Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of The Verge. I'm your friend David Pierce, and on today's show we are going to answer a bunch of your questions about WWDC. WWDC, Apple's big developer conference, started on Monday. We got a lot of new announcements, lots of new stuff for all kinds of Apple devices, big new Siri AI, Apple Intelligence. The phrase private cloud compute was used 450,000 times. You all had a lot of questions. We have lots of answers. Nilay Patel is going to join me from his hotel room somewhere in the Bay Area and we're going to go through as many of your questions as we can. It's going to be great. But first, here is everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, June 10th, 2026.
Users are starting to get access to a new Anthropic model called Claude Fable. A very good name for an AI model. It's based on the Mythos model that Anthropic previously said was too dangerous to release to the public. And now, basically two months, a bunch of hemming and hawing about security and one giant hack of Mythos later, here we are. It's being released to the world. Anthropic says the model is particularly good at software engineering, knowledge work, and vision, which makes sense. Those are three of the things that Anthropic is very focused on in enterprise AI. But it's also double the price of the company's other flagship model, 4.8. Use those tokens wisely, my friends.
Meanwhile, Xbox leaders have said that they're exploring radically different — that's a direct quote — radically different business models for the Xbox. Basically, with RAM making everything so expensive, Microsoft seems worried that not everyone will be able to afford a console going forward, especially not the one we know of as Project Helix, which is apparently just a super high-end gaming PC. What are radically different business models? Maybe it'll be ads. Maybe it'll be even more focus on Game Pass and streaming on any kind of hardware. Maybe it'll be lots of companies making lots of different kinds of Xboxes. Right now, under new leader Asha Sharma, it seems nothing is off the table for Xbox.
And finally, we have our first look at The Social Reckoning, the sequel to The Social Network coming later this year. And more importantly, we got our first look at Jeremy Strong trying to look and sound like Mark Zuckerberg.
People around here understand that when I say no, that's the end of the debate. I'm not two years out of a dorm room anymore. Charlie, look around.
The Frances Haugen story is an important and big and fascinating one, but I'm not so sure about this movie, you guys. We'll see. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That's it. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, June 10th.
All right. Now, let's get to your questions from WWDC. We had the live stream on Monday where we gave kind of our first thoughts on everything. It was pure chaos, but Nilay, you are here. Welcome, Nilay Patel.
From, I would say, looking at you, you're in an Aloft hotel. Like, that's the distinct vibe that I'm getting from your background.
This is definitely the Marriott competitor to an Aloft hotel. It's an AC Hotel.
I've never been. It's very corporate.
I assume every single person who is in your hotel is WWDC-related in some way.
Yeah, there's a lot of software developers just looking furious at their agents in the lobby.
About right. So we have a bunch of questions that people sent us about WWDC, about some of the announcements. But first, I just want to get a vibe check because one of the things we talked a lot about on Monday's show was how different and sort of bizarre the keynote was. Like, just a very different presentation from Apple than we're used to at WWDC. What was it like in the room at Apple Park?
You know, it's really interesting. I saw all the commentary about how the video was different online. No one there actually experienced the video that way. Like, we were outside. We're watching it together, but it's just in that environment. Like, you're watching a giant projection of a video. You don't spend time being like, 'Well, that lighting is kind of blown out,' or like, 'This is obviously handheld shot on an iPhone.' Like...
Why is everyone walking so much? Yeah.
Right. Like, it just kind of doesn't happen to you. Especially for me because I'm live logging, so I'm just typing furiously. I have to go back and watch the video every time to figure out what happened. So in the space, what you were really getting, and especially as you walked around and, you know, we did a bunch of reporting and went to briefings afterwards, you really got the sense that Apple wanted to prove it. Like, that was by far the vibe: this stuff is real. It works. We're doing the live demos. They had a tech talk with Craig Federighi afterwards and Mike Rockwell and a bunch of the team. They were doing the live demos in that room. They were standing up in front of a room full of old reporters, like, gesturing at architecture slides. The vibe was: this works now. We got caught with our pants down two years ago and now we are only talking about things we are shipping that works and we're being responsive to criticism. Look, the first thing they announced was an opacity slider for Liquid Glass on macOS. Like, literally the first announcement of WWDC. So that was the vibe there. Like, it was — I wouldn't say serious. It was like a party vibe. Like, they were in full celebration mode because the thing was working and it was shipping, but it was very — it wasn't as goofy as years past. Like, they weren't covering anything up with, like, theatricality or production value. And I think that came through on the video. I think everyone saw that in the video, like, there wasn't a lot of special effects or CGI Craig Federighi in the space. It was just very different, like, on campus walking around Apple Park. It was very, 'We did it. You like it. Would you like to see another live demo of it working?' And that we just kind of lived through that over and over again.
Yeah, I saw a lot of people talking about the slowness of the demos and the fact that you actually got to sort of watch it think every time. And I had the same reaction you did, which is like, this is Apple making damn sure that you can't accuse it of not showing real demos, like, out of its way to be like, 'No, no, no, this is how long it takes.'
Yeah, without question. And even, you know, the demos that we actually saw, things took a while. And I think part of that in real time in person was all the developers had downloaded the betas and private cloud compute was just on fire. Like, some of the demos just didn't work and the people doing the demos were like, 'Yeah, PCC is on fire today, like, sorry about that, we're going to try again.' And I very much appreciated that.
You know what I mean? Like, totally.
The notion that Apple had built the stuff, that it was working, that the demos were experiencing real failure as opposed to everything being on rails. You know, it's in beta. There was something about that that was just honest in a way that lots and lots of Apple presentations have just been infomercials for years. This one was very much like, 'We made products, we're shipping it, we have a point of view about what it can and can't do, and we really want you to talk about it.' Even down to Craig and team doing the live briefing for journalists afterwards, which, it was good. You know, they know their stuff and they were there and Tim Cook was sitting in the front row and it just struck me that they were a little nervous.
Not in a bad way. They weren't off their game at all. They were just out of practice.
They hadn't done it in so long.
Talking to real people and completing sentences without getting to retake it. There was just an element of Craig getting on stage and being like, 'Hey everybody, this is what this is like. I'm feeling this for the first time in ages.'
Which I thought was good. I think it's good for Apple to be in that position of saying we have to prove that the thing works this time.
Yeah, I think that's right. All right, let's get into some questions. And actually, the first question is about the structure of the keynote itself. Here's the first question.
Hey, this is Gabe from DC. I had a question about your thoughts on the WWDC keynote. I noticed this year Apple, like, barely segmented out anything into, you know, a specific section on iOS, on watchOS, on iPadOS, etc. There's like one small thing at macOS and apologizing for how bad the design was. But this struck me as a weird question. Is Apple moving to kind of a post-OS-specific product line? This seems like what, you know, what Google does — they just kind of talk about features and the assumption is that all their platforms will get the features. So is Apple going to start, like, deemphasizing, you know, all of their operating system-specific features and just kind of move to a general, 'This is what we're doing this year'? I don't know, that seems like an interesting thing and a big shift for Apple. Curious your thoughts. Thanks so much.
I just want to say, using Google as the example of the assumption that all their platforms will get the features is so generous to Google that I appreciate that. But Nilay, this jumped out to me too. What did you make of, like, the actual structure of the thing? We're so used to it going a very specific way. What did you make of the way this one went?
I think the only feature of note that they announced was the Apple Intelligence stuff and that does work across all the platforms. If they had gone platform by platform, I think just narratively they would have announced Apple Intelligence five times in a row. When we actually did go to the briefings and the demos, the way it works on different platforms is different. And they showed us Apple Intelligence working in different ways on the iPad. Like, they're very proud that on the iPad you can swipe down from the top and there's a little animation that drops the sort of Spotlight pill down. It's very cool, by the way. It might be the single coolest thing in the 27 operating systems is a little swipe down on the iPad. On the Mac, you know, there's context menus and they've rearchitected Spotlight and Command Space and now you can hit Command-Shift-Space to take a context screenshot for Siri AI, which is just a new keyboard command. Like, operating system by operating system, there are differences. There are different features in the operating systems, but the things that they announced cut across and most importantly, Apple Intelligence cuts across. And I don't think there's a way you can do that and then go back through the operating systems. And if you look at the structure of the keynote and their three pillars, the first thing they announced was refinement.
macOS 27 Golden Gate is, you know, it's the Snow Leopard of this era of macOS.
Yeah. 'We fixed all the stuff we broke the last time' was very much the vibe.
And so I think they just didn't want to do lists of features. I think they wanted to talk about the core capability. Interestingly, the family stuff, the, you know, the child safety stuff, all of those features are out already. They reannounced a bunch of tools that already exist. And the thing that's really different is the underlying architecture has been updated so that those tools might actually work now. And that to me is just a big section is Apple responding to regulatory pressure around the country in different states and around the world in different countries because there's so much of it and their products have existed and they paid no attention to them that they essentially fixed it. So maybe they'll work. We have to do the testing. They don't work now. So maybe the architecture will make them actually work. And then they reannounced a bunch of features to point out that they exist, which I thought was utterly fascinating.
So, but you don't think there's some bigger sort of reshuffling in how Apple thinks about operating systems here? Because I think one line you could draw from the AI thing you're saying is that if you think Apple Intelligence and Siri AI are the sort of umbrella features across everything, then maybe spending a lot of time thinking about iOS and iPadOS and macOS as fundamentally different things is not useful anymore. And that maybe this becomes a more sort of, I don't know, like single-OS company rather than being as individual silos as it has been over time. But it sounds like you're just saying this is more of like a keynote planning thing, not a giant rethink in how Apple thinks about software.
It's true in the case of Siri AI, which is, you know, a cloud service.
Yeah. So Apple has instantiated Siri AI as a cloud service across all of its devices. And for all of the talk about on-device processing, they did almost everything happens on private cloud compute.
Even deciding where the request should go in many cases goes up to PCC. So you say something to Siri and it might decide that the request itself is going to PCC and then PCC is going to tell your device, 'Oh, I need more. I need you to give me the on-screen context.' And then your device will decide what to do. And I think all of that is fascinating. I don't think that Apple's getting away from the app model on iOS or the sort of open, run-whatever-you-want model on macOS. They were very clear that the way these devices work is still different, that Siri is going to work on these devices differently. I think the mashing together that you're reacting to is because Siri AI is a horizontal cloud service. Like, fundamentally it's a service and you can access it on different devices in different ways, but at the end of the day it's just a thing that now exists across the Apple ecosystem.
Yeah, I think that's fair. That makes sense. All right, let's move on to the next question. This is just a very specific demand for you in particular, Nilay. Here it is.
Hi David and The Vergecast. This is Drew. I'm actually listening to the episode right now, like, live. So, like, I'm, like, calling you and listening to you live right now. I'm turning it down. Apologies. Anyway, I just wanted to say, can we have Nilay do, like, a tight five on corner radii and how much it matters that Apple took a second in the keynote to talk about the radius of app corners? And I don't know, I mean, I almost never do the beta on my Mac, especially not day one. And I did for that because all of my family's chats are in WhatsApp and the corner radius was always different than everything else. It was such a nightmare. So, if we could get some representation of this major success and major win from WWDC, potentially the biggest for me and people of my ilk, I would love it.
Nilay, the floor is yours. Corner radii, the greatest day of your life.
It was. It's very good that it's the first thing that they announced. And to your theme of 'we fixed it' — all the stuff was broken. All the people who ran those projects are gone. Alan Dye, the head of design, is gone. He works at Meta now. John Giannandrea, who was the head of AI, who oversaw the broken Apple Intelligence launch, is gone. Now, these are new people, and they have the freedom to say the stuff was broken. And boy, was the stuff broken in Tahoe. Boy, did they get completely away from what in particular makes the Mac the Mac in Tahoe, which is an absolute laser focus on user interface design and human interaction design. So, I was very pleased they led with it. I saw John Gruber walking around. He looks very proud of himself. He is fully taking credit for all of these changes. You know, the opacity slider for Liquid Glass is there by default, it's set in the middle, and they asked me like, 'Where would you put it?' And I was like, 'All the way to the right.' Like, as opaque as I can get it. I just want my buttons back. There was one part in the keynote where they announced that they're just adding colors back to menu items in Windows so that you know which window is the active window. There's an element that's very silly, right? All the corner radii are going to match. Now, there's also an element of that that's what you are buying when you buy an Apple product. You are buying the attention to detail and the focus and the sense of design. And if you want chaos, you can go get Windows or you can go get a Samsung phone or something else. But what you buy from Apple is one very constrained vision of design. I'm glad they're back to it. I would also connect it to how they're thinking about Apple Intelligence design, right? You know, I just interviewed Sundar and I was like, 'Do you want to look at the search result?' And his response was, 'We have a very scientific way of measuring whether the search results are good.' Like, there's no qualitative design over there. That's just not how they think about their products. Apple is very happy to talk to you about corner radii and fixing it now that Alan Dye is gone. And, you know, as he kind of pushed on that in different conversations I was having, there's a reason why they haven't jumped all the way into agents. There's a reason why they haven't done all of the things that everyone else are doing. They want to be thoughtful about that. Now, the uncharitable read is they're not ready for that. They had to reset the whole thing and all the features are basically free chats from two years ago in a more privacy-focused way. But their argument is no one knows how any of this should work. And Apple's point of view is, yes, we will be two years late and get it right. And like, that's Apple. That's the thing that they are doing right now. And I think corner radii is just evidence that they want to be that company.
Yeah. And I think, like, again, I'm trying not to read too much into keynote structure, but leading with that, I think you're exactly right. It's like, we are back to attending to detail in a way that I think made a lot of people very happy. Like, an easy win with all the Apple nerds out there to just do that. And it is one of those things that once you notice it, you can never ever stop seeing it. So, I'm very glad that they fixed this.
I mean, I never installed Tahoe. It was not... It was not...
You managed to avoid it entirely.
Yeah. Two years without installing an OS update.
Genuinely really impressive.
All right, let's get to the next question. This is from Conlin who says, 'What for you is the best feature that would normally be a big deal in a WWDC keynote that would send developers wild, yet this year was swallowed by all the time given to AI nonsense? For me, it would be Markdown in the Notes app.' Do you have one off the top of your head? Like, would have been a huge deal any other year except all they wanted to talk about was Siri.
Well, so it is Markdown in the Notes app. That did get a little cheer. Like, it was there. People saw it on the bento box. Like, 'Oh, that's cool.' The one that, like, they talked about it but it was just like the wrong moment in time to get the cheer was the agentic coding in Xcode. Like, they're very proud of it and the fact that you can swap the models out to Codex and Claude Code and all the other ones. There's something big brewing in Xcode that gets no attention and they talked about it more in the Developer State of the Union. But Xcode is becoming a big agentic coding platform for Apple developers, or at least they're trying to, and they know they have to keep up. And so I think from, like, the developer perspective, the idea that they're just going to lose to Claude Code is not an option and they're going to have to push Xcode down that direction.
That's a good one. Can I give you two? Well, I have two and a half.
Because one of them you're just going to make fun of me for. So I've been going through — they put up this slide at one point that was just like a billion words of, like, 'Here are the improvements that we're making.' And I've been going through and trying to pull out the ones that are in there that didn't get talked about a lot. One that I personally am very excited about is audio scrubbing in the Now Playing screen in CarPlay, to be able to actually just use your finger to move audio. For somebody who has to play the same song over and over and over for my three-year-old, that's going to change my life. One that I think actually might qualify as, like, would have been a big deal any other time, is extra-large widgets. They introduced a new widget size that is now basically the full size of your home screen. I've only seen screenshots. I don't have it on my phone yet, but it is just a widget that takes up the whole space that your entire app grid would, and it becomes essentially an interactive app on your home screen. And I think, like, if you want to get real galaxy brain about that, there's something really interesting happening in, like, how do we just elevate some of your most-used apps to your home screen? Like...
I mean, I would connect that directly to, in the Developer State of the Union, they announced the ability to resize iPhone apps in a simulator to, like, a landscape orientation. How do you get two apps on a wide screen?
Oh, and then clearly in the middle it's just a folding phone. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like, how do you get two apps at once on a wide screen? Maybe we just have full-screen widgets that go side by side.
100%. And then the other one, and this definitely does not count as would have been a big deal, but is natural language calendar input. Are you a calendar person? I don't know that I actually know this about you. Like, are you somebody who lives out of...
My entire life is a calendar.
Okay. What calendar app do you use?
