Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday began with an apology of sorts. Rather than jumping right into the headlines about improved AI-powered Siri, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, spent the first part of his keynote listing repairs.
For the past two years, Apple has been racing to catch up with AI, but frustrations with its core software have been quietly building. A redesign that users hate, a search feature that barely works, a file sharing feature that routinely fails, and a healthcare app that doesn’t focus enough on half of its user base. Apple said nothing of the sort on Monday. But the structure of the WWDC keynote was telling, putting fixes before features and positioning a better Siri as one item on a long list of improvements rather than the main event. This set of results suggests, at the very least, that Apple believes it needs to strengthen its foundation before users can credibly trust something as important as AI.
“Instead of just introducing a bunch of new features, we’re making improvements to the features you already rely on, because we believe the best operating systems aren’t just built on big advances, they’re built on detailed efforts,” Federighi said. This would be a low-key statement for most companies, but for Apple it was as close to an admission of fault as it gets. (Focusing on details is exactly what critics say the company has stopped doing.)
Federighi didn’t have to wait long to prove the point. The first item on the list was the company’s controversial Liquid Glass design language, which first appeared in iOS 26 and immediately sparked a consumer backlash over readability and usability concerns.
Although visually impressive, the glass-like aesthetic of liquid glass made it difficult to see certain elements on the screen. Users complained of a number of poorly handled updates, especially on Macs, and begged Apple for tools to restore a cloudier appearance.
The company approached this moment with caution, saying it is “truly appreciative” of the user feedback it has received about Liquid Glass over the past year.
“We think this is a great new default look, but we also know that some users want liquid glass to be more transparent, and others prefer a more tinted look,” Shubham Kedia, Apple’s director of human interface design, said in the keynote. (No one on the record has asked for this to be further clarified.)
Apple had already tweaked the design earlier today, and now it’s allowing users to dial it all the way down to “fully colored” using a new slider.
Several other small but important updates followed. In another usability improvement, Apple unveiled a “more uniform” toolbar in macOS, designed to more clearly distinguish controls and text from the content beneath them. App icons now have additional improvements to liquid glass, making them “crisper and clearer” even when set to clear mode.
Second, performance has improved. iPhone and iPad apps launch 30% faster, new photos appear in your library up to 70% faster, and files transfer up to 80% faster using AirDrop, the notoriously unstable file sharing system.
In a subtle acknowledgment that people are spending more time holding their phones in their hands these days, Apple said it has extended performance improvements for all models up to the iPhone 11, a phone launched in 2019.
Apple has also addressed long-standing friction points, including a smoother transition between Wi-Fi and cellular, a new indicator that lets you know when messages are taking a long time to send (useful if you’re using low bandwidth or sending large files), and a reimagined search experience that the company describes as “more stable, more efficient, and more comprehensive content.” New content is indexed almost instantly, and Mail’s new ranking system shows the most relevant results first. (The fact that this had to be fixed shows how far behind Apple’s research was.)
Apple’s Health app has added support for menopause and menopause tracking after years of failing to meaningfully support half of its user base.
iCloud shared photo albums can now accept posts from Android and Windows users, making this feature even more useful for shared trips and group events.
Apple also rolled out improved screen time controls for parents before moving on to the main event: the announcement of AI-enhanced Siri.
The ordering was intentional. By pre-loading a long list of small improvements, Apple has reframed the Siri update as part of a broader effort, rather than the make-or-break moment for AI that the industry has been focusing on.
That framing is probably smart. Siri will be available in “beta” to consumers later this year, but not in the EU or China, where Apple still has regulatory hurdles to clear. For a feature that was supposed to define Apple’s AI strategy, “Beta, coming later, but not everywhere” is a pretty remarkable workaround.
Apple outlined other small AI advances, including how Apple Intelligence organizes tabs on web pages, analyzes information on web pages, and checks for page updates. You can also use AI to generate custom Safari extensions on the fly. This is interesting.
Passwords and Safari now work together to automatically suggest and enforce stronger passwords. Apple Intelligence also adds helpful reply suggestions to your messages based on the context of the conversation. For example, if someone asks for a photo, Apple’s AI will tell you the appropriate photo. Calendar now allows you to create events from natural language commands. This is a feature that third-party apps like Fantastical have offered for years, and this is a follow-up feature.
AI will also be able to display important information when making phone calls, such as confirmation codes when calling an airline.
Meanwhile, the Home app uses AI to summarize events and is set to catch up with companies like Amazon and Google, which have moved into more advanced areas such as fire detection and facial recognition. (Thanks to Apple for avoiding the latter, though.)
Image Playground — Apple’s AI image generation app — appears to have finally crossed the threshold from novelty to useful. Previous versions produced images that were kitschy and difficult to apply in real life. The updated model can produce something as functional as a business flyer or a nicely edited photo. Apple also announced that it will be opening up image generation to developers via an API. This is a move that turns consumer features into a potential platform.
AI can now edit photos more substantively, using generative models to remove distracting items from a scene or extend edges, similar to what Google Photos offers. What stands out is Spatial Reframing, which uses Apple’s on-device spatial model to let you adjust the composition of your photos after the fact. It also works retroactively for photos that are already in your library, so you can use years of existing images without any issues.
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