The Top 6 most likely things to be announced by Apple at WWDC25

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference takes place in a little under seven weeks and, with the company on the back foot in several areas, this years’ WWDC25 looks to be more consequential than usual.

The rumour mill surrounding what Apple will and will not announce at WWDC25 is now rotating at the sort of RPM that could cause an injury. It’s a big event for the company and, in some ways, for the industry at large. While Apple didn’t quite bet the farm on AI and Apple Intelligence last year, it put a good amount of decent pasture on the line and, so far at least, that just hasn’t paid off.

Some of the more hyperbolic analysts suggested a year ago that AI could lead to a new supercycle of people looking to upgrade computers and smartphones in particular. That hasn’t happened as consumer response to AI has been overwhelmingly meh. Sure, the interwebs are periodically awash with annoying trends such as Ghibilification or the Action Figure meme. But, in terms of parting with money to gain access to AI features, consumers seem ready to wait till the next natural point in the upgrade cycle rather than bringing it forward.

And Apple itself can take the blame for some of that. More than one of the AI features unveiled at WWDC24 last year has so far yet to come to pass and Siri is a mess. In fact, it turns out that some of the new Siri features demonstrated at the event — personal context, on-screen awareness, in-app actions — were pretty much faked and are unlikely to appear now until some point in iOS 19.

“It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year,” Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy told Daring Fireball in March.

The company first put together this ad featuring Bella Ramsay and then had to pull it from its official channels. Vapourware, it has to be said, is not a good look.

The WWDC25 Top Six

So, given that context, what can we expect to see unveiled at WWDC25. Here are the Top 6 likely things.

1. A new OS design 

iOS 19, iPadOS 19, and macOS 16  are all expected to receive a serious makeover that is going to align all these platforms together into far more of a cross-device ecosystem, making transition from one to the other more of a seamless affair. Quite a few of these design cues are being taken from visionOS, such as a more translucent interface. Icons, menus, apps, windows, and system buttons are all up for an overhaul in what will be the biggest redesign for the iPhone since iOS 7 and for the Mac since Big Sur.

2. Siri and on-screen awareness

This is basically what Bella was demonstrating in the video. Apple has changed round lots of things in its Siri team at Cupertino as it attempts to catch up with what the rest of the industry is doing with AI. Current speculation has this long-promised ability coming anywhere between the last part of this year, or around the 19.4 release which normally drops around now, making it Easter-ish 2026. That will be close to two years after being announced. Poor show.

3. More customization

Giving consumers more control over their devices is a common theme in tech, and Apple look sets to ride this particular wave to the shore if it can with an expansion of the widget model, better integrated focus modes and more. It’s likely that a good deal of this might be tied into Apple Intelligence.

4. Apple Health+

One of Tim Cook’s oft-quoted statements is his belief that Apple’s long-term legacy will be in health, and now seems a good time to actually leverage those AI chops to do something in the area. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reckons there is something in the pipeline that will use an AI agent to replicate at least some of what a doctor does, add increased personalised health suggestions, add food logging, and even Fitness+ style videos.

5. Apple Watch gets AI - sort of

As part of this, it looks increasingly like watchOS 12 will add further AI features, though these are likely to be powered via a companion phone rather than running natively on the device itself.

6. Sneak peaks at hardware

Perhaps conscious that last year’s announcements tuned out to have rather a larger vapourware component than anyone thought, increasingly it looks like Apple might pull a hardware tease forward from its usual September event specifically for WWDC. The long gossiped video screen enabled HomePod seem to have been put back while it gets Siri to work properly, so this might include a first look at the extremely slim iPhone 17 Air. A new Mac Pro is perhaps on the cards too.

We’ll know more in seven weeks. One thing that is certain though is that the Rainbow Stage is back. Having been torn down in March, rather than this being some sort of drastic response to Trumpian anti-DEI policies, it seems that Apple was just replacing a temporary structure with a more robust one. And doing it in plenty of time to shoot all those WWDC videos as well…