By Jason Snell

June 10, 2026 12:40 PM PT

WWDC 2026: Emptying the notebook about AI, bug fixes, and more

I’m home after two and a half days down in the South Bay for WWDC. This year I tried to take notes at the keynote and in briefings using a traditional reporter’s notebook and a pen, which means that I’m literally emptying my notebook when I give you these first scattered impressions of what I saw.

The AI stuff

What struck me most about Apple’s AI announcements is how little the company’s stance on AI has changed since its fateful WWDC 2024 announcements. It’s still classic Apple: AI is not the end but a means to an end, with the goal of building “helpful products for people.”

So this release is not about Apple questioning its priors. Instead, it’s about getting back on track, back in the game. The goal here isn’t for Apple to blow away the competition, but to be relevant and helpful and create a foundation on which to build.

Also, having a version of Siri that actually works would be a pretty big win.

Apple’s huge advantage here is that it’s the platform owner, so it can build tools that search through all the data on your personal devices without requiring that you expose that private data to some company’s systems. It’s using that revamped Spotlight to search through your own data, then handing snippets off to Private Cloud Compute for processing. I think it’s all very promising.

In terms of where it’ll go next, look to the Passwords feature that agentically changes your passwords for you in the background. Look at the tools that let you vibe code Safari extensions and create Shortcuts. I do not doubt that Apple would love to do more of this sort of stuff, which is much closer to the present-day of AI enthusiasm, but it really does need to walk before it can run.

More broadly, I’d like to see Apple ship these features this fall and then maybe introduce some new AI features early next year. The pace of AI is so much faster than Apple’s annual software cycle can accommodate. It needs to get used to phasing in new AI features across the entire cycle, so it can make quick adjustments as new trends in AI functionality emerge.

I want to note that this year Apple has redefined what Private Cloud Compute, a concept it introduced in 2024, means. Before, it meant Apple servers running on Apple hardware in Apple data centers. Now it means something a bit broader, since it can also include Apple-controlled servers running on non-Apple hardware in Google data centers. Apple took great pains this week to explain that Apple controls those servers and they’re built to the same privacy specifications as the other servers in the PCC cloud—in other words, they’re not generic Google servers that could compromise your private data—but it’s also a sign that Apple needed more cloud AI power than it was capable of providing on its own. Hence the redefinition.

And one final AI note: The segmentation of AI models has commenced. Apple now has two different on-device AI models, one of which has much higher hardware requirements. Right now, this higher-powered model is primarily used for improved dictation and speech synthesis, but undoubtedly over time, it’ll be used for other things. I do wonder if, in the long run, older Apple devices will just have to turn more to Private Cloud Compute to perform beefier tasks, or if they’ll be entirely barred from new features? But we’ve already seen that being a device “capable of running Apple Intelligence” is no longer sufficient for some features.

On the server side, there are also multiple models. More basic jobs are handed to a smaller model running on Apple’s servers. Heavier tasks are instead handed to the bigger models running on Apple-controlled servers in Google’s data centers. This is all transparent to the user, which is as it should be, but it’s interesting to watch Apple’s AI back-end increase in complexity.

Snow Leopard revisited

The moment the keynote used the phrases “sweating the details” and “attention to detail,” it was clear that beyond AI and Siri features, this year is about small fixes and improvements. In more private settings, Apple folks specifically referenced Snow Leopard and iOS 12, two updates that saw Apple take a pause from huge feature roll-outs and prioritize speed and bug fixes a bit more.

But to be clear, referencing Snow Leopard does not mean “no new features.” Like Apple’s 27 releases, Snow Leopard was full of dozens, if not hundreds, of new features—they were just scattered small improvements throughout the system. Updates like this are a challenge to communicate because there are no big features to grab on to.

This is the conundrum of operating-system releases. People say they want bug fixes and small quality-of-life improvements, but a roll-out without tentpole features feels kind of bland. In any case, Apple’s all-out mission to finally fix Siri and get AI integrated in their products the way it said that it would two years ago has allowed the rest of the people developing software at the company to check a bunch of items off their longstanding to-do lists, and I’m here for it.

At the top of my “why did it take them this long?” list of improvements is the change, mentioned in the keynote, that will allow iPhones to better handle that moment when they leave an area with Wi-Fi and have to switch to cellular. I always think of this as the “driveway problem,” but whatever you call it, too often I’m sitting in my driveway looking up directions in Apple Maps only to have all my searches fail because I’m apparently too far from my home Wi-Fi, but my iPhone hasn’t given up hope that it’ll come back soon.

My understanding is that in iOS 27, the iPhone will rely not just on measurements of signal strength (which is the primary method of choosing the wireless network today), but will also use throughput, latency, and signs of network congestion as signifiers. And it’s designed to do so quickly, so you don’t spend as much time frustrated because your iPhone feels it hasn’t sufficiently mourned the loss of its Wi-Fi signal.

Apple fixes stuff it needs to use

A lot of frustrating bugs sit, untouched, for years. Apple has its priorities, and shiny new features get the love while rickety old stuff never rises to the level of being important enough to fix.

Until, that is, Apple needs to have that feature work right in order to serve one of its priorities for the latest OS release. At that point, you’ll find that old, broken features suddenly get the attention and fixes they’ve needed for years. That’s why some of the seemingly random big fixes and improvements scattered across the 27 releases aren’t actually random! They’re side effects of Apple’s larger feature pushes.

For example, imagine that you’re building a new Siri AI system that needs to lean on searching through a user’s local files in order to apply an important level of personal context. Perhaps when you’re building that system, you realize that you can’t actually rely on Spotlight to supply all of that context because it’s not nearly as stable or efficient as you need it to be.

If such a thing were to happen, well, perhaps Apple would find the time to rebuild all of Spotlight search to make it work faster and more reliably. Perhaps searching in Mail would float more relevant results up to the top. Perhaps Messages search would become less frustrating. And perhaps users who need to search for things will benefit, even if they’re not heavy users of Siri AI itself.

What I’m saying is, Spotlight’s going to be better in the 27 releases.

Long-suffering Shortcuts users will notice similar things happening there. It’s been incredibly frustrating to develop Shortcuts due to the lack of support for a proper If-Else statement, a cornerstone of programming. Scheduling Shortcuts has also been a pain, because you’ve got to tie a shortcut to a separate Automation step.

Well, guess what? Apple is introducing a cool new feature that lets you build Shortcuts entirely out of text prompts, using an AI model. It works pretty well, at least for basic tasks, and I’ll have a lot more to say about it this summer. But I have zero doubt that the people building that feature looked at Shortcuts and said, essentially, “What do you mean it doesn’t have If-Else or integrated scheduling? We need those things!” And so they’re now going to be there, for all Shortcuts users to take advantage of.

visionOS: Not dead

People are quick to bury the Vision Pro, which is and has always been a speculative and impractical device that’s more about the future than the present. It’ll be years before Apple is able to construct anything like the Vision Pro at a price and with a feature set that could possibly make it a mainstream product. In the meantime, it’s an experiment and exploration, and I’m okay with it. For all that to be true, though, visionOS needs to keep advancing. And it looks like it is.

This year, Apple’s adding the ability to convert panoramas into spatial scenes, which is just a wild idea. I’m dubious that my Sligachan panorama from the Isle of Skye is going to replace Bora Bora or Joshua Tree, but I love that Apple is still tinkering—and panoramas and spatial scenes are some of the best features in the Vision Pro. (That’s also a good sign, because it suggests Apple is learning what works well on visionOS and is leaning into those features.)

Also, if you believe the stories, Apple exec Mike Rockwell—who is the guy who was charged with shipping the Vision Pro—had originally planned for visionOS to be much more driven by Siri, only to be repeatedly let down by the Siri team. In visionOS 27, Siri AI seems to be pervasive. It feels like Rockwell, who is now in charge of Siri, is having his revenge—and fulfilling one of his dreams for how visionOS should work.

Of course, visionOS is also a playground for future features of other Apple devices. As Dan has pointed out, some of the visual-intelligence features of visionOS 27 sure feel like they might be applicable to other future wearable devices that Apple might be working on. Again, visionOS being a platform for experimentation is a good thing.

Photos improves, but it’s complicated

As someone who writes a book about the Photos app, I’m extremely invested in the changes Apple makes to that app from year to year. This year, it’s addressing one of its biggest limitations and adding a load of AI features that I’m ambivalent about.

First, the good news: Changes to Shared Albums! This feature has been compromised since it was launched, since it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images from your library. Over the years, Apple added other methods of sharing groups of photos via iCloud, and those could include full-resolution images, but this one prominent feature felt stuck in the past.

Now it’s getting a proper upgrade, with support for full-resolution images and allowing for full collaboration with people on other platforms so that everyone can contribute to a shared photo album. I’m relieved that I will soon have to stop explaining the differences among the various ways to share items in Photos and warning people away from Shared Albums.

As for the three AI-powered features in Photos, they’re a mixed bag. I have high hopes for a much improved Clean Up, which was already okay but could be a lot better. The new version appears to be much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context imagery. This is where generative AI is really required, because if the fill-in algorithm isn’t smart, the results will look fake. So far as I know, Clean Up occurs on your device, using on-device models.

The other two features, Extend and Spatial Reframe, require the use of an advanced diffusion model that’s only available via Private Cloud Compute, and as a result, they take time to execute, since Photos will need to upload your photo, wait for a result, and then download the result.

Extend feels like a good feature, since there are plenty of scenarios where your image needs just a little more headroom or width. It’s also going to be great for straightening images, since Extend can fill in the slivers of unknown image that are exposed when you rotate, which otherwise require that your image be cropped as you rotate.

However, every pixel you expand the selection increases the jeopardy that what’s going to be generated is weird or fake. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I found that I was much more comfortable expanding a photo a little bit to gain some headroom than doing it a lot, forcing the AI system to invent more objects or scenes. Judicious use would be my recommendation.

Then there’s Spatial Reframe, which brings together a load of existing Apple technologies, including the spatial scanning algorithm it used to create spatial photos on Vision Pro. This feature works by scanning your photo locally using that algorithm, inferring a depth map that is then used to build a 3-D version of the image that you can pivot a bit, up and down and left and right. This is the effect that allows you, on the Vision Pro, to feel like you can move your head and see parallaxes shifting, even though, if you look closely, the exposed content behind a subject is just a simple generative fill. It all happens so quickly, and in service of a live 3-D effect, that it’s often not noticeable, and even when it is, it’s not that big a deal.

The bar is a lot higher for a fixed, 2-D photo at full resolution. So after you use Spatial Reframe to slightly move the perspective of a shot, all the data is sent up to Private Cloud Compute, where a new version of your shot is rendered—including much more advanced generation of all of those pixels that are revealed by parallax or at the edges of the frame.

The problem is that these results feel pretty generative, through and through. I saw some samples of people’s faces that, after being Spatially Reframed, didn’t really look like their faces anymore. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything that’s visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result is an image that, at least based on my initial reactions, felt surprisingly artificial. I’ve got to use this feature a lot more over the summer, but my initial reaction is skepticism.

By Dan Moren

June 10, 2026 6:33 AM PT

Apple’s 27 platform updates plant the seeds of future devices

Apple’s annual software updates have implications throughout time. They reach back to older devices, some years making them more performant and usable or, alternatively, removing support for them altogether; they deal, obviously, with the products people are using and buying right now; and, perhaps most interestingly, they hint at what we might see from the company down the road.

This year’s updates, in what we’ll call the 27 model year, do all of this. Though, when combined with the pervading reports of significant new types of devices from Apple, it provides some of the most tantalizing hints about what’s to come.

Know when to fold them

Given that the annual updates see their release around the time that Apple puts out a new iPhone, people are always spelunking for interesting tidbits in the code to see if they can find anything that informs those next generation of devices.

It’s a poorly kept secret that Apple is working on its first foldable device. Look in the right places, you can see cases, purported leaked photos of its exterior, and even 3D-printed dummy units.

For all of that, it’s the details of the implementation that are still unknown for now, but iOS 27 gives us a few clues about how this might impact developers.

For example, there are a couple of features on Apple’s big wall of text that seem to point to the foldable phone being nigh: “iPhone app resizing in iPadOS” and “App resizing in iPhone Mirroring”, as well as a bit in the keynote where Craig Federighi demos the latest device simulator for developers allowing them to test said resizing.

iPhone apps have, of course, long been available in both landscape and portrait modes, obviously, and various sizes to support the different size displays that iPhones have had over the years. But allowing users to resize them is certainly a new feature, one that feels plucked from the recent iPad multitasking updates.

While this doesn’t definitively tell us how iPhone apps will behave on a larger, unfolded iPhone display, it certainly makes it clear that iPhone apps are going to have to deal with a new multi-size future.

Reach out and touch your Mac

Second only in speculation to the folding iPhone might be the reported MacBook Pro that will be Apple’s first Mac with a touchscreen.

Apple’s been more than happy to make the iPad more Mac-like, first with support for keyboard and pointing devices, more recently with Mac-like multitasking. This year, the iPad gets an option to keep the menu bar visible all the time—and it’s now pinned to the left. Look familiar?

Turnabout is, of course, only fair play. Not unlike with foldable phones, touchscreen laptops have been sold by Apple’s competitors for years. But Apple seemed intent on keeping the iPad and the Mac in separate lanes.

Until, it seems, now. A preponderance of drawing related features are specifically making their way to the Mac, including both in Notes and in Freeform. Those features have existed on Apple’s touch-first platforms for some time, but this is their first jump to the Mac. While nominally this will work with your trackpad or even using an iPad as input, it’s not hard to imagine a future where you might be able to draw right on your Mac’s screen.

Messages now has a Drawing app on all platforms.

Likewise, a new drawing app in Messages across all of Apple’s platforms, including the Mac, and some other touch-related improvements, such as the Mac’s Sidecar feature, which now has a full-fledged touch interface, instead of just being limited to certain two finger gestures. And Apple also called out the addition of “pull down to refresh” on apps like Mail, Calendar, Safari, and more. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s a perfectly fine feature on a multitouch trackpad, but as an interface convention, we all know where it comes from.

Apple’s willingness to adopt Mac interface conventions on the iPad’s touchscreen—including the iconic stoplight controls—shows that such an idea isn’t nearly as farfetched as some might have thought. And it certainly feels like the touch future of the Mac is just around the corner.

A vision of the future

Not every future Apple device is imminent, though. While a folding iPhone and touchscreen Mac might be in people’s hands before the end of the year, Apple’s got plenty of ideas for farther off devices up its sleeves. Or, I guess, on your face.

During its preview of visionOS 27, Apple showed off the implementation of its Visual Intelligence feature on the Apple Vision Pro, saying that you could get information by an object just by looking at it.

Which is cool, but the Vision Pro is a device that stays in the confines of my house—and even there, generally in my office. Frankly, there aren’t a lot of objects in my office that I really need to know more about.

But take a similar device—say, a smaller, lighter one—into the wilds of the outdoors and there are any number of things that you might want to learn more about, from plants and animals to cars or clothing.

Reports suggest Apple is working on wearable devices, both in the form of glasses and AirPods, with cameras that can tell you about the world around you. Don’t be surprised, if and when they arrive, if they have a Visual Intelligence implementation that draws upon what they’ve done here with visionOS.

Future proof

With Apple notoriously tightlipped about its future plans and product roadmap, you might wonder why exactly Apple continues to roll out features that seem to provide evidence of just such a future.

At the base level, of course, is that if there’s a cool feature that’s ready to go at the time of an update, then there’s no reason not to put it out. (And said speculation also builds buzz, which doesn’t particularly hurt them.)

But moreover, in the same way that Apple builds in APIs and features for developers to prepare their apps for future releases, putting these features in early helps lay groundwork. In part to be able to best show off those new devices when they arrive—”And if you want to draw in Notes, just use your finger on the screen!”—and in part to let users themselves prepare for all the cool things they might want to do in the future—whether on the devices they have right now, or the ones they might someday get.

[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.]

By Philip Michaels

June 8, 2026 12:45 PM PT

WWDC 2026: Apple’s AI overhaul leads the changes for this year’s software updates

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.]

By Dan Moren

June 8, 2026 12:41 PM PT

All the little details Apple did show in its WWDC 2026 keynote…just very quickly

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.

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.]

By Glenn Fleishman

June 8, 2026 3:00 AM PT

High Performance mode allows sharing another Mac’s display as if your own

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 connect to another Mac using Screen Sharing, you’re given a choice of which mode to use. Let’s walk through the connection steps:

1. 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.)
2. 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.
3. Click Continue.
4. Enter your credentials.
5. 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.

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.

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 /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Shelly Brisbin

June 5, 2026 10:35 AM PT

RSS journeys: Consider the news-reading squirrel

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.

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?

Continue reading “RSS journeys: Consider the news-reading squirrel”…

By Jason Snell

June 3, 2026 4:09 PM PT

Road to WWDC 2026: What’s a developer?

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.