This year’s WWDC theme has bee uncharacteristically telegraphed: AI. Apple has been drawing more attention than normal to the neural engine found in Apple Silicon chips, they’ve published OpenELM (on-device language model), actually mentioned AI in press releases/events, and are actively working on contracts with OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Google (Gemini).
What this translates to is, likely, a whole new Siri and perhaps additional SDKs for integrating Generative AI and/or Chat Bot experiences into applications on Apple platforms. This would also mean that Apple is gearing up for a coding co-pilot within Xcode (and thus opening up a new revenue stream).
To me, this means that Apple engineering is spending most of its time on fads (AI and AR) rather than fixing core problems.
Logistically speaking, we know that visionOS 2 is going to be a major focus as 1.0 launched without key features (e.g. rearranging home screen icons). iPadOS will be catching up with iOS features and apps (e.g. Calculator and maybe the Sports app). tvOS and macOS are always a crapshoot given that tvOS is feature complete and macOS is an afterthought. watchOS will get more fitness features and I hope that Apple finally relents and gives developers APIs to make custom watch faces. iOS will primarily be used to demo the AI features and perhaps there will be a UI refresh more akin to what was implemented in visionOS.
My fear though is that Xcode continues to languish. With Xcode 15 this year, I’ve encountered many issues with the simulator runtime and the issue navigator not acknowledging resolved issues. With the potential co-pilot, my concern is that the standard built-in diagnostics will get worse. Not to mention that macOS has had several embarrassing high profile bugs this release cycle.
So, Apple, please slow down and just fix things. Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot with Windows 11, but there are tons of desktop computing enhancements that are desperately needed on the Mac and iPadOS is just a joke at this point.
Just like the previous years since 2020, Apple hardware is firing on all cylinders, but the software quality and consistency has taken several nosedives and Apple does not appear to be inclined to fix it.