It’s only a day to go until WWDC 2026, and in a way it’s kind of strange when you stop to think about it. Each year we sit down to watch a marketing video, and over the next couple of hours Apple tells us the direction it has chosen for its platforms, its developers and a surprisingly large preportion of the human race.
Apple devices are now used by roughly 1 in 5 humans on the planet. That’s roughly 1.4 to 1.7 billion people, depending on how you account for people who own more than one Apple device. The company says there are more than 2.5 billion active Apple devices in use, against a world population of about 8.3 billion.[1][2] Around one in four active smartphones globally is an iPhone.[3]
Which makes me wonder whether the yearly feature rollout process should be a bit more, say, democratic? But that’s a thought to explore another day…
What I’m interested in is what Apple plans to do with AI. As I see it, there are three pillars to any AI strategy Apple might have.
The first is consumer-facing features: making my phone better at understanding me and doing useful things automatically. While there are features that attempt this at the moment, they are often unreliable or inconsistent. In 2026, nobody should have to copy and paste text from a WhatsApp message into their Calendar app, manually create an appointment, and invite everyone. AI is more than capable of automating this.
2023 was the year of using LLMs to improve spelling and grammar[4], and Apple was late to that. 2025 was the year of using them to actually perform tasks, and Apple is again late to this. I use the Reminders app to collaborate with my wife on a shared shopping list throughout the week. One of us then logs into a supermarket website and adds everything from the reminders list to the grocery basket, most of which we bought the week before (we tend to buy a lot of the same things every week but not always). As I go down the list, I’m mainly checking that prices haven’t become unreasonably high and looking out for the occasional special offer. What if Siri could notice that I’m doing this and offer to take control of my browser and do it for me? Again, the technology is capable of this, as anyone who has used the Claude browser plugin will tell you. This could be genuinely useful: a reminders app that actually executes your tasks rather than just bothering you about them! For a limited subset of life admin: things like booking car services, weekly grocery shopping, and holiday planning, I can see this being possible.
The second category is developer facing APIs. Here I think the ask is relativly simple. Allow developers to access AI models both on-device and in the cloud, automatically taking on user preferences, context and memory. I coudl go on here, but what I’m really interested in is the 3rd pillar.
The third pillar is vibe coding. The name is somewhat dismissive, but it represents the biggest change in the software industry since the World Wide Web went mainstream in the mid-1990s. It is now possible to create useful utility apps without writing any code by hand. Google has leaned into this with the latest version of Android, and Apple needs to do the same to avoid falling behind.
It should be possible to prompt my phone to make an app that shows me a map of every run I’ve ever logged, with the routes marked using a colour gradient based on the temperature on the day of each run. Or any other unique, random idea I might have. Apple needs to embrace the original vision of the Mac as a bicycle for the mind, only now it’s a motorbike for the mind. A consumer-facing vibe coding app, in the vein of Swift Playgrounds, could enable anyone to create small apps without ever needing to look at the underlying code. Those apps could then be saved to a private gallery and made available across all of their devices. The future is bespoke software, created by a prompt – that anyone can build regardless of how technical they are. I don’t think these small ‘applets’ will replace enterprise SaaS solutions, but for simple needs they will surfice. I’d like to see Apple embracing this in appleOS 27.
Unbeknown to me I was actually building “agentic” AI in 2023. I wrote an app that used an LLM to control Selenium and interact with online chatbots in a web browser, testing whether they were working correctly. It would automatically stop when it determined that the chatbot being tested had satisfied the objective it had been given. ↩︎
Today I am announcing a new app for iPhone and Apple Watch users called nxTrain. It’s designed to fill a gap specifically for people who commute by train in the UK on a regular basis. It allows you to configure your regular commute and then quickly see the next train, either from an Apple Watch complication, an iPhone widget, or by opening the app. That’s all it does. It’s that simple.
The specific problem I wanted to solve is this: when I’m on the Underground arriving at Waterloo station, I often have only a couple of minutes to find out when the next fastest train to Basingstoke is. Most existing apps assume you want to plan a complex journey or buy tickets. nxTrain assumes you already know where you are going, and just need to know which platform to run to. It will always show the next train based on its arrival time, not the departure time. So you don’t have to worry about inadvertently taking the slow stopping train. Background updating means there is also a good chance the platform information will already be there on your lock screen or watch face and you won’t have to struggle to find out on the underground with limited signal or at the station where signal can be saturated.
The app also lets you configure the times of day you usually leave for work and return home. This means widgets and complications can automatically show the next train in the appropriate direction based on the time of day. For hybrid workers, you can also configure the days you commute - so it won’t update on days when you don’t need it to, saving both battery life and bandwidth.
The app only supports direct train journeys, but for commutes with multiple legs it’s possible to set up multiple journeys, and even have a different widget setup for each. This can actually end up being more efficient than dedicated journey planner apps, which tend to assume people need longer to move between platforms than is often the case, especially if you do it regularly.
nxTrain is available in the App Store for less then at the price of a coffee.
In the late 90s, the term “RAD” was everywhere in software development. This had nothing to do with being stoner movies or being totally radical however. RAD stood for “Rapid Application Development”. It described an approach centred on speed and accessibility, where tools such as Delphi from Borland and Visual Basic from Microsoft made it possible to build working applications quickly, often with far less overhead and knowledge. This stood in contrast to more traditional methods of Windows development, which typically involved working directly with the C/C++ APIs and Win32 libraries, a process that was considerably more complex and time-consuming.
Visual Basic even came packaged as a “Leaning Edition” aimed at hobbyists looking to learn to code. The name Visual Studio was called this because it was “visual” - you could design your software by using a mouse and keyboard and by laying out elements on the screen. On the web development side, software like Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver also had this goal.
This idea that the layperson could do anything they want with their computer, not just what some somewhere software company somewhere allow them to do seemed to get lost somewhere in the mid-2000s. Software development got more and more complex and harder to pickup from scratch.
But now thanks to LLMs we are entering this era again. Right now, LLMs are unfathomably good at writing code. Good code. At present, to get the most out of tools like Open AI’s Codex or Claude Code, you need to have some prior experience of software development. This requirement is only going to lessen. In the near future it’s likely anyone will be able to type in an idea for an iPhone app and have something of decent quality generated within a few hours, if not minutes. I’ve recently “written” a bespoke iPhone app that fills a niche in my life. It’s production quality. It supports all the little things you’d expect on iOS, including widgets and an Apple Watch companion app. I didn’t write a single line of code. Instead, I used my experience as a developer to direct Codex and architect an application that is of sufficient quality that I’ve decided to release it to the App Store, in case anyone else finds it useful (more on this soon).
In my role as a product manager, I make extensive use of Jira. Nobody likes Jira. It is typical enterprise software that does everything for everyone, yet pleases nobody! While it’s possible to bend it to any process, but impossible to do so easily and elegantly without a million “hacks” or spending hours learning how to use its confusing UI. So I asked Claude Code to write an app that connects to the Jira API and presents a user interface that actually makes sense for the way we plan work. It took about 90 minutes in total and turned out to be very helpful.
What this means for SaaS companies is unknown. The way I see it, these “vibe coded” apps have a lot in common with the Visual Basic or Microsoft Access apps that would have been spun up by “power users” in the late 90s. They are able to fill gaps in software that SaaS companies struggle to justify the time to address, yet unless they happen to have an ex-developer building them, they will likely have all the pitfalls of RAD in the 90s. No backups. No upgrade path. Minimal testing. Little thought given to edge cases, compliance or security.
Maybe LLMs will be able to cover all that too. It is quite possible. But unless the human in charge knows to check for these things, then who knows? In the meantime, I can see SaaS companies that are able to bring the best of both worlds thriving by filling those bespoke gaps rapidly using LLMs to speed up development, while also providing SLAs and quality guarantees.
This also changes what users will expect from a computer. An iPad that can’t run Claude Code and do anything I can imagine, in minutes, is now orders of magnitude less useful than a full laptop that can.
AI is making it easier than ever to build your own software – and this is fantastic for users – but doing it well still takes care and attention.
The Apple Watch has been out for over a decade now, and yet its health and fitness insights have only improved marginally. GPS brought maps of your running routes, while more accurate accelerometers and gyroscopes enabled more in-depth running analysis. Better heart rate sensors allow for ongoing heart monitoring, and the addition of a thermometer helps with sleep and menstrual cycle tracking. There have been other improvements, admittedly, but the Health app itself has mostly just accumulated more charts.
Bevel aims to augment Apple’s base offering with its own app that analyses and interprets data from an Apple Watch, or any fitness tracker that writes to Apple Health, and provides actual recommendations, commentary, and more actionable insights. At least, that is the pitch.
The key tenets of the app are the scores it provides for “Strain”, “Recovery”, “Sleep”, and “Stress”. The app is often compared to the Whoop fitness tracker, as both provide similar functionality[1]. Strain is a measure of how much you have put your body through on any given day. Unlike Apple’s Activity metric, it does not just look at movement and heart rate. It also factors in the toll your overall stress level takes on your body, as well as your ability to cope with that stress based on how well you recovered from the previous day, hence the Recovery and Sleep scores. Sleep takes into account how much time you spend in each sleep stage, not just total time asleep, along with wake-ups and bedtime consistency. Recovery looks at how quickly your nervous system calms down after stress and exercise. Stress uses resting heart rate and heart rate variability to estimate how stressed you are.
Overall, I have found the scores to be pretty helpful. It is important to take them in context. Sleep tracking using a device on your wrist is far from perfect, so if I wake up feeling great but Bevel says I had a bad night, I am not going to lose any sleep over it. Where it does help is in showing the impact of lifestyle choices on things like sleep and stress. Having a single pint of 4% IPA at lunchtime led to my HRV spiking for the next 24 hours and reduced the amount of deep sleep I got that night. Training too hard by pushing myself on runs too close together also spikes my stress levels. I more or less knew this already, but seeing the data as evidence, and seeing when positive changes make a difference, is genuinely useful. The stress metric is also much simpler than trying to work what your HRV means. As someone who has a tendency to over train and over work while not paying attention to my what my body is telling me, having a large stress score a tap away is good way to know when to skip that run or log off early.
And of course, it would not be 2026 if the app did not include a conversational interface courtesy of an LLM. The chat feature is actually very good. As someone who has worked in AI for the past decade, I cannot imagine that even three years ago we would have had a chatbot capable of making such accurate and useful insights about my own health. I can ask whether I should attempt a 10-mile run tomorrow or hold off for another day, and it will look at my scores, workout history, and other data to make a data-driven recommendation. It is not perfect. Like many LLM-based systems, it keeps a memory of things you say that it considers significant. This data is then fed into subsequent prompts, allowing an otherwise stateless model to learn about you over time. This can lead to amusing results when it overplays the importance or timing of something it has stored, such as when it assumed a beer I had at lunchtime on a Saturday was consumed at 6am on Sunday morning before a 10-mile run. Still, while many tech companies and LinkedIn influencers talk up so-called “agentic” software, Bevel is actually doing it, and it is providing real value. The LLM is cloud-based, probably OpenAI, Google Gemini, or Claude Sonnet, and Bevel state that they do not bulk-share your health data. Instead, they appear to send limited snippets as part of the prompt.
Bevel also supports logging food and drink, allowing you to correlate this with your scores and see how they are affected. For example, log a cup of tea at 5pm and you will probably see your sleep score drop noticeably. I have not really used this feature properly. For me, life is too short to estimate food intake precisely enough to be genuinely useful, although I can see how this would be worthwhile for some people.
Finally, there is the cost. It is £50 a year for the features mentioned above. Compared to the competition, namely Whoop or possibly the Oura Ring, that is very good value, assuming you already own an Apple Watch. The fact that you also get a capable smartwatch that does many other things, rather than a commodity fitness tracker or a very limited ring, makes this feel like a much better deal. It is also widely expected that Apple will introduce its own AI-based offering at some point in the near future.
Overall, I am very pleased with it and will be subscribing for a year.
As an aside, I have noticed Whoop becoming increasingly popular recently, which shows where Fitbit could have gone. It is essentially a Fitbit for the 2020s. I have even noticed people wearing both a Whoop and an Apple Watch. This really should not be necessary and is the primary reason I sought out a software-based solution. ↩︎
Anthropic, whose advanced chatbots are used by millions of people, discovered its Claude Opus 4 tool was averse to carrying out harmful tasks for its human masters, such as providing sexual content involving minors or information to enable large-scale violence or terrorism.
The San Francisco-based firm, recently valued at $170bn, has now given Claude Opus 4 (and the Claude Opus 4.1 update) – a large language model (LLM) that can understand, generate and manipulate human language – the power to “end or exit potentially distressing interactions”.
It said it was “highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future” but it was taking the issue seriously and is “working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible”.
They are “highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs” –this sounds like great marketing from Anthropic. Fundamentally, LLMs are vast sequences of numerical operations on arrays of numbers, most prominently matrix multiplications. If these computations are suspected of having feelings, then by the same logic the calculations that render Super Mario racing around the track in Mario Kart would too. Maybe Nintendo’s next marketing campaign should be about how they have a study in place to make sure Mario and his chums’ welfare is looked after as they are forced to race endlessly around the same track day in day out.
Microsoft originally encouraged its employees to work from home amid the coronavirus outbreak in 2020. This new flexible working arrangement then became an official “hybrid workplace” policy several months after the pandemic began, allowing managers to approve permanent remote work. Now that the pandemic has settled into endemicity, Microsoft wants employees to return to the office. And if some quit in response, well, that’s probably exactly what Microsoft is expecting.
…
Microsoft is preparing to announce a mandatory return to office of three days a week. The policy will apply to those who live within 50 miles of Microsoft’s Redmond campus, and some teams at Microsoft may even return for four or five days.
My thoughts on working from home are that it’s a bit like your diet. The most appealing food isn’t necessarily the most nutritious. It might be tempting to avoid the office, and yes, the commute isn’t always the best use of time, but then doughnuts also taste better than kale.
We’ve come a long way from 2022, when a group of Apple employees attempted a Steve Jobs pastiche[1] by writing an open letter entitled “Thoughts on Office-Bound Work”, a reference to Jobs’s famous “Thoughts on Flash” open letter published in 2010. However, this article was not only poorly written and poorly argued, it also tried to frame some of the most privileged people in America (Silicon Valley tech workers) as somehow marginalised because Apple wanted them to turn up at the office a few days a week. The fact that you need to be wealthy enough to live in a house with a dedicated working space, that working from home isn’t even an option for many of the lowest-paid jobs, and that it therefore requires a certain amount of privilege, seemed to be completely lost on them.
I am fortunate enough to work from home 3 days of the week, but I also know that meeting colleagues in person is very important when it comes to building trust and camaraderie. It’s also vital for mentoring junior colleagues. I know several people early in their careers who have switched jobs to find companies where being in the office is the norm rather than the exception.
Hybrid is the way forward. A great employer understands that allowing workers to fit work around their life, whether that’s picking up children, attending appointments, or other commitments, leads to the best performance.
At the same time, it’s up to employees to take a mature view and acknowledge that it’s not just about them. Maybe other people they work with will need human contact. Maybe they do too, but don’t realise it. It’s no surprise that Microsoft reports higher employee wellbeing among those who come into the office.
So I’m hoping we can see a nuanced, balanced approach that respects workers’ rights, allows for flexibility, but also acknowledges that meeting people in person is valuable and not something to be avoided completely.
They even have “hot news” in the URL, a reference to a section on Apple’s web site in the early 2000s. ↩︎
No joke: the UK Government’s Environment Agency and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs has suggested deleting old emails to reduce water consumption.
If we assume these emails are stored in the cloud, and not on someone’s laptop (as was more often the case 10–15 years ago), then there might be something in this — but it’s tenuous, to say the least.
Yes, water is used to remove heat from data centres, but storing data does not, in and of itself, generate heat. Heat comes from computation, a deep property of the physical universe, though our current technology is still far from the theoretical limits where this becomes unavoidable.
Presumably, the thinking is that less data means fewer spinning hard disks or SSDs will be needed, and there will be less data to back up. So less heat. But this overlooks the minuscule amount of space an email actually takes up.
Processing email content creates heat (for example, to update search indexes or power AI tools) — but there’s a chance that deleting emails will cause these processes to run again anyway.
So I’m very confused by this. I’m pretty sure that having slighly less coffee in your mug would have a much greater impact than deleting some old emails.
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a number of Amazon sellers using blatantly fake product shots. They’re not even trying to make them look realistic. A reverse image search reveals they’ve simply taken stock photos and pasted what is presumably a real photo of their product into them, with no regard for how the angle, lighting, or shadows appear.
This must surely be the best way to tell if a product is rubbish, rather than relying on the (probably also fake) reviews.
I haven’t quite dared to try any of them in person yet, but from what I’ve observed this year’s operating system releases are generally positive.
The new Liquid Glass UI theme is a welcome change, recalling the early days of Aqua when Apple crafted inventive, whimsical interfaces. Those were certainly fun times, but it’s important to remember it was a different era and Apple had far fewer customers. Early versions of Mac OS X also ran painfully slowly in part because of their fancy user interface. I’m hoping Liquid Glass won’t suffer the same performance issues, especially on older devices. I’m also aware of the legibility issues some beta testers are reporting, but I’m confident these will be ironed out before it rolls out in September.
The AI improvements are minor and there seems to be less focus on Apple Intelligence as a brand. I’m not sure why AI needed its own brand name really. It struck me that the likley reason for this seperation was because it was built by a different team within Apple, rather than it making sense from a user’s perepctive. Some of the new AI features do look interesting however: being able to call Apple’s models from within Shortcuts, and 3rd parties being able to utlise local LLMs (thus not requriing an internet connection) is huge. The problem is that the only devices to support this are relativly recent ones: 2023’s iPhone Pro line and 2025’s iPhone lineup. Even the base iPad which you can buy brand new from Apple today does not support local AI models. This means most apps will either have to make their AI powered features optional, ensure there is a server-side backup in place, or restrict their market to those on the latest devices. Since many apps are cross platform anyway, I think most developers will go with option 1 or 2.
The iPad has received the most substantial update, with full windowing support now available. I have no complaints about this, and can’t wait to try it out. I was particularly pleased to see that it will work even on the iPad mini and the 2020 iPad Air. While many people will now finally be able to harness the device’s powerful hardware, I still think the iPad’s biggest drawback is that it can only run software from the App Store. There are so many great apps like Visual Studio Code and Chrome that are not there for commercial or Apple’s policy reasons.
The fact that windowing is not available on the iPhone is also curious. When Apple split iOS and iPadOS into separate brands a few years ago, the reaction was mostly positive; finally, the iPad was getting the attention it deserved. But thinking about it now, I have to wonder if the reason was to reduce any expectation that features added to the iPad would also appear on the iPhone. At this point, with Apple Silicon, Apple is essentially selling its customers the same computer three or four times with only minor differences. They have different-sized screens, some have a keyboard attached and others rely on a touchscreen. Some have a better camera, and built in cellular. The core of the devices, even the operating system, near enough identical. if you own a recent iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Watch – you’ve bought the same computer multiple times. The iPhone’s Apple A18 chip has a similar level of performance to the Mac’s M1 chip, which is still a ridiulasly fast chip. There is no reason why an iPhone could not become a laptop or full desktop simply by plugging it into the a keyboard and monitor. In decades past, mobile phones lagged far behind desktop PCs in terms of performance, but today most people could use their phone as a desktop PC or laptop: the chip is powerful enough and there is ample memory. What’s holding this back is not the “free market” or a lack of demand, but, I suspect, Apple’s preference to continue selling us multiple devices. In this respect, the distinction between device classes is more a marketing one than a technical one.
Overall, I think the ’26 releases should be exciting, even if I wish Apple would embrace change product category perspective a bit more. Would today’s Apple of 2025 have released the iPhone in 2007 when the iPod was still king? I’m not so sure.
New estimates regarding the recently-exploited Microsoft SharePoint vulnerabilities now evaluate that as many as 400 organizations may have been targeted.
The figure is a sharp increase from the original count of around 100, with Microsoft pointing the finger at Chinese threat actors for the hacks, namely Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon, and Storm-2603.
The victims are primarily US based, and amongst these are some high value targets, including the National Nuclear Security Administration - the US agency responsible for maintaining and designing nuclear weapons, Bloomberg reports.
Microsoft makes it clear this is an issue with on-prem instances of SharePoint, not the cloud based Office 365 solution.
One might question why an organisation would choose to run these services on premises in 2025. In my experience, banks and other security-focused institutions often believe their own teams can outperform Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or AWS. Yet time and time again, we see on-prem is actually less secure than the cloud. Unless your service is complelty air-locked from the Internet, I see very few reasons to be relying on on-premisis software, especially Microsoft products, in 2025.
Hopefully, running on-premises commercial services like this in the name of security will soon be consigned to the trash can of computing history, along with other security theatre measures often imposed by IT administrators, such as enforced password expiration.
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a number of Amazon sellers using blatantly fake product shots. They’re not even trying to make them look realistic. A reverse image search reveals they’ve simply taken