Interviewing Apple's Craig Federighi on WWDC25 & everything OS26

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.

Oh great. Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah. Well, I would always tell your friends to buy both.

You know, the Mac is first and foremost a keyboard and trackpad experience and the density of the UI is very much oriented around the precision of a trackpad and the trackpad pointer and so it's really optimized with that as the starting place. The iPad, meanwhile, is at its heart the ultimate touch platform, right? You can just hold it in your hand. You've got just multi-touch gestures and it's also a fantastic hold-it-in-your-hand lean-back device. And so they do come from different centers and yet we've found ways that in a consistent way where there were common things you wanted to do that we could do it in a way that was very familiar and common across them. And I think there were solutions in the past with iPad where we'd skirted away from taking the Mac answer to a problem. You know, we had the ability for accessing keyboard accelerators and we had this kind of popup HUD and then we realized, you know, the menu bar is just a better answer to that problem. We had it all along. And so, we're not resisting bringing ideas from the Mac to iPad when it's the best answer for iPad. But at the same time, iPad is going to be iPad. It's important that we continue to make iPad that thing that is touch-first, lean-back, awesome for all forms of content production, but also can stretch into productivity. So, I think they both have their uses. I think for many of us, we have great reasons to use both of them. And the key is we want to make it so you can work with them together, right? As seamlessly as you can. And with the new design, I think that experience even feels all the more seamless as you move across them.

I think you're totally right. And I think I find in so many ways AI when properly used, it can be the ultimate tool to enrich yourself, to better yourself, to explore, to create. You know, you see some people who maybe take AI as a shortcut to avoid learning or taking on a task. But I think when you come at it with the right mindset, AI can be the ultimate resource and the ultimate teacher. And I think translation is just one example of many that now you're empowered to learn some new language. And even if you start with translation and you're seeing what you're saying, but you're also seeing the translation, you're being exposed to now both languages and how they work together in a very interactive way that's I think going to stick. And so yes, I totally agree with you. I think it's hugely empowering.

Well, I did study marketing.

Likewise. Yeah. Thank you.