Okay. Well, let's just name all of those 26. I'm such a huge fan of the redesign. The mirroring of the iPhone as well, which I use every single day. Great. Life-changing function. So, I'm really happy to hear the live translation. I feel like I have a little translator in my pocket.
Hi, Craig. I was going to start with the big elephant in the room, renaming to a year-based system. Could you walk us through the decision behind the new convention?
As we've introduced more and more platforms, we had such a range of names. It was tvOS this version and macOS this number and iOS this number, and strangely the macOS number was less than the iOS number even though the Mac's been around longer. It was visionOS 3 and it was sort of getting to be all over the map. And yet for customers, they increasingly use these things together. And with the new design especially, there's really a unified design across all of them as well. And so we're thinking of them as one thing. It felt very unifying and very simple to say what is the system that you're going to be running by and large in 2026. Okay, well, let's just name all of those 26. And you know, once we'd done it, we realized like, ah, it was sort of a relief. Like this is so much easier to think about and talk about and really express the unity of all of our platforms.
Definitely. And personally I love it because it helps me as well convey everything to followers and people who ask questions. It's so much easier. So thank you from, I think this is a good one from the creator side as well. And then the liquid glass redesign. God, I'm such a huge fan of the redesign.
There's been speculation about rounder-cornered app shapes and I personally am relieved that that's not the case, or like the app icons, were they going to be circles? I can see that the design is so much slicker. It's nicer. It's glassy. And I'm wondering if it was purely an aesthetic purpose decision or if it's functional as well.
Yeah. Well, I think there are design elements that run pretty deep and then there are functional ones. So, the shapes really are about concentricity with the design. If you look at how your iPhone for instance, how the bezel has evolved and that of the iPad and that of the new Macs, they've become rounder on the corners. And so having all of the shapes mirror that same structure is just incredibly harmonious for the eye. And even the icon shapes, they are slightly changed, but they're changed in a way that's meant to be very balanced with the overall concentricity of the entire design. And that's why when you look at it, it just feels so right. But then there are these functional elements to it. You know, we wanted to at the same time have your content feel like it was completely edge-to-edge. If you are looking at a photo or scrolling through a news article, that content fills your beautiful display and yet have the controls also feel very clear and accessible. And if you think about the previous designs, there were sort of bars and those bars had glyphs on them that were flat without a very buttony feel. And we were able to get the best of both worlds with the design that took those shapes, brought them in from the edges so that your content flows to the edges, and yet the buttons themselves feel very much like that is something I can act on really easily. And then it also gave us this incredible opportunity for dynamism. So that as you're scrolling and something can move out of the way and come back. This is something if you have a bar just really doesn't make sense. But when you have these shapes made of this material that's very alive, this liquid glass, then functionally they could get out of the way and give you more access to your content. So it really all came together in a beautiful way.
Wow. I love the way you speak about everything. We're all very excited about it. Yeah, it made me think being Italian of the Murano glass. I don't know if you've ever seen it. Honestly, that's exactly what you're describing and we should go there and do a piece of content there. I was also thinking, this is a bit of my speculation, but I was also thinking that perhaps it could help users understand when they're interacting with the system and when they're interacting with Apple Intelligence because of the difference in design that's now kind of palpable, right? It's kind of visible.
Well, I think Apple Intelligence last year we really wanted to create the feeling that Apple Intelligence was there around your entire experience. And so that edge-light glow really made a lot of sense. But now with the elements of the UI sort of pulled in from those corners, now it makes even more sense that the glow of Apple Intelligence is coming in from the sides and the controls are not getting covered by Apple Intelligence, but they're sort of inset within Apple Intelligence. And so that's another element that just sort of came together in a beautiful way.
So, moving on to the Mac, I noticed how Spotlight has evolved into such a more powerful tool thanks to Apple Intelligence as well. And it's been really going from a search bar to kind of like a command center. So, I was just wondering if you could talk about the reason behind it and if you see it becoming like a bit of a universal assistant prompt or...
Yeah. So well this is an area that is so exciting of course for software engineers, people like me where we spend a lot of time with our hands on the keyboard. It's incredibly productive if you can just quickly get to what you want to or carry out the commands you want to very concisely. And so we have so many users on the Mac that are power users that string together very particular workflows and want to be just completely in their flow without sort of switching input modalities and so forth. And so bringing this ability to run actions, custom actions like shortcuts, and do it all from that single bar was something that really captured our imagination early in the project and drove a ton of excitement. We also see, and in fact it is a capability of the bar, that if you type something long like some natural language, that what Spotlight will offer you as its primary suggestion is to ask Siri. So you can actually type a long question, hit it, and there you've just typed to Siri. But if you type a file name or an app name, boom, you've opened it. If you type a command, you've run it. And so yes, it is becoming a sort of universal prompt and it brings everything together.
