Yesterday’s WWDC 2026 keynote was a very different beast to its predecessors – and not just because the company spent more than ten minutes talking about child safety and screen time in response to growing concerns by regulators.
The structure of the keynote presentation was completely different to what we have seen in the past, but we can expect this to be the new normal …
Previous Apple WWDC keynotes looked at one operating system at a time. Take last year, for example – the sequence was:
- Intro
- iOS
- watchOS
- tvOS
- macOS
- visionOS
- iPadOS
- Developers
This year, however, Apple didn’t structure the keynote by platform. Instead, the structure was:
- Intro
- Platform improvements
- Trust and safety
- Apple Intelligence and Siri
There’s a very good reason for this change: because this year sees greater platform integration than ever before. It doesn’t make sense to break things down by operating system because the same features are being introduced across the board.
Top comment by GreenBeer
It wasn’t as flashy as years prior and that’s a very good thing. They actually used the keynote to convey information about products instead of it being one big ad. Progress!
While it was slightly unsettling to those of us who have years of familiarity with the previous structure, this is what we can expect to see in future years. From this point on, it will be overall Apple ecosystem over individual platforms.
This is a watershed moment for the company. Apple has long promoted tight integration between different products as a key benefit, but this is the first time it’s been achieved so well that it no longer makes sense to address each product category in turn when talking about new features.
My colleague Jeff Benjamin also noticed that the cinematography was different. There seemed to be far less reliance on whizzy digital effects, and more ‘real’ footage. I wondered whether this was a deliberate choice – to emphasize that while other companies may be focused on the most impressive AI features, Apple is prioritizing the ones that make the most real-world difference.
What did you think of the new format? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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