Apple WWDC 2026 – Mummy Moment

Apple runs home to Momma.

• In the absence of AI, Apple did what it does best, which was to revamp the look and feel of its user experience in the hope that users won’t care that Apple’s position in AI is weak and falling ever further behind with every day that passes.  
• Unlike its rivals, Google, Meta, OpenAI and so on, Apple is focusing all of its current efforts on making the experience even nicer to look at in the hope that this keeps the users happy while it works on fixing AI.
• Hence, top billing went to the new look that Apple is putting into all of its operating systems called Liquid Glass.
• This adds a level of transparency and dynamism to the user experience that does very little to make it easier or more useful, but is lovely to look at, and with its fickle user base, I think this will be enough for now.
• The icons and the user experience are more responsive to the content on the screen and have been redesigned to fit in with the current generation of hardware.
• Outside of that, Apple is tweaking and improving stuff around the edges while it works out what it is going to do about the AI tsunami that threatens to cause it real problems.
• This is something that RFM Research has identified (see here) and refers to the use of AI agents on smartphones.
• Most of the commentariat and tech press are already convinced that soon we will all be using AI agents on our devices instead of the touchscreen, but I am not so sure.
• While there has been a large increase in the quality of using voice as the man-machine interface using LLMs, the touchscreen and icon grid are already a very good way to interact with a smartphone.
• Consequently, the utility improvement gained by switching to voice is not that large and, therefore, users may not be inclined to switch even if voice is just as good.
• Apple also focused on harmonising the look and feel of all of its user experiences and added a lot of functionality that integrates iPhone functionality with the Mac and other devices.
• This includes the decision to rename all of its platforms with the version number being the year where they will be most used (2026 in this case).
• This is all part of the strategy to strengthen the stickiness of the Apple ecosystem, making it harder to leave once one has more than one device from Apple.
• Many of its users have more than one device, and so this will make the ecosystem even more sticky while it goes back to the drawing board to figure out what to do if AI becomes as large a part of the user experience as everyone is promising.
• For a company in Apple’s current position, this is exactly the right move as it needs to play to its strengths to give it as much time as possible to get its AI offering right.
• At the moment, the prospect of an AI agent has very little impact on the user’s decision to purchase a smartphone, as the current use case is really only for reference, and all of the major models are available on all ecosystems.
• Consequently, it is not until AI agents become part of interacting with the device and accessing apps and services that this is going to matter.
• There is no question that the voice AI is now good enough, but the practicalities of running one on a battery-powered device with all of the apps connected to the agent still need to be fully worked out.
• The current status is that the demos look great, but the minute one strays from the use case for which they were designed, they rapidly fall apart, but this will be fixed in time.
• This is the breathing space that Apple has, and I suspect that the fix is a purchase of one of the leading AI companies to provide an exclusive agent, AI architecture and foundation model just for Apple.
• Hence, I don’t think that Apple is about to start losing market share or feeling price pressure, but this is a problem that has to be fixed, or the consequences may end up being severe.
• Critics will point to the woeful progress over the last year, but while AI agents do not feature in the device purchase decision, this does not matter very much.
• It may never matter, but if it does, Apple has everything to lose if it does not get this right.