jump from version 2 to version 26—and it will feel like that big of an update because Apple has packed a ton of great new features in this update. Jason Snell of Six Colors wrote perhaps the best overview that I have seen of all of the key new features. What I find particularly interesting is that while visionOS 26 will make the current Apple Vision Pro much better, it seems clear to me that Apple is really doing is getting everything ready for its next visionOS device, one that will presumably be smaller and lighter and less expensive. When that comes out—and it is just a question of when, not if—we will already have a very robust operating system ready for the new hardware.
- The Spatial Persona feature in visionOS 26 is so much better that when I first saw this short YouTube video from Justine Ezarik (iJustine), I actually thought it was a real video of her face, not a virtual Spatial Persona.
- Nick deCourville notes that with visionOS 26, you and your spouse can get comfortable on your couch and watch a movie together using the Apple Vision Pro. Assuming that you both have your own Vision Pro. And that is quite an assumption. I barely have any friends at all with a Vision Pro, let alone any friends with two in the house. Nevertheless, I see this as another example of Apple preparing for the future when vision devices are more common.
- Dan Moren of Six Colors shares some of his favorite and least favorite announcements at WWDC.
- Twenty years ago yesterday, Steve Jobs gave the commencement address at Stanford. It is short, but it is one of the best commencement addresses ever given, and I enjoy watching it again every few years. As podcast Leo Laporte wrote this week: “He distilled a lifetime’s worth of insight into 15 minutes. It’s brilliant. Better yet, it’s deeply true.” To celebrate the 20th anniversary, the Steve Jobs Archive posted a new, higher-quality version of the video along with interesting details on the backstory. (For example, Jobs wasn’t even the first choice; he was only selected after the school could not get Jon Stewart.) Even if you have watched this before, it is worth revisiting. And if you haven’t watched it, you should do so because I think you will really enjoy it.
- And finally, the best video that I saw this week about WWDC was the interview of Apple executives Craig Federighi and Greg “Joz” Joswiak by Mark Spoonauer of Tom’s Guide and Lance Ulanof of Tech Radar. Federighi, in particular, provided lots of additional details on a large variety of topics: