WWDC 25 Keynote Thoughts

If you discount the completely over the top book-ending (the F1 cameo featuring Craig’s hair and the weird app review medley at the end), there were a few actual surprises in the keynote.

The top three highlights for me were:

  • Direct access to Apple’s AI models via both APIs and Shortcuts, which is a game-changer for app developers and something that should have been done in the first place (I have been doing almost exactly what they demoed with custom Shortcut actions that invoke Azure services, so I am glad they are finally catching up). But having that (and all the privacy-preserving components of their confidential computing platform) available to app developers is a huge win, and I hope they will also make it easier to use custom models in the future.
  • The (apparent) fixing of Spotlight and effective return of almost two decades later and in almost every respect including parameters and menu navigation. This is a huge win for power users and a long-overdue update to the experience. That it took Apple this long to do it is a bit sad, but at least they appear to be doing it right.
  • The iPad’s (creeping) convergence towards macOS, which is something regular people will value highly. Although we are not getting hypervisor support (or any sort of terminal), at least Stage Manager is now an option and not the default, and windows behave in a mostly sane way (including a proper tiling mode).

The iPad is finally becoming a more capable device for both regular and power users, which is great to see. I just hope my iPad Pro M1 will be able to run the new iPadOS 26… Because it really should be able to if they are targeting the A18.

So are still valid, especially everything related to Siri and broader automation support–the latter because even though they are retrofitting -like functionality into macOS, it is still a few steps behind , and there were no hints of [Quicksiver]’s former extensibility or plugin support.

For instance, I would like to have seen a clean cut way to hand over context to a Shortcut (which would be a huge win for power users).

Update: It is apparently done via App Intents.

The rest… I honestly don’t care that much. The UX changes look pretty (even if I have a lot of concerns regarding readability and accessibility, especially given the emphasis on floating buttons and the like), and I fast-forwarded through all of the emoji and Messages stuff since it felt like pure fluff.

I do appreciate Apple cleaning up the UX in Photos and Music (and sort of expect the new Games app to be a way for Apple to hold on to their gaming revenue, although there are as yet no hints on pricing model changes), but in the end the biggest feature gaps around AI (Siri) only got one brief mention and no real details other than “we are working on it”.

I’m really sad about the and Finder icons, though. They are just awful and look like they were designed by a 12-year-old. I really hope they are changed before the final release, but I doubt it (I also doubt we’ll get all the new Mac/iPhone integration features in the EU given we still don’t have iPhone Mirroring, but I guess we’ll see).

Even the updates were a bit underwhelming, to be honest.

Update: I’ve since watched the Platform State of the Union and I was pleasantly surprised by the new @Generable annotation and the way models are prompted and can perform tool calling and structured output inside Swift Playgrounds. This is a great step forward for Swift and features in general and a much nicer, native approach to integration than what we have seen so far, so, OK, I take that back a bit.

What do I really wish they had announced (besides a better Siri)? A Scottish exercise coach to tell me to “get off my arse” and “stop being a lazy git” in excessively colorful language would have been a fun twist. But I guess that’s too much to ask for.

The Sky's the Limit

I’ve been sitting on this draft for a few days now, partly because I thought it would turn down the bitterness, and partly because I kept asking myself whether I should even write it. But I think it is worth getting out of my system, so here goes.

In case you’re not in the Mac community, Sky is an app that brings automation to the Mac that Federico Viticci wrote about at length last week, and that not only looks and feels exactly like what I would expect to be like, it also completely blows out of the water all the desktop automation tools that have sprung out of the hype.

I have several questions, some of which I have already sort of asked , but which I think are worth reformulating.

The people who created Sky are the same people who created Workflow and worked on Shortcuts, so here’s my first question:

Why wasn’t Apple able to harness their expertise in the first place?

I mean, people have free will and all, and can choose to work wherever they want, but this makes my feel like the first clue to a corporate culture murder scene.

Not having made it possible for them to thrive feels like vanilla corporate politics, but having brilliant people leave Apple and ship something that is, even in preview, much better than anything that Apple Intelligence promised (including the made up bits they paraded as marketing material) is just gross mismanagement (now you know why I held back on this draft).

Which leads me to my second question:

Why has Apple failed this badly?

Was it just a consequence of their innately siloed nature? The internal decline of John Giannandrea’s team (and the rumored hand-over of Siri to Craig Federighi’s team) might have played a role, but has been largely stagnant from a UX perspective for ages (and as far as I know it isn’t even being addressed in the upcoming Solarium redesign), so I have to assume the Sky team saw this huge blind spot in terms of improving the desktop experience and just jumped on it.

Was it about control? Privacy?

I can see Apple balking at doing something like Sky (if they ever even considered it) because it not only has to share bits of your screen with an LLM, but also because it would have to open up the Mac to third-party automation in a way that it has never done before, and that would be a huge departure from their current approach.

Which, , is pretty much non-existent, so… No, that doesn’t make sense.

But the privacy angle is interesting, because Apple was in a perfect position to do something exactly like Sky and ensure that it was done in a way that respected user privacy. Even though local models are still not quite there yet (remember that RAM requirements are still very high as far as running truly useful models are concerned), they do have the confidential computing tech to run inference in a privacy-preserving way–which might be the only bit of Apple Intelligence that actually works at this point.

But Sky, despite having cloud inference, is designed to enhance your local Mac experience, and it does so in a way that looks extremely polished, and, above all, feels like the way people always wanted to use computers. Star Trek echoes aside, it has the ability to understand what you want to do, and automates your Mac to achieve that.

Federico’s post also goes into part of the how it does this, and I get the impression that even though Sky can leverage the remnants of Mac automation, for gathering context it is completely bypassing the standard automation APIs and inferring UI structure and content.

Everything I read about it makes me think that Apple has dropped the ball so badly that Sky is like a perfect storm of what they could have done, but didn’t.

And now, not only is it a third-party app that is doing what Apple should have done, but it is also doing it in a better way that anything they ever shipped.

And if Sky takes off (let’s face it, the Mac desktop market isn’t really mainstream these days and there is too much AI hype, but just entertain the notion for a bit), that will have the added bonus of highlighting that Apple are completely out of touch with what people want from their computers.

Which leads me to my final question:

What will it take for Apple to get its act together?

I honestly don’t know. I mean, I have been asking this question for years now, and I have no idea what it will take for Apple to take any sort of integration or automation seriously. I currently have zero expectations towards next week’s WWDC, and not only because of the Mac. We were fooled once, and I don’t think we will be fooled again.

Unless they actually ship something, which seems highly unlikely unless it slots into their yearly release cycle (which they are rumored to be rebranding as “OS 26” because, well, why not ship the org chart and their corporate calendar?).

A case in point (and stop me if you’ve heard this before): Spotlight has been a complete mess for years, and Apple has done nothing to effectively fix it on any of its platforms–and it would be a perfect place to start integrating in a way that would actually make sense and be useful to users.

Not to mention that it would be a key component of any sort of retrieval-augmented generation approach, etc.

So yes, Sky is the limit. Or, at least, one very concrete yardstick by which we can measure how much Apple has failed to deliver on the promise of AI.

Notes for May 2025

This was a busy month, but there were a few things worth noting in between the usual work and family stuff, so here goes.

Something That Sparks Joy

I’ve been hemming and hawing about doing this something like this for ages, and I can’t fathom why I never got around to it since it’s just plain fun. In short, I was looking for a way to re-use some old 3B+ boards, and after I ended up printing an SE/30-like enclosure for one of them:

SE/30-like Raspberry Pi case
SE/30-like Raspberry Pi case

The filament color isn’t quite right (it’s eSun Bone White PLA+, which looks adequately yellowish but a bit too much), the case needs a bit of filing to fit properly (it isn’t even screwed on), but it looks so cute even without electronics that everyone would be fine if I just dropped in a black screen insert and put it on a shelf.

I will be installing a Pi 3B+ in this one, but I did some cursory measuring to fit the enhanced internals I was planning to use for and it seems entirely viable to just patch up this model and mount everything inside, so I’m ordering some PolyMaker PLA to see if I can get a better color match and preparing to print another.

Update: There is now another attempt at recreating the original color in PLA filament, but it isn’t available in Europe (yet).

I even dug up a CAD model for an Apple G4351 mouse to see if I can do something with it and a sacrificial $2 USD mouse from AliExpress…

Bitwig Flatpak

I’ve been trying to get to run on the and the flatpak version installs and runs just fine, but I can’t get yabridge and my Arturia VSTs to work in that setup.

The anointed workaround seems to be setting up a distrobox/toolbox Ubuntu environment to host both the Debian package, WINE and yabridge, but there are some serious rendering issues with that, so I’m still trying to sort things out…

Kata

A couple of weeks back I started hacking at various little projects to see if I could revamp my minimalist tool stack, and one of the things I decided to tackle was improving piku, my little micro-PaaS.

I wanted to try to use systemd and podman quadlets to replace the uwsgi supervisor, but the experience was so annoying that I decided to explore using docker compose instead.

This is because I have been using for a couple of years now and have found what I really want to do is have all the docker compose stack definitions in and just deploy from git, so there’s really no point in using the web interface.

Right now, I have my kata experiment working to a point where I can deploy most of the micro-services I run at home without any significant hassles and using half the code that was in piku, so I am calling it a win – you can have a look at both the systemd and docker variants over on GitHub.

Early Summer Musings

It’s early Summer, and the slanted sunlight from beneath the drawn blinds reminds me it’s a balmy 30oC outside in a way the orange arc that frames the temperature complication on my Apple Watch can’t, spraying warmth into the living room, so I retire to the rear balcony and spent an hour reading Pattern Recognition in a slightly faded lounger, the tarp taut with my weight.

Read More...

The Chuwi MiniBook X N150

The netbook era has come and gone, but I am one of the many people who miss small form factor laptops (12” or smaller), and I’ve found it somewhat frustrating that they’ve been nowhere to be found in mainstream offerings.

Read More...

The Vibes

The profusion of hype on the Internet has led me to take a lot of things with a grain of salt, and if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that generative AI has already added more than a few teaspoons into the broth of -driven coding.

Read More...

The Orange Pi RV2 RISC-V SBC

Although I’ve spent many years looking at SBCs, so far nearly all of them have been ARM-based, and this is the first time I’ve had a proper look at a RISC-V system.

Read More...

Notes For Recent Weeks

This was a bit of an eventful week–at work and otherwise. I seem to be energized by constant context switching, so a peak of project work actually resulted in me needing to “relax” more thoroughly and do a lot more hobby stuff than usual at the expense of sleep (I’ve slept an average of 6h/night over the past month…)

Read More...

My Quest For Home Automation, Part 6

This weekend, I finally migrated my home automation setup off the 4 it’s been running on for the last four years and into an LXC container managed by on my .

Read More...

The Kingroon KP3S Pro (V1), Two Years Later

It’s been since I got myself one of the first iterations of the , so I thought I’d post a sort of cursory long-term review of what it’s been like to use it.

Read More...

The HomePod Mini

Since Alexa has changed the way it handles voice recordings and I don’t feel comfortable with their privacy disclaimers, I decided to retire the Echo Dot I have been using for years in my office and replace it with a HomePod Mini.

Read More...

A bit of a personal update

I have been mostly in “inbox zero” mode for the past few weeks, which generally meant checking stuff off my to-do list, trying to ignore the news, and using some fairly colorful language when I didn’t.

Read More...

Archives3D Site Map