Apple put last year’s wonderkid, Apple Intelligence, firmly in the corner today and focused instead on iOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, macOS 26, and iPadOS 26 (all Apple’s new operating systems now have a new name, reflecting the year they will be most active in) at this year’s WWDC 2025.
In fact, the whole keynote built steadily to the real star of the show, the iPad. The new windowing system on the new iPadOS 26 looks like it finally makes it capable of switching between multiple running apps with ease, and also adds a menu bar, which is context sensitive to whichever app is in the foreground.
This essentially makes the humble iPad less of a large iPhone and more like an extremely lightweight and portable Mac. It won't run Mac software, of course, but it will finally work like one, especially when plugged into a keyboard and trackpad.
iPadOS 26 even gets its own version of the Preview app from macOS to look at PDFs with, and a new Files app that is more powerful and Finder-like.
The iPad upgrade got by far the most animated reaction from Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice President of Software Engineering.
Federighi enthused about the new iPadOS 26 with a passion I haven’t seen since he introduced Apple Intelligence to us last year, calling it “the biggest iPadOS release ever.”
And there was no new hardware from Apple either! I was hoping for at least an upgrade to HomePod, but everything this year was about the various Apple OSs.
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Where was the AI?
Where was Apple Intelligence in the keynote? It had a little recap right at the start, which focused on what Apple Intelligence features Apple had actually released over the course of the last year, you know, Genmoji, Writing Tools, Notification Summaries, etc, and then it just faded into the background.
Sure, Apple Intelligence was mentioned frequently throughout Apple’s keynote, powering some of the most innovative features on display, like Visual Intelligence now being available every time you take a screenshot, or the ability to suggest when a poll might be a good idea in a group chat, or even letting you create your own original chat backgrounds.
But Apple Intelligence, which last year was the new kid on the block, has now become just another part of the furniture of Apple’s operating systems.
There was no talk about a fully AI-powered Siri, or really any groundbreaking new Apple Intelligence features, although there were quite a few minor ones like Live Translation and new AI-powered Shortcuts.
Standing in the shadows
But perhaps the background is where Apple Intelligence really belongs? It’s fair to say that the world has gone crazy for AI, thanks to OpenAI and Google steaming ahead with ChatGPT and Gemini. It’s almost impossible for companies not to get swept up in the unlimited possibilities that AI offers.
And yet, are people actually asking for AI features in Macs, iPads, and iPhones? From all of the Apple Intelligence features that Apple has released over the last year, I don’t really use any of them regularly, if at all.
I played around with Genmoji for a day, then got bored. Notification summaries' attempts at summarizing very short text messages were so annoying, I’d rather just read the actual message, which in most cases were just a few words longer.
I do use AI every day, but I prefer to use it inside the fully-featured apps from Google and OpenAI, which work fine on my iPhone and contain advanced voice modes for natural human-like language interaction. This, for me, is where AI really shines, and not when it comes to trying to rewrite, or even read, my emails for me.
Apple did reveal one key detail at this year's WWDC 2025 that I think could change the game for Apple Intelligence. With iOS 26, Apple is making its Foundation AI Models Framework available to developers for the first time.
Now, while this doesn’t sound like big news right now, it’s going to mean that app developers are going to be able to integrate on-device AI into their apps going forward. The possibilities here are endless, and frankly, I think developers will do a better job than Apple has of coming up with creative ways to use AI.
At a time when investors must be starting to wobble as Apple seems to have dropped the ball on AI, by opening up its AI to developers ,Apple might have just secured its future.
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