Predictions in the Apple-sphere
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Comments: 22 (plus live) (latest 4 hours later)
Tagged: apple, ios, macos, ipad, apple vision pro, backwards compatibility, ui, swift, ai, llms
A couple of months ago, I wrote:
[...] It may become impossible to launch a new programming language. No corpus of training data in the coding AI assistant; new developers don't want to use it because their assistant can't offer help; no critical mass of new users; language dies on the vine. --@zarfeblong, March 28
I was replying to a comment by Charlie Stross, who noted that LLMs are trained on existing data and therefore are biased against recognizing new phenomena. My point was that in tech, we look forward to learning about new inventions -- new phenomena by definition. Are AI coding tools going to roadblock that?
Already happening! Here's Kyle Hughes last week:
At work I’m developing a new iOS app on a small team alongside a small Android team doing the same. We are getting lapped to an unfathomable degree because of how productive they are with Kotlin, Compose, and Cursor. They are able to support all the way back to Android 10 (2019) with the latest features; we are targeting iOS 16 (2022) and have to make huge sacrifices (e.g Observable, parameter packs in generics on types). Swift 6 makes a mockery of LLMs. It is almost untenable.
[...] To be clear, I’m not part of the Anti Swift 6 brigade, nor aligned with the Swift Is Getting Too Complicated party. I can embed my intent into the code I write more than ever and I look forward to it becoming even more expressive.
I am just struck by the unfortunate timing with the rise of LLMs. There has never been a worse time in the history of computers to launch, and require, fundamental and sweeping changes to languages and frameworks. --@kyle, June 1 (thread)
That's not even a new language, it's just a new major version. Is C++26 going to run into the same problem?
Hat tip to John Gruber, who quotes more dev comments as we swing into WWDC week.
Speaking of WWDC, the new "liquid glass" UI is now announced. (Screenshots everywhere.) I like it, although I haven't installed the betas to play with it myself.
Joseph Humphrey has, and he notes that existing app icons are being glassified by default:
Kinda shocked to see these 3rd party app icons having been liquid-glassed already. Is this some kind of automatic filter, or did Apple & 3rd parties prep them in advance?? --@joethephish, June 10 (thread)
The icon auto-glassification uses non-obvious heuristics, and Joe's screenshots show some weird artifacts.
I was surprised too! For the iOS7 "flatten it all" UI transition, existing apps did not get the new look -- either in their icons or their internal buttons, etc -- until the developer recompiled with the new SDK. (And thus had a chance to redesign their icons for the new style.) As I wrote a couple of months ago:
[In 2012] Apple put in a lot of work to ensure that OS upgrades didn't break apps for users. Not even visually. (It goes without saying that Apple considers visual design part of an app's functionality.) The toolkit continued to support old APIs, and it also secretly retained the old UI style for every widget.
-- me, April 9
Are they really going to bag that policy for this fall? I guess they already sort of did. Last year's "tint mode" squashed existing icons to tinted monochrome whether they liked it or not. But that was a user option, and not a very popular one, I suspect.
This year's icon change feels like a bigger rug-pull for developers. And developers have raw nerves these days.
This is supposed to be a prediction post. I guess I'll predict that Apple rolls this back, leaving old (third-party) icons alone for the iOS26 full release. Maybe.
(I see Marco Arment is doing a day of "it's a beta, calm down and send feedback". Listen to him, he knows his stuff.)
But the big lurking announcement was iPadOS gaining windows, a menu bar, and a more (though not completely) file-oriented environment. A lot of people have been waiting years for those features. Craig Federighi presented the news with an understated but real wince of apology.
Personally, not my thing. I don't tend to use my iPad for productive work. And it's not for want of windows and a menu bar; it's for want of a keyboard and a terminal window. I have a very terminal-centric work life. My current Mac desktop has nine terminal windows, two of which are running Emacs.
(No, I don't want to carry around an external keyboard for my iPad. If I carry another big thing, it'll be the MacBook, and then the problem is solved.)
But -- look. For more than a decade, people have been predicting that Apple would kill MacOS and force Macs to run some form of iOS. They predicted it when Apple launched Gatekeeper, they predicted it when Apple brought SwiftUI apps to MacOS, they predicted it when Apple redesigned the Settings app.
I never bought it before. Watching this week's keynote, I buy it. Now there is room for i(Pad)OS to replace MacOS.
Changing or locking down MacOS is a weak signal because people use MacOS. You can only do so much to it. Apple has been tightening the bolts on Gatekeeper at regular intervals, but you can still run unsigned apps on a Mac. The hoops still exist. You can install Linux packages with Homebrew.
But adding features to iPad is a different play! That's pushing the iPad UI in a direction where it could plausibly take over the desktop-OS role. And this direction isn't new, it's a well-established thing. The iPad has been acquiring keyboard/mouse features for years now.
So is Apple planning to eliminate MacOS entirely, and ship Macs with (more or less) iPadOS installed? Maybe! This is all finger-in-the-wind. I doubt it's happening soon. It may never happen. It could be that Apple wants iPad to stand on its own as a serious mobile productivity platform, as good as the Mac but separate from it.
But Apple thinks in terms of company strategy, not separate siloed platforms. And, as many people have pointed out, supporting two similar-but-separate OSes is a terrible business case. Surely Apple has better uses for that redundant budget line.
Abstractly, they could unify the two OSes rather than killing one of them. But, in practice, they would kill MacOS. Look at yesterday's announcements. iPad gets the new features; Mac gets nothing. (Except the universal shiny glass layer.) The writing is not on the wall but the wind is blowing, and we can see which way.
Say this happens, in 2028 or whenever. (If Apple still exists, if I haven't died in the food riots, etc etc.) Can my terminal-centric lifestyle make its way to an iPad-like world?
...Well, that depends on whether they add a terminal app, doesn't it? Fundamentally I don't care about MacOS as a brand. I just want to set up my home directory and my .emacs file and install Python and git and npm and all the other stuff that my habits have accumulated. You have no idea how many little Python scripts are involved in everyday tasks like, you know, writing this blog post.
(Okay, you do know that because my blogging tool is up on Github. The answer is four. Four vonderful Python scripts, ah ah ah!)
If I can't do all that in MacOS 28/29/whichever, it'll be time to pick a Linux distro. Not looking forward to that, honestly. (I fly Linux servers all the time, but the last time I used a Linux desktop environment it was GNOME 1.0? I think?)
Other notes from WWDC. (Not really predictions, sorry, I am failing my post title.)
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Tim Cook looks tired. I don't mean that in a Harriet Jones way! I assume he's run himself ragged trying to manage political crap. Craig Federighi is still having fun but I felt like he was over-playing it a lot of the time. Doesn't feel like a happy company. Eh, what do I know, I'm trying to read tea leaves from a scripted video.
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I said "Mac gets nothing" but that's unfair. The Spotlight update with integrated actions and shortcuts looks extremely sexy. Yes, this is about getting third-party devs to support App Intents so that Siri/AI can hook into them. But it will also be great for Automator and other non-AI scripting tools.
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WWDC is a software event; Apple never talks about new hardware there. I know it. You know it. But it sure was weird to have a whole VisionOS segment pushing new features when the rev1 Vision Pro is at a dead standstill. My sense is that the whole ecosystem is on hold waiting for a consumer-viable rev2 model.
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I think the consumer-viable rev2 model is coming this fall. There, that's a prediction. Worth what you paid for it.
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I'm enjoying the Murderbot show but damn if Gurathin isn't a low-key Vision Pro ad. He's got the offhand tap-fingers gesture right there.
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I'm excited about the liquid glass UI. I want to play with it. Fun is fun, dammit.
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I hate redesigning app icons for a new UI. Oh, well, I'll manage. (EDIT-ADD: Turns out Apple is pushing a new single-source process which generates all icon sizes and modes. Okay! Good news there.)
Comments from Mastodon
@ireneista @zarfeblong the glass-half-full way I look at it is that LLM-dependent developers are going to be stuck with 2021-era languages and frameworks for the foreseeable future, and it seems unlikely that there won’t be further major advances in either languages or frameworks going forward, given how much things have changed in the last couple decades
@joe @zarfeblong yeah, it's possible that, like... community-focused languages will start to explicitly not care about that stuff, and go back to older models of how we used to teach each other
(we were personally part of running a programming-teaching IRC channel in the 90s, and we still have significant anger at how Stack Overflow sucked the air out of the room for that stuff. we see the old model as better because it builds community)
@joe @zarfeblong for commercially-focused languages, the whole instant gratification with advice thing is a genuine commercial benefit, but it's not clear to us that that serves the interests of actual people, except in the very very short term
@ireneista @joe That’s interesting, I haven’t come across that sentiment about stackoverflow before.
The only teaching community I’ve been involved in is IF tools (Inform), which are too small to have a stackoverflow presence. (We tried at one point! Fell flat.)
@zarfeblong @joe yeah, with every passing year a smaller percentage of people remember that period of history... this is a bit of perspective that we've recently realized is important and resolved to talk about more often
@zarfeblong @ireneista @joe For what it's worth I find Copilot useful for Inform, because I find languages that pretend to be like English endlessly frustrating.
Same with AppleScript. Copilot can get the grammar right, and I can then work on getting the logic right, which is the bit it's dismally bad at.
@mathew @zarfeblong @joe yeah we're honestly just so relieved the I7 source finally got published... we used to have a lot of trouble guessing the grammar, and wanted to be able to look it up, even though we understand that not putting a formal grammar in the docs was a deliberate decision because most people don't learn that way
@mathew @zarfeblong @joe (we say "finally", we realize this was like five years ago. what is time.)
@ireneista @zarfeblong it's funny you mention stack overflow, because i never got into using or participating in it myself (at least before platform documentation started tapering off/losing the SEO battle to it), and it seems to me that a lot of the appeal of the LLM model is that it essentially eliminates the friction in the stereotypical search stack overflow-copy-paste-compile loop
@joe @zarfeblong yes. it's even-more-instant gratification.
@joe @zarfeblong compared to a chat room, on stack overflow you aren't "burdened" with having to get to know the people who are helping you, be polite to them, etc. the site's game mechanics provide an artificial incentive that replaces people's natural desire to help each other and seek community.
... but stack overflow still has people, and their personalities and beliefs can still get in the way of fast, easy answers. LLMs factor that out entirely.
@joe @zarfeblong so it's a continuation of the trend, not an entirely new thing
@joe @zarfeblong (for the removal of doubt: we personally regard factoring the people out of things as self-evidently undesirable. however, there are a very large number of people in the world with the exact opposite belief, so we should clarify.)
@ireneista @zarfeblong baldur bjarnason's post from yesterday https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judgement-on-ai/ also reminded me that we still really are in the "too early to tell" phase as to whether LLM workflows actually are or just feel more productive, and we can't really trust the people who've convinced themselves they are to judge
@joe @zarfeblong yeah... it's an okay post. people do need the reminder that, yes, no matter how smart or grounded or self-critical you are, you can still fall for manipulation
we do think the take-away of never trust your own judgement goes too far, and does people a disservice
@joe @zarfeblong while we do agree that the jury is still out, we've personally made up our mind.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576915.3623157
(we have the full text of this in our reaction PDF folder - it's like reaction memes, but it's the full text of peer reviewed research. alas, fedi doesn't allow arbitrary file uploads, so we can't put it here)
@ireneista @zarfeblong hmm, I read it as more specifically trying to hit home that intelligence is not by itself a guard against manipulation, and a warning toward self-identified “smart people” like many of us programmers seeing ourselves as uniquely impartial
@joe@f.duriansoftware.com @ireneista@adhd.irenes.space @zarfeblong@mastodon.gamedev.place comfortably relatable
@joe @ireneista @zarfeblong
one half-baked glass-half-empty take I've been toying with: all future language/framework development might require immense resources because you have to pretrain a model to get people to adopt your stuff.
another is that it will divide the population into those who only use LLMs and those who do actual creative work (maybe assisted by LLMs, maybe not) That society might looks like the one in Asimov's Profession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession_(novella)
Speaking of backwards compatibility, the timeline for Rosetta deprecation (and thus Intel-only apps) has dropped. Get your app updates built before fall 2027.
I added a footnote to my April post:
https://blog.zarfhome.com/2025/04/how-long-intel-mac-software#june
This subthread of comments shall live on that post.
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@zarfeblong well, damn. we had really hoped you were wrong about the generative ML thing (other versions of the concern have been on our mind for a while).