So WWDC happened Monday, June 10th at 10AM P.T, and it was both the most fascinating Apple keynote, with them announcing their most boundary-pushing software, but also the most depressing.

Apple Intelligence

The good

Let’s start with the elephant in the room — the reveal of their new AI platform: Apple Intelligence, which by the way, is quite literally an acronym for AI (this even better than the Dynamic Island branding).

And honestly, this is exactly what I expected from Apple: not just a Siri chatbot revamp running ChatGPT, but rather a deep system integration that would greatly understand you and how you interact with your phone, as well as how and what you communicate with others. All this with incredible privacy, of course. I found the new features they’re introducing to be absolutely entrancing, and I cannot wait to be able to try them out when they eventually come out.

A recap of the Apple Intelligence features

I hate to say this, but Apple is really smart for only making the feature available on iPhone 15 Pro and devices running any M chip. I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max, which I love, and it’s the first time that I’ve considered upgrading my phone. Not for the hardware, but for the software it’s running.

It's well-known that iPhone sales have been gradually declining over the last few years. This is a testament to their reliability, but also a result of an incremental innovation mindset that has led the iPhone lineup to plateau. By offering Apple Intelligence exclusively on their highest-end devices, Apple is capitalizing on software experiences. This goes in-line with their shift in their business model to focus more on subscriptions, such as Apple One, iCloud+, and Apple TV+.

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The Bad (Image Playground)

The issues started to arise as soon as they started talking about being able to use Apple Intelligence to generate images in their new Image Playground. In concept, that seems fun — being in a conversation with your friend, wishing him a happy birthday, and being able to generate a fun picture of them having fun. But does, though ? Doesn’t that raise a huge raise flag ? Even though only three styles are available (Sketch, Animation, Illustration), which could limit the risk of impersonation, anyone that has you in their contacts with a Profile Photo set can still generate any image of you ! And don’t get me started on the actual result, because it looks just like any other Image Generation model: lifeless, and soulless.

But what I find the most disturbing, is how Apple spent their entire presentation talking about privacy, and how these new APIs will be great for developers. And knowing the background of company, I don’t doubt a second that this is true ! The WWDC presentation did not touch on the source of the data used to train their models, but they have since released a paper explaining how they were trained:

We train our foundation models on licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web-crawler, AppleBot. Web publishers have the option to opt out of the use of their web content for Apple Intelligence training with a data usage control.

From Apple’s Featured Highlight “Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models”

But this is all very vague and doesn’t tackle the issue head on. I never once thought that Apple, a company based with empowering creators at its core, would be so shameless about ripping off their work. The only justification I can think of for the implementation of that feature is keeping the confidence of Apple’s investors, therefore keeping up their stock price. Our best bet is to spam report feedback.apple.com and maybe try to bully Apple into removing this feature. If the Internet was powerful enough to get worked up about the Crush ad, they should be even more repelled by the introduction of image generation in iOS and its implications.

Elon Musk, who has since started multiple rants on Twitter about the data privacy implications of this new AI integration in iOS, a subject that has been thoroughly discussed in the keynote, should get worked up about more important matters, if only he wasn’t purposefully spreading misinformation.

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The UIs (The Ugly)

Apple also pushed their most un-Apple-like UI’s this year, which I absolutely did not foresee coming.

The new UIs just feel like each teams took Apple’s design principles and made it their own, without any sort of communication between them. The result is a very inconsistent design system that just goes against Apple’s core philosophy: simplicity.

…Starting with the Home Screen redesign

Let’s start things off with the flagship new feature of iOS 18: tinted icons. I’m always looking for ways to personalize my iPhone more and make it mine. And an icon theming engine is a great way to do so ! Though, the whole feature just feels like it was implemented a week before WWDC. None of the home screens shown in Apple’s press material look cohesive — it’s so bad that it makes a 2013 badly jailbroken iPhone look good.

It doesn’t help that the tinted icons (as of beta 1) only work on dark backgrounds, which makes the contrast ratio between the foreground and the background even worse.

Press Material published by Apple

Heck, even a random guy on Twitter managed to make a theming engine on Figma with a simple overlay that looks miles better than what Apple shipped in the first iOS 18 beta. All credits go to @Aaron_Carpentr on Twitter.

…Through the New Control Center

The new Control Center is confusing. On one hand, having more customization, as I’ve said before, is always a good thing. But its actual implementation feels nonsensical and convoluted. Apple is clearly transitioning their platforms to adopt the “visionOS” aesthetic, which I love, but its current state leads to a visual inconsistency throughout iOS.

Furthermore, the Control Center is now tiny because of the added padding on the sides that house the pagination. This also leads to the swipe up to dismiss the Control Center to be way more annoying than it was before, as you have to either tap in a blank area, or swipe up from the actual Home Indicator.

Pagination from left to right, instead of top to bottom, would make way more sense. Not only would it would free up space on the sides, it would also align with the gestures ingrained in most iPhone users' muscle memory.

Also, how cluttered is this status bar ? And what about the horrid contrast ratio between the bright yellow brightness icon and its white background ? My only hope is that future betas keep on improving the software, and in the meantime, I’ll keep reporting every time to feedback.apple.com, which you should do too !

…And into the new Photos app

During WWDC, Apple described the new Photos app as its “biggest-ever redesign.” And indeed it is, but it’s also a change that proves two things. Firstly, that change doesn’t always mean progress, and second, that function should always go before form.

This redesign is one that belongs on a designer’s Behance page, not in the hand of tens of millions of users all over the world (and many confused parents and grandparents).

So, what’s wrong ? Well, judging from the first few betas, it’s insanely hard to navigate. Instead of having all your photos displayed as soon as you open the app, there’s now a new section at the bottoms where all your albums, smart collections, and others are stuffed into. On the topic of albums, the ones you’ve created are crammed deep at the bottom of the navigation. There’s also the issue of having a single “Search” button at the top, and the “Select” button appearing only after you’ve swiped down to see all your photos. Odd…

But it gets worse ! When viewing a photo, the new view adopts this trendy “poster” view, where instead of filling the screen at the risk of some parts being hidden by UI elements, the photo is now fitted into the view. You now have to tap the photo, which will hide the UI and display it at its full size. When viewing a video, the inline player is now gone ! To scrub through, you have this new (and quite generic) floating scrollbar, just like the native iOS video player.

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Conclusion

This WWDC ends up as a mixed bag for me. Apple Intelligence is very impressive technically impressive, promising smarter devices with strong privacy. But the Image Playground features raise ethical questions, and a lot of UI changes are just confusing. The redesigns feel clunky, straying from Apple's usual simplicity. It's early days though, so I've reported issues through the Feedback app (as you should too!). Hopefully, Apple listens and irons out the kinks before launch. There's potential here, but they need to step up their game to meet the high bar they've set. Let's keep the pressure on - our feedback matters !