Apple WWDC 2026: Finally Delivering on AI Promises

**Josh Kale** (0:00)
Two years ago, Tim Cook got on stage at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference and announced what I believe to be the most amazing set of features in the history of Apple, Apple Intelligence. It turned out to be the most disappointing WWDC of all time. It was a complete and total failure, so much so that they are still currently dealing with lawsuits around advertising for how big of a flop Apple Intelligence was. They promised us the world, they delivered absolutely nothing. In fact, the iPhone that they built for that year in particular for Apple Intelligence, is not supported by Apple Intelligence. This sounds like a disaster, but just yesterday Apple had an opportunity to fix this wrong, to write the things that they were not able to do the first time. I got to say, I'm very impressed. I think this year's WWDC left a significantly different taste in my mouth than the last one, because this year was all about AI, and for the first time ever, we have features that are actually going to work.

**Ejaaz** (0:54)
I remember filming last year's WWDC episode, and I was just being thoroughly disappointed.

**Josh Kale** (1:01)
I was just shaking my head.

**Ejaaz** (1:02)
Just the lack of AI stuff. They just didn't pay it any kind of attention, and they delayed it yet another year. Up until yesterday, actually, Siri couldn't even tell you which month we were in. That was ironically one of the demos that they showed yesterday. Anyway, a slew of new AI updates. The two flagship headline updates from Apple is, Siri is now Siri AI, powered kind of by Google's Gemini model and also by Apple's own foundational model, which brings me to the second major headline announcement. We've got four to five brand new Apple foundational models, which can run both locally on your device as well as through their own private compute server. We're going to get into a lot of the details about how this actually works. But my main takeaway from yesterday's WWDC is that Apple is finally taking AI seriously.
While some of the feature updates that we're going to go through may seem like they're basic, collectively, they actually make your life way, way better. You listening to this, if you have any kind of an Apple device, an iPad, an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, whatever it might be, you can use a net new feature once these features actually roll out by the end of the year, which will change the way that you work. It's done over or across 3.5 billion active Apple devices.

**Josh Kale** (2:16)
Yesterday, they oriented this presentation around three key pillars. The first was stability, the second was how you can use it with your children and security and privacy. The third was AI. We all want to talk about AI, we want to hear about AI, let's get into the AI first. It's now Siri AI, like you mentioned. And what we're seeing on screen is unique and novel. It's a demo that's in real time that actually works. And this was something that I found uniquely interesting for this presentation in general. Generally, when Apple has these things, they have these very pre-produced demos that look very good, that operate very well. When we saw them initially released two years ago, they looked incredible. The difference now is you'll notice that there's no cuts happening in this demo. They're not doing it for speed. They're not doing it for time. They're doing this for proof that it actually works. So what we're seeing on screen is someone from the Apple team who is actually asking it to search his text messages and uncover a text message about a specific song and then go off and play that song. And for the first time ever, Siri has the context. So what we're seeing now is he's showing it a screen from Instagram and Siri can see the content of your screen. It could understand where that location is and then it could route you there on your maps. And this is something unique and novel only to Apple where it has the full permissions of your phone. It could see what's on your device. It can actually engage with your device and it does everything that I think we imagined it and always hoped it would, which is just have full context of your entire life and be able to turn that into some useful information and useful actions. So for me, this was exciting because this was kind of definitive proof that it actually worked. And what we'll notice as we go through the demos from yesterday is that this is actually available for developers right now. So people have been testing it, they have shown that it worked, and there's a lot of cool features that they actually released.