Apple Vision Pro, WWDC, and Apple takes on Chrome, on the AppleInsider Podcast

**William Gallagher** (0:04)
Hello, welcome to the Apple Insider Podcast. I'm William Gallagher. Our sponsors this week are Claude by Anthropic and Nord Stella. More about them later. And I'm joined on this most significant week.
It's not quite the night before Christmas, but it's so close. WWEDC, seconds away. I mean, quite a few seconds, but you know, I'm joined by Wes Hilliard, who is as thrilled as I am. Aren't you? Yes.

**Wes Hilliard** (0:28)
Oh, yeah. I mean, everything is seconds away if you do the math. So it's just depends on how many seconds you want to talk about.

**William Gallagher** (0:35)
Well, that got suddenly deep and profound. Yeah, mortality came to mind. Anyway, I want to go straight in on something that we got wrong. Well, we think we've got wrong because last week, I think, I think it was last week, the week before, we were discussing all the possible names for macOS 27
You suggested it shouldn't be macOS Death Valley, and I thought you were right. Since we spoke, someone has suggested the odds are it will be macOS Trump, and that was distressing enough. But then, is it a leak? Is it a clue? I don't know. The news came out that it would possibly be, might be, macOS Big Bear.

**Wes Hilliard** (1:19)
So, Apple gave money to the social media platform called X to have a hashmoji, they do this every year, and their hashmoji appears when you type in hashtag WWDC26, and the hashmoji is basically an image file, and that image file, someone dug out of the interface, and the name inside of it had the name Big Bear, and Big Bear is a lake in California. The thing is, there's no way this is the name of macOS, no way.

**William Gallagher** (2:00)
I mean, I want you to be right. I mean, I mean, I mean, England, we don't have this, but still Big Bear sounds to me like 10-4, good buddy, you've got a convoy coming into all this kind of stuff. And it just, oh, there's also, there's kind of a reference to the prisoner as well. Big Ben, Big Bill, all of this. There's so much connotation. And to go around-

**Wes Hilliard** (2:20)
It's also an animal.

**William Gallagher** (2:21)
Yeah.

**Wes Hilliard** (2:22)
I don't know that Apple wants to have an animal name, if only because it's meant to be a place name in California. And what if this confuses people and they're like, oh, next year we're going to get tiny wolf or, you know, it's small cat. Large elephant. I don't know.
It's code name-y. It's very, very code name-y. This is what a code name sounds like. You're correct. You know, you're talking about Convoy. They have code names in Convoy. And when they say all of their phrases, that's what they're saying is code names. So yeah, this is a code name. There's almost 4% chance that this is actually the name of macOS. And I'd be very surprised if it is.

**William Gallagher** (3:06)
You see, you had me reassured until you said code name, because and, because and, oh, that's a new word. I just brought, because yeah, Portmanteau word there, because and, I'm having that. Wasn't one of the very first names of macOS 10, a code name. It might've been Jaguar, Target, somewhere around there. It was an internal code name, and yet somehow we've already got to know it. And so it became the product name. Are we contributing to the odds of this becoming a real name by talking about it? In which case, we shut up right now. Absolutely no, that's done. And instead, go on to the far, far less concerning news of something that actually I heard about this week, and I'm afraid I thought about you. It was, I don't want to say the death of the Apple Vision Pro, because that's just insightful, isn't it? I don't know whether that means as in inciting to anger, or insightful as in perceptive or something. But it's one of the two.
You are, the two of us, the Apple Vision Pro user. You like it very much. You have clear criticisms of it. But this news this week, it's not quite doubling down on things going away, but it sounds like it's halving down on things going away.
Do you want to reassure me on this as well?

**Wes Hilliard** (4:27)
So the reporting around this is confusing, because everyone wants to fit their narrative to whatever is happening. All we know is a few weeks back, there were some internal changes to Apple's Vision Projects team, which led to the story that suggested Apple Vision Pro was dead.