In this episode of the AppleVis Extra podcast, Dave Nason is joined by Thomas Domville and Tyler Stephen for an in-depth discussion of Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote. The team examines Apple’s new presentation format, the company’s focus on refinement, trust and safety, and artificial intelligence, and what these changes mean for blind and low-vision users.
The conversation begins with overall impressions of the keynote, which the hosts describe as a departure from previous WWDC events. Rather than organizing announcements by operating system, Apple focused on three major themes: refinement, trust and safety, and AI. The hosts discuss why this approach reflects Apple’s increasing platform convergence and why this year’s event felt more like a “Snow Leopard” release focused on improvements and stability rather than a long list of new features.
A significant portion of the discussion centers on Apple’s expanded family safety and parental control features. The hosts explore improvements to Screen Time, website access controls, contact approval requests, and age-verification technologies. They also discuss how Apple’s new Declarative Age Range API could potentially reduce accessibility barriers while helping companies comply with growing age-restriction requirements worldwide.
The podcast then shifts to Apple Intelligence and the newly announced Siri AI experience. Thomas, Tyler, and Dave discuss Apple’s renewed effort to deliver the AI-powered Siri capabilities first previewed several years ago. Topics include contextual awareness, world knowledge, app actions, improved dictation, more expressive voices, and Apple’s continued rollout strategy. The hosts also discuss concerns about device compatibility, regional availability, and the growing fragmentation between supported and unsupported devices.
A major accessibility highlight is Apple Intelligence image description. The hosts explain how blind users can now quickly describe images anywhere in the operating system without relying on third-party services such as Be My AI or PiccyBot. They discuss the new image description rotor actions, follow-up questioning, screen-level descriptions through the Dynamic Island, and the potential future benefits of AI-powered contextual understanding for unlabeled interface elements.
Other Apple Intelligence features covered include Visual Intelligence, AI-powered web monitoring, custom Safari extension generation, natural language Shortcut creation, password management automation, and AI-assisted productivity improvements.
The discussion also covers operating system compatibility changes across Apple’s platforms. The hosts review iOS 27 device support, the end of Intel Mac support in macOS 27 Golden Gate, Rosetta’s remaining lifespan, Apple Silicon requirements, and changes to Apple Watch compatibility.
Additional accessibility-related improvements discussed include pronunciation dictionary import and export, enhanced VoiceOver verbosity controls, Braille Screen Input improvements, predictive text support for Braille users, and settings related to VoiceOver cursor visibility during screen recordings.
The team also reviews Apple’s claims regarding system performance improvements, including faster app launches, improved AirDrop transfers, better networking transitions, Spotlight indexing enhancements, CPU scheduling improvements, and the overall goal of making Apple devices feel more responsive and reliable.
Toward the end of the episode, Thomas outlines AppleVis' annual beta testing initiative. Listeners are encouraged to participate in community bug reporting, submit accessibility issues early in the beta cycle, and contribute to AppleVis forum discussions so that accessibility concerns can be documented and reported to Apple before development freezes later in the summer.
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI Note Taker – VoicePen, an AI-powered transcription app. It is not edited or formatted, and it may not accurately capture the speakers’ names, voices, or content.
Dave: Hello and welcome to another episode of the AppleVis Extra. It is that time of year WWDC keynote took place on Monday. My name is Dave Nason. I'm joined by my wonderful colleagues from AppleVis, Thomas Domville and Tyler Stephen to talk all about it. Guys, how are you doing?
Tyler: I'm good.
Thomas: I'm doing great. It's good to have all three of us together again. It's been a long time, so I'm excited to talk about our angle of what we thought of WWDC.
Dave: Yeah, it is great to be back together on a podcast. It has been a while, so even people, Thomas, have asked me about, is Thomas still doing podcasts? So it's great to hear your voice.
Thomas: Well, thank you. Yeah, it's been a crazy couple months, you know, with technical issues and medical leave. I'm back in action, so we're good. So that's where I've been. So hopefully you'll hear a lot more of me at this point on.
Dave: Great stuff. And yeah, let's jump into it. We've got... I think an unusual WWDC keynote this year. So give me your overall impression of just how they went about it first and what you thought of the show before we dig into the details, because I think it was a departure from previous years, right?
Tyler: Was it ever? One interesting thing that stuck out was going right into it, they did three major pillars, whereas in prior years it would be like they'd talk about iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and maybe tvOS and audioOS or whatever those things are. But this time it was... They were pretty clear from the outset. There were three pillars they were going to focus on, refinement, trust and safety, and AI. So in the beginning of the keynote, when Craig Federighi started talking, they went right to – before they could get really into the meat of the presentation – immediately announced the name of macOS 27, which is GoldenGate, continuing on their tradition of California-themed names. In prior years, they would have saved that for the macOS segment of the presentation, but considering that this one was different, they just went ahead and took care of it before getting into MacOS. the details of the products they announced. Um, so it is, yeah. And it was a shorter keynote than before ran for about, you know, then prior years ran for about hour, 15 minutes. Some of them have run hour and a half, two hours, or sometimes even maybe even over two hours.
Dave: Yeah. I noticed that as well. Thomas, some people have called it low key or, uh, But eventful. But I mean, there was stuff in there.
Thomas: Like, what was your kind of thoughts in the whole... You know, it's kind of like, I was just shocked that they spent a whole segment on the family safety thing. That was kind of a surprise. But I agree with Tyler is that this is a totally different direction they went with this year. And I think... I mean, going into it, I knew it was going to be one of those update years. So I think some people were kind of anticipating a whole bunch of new stuff, and I don't think people came in knowing that. If I had not known that, I would have said, man, this is so underwhelming. But knowing that in the get-go, I was kind of happy. I was kind of happy it wasn't packed with a bunch of stuff because they really meant what they said, this is going to be an update year.
Dave: I think you're right. And we can't have it both ways, I guess, because people have for a while been asking for the so-called snow leopard here to tidy things up. So then if they do that, we can't complain that it's boring because you can't have it both ways.
Thomas: Right, but I mean, it was obvious, too, that there was definitely the gorilla in the room, and it was like they were doing their darndest to try to make it relevant and something interesting to talk for the first half hour or whatever it was through the... first two pillar, um, Tyler mentioned. And then it was kind of like, okay, now for the gorilla in the room, let's talk about what we're really here for. And so it was kind of a buildup for me. It's like, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Lots of videos. And so I was thinking, man, it would have probably been 45 minutes if it wasn't for all the videos.
Dave: Yeah, totally. In a way, it makes actual sense, because in recent years, with the amount of stuff that's been, the convergence of the operating systems, there had been got to a point where they denounced iOS and all the stuff that's new in iOS, and then they get to iPad and go, you get all of that stuff as well, and get to Mac and go, yeah, you get all that kind of stuff as well. So there is some actual sense, I think, to doing it this way as well, maybe. But yeah, I think overall, I agree with you. We dive in, first get the safety piece, because I know... You said you weren't maybe expecting them to spend so much time on it, but it is kind of cool in the sense of some of the parental features, the screen time. I don't have kids myself. I have nieces and nephews and stuff, so I get it to that level, I suppose. Thomas, you've kids. They're grown now, but if they were 12, 13, 14 years old, would you be impressed by what they announced here?
Thomas: You know, I was really happy that they were taking this a little more serious. But I also was kind of chuckling through this part because in hindsight, I felt like Apple is doing this because they're forced to. You know, there's a lot of different countries, a lot of places are starting to implement this. more stricter control of how old uh individual have to be to get to social media and all that it seems like apple was kind of confronted like you're going to have to do something you're going to have to make it big because you're going to have to get ahead of this before you start getting into a lot of trouble and i felt like This was their answer. Now, to answer your question, it was so badly needed what they did. Yes, what they enhanced on parental control and the type of controls that we can do was way more improved because... It was kind of really complicated and messy. We tried this a couple times with our kids, and it was just hard. It was very hard for anybody to sit down and know exactly because there was too many things and fragmented. And I felt like they did a better job of kind of consolidating things. And the thing is what really played in here is that – the old child safety was terrible. There were holes that the kids were found a way to get around and they never did anything about it for years. And so they were able to get around some of the things, studies that we had. And now they address some of those holes that schools and other parents have had in the past to kind of just make things a little bit tighter, a little bit more, um, configurable because not all sites fit the same where before it was just like you got this it's either on or off and it was just like uh but it was more configurable i like it i thought this was uh well done and bravo i wish they have done this years ago um that when they could have instead of just wait until they had to do something
Dave: Yeah, I think that user experience piece is huge because kids are always going to be one step ahead. Historically, anyway, it seems when it comes to this stuff. So make it as easy to use and as easy to find for parents as possible. I think it's definitely going to be key. I'm on the fence about what you said about them being forced to do it in the sense that To some extent, I think it's the social media companies and things that maybe aren't doing enough. And now Apple are stepping into that space, one could argue. I don't know if you'd agree with that.
Thomas: No, I mean, you know, this is kind of those areas, this gray area where everybody will have something different. You know, we're in a state now where, you know, I know United Kingdom or England, Australia and other places are starting to force OS level age restriction. And it seems like. Apple is trying to kind of comply with those things. And I feel like, okay, since we're doing this already, we might as well start to kind of tighten down the nuts and bolts for the rest of the family safety things that we need to control now. Because here in the States, we're a little behind on that. There's a lot of drum rolling. There's certain states that are starting to say, hey, we want more of the OS technology. Whether that's right or wrong, it really comes down to being so political, but whether I think that's right or wrong, I'm not going to mention anything or say what I think about that, but I just think that this is Apple's way of complying with a lot of that stuff, and I think that's what I meant by being forced, is that I think their hands are tied by a lot of different things that's going on now, so they're trying to get ahead of that.
Dave: Fair. And Tyler, like, I think some of the things, technically speaking, like what it's doing now, correct me if I'm wrong, is you can, the parents get control over things like specific websites. And if they can set it so their child wants to go to a new website, it will literally notify them to ask, can I access this website? Or can I add this contact to my phone, which is a key, I guess, safety thing. Were you impressed by it on a technical level?
Tyler: Yeah, I think it's a healthy expansion of their prior. There was a couple iterations over the years. Like, for example, on iOS, there was restrictions coming back in the day. And then, of course, on macOS, there was the parental controls facility associated with user accounts. And then, obviously, screen time was introduced in 2018. And so this is kind of a... a major enhancement of that like for example ask to browse they're building on their ask to buy feature for the app store but you know bringing it to the open web or trying to apply their parental controls functions to you know attempting to regulate access to the open web um So I wonder if, you know, in some ways you could say it's Apple trying to sort of get ahead of some of these regulations, which is currently very much a patchwork between states and countries. But if they can, you know, prove the viability of the declarative age range API... then that could be a step forward in the long run for accessibility. Because when a bunch of companies like social media companies and other sorts of things require age and in different places might have different forms of ID that are considered acceptable, that can introduce a lot of barriers in terms of disability as well as other characteristics that may cause someone to not have that form of ID or not be able to readily present that type of ID. Whereas if the declarative age range API and similar OS level things from competitors become widely accepted as trustworthy proofs of age, then that could reduce some of those barriers and friction points. Because if you think about... with at least my understanding of how declarative age range works on Apple platforms is they can, based on a number of signals, they can guess someone's age or ascertain whether someone's age is what they say it is. So for example, if they have a credit card connected to their Apple account or or Face ID, which has the added benefit of not sharing biometric data with third parties, just using that as the token that the operating system will then use to attest to the user's age. So maybe that's a way that's kind of how they're approaching it, which if it, you know, if it goes as they plan, then I think that could be useful because this is one of those things where even if you were not in a situation where you would use parental controls or screen time. The fact that age gating is becoming more prevalent means that it affects everybody in a society, whether or not you are a kid or whether or not you have kids. So that's why it needs everybody to sort of be on that same page or have that ongoing sort of discussions. Yeah.
Dave: Well, it'll be interesting to see how it all plays out and whether parents actually use these tools in practice. So, yeah, maybe there'll be discussions about this on the site in the future. Speaking of the site, Alex Hall came back, our former team member, but still, shall we say, correspondent, came back and did one of his great recaps of the event. Check that out on the website. And I think for the main meat of the event was the Siri and the Apple Intelligence or the new Siri AI. I think Alex referred to it as Apple Intelligence Super Extra Plus, something to that effect, referring to the fact that it was announced two years ago, has arrived in a very, very limited way. They went back to the drawing board and now we have new features and new Apple intelligence and a new Siri called Siri AI. Thomas, what did you make of it?
Thomas: You know, it's funny because I can't help it, but I have to think of myself two years ago when I heard the same thing or at least portion what they went over in that keynote. They kind of ditto and kind of piggybacked out. OK, now we're here for real. And this is what you do. And it was kind of like. On theory, on paper, the whole Apple intelligence section was amazing. There was a lot of things to digest. They just went bang, bang, bang, bang. And it took me a while to really kind of think this out because this is a whole new way of of how to interact with our iPhone instead of having to open up ChatGPT and ask all those questions. It's just like right there on your side button to initiate all this stuff. There were a ton of stuff in there. My God, it was like, wow, I'm still trying to digest how in a practical use this is going to be for us. But in saying that, I'm almost... Part of me was thinking... I hope they deliver this this time for real. And part of me also say, hmm, I wonder if my device will support this.
Dave: Yes. And two points on that, it said the words in beta later this year were said. And it's like, how is this thing still in beta? And number two, there was kind of a reference to some parts of us being on our most powerful devices or something of that effect without that being defined. Yes.
Tyler: So it's 12 gigs of RAM, and so it would be like the Pro – I believe it's the iPhone – is it the 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max? The 17 and the 17E are excluded, and I believe the Air is – yeah.
VoiceOver: So it's weird.
Tyler: Yeah, the latest models, but not the most powerful technically. The 17 and the 17E will not get this new model. On macOS – m3 max and later with 16 gigs of ram um and i don't know about oh is that based sorry is that based though on anything apple have told us or is that based on people's experience so far with betas That is, from my understanding, I read it from, I believe, MacRumors. I don't know exactly where, but it seemed to have been corroborated multiple times. I don't know exactly where that comes from, but it makes sense considering how Apple has branched out their... their devices over the years in terms of RAM and chip.
Dave: And I don't think we're that clear. I'm certainly not that clear on what parts are part of this. And some of it is... maybe you'll still get the feature, but if you're not on one of those powerful devices, it'll be on Apple Private Cloud as opposed to on device. Is that correct?
Tyler: Yeah, again, my understanding is there were two features and what I got was vague, but basically the dictation, which Apple claims is vastly improved dictation accuracy, as well as much more expressive voices, apparently for Siri, more expressive than they are now. is only available those two things are only available on the most powerful devices which i interpret to mean the iphone 17 pro max and air as well as m3 or later max with 16 gigs of ram or higher um but the rest the rest of this area will go back to other devices okay But I don't think, my understanding is anything that isn't that, but is Apple intelligence capable, will be able to do much of the functions of Siri AI, but not the more expressive voices or the enhanced or improved dictation accuracy.
Thomas: What drives me crazy is that, you know, we had the discussion last year or even on the year before when Apple Intelligence was being spoken. And I keep repeating this over and over. I said, welcome to the new era of fragmentation where things are really going to make a big difference now. Where before, eh, some features here and there, but now... There's going to be some major fragmentation with this. And I agree with Tyler is that it's not confirmed. Nobody can get a confirm of what actual feature is considered advanced AI and what device. But there has been discussions about the things I wanted was the new voices, the more expressive. Those are being seen now only on 17 Pro and above. So they're assuming that. But they're trying to get a confirmation on that. So now you've got three tiers of people. And I don't think we've ever had that problem. So those three tiers are tier number one is anybody that has a iPhone 15 and down. Not the i15 Pro, but the i15 and down will not get any of this. None. Now, for those that have i15 Pro up to the 16 Pro, we'll get tier number two, meaning that we do have Apple Intelligence. We'll get most of the things minus the major player when it comes to the imaging, the voices, and the advanced dictation. Those are on tier three. And it just blows my mind. I have a 16 Pro. No, yeah, 16 Pro. Not even two years old, and it won't be Tier 3. That is just, I'm just like, that's really going to upset the community completely. I think that's going to really upset a lot of people because now you're talking about you have to have the device of last fall, but the pros be able to take advantage of the tier three stuff.
Dave: Yeah, absolutely. Especially if they are particularly turned out to be useful features. And then you have the geographical tiers on top of that as well. Oh, that's right. People like me in the European Union are told they're coming sometime. is about as much info as we got on that one. So, yeah, China as well.
Thomas: Right. Again, yeah, you're right. It was regional specifically. They made that very clear, English only. But they didn't get into the details like, okay, EU's not going to get this, da-da-da-da. And so you guys have to wait maybe a year. It's hard to say. So it's kind of disappointing on that line. And I... I'm kind of disappointed it didn't all just fall out, but I guess it makes sense to come in phases. So as of right now, Beta 1, not everything is there, of course. So the meat of it is still missing. But I do have... I like in the keynotes in Apple intelligence, which we might as well just get into some of the things I do. I did get access to the Siri AI. It's interesting. It's not, I thought we were going to have a chat bot and maybe that will come at some point, but right now when you talk to it, it stops and then you kind of read it on your screen or she'll tell you what it is. And then you have to hit the microphone button and, to keep going back and forth with the dialogue. I thought there'd be an option to say, hey, how you doing? Oh, I'm doing fine. Let's just keep talking together. No, at this point, that's not the case. But the things I like about this and the ones I get most out of the keynote are is the Apple Intelligence describe image. What does that mean? This is a game changer in terms of productivity. So let's just say I'm on Facebook, and we've all been there. To try to find a picture and share that with Pixie Bot or Be My AI is complicated. Lots of swiping, lots of buttons to push, and that's if it even works at all. This works anywhere all the time. I love it. It doesn't matter what app you're in. If you see an image, you just focus on the image, swipe up, boom. It says intelligent image description. Double tap that, and within a second, it just describes the image. Now, it's a huge improvement from what they had before, but it's not at the Be My AI or Pixie Bot level, but it's good enough for me. um i love it that if i'm done listen to that i can swipe up twice and it says a follow-up and i double tap that and i can ask additional questions about it the answers are kind of quick and quip right now which is kind of i wish we can i at some point i'm hoping that we'll get more describe more depth but i hope there might be a settings we can do that but if they don't it's okay But I will say 80% of my work now is just doing that. I could just swipe up, up, up, and I'm able to do what I need without having to go to be my AI or Pixiebot now. So that is huge.
Dave: I agree. That's one part. And actually, I know this is beta, so things can change tomorrow. But as of now, that part does appear to be available in the European Union. which is brilliant. So it's not part of, so I don't have that. We can't get the Siri AI app. We can't apply for it or anything. So we don't have that interface and we don't have some of the other stuff that we'll talk about in a bit, like the contextual awareness and stuff. But we do have that. Thankfully, we do have that image description and I agree. It's really fast. I think it's being done on device, but I'm not sure, to be honest. But it is fast. It's got three options, like the intelligent description, and you've got the ask, which is voice-only input, I think, at the moment. If you select the ask button, I would like that to have a text option as well. But also then explore, which lets you go into it a bit more. I don't know if you can explain the difference between those three at all.
Tyler: So I think Explorer is an update to the classic voiceover image explorer where you can get a sense of sorts of where objects are positioned in an image. So if you have... A person in the center, if it's a picture of a person and then there's other things in the shadows, say a table, a deck, plates of food, whatever, my understanding is that Image Explorer can... allow the user to essentially navigate the objects in the image spatially. It's not something I use the way I get images described and the way I take in that kind of information. I don't have the inclination to explore tactilely, but that's my understanding of what Image Explorer is. It's existed for a number of years now, but this is, you know, with the improvements in ai descriptions it's supposed to be richer um whereas ask is like if you have an image you get it described if you want to follow up you can choose ask and it will um
Dave: But what you can do is actually you can jump straight to the question. You don't have to get the image description first. You can just hit ask and just ask your question.
Tyler: Yeah, so those are all in the rotor on iOS and iPadOS. And on macOS, you get the description with VO shift L. It's the classic image description command that's been there since 2017, I believe for Image Explorer, which is new on macOS this year. is vo shift e, and there's another command for ask. I don't know if that's mapped or not.
Dave: Yeah, it's it's pretty cool as well. I don't know if you guys notice if you just say you might be in a case where you want more than just one image. It's just, you know, the whole screen or it could be that you can't actually focus. Maybe you're in Facebook. You can't actually focus on the image itself because it's focusing on the whole post. You can go to the dynamic island and swipe there and get a description of the screen of the whole screen rather than just the one image.
Thomas: Yeah, that's huge because it's not just on Facebook, but yeah, you can do that to any screen and have it describe what it's seeing, and then you can ask questions upon that. It's not there yet, but I'd be really curious how much further we can do contextually to that and perform things for us.
Dave: That's where I hope Siri AI will come in and you'll be able to say, maybe it's an app with unlabeled buttons. So you do the swipe down on that and say, what is this? And it'll tell you that this is a check-in button or a submit button or what have you. And you can say, okay, select that button for me. Yeah.
Thomas: Well, the Siri app that I have now, obviously this is very early on and it doesn't have everything in it, but really my understanding of Siri app that I've seen so far is just a app. Like if I open the chat GPT, you got your history area and you can ask questions there and then you can attach files and stuff to, to have a describe and you can ask questions upon that. Um, that's really what that's for. But, um, Siri AI once it's installed, meaning that you don't need to go to the app itself. It goes across the whole system at that point, meaning that now I can, for example, where you had the page one of two on your home screen. where you used to double-tap that page. A lot of people didn't realize they went to the Spotlight before. That actually brings up your Siri AI. So you're in the Spotlight, and so when I double-tap that, it says, how can I help you? And you just ask what you want to do. So it's everywhere. So it's in the Dynamic Island. It's in your Action all the time. And certain apps, there might be a Siri built into it where you can just – typing the prompt in there so it's not like you have to go to the siri app all the time to make it work it's just it's just there everywhere and it's present everywhere and that's my experience so far with my siri ai app and i suppose it's kind of what they promised two years ago was that siri would be able to be context aware and take actions in apps for you and they're kind of 30:11 Who's playing that? That me?
VoiceOver: Oh, it must have hurt us. I'm so sorry. Let's go down there. That's your AI right there if you talk to it. Oh, because you said the S-I-R-I word, probably did that trigger it?
Thomas: I think it did. And so you heard it. Yeah, we were like, what's that voice? That is the new AI intelligence. The conversation and discussion that you have is way more deep. It has this world knowledge. Yeah. There you go. You got to hear it in action. But my apologies. Go ahead, Dave.
Dave: I was going to say, yeah, two years ago, they promised us contextual awareness and being able to take actions in apps. And I suppose that kind of agentic, I suppose AI is what we're calling it nowadays. Is that what they're trying to promise? Yeah. But like, is it as ambitious as what they told us? Or are they being a bit more, that's what they promised two years ago. Are they being a bit more maybe careful now? Like, what did you think of the demos they showed us maybe?
Thomas: I think they're definitely trying to be careful. They actually demonstrate what they can do, and they were very tight about what about this, what about that. So I think that poses more problem for us because we don't know exactly what you can do without doing it because Apple was kind of very scripted in what things does work. And so I was kind of like, hmm. But that's one of those things we'll have to find out exactly how it works. And I think all the news sources are in the same boat. It's like, well, what does that mean exactly? What can we do? What can't we do? So it's one of those we'll have to wait and see.
Dave: Yeah, because I gave examples of, you know, I guess they were on Amazon or a shopping site and he had a picture of a bag and said, well, this bag worked for my trip. Oh, that's right. And there was one where he took a picture of a place and asked what the place is and it said it could recognise and then, oh, does my friend live near there? Can you give me a map or something? You know, are they practical solutions that you're actually going to use it for? I don't know. Yeah.
Thomas: well yeah kind of sort of because um right now i'm able to um because i have a 16 pro i have that little extra camera button down there and for those that don't aren't aware about the camera action button if you hold on it it turns on apple intelligence and i was given to go and it was pretty it was pretty remarkable i i so i took i just turned that apple intelligent on camera looked at it says oh aces viva book i was like Oh, my gosh. And it was very descriptive about my Asus laptop. And then I would say, okay. I would hit the follow-up question, and I said, okay, what did you tell me about that? And it described to the T, oh, well, that particular model has a Qualcomm – Elite Pro chip on it, first generation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, whoa. So I haven't really gotten to go. My next adventure is going to the kitchen. And I'm curious if all I have to do is just hold down that button and it'll just say, oh, let's say TV dinner meal, such and such a banquet, fried chicken, whatever. And I can follow up. I want to see if it does just as well in terms of ingredients and cooking time. That's something to be seen. But that is another one I can do now, which is seem to be pretty good.
Dave: That's interesting. I wonder, is that one of the region locked bits that's under the Siri AI umbrella? Because I don't think I've seen that so far.
Tyler: is that scene descriptions or what does that consider a bunch of, when you go into live recognition, there's a bunch of things, there's scene recognition, text. Um, there's of course, visual intelligence, um, which you can map your action button to Thomas. What do you, what were you, were you using visual intelligence or scene descriptions? What were you,
Thomas: I was doing the visual intelligence, so when I implement it, it brings up the visual intelligence camera, and you just tap OK, and then it will just take a snap of what you're looking at, and then it just tells me to describe. So this is where the Siri AI, because like I said, it's presented everywhere, and that was Siri AI to the T. It was just starting to talk to me. I was like, this is way better than live recognition.
Tyler: yeah um that's great so i am i have not gotten access to that feature yet i did apply but i haven't at least last i checked i've not been granted access um does it say does it cite the sources to say where things are coming from like you know when you go to chat gpt and it searches to say like corroborating links or not at this moment not when i was asking various questions not um
Thomas: Well, I take that back. Yes, it did. It did source some. I did ask some questions. This is according to MacRumor. And so it did have that little thing at the end where it was pulling if you had world knowledge question. Now, I don't know about... It did not say that when it saw my Asus computer. It just started doing it. Interesting, yeah.
Dave: These are the things that we... Once it's... We're a few months down the line and it's in more people's hands and we're using it, I think we'll know a lot more. I think we're in a bit of a holding pattern at the moment to see... uh what this is really going to be capable of they talked about it having a few different aspects i think there's three kind of tentpoles you know the contextual awareness the um world awareness i guess wasn't it and i remind me what the third one is there you go um
Thomas: But there's some other features that I've found that are not related to voiceover that I like, and I like to point those out to people. There's two things I was really stunned, and I thought, this is going to be huge for me, and that one is... Um, you being able to create your own extension and Safari, meaning that you can have this do what you want. And I was like, and then it says web monitoring is one of those. So I can say, um, create an extension for this and watch for the price. If it drops, then notify me.
Dave: I mean, I think there are two different things, Thomas. I think so. The, the monitoring thing is one feature where you can say, yeah, tell me when this goes on sale or when this is back on stock and stock and it'll, um, create that yeah that'll notify you at that point and then the create an extension is like you could say I want a dark mode for these websites or I want you know yeah just that create your own kind of extensions rather than having to download them from developers yeah
Thomas: Wow, typical extensions. So it's just mind-boggling. I mean, I feel bad for the people that created extensions for this, and now we're going to be able to create our own. That's just going to out the window. And lastly, my other one that I'm really looking forward to, but it's not implemented yet, is create your own shortcut. Shortcut is so complicated, I just give up. I think most people don't use it because it's too complicated. Now I can say... I want this action button to be set to where when I press on it to send an ETA to my wife when I leave such and such place. It was demonstrated. I said, oh my gosh, that is huge.
Dave: Yeah, I think shortcuts has been... I mean, accessibility, poor accessibility in that app hasn't helped. I think deteriorating accessibility in that hasn't helped. But yeah, now being able to create them, even if you leave the accessibility side, it is a complicated app to use. So to be able to just, yeah, in natural language, just type out what you want, that's really cool. Are you going to use this, Tyler?
Tyler: Yeah, maybe, yeah. I mean, shortcuts are one of those things where... in order for me to justify spending the time to investigate and create a shortcut, I sort of need to prove to myself ahead of time that it's something I'm going to actually use or something that it's going to be worth that lift to, you know, in terms of simplifying my workflow. So I do have a couple shortcuts that I sort of developed muscle memory around, kind of like navigating the shortcuts app. It's one of those things where it's complicated, but if you know the basics of how to use it, you can kind of get on with it. Whereas I think what this will do, these intelligent, describe your own shortcuts, is could really increase its accessibility and reachability to those who maybe might be intimidated by the Shortcuts app or maybe who are less technically inclined to. this could open the door to them. It's almost like if you think about vibe coding, someone can code their own, you know, their own apps or whatever, using things like Claude and Codex and whatever else. This is kind of, not that you're interacting directly with the code with shortcuts, but a similar idea. Whereas rather than using, say, what I equate is similar to an IDE like with shortcuts you can just describe a shortcut and theoretically have it generated and that could really increase its utility its accessibility and reachability you know not having to go through all those hoops you know the graphical hoops of you know creating actions and defining them etc so that could be pretty neat in terms of especially I'd like to see it expand to more things
Dave: where it can work deeper into the system because there are certain things where i would love to automate but they you know just currently not supported um i know i'd even love to just say open this app select this button then select this button you know that is one thing like i wish that's the kind of stuff i hope with between siri and shortcuts that it's able to just do yeah
Thomas: Yeah, I think that's going to be the most frustrating part, and we're going to be pulling our hair out, is that, again, from the keynote aspect, it's like your mind can kind of run away from you. It's like, oh, I can do this, I can do that. And in the real world, they were only demonstrating the stuff that does work. And so I'm afraid to tell people... kind of tame down your expectation because it's not going to be like that. It's not going to be a free for all, do anything you want. I think it's going to be still limited, especially the shortcut. I mean, obviously there has to be components installed to do that. So you have to use existing components or new ones to come up. So it's going to be limited. So it's not quite a hundred percent. Like I can do anything I want. It's not going to be there.
Dave: Yeah. And Thomas, like in recent years, you know, we've had things like the writing tools and Genmoji and things launch. We've had, say, the iPhone mirroring to Mac and voiceover support hasn't been where we'd want at the time of launch. Do you have any concerns about that this year that we're looking at these cool new Siri AI tools, things like that, shortcuts or the creating extensions that give any concerns or fears about whether we'll actually be able to use them?
Thomas: I don't, because I always felt like they did a great job when it came to emojis and all these new things. I thought they did a pretty good job making sure accessibility worked right out of the box. Now, in beta terms, yeah, there's still going to be some issue. My Siri AI, for example, good Lord, there's still some missing elements and stuff that not being spoken to voiceover. But I know that's going to be resolved and fixed. But I know I never had any issue with that in terms of accessibility. I think there's going to be limitations, of course, common sense stuff like the image playground. Yeah, you're not going to be able to do what you visual people can do. I mean, some of the cool stuff they were able to do that with advanced models of pre-fillers or these filler things like i remove something out of the pictures and it filled in yeah and you're going to be limited to that so there's certain things with common sense we're just not going to be able to do but um for the most part i i think it's it's right out of the box it's working rather well um knowing that this is going to be a snow leopard year it's going to be awesome to fix a lot of different bugs that's still out there
Dave: Yeah, I was hoping anyway. And yeah, I share your optimism. I share your optimism.
Thomas: Yeah, I think Apple's doing a great job.
Tyler: And another thing I just wanted to point out is there is another agentic feature that I thought could be useful if it works as advertised. And that is the ability for the AI to change your passwords for you in the passwords app to make them more secure. Say if there was a data leak that the passwords app detects, then rather than needing to manually go to the website, sign in, find where you changed the password, and make that change and update it in the Passwords app, what this feature can do, theoretically, is go on the website, change the password for you, and update it. So you don't need to do anything. You just need to allow it to do its thing. Now, assuming that works with the appropriate security and privacy safeguards, say – I can't imagine something like that would work entirely on device given the computational power that sounds like it would be involved. But if it's using, say, private cloud compute where things aren't stored – then that could be useful. Maybe not so much if there's maybe one password to change because, at least for me, I don't find the process of changing passwords, it's usually not that complicated in my experience. It's fairly uniform across the internet, I found. But I picture it being more useful for people who... currently don't use a password manager, but may want to get into it, say creating randomly generated passwords instead of using the same or similar passwords for everything, which makes them, you know, rather than being totally vulnerable to a dictionary attack, you could use a password manager without all the pain points of going to each every website and changing the password to every random password, that transition can be a bit daunting when you think about all the accounts that a person might have. If the AI can do that in the background, that could be a huge security win because more people would be using... inclined to use a password manager if they weren't so before because of what was involved in sort of in that kind of migration if all of that was taken care of for them they wouldn't need to transition and methodically and meticulously go through each website change each password and make sure each thing was you know record was correct i'm not confident on that one
Dave: Yeah, I think if it works, we're doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Thomas: I'm not confident. I don't give you a reason. Remember hold assist? That sounds amazing. Well, oh my gosh, this is great. It's going to work like, like, you know, it was like. Yeah, that has some severe limitation. And I got a funny feeling that's going to have a limitation too. In a perfect world, you know, that's the first thing I thought, oh, this would be fantastic. But I don't think it's going to work as well as you. I think some places will be fine. Some places just not going to work because some places just very difficult to get a password change. I don't. That's just my two cents. I'm not confident or hopeful that's going to be as good as it advertised.
Dave: And what type of multi-factor is it using? If it's using an SMS sort of multi-factor, I could see it working because that comes in. It's already able to kind of auto-fill those codes when they're sent to you. But what if it's like Google and they use a thing where it sends a notification to another device automatically? Like, you know, please open YouTube on your iPad to confirm that you're trying to sign in on your Mac. That kind of thing happens. So, yeah, will those more complex multi-factor websites work with this, I think, as well?
Thomas: Mm-hmm. I thought maybe we could address some of the questions that people have, and these are the things that they want to know besides the features we have. First, let's talk about the OS and OS 27, what devices support it. There's two big ones, and the other ones are not as big. There was a major surprise. I think we all were like, oh, wow. Especially for those that are up on news and rumors and things like that. There were rumors that iPhone 11 would be out, and that was not the case. So OS 27 for when it comes to the iPhone... And the iPads, if your device supports OS 26 now, congratulations, you've got another year. You're going to get 27 now, minus the Apple Intelligence, which we talked about earlier, the three different tiers, but you get that OS. I was shocked. I was like, holy crap, that's a seven-year device, and it's still getting the latest release, so I was happy about that. The major one I was surprised, or the two, is the Mac OS. Which, by the way, I'm not a fan of the Golden Gate name at all. I thought it was going to be Big Bear. That was the rumor. That was a rumor, and I really like Big Bear, but Golden Gate, I was not impressed by that at all. So the naming was terrible. But nonetheless, this is the year. It dropped all Intel Macs. So if you have an Intel, goodbye. You have to have M chips now to support the new OS 27. And I am curious if the rumors are true, which have not been discussed yet. Because they dropped the Intel, I have a funny feeling that OS 27 will have to confirm it, is that it no longer will run Intel applications. So we had the Rosetta, I think it's called. I think that Rosetta is gone.
Dave: I think they have made an announcement of that. I think there's one more year. Is that right, Tyler?
Tyler: One more year? Yeah. So Apple announced last year that 26 Tahoe would be the last version of macOS to run on Intel-based Macs. So this was expected that it would only run on Apple Silicon Macs for 27. 27 will be the last version to support Rosetta fully. Meaning if you have an Intel app now, you can run it on 27. It's going to give you a warning before you open. I think it still does in 26.4 and 26.5 or whatever. It gives you a warning saying, you know, this Rosetta will not be supported in a future version of macOS. I interpret that to mean macOS 28. At that time, Apple will... remove Rosetta support except for some features intended mainly for legacy games. Exactly where they draw that line and why it will work for a game but not something else, I don't know. But that is, they did lay out their roadmap last year for winding down the Intel era.
Dave: That's interesting. But at least in terms of whether you're going to get 27, it's pretty cut and dry. Intel, no. And one upwards, yes.
Tyler: Yeah. So there's no Intel. You cannot run 27 on an Intel-based Mac, but you can run Intel apps. Whereas 28, you will not be able to run Intel apps except for legacy games, whatever those are.
Thomas: Well, thanks for the clarification. That helped a lot. So the bottom line is that it's starting to be more clear cut now. And then you got another year for the Rosetta. So that's kind of a nudge that they're going this direction. So they're going to dump that. And then the other OS 27 bomb I thought was a bomb to me was the watch OS. only now supports 9, 10, and 11. I was like, whoa, that was huge because that means if you have a watch that's only, well, coming up this fall, it'll be three years old. That's it. You know, where the iPhone, you got seven years with the phones, iPhone 11 and up. And I'm just, I was just stunned. I was very surprised.
Dave: Even the Ultra, I think the first Ultra is dropped, which...
Thomas: Yeah, you had to have the second-generation Ultra and the third-generation SE. Or, I'm sorry, I'm thinking of the... Yeah, that's right.
Dave: Yeah, and you're right, because that's not that old, and it's not unusual to keep an Apple Watch for four or five years, you know? Right.
Thomas: I don't know. I'm going to be disappointed with that. You know, my wife has a Series 8, and that's only going to be four years old. You would think that'd still be...
Dave: within the supported os no i was i was done i was done i was like on the plus side well maybe i'm just speaking for myself but i couldn't tell you one single thing that watch os 27 has there's some improved health tracking um there's some improved like health features i think
Thomas: Yeah, I mean, if you look internally, spec-wise, it's the same iOS or watchOS. If you look internally, spec-wise, 9, 10, 11 are identical. It's just a little here and there of upper software things you can get with 10 and 11, but that was it. And then just like the 6, 7, 8 were the same series where they had the exact same internal chips and spec for them too.
Dave: Yeah. WatchOS barely got a mention yesterday. I mean, I know... None of the OSs got a huge amount because they were talking about features rather than OSs, but WatchOS really didn't get mentioned.
Thomas: I've not heard about that. My feelings are not hurt because I hate... I don't like watching these... watch video where somebody's hiking and biking and stuff like, Oh man, none of us. I don't know. I was just glad that we didn't get too much love, but yeah, it barely got any dimension. But, um, so I thought people would be interested in that. And then the most second part, I think that a lot of people in exclusive that we do for our round table is what's new, what's new in OS 27 that we might find this, um, interesting. Um, Besides the Apple intelligence, there are a few things I found on my own. No, there's no new voices, folks. There's no major thing. There's just some minor things. There's now I found in within this settings voiceover, there's a new control that gives you a little more verbosity that you want. For the text exploration or touch exploration I found, when you do any recording on screen reader, your voiceover cursor appears. Now there's a setting in there. You can turn that off. Not that it's a big deal, but if that's something that you record for YouTube or something you don't want people to know that you have all that, that you can turn that off. And my favorite, and I think a lot of people like this, if you have a punctuation dictionary, that's very important. I saw in there that you can import and export that. So that means you can put that on a totally different device for somebody else. You can export that and import it.
Dave: Punctuation or pronunciation?
Thomas: I thought it was pronunciation. Pronunciation. I apologize for the correction. It is a pronunciation dictionary.
Dave: That's good. Yeah. So you can export that and send it to somebody else. Is that the idea? As opposed to just... Yeah, you don't like the Wi-Fi? You can actually put Wi-Fi. Yeah, that's cool. And in fairness, we've only had developer beta 1, so it's not impossible that more things will happen. So even if you say no new voices, that may well be the case, but never say never, I suppose.
Tyler: And then another thing, just briefly, the third pillar that was actually the start of the keynote, but we didn't talk, I'm just going to address briefly, Apple did... I emphasize performance improvements and improvements to sort of common everyday tasks that aren't hugely marketable new features, but could be improvements in overall quality of life for Apple device users. According to them, apps launch up to 30% faster. AirDrop transfers can be up to 80% faster. And there's improvements in network connectivity in roaming or going from, you know, when things say handing off from cell to Wi-Fi and things like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Dave: New indexing for Spotlight and stuff like that.
Tyler: The new search infrastructure. That's what all the indexing is. When you first install the beta, you might notice it's indexing, and it might feel a bit laggy because it's indexing, and it's supposedly to improve the reliability and accessibility of various types of information, getting them surfaced more quickly.
Thomas: Boy, that indexing took forever, didn't it? Oh, my God. It took a whole day for me before the indexing was done. And during that time, especially first installing it, it was, you can tell it was lagging. I was like, Oh my gosh. And finally it stopped. And now it's not draining my battery anymore.
Dave: certain tasks still are for me again beta one this is just a warning of like if you put it on a main device you're putting your life in your hands because i swear to god my thing got hotter than the sun coming home from work today just using just using safari and listening to a podcast you know so i'm sure it'll improve when it comes to release oh absolutely yeah
Thomas: Definitely have to warn people when they install it when this coming fall that it'll definitely be laggy for a little bit, and I think they're going to do their best to make it not as laggy, but we'll have to remind people it's laggy because it's indexing, and I'll show them where to find it if it's still indexing and then... I highly recommend leaving in charge for a while to expedite and speed that up. But, um, do you guys see that there's a settings in the Braille area now that, um, you can now have predictive text and Braille display. I was like, that wasn't a thing before.
Dave: That's an interesting, I'm not a Braille user enough to say, but yeah.
Thomas: Yeah, and the Braille screen.
Dave: How that mixes with contractions and things like that.
Thomas: Yeah, it'd be interesting. Oh, yeah. um bsi users will be happy too because it now has um autocorrect is now part of the bsi which wasn't there before but i know a lot of people have that turned off from the keyboard anyway but that's in the settings as well to have that on or off okay and the predictive thing is also in the bsi too is the setting yeah
Dave: And in terms of, yeah, Tyler, you kind of bring up that whole part of it, the reliability. I suppose it goes back to what we were saying earlier about it's Snow Leopard, so-called Snow Leopard release that people have been shouting and asking for. And we hope that it extends to making voiceover more stable, less bugs, all of that kind of stuff by the time we get to release.
VoiceOver: Yeah.
Tyler: Another thing, according to Apple, users of older devices can apparently look forward to is the improved CPU scheduling. They were somehow able to backport the software side of that to older devices, which again should make them feel faster and more fluid in terms of performance. For the system to build ability to predict the tasks that a user might do and prioritize them so that they feel faster and more fluid. That's that improved CPU scheduling that they were talking about. That's what they've claimed. I've not seen any benchmarks or comparisons between that. But if you are on an older device, that may be something to look forward to having those improvements. which is actually, funnily enough, similar to what Snow Leopard did with their own, at the time, their revamped task scheduling on macOS, what at the time was like Grand Central Dispatch, where how things were prioritized by the CPU, how they would change the order of how things were prioritized to make it supposedly more efficient.
Thomas: I'm glad you mentioned that, Tyler, because that's exactly what I was thinking. Boy, this sure sounds like Snow Leopard for real this time. Now, a couple years ago, they so-called said this was going to be the update. It seems like this one is more serious because of all those updates. updates and optimizing and configuring to make some tweaks. And so I think that's overdue. And this year, yes, you're going to be overwhelmed if you're expecting a lot of things. But I'm really looking forward to this from the keynote and to iOS or OS 27. I'm looking forward to it because I really do think they're going to be serious this time and try to weed whack a lot of the bugs that we all have come to experience. or endure for the past few years. So I'm hoping that when it gets released that this will be bug-free or a lot less.
Dave: This is our year.
Thomas: Yeah, this is our year, finally.
Dave: Let's hope.
Thomas: That was the impression I got from the keynote. And when they first mentioned when it came in the keynote, this is the year that we're taking a backseat. All your major...
Dave: apps that we do is taking a back seat there's nothing major and and they were very upfront with that yeah so yeah great and thomas you want to tell people just a little about our what we're going to be up to over the summer in terms that we've got community book program and then yeah what people can expect in terms of coverage on the website and over the next three months i guess
Thomas: Well, as you always know, this is the summertime. This is the beta testing time. And so we encourage everybody to beta test if you have access or if you are willing to beta test. It's pretty stable in terms of beta 1, in terms of not posing too many problems. There's lots of little minor bugs, of course. But we do have a community bug submission. So there's two ways to participate. The community bug submission we have on the website, you can fill out and share what you found with us, and so we can also report that to Apple. So the more people that submit it to us, the more we can, together as a team and community, get to Apple to get these things fixed. We need to do this very soon, which means... The whole month of June and July, definitely we need to do it now. Because if you wait until August, forget it. Because at that time, they're done doing fixes. They're just wrapping things up. The second thing, we do have lots of forum posts out there now that a lot of people are just coming in to talk and telling us all about their bugs and see if other people had issues. Please do chime in. submit or just mention about your bugs because we do have team members that is going to be combing through all the forums and topics and people that are reporting things. If it's something that we can reproduce easily, we will report it automatically without you having to submit it to us. So it's kind of a two-prong attack that we are serious about this year, but we need your help. We want to make this happen. um gone and so if you have previous bugs let us know mention in the form or submit that into the bug community so that's what we're going to be focused on for the next two or three months so remember by august it's going to be too late usually about beta 5 forget it because at that time they're done unless it's something major so we've got to do it now
Dave: We're going to be busy bees over the summer, but it'll all be worth it. And we'll have some great stuff come September then. And some great operating systems, we hope.
Thomas: Everybody's happy with us and helping each other to make this the best beta testing. And most of all, this will be the best iOS release. Let's hope. Let's cross our fingers, but we need your help.
Dave: Well, with all that said, I just want to say huge thanks again to you, Thomas, and to you, Tyler, for joining the show today. Great chat. Really interesting event in many ways. Plenty to talk about, plenty to think about. And yeah, let's enjoy the summer.
Thomas: All right. Bye-bye.