This is Technology Bytes, episode 171 for June 14th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bites on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
To no surprise, this week I am talking about WWDC 2026.
So this was the week, I think it’s over now, but starting Monday with a keynote at their normal time, Apple announced some of the things that will be new in the new OSs called 27.
And so I always enjoy watching that.
I was a little bit surprised that I didn’t, that my newsfeed wasn’t inundated with stuff and my watch wasn’t going off.
I don’t have time to watch it at work, so I waited until I got home.
And then I started watching it and it was an interesting start and maybe a little boring, but they talked about improvements that they had made just to the system, almost like an update of the foundation.
Things were happening faster.
Things were a little more stable.
Things were a little more controlled.
There was things that you could do to control the environment in which you wanted to work.
And I think those things are important.
Many people talk about this kind of being a snow leopard year, if you’ve been with Apple for that long, where it’s really just kind of a stability year, fixing things.
And it was interesting to start there.
People were enjoying that, I guess, but some thought it was a little bit boring.
And then they went from there into parental controls and spent a lot of time, depending on how you measure, on that particular subject and how they managed to make some changes and what it meant to parents and how do you use that tool and what does it look like.
And I think much of it has to do with people wanting age verification for websites, for social media, for just screen time, all kinds of things that are coming up in respect to children of all ages.
And I think Apple is just kind of leaning into that.
A lot of what they talked about is probably for regulators to say, you know, hey, you can put restrictions on us, but we are working on our own to try to make our devices safer for kids.
And I think that’s good.
I have grandkids and the screen time sometimes when they’re at the grandparents' house is a little bit out of control.
But I think what Apple has done to try to protect children or give parents tools to protect their kids, I think it’s wise.
I think it’s a good thing to do.
And many people, and I think I agree with them, have said in the podcast I listen to that trying to get every app to verify ages would be a nightmare because so many apps would have personal information that we just don’t want them to have.
And if we could get the platforms to do the age verification in a more restrictive, more safe manner, then that might be the better way to do it.
And Apple really laid that out for their users and for their developers in the first part of the keynote.
But of course, what everyone really wanted them to talk about was how they were going to approach artificial intelligence.
And they continued to not use that term.
They continued to use Apple intelligence.
And they did talk about it for quite a while.
And it was kind of interesting because we know that they have paid Google to use Gemini.
And a lot of money, a billion dollars or whatever.
Sometimes those numbers just get thrown around when companies are multi-trillion dollar companies.
But that was the basis for what everyone was looking to see what Apple would do with improving Apple intelligence.
And it was interesting.
One podcast I listened to said they never talked about Gemini.
And that’s not really true.
They talked about Apple’s foundation models and the use of Gemini foundation models.
And they kind of did a thing where they merged them together.
But then they didn’t really talk about Gemini anymore after that.
They talked about Apple’s models, how they run.
They talked about private cloud compute.
They talked about keeping data safe and secure.
And that is Apple’s backbone in the marketing world.
So Apple intelligence is built on Apple’s hardware.
It’s built on Apple’s models with an underlying improvement because of what Google has done with Gemini.
And so then they said that the new Siri is going to be called Siri AI.
And of course AI is Apple intelligence, not artificial intelligence.
And so they talked about what Siri AI would be able to do.
There are some restrictions based on what devices you have.
But mostly those, often those are whether they will do the calculations or the work on device or if they’re going to have to send it off to the cloud.
And so they actually did demonstrations.
Now everybody knows that two years ago they did the same thing and their demonstrations never came to fruition.
And they took the heat for that for two full years.
And so I know that Apple had to be a little nervous about how they were going to do demonstrations of this new smarter Siri.
But at the same time, they kind of pulled it off.
And I read some things afterwards that people were saying it was so slow and other people’s artificial intelligence is much faster.
Well, I don’t use artificial intelligence all that much, but the last couple of weeks I have kind of dove in because of some work things I talked about before.
And I’m using Claude and it is not fast.
The things that I ask it to do does not happen quickly.
Now maybe these demonstrations that Apple did should have happened a little quicker.
But what is one thing that we know about software?
Getting it right is the most important thing.
Increasing speed can always happen after.
But if you’re fast and wrong, that is why people don’t like artificial intelligence.
So Apple is being fairly conservative, not surprising.
And they are making sure what they show is available to their users when they have access to it.
And so they want to make sure we are correct.
We have demonstrated things that we can actually do on device.
And we want people to recognize that over time that will improve.
And so I thought it was pretty good.
I think that second three quarters of the keynote was pretty good.
And I’m going to talk a little bit about the first developer beta.
So the rule is if you’re a developer, go ahead and put the developer beta on a device that’s not your everyday driver.
Because you need to to develop software.
That’s the whole point of your job.
And so I held off for a day and a half.
And then I was listening to podcasts.
And this being a stability year where there’s not a ton of things that they’ve done that might make things a little shaky.
I decided to jump in with both feet.
And in doing that, I have not been disappointed.
But mostly I did it so I could use the smart Siri.
And I still don’t have access to that.
So this is what’s happened so far with the betas.
There’s been a couple things that have been pretty cool.
I’ll talk about those sometime in the future.
But the first thing that is happening on my devices is they are all indexing.
And they tell you that they’re indexing.
And so sometimes the device might be a little wonky, might work a little slow.
People talk about battery life.
That’s always the case with betas.
But because of what Apple’s doing with search and knowing you and knowing what’s on your device, this indexing is going to take a while.
So I installed the betas on Wednesday morning at work about 8 o’clock.
And all of my devices, I can’t figure it out on the Macs too much, but my iPad and my phone are still indexing three days later.
So Wednesday to Thursday to Friday to Saturday.
So I’m sitting here Saturday morning at 11.25 and all of my devices still say they’re indexing.
The other thing you get to do is get on a waiting list for what I’m calling the smart Siri.
And so for that same three-day time period, I’ve been on that waiting list, have not had the notification yet that it’s available to me.
I have listened to people who have had it kind of right away.
And some of them are fairly impressed, but time will tell.
So right now I’m sitting on the betas.
I like them.
I like what they’ve done.
The system is very stable.
There’s some other things that work real well while I’m waiting for smart Siri because that’s really what I want to test.
And until then, I just have to try and be patient.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytesatmarigfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes Microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
