Today was Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference!

Big news of the day? Siri is profoundly smarter now! Sure it's not like that was a high bar to clear. Siri has been stupid as shit for years.

But anyway... let's get into it all, shall we?

• GOLDEN GATE! Craig is hilarious, as always. The naming announcement of MacOS 27 was almost too on the nose. That's how people think Apple operates in their big spaceship HQ, so why not lean into it?

• REFINEMENT! Focusing on fixing all the crap that users have been begging for seems like a good focus to have. And starting with addressing the horrendous readability problems with "Liquid Glass" is something I never thought Apple would even admit (remember the butterfly keyboard fiasco?). Fine tuning performance is also essential, and speeding up Photos will be a welcome change that's been a long time coming. Fixing searches is nice, but it looks like they aren't going far enough in Mail. I switch over to Microsoft Outlook whenever I have to find stuff because Mail is so flippin' bad.

EQ? I had to rewind, because they blazed past being able to customize the equalizer on AirPods. Holy crap has this been a long time coming!

STREET VIEW! Dang dang dang does the new refinements to Apple Maps 3D views look stunning. I know it will take a while to roll out to everywhere (and some locations like my backwater will be skipped as usual) but this is very cool.

PRIVACY! Apple has always seemed to be more concerned with personal privacy than other companies... and I'm happy that they are going full-throttle on keeping kids safe... but boy did they spend a lot of time on the topic. I get having this as a supplement to the keynote, but to go this hard on it within the keynote just made it feel that Apple didn't have enough material to present, so they dragged this out.

• BAIL OUT! At least they're not hiding that Google bailed out their asses. Apple couldn't manage to get AI working on their own, two years after telling us "Apple Intelligence" was here, so they had to form a "deep collaboration" with Google to use their Gemini AI instead. Unreal. And, as much as I love Craig, his presenting Apple's catastrophic failure as a positive thing was pathetic. I would have had far more respect if he had said "We announced too soon, we lied about where we were at, we fucked up, we apologize, and here's how we're fixing things." But that's not what we got, and I think it was a misstep.

• CONTEXT! The above point having been said, I do appreciate that Apple is putting rails on their AI "solution." The fact that there's an abstraction layer which disassociates users from the AI servers seems a responsible way to keep privacy as a priority.

• FUNKY ORB! I am very, very disappointed with the new representation of Siri in MacOS. I wanted them to use Lil' Finder Guy... but instead we get an orb? I do like that it's being integrated into the island.

• SIRI AI & DEEP INTEGRATION! So far, I have not been impressed with how AI has been "helping" me out on a day to day basis. It's been so bad that I've turned it off or am regularly ignoring it. Watching the demonstration of the new Siri AI makes it seem that Apple it finally... finally upgrading dipshit Siri to something useable. Something that other platforms (namely, Android) has been doing for years now. Better late than never, I guess?

&bulls; VOICE! I'm telling you right now... if Apple removes the Australian guy who's been my default voice for Siri, I will be upset. Hopefully they hired the same guy to create this new "more expressive" voice.

• A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION! The guy presenting Siri conversational chat was way, way too excited about something you have been able to do with ChatGPT for years. I mean, sure, it's nice that Apple has integrated all of it into their OS offerings, and it seems that it's a take on AI that's actually useful for once... but let's stop pretending that this is brilliant new technology. It's kinda embarrassing. And I maintain that before any of these people demonstrate some "amazing new feature" they should have apologized that they forced people to buy new iPhones TWO YEARS AGO to get the crap that they're delivering only just now. I wouldn't have bought the iPhone 16 Pro Max had I known dumbass Siri wasn't going to be fixed until iPhone 18 Pro Max was nigh. Apple owes me an apology... and money.

• APP INTEGRATION! Apple Intelligence being dumped into apps seems like something that sounds great but, in reality, is something I don't want and don't use. For example, having Safari monitor a web page for changes might be useful, but it remains to be seen whether it can recognize what I'm wanting... or just blow out an alert for hundreds of changes that have nothing to do with what I'm wanting it to watch. Another example? The Passwords app being able to go update all my bad passwords with more secure passwords is great. But I have had numerous problems with Passwords not recording new passwords, so this could quickly turn into a nightmare. I hope there's a way to select the sites so I can test this.

• HOMESHIT! HomeKit is a fucking disaster. Here's hoping that, at minimum, Apple Intelligence can fucking backup all my fucking automations so they can be restored when Apple fucking deletes them for no reason. And forgive me for being doubtful that my existing Nest cameras will be "supported" so Apple Intelligence can keep watch on stuff for me. Nope. Apple will likely only be compatible with brand new cameras with no help for older models. So they are announcing something that likely won't be able to be used by the majority of people who would actually like to use it. Not cool.

• SHORTY! Using Apple Intelligence assistance to create shortcuts is nice... but I can't help but wonder how reliable the shortcuts will be. If Home is deleting shit all the time, I don't know that I feel the shortcuts won't do the same. Still, this is a use of AI that seems an actual benefit. Hopefully.

• IMAGE SLOPGROUND! Oh great. Apple is helping people create their own AI slop easier than ever! Fuck them for this Image Playground bullshit that steals from real artists.

• DISRESPECT! Here we go. Apple "respects photography" SO MUCH that the AI tools they're giving you are going to honor the original photo. Sure. Surrrrrre. I mean, the new "reframing" tool looks crazy-cool, but is it really "respecting" anything about the original photo if it's changing everything about it? I'm not going to lie, if these tools are any good I will undoubtedly use them because they are getting more and more capable... but I have so many questions about whether these tools were built ethically by compensating the photographers whose work was used to "generate" stuff... or if it was scraped without permission?

• GET PAID! Well, the AI photo crap isn't free... it costs real money by way of "credits" that come with iCloud Plus subscriptions. Wonder how much of that money goes to all the photographers and artists who got ripped off to train these tools? What's that? ZERO DOLLARS?!? Wish I could even pretend to be surprised.

• MODELS! Oh shocker. The most "advanced" features of all this AI crap won't be available on my two-year-old iPhone 16 Pro MAX, even though I bought it specifically because Apple told me that it would be able to take advantage of the cool "any day now" features they were releasing. This is profoundly shitty, and fuck Apple for being such assholes about it. Everybody who bought the iPhone 16 Pro Max should get a huge sweetheart deal on a new model. But will that happen? No. Trillions of dollars in valuation doesn't come from taking care of your customers and keeping promises.

• IN SUMMARY: "Enhanced with Apple Intelligence, not replaced by it." Sure, Jan. Sure.