Siri AI, Screen Time, and the rest of WWDC 2026: The Vergecast Livestream

23:37there is also an interesting moment that I thought was just so like Apple marketing, just typical Apple marketing kind of trying to make sure that everyone knows, oh, like even though we made a mistake, it's actually a good thing. So they said some appear to be racing forward, pursuing AI for the sake of AI. At Apple, our mission has always been to turn the potential of advanced technology into helpful and intuitive products for everyone. So basically they're saying like, oh, like we didn't rush. See, like we're two years late, but we didn't rush. And we were working on something that's human centric.

24:10And even that is pretty late because we saw Microsoft and a ton of other companies rebrand AGI last year to be like human centric AI. And they all coined these terms to kind of make AI look less scary. Didn't really work. But yeah, it's just funny how Apple saying, oh, it's good that we're late. And we're doing this new thing, making it about humans, which is the marketing tactic that every single AI company is using right now.

24:34David Pierce:Yeah, it's good that we're late on these things that we promised you two years ago and have since been sued over. Yeah, Apple's ability to turn totally blowing this into a marketing victory, never not impressive. Just mind-blowingly great. Can we talk about the new Siri voice for just a minute? I have a clip of the new voice of Siri, which I actually think this is like a meaningful part of the thing. Like the actual experience of talking to these assistants is really important. This is the thing I kept hearing from people, even in the very early days of ChatGPT, that's like, if you make these things fun to talk to, you solve most of your other problems.

25:13David Pierce:Like they don't actually have to do anything if they're fun to talk to. Can I play you this clip of the voice? and then I just want to litigate if this voice is actually a good Siri voice. Let me see if I can do this. Said, team, these apricots are peak. Have they always been this good? Why has no one told me? I'm telling you, man, I've been changed. Clear the fridge. No, clear all the fridges. On it, Jaws. And you can customize Siri's voice like never before, adjusting expressivity and pace until it clicks. Hi, let's find the right voice for you. I'll practice some things I like to say while you listen.

25:54Let me try this one out. You have one new message. Here's another one. Your timer is set for one minute. Now for some directions. At the next stop sign, turn right.

26:05David Pierce:Okay, our chat is as thrown by this as I am. Hayden, these apricots are peak. I want to know what you think. How do you feel about the apricots? I, I cringe so deeply hearing this live, like during the keynote, I couldn't, I had to stop writing and just stop. I couldn't handle it. Also, I think it, it combines the worst, most cringe part of people trying to adopt like slang and the worst parts of like the millennial voice of yesteryear, you know, like the BuzzFeed style. Like what did it say after the apricots being peak. It was like, clear the fridge. No, clear all the fridges. It's just like the old YouTube.

26:47I don't know. It's very stuck in the past and very cringe, just like what I'm sure whatever voices they trained it on, you know?

26:58David Pierce:Decidedly not Scarlett Johansson on this one. Decidedly not. Yeah, I think, I don't know, Jake, what's your read on this? It is undoubtedly better than old series like for for that you when they play this the first time i we were all in slack chatting about about it and i was like i think my headphones messed up like that couldn't have been right it's like uh but no yeah that's i it's weird that they said it's more expressive and then they like immediately play something where the voice just like is supposed to get excited and then it's like i'm gonna stay really neutral like i were reading ad copy for a pharmaceutical and it's like I that was that is what it was maybe that was part of the unnervingness it was like not not only was it trying to be like hip but also the vocal energy didn't match that either um so you didn't believe it it's like yeah like ad copy that's what it read as and it kind of was which I don't know so maybe that's healthier for all of us yeah if we're like ah this thing's kind of stupid like that's that's what we need out of our AI assistance this year I'm not just imagining the like, it's the voice reading the side effects in every medication ad in history.

28:10David Pierce:It'll be perfect. It's very good. Theory will destroy those jobs. That is what we do. Yeah, it absolutely will. I do love the idea that you can customize it, actually. We just had a commenter saying that they prefer that their robot voices sound like robots. I fully agree with that. I want my robot voices to either sound like a robot or like a 1920s newscaster with that like mid-Atlantic accent and the sort of crackly staticky, like give me one of those telling me what's going on all the time and we're up to something. For me, it's like the robotic voice or if it's like a GPS, I need it to be a British man.

28:47Those are my only two. That's my only mix.

28:49David Pierce:Just very gently telling you when to turn left. Yeah, I said if I'm going to have a man yelling at me in my car, it's going to be a British guy. That's what I always say. I respect that. I get that. I keep seeing celebrities' posts, me in the 90s versus now. While the person staring at me in the mirror is definitely not the same person that could pull off bootcut jeans, time creeps up on us so slowly. You don't see it until suddenly you do. Same thing goes for your bills. A dollar here, an uptick there. It's a slow burn until one day you realize the price you're paying now is way higher than when you signed up.

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31:35David Pierce:The one other thing I want to talk about, and we should pivot off of AI because there's other stuff to talk about here, but this idea of sort of Siri app intense and spotlight search And the idea that you can like pull everything into the AI strikes me as the place Apple actually has a shot at doing something meaningfully different than what anybody else can do. Right. You have like endless competition in terms of what thing can I ask questions to. And I think a lot of people already have habit built there. Siri has been so bad for so long that a lot of people, I think, happily use Gemini and Claude and whatever.

32:12David Pierce:I talk to people every single day who have the action button on their iPhone to voice mode for some AI thing. But the idea, like we're seeing here in the stream, that you can grab a bunch of files and right-click in the Finder and ask Siri about them is so much better than pulling it all into Claude or ChatGPT or something else. That it's like, these are the things where Apple might have a real chance to win because it is just so seamless. And when you go to Spotlight and you just start typing and you ask a question, having it ask Siri that question and understand that you're asking Siri a question rather than looking for, you know, just a file on your computer.

32:51David Pierce:That's the kind of stuff where it's like, OK, if you believe in AI, this is the stuff where Apple has a real user interface chance to win here. Am I crazy thinking that's the stuff that's actually exciting if you're Apple? I think that's true. And I also think that a lot of these companies are just so divorced from like what consumers actually want. And in this case, if Apple can actually deliver on some of this stuff, it is some of it, as we said, there's a big range here, but some of it is really what consumers want. One example is, you know, the iMessage search has been horrible the past year.

33:25If I search for someone's address, can't find it. Like I always have to ask again. And then one of the examples they gave was, oh, like, what's Jeff's new address? Yeah, like, pull up the directions to this nature spot with a stop at Jeff's. So if it can actually deliver on that type of thing, great. We all have so much data right now in our lives that, like, searching through it in a better way is something that every consumer wants and gets extremely frustrated by. So I think, you know, this is one of the areas where they can win.

33:53David Pierce:yeah they can all Craig Federighi right right now as we speak Craig Federighi is giving some kind of like technical explanation of how this all works and I think every time you say Hayden if it works I just keep thinking well it's gonna work because it works when Gemini works and it's just Gemini so I think to me this question of like to what extent is this just Gemini and to what extent is Apple doing its own thing trying to run stuff on device like this mix of private cloud compute and on device processing and Gemini it is unknown enough that we should probably still be skeptical that it's going to work but just the fact that Gemini underpins it I feel like gives me vastly more confidence than I had in you know their ability to do this two years ago well that that was the only stuff we saw that was like fully new right it's like they kept doing these uh goofy demos that we've seen a hundred times before of planning a party or a trip or whatever and it's like okay like this this doesn't happen every day, so this isn't very useful.

34:50We are fully aware that chatbots can pull together an agenda for you. Great. It is specifically highlighting files on your computer and having it go to a private server to give you an answer based on whatever's going on with them. That's new. That's unique. And that's a thing that if Apple can pull it off, this will actually be a somewhat at least more compelling product than a lot of the other things. It's also why we don't know if it's actually going to work yet. It's kind of like, as we always say, like, or I always say this, enterprise AI is like the most useful right now for a lot of different reasons.

35:26But this is kind of like enterprise AI for the consumer because it's like you can search your own data and files and query them. So, like, I mean, that's one of the main reasons enterprises pay big bucks for this stuff. So if you can do it yourself on your own files, great. That will actually be a useful AI agent for one.

35:45David Pierce:Yeah, I totally agree. Okay, the only other thing we should talk about on AI, and I left this to the very end because I know I'm the only one of the three of us that cares. You can now Vibecode shortcuts, and that is going to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I'm going to ruin my phone trying to Vibecode shortcuts and Vibecode extensions for Safari that let you do things. But this idea of you can do things on your phone just by asking your phone to do it is what AI is supposed to enable. And I think that's one instantiation of it that I think is very cool. Actually, I thought it was very bold.

36:17It was surprising to see Apple adding basic bits of Vibe coding, particularly they also added in Safari, you can Vibe code extensions that like change individual websites, which is like actually a very powerful little feature. And I think among the many problems with AI, it is taking this very kind of abstract product and productizing it. and that's one thing where it's like, okay, this is still for power users, but you can figure out ways to use that.

36:49David Pierce:Yeah, yeah. I think all of that stuff, again, remains to be seen how this is all going to work. Potentially very cool. Shortcuts, my opinions about shortcuts are well-documented. Shout out to our buddy, Stephen Robles, who is in the room at WWDC and I'm sure just like passed out out of joy that we can vibe good shortcuts now. sorry can I mention one more Siri please I don't know how you skipped over this Siri is now a little orb that on the Vision Pro you can talk to it's a 3D orb that like glows or wiggles or something and they're like you can put it wherever you want you can just you just look at it and start talking to it and that was my favorite part it was how it looked before when you turned it on right I mean but now it's 3D that's true yeah it was yeah but the thing is if you're Apple there's nothing else you can do you can't do physical character because that's been tried a bunch of times and it always gets weird and creepy and people do sex things with it.

37:47David Pierce:You can't do Clippy. Clippy's ruined. You can't just do lights because that's what they've been trying to do and that didn't really work. At some point all that's left is gelatinous orb and I think we are in the gelatinous orb era of AI products. I did a video on being interviewed by AI for jobs which is a whole other thing but the point is there were three different companies that i tried and the only non like they were all bad but the least bad one had a gelatinous orb because it wasn't as creepy as like talking to a fake person so i'm a fan of the orb if you get out of the like terrible uncanny valley of all of this stuff um i do think the i think it's it's sort of silly and overly physical on Vision OS.

38:35David Pierce:I love the visuals on the iPhone. They showed a bunch. But the new thing where instead of being sort of the light all the way around and then the UX is not super obvious, now it's like it all just sort of exists. It's like Siri lives in your dynamic island. And when you do it, you get the little orb that comes out. And then the information kind of comes down from the dynamic island. And if you want to expand it, then you're basically, I think, in the Siri app? That I'm not creating. I have further complaints about this. Can you tell me if I have this correct? So now, on the iPhone, there are different interactions if you swipe down from the top left corner, from the top right corner, and from the center.

39:15Those all do different things. Yeah, yep.

39:19David Pierce:That's correct. This is not how it should be. And I assume you'll still be able to tap and long press on the dynamic island to do things. So, like, is it possible there are going to be somewhere between five and ten different interactions that you can do with the top of the screen on your iPhone? Absolutely, yes. There are nine different ways to access Siri. They have got to cool it. This is going to be like... It's the worst feature on the iPhone and the most accessible. I had to turn off Siri for a while on my iPhone because I've already, like, annoyed with accessing it all the time, and now it's going to be even worse.

39:53If I can just, like, dream redo this keynote, I want one hour dedicated to notifications and how they're going to fix it. Because this is how they fixed it in this keynote. They went, it's so bad, you can only find it by swiping down from the top left corner. That's what's happening. Don't worry about it. Just forget it's there.

40:13David Pierce:You have to just shake your phone violently. We've taken the undo shake. That's not bad, actually. You can get Siri by shaking it as hard as you can. That would be better. I don't have notifications on any apps. Like, literally, I only have messages. Because they're so bad. And I also check all the important apps enough that I don't need to be prompting myself to check it more. That's unhealthy as well. To be clear, that's the correct way to live your life. Like, congratulations on being a more well-adjusted human than either Jake or I. I'm sure we've both gotten hundreds of notifications since we've been sitting here.

40:46No, but also it's about that I check the apps enough that I don't need them, you know? That's fair. To each their own.

40:53David Pierce:Let's talk about some of the trots and safety stuff just for a few minutes. because I think, A, it was fascinating that Apple spent as much time as it did on this stuff. And B, I think the amount of time it spent and the actual stuff it's shipping were kind of not commensurate. Does that make sense, right? I think, again, I was so struck this whole time by Apple is making a very clear messaging pivot to we are the good guys. We are the ones you can trust. They've been doing this for a very long time, But I think especially at this moment, Apple is sensing the backlash to AI, this increasing sense among young people that they would like to be off of their devices.

41:37David Pierce:Never mind, I think it was V who said in the live blog that like, gosh, it's weird that Apple feels that way, given that they're literally called iPad kids. Like, it's Tim Robinson in the hamburger suit being like, we're all trying to figure out who did this. And even given all of that, I think Apple is, if Apple is serious about this idea of we need to give people more tools to responsibly use their devices, particularly kids, I think that's great. I don't think Apple shipped that much here. Like, they talked a lot about principles, Jake, but they didn't give us that much new stuff. it was as they were going through it, it was really, really difficult to figure out what already existed and what they were projecting that they might do in the future and what was actually shipping, you know, this year.

42:23Because I don't think it was that much. There were a couple new things that did seem like they were going to be really useful. They allow scheduling in screen time now. And I thought the most interesting thing that they... sort of talked a lot about but didn't do a ton with is they're going to give expert recommendations about how much screen time you should allow for different types of apps. I think that's like actually pretty interesting as a direction for them to go. Now, do you trust Apple on how much, you know, your kids should use their phone? You know, that's, we'll have to see what recommendations they come up with.

43:02They probably want your phone a lot, but that's an interesting idea that Apple, you know they're not saying that they're the x-ray they say they're partnering with experts nonetheless it's apple taking some responsibility and saying um we're gonna try to guide you in the correct direction on how much tiktok your kid should be using i would love to hear like some middle schooler and high schooler reactions to this because i was just imagining the reactions like listening to this and it was just so funny because it's like yeah your parent can change the recommendation or the lockouts on certain apps at any time with one tap.

43:37Like if they see you're using something too much, it's over. Or like during school, suddenly you're locked out of everything, which I think is good, but it would just be hilarious to see like, I don't know, it seems like it could go from like zero to 100 extremely quickly. So we'll see how parents use this.

43:54David Pierce:Yeah. I mean, as ever, I think whenever I talk to people about parenting limits and these kinds of controls, the overwhelming thing you hear is these are much more parenting questions than they are tech questions, right? And it's like, it's actually, this is much more about your relationship with your children than it is about any specific technology. But some of these things are, I would say, like, universally just a good idea, right? It's more options. The browsing stuff is really useful and important, I think. Like, that's been an easy way to get around a lot of the parental controls is the web exists.

44:32David Pierce:And this is going to give them more control over this stuff. I think it was called Ask to Browse, where they have to go on to some of the new websites. The strangest part to me, though, was Apple basically abdicating all responsibility when it comes to third-party apps. That they're like, this is a company that has such incredibly iron-fisted control over its platform whenever it wants it. But then I think even the phrase was something like, developers play an important role in ensuring kids are getting a good experience within apps, which means nothing. So they're like, we're giving you a bunch of tools.

45:07David Pierce:You can use them or not. And I think that to me is like, if you're as serious about this as Apple wants us to believe that it is, you have to come into this with stronger opinions. They didn't talk about parental controls with some of this AI stuff. Like, are kids going to have unfettered access to this new Siri? That changes the dynamic of what they can interact with in the same way that the web did. So to me, it's like, again, I'm just struck by how much time Apple devoted to this. Like, this is not a company that picks the order of operations by accident, right? And the fact that they talked about trust and safety before they talked about Siri is big and important and telling.

45:46David Pierce:But then to just say, like, here's a bunch of APIs, we hope developers do the right thing, was like, that was, it just didn't feel like enough to me. It's very pick and choosy. Like, do you remember when they were talking about, like the nudity and violence controls. Was that something that, and they said even if they're browsing, it will automatically, you know, blur stuff out. I don't know if that was just across everything, including external apps, or if it was only across Apple stuff and browsing. But yeah, that was an interesting example. Like, you know, they have the ability to do that anywhere.

46:19So why pick and choose? And then also I thought it was very telling, yes, that they didn't mention doing this with their own AI. And kids using AI is like a huge talking point right now in terms of like the effects.

46:32David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah. And I think Apple is, like Jake, you mentioned partnering with experts. They did a lot of offloading to the, I think it was the American Academy of Pediatrics, that it was kind of like, they make the rules, we're just implementing them. And so on the one hand, it's like, that's great. And I think that's a good thing. And I think Apple should probably not be the arbiter of how kids should use devices. that there are people who are better qualified to make some of those decisions. The American Academy of Pediatrics is not an organization I know about, but presumably is one of those things.

47:04David Pierce:But then it's like to make that kind of thing and then just say, this is a thing we care deeply about. We think it's super important. We hope developers do it. I mean, I think you have to look through the lens of the pressure on them from regulatory bodies and from, you know, advocates who want to see them be the arbiters here. As we talk about all the time, the only thing governments can agree on is that we need to protect children from technology. Like that's the only bipartisan issue in the world right now. Well, and to your point, you know, Apple has positioned itself dead center here. It is the source of power.

47:42And so if you do want to regulate these things, the easiest way to do that is to go through Apple. And so I think, does Apple care legitimately about our children? Like, like, Probably, probably. Like, I think these are all very nice, lovely features. But I think that a lot of this also goes back to when Apple gets called before the Senate or wherever, can they say, oh, actually, we already provide the ability for apps to do X, Y, and Z. We actually, we have all kinds of tools for parents to limit their, you know. I think a lot of this is based around potential to prevent them from having to do more, right?

48:20And yes, that is abdicating. But in avoiding that all out crackdown, they are at least adding some ability here. But it's true. They're not saying, hey, TikTok, you really better use the age API to tailor your content because, you know, they don't want to be in the process of having to moderate and all of that.

48:46David Pierce:Yeah, I mean, there were protesters outside of WWDC. It looked like handing out flyers about Apple continuing to host, you know, things like Grok and nudifying apps on the App Store. And it is increasingly hard to square those two things with each other. And there's some real cognitive dissonance with watching Apple talk about this stuff in the way that it does. I mean, I think Apple has put itself in a tricky position that somehow it manages surprisingly well. But, you know, if you look, I mean, God, all of Elon's apps are really the superstars here in terms of problematic. But like, if you look at the content on X or on Grok, it's like, does some of this violate the App Store's rules?

49:30Obviously. Yeah. Is Apple going to get more heat for removing it or for leaving it there? I remember when all the Grok stuff was happening, or the latest round, we asked Apple, are you going to take this off the App Store? And they just pleaded the fit. They never responded. And it was a question that, it was amid all the nudifying stuff. So I mean, yeah, I think they'd rather just kind of stay out of the conversation. They don't want to ruffle any feathers when they're so behind in the race. They don't want to mess with the current loyal users of whatever app. But is that a good thing? Probably not.

50:07David Pierce:Yeah, I think we, this is, again, it's a question that comes up a lot in the what will John Ternus do as CEO kind of universe right now because Tim Cook has been a person who has tried to walk a lot of lines and make a lot of people happy and has not taken a lot of what I would call very strong stances about much of anything. It'll be very interesting to see if the new CEO is willing to take bigger swings in the name of some of the values that Apple talks about. Let's talk about one more news thing, and then I just want to talk about features we're excited about for 10 minutes, and we're going to get out of here.

50:43David Pierce:This has been coming up a lot in the comments on the live stream too, which is Apple is kind of deliberately or otherwise treating the 27 operating systems as like a real hardware dividing line. It is dropping support for a huge number of Apple Watches. It's dropping support for a lot of older Macs when it comes to, especially like the Siri stuff, that is just sort of a much larger set of devices being left behind for this rev of the software than I think we're used to. Oh yeah, right, iPads too. A lot of old iPads are being dropped too. And Apple is a company that I think has a really strong track record of supporting its old devices and is just kind of clean breaking here.

51:33David Pierce:On some level, I think this is just technology, right? Like you need RAM in particular to do the kind of stuff Apple's trying to do on devices here. But Jake, were you surprised here that at the sort of sheer number of devices being left behind? Oh, yeah. I mean, this this feels like way more than usual and stuff that's pretty recent, right? Like the first Apple Watch Ultra isn't supported. Like that, that that's not something right. Like that's really something's up here. And I think AI is probably the reason I I assume there's probably some sort of RAM limitations here. There's also this interesting thing where there's like two tiers of Apple intelligence and you have to have enough RAM to get the better tier.

52:14But this is rough. I mean, listen, I personally, I bought an M1 iPad Air this time last year so that I could test the betas out. And I have to get rid of it now because it's not supported. And those, yeah, it was a few years old at the time when I bought it, which is a good deal. but um you know i expected it to last for a few more years um because apple is apple is like famously good at supporting uh operating system updates for years and years and years and it was this funny thing where you know google and android for the longest time were a disaster um and then even when they started saying you know when they started saying oh we're gonna do five years we're gonna do seven years it was interesting because the defense you know apple didn't have these promises of oh five years seven years whatever um but it was like oh but they do it anyway they don't need to promise it they just do it yeah and here it's like oh like when did the apple watch ultra come out i don't what like it wasn't that long ago and that's a premium iphone

53:11David Pierce:17 as one of our commenters just pointed out the base iphone 17 yeah this is wild this is and i think to me there's a really interesting thing happening here too which is not just that it's uh it's dropping a bunch of relatively recent devices but also that it is creating this sort of fragmented sliding scale of what can do what that may be probably not a super long-term problem eventually people will get powerful enough devices and it'll be fine but like how many years has apple spent making fun of the fact that not every android user is on the latest version of android and it makes it harder to develop apps because you don't know what you're developing for because a lot of people are going to be on older less powerful devices that run old software and actually can't run the new software.

53:57David Pierce:So you're like, do I leave a huge portion of my user base behind in order to support the new technology or do I risk being late to the new technology? Like, this is actually a problem Apple has been really good at avoiding with its products for a very long time. And it feels like it is walking into at least a few years of really complicated fragmentation on that front. There's a real like double whammy here too of number one, Apple spent years being very, very conservative with RAM allocations. There's a ton of Apple devices out there with like eight gigs or less of RAM. And now, RAMpocalypse is upon us.

54:34And so RAM is frigging expensive. And it's not like they can suddenly, you know, ship a bunch of devices that have tons of RAM. And you look at the MacBook Neo, which is an Uber hit, and by all means, a very great laptop, immediately losing access to brand new features, right? And it's like, what is going to cost Apple and or eventually probably consumers to upgrade the Neo to get access? Like, Apple is creating problems for itself. And, you know, the AI squeeze is creating problems for everybody. And it's true. It's going to be very weird because having just, like, literally, we just watched this keynote.

55:12I couldn't tell you which features are part of which systems.

55:17David Pierce:There's a very complicated, very long Verge story in our future that is just explaining what happens. We need like a really messy flow chart of devices and features and all of the things that you can still do. It's going to be complicated. and I like and what I wonder is how many people will bite the bullet and upgrade right because I think if you're if you're a cynical Apple watcher what you would say is this is just Apple forcing everybody's hand to buy new devices uh and you know the the lifespan of these devices is getting longer that's a threat to Apple so they are basically pulling the plug on everything and forcing you to upgrade um it's particularly rough that they open the keynote with we finally did it we took all the the hardware that's like running kind of slow and we sped it up by the way this isn't available on a lot of the old stuff and you can't have it yeah exactly and some of it like requires like interfacing with your friend right so it's like one of your your friend has the old one okay great like now you upgraded but still you it's just yeah there's a lot there yeah like yeah the 80 airdrop thing i was so excited about but now i'm like okay well all my friends have older phones than me.

56:31The text message thing where it shows which message sent via a specific bar on each portion of the message, very helpful for when I'm in the subway every single day. But who knows if others will be able to see it, you know? So yeah, there's a lot. Yeah.

56:47David Pierce:And we should say, there are a bunch of commenters talking about this. And I think, frankly, I don't have the exact list of supported devices in my head. We'll figure all of this out. But what seems to be the case is that a lot of devices are going to get OS 27 without a lot of the AI features. And we should also point out that Siri AI is in beta coming later this year. That is a bet I would have lost coming into WWDC. I figured coming out of 2024, the disaster that that was, Apple would not announce this thing until it had a thing to ship today. And I was very surprised to see it not actually launched in a more finished, available way.

57:26So we're still we're in this like liminal phase of AI for lots of people and lots of devices where in a sort of unreadable way, it's going to be hard to figure out what your device is going to get and when.

57:39David Pierce:And I think this is this is going to be this is just going to be a challenge for people. Let's we should go here in a couple of minutes. But let's just end on a happy note. Tell me features that Apple announced that you're excited about cool things coming to Apple devices. in 2026. What year is it? It's 2026, right? Yeah, coming into the Apple devices in 2026. I'll give you one. I'll go first. What do you guys think? The opacity slider on liquid glass. I'm dead serious. I think this is a great idea because Apple has spent a lot of time giving people more customization options on the iPhone in particular.

58:17David Pierce:And I think that's great. If you want to make your iPhone hideously ugly, that is your right. And you should not have to live in a world created for you by Apple's designers. There are people out there who like liquid glass. You're all wrong, but you are entitled to your wrong opinion. And that is fine. And that is a beautiful thing. So the fact that rather than say, we blew it, we're scaling it back, which in Apple's way is what it said, right? Like I cannot overstate the extent to which Apple saying, we've heard your feedback in a WWDC keynote is them saying, oh my God, we know we screwed it up so bad.

58:51David Pierce:We're so, so, so sorry. Just let people customize. Just let people turn the thing off who don't like it and let people get more liquidy and glassy. Like, what if you just couldn't see any of the buttons? If you want that, you should have that. And I think it's great that that's what this is. Go full liquid. I want the buttons to start dripping and falling apart. They need to, like, amplify the, like, fluid effects here. Like, why is my operating system not on Unreal Engine? I want ray tracing. There we go. They got to go further. Yes. Jake, what do you like? What are you excited about? Okay, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but Apple framed the...

59:33Well, they had a whole bunch of screen time upgrades, and they framed a lot of the stuff around child controls. But straight up, being able to schedule specific times when apps aren't allowed and how much time is allowed during those specific times, that's actually really, really useful. I have... Honestly, it's mostly for TikTok. But having a screen time limit on apps that you know are just sort of like time killers is really, really useful. But it's also very different during the week versus on the weekends or during, you know, work and school hours versus like at night when you really do have some time to kill.

1:00:15And so I think I thought that was a super smart addition and something that people will like legitimately get value out of. Totally. My bricks are so popular.

1:00:24David Pierce:yeah totally uh my only feature request on that front and this has been true for a long time is i need the screen time limits to be meaner to me like when it just throws up the thing and is like put in your passcode and you can bypass it i i just will do that screen time limits have never worked for me for that reason but if siri would just show up as i was hitting the button then it was like like don't don't you do it you stupid idiot go play with your kids instead do you know how successful that would be for me oh my god i would never look at tiktok again i don't remember what exactly it is, but Google added something for Android 17 where you like physically have to restart your phone if you want to like get rid of the limit that you put on it.

1:01:02And it's like, that's a great idea.

1:01:05David Pierce:That's effective, honestly. They're like, they're screwing with you a little bit. They're like, you're too lazy for this. That's why the brick works, like you were saying, Hayden, because it's like, oh, you want to look at TikTok? Walk over there and touch your fridge and then you can look at TikTok. And I'm like, fine. I won't. uh hayden what about you what are you excited about my favorites were just some of the like yeah really simple everyday things that i think will make my life a lot better like airdropping 80 faster um yeah the message bar telling you like what's been sent in a conversation there's so many times i'm on the subway and i'm like talking to a friend and i'm i didn't anticipate that i would lose service even though i do every single time and so i'm like sending like five messages in a row but then she sends a message and then it looks like i didn't get hers like Like there's a weird like so it just be so great to, you know, have a bar showing what was said and what wasn't so there's no miscommunications.

1:01:57And then, yeah, like the Wi-Fi thing being smarter about when to stay connected and when not to like that always bothers me so much when I have to like manually disconnect from like the plain Wi-Fi or whatever. And yeah, just like some of the in-message AI features like, oh, like your friend says, oh, can you bring this thing that I forgot last week? and you can click yes, set reminder. Because I'm never going to go and set the reminder on my own. It's just annoying and takes a lot of time. But if I could just do it with one tap or any of the other stuff in there, like yeah, sending the photos one tap or adding to a shared album, you can decide exactly which photos of who are going to be in there.

1:02:37Stuff like that is just going to save me a lot of time. So I really liked kind of the more boring, like everyday stuff that will actually help me. Yo, wait, the promise of them, they did promise that they're going to fix voice dictation, right? Because that is huge.

1:02:52David Pierce:So I'm confused by this. And chat, please chime in on this. By the way, to all the people in the chat, we are excited about the corner radii and the fact that... Don't worry about the corner radii. We love a good corner radii. That's true. I'm excited about that. The dictation thing I couldn't figure out is I've been reporting on these dictation apps like Whisperflow a lot recently, and people love them. and they work really well. And one of the things that has been astounding to me has been that Apple's dictation remains so terrible. They said dictation. That's about right. Yeah. No, they said dictation and then the demo they showed, and it's possible that I missed it, but the demo that they showed looked like AI text generation, which is not the same thing.

1:03:37David Pierce:Like they did a demo where it was like, okay, you can open up a document and tell it what you want and it will write the first draft of the document for me. That's a feature. I have no particular use for that, but that's a feature. What I want is we made the actual speech-to-text dictation on the iPhone better. And that's what I thought dictation would mean. Maybe that's there, and maybe I just missed the demo, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I started very excited about dictation and ended sort of disappointed unless I missed something. Okay, that's devastating then if they did not actually fix dictation.

1:04:11David Pierce:It's like hilarious how bad the dictation is on an iPhone. On my Pixel, I'm dictating text messages all day long. People hate getting them because my text messages are enormous. But you know what? I feel great. I have one friend that sends me a dictation text messages all the time. And as a recipient, horrible, horrible. But I would love if they fixed it. Yeah, that's good stuff. All right. Anything else we should talk about? I'm still in this like crazy headspace of what on earth just happened. Anything else on y 'all's mind before we get out of here? Theory is an orb. Screen time is better. and AI might be here soon.

1:04:48Done.

1:04:49David Pierce:AI is in beta on a wait list. In some regions. By the way, Siri AI, terrible name. Just call it Siri, people. You did it. It's Siri, but it doesn't suck now. Siri AI is not going to bring back all the people who hate Siri to Siri. But David, you have to put the word AI in everything. You do, because it makes your stock price go up. It is. I really feel like they put together two words that people hate and try to make it seem like it's a better thing. Yeah, I don't think that's going to go well. Drives me nuts. All right. We should get out of here. Thank you both for being here. This was a delight.

1:05:26David Pierce:We are going to be back on Wednesday with much more WWDC stuff. And so send us all of your questions. Neelai is flying a red eye home tonight, and then he's going to be on with me tomorrow afternoon answering all of your questions. So send them all in. 866-VERGE11 is the hotline. vergecast at theverge.com is the email address. There's a QR code on the screen. I don't know what to do something. Do it. QR code. I don't know. Everything will be fine. I promise. And we're going to be back Wednesday with that episode. I think one of the things we're doing right now is one show reporters are going out looking for all of the features that are coming to these devices that didn't get talked about in the keynote because I think there's an unusually large amount of stuff.

1:06:09David Pierce:coming to your phone and iPad and Mac this year that didn't get any screen time in the keynote because it was a weird-ass keynote. Here we are. But anyway, we'll be back tomorrow with our regularly scheduled programming. Thank you to Travis and Eric and Brandon and Denise and the whole team for putting all of this together. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock it.