WWDC 2025: New Features Coming To iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 "Tahoe"

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about what's coming to macOS, iOS, and iPadOS fresh from today's Worldwide Developer Conference announcements. So at the big keynote event today for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, they announced all sorts of new features coming to the operating systems. Now, a lot of these features apply to all of the systems, and that includes the new design. The new design is called Liquid Glass, and it makes a lot of elements look like they're actually on pieces of glass hovering over whatever's underneath it. So you're going to see these glass elements throughout macOS, iOS, iPadOS, even VisionOS and WatchOS. Another thing that applies to all of these is the new naming scheme. Instead of them having different numbers after the different operating systems, they're now all going to follow a naming scheme based on the next year. So since these operating systems will come out in the fall of 2025, they're all going to be numbered 26. So we get iOS 26, macOS 26, iPadOS 26, and so on. This makes sense. So now we can actually look at features across all of these systems and have a number that's the same. If a new feature comes to all the systems, it'll come in version 26 of all those systems instead of having to have different numbers for different devices. Now let's start by talking about the changes for iOS. So you've got the new Liquid Glass on your iPhone now. In addition, you've got these specific new features. Like, for instance, visual intelligence, the ability to have something identified in a photo or with the camera, that now extends to screenshots. So if you see something while you're browsing, say, a web page or in an app, you can take a screenshot and use visual intelligence to identify the item or add events, things like that. There's a lot of new features in the communications apps. That's messages, phone, and FaceTime. In messages, you've got two particular features. One is backgrounds for conversations. So an ongoing conversation with a group or just with your best friend, you can now add a background to it. So it's got a different color or image behind it. Also, you've got polling. So you could have polls, which you start, which ask people for their opinions on things, in a group chat situation. There's also live translation. So you'll get live translations of messages, both to and from, but it also works with audio in the phone app and in FaceTime. So you'll be able to do things like talk to somebody who doesn't speak your language, and it will translate so they hear it. And then when they talk back to you, you'll get a translation on your end. So it doesn't require they have anything special, just that you've got an iPhone with iOS 26. There's also a couple of screening tools. This applies to all three apps as well. So the idea is, say, on your phone, if you get a call from an unknown number, it can actually screen the call for you. So it won't just be like leave a voicemail. It will actually ask their name and what they're calling about. And then it will take that, translate it to text, and then your phone will ring, and it will show what the person says is their name and what they're calling about. And you can then decide whether or not to answer, send it to voicemail, ignore it, and so on. There's also hold assist. So if you're put on hold and there's music playing, you can actually exit, then the phone calls stay live, and then you'll get an alert when the person actually is on the line. The music app has a few new features that I like. One is auto mix, which will basically fade one song in over the other song at the end, kind of like a DJ would do. Even matching beats and things like that, that'll be interesting to play around with. And a lot going on with lyrics. It will translate lyrics for you, but also show you pronunciations. And I'm not really going to talk about the Apple TV OS here, except for the fact that the music app there, there's that sing feature that's kind of like karaoke. Well, people always ask, how do you hook a microphone up? And the truth is you didn't. You just sung with your voice while the song was playing on the TV. But now you can actually use your iPhone, and other friends can use their iPhones as microphones for the sing feature on Apple TV. That's going to be really cool. A couple other notes. There's going to be a customized snooze duration for clock. I know that's one of the most requested features. There's also going to be passport support in Wallet. In the Maps app, it will recognize preferred routes, so not always trying to send you that other way that you don't want to go, but the same way maybe you went previously to a location, and a list of visited places, so you could actually add to that and remove from that for places you regularly go, so it'll understand those better. There's going to be, in the Journals app, multiple journals. And also, I want to add here, the Journals app is coming to the iPad and the Mac as well. And there's going to be a new Games app. So it looks like this is going to be an evolution of Game Center, but it'll also include lists of your games. You can launch them. You can challenge friends for scoring and things like that in this new app. And this will be on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac as well. So a lot of cool stuff to look forward to. And there's probably all these tiny little features, some of which may end up being your favorite, that Apple didn't even talk about today. And we'll have to see those over the course of the betas during the summer. If you find my videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. Now let's get to the Mac because after all, this is MacMost. So on the Mac, we're also going to get the new liquid glass design. There's going to be new icons for some things. And you're going to see changes for how things like the dock looks, control center. The menu bar is now going to be transparent. So it really is going to kind of modernize the macOS look. In addition, you'll be able to do some things on your own. Like this has been a hugely requested feature. You'll be able to actually change the colors of folders and add an icon to folders. So you can customize your folders. In addition to the liquid glass look and the ability to change some things, like take the color out of all of the interface elements and apply your own color, like you could already do on the iPhone, with the dock and the customized folders, we're really going to be able to get back to theming macOS as we want. There's some new continuity features that make your iPhone and your Mac work closer together. A big one is there's going to be a phone app. There'll be a phone app. It's going to be on the iPad too. And of course, making phone calls is going to be something you do primarily through your iPhone. But the idea is now you can use the app on your Mac. So you can do things like see voicemails and trigger phone calls and get notifications of phone calls and answer them on your Mac easier. You can do some of this through the FaceTime app before, but now there's going to be a dedicated phone app. So the phone apps work across all your devices together with continuity. You're also going to see the journal app come to Mac. You're going to see that games app I told you before. And in addition, we're going to see some Mac specific functionality. Most notably, Spotlight's going to get a big update. They listed a whole bunch of new features. There's going to be a new short order to things, trying to order things in a way that makes sense. So you see the item actually searching for right at the top instead of having to scroll down for it. You're going to be able to access things using these quick letter codes. So you might just type a couple letters for an action you do very often and then be able to just jump right to it, like launching an app or a shortcut or doing a specific kind of search. There'll be more activities. So more things like setting calendar events and sending messages right from Spotlight without having to go to the app. And also there's going to be a major update to the shortcuts app. It looks like most notably, a bunch of actions are going to be added that tie in Apple Intelligence. So you can actually have your shortcuts do things like summarize text or ask Apple Intelligence to analyze something. You'll be able to incorporate those in your shortcuts. And in addition, shortcuts is also going to add automations. So you can have shortcuts that automatically run at a given time or when something happens on your Mac. This is going to be huge. It's something the iPhones had, but the Mac hasn't really had until now. So usually that's about it, right? The iPad gets all of the new features that the iPhone is getting and maybe a couple things that tie into the Mac stuff. But it seems like this year, the iPad is actually getting the biggest update. iPad OS 26 is going to introduce a bunch of features that are not like the iPhone, but like Mac. You're going to get windowing. So you'll be able to still use apps just like you use them now, but also have apps in Windows. So you can have multiple windows on the screen. It looks just like you're using a Mac. There's even going to be a menu bar. There's even going to be expose. There's even going to be window tiling and you're going to get the three colored buttons there and be able to minimize windows. All sorts of stuff like that. So if you've been having trouble deciding whether your next machine is going to be a Mac or an iPad, well, now the decision is probably even harder because there's more overlap between the two. Or maybe it's easier because now you get the windowing features, which may be what you really wanted from the Mac in the first place. And the iPad will soon work that way. In addition, there's going to be better support for background tasks like rendering video. There's going to be a improvement to the files app, which makes it look a lot more like the Finder. It already did, but now it looks like it takes a few steps in that direction. And a preview app for iPad. So if you use preview a lot on the Mac for marking up PDFs and things like that, you'll now have that same app on the iPad. No word yet on whether they're going to bring text added to the iPad as well. And like I mentioned before, the phone app and the journal app also come to the iPad. Plus a lot of the other things I talked about, things like the improvements to shortcuts, that's across all of these devices. So developers are going to immediately get the first developer betas of these. In July, we'll see public betas for those that are brave enough to test them out. And then in the fall, that's when we'll see the released versions. A big question people have are the requirements for these. And it looks like we've got some good news there. It looks like the iPhone 11 and SE second generation, those will be compatible with this. Of course, not all of the features may be compatible with older versions. And particularly on the Mac, a lot of people were predicting Apple Silicon only for the new version. But it looks like some Intel Macs are still supported, like the 2019 MacBook Pros and the 2019 Mac Pro as well. This summer, I'll be taking a closer look at some of these new features using the public betas. And then, of course, covering these extensively in the fall when the new operating systems are released. So there's a lot to look forward to this fall when these new versions of iOS, macOS, and iPadOS reach our devices. And then, of course, we'll see you next time.