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All right, so today was Apple's big software event for 2025 WWDC. And it was a really, it was actually a really interesting one. I was kind of wondering how this would go 'cause in this landscape of AI, AI, AI, everyone's talking about Gemini and GPT everywhere where it feels like Apple is being left behind. They could kind of go one of two ways. They could either double down on Apple Intelligence and just lean right in. Like, everything's fine. Everything's going to plan. Or they could shelf some of that stuff but show a whole bunch of other stuff and hope that that's good enough. So, now, we've seen the keynote and I've gotten to try a lot of these software features and think about them a lot, and they definitely did the second thing. Don't get me wrong. There's much more other stuff than AI versus what like Google was doing earlier. But I do think that that other stuff was actually kind of a lot. And so maybe you can leave a comment below if you agree with me after you subscribe of course. But this is everything you need to know about WWDC 2025.

So, first of all, they always talk about all of their OSs, all their platforms this year, and they are now all unified in their version number just to keep it simple. So instead of having iOS 19, iPadOS 19, tvOS 19, macOS 16, watchOS 12, and visionOS 3, they're now just doing version 26 for everything. Kinda the same thing Samsung just did with their phones in 2020, how they match the year even though it's a year ahead. Cool. Easy. And everything is getting this fresh glassy coat of paint over everything to be unified as well. So it's more obvious in some places that I'll show you and less noticeable in some others. But in general they're calling this liquid glass and they're treating basically every window, every dialogue box, every icon, every sidebar that they possibly can as like a piece of physical glass that's mostly transparent to the things below it. Even the lock screen clock and some texts, some fonts are clear and transparent.

So, we might as well start here with iOS 26 because this is the biggest one. All of the icons are slightly updated. The lock screen clock is just as big glassy clear time that adapts to the size of what's behind it. Once you unlock the iPhone, overall like zoomed out, it doesn't look that different. It's slightly different. But they also kept showing this clear home screen setup where all of the widgets and icons are all clear. This is a new option, and I don't know about this one. I mean, it is new and you can do that if you want to or never turn it on if you don't want to. But I just think it's a little much. And readability might be kind of tough. But beyond the liquid glass thing, there are also some new features. Like they redesigned the camera app. Really for the first time in a decade plus, it's now gonna be super simplified to just photo and video buttons and the shutter, and then there's a whole bunch of hidden UI. So you have to swipe to reveal the additional modes. And those still work the way they did before, but then also the frames per second and resolution settings are also super hidden.

You have to know to hit that little button up there on the corner to change to 30 or 60 FPS, which is a really interesting choice there. I mean, especially on an iPhone where you kind of have to assume Apple knows which things people click most of the time. This kind of implies that nobody ever changes a lot of these things. The swipe up to reveal a lot of those settings, most people will never see that. But hey, you're watching this video so now you know that the live photos setting toggle is there under that swipe. So good for you. There's also a new FaceTime app with a new landing page to quickly hit up your main contacts. And then also the phone app is updated to bring voicemail and missed calls and contacts all into one unified place, kind of like that. And they've also matched or copied, you could say it however you want, matched or copied, but they've matched two of my favorite pixel features from the dialer from the phone app, which is Call Screening and Hold For Me. Those are the pixel feature names. So now, in iOS 26 there's a feature that can automatically screen unknown numbers and it'll answer the call for you and then transcribe whatever the person says before trying to ring you and showing you who's calling, which is interesting because the pixel would let me choose that for every single call manually. But then also the Hold Assist feature is a no-brainer, just waits on hold for you while you do other things. And when it's time to come back, it rings you again. Both super useful. And there's also a couple iMessage features, like you can do native polls inside of iMessage now.

Typing indicators in group chats will show you which person is typing, which is sweet. And you can add pictures as backgrounds for each of your iMessage chats. None of this is groundbreaking or unheard of, but it is nice that they're finally adding it. And then I would say the most AI-focused thing here is translate, and I feel like there's, like, a storm of, like, a video idea brewing where I might have to make an entire essay about how this is the year of live translation. It's just happening all at once now. But yeah, in short, Apple added live translation to FaceTime, to Messages and the Phone app and it works basically as you'd expect with the on-device AI models. If you turn it on during a phone call, you can hear a person speak in their own language and then it gets translated and read in your language. And then if you wanna speak back it gets translated again and read back in another voice to that person. It's a little laggy but it gets the job done. There's also a little bit more stuff in Maps, and in Apple Music, and a new games app. I plan on breaking all of this down in a dedicated best new features of iOS video. Definitely get subscribed if you wanna see that right when it comes out. I always do this when the public beta rolls around, so that's coming soon.

But my main concern from seeing Apple's demo videos and playing with a little bit myself is readability. This glass aesthetic, it looks cool sometimes but it also is a little hard to read sometimes. Like, I get that the clear and glassy sheen is very modern and it looks like visionOS and it's fresh. But also there's a reason that we add backgrounds to things in the video world a lot, even if it's subtle, because it's to provide more contrast to make things easier to see, just basic stuff. And there were so many bits of text like notifications or menus or even UI elements that just looked kind of harder to read. Now the OS is supposed to adapt to it by giving light things, dark backgrounds and dark things, light backgrounds. But sometimes you'll have, like, a half light, half dark background and that's where things get weird. So I'm curious how this is gonna play out.

Now some of the other smaller updates, watchOS 26 also got a lot of these glassy UI elements and it's noticeable. There's big touch areas and reflections and glassy buttons galore and you can also definitely feel that fresh coat of paint. But beyond that, I really like the new wrist flick gesture, which is just that. So if you ever get a notification and you don't wanna do anything with it, you know, just kind of sits on the watch for a while, you can just flip it and it goes away. So if you're getting a notification, you don't care, flip it. You're getting a phone call. You don't wanna accept the phone call. Dismiss it. If you've got an alarm that's starting to ring or anything else like that, you don't want to be on your screen, just flip your wrist and it goes away. I think I'll be doing this all the time. And the other big thing is this workout buddy, which feels, I'm gonna describe it as Spotify DJ, but for Apple Watch workouts, like it's basically a new customizable high energy voice that talks to you at various times that it thinks you need some energy or motivation during your workout just by telling you stuff like random stats, like your heart rate, or your mile splits, or, 'Hey, this is your third workout of the week. Great job. Keep it up. ' Stuff like that. Still no group fitness challenges though.

I'm gonna just keep saying that every year 'cause every year I think they're gonna do it. And every year they don't do it, still no group fitness challenges.

Then there was tvOS 26 that also got new liquid glass. And I'll be honest with this one, I barely notice it here, but apparently the icons are shimmering a little differently, allegedly, but also just more content obviously, otherwise not a huge upgrade there.

But then there's macOS 26 which is also called Tahoe. And this one, yeah, this one you notice. This one's got way more very clear elements to it and some of it kind of can look cool. Others? I really don't like as much personally. And I thought this again about some older versions of macOS. I'm sure we'll get used to it but like the Control Center with the super classified feels a little more cartoony buttons. I'm just not a huge fan of that. You can also do clear widgets, clear doc. And the menu bar is completely clear at the top, which is also sweet, makes your screen feel bigger. And so yeah, there's some stuff to get used to here. I think I like some of it. It's just not totally, like, winning me over yet. One really good feature now though is Live Activities, which is already a nice thing on the iPhone. If you have an iPhone and a Mac, it'll show up in the little menu bar and the Mac when something was, like, happening, a delivery or a flight information, whatever it is.

You can click on it and that'll view that convenient information from the Live Activity. And then if you wanna click on it again, you can bring up the whole iPhone mirrored app to keep track of that Live Activity. Makes a lot of sense. Nice continuity feature. Anyway, the Mac also gets the new phone app so, you know, your voicemail and everything in one place, and the Hold For Me, all those features. But the number one biggest update I'm interested in on the Mac is actually the new Spotlight. Now some of you might not care about Spotlight, but some of you are productivity nerds like me 'cause you're subscribed to a tech YouTube channel, and you might already know about this, but my favorite productivity app on the Mac and it has been for years, every fresh new Mac I install it first, is called Raycast. And it's basically Spotlight on steroids. It lets you open apps but also do shortcuts and do window management and find files and do even more useful things like viewing my Clipboard History. So now, Apple comes out and shows us the new Spotlight in macOS 26 and it does almost all of that stuff. This is what we call in the industry getting sherlocked. Basically Apple showed a whole bunch of really cool stuff you can do now with the new Spotlight. It's got the suite animation which separates out things like file searches or series shortcut searches. You can do shortcuts from the keyboard to open actions inside of certain apps and perform them straight up entire strings of commands without even opening an app or touching your mouse. Real power user stuff.

Productivity nerd stuff right here. It doesn't do fully every single thing that I've done with Raycast. Like in Raycast, I can tab over and start a new search or conversation with GPT or Gemini or a bunch of other stuff. The Spotlight doesn't do that yet, but who's to say if next year they might add that feature or might slowly start doing all the things that Raycast does. It's an interesting step. It's definitely better.

But then, okay, visionOS, this is where all the glass came from. This is technically only the third version of visionOS, but now it's visionOS 26. And there's some smaller updates to this one. But I think the new widgets, even though they're kind of silly and not really that functional, I think they're awesome. I think they're super cool. Basically, you can pin these things to persistent locations and customize the size and depth and color of them exactly how you want. So they showed things like clocks and weather widgets and picture frames, but then they have these, like, really convincing location pinning plus all the reflectivity and depth that they always have. And I just, I don't know, I thought it was super cool. I was sold. But really this is also pinned with the fact that visionOS or the Vision Pro will remember where you put your windows now all the time, like through a reboot and everything, which it didn't do before. It was one of my biggest complaints. I talked about it in the original visionOS review. So yes, it will remember where you put your windows and where you put your widgets. The updated fidelity of the personas also, it's inevitable. Like, we just knew they were gonna continually get more and more photorealistic.

So they showed another pretty big jump. Not sure if you're gonna have to do another scan to get the updated persona, but either way looks much better and less cartoon ghosty. And there's also, they added PlayStation VR2 Sense controller support, which no doubt will be much better for some of the more precise controls in certain games. There's also a new Jupiter environment, so you're on one of Jupiter's moons with Jupiter in the sky above you. Cool. They also added native 360 video support playback for cameras from GoPro, Insta360, and Canon. It's pretty cool. We're still hoping to see, like, more high quality 360 content for these headsets to view. There's some on YouTube, but not a ton.

But then the biggest, most interesting update of the day by far to me was iPadOS 26. This was fascinating because, you know, every iPad Pro video for the last six years or however long it's been has always said the same thing. It's great. It's amazing hardware. It's very powerful. But it's still an iPad, meaning it's still gonna have lots of limitations and we never really expect Apple to add those really computer-like extra features because they make computers too. Why? They're a business. They're not gonna cannibalize their own products. They're not gonna overlap that stuff. So there's iPads and then there's computers. But with this update, I feel like, they use the word game changer, which they use that word all the time, but I actually feel like this genuinely fit the bill because they added things, multitasking, file management, things straight from the Mac. So yes, it still has the liquid glass, of course. It has the new Phone app, the new lock screen, all of the new icons and widgets and all that. But then this whole new multitasking and multi-window system where in any app you can just grab that handle in the bottom right corner and shrink it in and make the app whatever size you want immediately to a floating window.

And then you can just start stacking floating windows and putting them side by side and messing around with window management very, very freely. I'm sure there's a limit to how many windows you can have open. I got as many as four open at the same time. But not only that, they added this three dot window control to the corner of each window. The Stoplights that we have straight from the Mac. So you can minimize or change the shape of any app just like on a Mac. And on top of that, there's a new literal Mac menu bar at the top of the screen just giving you File, Edit, View menu, Help, just stuff that you see in Mac apps. There's also a redesign cursor that seems a lot more like a Mac cursor. It's less of a floating blob that had like the Aim Assist that we had before. Now, it's just a normal mouse. There's also a new Files app that lets you sort through things with different ways the same way you would with the Finder app on a Mac. There's now, like, you can have downloads in your doc. There's all kinds of things that, I mean, as someone who's used a Mac for years, feels exactly like a Mac. There is even an audio input selector built in now for all media apps, which sounds like such a small thing, but do you know how hard it's been to change your microphone input source on an iPad for all of these years? It's like they're choosing now to add it.

Great. Also background activities. So if you're exporting something from Final Cut Pro for iPad, you can close the Final Cut Pro app and do other things and the export will continue in the background just like a computer. So yeah, as a computer user, I'm fascinated. This moves the iPad, especially like the most powerful iPad Pro. Way further on the spectrum of compelling laptop alternatives for certain people. It certainly doesn't do everything obviously. It still doesn't have multiple profile support. There are some basics that we're still gonna be missing, but I never thought that they would go this far. And it definitely feels like in lieu of some other AI stuff, they took a lot of wishlist things that people have been talking about with the iPads and gave 'em to us.

But speaking of that, I mean the real question is, were all of those features enough to, you know, tide us over to distract us from the lack of AI stuff? I looked at the transcript. And if the transcript that I have is accurate, they said the word Siri two times in that entire 90-minute keynote. So that clearly wasn't a big focus. And to me it just feels like Apple's AI strength, if they have one, is really much more in how well integrated their features are. It's not gonna be how good the AI is. It's just how plugged in they are to their ecosystem. Like, a lot of features they showed us do use AI, but they aren't necessarily branded as AI or Apple Intelligence all the time. And then also some of this Apple Intelligence stuff is slowly taking steps forward, including them making their own foundational models available for developers to have access to those on device models and build more AI features into their apps. Now, are those gonna be the best models in the world? No, probably not. At least not right now. But they are on device and local and can be used offline and it will probably be the fastest since they don't have to go to the internet and back. So you can probably expect many more apps to have little AI features built into them, whether it's just summarizations here and there, or shortening things that were longer, things like that. Now, as for the big LLM Siri upgrade that we kind of in the background knew was taking too long, they had a statement at the very beginning of the keynote.

If you blinked, you might have missed it. But the statement was, 'This work required more time to reach our high quality bar and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year. ' 2026. We will see. I just like that they added the onscreen capabilities for Visual Intelligence. So it was just from the camera feed before, but now, you know how every Android phone has circle to search. Well, yeah, now with screenshots, the iPhone's gonna get that too. This was a fascinating WWDC. I'm very excited to dig into these betas and see what's actually good, what's new about 'em. Stay tuned for those videos. But let me know in the comments what you think. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys the next one. Peace.