Apple plays catch-up at WWDC

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday started off with an apology of sorts. Instead of jumping right into the headline news about a revamped AI-powered Siri , Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi spent the first stretch of the keynote on a list of repairs.

For the past two years, Apple has been racing to catch up in AI while frustrations with its core software quietly added up: a design overhaul users hated, a search function that barely worked, a file-sharing feature that routinely failed, and a Health app that ignored half its user base. Apple didn’t say any of that on Monday. But the structure of its WWDC keynote said it for them, leading with fixes before features, and framing a better Siri as one item on a long list of improvements rather than the main event. At minimum, the sequencing suggests Apple believes the foundation needs shoring up before it can credibly ask users to trust it with something as consequential as AI.

“Instead of just introducing a host of new features, we’re also taking the features you already rely on and making them even better, because we believe the best operating systems aren’t just built on big breakthroughs, they’re built on sweating the details,” Federighi said. It’s the kind of statement that would be unremarkable from most companies, but from Apple, it was as close to an admission of fault as you’ll get. (Sweating the details is exactly what critics said the company had stopped doing.)

Federighi didn’t have to wait long to prove the point. The first item on the list was the company’s controversial Liquid Glass design language that first arrived in iOS 26 and promptly triggered consumer backlash over readability and usability concerns.

While visually impressive, Liquid Glass’s glass-like aesthetic made certain on-screen elements harder to see. Users pointed out numerous ways the update was undercooked, particularly on the Mac, and begged Apple for tools to restore the more frosted look.

The company approached the moment carefully, saying “really appreciates” the user feedback it received over Liquid Glass over the past year.

“While we think this is a great new default look, we also know that some users would like Liquid Glass to be even more clear, and others prefer a more tinted appearance,” said Apple’s director of human interface design, Shubham Kedia, during the keynote address. (Nobody, for the record, is asking for it to be even clearer.)

Apple, which had already tweaked the design before today, is now allowing users to dial it back entirely with a new slider that goes all the way to “fully tinted.”

A few other small but telling updates followed. Apple showed a “more uniform” toolbar in macOS designed to better distinguish controls and text from the content beneath them, in another usability improvement. App icons received additional Liquid Glass refinements to make them “sharper and more defined,” even when set to clear mode.