WWDC 2025 roundup

You probably know by now, but Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) opening keynote is one of the big highlights in my calendar.

I love software design, and Apple do it pretty well; I also spend a lot of time using their software, whether on my wrist, in my hand, on my lap, or desk.

Apple Intelligence

It started with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it explanation for the headline AI features from last year’s keynote that they didn’t deliver, citing their high quality assurance bar as the reason. Fair enough, I suppose, but it’s not like Apple to announce something that they know might not ship.

There was a bit more AI at this year’s event, with a nice Visual Intelligence feature via the screenshots. I’m still not all that blown away by the whole AI thing, but it’s coming in useful here and there. Maybe in time I’ll wonder how I managed without it, but that’s years off.

Liquid Glass

The headline news was the new visual design language, Liquid Glass, which looks lovely but gives me iOS 7 vibes, in terms of its accessibility, particularly from a contrast point of view with all those translucent backgrounds. I’m sure I’ll dig into that when I get the chance.

Spotlight

A visual refresh is great, but it’s new and improved features that are the most useful; the feature that jumped out to me was Spotlight on macOS.

I use spotlight as my app launcher, rather than the Dock, and the extra power it’s getting will be welcome:

• Quick-launch looks great, so I can carry out an action like adding a to-do list item to Reminders by typing a, r (‘add reminder’)
• It also allows you to do a bunch of things directly inside Spotlight, like typing out the reminder you’ve just quick-launched, rather than going to the Reminders app itself; a bit like Siri, only I don’t have to worry about it constantly misinterpreting my Scottish accent
• Clipboard History looks perfect for me! I use Pastebot for that at the moment, but Pastebot’s other features are wasted on me so I’ll be fine with Clipboard History inside Spotlight

Juicy but not of benefit to me

The changes to iPadOS are probably the most consequential of all, but only for iPad users, and I’m not one. Introducing windows brings it much closer to the Mac experience and, while I’d be interested to try it out, I often need deeper control using things like Terminal to do the work I do, so iPad would never be much more than a writing and scribbling device for me.

Features without fanfare

There are also a handful nice features sneaking in too, which they didn’t speak about but showed on a quick slide:

• Select partial text in a bubble in Messages (finally!)
• Custom snooze length for alarms (not just 9 minutes anymore)
• Export notes to Markdown, which gives me yet another reason to double down on using the Notes app

What’s missing

It has got to the point where there’s not much I’m really desperate for in the way of features across the Apple ecosystem. If you really pressed me, I would have liked draft messages to sync across devices. Slack does that: start writing on your phone, pick it up on your Mac (or vice versa). Only the other day I found a month-old, half-written message on my Mac that I would have noticed and sent had it had it appeared on my iPhone. But I’m not pining for that.

The odd thing I never knew I wanted might appear, as with iPhone Mirroring last year, but in general all I want year-on-year is refinement.