WWDC 2025. An inflection point for Apple 📐

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CMD / Start 🏁

WWDC 2025

Apple officially announced the date for the 2025 worldwide developer conference. The live streamed keynote event will take place on June 9th with members of the media attending in person. There’s also a lottery for developers to win an opportunity to attend in person too. You’ll need to join Apple’s developer program or be an existing member. And enter before the 2nd of April.

“We’re excited to mark another incredible year of WWDC with our global developer community,” said Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “We can’t wait to share the latest tools and technologies that will empower developers and help them continue to innovate.”

It’s been a tough few weeks for Apple. They’ve been under heavy criticism over the delay to the new Siri features that were originally announced at WWDC last year. And they’ve had a spot of legal trouble over marketing of these features. I’m intrigued to see how Apple plans to address the elephant in the room when it comes to Apple Intelligence 🐘

Allegedly, the head of Apple’s Vision Pro team, Mike Rockwell, has taken over development of Siri as part of restructuring. But it’s pretty close now to WWDC. There isn’t much time for Apple to make sweeping changes to its plans for iOS 19. If anything, given the Apple Intelligence situation, I’d expect some content from the keynote to be cut altogether. Rather than risk announcing features only to later postpone them again. But Apple still needs something shiny and new to announce. A new UI perhaps?

iOS 19 Design Overhaul

Apple is planning the biggest redesign of iOS since iOS 7. Sources including Front Page Tech allege that iOS 19 takes a lot of visual cues from VisionOS. Making use of transparency, glass-like buttons and frosting, the rumoured design has more depth and shading.

The jury is out on whether the icons will be redesigned to take on a circular appearance. Front Page Tech states that they remain square in the build they claim to have seen. Other sources, including this image (shown above) from Gumroad, claim the icons will be circular.

Front Page Tech has a rumour accuracy score of 69.1% according to AppleTrack. Take from that what you will. Personally I expect we’ll see some design changes, but they might be more conservative than is being reported. Icons could change to circles for instance, but the actual glyphs might stay the same.

Run / Update ⚙️

iOS 18.4 expected April 1st

Apple just seeded the second release candidate of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4 and macOS 15.4. The updates should be out to the public this week. We should also see visionOS 2.4 and watchOS 11.4 arrive along with tvOS 18.4. Apple likes to release major updates on Tuesdays so we could see these updates go live on April fools 🃏

Here’s a summary of the key features in these updates.

Apple Intelligence 🤖

• Priority notifications, surfaced by Apple Intelligence
• Apple Intelligence support in 8 more languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. And English for India and Singapore.
• Sketch image style for Image Playground
• App Store summaries of user reviews
• Apple Intelligence support for Apple Vision Pro
• macOS 15.4 adds support for intelligent mail categorisation, first introduced on iOS.

Vision Pro Features 👓

• Apple Vision Pro app on iPhone for discovering spatial content, apps and managing your Apple Vision Pro
• Apple Vision Pro gets access to the new Spatial Gallery, providing access to curated immersive content created by Apple, users and other sources.

General ⚙️

• Pause and resume app downloads without losing progress
• Screen time app limits persist after deleting and reinstalling an app
• Recent search suggestions in safari
• New widgets for podcasts including a followed shows widget
• Ambient music in control centre adding the ability to play custom focus playlists
• 10 new system languages including Punjabi, Urdu and Telugu

AirPods Max go Lossless

Apple shared the news this week that with iOS 18.4, AirPods Max will support true lossless audio playback with ultra low latency via a wired connection. The update is only available for AirPods Max with USB-C and not the original model with lightning unfortunately. It isn’t clear why, since both models contain the same H1 chip.

Most people will struggle to hear the differences since Apple claims that its regular AAC auto standard is almost imperceptible to lossless audio. Still, the update does enable lossless Spatial Audio and may appeal to people working in music production and mixing in a studio.

Launch / CTRL 🚀

iPhone 17 lineup rumours

Rumours about the iPhone 17 lineup continue to heat up. Big design changes are expected across the board this year. But in the last week more information about the Pro models has surfaced. According to Macrumors these are the top new features we can expect to see:

• A return to an aluminium frame with a part metal, part glass back
• The camera bump will form a rectangular visor shape and span the width of the device
• There will be a large battery and the phone is getting thicker to support it
• A scratch resistant, anti-reflective coating on the display
• The A19 Pro chip will come with 12GB of RAM, the most ever on an iPhone
• An enhanced thermal system, possibly using vapour chamber technology
• The telephoto camera is being bumped up to 48 megapixels, bringing it in line with the wide and ultra wide camera
• The front facing camera will double its resolution to 24 megapixels

All in all, if these rumours prove to be true, this will be a sizeable upgrade. Especially with the design changes and a possible new iOS user interface. I’m excited, and hopefully, this will be a big year for the iPhone after a few years of modest improvements. And it’ll be interesting to see if the so-called ‘iPhone Air’ tempts Pro users like me with its thinner design 👀

The iPhone Fold

As reported by 9to5 Mac, Apple’s long-rumoured foldable iPhone remains in active development. But more details have started to emerge, including information surrounding the display. The inner display is said to have a similar aspect ratio to an iPad at 3:4. This would be very useful for Apple because iPad apps would run perfectly when the device is opened up, reducing the work for developers to optimise their apps.

No doubt developers will want to do special work to take advantage of the foldable display, perhaps being able to prop the device up, for instance. And finally, we’ll get split-screen multitasking on an iPhone. Perhaps we’ll even see Instagram and other notable holdouts like Bluesky finally release iPad-optimised versions of their apps.

My biggest ask is that if Apple does a foldable, it really nails it. Deliver a product without a crease. No other company has been able to achieve this. If Apple can be first, it’ll be a clear differentiator. It’s going to be an expensive device. Perhaps as much as £2000/$2000. But you can guarantee that if and when it does arrive, provided the execution is seamless, it’ll sell like hotcakes.

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