This week Apple officially announced its worldwide developer conference 2026 (WWDC26) and we saw plenty of speculation in the last few days regarding the big Siri reset. Wrapping up the week Apple confirmed the death of the Mac Pro. Let’s unpack this and more in this weeks roundup 👇
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WWDC26
WWDC 2026 takes place from the 8th of June to the 12th of June. As always, this year’s conference will open with the keynote, giving both customers and developers a first look at Apple’s next generation of operating systems. We already know Apple is moving to a unified, year based naming system, so expect iOS 27, macOS 27, iPadOS 27 and the rest to follow suit. Apple still keeps most features tightly under wraps, but between analyst reports and Apple’s own hints, a clearer picture of what we can expect is starting to form.
The headline story will be Siri. This is shaping up to be a full reset rather than a routine update. Apple is expected to relaunch Siri after delaying its more personalised, context aware features, which were originally planned for late 2024. At the time, Apple said those features didn’t meet its standards for quality and reliability. That delay now looks like a reset moment, not a setback given the stock markets fears around the so called ‘AI bubble’. Siri is likely to be one of the two defining pillars of WWDC26.
The second focus is less flashy but just as important: stability and polish. Last year introduced a sweeping redesign across Apple’s platforms, headlined by the new Liquid Glass interface. Any overhaul at that scale comes with trade offs. Early versions tend to carry rough edges (think back to iOS7!), performance quirks, and the occasional visual inconsistency. This year feels Apple is entering the first year of its refinement phase, where everything starts to tighten up, friction points are smooth out, and brings the user experience closer to what its human interface designers originally intended.
Liquid Glass itself has split opinion. Some love the cohesion it brings across devices, others find it less convincing, particularly on the Mac. It’s easy to see why. Some people feel like the design language is more at home on touch first devices, where spacing, depth, and motion have room to breathe. An intentional design decision of course due to the need to accommodate touch targets. On macOS, where precision and information density matter more, those same design choices can feel slightly out of place.
That puts the Mac in an interesting position this year. It’s the platform most in need of careful tuning. macOS relies on keyboard and pointer input, tighter layouts, and faster visual parsing. What feels fluid on an iPhone can feel excessive on a desktop. Apple’s human interface team will likely spend time refining how Liquid Glass behaves on the Mac, adjusting spacing, motion, and hierarchy so it feels intentional rather than transplanted. The goal isn’t to walk the design back, but to make it feel properly native to each device.
Personally, I think these two key focuses are absolutely the right ones. But let’s take a deeper dive into Apple’s alleged AI reset.
The big Siri overhaul
Apple’s ambitions for Siri have allegedly expanded significantly from its initial planned overhaul announced at WWDC24. Siri is no longer being treated as a simple voice assistant. Apple is rebuilding it into a full chatbot style experience, closer to tools like ChatGPT or Claude. That means proper conversations with speech bubbles, handling more complex questions, and completing multi step tasks instead of just firing off single commands. Yes this will also include the long promised features that were delayed from earlier releases, like deeper personal context, awareness of what’s on your screen, and the ability to act across apps rather than within one silo. But the scale of what Apple intends to deliver has expanded beyond that.
Apple is opening Siri up in a way it never has before. Instead of relying on a single AI model like ChatGPT, iOS 27 is expected to introduce “Extensions”, letting users choose which chatbot handles a request. If you’ve got apps like Gemini or Claude installed for example, Siri may be able to pass queries directly to them, much like it already does with ChatGPT. It would turn Siri into more of a control layer than the brain itself, with Apple sitting in the middle deciding how requests are routed while still owning the experience and settings layer.
Under the hood, Apple is leaning on Google’s Gemini models to power parts of the new Siri, including the chatbot experience, and may rely on external infrastructure to handle demand. Although reports on that are conflicting with some stating that Google is allowing these models to run on Apple’s own private cloud compute servers. If this comes to fruition, the result will be something of a hybrid approach where Apple keeps control of privacy and the interface, but leans on third party models for capability. If it lands well, Siri shifts from being the butt of jokes in Apple’s ecosystem to something far more competitive. Customers won’t care how it works. As long as it works.
RIP Mac Pro
The end of the Mac Pro didn’t come out of nowhere. The warning signs were there as far back as last year, when Apple chose not to update it with M3 Ultra. For a machine that’s meant to represent the very peak of Mac performance, skipping a full generation of Apple silicon wasn’t a minor delay, it was a signal. At the same time, the Mac Pro has always served a relatively small audience, and with such a high cost of entry, it became harder to justify its place in a lineup that’s increasingly focused on scale.
It also hasn’t helped that the Mac Pro’s identity has been a bit uneven over the years. Decisions like the 2013 “trash can” design, which prioritised form over function, and the eyebrow raising cost of accessories like the wheels on the 2019 model, chipped away at its credibility. For a product aimed at professionals, those moments stuck. They created a sense that Apple wasn’t always fully aligned with what its target market actually needed from a workstation. In fairness Apple did a lot of outreach with the community including a technical roundtable in the lead up to the launch of the 2019 model. But this was a in world before Apple silicon.
Apple silicon is a philosophical shift compared to the Intel days. Its tightly integrated design, where CPU, GPU and memory sit on a single chip, delivers huge gains in performance and efficiency, but it doesn’t lend itself to the kind of modular expansion that defined the Mac Pro in the first place. And when you pair that with the rise of the Mac Studio, which can deliver comparable performance in a far smaller, more efficient form factor, the gap the Mac Pro once filled effectively disappears in all but very specific edge cases. At this point, discontinuing it isn’t surprising, it’s the logical end of a product that no longer fits Apple’s direction.
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