Your biggest questions from Apple's WWDC

Apple's 2026 WWDC keynote broke from tradition not just in format, but in spirit—delivering raw, unpolished live demos that proved the company had finally shipped working AI features. David Pierce and Nilay Patel dissect the shift from Apple’s past infomercial-style keynotes to a new era of honesty: the company is no longer hiding behind slick production, but instead showing real, sometimes glitchy, functionality. The most striking revelation? Apple led with a fix to corner radii on Mac apps—a tiny but symbolic win for design purists that signaled a return to obsessive attention to detail. Yet beneath the surface, Apple is quietly building a privacy-first, cloud-powered AI ecosystem that runs on private cloud compute, relying on distilled models from Google’s Gemini without direct access. This raises ethical questions about data origins and web indexing, even as Apple claims full control. The real tension lies in Apple’s strategy: it’s not chasing the AI race head-on, but instead playing catch-up with a Sherlocked version of free ChatGPT—functional, convenient, and deeply integrated into the iPhone, but still far from true agent-driven automation. The absence of new HomePod or Apple TV hardware suggests Apple is waiting for the right hardware foundation, possibly including a foldable iPhone and a new home device, to fully unlock its AI vision.