Thoughts on WWDC 2025

19 June

Right, so they begin with some silliness again, that’s good. It’s Craig driving an F1 on the roof of the Apple building. The CEO is wearing some authentic headset — not Beats headphones— because he’s in the driver Mission Control. They do a visual gag about Craig’s hair, which lands well.

This is confusing, but then we get a quick reminder that it’s to promote their new movie.

Then Craig starts his intro, and as soon as there's some audio it seems weird. Is it that his audio has been dubbed separately? Has it been cleaned up by some AI-based software? The lip sync seems tight enough but there's some uncanny valley happening for me.

I understand they wanted him to do his talk in that location, and from the cold empty look of that room I'll bet the audio wouldn't have been great. But what about a boom mic and then remove the reverb with some traditional software. Perhaps that's what they did, but it came out in a slightly unnerving way.

Are his eyes unable to open any further? Can he even see anymore?

Within a few moments the dance begins. Every few seconds — time it if you like, it's not quite on exact beats — he shuffles his weight from one foot to the other. I've seen enough of these to know that it adds some dynamics to the presentation. I imagine it was encouraged to avoid seeming stiff and unenthusiastic, but like the audio it has gone too far in the other direction, and is now distracting.

Other presenters are invited on to show their department's achievements. Their audio does not seem like its had the same treatments as Craig’s, and they don't do The Dance. The rehearsed arm gestures are there, though. I'm sorry to tell you that I don't really know who you are, partially because their names don't seem to appear in the tech news and they seem to be different every year, so I don't get a sense of the team and who's responsible for what feature.

Liquid Glass

Much has been and will be said about the user interface of this popular product, so I wont repeat it here. I will say that people seem to miss the point of the liquid glass design’s attempt to get further out of the way of the content and return a few precious pixels to the app you're trying to use. A few welcome additions like the contextual menu no longer being totally horizontal. No mention of any fixes or alterations of common complaints like moving apps into folders or into empty slots. That's right folks — they're slots, not empty spaces like on a desktop OS. I will say that their choices of the blue-and-turquoise wallpaper, stretching the font used for the clock on the Lock Screen leave something to be desired. As well as the Liquid Glass icons… they just look… weird. I guess once the OS is out and we see them catching the light in a parallaxy way will help, but you know that there will be a ton of old apps that never get a custom designed Liquid Glass icon and this will ruin the effect they are trying to achieve.

CarPlay

*We live in the future… if you have a newish car*

It's good to see there's progress being made here, even though for me all this is for people who have new cars… and not many of those brands look familiar. For a moment I wasn't sure they let Emily drive a real car to end the segment. Everything seems so controlled I thought someone would say it was too dangerous. Maybe she was being towed and they digitally removed the other vehicle, or had a stunt driver.

iPhone

Darren tells us about small changes for their popular iMessage app, but no huge changes that really impress, like being able to handle messages more like we do with emails.

Leslie tells us about using the AI to make cartoonish Genmoji images with Image Playground. I hope somebody appreciates this.

Kathy tells us about some features in Apple Music and Maps, but none really address the complaints about it I’ve seen online. For example in Maps, there are plenty of errors in their map data, and it's not too hard to submit a correction, but not only is it anonymously handled on their side, you sometimes get asked for more information. I’ve told you it’s wrong, it’s your job to fix it!

Gaming

*People will say it looks messy, but not as ugly as WhatsApp*

Ann tells us about the gaming platform. They say a lot of people are playing them, but I think the Switch is more popular. What do I know, I don’t play any of them so I’m not the target market.

Visual Intelligence

Billy tells us about Visual Intelligence, which seems like a good idea, because a lot of people did not know about the share sheet and their first impulse is to screen shot something they want to know more about. I've seen plenty of people screenshot a location they were viewing in the maps app or something on Instagram, so if they manage to learn about the new button — and there's no way of knowing that they will considering a lot of people missed the Three Dots button in Apple Mail— they will welcome this.

No mention of being able to use Siri in the way that people expect it to work in 2025.

WatchOS

David tells us about the latest. This really is their cash cow for the fitness market, so nearly everything is focused on that. I've seen people complain about having to recharge their watches almost every day without considering just how many more features this little device has then the old competition of Fitbit and Garmin. I will admit I haven't had any experience with those brands in a few years, but when I did the experience was ghastly. The devices had bare minimum user feedback, basically just some blinkenlights to try to tell you what they were doing, and they couldn't do anything like make calls or remote control your camera app or a MIDI keyboard, for example.

Stephanie tells us about The Workout Buddy. The feature seemed to have a better AI voice than the Live Translation feature. I wonder if the Live Translation is still on-device for privacy and thus has worse cadence. I noticed the Live Recognition voice in iOS 18.5 was still using the old-school technology and still sounded robotic, a modern day MacinTalk.

The feature where you flick your wrist away from you to dismiss notifications is welcome, as their pinching and clenching features they took from the accessibility team don't seem to work that well, if you even know they exist at all.

TvOS

Justin talks about tvOS. Aside from the Liquid Glass look, I didn't notice much different to this. The multiple user profiles feature mentioned will be useful, but we already see that when we are inside the streaming apps from the various companies, so it's not that thrilling. I guess Apple is excited about the Games app, and how it will somehow handle multiple people being signed in to an AppleID while keeping the kids’ games stuff separate. Can they do anything interesting with that IMDB-inspired section where you get to see who the cast and crew are? Anything more than just the static headshot?

MacOS

Another gag about what the developer teams get up to on their holidays. A handover to another new face, and we're told Spotlight has been improved. The feature of being able to use key commands to directly access an app's feature is something that I first saw in Quicksilver back in 2006 perhaps? That has fallen into near abandonware, but after Launchbar and Alfred came out, we saw Raycast take the throne to show what could be done with this type-a-little style interface. The demo is neat, but we all know that it's not going to find and show us the app's features when we want it to, possibly not at all if the app is some halfbaked port from Windows or made with Java, and most of us wont know why it stopped working and we'll have to rebuild our Spotlight indices once again.

Raja shows us some page layout in Pages. Umm… big deal? We have been able to do stuff like this since ReadySetGo to some extent. Sure the user interface is smoother and more responsive, but it wasn't really exciting.

You can color your icons and put emoji on them… umm… we have been able to replace the entire icon for many years now, but this seems to have been forgotten.

VisionOS

Mike and Haley introduce this. Like the Lisa when it was first launched, this technology is mostly too pricey for the general population to experience. I still see regular posts by musicians who can't run the latest version of Logic because they are still using an Intel-based Mac, and other people complaining or asking for advice about their aging Mac that can't run the latest versions iof Microsoft or Adobe suites. Sometimes I try to remind them that there are probably a host of 4-to-5-year younger Macs available secondhand for the latter issue.

*Position that virtual funky sidetable whereever you like*

*Is this what things will look like when we’re forced to stay indoors due to air pollution? Or maybe how to stop people from going crazy on those long trips to Mars.*

In any case the demos are still impressive, in particular the virtual windows that you can position wherever you prefer. They neglected to mention that their goal is to sell you a phone which is also a good camera which also takes spatial photos which you can then experience fully once you buy the Vision Pro. The floating head of your videoconference caller still has some uncanny valley issues, and they are careful to not show you the actual footage of that person so there's nothing to compare it to.

iPadOS

Back to Craig for a moment. Cindy announces we now have draggable windows on the iPad. You dont have to use them if you dont want to, but they are there for the people who need them. Thus one more difference between iPad and the Mac has been eroded. You even get the “lickable” window chrome first introduced in OS X, twenty-four years ago. We knew it could be done, because some of us using audio software such as AUM and apeMatrix have had this for a while. It looks like people wanted their iPads to be more like their Macs to match how their Macs have become a little more iPadish.

Unifying all the version numbers

Here's my opportunity to remind people that Apple is not trying to be like the Pope that ordered several days to vanish in order to correct a faulty calendar. This doesn't officially launch until the North American fall, and will be the OS version through 2026 until presumably the 27 version is announced next year.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps someone left who the staff liked, or someone got hired who they didn’t, but overall they seemed less enthusiastic than last year. As for the overall look-&-feel, it all looked more brightly colored to the point of garishness. I am getting tired of almost every example photo being one that looks like it’s from a fashion shoot, like it could be a cover from Vogue magazine. I do like the amusing text message in-jokes, and the song at the end about how developers make things that people really appreciate being in their lives was easily as touching as any of their Apple-tech-saved-my-life pieces from previous years.

Every company has its ups and downs and this is hardly the lowest down we’ve seen them in. Let’s hope they press on and make something insanely great again soon, something so compelling you feel that mild rush of excitement where you say to yourself “I can’t wait to use that”.

Jason Cutler