With only a few pauses to switch presenters, the company raced through announcements and brief demos of numerous new features, or, as Tim Cook redundantly said, “new innovations.” Although the feature selection often felt disjointed, two themes emerged: the new Liquid Glass interface design and Apple Intelligence. [...]
Apple also swiftly confirmed the rumors regarding the version numbers, which will all increase to 26, much as car manufacturers designate their model years. And yes, as leaked a few days ago, the name for macOS 26 will be Tahoe, named after Lake Tahoe.
The design refresh is inspired by Apple’s VR headset, the Vision Pro. It unifies the iPhone’s design and that of Apple’s other devices, with the interface built for the spatial computing headset. This change could also hint at a potential future that could see Apple’s operating system and software extended to other surfaces besides phones, tablets, and watches — like AR glasses, perhaps.
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The company says the update will bring more clarity to navigation and controls, refracts light, and dynamically reacts to your movement. In addition, it will respond in real time to your content and your input, creating a “more lively experience,” Dye said.
“It's hard to read some of it,” says Allan Yu, a product designer currently building the workplace messaging app Output. “Mainly because I think they made it too transparent.” Yu suggests bumping up the blurring or adjusting the backgrounds to make onscreen designs more readable.
“Similar to the first beta for iOS 7, what we’ve seen so far is rough on the edges and potentially veers into distracting or challenging to read, especially for users with visual impairments,” says Josh Puckett, cofounder of Iteration, which helps startups with designs. Still, Puckett is optimistic, based on Apple’s past accessibility features, that readability will improve over time.
Among the buzzier AI announcements at the event was Live Translation, a feature that translates phone and FaceTime calls from one language to another in real time. Apple also showed off Workout Buddy, an AI-powered voice helper designed to provide words of encouragement and useful updates during exercise. “This is your second run this week,” Workout Buddy told a jogging woman in a demo video. “You’re crushing it.”
Apple also announced an upgrade to Visual Intelligence, a tool that uses AI to interpret the world through a device’s camera. The new version can also look at screenshots to do things like identify a product or summarize a webpage. Apple showcased upgrades to Genmoji and Image Playground, two tools that generate stylized images with AI. And it showed off ways of using AI to automate tasks, generate text, summarize emails, edit photos, and find video clips.
With the Foundation Models Framework, developers can integrate Apple's on-device models directly into apps, allowing them to build on Apple Intelligence.
Most glaringly, the company didn't offer a concrete timeline for the improved Siri originally promised last year. Apple's Craig Federighi said only that Apple would have more to say about the delayed feature within the coming year.
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The restraint reflects the fear of repeating last year's WWDC disastrous hyping of AI features that slipped past their ship dates.
People who use their iPad for work or school may be relieved to hear that the iPad will finally get its own version of folders, the Preview app, and more intuitive window displays, making it easier to use the iPad like a Mac. Preview makes it easier to edit and mark up PDFs, while the Files app now allows users to drag any folder to the Dock or set a default app to open specific kinds of files.
With the new window controls, you can see all of your open windows at once, then tile them intuitively to help you multitask. These window controls are also compatible with Stage Manager, allowing users to organize their windows into specific stages or work on multiple screens.
The centerpiece of the multitasking improvements is a new macOS-style windowing system. Apps still launch in full-screen by default, preserving the familiar iPad experience, but users can now resize apps into windows using a new grab handle. If an app was previously used in a windowed state, it will remember that layout and reopen the same way next time.
Users who have enabled iPhone Mirroring get a couple of new Continuity features. One is a Mac version of the Phone app, which supports most of the same features as the Phone app on iOS, allowing you to initiate phone calls more easily from your Mac. Live Activities from your phone will also show up in your Mac's menu bar; clicking the activity will open the app that generated it via iPhone Mirroring.
Spotlight is also getting a fairly major overhaul, with some specific search views for recent and contextually relevant files. It will be able to search through and launch iPhone apps using iPhone Mirroring, and there's a new view that will show your system clipboard history.
macOS Tahoe will be the last new macOS release to support any Intel Macs. All new releases starting with macOS 27 will require an Apple Silicon Mac. Apple will provide additional security updates for Tahoe until fall 2028, two years after it is replaced with macOS 27.
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Rosetta will continue to work as a general-purpose app translation tool in both macOS 26 and macOS 27. But after that, Rosetta will be pared back and will only be available to a limited subset of apps—specifically, older games that rely on Intel-specific libraries but are no longer being actively maintained by their developers.
Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed.
Apple says that throughout the system, Liquid Glass enhances app experiences with greater focus on content. Safari pages now flow edge-to-edge for more viewing space, while the Camera app now has a simplified layout to minimize distractions during capture. The Photos app introduces separate Library and Collections tabs, and tab bars in Apple Music, News, and Podcasts dynamically shrink during browsing to prioritize content.
Apple Intelligence is also getting enhancements, with Live Translation integrating across Messages, FaceTime, and Phone for real-time communication across languages using on-device processing. Elsewhere, Visual Intelligence extends beyond the camera to analyze on-screen content, enabling users to search Google, Etsy, or other apps for similar items or ask ChatGPT questions about displayed information. The feature also recognizes events and can automatically populate calendar entries.
The new toggle prevents audio from automatically switching to newly connected devices like car speakers or Bluetooth speakers when you're already listening through headphones or AirPods. Instead of having your music suddenly blast through your car's sound system, audio continues playing through your original output device.
If your camera lens is dirty, your iPhone can detect it and suggest that you clean it.
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Your iPhone will tell you if you're using more battery than normal at any given point in the day, and it flags apps that are using more power.
The new wrist-flick gesture can be used to dismiss notifications that you want to address later. You can also use a flick of your wrist to mute incoming calls and silence timers and alarms.
Meanwhile, the new “Workout Buddy” is built with Apple Intelligence, and is designed to motivate you based on your fitness history. It gathers data from your workout and analyzes this data to identify meaningful insights in real-time. It provides you with encouragement, and a new text-to-speech model translates that encouragement into a dynamic, generative voice.
With the Notes app on the Apple Watch, you can finally view your notes right on your wrist. You can also create new notes with Siri, or by using the on-screen keyboard, and they will sync to your iPhone, iPad, and Mac via iCloud.
Both California and Utility show a ticking seconds hand in always-on mode in watchOS 26.
Apple Music Sing is upgraded in tvOS 26. Now, you can use your iPhone as a handheld microphone to really get the sing-along party started.
Profile switching gets a bit more convenient in tvOS 26, with a setting to automatically show the profile chooser UI when the Apple TV wakes from sleep.
For example, the headset will soon support native playback of 3D video recorded by people other than Apple and downloaded from anywhere on the Internet—something you had to use a few, somewhat janky third-party apps to do until now, but which is an easier-to-access feature of some other mixed-reality headsets.
In general, making experiences consistent across a space is a theme of the new version of visionOS. For the first time, multiple Vision Pro users can view the same content in sync in the same room. The examples Apple showed included two people watching a movie on a virtual screen together on the couch, and two people in the same room and one person remotely via their Persona working in a car design app.
The AirPods 4 and the AirPods Pro 2 can be used to record studio-quality audio for interviews, podcasts, songs, videos, and more. Apple says that the feature can be used to record high-quality vocals while on the go.
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The AirPods can be used as a camera remote with the Camera app and third-party camera apps on iPhone or iPad. Just press and hold on the AirPods stem to take a photo or start a video recording.
After two years as an iPhone exclusive, Apple’s Journal app will soon be available on Mac and iPad. Apple announced at WWDC on Monday that its latest macOS 26 and iPadOS 26 updates will support the Journal app, which helps users track their daily activities and experiences with images, videos, and voice memos.
Widgets can now appear on CarPlay, including from third-party apps on iPhone that do not have CarPlay versions. Widgets on CarPlay look a lot like StandBy widgets on iPhone since the technology is shared.
And now we await to see if it is iPhone 17 or iPhone 26 this year.
If I have to bet, I'll bet on iPhone 17. iPhone 26 sounds okay, but then, if consistency is the goal, we will also have iPad 26, Apple Watch Series 26, MacBook Air 26, Apple TV 26, and Vision Pro 26. All of which just don't sound right.
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Thanks for reading.