alt Hacker NewsApple WWDC 2026
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They try so hard to do a polished presentation that everything is kinda fake and unauthentic. I don't understand how this attitude survived so many years.
"Siri AI will not be available in E.U. until we figure out privacy"
Funny to hear that after they mentioned how seriously they are taking privacy every 37 seconds.
I think the potentially most impactful singular feature mentioned in all this is being able to conversationally describe Shortcuts for AI to create. That feels like the type of thing that if done right can change how we all use our phones in a way that things like Siri becoming smarter and more conversational likely won't.
I have to say, I extremely dislike AI processing of photos. The camera is a vehicle to capture the realness of the world around us, including the imperfect moments. Distorting that with AI and being okay with it is really disappointing.
Spatial Framing? Yay, even more fakeness in photos, creating ever more artificial, never-happened memories!
Hopefully this new golden gate update is really the snow leopard everyone's been hoping for.. already exciting one can now (if only partially) disable liquid glass
WWDC makes me sad. It was such a great in person conference, I remember having a really weird issue with cookie handoff in Safari, and being able to sit down with a bunch of the Safari engineers to troubleshoot the issue. It started with one, then more and more engineers came to give ideas!
I appreciate making it available to everyone but it feels like there needs to be some kind of middle ground. IOS development just isn't as much fun absent the in-person community.
Man that conversation history navigation for the new Siri app looks super unuseable ... how the hell am I supposed to actually find the conversation I want with the super-dynamic non-ordered 2-column offset-row view thing ...?
It looks hard to use ...
Also the 'floating semi-window but not a window' thing when using contextual siri in the context of some other app ... sure looks like it won't work with cmd-tab navigation ... I really hope is not the case ...
The only thing that interested in is: did they fix screen brightness getting super dim even when the slider is at max? That’s incredibly annoying and frustrating, and it’s been like that since first 26 release. And it’s a clear bug because brightness resets to expected level if I go to photos and open an HDR image. I can wait for autocomplete that doesn’t suggest garbage 50% of the time, but this one is just too annoying.
Siri wakes up on my phone every time they say "hey siri". I thought it was supposed to be bound to my voice. :/
Ouch. “ Developers can start trying out the new version of Siri today, with a beta launching to the public later this year. Siri AI will not be available in the EU on iOS and iPadOS.”
Will it be available to developers in the EU though?
Ever since the liquid glass update, my wallpaper is just a muted color. I investigated the settings and previously my wallpaper was the "blur" version of my lock screen. Since the liquid glass update, "blur" apparently means "99% blur" instead of the 20-30% blur it used to be. The muted color does seem to be an average color of the lock screen image. But nothing recognizable.
They fixed all the extremely egregious issues with Liquid Glass, good to see.
It's still an extremely ugly, "worst of both worlds" combination of wasted space (from early-gen flat design) with gaudy effects (from late-gen skeumorphism), but at least now it is usable.
I'd never update to macOS 26, but 27 I might, begrudgingly.
The new Siri might bring AI to way more people than OpenAI managed to reach with ChatGPT. I wonder what it means to OpenAI‘s planned IPO. Curious to try the beta to see how the new Siri feels.
I read through a summary of what was announced today, and I don't really want/care about any of it. The biggest apple announcement today that I was excited about, and would tell other people about was https://lowtechguys.com/musicdecoy/
I have an older iPhone that can't run any of this new stuff, and I'm not upgrading because I have no reason to. I think I actually prefer at this point to be on an older phone that won't get all of this.
When is technology going to get exciting and fun again?
(that's not 100% true, I was excited to hear they were walking back liquid glass.)
Stoked about custom environments on visionOS from your panoramas. I have been shooting so many panoramas of national parks in anticipation of this moment.
I often think that Zuck spent so much on metaverse in order to to bait Apple to spend enormously on an experimental product and OS which now they are forced to maintain
finally a snow leopard like release focused on performance and fixing user experience
Old sidebar back on macOS thank god. 2026, the year Apple discovered toolbars are useful.
I swear I watched this Keynote before when they announced Apple Intelligence. Then proceeded to deliver nothing. Apple is so lost it makes me really sad.
Lightweight browser extensions generated on demand, now there's a good use case for what they seem to be actually building.
Extending applications without having to launch a full agentic IDE. Macos is already very well equipped with GUI automation tools.
It would be nice if you could use the processing power of your idle desktop Mac as an alternative to the paid cloud compute for images.
I have to manually log in to Gmail and other emails accounts just to search it properly. Really glad to see some action on this
I hope they keep the switch allowing you to disable Apple Intelligence.
In case anyone missed it, Apple's dropping support for Watch Series 6/7/8/9 and the Ultra 1 with this release.
The 9 isn't even 3 years old yet until September, absolutely garbage support timeline for a wearable. I have a Series 9, and it's still essentially like new.
edit Seems this was an error on Apple's part, all watches that support 26 should get 27
Are we living the worst times in a while technology wise, this presentation showed nothing useful. Last year at least they showed some interesting features, but as always I don’t use any of them, the only one I wanted in the past few years was to use the iPhone from my mac, but never shipped in EU. And the other feature was universal control that I use every day and works just fine most of the time.
It's nice to see the improve focused on AI and recognition of their past missteps. So far out of all the announcements this past month, I think this will be the most significant. The increased emphasis with on device models is exactly the right move. I'm tired of sending data out of my computer when it isn't needed.
Siri AI - looks like finally Siri is getting its due update, hopefully they ship it soon!
Much as I have a not so great opinion on Siri's capabilities, I'm rather surprised how many people appear to use Siri/Apple Intelligence to search for rather niche hobby content that I run a site for. OpenAI's scrapers I expect volume from, but I didnt really expect apple's to be consistently rank second.
They really are trying to convince the skeptics about AI privacy.
Do they allow you to opt out of data collection to improve their models for Siri? What about allow users to choose on-device only processing?
If not, they are only speaking to the converted when they have Craig drill home their supposed privacy guarantees.
It's uncanny how they announce that AI features won't be available in the UK or China, and then, with a smile, proceed with, "Now, let's discuss what's next for developers."
So sterile and performative.
I’m so stoked for macOS 27 for feature improvements and polish. The ai stuff fine but a snow leopard like release I’m here for.
I'm glad to see their "Private Cloud AI" thing is actually happening. They announced it a couple years ago and then after not hearing a ton I was worried they were going to drop it.
That said, the foundational models they talk about running on it - is that something they've trained themselves? I know they had some sort of deal with Google; could it be Gemini weights loaded into their private compute or something?
Apple continues to innovate in new and excited ways, because I never though I would speak the words "I guess I'm sticking with ios26 until the end of security updates."
Unless I can continue to neuter AI, and keep the older siri this is my last iOS.
While I give kudos for Apple bring these Intelligent features, but does anyone see themselves using these features in your daily life?
Let me know if Metal gets any cool new features
I wonder if visual intelligence can be used to produced code like claudcode can. like highlight a UI component on an app you like and say "implement this for me". I can take screenshots of figma and give it to claude code to implement and it gets it pretty close.
A real snooze fest. I care so little about the AI features. I felt like they introduced the same thing over and over again.
I would be more excited if they said “AI? Yeah, we decided we aren’t interested in doing it anymore.”
WWDC - time of the year Apple reminds us it has a VR.
For a company of Apple's caliber, I'd expect better lighting on the presenters.
Honestly, I’m more excited about a faster and more polished OS than any new feature they announced.
Is there a live text play-by-play so we don't have to watch a video like some pre-literate? ArsTechnica used to do one but I can't find it for this year.
Anyone able to restart the stream if you missed the first few minutes or are we living in a world where AI will cure cancer but Apple can't build a "Watch live / Watch from start" button ?
All I want the ability to talk to Siri while I'm in the car. My buddy's Tesla has this feature with Grok and it's actually really awesome. Let me have an on-demand CONVERSATIONAL assistant, meaning something I'd actually want to have a conversation with.
They can't come up with a better demo than planning the menu for a party???
Apple very rarely admits mistakes. The fact they're rolling back some of the extremeness in Liquid Glass and actively mentioned in the keynote that they very seriously took the user feedback shows just how bad it was, at least initially.