Apple’s question for the developer: Are you up for an AI do-over?

Take two, two years later. That’s the 2026 WWDC in a nutshell, at least for developers. And for consumers? If your Apple Watch is more than a few years old, it’s headed for retirement-and-replacement.

Ironically, albeit not atypically, Apple announced no new hardware at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) keynote, even though the featured image for the event’s summary press release contained an assortment of it:

And also typically (of late, at least) and as-always disappointingly, the keynote was as-usual pre-recorded.

Which was particularly disappointing in this instance, as the company’s messaging would have benefitted greatly from the presence of live demos, regardless of whether (but especially if) they went off without a hitch. Why? In 2024, Apple made big promises regarding the AI-enhanced version of its Siri virtual assistant and the broader AI-enabled capabilities of its various coming-soon operating systems and application suites.

Two years and a $250 million class action lawsuit settlement later, the company’s trying again, this time in partnership with Google (who held its own developer event just a few weeks ago). I concur with TechCrunch that the demo videos seemed more genuine this time around, with real people interacting with real devices and doing real-life-reminiscent things. Still…pre-recorded.

It’s 2009 all over again

But Apple didn’t lead with AI…sorry, Apple Intelligence…this year. Instead, it focused first on the broader nips and tucks that upcoming (and in the first three cases, already available in developer beta form) 27-series operating systems for computers (just-christened MacOS “Golden Gate”), iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, visionOS and tvOS aspire to deliver above and beyond their generational precursors. All of which takes me back nearly two decades.

At the June 2009 WWDC, Apple unveiled Mac OS 10.6 “Snow Leopard”, which the company proudly trumpeted as having “zero new features” versus its two-years-earlier Mac OS 10.5 “Leopard” predecessor. Instead, Apple focused on, quoting from the Wikipedia entry, “improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint.” One key means of doing so (quite effectively, in my personal experience along with broader industry reputation) was to strip out legacy PowerPC CPU support. And one year and one O/S generation later, OS X Lion 10.7 also dropped the Rosetta emulation support that had enabled legacy PowerPC-compiled applications to continue to run on top of an Intel x86-centric operating system base.

Fast forward to today and the sense of déjà vu is strong. The last clutch of Intel-based systems (two of which I ironically own, as noted in my last-year’s WWDC coverage) are no longer supported in MacOS 27. And although Rosetta 2 emulation support for x86-compiled code is still baked in, I’d wager that (again like last time) it won’t remain there for long. More generally, all the new operating system versions focused notably on performance, stability and other improvements, such as Liquid Glass U/I tweaks.

The enemy of my enemy…

I still struggle a bit to wrap my head around the partnership between Apple and Google on both AI models and cloud services (the latter alongside NVIDIA, interestingly)…but only a bit. After all, as I noted in my recent Google I/O coverage, Google’s on quite a roll right now. Apple had previously worked with OpenAI to add ChatGPT support to Siri, with limited-at-best success as far as I can tell. And OpenAI’s made no secret of its aspirations to deliver Apple-competitive hardware, going so far as to partner with former Apple design chief Sir Jony Ive.

Yes, Google (Android and derivates, including Wear OS, plus ChromeOS and the upcoming “Aluminum”) and Apple (iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, visionOS and tvOS) are market competitors, but so too are Microsoft (Windows) and Apple (MacOS). Microsoft is increasingly becoming a broad AI technology supplier in its own right. And then there’s Meta, still pushing VR, increasingly enthusiastic about smart glasses and rumored to be branching into other hardware. And Amazon, supposedly flirting with smartphones again. And…get my point?

While Apple (along with Apple fanboy sites) goes to great pains to position the Google arrangement as a partnership, I strongly suspect that in reality, Google-developed models were distilled (at most, and maybe not even that) to come up with Apple architecture-optimized versions, leveraging unique acceleration coprocessor capabilities, for example, or using data formats (and sizes of those formats) that inference-execute optimally on Apple Silicon.

Beyond that, along with (I suppose) a dedicated Siri AI app this time around, it all sorta feels like two years ago all over again, this time leveraging a robust trained-model foundation. Which isn’t a bad thing, mind you, quite the contrary. And Apple’s not unrecoverably late, mind you, although if the company had kept waffling for another year or few, I might be saying something different. It’s all just …well…meh.

Obsolescence by design strikes again

Switching to hardware (still mentioned, albeit not newly introduced), and beyond the aforementioned Intel-based computer support demise, the messaging was something of a mixed bag. The company is already beginning to feature-set differentiate between various Apple Silicon system generations, although it hasn’t (yet, at least) started culling any of them from the supported-at-all list. The same goes for iPhones.

Apple has apparently decided that in the midst of a shaky economy, telling folks that they need to go buy new iPhones isn’t a particularly wise move. Similarly, although not exactly so, many (but not all) iPads that run iPadOS 26 are upgradeable to iPad OS 27, too, including I’m happy to say the four fondleslabs in the Dipert household.

And what about smart watches? The story here is unfortunately far more ugly. Apple has apparently decided that in the midst of a shaky economy, it’s still going to be able to (or at least try to) tell lots of folks that they need to go buy new Apple Watches. Including my wife, whose first-generation Watch Ultra has just gotten knifed. I guess I now know what I’ll be buying her for her birthday in a few months…

I’ve only hit here what I thought were the high points; plenty more announcements and tidbits also got covered elsewhere. But what do you think about what I’ve focused on in this piece? As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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