Nice overview from Jonathan Reed at MacStories of Apple’s watchOS 27 updates. Like some of Apple’s other platforms—cough, cough, tvOS—the Watch didn’t get a huge amount of time during the keynote, but there are some good tweaks there.
It’s not a total surprise that watchOS 27 isn’t a huge release, but there are still some very welcome features. The first is Siri AI, which, thankfully, is heavily integrated into the Apple Watch. I had wondered how much the Apple Watch would support this new LLM-backed assistant, but it seems that many of its key abilities available on iOS are also accessible on watchOS. That’s great to see.
However, the downside for me is that my beloved blue Series 7 Apple Watch will not be supported by this update, which requires at least a Series 9. Here’s hoping Apple adds some more color options in this year’s models.
Live from Apple Park just hours after the WWDC keynote, Jason and Myke offer their in-person reactions to Apple’s announcements, including Apple Intelligence, Siri AI, platform improvements and refinements, and features for kids.
Siri’s long-awaited overhaul made its public debut today during Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote, as Apple outlined its vision for a more capable version of its virtual assistant that’s powered by a new generation of Apple Intelligence.
From now on, Apple’s foundation models are being blended with Google Gemini to create the new heart of Apple Intelligence. The result, Apple executives say, will be AI features that are aware of your context, including what’s on your screen, with a personal assistant in the form of the rebranded Siri AI that’s more responsive to your needs.
Developers will get the first crack at seeing what’s new with Siri and Apple Intelligence, as Apple releases developer betas of this year’s software updates — iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 and tvOS 27 — starting today. Public betas will follow in July, with the full releases arriving in the fall as they usually do.
Of course, not every iPhone and iPad owner is going to have access to Siri AI right away. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, announced during the keynote that the updated digital assistant won’t ship to EU countries with the rest of iPadOS 27 and iOS 27 in the fall, as EU regulators want other virtual assistants to have the same access to users’ private data that Siri gets. That’s a hard no for Apple, which insists that user data remain private. There’s no timeline on when Siri AI might hit the EU.
But that’s for Apple and the regulators to hash out. Here’s an overview of what Apple announced during the WWDC keynote and what it means for your iPhones, iPads, Macs and more.
Apple Intelligence and Siri AI
Apple says it rebuilt the architecture for its AI features using those new foundation models, with Apple Intelligence able to understand speech as well as text and images. It can draw on the personal context stored on your device, recognize what’s on your screen and pull from external information available on the web. As before, Apple Intelligence operates on your devices as well as servers via Private Cloud Compute, and all your AI interactions are kept private, even from Apple.
One note about on-device actions, though: only recent hardware will be powerful enough to run what Apple describes as its most advanced on-device model. That means the iPhones released last fall, any M4-powered iPad or M3-powered Mac with at least 12GB of unified memory and the M5-based Apple Vision Pro.
Siri is accessible from anywhere on your device, and you can summon the assistant with the usual “Hey Siri” vocal command. iPhone users will be able to activate Siri with the side button on the phone or with a swipe down from the Dynamic Island; another swipe can expand Siri’s answer to get a more detailed response. iPad and Mac users can interact with Siri AI from the Spotlight tool as well as systemwide context menus.
Siri AI will be available on the Apple Watch, too, letting users start a conversation with an assistant or continue one started on another Apple device via a new Smart Stack suggestion. In addition, the changes coming to Siri and Apple Intelligence will extend to CarPlay and AirPods.
A new Siri app will debut on Apple devices this fall, giving you a place to access past conversations with Siri; you can also start a conversation on your iPhone and continue it on your Mac.
Some of the examples Apple showed off during its WWDC keynote featured Apple executive Mike Rockwell asking Siri about an upcoming concert, with the assistant pulling the dates from the web. Follow-up questions let Rockwell ask Siri about the ticketing process, set a reminder to buy tickets at the appropriate time and play music from the artist. All of this was done in a conversational style, without the hassle of having to repeat the artist’s name.
Other demos of Siri AI showed how the assistant can now help you plan things, pulling a schedule of World Cup matches, formulating a menu of possible meals for a watch party centered around a specific match that also included recipes shared via Messages, and generating and sending out an invitation to the party. It’s worth noting that at each step, Siri has you confirm actions, and you can leap in and edit things should Siri get them wrong.
Siri AI also features improvements to the expressiveness of its voice — imagine the assistant emphasizing certain words or striking a more excited tone to reflect the message it’s reading to you. You have the ability to adjust that expressiveness as well as the pace of Siri’s voice.
Siri AI will be limited to English initially, but Apple plans to add support for other languages in short order.
Siri features in apps
There’s more to Siri AI than just a new app, though, as many features are being integrated and enhanced in other apps. Visual Intelligence is integrated directly into the Camera app, for example, with a Siri mode to show the assistant exactly what you’re seeing. Point your iPhone’s camera at a plate of food, and you can pull up nutritional information or capture an image of a bill to split it with friends, all while paying your share via Apple Pay. Those Visual Intelligence tools will be available on the Mac and iPad as well as the iPhone.
Writing tools are getting a boost with this Apple Intelligence revamp, as you can ask Siri to draft documents for you. Apple suggests that this is just a starting point for a draft that you would then elaborate on, and as a writer who balks at the idea that any AI feature can handle writing on my behalf, I should certainly hope so. I’m far more intrigued by a promised feature in which you can ask Siri to give you feedback on writing.
Additional writing tools coming to anywhere you can type include automatic proofreading — hope it proves more reliable than autocorrect — and the ability to recognize who you’re sending messages and texts to and adapt the tone to correspond to the recipient.
Photos gets a number of AI-powered image-editing tools, such as an enhanced Clean Up feature that promises better fill-ins when you remove distracting objects or people. An extend tool expands the background on shots, while a spatial reframing feature lets you change the perspective of the photo after you’ve taken it.
Safari now taps into Apple Intelligence to organize all those open tabs by topic, while a Notify Me feature uses your natural-language instructions to monitor changes in web pages — say an item going on sale — and alert you when it happens. Passwords can change passwords on your behalf, while Shortcuts taps into the vibe coding fad by letting you describe a shortcut to auto-generate it.
Apps like Messages, Calendar, Mail and Phone better understand context to offer up more useful one-tap suggestions. For instance, if you’re in a Message conversation where someone asks you for a specific photo, the Siri assistant should be smart enough to generate a suggestion that finds and sends the photo on your behalf.
You can also expect an update to Image Playground that will add support for more styles as well as new ways to modify and tweak anything created by Apple’s image generation tool. A welcome change will be the ability to create images in more formats, such as landscape. And the app figures to be better integrated with contact posters and wallpapers for your iPhone. Note that image generation will be among the Apple Intelligence features that come with a daily limit, as those capabilities are being offloaded to servers; you will be able to bolster your access through iCloud Plus subscription plans.
Platform improvements
Apple Intelligence dominated the WWDC keynote, but it’s not the only change Apple has planned for its software. Apple is promising a number of system improvements across its various operating systems. “Instead of just introducing a host of new features, we’re taking the features you’re already relying on and making them better,” Federighi said.
That includes system optimizations that speed up things like app launches, content loading and AirDrop transfers. Older iPhones can count on a new CPU scheduler to make sure tasks run more efficiently; as a result, iOS 27 will run on the same devices that support iOS 26.
The most anticipated changes, though, are likely to be promised enhancements for Liquid Glass, the new interface Apple rolled out across its platforms last year. Not everyone was a fan of the new look for the various OSes, and Apple took some of that feedback to heart. Liquid Glass changes promise more readable menus thanks to better diffusion for complex content, and there will now be a slider in Settings to adjust the look between fully clear and fully tinted.
Apple is also promising more uniform toolbars, with color returning to the icons in sidebars so that it’s easier to see which menu item is active. Icons are getting new layers that should make them look sharper and more defined.
Refined parental controls
Capturing the zeitgeist of society’s growing unease about how much access kids have to technology, Apple spent a chunk of the WWDC keynote reviewing trust and safety issues with its software, including new child safety tools formulated with feedback from experts.
To that end, Apple is expanding upon the Ask to Buy feature that lets parents approve App Store downloads with a new Ask to Browse tool. That lets parents view a website a child is trying to access and determine if it’s age-appropriate. A similar feature lets parents approve who their kids can connect with in Messages and other communication apps. The Communication Safety feature that already detects and blurs nudity in Messages and FaceTime will do the same when it detects gore or violent images.
Apple highlighted Time Allowances that manage when kids can access certain apps and for how long. Screen Time is getting a redesign to better highlight how kids are using their devices and what apps they’re accessing the most.
More to come
Part of the fun of WWDC keynotes is seeing what new features weren’t highlighted during Apple’s presentation. More of those details should come out in the coming days as people get their hands on the developer betas and have more of a chance to go over Apple’s supporting documents.
Both Jason Snell and Dan Moren are on the ground in Cupertino getting up-close looks at Apple’s planned software updates and Apple Intelligence changes. Expect more reports from them today and throughout WWDC, as we make sense of what Apple has in store for our devices the rest of this year.
[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]
One of my favorite bits of most Apple events is picking out the little things that Apple doesn’t talk about in its keynotes. At WWDC 2026, however, a lot of those little details did get mentioned—but if you blinked, you might have missed them.
During its discussion of platform improvements, Apple zoomed out on a small-text screen of many of the changes coming in its platforms this year—and there are a lot of them. Good news, now you can read at your own convenience—still in very small text.
Click to see full size. (Source: Apple)
I’ve been skimming through these items to pull out some of personal highlights. As I’ve said before, these quality of life improvements are among my favorites because I generally want to see the quality of my life improved. Who doesn’t?
At a glance, here are some particular favorites:
Else if support in Shortcuts – I’ve been requesting this for quite some time, and I’m glad to finally see it here. It seems likely that a lot of the improvements to Shortcuts are driven by the new “Describe a Shortcut” feature, which highlighted shortcomings in the app.
More consistent window positioning persistence across external displays — I’m a single display user, but I’ve heard this complaint for years from my friends and colleagues who use multiple monitors; here’s hoping it delivers for them.
Faster HomeKit accessory pairing — Honestly, it would be pretty hard for it to get slower, but this is definitely a place where a speed improvement is welcome.
Store data in Shortcut — Exactly what the mechanism for this is unclear, but having previously relied on third-party apps for this, a first-party solution is a good addition.
Improved Control Center in visionOS — I’m hopeful this allows for easier toggling between environments, especially now that you can create your own with panoramas.
Optional persistent menu bar on iPad — In case your iPad wasn’t Mac-like enough.
Expanded touch support in Sidecar — There’s always been a limit to using the standard touch interface in Sidecar; you could use two fingers to scroll or other gestures, or use the Apple Pencil, but you couldn’t just use a single finger. Interesting to see this improvement, along with the ability to draw in Notes and Freeform in macOS, right around the time we’re expecting to see the first Mac with a touchscreen.
Faster workout start in the Workout app — There were a lot of complaints about watchOS 26’s redesign of the Workout app, in particular making it harder to start workouts, so we’ll see if this addresses that.
Copy and paste as Markdown in Notes — Notes added Markdown export a while back, but now it’ll be even easier to work with the markup language.
Redesigned Shortcuts editor — 👀 Yeah. Vague, but again, it needs improvements, so I’ll take it.
React with any emoji in Shared Albums — I have a shared album of my pictures of my kid that my family can view, and while the thumbs up emoji is fine, it hardly covers every eventuality.
Updated menu bar icons — Another set of 👀 for that one.
Consolidated notifications for multiple Tapbacks in Messages — Thank god.
Screenshot and notification automations in Shortcuts — Automations are one of my favorite aspects of Shortcuts, and adding more potential triggers means even more options for how to kick them off.
As I said, there’s a ton more there—you can click through the screenshot above to see it at full size, but it certainly appears that Apple has spent a lot of time making these little improvements throughout all of its platforms this year.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Apple’s built-in screen sharing support for Mac-to-Mac connections has always been a help for those of us with remote setups: headless Macs acting as servers, an office and home Mac, or the laziness of having Macs in different parts of your house you want to access without standing up.1
Under the hood, Apple relies on VNC (Virtual Network Computing), a fairly ancient standard at this point in time, and you probably get the sense of its creaking joints if you use the Screen Sharing app regularly.2 But it’s possible you didn’t know that, starting in Sonoma, Apple added a “super excellent” mode to Screen Sharing as an option when you connect two Macs with M-series chips. Called High Performance, it can deliver on its name.
Let’s shift into overdrive
When you initiate a connection, Screen Sharing asks you to pick between Standard and High Performance modes.
When you connect to another Mac using Screen Sharing, you’re given a choice of which mode to use. Let’s walk through the connection steps:
Either launch the Screen Sharing app and double-click the Mac’s name in a list, or, in the Finder, Control-click/right-click the Mac’s name and choose Screen Sharing. (There are still more ways to start, too.)
From the Select Screen Sharing Type options, you can select Standard, which is VNC-based, or High Performance, which adds Apple’s secret sauce on top.
Click Continue.
Enter your credentials.
The screen appears, and you may need to enter your macOS account password on the remote Mac to unlock it.
In that pathway, if you choose High Performance, you’re presented with different options. You can also click the info (i) button to the right of an existing connection in the Connections window in Screen Sharing, and choose High Performance from the Screen Sharing Type pop-up menu to save that option for the next connection.
A saved connection’s settings let you change the sharing type, display configuration, and port after the fact.
With a Standard connection, you get a pixel-for-pixel remote view of the other Mac’s display or displays. It’s just like you’re sitting in front of it. In fact, if you use the same account as the currently logged-in user, the remote Mac shows what you’re doing to anyone who looks at it. (You can log in as another user, and a session starts in the background that doesn’t appear on the remote display screen.)
High Performance takes a different approach. You can opt to create one or two virtual displays on the remote Mac, each with independent resolution, high-dynamic-range (HDR) support, and other features. It’s like being a remote user of the computer rather than sharing. (This mode doesn’t change the remote display resolution or other settings.)
With a High Performance connection between Apple silicon Macs, you gain these advantages:
You can choose one or two virtual displays, regardless of the number of displays connected to the shared computer.
The Dynamic Resolution option lets you resize a virtual display to the native resolution of your local screen, up to 4K (3840×2160 pixels) or, with HiDPI, up to 1920×1080. You can click the Dynamic button on the Screen Sharing toolbar or choose View: Dynamic Resolution during a live session.
Stereo audio passes over the connection, as does improved video. The connection supports HDR (for richer low-light and shadow tones), 4:4:4 chroma subsampling (uncompressed color data for improved fidelity), and high frame rates of 30 or 60 frames per second (for more stable video streaming, such as when watching a video or using video-editing software).
The downside of High Performance is that it imposes severe requirements for it to work well. You need 75 Mbps per 4K display and low network latency, which requires fast Wi-Fi with a gigabit-or-faster mesh or wired backbone if there are multiple network routers or base stations. However, that requirement also means that when you’re using High Performance, it feels very much like sitting in front of the other display rather than viewing it remotely.
The Screen Sharing toolbar with High Performance mode enabled offers controls unavailable in a Standard session; some options remain dimmed depending on the remote Mac’s capabilities.
If you want the depth of HDR Video, you have to enable it on the remote Mac via System Settings: Displays. The option for HDR Video appears in a Preset pop-up menu, but, of course, only if the display supports the right HDR signal. HDR can be enabled or disabled from the View menu and Screen Sharing toolbar, if it’s available.
Because the remote display is blacked out when using High Performance (even when connecting as the currently logged-in user), this can be seen as a privacy advantage if you have concerns about anyone else viewing the remote Mac’s screen. However, High Performance mode’s utility really lies in treating Screen Sharing like a high-speed display tunnel instead of a jerky remote view.
For further reading
If you’re looking for more detailed information about High Performance mode or any aspect of Mac-based file and screen sharing, you might consult my book, Take Control of Apple Screen and File Sharing.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
I don’t have a couch Mac and a kitchen Mac and a bedroom Mac and a… you get it. But I do have a downstairs office Mac and a laptop. ↩
Screen Sharing is found in /System/Applications/Utilities, just an oddity of how Apple locates certain apps on the immutable System volume. ↩
It’s our last chance to read the tea leaves on Apple’s AI announcements next week, so let’s do this thing. Meanwhile, Apple bumps up production of the MacBook Neo and bumps down the number of Vision products it’s working on.
Now serving…
With only a few more days to speculate, let us do just that. What else would we do? Just wait until Monday? Waiting to see what Apple announces is for suckers.
The big thing on everyone’s mind for WWDC26 is enhanced Siri and Apple’s ability to finally deliver on some of the bounced Apple Intelligence checks its mouth wrote two years ago. If we’re looking for clues, we can start by studying Google’s AI capabilities, since Apple’s upcoming offering will be based on Google’s technology. According to The Verge’s Jay Peters, it’s fairly good.
I noted Jason’s post awhile back about his reading routine with interest. My ears perked up again at the announcement of the audio newsletter for Six Colors members. And Glenn had a few words about history and his RSS journey. Surprisingly, all of these developments have left me with a take that still feels like my own.
I’m an avid combiner of RSS and a user of read-it-later services. And I read widely — tech, politics, Texas news, accessibility, and movies. I also consume as many words as possible as audio, rather than text on a screen. That’s an accessibility story I’ll get to in a bit. But even in our little Six Colors family, where RSS is mighty popular, it still means very different things to different people.
Here are my folders of RSS feeds, shown in Feedbin for the Web. I can select one, and either read it right away, or press a key to send it to Instapaper, or elsewhere.
The first step, it seems to me, is to know what kind of reading routine you want. Are you, like Jason, a fan of newsletters or newspapers, who wants a concentrated once-a-day digest? Or do you want to monitor feeds all day, allowing the river of news to wash over you as it arrives? Or maybe you’re like me — a scanner of feeds multiple times a day, who takes read-it-later at its word, putting most items aside for focused digesting in bunches?
This week, Rogue Amoeba is sponsoring Six Colors. Their strange name has been synonymous with audio software on the Mac for over two decades. (How did I not could come up with the response AMOEBA when I was on Jeopardy!?! Sorry, Rogue Amoeba.)
The app I want to highlight this time around is one I rely on constantly: Audio Hijack.
If you’ve ever wanted to record audio from a specific app on your Mac, Audio Hijack is the tool that makes it happen. Its session editor offers a visual canvas: drop in your source(s), apply optional effects, then add a way to record and listen to that audio. The app helpfully connects everything automatically, so the audio flows just the way you want.
Audio Hijack has a fully functional free trial, so you can try it out before committing. Download it today)!
And as a Six Colors reader, you can save 20% on Audio Hijack – and anything else from Rogue Amoeba’s lineup – through the end of June. Use coupon code SIXCOLORS2606in their online store.
I’m a bit in awe of Parish Khan’s Mac Cable Bandwidth Calculator, an interactive web site that lets you visualize the combination of cable and Mac you need to drive particular displays, based on their resolution, color depth, and refresh rate. Even better, the site packages it in an appealing way. Parish built this tool due to frequent questions from the site’s visitors, the same thing that led me to write several columns at Macworld—particularly about connecting legacy displays and modern Macs.
Parish sending me a link to the site led me to do some final tweaking on a project I’ve had brewing for a while: the much less fancy Apple Specs Database. I built this site to help me figure out which hardware appears on given Apple devices, and which features are present in operating systems across Apple’s platforms. It lets me answer questions like, “What’s the oldest iPhone that supports MagSafe?” This is almost the inverse of the long-running MacTracker, which is organized around devices.
In a preview of our new Designed in California podcast, we take you back to 1976 and recount Steve Jobs’s numerous attempts to sell Apple or, at the very least, get someone to make an investment in the fledgling company.
Next week is WWDC, which has always represented Apple’s connection to its community of third-party developers, and in recent years has also served as the official start of Apple’s annual operating-system cycle.
Recently, I’ve been thinking of the D in WWDC a lot more. Developers aren’t all programmers, but many of them are. The programmers have always created the code that runs the apps that run on our devices. And yet, this year, things have changed an awful lot.
These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app development on Apple’s platforms was focused on iOS. Even more interesting, these are all indie Mac apps that seem to be built using native Mac frameworks, not the product of big corporations that are just rolling their cross-platform development system out everywhere. These apps seem to have a point of view and are focused on the Mac.
Of course, it’s happening because of AI.
Not just AI for the emails I get, though to be clear, I am being inundated with emails that purport to be from humans but are very much the product of an AI agent trying to add a personal touch to media pitches. (It’s a shame, because I used to really be impressed when an actual human emailed me about their product. Those people are entirely invisible now, lost in the wash of the AI pitches. I couldn’t tell the difference if I tried, so good are the imitations.)
But it’s also clear that a decent percentage of these new apps is being generated, in whole or in part, by an AI code assistant. Mac users—some of them developers, some of them people who have never written software in their lives—are building apps that fulfill their imaginations.
We now live in an era where, if you can dream an app, you can probably build it. Especially Mac utilities. And who cares more about native Mac software than Mac users? Certainly not those companies that gave up on Mac development and focused all their energies on giant cross-platform code bases to attract venture investment and big payouts.
Focus on the vision
Federico Viticci of MacStories recently released a command-line app that uses all features of Reminders. He previously released Shortcuts Playground, which lets you generate shortcuts with AI coding assistants. My pal Lex Friedman just released Gnome, a vibe-coded GIF menu bar utility. On the Six Colors Podcast last week, Dan Moren mentioned that he’s been using AI to build himself a simple ePub ebook reader that fulfills his very specific needs as a writer.
And, yes, a couple of weeks ago, I made a Mac app of my own, using Claude Code. I can’t say that I wrote it, because I didn’t write a line of Swift code. It would be more accurate to say that I envisioned it, or produced it, or product-managed it. I knew what I wanted, described it in detail to an AI assistant, iterated a whole lot, and ultimately got something that basically does everything I imagined it would do.1
It was an astounding experience. I have been using Mac apps for nearly 40 years, but I have never come close to writing one. AppleScript scripts and Automator actions are as close as I’ve ever come. But this week, I sat down at my desk with just an idea, and a couple of hours later, I had a completely functional (if ugly and incomplete) app that did exactly what I wanted it to do.
The process of building the app reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: coding is a specific skill, but it’s only one part of a much larger process. Great developers aren’t necessarily great coders, though they can be. Apps must be envisioned, their specifications defined. The act of trying to describe an app to an AI coding engine is a clarifying one. The more you describe the app, the harder your brain has to work, because it’s always more complicated than you think it’s going to be. The decisions you make determine what the app comes to be. It’s authorship of a sort, but defined in a way that takes the writing of code out of the equation, which is weird, since the act of coding has usually been an inextricable part of the process of making software.
I guess it still is, but sometimes a human isn’t writing that code.
I have no illusions that the code AI code engines generate is flawless and beautiful, though it may yet improve. If I hired a developer to write my app for me, they might very well create cleaner code than Claude did. But I’d never hire someone to build such a minor app, and no human programmer could generate it in a few hours for the $30 cost of a Claude Pro subscription.
Whatever you call it, whether it’s being a producer or product manager or something else that isn’t a programmer, creating good software in the AI era still requires the power of a human brain: being creative, solving problems, and making decisions. Some people will be better at it than others. It’s a skill, and a bit of an art. I’m excited that modern coding tools have given people with vision and desire the ability to make software.
The next step for developers
Which brings me to a final point: Apple’s development tools, most notably Xcode, are nightmarish. My developer friends are used to them, but as someone who has never really used Xcode before, I was shocked at just how deeply unintuitive it is. As in, Claude would tell me to click on things, and I would have to reply, “I have no idea what that is or where it’s supposed to be.” And I’ve been a Mac user for a long time! I’ve gotten very good at intuiting where stuff is in a Mac interface.
Which is why one of the things Apple should be doing, as quickly as possible, is finding ways to make it easier for people to develop apps on its platforms. The Xcode learning curve is just too high. Either there needs to be a novice mode for Xcode, or Swift Playground needs to be given a boost, or a new tool needs to be built for the task.
While AI tools have made it more possible to build apps on Apple’s platforms, the developer tools themselves are still a formidable barrier. As the definition of “developer” changes, so, too, must the definition of developer tools.
The future product managers of some great Mac and iPhone apps thank you in advance.
Microsoft has actually renewed the suite’s certificate, but the fix can only be delivered through a software update. That means users of Microsoft 365 and Office 2021 are in the clear – they’ll receive the update, so neither will be affected. However, Microsoft stopped offering support for Office 2019 on October 10, 2023, and the suite has received no updates since. As such, it won’t be updated to version 16.83, which is the release that includes the renewed certificate….
Some critics have argued that Microsoft’s deadline is effectively self-imposed because the company renewed the certificate but chose not to provide the update to Office 2019 users. For example, JimmyTech, the IT consultancy that spotted the change, has argued that using the expiry to retire older software rather than quietly renewing it “amounts to a choice.”
Microsoft’s messaging on the subject hasn’t done it any favors, either. Its end-of-support page for Office 2019 for Mac, originally posted in October 2023, once told owners to “Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps will continue to function.” A revision now dated May 15, 2026 has dropped that line, replacing it with a note that their data “can be accessed in a supported Microsoft 365 or Office product.”
Old software becomes incompatible. It’s a fact of life. But to build it so that it just suddenly stops working one day, and to take no steps to ameliorate that situation, is pretty disgusting. Shame on Microsoft.
Have you ever really looked at your Photos, man? There’s much depth there—just keep looking. I’m not stoned; I’m just thinking about Apple’s two ways of demonstrating depth in Photos to simulate adding a sense of layers or dimensionality to images you took with one or more cameras on your iPhone.
Starting way back in iOS 16, Apple started analyzing images for your Lock Screen to offer a cool in-front/behind split against the clock. In iOS 26, Apple went further, with Spatial Scene photos. I’ve heard from readers and seen online that both ways of spatializing photos leave people confused: Which photos does iOS choose? How does the analysis work? And, importantly for some, how do I disable these effects on a per-photo or overall basis?
Depth Effect
Starting way back in iOS 16 and available on an iPhone XR or XS or later, Depth Effect provides a sense of layering in a photo when used on your Lock Screen when you are pulling images from your Photos library. To access it:
Touch and hold your Lock Screen.
Tap Customize.
Tap the More … button.
If Depth Effect is not checked, select it; if it’s grayed out, see below. Your photos in the current display will be analyzed, which may take a moment; during that time, you will see a progress circle fill clockwise.
Tap Done.
Left: Use the More menu to enable Depth Effect. Right: You can see the hills rising in front of the clock display.
If you want to see how Depth Effect interacts with your images, a handy way is to choose On Tap from the More menu in step 3. When you tap, you can cycle through the current selection of images to see how they appear.
In doing so, you might notice that the Depth Effect doesn’t appear for every image. In fact, if you tap the more button and Depth Effect is grayed out, then the current image didn’t pass the depth analysis test.1 You can still enable the feature, but you have to tap to find another candidate—most qualify for depthifying!
The analysis in step 4 identifies objects and animals (including people) and makes educated silhouette guesses to separate foreground and background images. The clock element may resize to better display foreground elements. The foreground element may also be set to the background if it would obscure too much of the clock display.
Starting in iOS 26, you can adjust the clock’s depth by dragging it to make it taller on the screen. Depth Effect takes advantage of this by resizing the clock as needed.
In controlling Depth Effect, you might have noticed an oddball icon on your Lock Screen: a hexagon, with one tip at zero degrees, with a moon rising over some mountains. That is Spatial Scene, up next.
Spatial Scene
I have mixed feelings about Spatial Scene, new in iOS 26, because it partly invents reality and sometimes makes me a little queasy. Fortunately, I don’t have the motion sickness some iOS 7 users experienced with the long-ago introduction of parallax on wallpapers. But there’s another dale between the uncanny valley and the cliffs of heebie-jeebies that Spatial Scene fits into.
Spatial Scenes were designed for Apple’s Vision Pro, and the feature relies on machine learning to pick apart the depth in a 2D image. When you move your phone around, iOS creates a parallax effect that makes your brain think it’s looking into a 3D scene: the foreground elements remain steady, while background elements move. Spatializing doesn’t require photos captured with a newer camera, nor do you need Apple Intelligence. Any iPhone starting with the iPhone 12 series can generate them.2
Depth Effect shouldn’t make you hallucinate, but this red valerian appears normal at left, and a screen capture glitch may reveal some of the layers of depth that create the parallax effect.
You can also view images in the Photos app with the spatialization applied. Make sure Settings: Apps: Photos: Spatial Photos and Videos is enabled. This label is awfully confusing because the name of the iPhone feature is Spatial Scene, while the Vision Pro 3D feature is “spatial photo” as well as “spatial video,” both lowercase. Those kinds of media can only be viewed on a Vision Pro in 3D (they look 2D on an iPhone) and can be captured with an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, any model of iPhone 16 or iPhone 17, or Vision Pro.
Now, when you view a qualifying photo, a Spatial Scene hexagon button appears. Tap it, and you see a kind of scanner motion over the image as it’s analyzed. This resembles other scanning simulations in Photos, such as when it identifies plants, people, and buildings. A Spatial Scene version of the image appears, which you can view at simulated angles while moving your photo around. Tap the X to close the view. The analysis is not currently retained, so it’s regenerated each time you use the feature.
At left, this image of peonies is being scanned, with Photos using a wash of shimmering color passing over it to disguise that it’s engaged in a different operation behind the scenes. At right, the spatialized image is somewhat smaller to allow for movement in foreground and background, and has a X close button.
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Apple poorly documents this feature, so I have read people complaining about this, but I can’t get it to turn gray on my iPhone. Apple used to explain why a photo might not support Depth Effect, but it removed that explanation from its documentation a few releases ago. ↩
The iPhone 11 and 2nd-generation iPhone SE can use iOS 26, but they can’t create Spatial Scenes. Apple didn’t say why. ↩
Longtime tech writer and columnist and Friend of the Site Andy Ihnatko, who I have known since I started in this business (he was a columnist at MacUser!), has finally launched his own website, full of stuff he’s been writing for months as he built the site:
One of the disadvantages of adulthood is self-awareness, however. A Close Personal Friend whose encouragement and opinions I value messaged me in response to the morning blog post, and echoed (not for the first time) a thought that I’d been having all morning (also not for the first time): I really should just push the button, already. It’ll be fine…
In the meantime, enjoy the stuff I’ve been writing when I thought nobody was looking and it didn’t matter how frequently I posted. This is the end of a mighty long journey and if it were any more epic, Annie Lennox would be singing over the end credits and making everybody cry.
