By Dan Moren
May 30, 2025 8:00 AM PT
The Back Page: Be WWDCing you
Good morning and welcome once again to Apple Park! We’re so pleased to have you with us to celebrate our annual Worldwide Conference. Did I forget a word there? Oh well, it probably wasn’t one of the important ones.
Today’s announcements mark the beginnings of a big week for Apple. We’re delighted to share with you our latest updates for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and some other OSes that I’ve probably forgotten about but still see once a year at the holidays.
First up, we’ve got a brand new design language that stretches across all our product lines, inspired by our blockbuster Apple Vision Pro—a device so popular its sales made this last quarter a tough compare—and we think you’re going to love it. We’re calling it Solarium, because it’s like the heat of a thousand fiery suns are searing right into your retinas. Dark mode? There is no dark mode. ALL IS LIGHT.
With this new glass-themed design, you’ll be able to see your content better than ever before, and it’s a constant reminder of how much Apple is committed to transparency. Look, I’m just reading what’s on the teleprompters.
Some may say rolling out a new design for our operating systems is just a way to distract from our failure to ship features we promised at last year’s WWDC, to which I’ll point out that it takes a lot of work to come up with and implement a new design and if we wanted to gin up a last-minute distraction, we’d clearly do something far more surface level.
So today we’re also announcing a significant change to how we name our operating systems. We know it’s tough to keep your Sequoias and Sonomas straight, to remember if that new take on iPad multitasking was introduced in iPadOS 14 or iPadOS 15 or iPadOS 16. That’s why we’re standardizing across the board with a single, simple number: the year. And it starts here, with iOS 19.
To be clear, we didn’t get our version numbering wrong, you got your years wrong. In order to make this happen, we’re rolling back the clock to 2019. What a great year that was. Nothing but blue sky ahead of us.
Yes, it was easier for us to rejigger the entire date system than it was to admit our own numbering was wrong.
Last but not least (because we still haven’t talked about tvOS), there’s been a lot of talk about the future of the App Store. Since 2008, the App Store has been the most trusted, profitable, and secure place to sell software on the internet, and did I mention profitable?
We believe the App Store remains the best place to do business and not THE OPEN WEB WHERE THINGS ARE SCARY AND CLICK CONTINUE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE INFECTED WITH MALWARE AND HAVE YOUR CREDIT CARD STOLEN BY ‘Cyberdyne Systems, Inc.’. And, of course, we can’t comment on ongoing litigation other than to say…pthbbbbbbt.
What a great week we have ahead of us. We’ve got our Platforms State of the Union coming up, as well as hundreds of engineers on hand to answer your questions and confirm we haven’t quite gotten around to fixing that bug you filed a radar for roughly five years ago. Thank you and have a great time!
[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.]