Your biggest questions from Apple's WWDC

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0:40Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast. of Corner Radii. I'm your friend David Pierce, and on today's show, we are going to answer a bunch of your questions about WWDC. WWDC, Apple's big developer conference, started on Monday. We got a lot of new announcements, lots of new stuff for all kinds of Apple devices, big new Siri AI, Apple intelligence.

1:16The phrase private cloud compute was used 450 ,000 times. You all had a lot of questions. We have lots of answers. Neil I. Patel is going to join me from his hotel room somewhere in the Bay Area, and we're going to go through as many of your questions as we can, it's going to be great. But first, here is everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, June 10th, 2026. Users are starting to get access to a new Anthropic model called Claude Fable, a very good name for an AI model. It's based on the Mythos model that Anthropic previously said was too dangerous to release to the public.

1:50And now, basically two months, a bunch of hemming and hawing about security, and one giant hack of Mythos later, here we are. It's being released to the world. Anthropic says the model is particularly good at software engineering, knowledge work, and vision, which makes sense. Those are the three of the things that Anthropic is very focused on in enterprise AI. But it's also double the price of the company's other flagship model, Opus 4.8. Use those tokens wisely, my friends. Meanwhile, Xbox leaders have said that they're exploring radically different, that's a direct quote, radically different business models for the Xbox.

2:21Basically, with RAM making everything so expensive, Microsoft seems worried that not everyone will be able to afford a console going forward. especially not the one we know of as Project Helix, which is apparently just a super high-end gaming PC. What are radically different business models? Maybe it'll be ads. Maybe it'll be even more focus on Game Pass and streaming on any kind of hardware. Maybe it'll be lots of companies making lots of different kinds of Xboxes. Right now, under new leader Asha Sharma, it seems nothing is off the table for Xbox. And finally, we have our first look at the Social Reckoning, the sequel to The Social Network, coming later this year.

2:55And more importantly, we got our first look at Jeremy Strong trying to look and sound like Mark Zuckerberg. People around here understand that when I say no, that's the end of the debate. I'm not two years out of a dorm room anymore, Charlie. Look around. The Frances Haugen story is an important and big and fascinating one, but I'm not so sure about this movie, you guys. We'll see. You can read more about all of this at TheVerge.com. That's it. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, June 10th.

3:27All right. Now, let's get to your questions from WWDC. We had the live stream on Monday where we gave kind of our first thoughts on everything. It was pure chaos. But, Neelai, you are here. Welcome, Neelai Patel. What's up? From, I would say, looking at you, you're in an Aloft hotel. Like, that's the distinct vibe that I'm getting from your background. This is definitely the Marriott Confederates in Aloft Hotel. It's the AC Hotel. I've never been. It's very corporate. Yeah, I love it. I assume every single person who is in your hotel is WWDC related in some way. Yeah, there's a lot of software developers just looking furious at their agents.

4:03Yeah, that sounds about right. So we have a bunch of questions that people sent us about WWDC, about some of the announcements. But first, I just want to get a vibe check because one of the things we talked a lot about on Monday's show was how different and sort of bizarre the keynote was. Like just a very different presentation from Apple than we're used to at WWDC. What was it like in the room at Apple Park? You know, it's really interesting. I saw all the commentary about how the video was different online. No one there actually experienced the video that way. Like we were outside, we're watching it together, but it's just in that environment, like you're watching a giant projection of a video.

4:43You don't spend time being like, well, that lighting's kind of blown out. This is obviously handheld, shot on an iPhone. Why is everyone walking so much? Yeah. Right, like it just, it kind of doesn't happen to you, especially for me because I'm live-logging, so I'm just typing furiously. I have to go back and watch the video every time to figure out what happened. So in the space, what you were really getting, and especially as you walked around and we did a bunch of reporting and went to briefings afterwards, you really got the sense that Apple wanted to prove it. Like that was by far the vibe was this stuff is real.

5:13It works. We're doing the live demos. They had a tech talk with Craig Federighi afterwards and Mike Rockwell and a bunch of the team. They were doing the live demos in that room. They were standing up in front of a room for reporters, like gesturing at architecture slides. The vibe was, this works now. We got caught with our pants down two years ago, and now we are only talking about things we are shipping that works, and we're being responsive to criticism. By the way, the first thing they announced was an opacity slider for liquid glass on Mac OS. Like literally the first announcement of WWC.

5:44So that was the vibe there. Like, I wouldn't say serious. It was like a party vibe. Like they were in full celebration mode because the thing was working and it was shipping. But it was very, it wasn't as goofy as years past. Like, they weren't covering anything up with, like, theatricality or production value. And I think that came through on the video. I think everyone saw that in the video. Like, there wasn't a lot of special effects for CGI, Craig Federighi. In the space, it was just very different. Like, on campus, walking around Apple Park, it was very, we did it, right? You like it. Would you like to see another live demo of it working?

6:20And that we just kind of, like, lived through that over and over again. Yeah, I saw a lot of people talking about the slowness of the demos and the fact that you actually got to sort of watch it think every time. And I had the same reaction you did, which is like, this is Apple making damn sure that you can't accuse it of not showing real demos. Like, out of its way to be like, no, no, no, this is how long it takes. Yeah, without question. And even the demos that we actually saw, things took a while. And I think part of that in real time, in person, was all the developers had downloaded the betas and private cloud compute was just on fire.

6:56Like, some of the demos just didn't work. And the people doing the demos were like, yeah, PCC is on fire today. Like, sorry about that. We're going to try again. And I very much appreciated that. Do you know what I mean? Totally. The notion that Apple had built this stuff, that it was working, that the demos were experiencing real failure as opposed to everything being on Rails. You know, it's in beta. There was something about that that was just honest in a way that lots and lots of Apple presentations have just been infomercials for years. This one was very much like we made products, we're shipping it.

7:28We have a point of view about what they can and can't do. And we really want you to talk about it. Even down to Craig and team doing the live briefing for journalists afterwards, which it was good. You know, they know their stuff and they were there and Tim Cook was sitting in the front row. And it just struck me that they were a little nervous, not in a bad way. They weren't off their game at all. They were just out of practice. They hadn't done it in so long. Talking to real people. Talking to real people and completing sentences without getting to retake it. There was just an element of Craig getting on stage and being like, hey, everybody, this is what this is like.

8:07I'm feeling this for the first time in ages. Yeah. Which I thought was good. I think it's good for Apple to be in that position of saying we have to prove that the thing works this time. Yeah, I think that's right. All right, let's get into some questions. And actually, the first question is about the structure of the keynote itself. Here's the first question. Hey, this is Gabe from D.C. I had a question about your thoughts on the WWDC keynote. I noticed this year Apple barely segmented out anything into a specific section on iOS, on watchOS, on iPadOS, et cetera. There's like one small thing at macOS and apologizing for how bad the design was.

8:52But this struck me as a weird question. Is Apple moving to kind of a post-OS specific product line? And it just seems like what Google does, they just kind of talk about features and the assumption is that all their platforms will get the features. So is Apple going to start like de-emphasizing, you know, all of their operating system, specific features, and just kind of move to a general, this is what we're doing this year? I don't know. That seems like an interesting thing and a big shift for Apple. Here's some of your thoughts. Thanks so much. I just want to say using Google as the example of the assumption that all their platforms will get the features is so generous to Google that I appreciate that.

9:32But, Neal, this jumped out to me, too. What did you make of, like, the actual structure of the thing? We're so used to it going a very specific way. What did you make of the way this one went? I think the only feature of note that they announced was the Apple Intelligence stuff, and that does work across all the platforms. If they had gone platform by platform, I think just narratively, they would have announced Apple Intelligence five times in a row. When we actually did go to the briefings and the demos, the way it works on different platforms is different. And they showed us Apple Intelligence working in different ways on the iPad.

10:05Like, they're very proud that on the iPad you can swipe down from the top and there's a little animation that drops the sort of spotlight pill down. It's very cool, by the way. It might be the single coolest thing in the 27 operating systems is a little swipe down on the iPad. On the Mac, you know, there's context menus and they've re-architected Spotlight in command space. And now you can hit command shift space to take a context screenshot for Siri AI, which is just a new keyboard command. Like operating system by operating system, there are differences. There are different features in the operating systems, but the things that they announced cut across.

10:39And most importantly, Apple intelligence cuts across. And I don't think there's a way you can do that and then go back through the operating systems. And if you look at the structure of the keynote and there are three pillars, the first thing they announced was refinement. Yeah. Mac OS 27 Golden Gate is, you know, it's the snow leopard of this era of Mac OS. Yeah, we fixed all the stuff we broke the last time was very much the vibe. And so I think they just didn't want to do lists of features. I think they wanted to talk about their core capability. Interestingly, the family stuff, the, you know, the child safety stuff, all of those features are out already.

11:17They reannounced a bunch of tools that already exist. And the thing that's really different is the underlying architecture has been updated so that those tools might actually work now. And that, to me, is just a big section is Apple responding to regulatory pressure around the country in different states and around the world in different countries because there's so much of it. And their products have existed and they paid no attention to them that they essentially fixed it. So maybe they'll work. We have to do the testing. They don't work now. So maybe the architecture will make them actually work.

11:51And then they reannounced a bunch of features to point out that they exist, which I thought was utterly fascinating. So, but you don't think there's some bigger sort of reshuffling in how Apple thinks about operating systems here? Because I think one line you could draw from the AI thing you're saying is that if you think Apple intelligence and Siri AI are the sort of umbrella features across everything, then maybe spending a lot of time thinking about iOS and iPadOS and macOS as fundamentally different things is not useful anymore. And that maybe this becomes a more sort of, I don't know, like single OS company rather than being as individual silos as it has been over time.

12:34But it sounds like you're just saying this is more of like a keynote planning thing, not a giant rethink in how Apple thinks about software. It's true in the case of Siri AI, which is a cloud service. So Apple has instantiated Siri AI as a cloud service across all of its devices. And for all of the talk about on-device processing they did, almost everything happens on private cloud compute. Even deciding where the request should go in many cases goes up to PCC. So you say something to Siri AI and it might decide that the request itself is going to PCC and then PCC is going to tell your device, oh, I need more.

13:14I need you to give me the onscreen context and then your device will decide what to do. And I think all of that is fascinating. I don't think that Apple is getting away from the app model on iOS or the sort of open run whatever you want model on macOS. They were very clear that the way these devices work is still different, that Siri AI is going to work on these devices differently. I think the mashing together that you're reacting to is because Siri AI is a horizontal cloud service. Like, fundamentally, it's a service. And you can access it on different devices in different ways. But at the end of the day, it's just a thing that now exists across the Apple ecosystem.

13:54Yeah, I think that's fair. That makes sense. All right, let's move on to the next question. This is just a very specific demand for you in particular, Eli. Here it is. Hi, David and the BridgeCast. This is Drew. I'm actually listening to the episode right now, like live. So, like, I'm, like, calling you and listening to you live right now. I'm turning it down. Apologies. Anyway, I just wanted to say, can we have Eli do, like, a tight five on corner radii and how much it matters that Apple took a second in the keynote to talk about the radius of app corners. And I don't know. I mean, I almost never do the beta on my Mac, especially not day one.

14:35And I did for that because all of my family's chats are in WhatsApp. And the corner radius was always different than everything else. It was such a nightmare. So if we could get some representation of this major success, and major win from WWDC, potentially the biggest for me and people with my ilk, I would love it. Neal, the floor is yours. Corner Radii, the greatest day of your life. It was, it's very good that it's the first thing that they announced. And to your theme of we fixed it, all the stuff was broken. All the people who ran those projects are gone. Alan Dye, the head of design is gone.

15:14He works at Meta now. John Giandria, who was the head of AI, who oversaw the broken Apple intelligence launch is gone now. These are new people, and they have the freedom to say the stuff was broken. And boy, was the stuff broken in Tahoe. Boy, did they get completely away from what in particular makes the Mac the Mac in Tahoe, which is an absolute laser focus on user interface design and human interaction design. So I was very pleased they led with it. I saw John Gruber walking around. He looks very proud of himself. He is fully taking credit for all of these changes. You know, the opacity slider for liquid glass is, by default, it's set in the middle.

15:56And they asked me, like, where would you put it? And I was like, all the way to the right. Like, as opaque as I can get it. I just want my buttons back. There was one part in the keynote where they announced that they're just adding colors back to menu items in Windows so that you know which window is the active window. There's an element that's very silly, right? All the corner radii are going to match now. There's also an element of that's what you are buying when you buy an Apple product. You are buying the attention to detail and the focus and the sense of design. And if you want chaos, you can go get Windows or you can go get a Samsung phone or something else.

16:27But what you buy from Apple is one very constrained vision of design. I'm glad they're back to it. I would also connect it to how they're thinking about Apple intelligence design. I just interviewed Sundar, and I was like, do you want to look at this search result? And his response was, we have a very scientific way of measuring whether the search results are good. Like, there's no qualitative design over there. That's just not how they think about their products. Apple is very happy to talk to you about corner radii and fixing it now that Allen Dye is gone. And, you know, he kind of pushed on that in different conversations I was having.

17:02There's a reason why they haven't jumped all the way into agents. There's a reason why they haven't done all of the things that everyone else is doing. They want to be thoughtful about that. Now, the uncharitable read is they're not ready for that. They had to reset the whole thing and all the features are basically free chats, VT from two years ago in a more privacy-focused way. But their argument is no one knows how any of this should work. And Apple's point of view is, yes, we will be two years late and get it right. And, like, that's Apple. That's the thing that they are doing right now. And I think corner radii is just evidence that they want to be that company.

17:36Yeah. And I think, like, again, I'm trying not to read too much into keynote structure. But leading with that, I think you're exactly right. It's like we are back to attending to detail in a way that I think made a lot of people very happy. Like an easy win with all the Apple nerds out there to just do that. And it is one of those things that once you notice it, you can never, ever stop seeing it. So I'm very glad that they fixed this. I mean, I never installed Tahoe. You managed to avoid it entirely? Yeah, I've got two years on installing on a OSU table. Genuinely really impressive. I keep seeing celebrities' posts, me in the 90s versus now.

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20:25so the 2026 midterms is shaping up to be an all-out brawl but the biggest fight may not be between democrats and republicans but over the congressional maps itself gerrymandering is not a good thing we don't like it and then all of a sudden we're going out and telling people vote for this so i'm in ashland virginia a small town just outside of richmond which calls itself the center of the universe. And that checks out because it's the center of the political universe, at least when it comes to the 2026 midterms. That's because Ashland sits in Virginia's first congressional district, which is one of only about 35 or so that are actually competitive.

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21:32All right, let's get to the next question. This is from Conlon, who says, What for you is the best feature that would normally be a big deal in a WWDC keynote that would send developers wild, yet this year was swallowed by all the time given to AI nonsense? For me, it would be Markdown in the Notes app. Do you have one off the top of your head? Like, would have been a huge deal any other year except all they wanted to talk about was Siri? Well, so it is Markdown in the Notes app. That did get a little cheer. Like, it was there. People saw it on the Bento box. Like, that's cool. The one that, like, they talked about it, but it was just, like, the wrong moment in time to get the cheer was the agentic coding in Xcode.

22:11Like, they're very proud of it. And the fact that you can swap the models out to Codex and CloudCode and all the other ones, there's something big brewing in Xcode that gets no attention. And they talked about it more in the developer State of the Union, but Xcode is becoming a big agentic coding platform for Apple developers, or at least they're trying to, and they know they have to keep up. And so I think from the developer perspective, the idea that they're just going to lose to CloudCode is not an option, and they're going to have to push Xcode down that direction. That's a good one. Um, can I, can I give you two?

22:47Well, I have two and a half because one of them you're just going to make fun of me for. Um, so I, I've been going through, they put up this slide at one point that was just like a billion words of like, here are the improvements that we're making. Uh, and I've been going through and trying to pull out the ones that are in there that didn't get talked about a lot. Um, one that I personally am very excited about is audio scrubbing in the now playing screen in CarPlay to be able to actually just use your finger to move audio, uh, for as somebody who has to play the same song over and over and over for my three-year-old, that's going to change my life.

23:19Um, one that I think actually might qualify as like would have been a big deal any other time, um, is extra large widgets. They introduced a new widget size that is now basically the full size of your home screen. I've only seen screenshots. I don't have it on my phone yet, but, uh, it is, it is just a widget that takes up the whole space that your entire app grade would. And it becomes essentially an interactive app on your home screen. And I think like, if you want to get real galaxy brained about that, there's something really interesting happening. And like, how do we just elevate some of your most used apps to your home screen?