Apple unveils catch-up AI and features at WWDC

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off Monday with an unusual tone of humility. Rather than diving straight into the much-anticipated revamp of an AI-powered Siri, the company’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, devoted the opening portion of the keynote to a catalog of repairs.

For roughly two years, Apple has scrambled to catch up in the AI race, all while user frustrations with its core software quietly mounted: a polarizing design overhaul, a nearly broken search function, an unreliable file-sharing system, and a Health app that overlooked half its audience. Apple never explicitly acknowledged these shortcomings on Monday. But the structure of its WWDC keynote spoke volumes. By leading with fixes before features, the company framed a smarter Siri as just one item on a broader list of improvements, not the centerpiece. At the very least, the order suggests Apple believes its foundation needs reinforcement before it can credibly ask users to trust it with something as significant as artificial intelligence.

“Instead of just introducing a host of new features, we’re also taking the features you already rely on and making them even better, because we believe the best operating systems aren’t just built on big breakthroughs, they’re built on sweating the details,” Federighi said. For most companies, that statement would be unremarkable. For Apple, it was as close to an admission of fault as the company ever gets. Critics had precisely argued that Apple had stopped sweating the details.

Federighi didn’t have to wait long to prove the point. The first fix addressed the controversial Liquid Glass design language, introduced with iOS 26 and met with immediate backlash over readability and usability issues. While visually striking, the glass-like aesthetic made certain on-screen elements harder to see. Users flagged numerous ways the update felt undercooked, especially on the Mac, and pleaded for tools to restore a more frosted appearance.

Apple handled the moment carefully, saying it “really appreciates” the feedback received over the past year. “While we think this is a great new default look, we also know that some users would like Liquid Glass to be even more clear, and others prefer a more tinted appearance,” said Shubham Kedia, Apple’s director of human interface design, during the keynote. (No one, for the record, has asked for it to be clearer.) After already tweaking the design, Apple is now letting users dial it back entirely with a new slider that goes all the way to “fully tinted.”

A handful of other small but telling updates followed. Apple showed a “more uniform” toolbar in macOS designed to better separate controls and text from the content beneath them. App icons received additional Liquid Glass refinements to make them “sharper and more defined,” even in clear mode. Then came performance improvements: iPhone and iPad apps now launch 30% faster, new photos appear up to 70% faster in your library, and files transfer up to 80% faster using AirDrop, a notoriously unreliable file-sharing system. In a subtle nod to users holding onto their phones longer, Apple extended these performance gains to all models back to the iPhone 11, released in 2019.

Apple also addressed several long-standing friction points: smoother transitions between Wi-Fi and cellular, a new indicator for when messages are taking longer to send (helpful on low bandwidth or when sending large files), and a rebuilt search experience described as “more stable, more efficient, and more comprehensive of content.” New content will be indexed almost immediately, and a revamped ranking system in Mail will surface the most relevant results first. That this needed fixing at all underscores how far Apple’s search had fallen behind.

The Health app, which had gone years without meaningfully supporting half its user base, finally added perimenopause and menopause tracking. It’s a long-overdue move arriving as the menopause care market hits its stride. Earlier this year, menopause telehealth startup Midi Health crossed a $1 billion valuation, and dedicated investment in the category topped $294 million between 2022 and last year. iCloud shared photo albums can now accept contributions from Android and Windows users, making the feature far more useful for shared trips and group events.

Apple also rolled out improved screen time controls for parents before turning to the main event: the announcement of the AI-enhanced Siri. The sequencing was deliberate. By stacking a long list of smaller improvements up front, Apple reframed its Siri update as one piece of a broader effort, rather than the make-or-break AI moment the industry had been watching for. That framing is probably smart. Siri is launching into “beta” for consumers later this year, but not in the EU or China, where Apple still has regulatory hurdles to clear. For a feature meant to define Apple’s AI strategy, “beta, coming later, not everywhere” is a notable hedge.

Apple outlined other smaller AI advances. Apple Intelligence will organize web page tabs, analyze pages for information, check for updates, and more. You can even generate a custom Safari extension on the fly using AI. Passwords and Safari can now work together to suggest and apply stronger passwords automatically. Apple Intelligence is also adding helpful reply suggestions in Messages based on conversation context. For example, if someone asks for photos, the AI can point you to the right ones. Calendar can now create events from natural language commands, a feature third-party apps like Fantastical have offered for years, making this a catch-up feature. AI will also surface key information during phone calls, like a confirmation code when calling an airline.

The Home app will use AI to summarize events, catching up with Amazon and Google, which have moved on to more advanced territory like fire detection and facial recognition. (We’d like to thank Apple for staying away from the latter.) Image Playground, Apple’s AI image generation app, appears to have finally crossed from novelty to utility. Earlier versions produced kitschy, hard-to-use images; the updated model can generate something as functional as a business flyer or a cleanly edited photo. Apple also announced it will open image generation to developers via an API, turning a consumer feature into a potential platform. AI can now edit photos more substantively, removing distracting items or expanding edges using generative models, similar to what Google Photos offers. The standout is Spatial Reframing, which lets you adjust a photo’s composition after the fact using Apple’s on-device spatial models. It even works retroactively on photos already in your library, meaning years of existing images are now fair game.