Something I have a tendency to do is want to build lots of little custom interactions, which serves me well in some contexts but here it would be rather unwise. Apple has spent a lot of effort crafting this new design system and likely explored and tried a great number of different paths which they now advise us to avoid.
As a result, my first rule I’m adopting for myself in this initial redesign is that I will 100% follow the system guidance and use all default system behaviors.
I’m going to write that again in a different way because I really want to get this point across: My designer brain sees Liquid Glass applied to elements like Control Center and thinks “That looks terrible. This is almost illegible.” But I also find myself smiling? Because Liquid Glass is legitimately fun to look at, and fun to use. It’s a huge swing and one I didn’t expect to land in a way that makes me truly feel like I have an entirely new phone from another universe where iOS 7 never happened and flat design never supplanted skeuomorphism and tactile aesthetics as the dominant visual identity of the technology we use on a daily basis.
But after spending a bit of time with the first iOS 26 developer beta, I'm more intrigued by Liquid Glass than anything else. It makes app icons look like tiny jewels that I just want to touch, and I dig the transparency effects throughout the OS — they almost seem like a preview for a future where we're using holographic Apple devices. (That's also something I felt while using visionOS on the Vision Pro, which served as the launchpad for Liquid Glass.) I also genuinely love iOS 26's revamped Safari, which lets you browse completely in full screen. As you scroll down, the location bar at the bottom of your screen shrinks and gets out of the way. But if you scroll up or tap into the location bar, it pops back up to give you the sharing and navigation options you're used to.
The point is that by adopting a glasslike aesthetic, Apple isn’t leading the design conversation, it’s simply giving users what they’re already used to. Glassmorphism is a popular UI style at the moment, but it was identified as a trend as early as 2020. This is fine for the time being, but suggests that Liquid Glass might start to appear dated far sooner than iOS 7’s 12-year lifespan.
Stern asked the executives if Apple had a working version of the more personalized Siri when the company demonstrated the features during its WWDC 2024 keynote.
According to Federighi, it did.
"We were filming real working software, with a real large language model, with real semantic search, that's what you saw," said Federighi.
Apple invested extensively to develop Private Cloud Compute to maintain strong security and privacy guarantees for AI processing in the cloud. Other companies have even begun to create similar secure AI cloud schemes for products and services that specifically center privacy as a crucial feature. But the fact that Apple still deploys local processing for new features when possible may indicate that privacy isn't just an intellectual priority in the company's approach to AI, it may be a business strategy.
That’s because Apple’s whole deal is, like, “our stuff works and people like it” — two qualities that generative AI systems still broadly lack, whether they’re made by Apple, Google, Meta or OpenAI.
Whenever I’ve tried to use multiple apps on the iPad, I’ve always felt like I was fighting the system. It would let you look at multiple things at a time, but it wanted you to see everything full screen. Now, and especially once developers update for even more fluid window sizes, multitasking feels like a first-class tablet citizen. It feels like a Mac in the sense that it feels like everything is happening in the same place, on the same screen, rather than constantly bouncing you between different full-screen experiences. Is it busier and occasionally more chaotic than the traditionally focused iPad vibe? You betcha! But I love it so far.
We didn’t need a decade and a half to arrive at a mediocre compromise. If Apple had truly lost faith in the iPad’s unique vision—the vision that differentiated it—they should have had the guts to kill it. Just kill the damn thing and make a MacBook Air with a detachable keyboard. Go ahead. Slap touchscreens on every Mac in the line and call it a day. Just don’t make an iPad that’s less than it was meant to be, clumsily aping the thing it was supposed to replace.
Perhaps clinging to the original idea of a new computing paradigm is an untenable idea. But this compromise feels particularly bad right now, right at the very moment where there’s a clear window of opportunity for Apple.
iPadOS 26 introduces major new windowing features designed to upgrade the iPad’s multitasking experience. But with those new features, two longstanding multitasking features have been removed: Split View and Slide Over are no longer supported in iPadOS 26.
With the next-gen Spotlight, Apple has created a universal system that lets you find items and execute tasks without even having to go through the hassle of launching apps. In macOS Tahoe, it has turned into an omnipresent assistant that learns from your usage history and executes tasks with merely a few letters and words. That’s the kind of convenience we deserve from computing machines on a day-to-day basis.
Apple Wallet will be able to automatically scan your emails to find messages from merchants or delivery carriers, and tracking numbers will be added to the Wallet app so you can keep an eye on upcoming deliveries.
Apple’s next major software updates are getting a huge new feature for playback speed sickos like me: you’ll be able to listen to shows on the Podcasts app at as much as 3x speed, Apple notes in a press release about new services features. Previously, the maximum was 2x.
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The popup also includes a new “Enhance Dialogue” option that you can tap on or off. “Using real-time audio processing and machine learning, users can turn on Enhance Dialogue to hear speech more clearly over background sounds,” according to Apple’s press release.
Apple is adding a "Verify with Wallet on the Web" option in iOS 26 that can use a state-issued license or Digital ID to verify age and identity in a private and secure way. This is already an option in apps, but Apple is expanding it to the web through support for the W3C Digital Credentials API and the FIDO CTAP protocol.
While macOS Tahoe 26, announced on Monday and released in beta, will continue to support backups to storage connected to Apple routers, Mac users should expect macOS 27 to lose support.
Apple is continuing its marketing onslaught for the F1 movie, which arrives in US cinemas on June 27. Apple has released a new trailer in the TV app for the film, but this one has a twist. Apple calls it a “haptic trailer”. What they means is as you watch, your phone vibrates in sync with the video.
Time traveling stories continue to fascinate me. And I do consider Groundhog-day-like stories to be time traveling stories. So I am delighted to learn about the excellent On the Calculation of Volume, by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland.
It is supposed to be a 7-book series, and only the first five books have been published, of which only the first two books have been translated into English. I worried, just a little, I may not have the time to wait for all of the next five books that I haven't read.
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Thanks for reading.