WWDC26: Early Impressions - Tao of Mac
Rui Carmo
Tao of Mac
Jun 8th 2026 · 3 min read<br>·<br>#ai<br>#apple<br>#automation<br>#design<br>#ios<br>#macos<br>#opinion<br>#siri<br>#wwdc
WWDC26: Early Impressions
This was the weirdest WWDC26 keynote in a while, and some of the past ones were visibly phoned in. It was rife with weirdness and flashbacks.
To my surprise, a few of my wish list items actually made it. Naming the next macOS "Golden Gate" was not on my bingo card, though; a little too trippy and a lot too lofty for what is, by Apple’s own tacit admission, a Snow Leopard year: catching up rather than charging ahead.
The self-deprecating tone ran through the whole thing, from a hippy bus that was equal parts weird and funny to the unmistakable sense of a company that spent the past year watching the industry sprint past it on AI and is now, not running but sedately pacing, to catch up.
Moderately Likely To Work<br>Much to my surprise, two of my top annoyances got airtime: they’re tackling Spotlight and Mail search, the exact failures I called out, although whether either works once it ships is anyone’s guess.
They’re also doubling down on automation, at least superficially, with vibecoded Shortcuts and a renewed push for third-party Actions. Vibecoding Safari extensions and Shortcuts is the genuinely interesting part: it points at automation rather than novelty, which is more than I can say for yet another Image Playground. None of it erases the brittleness and legacy gaps that made me want a real platform to begin with, but it’s at least pointing the right way. Tab grouping and change detection in Safari are a fun party trick, no more.
Siri AI<br>And yes, there’s a new, as-yet-unproven Siri (with a completely pointless AI moniker) you summon by holding the power button (part Spotlight, part walkie-talkie, plus a floating gelatinous orb in Vision Pro), and a Siri app trying to be a catch-all bucket for every interaction.
The new voice struck me as a little cringe and overly American, which is an odd note to land on when you want me talking to my machines all day. The feature set is fuzzy: on paper it can touch far more of my data, and moving photos to the shared library by voice would be neat if it works. But Siri has been stuck at "if it works" for fifteen years, and the one thing I actually want (for it to handle my mail and calendar properly) wasn’t demoed in any useful detail.
Reheated, Or Absent<br>I wondered whether the automation push would reach HomeKit, and the answer is a shrug: the new camera detection is cute, but a YOLO model has done exactly that for a decade, and the automation logic I actually need stays vague. The rest of my list didn’t show at all: no hypervisor on the iPad, no running my own code without the annual toll, nothing on iCloud sync, the Watch, or SwiftUI. Maybe the sessions turn something up (which is why this is an early read), but my expectations haven’t budged.
The framing around Apple Foundation Models was the bigger tell: we already know there’s Gemini underneath, which leaves me wondering how much Apple is adding beyond the wrapper. Liquid Glass got the same treatment by being walked back in the most face-saving way imaginable, with the old Accessibility transparency slider re-warmed and trotted out as an improvement. Disingenuous is the word, twice over.
Update: Also much to my surprise, they actually mentioned unifying the corner radii, which I completely missed. I must have tuned it out after the 300 random percentage performance improvements they quoted against… no real baseline, really.
Anyway, Apple heard the parts of everyone’s complaints that a) did not force them to walk back Liquid Glass and b) fit the AI story it needed to tell, and stayed quiet on a lot of the boring structural stuff that’s been broken for years. Yes, they are committing to improving performance and fixing some of the most egregious issues, and that’s not nothing; hearing Spotlight and Mail search admitted out loud is more than I expected, but it is mostly Apple’s technical debt catching up with them, and, of course, Apple catching up with everyone else where it regards AI, but on its own terms and at its own pace.
Oh, and they deprecated pretty much all of my hardware, too. Kind of expected, much like the usual geographical restrictions, which mean a good chunk of this may not reach Portugal for a year, if at all.
I’m going to give it a couple of days until the dust settles, watch the Platforms State of the Union tomorrow, and then mull things over a bit more. Maybe we can chalk up this WWDC as a sort of a win, for a change.
← Notes for June 1–7