This Week in the Labs — June 12, 2026

This week in the Labs was a lot of fun as we covered Apple’s WWDC event. We had three meetups, and there were multiple videos. This year’s WWDC announcements were unlike most years, and we all had a lot of takes.

Below you’ll find the week’s new videos and podcasts, a few of the conversations happening in the member community, and what’s coming next week. Most of those links lead straight into the Labs community on Circle, so they’ll only open if you’re a member. If you’re a Labs member who hasn’t set up your Circle access yet, send me a note and I’ll get you in. For members, this is your week at a glance. If you’re not one yet, it’s a peek at what you’re missing.

The Week’s Releases

Productivity Field Guide Early Access in Circle

Announcement · June 6 · Labs members that are PFG owners.
Labs Members who own the Productivity Field Guide got early access to the PFG space inside MacSparky Circle this week. It’s not open to the public yet. If you own the PFG and haven’t seen your invite, drop me a note.

WWDC Keynote Reactions Meetup

Live Meetup Recording · June 8 · All Labs Members
A last-minute bonus meetup to share first reactions to the WWDC keynote before everyone disappeared into the betas. Noon Pacific on Zoom. Recording now published.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

First Look at the New Siri

Video · June 9 · All Labs Members
It’s WWDC keynote day, and the new Siri is here. I got beta access about an hour after the keynote and went straight to testing. This video shows exactly what it could and couldn’t do, with my take at the end.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

June Labs WWDC Meetup

Live Meetup · June 10 · Pathfinder & Insider
Our monthly Labs meetup, this month all about WWDC. We worked through the announcements together. Questions, reactions, and the stuff everyone was still trying to make sense of the day after the keynote.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link

Apple Photos AI Features in iOS 27

Video · June 11 · Pathfinder & Insider
iOS 27 gives Apple Photos a new set of AI editing tools. I put Cleanup, Extend, and Reframe through their paces on a beta iPhone Air, using a family photo from Disneyland. Here’s what worked, what didn’t, and where the generative fill surprised me.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link

June Deep Dive: Exploring the New Beta Software

Deep Dive · June 11 · Pathfinder
We went hands-on with the new betas. What’s different, what’s worth installing on a backup device, and what to watch as the betas mature over the summer.

Pathfinder Link

The Lab Report for June 12, 2026

Podcast · June 12 · all tiers
WWDC week, and after two years of Apple Intelligence promises that didn’t quite land, Apple came back with a real answer. The new Siri, rebranded Siri AI, is the center of it.

Pathfinder Link | Insider Link | Member Link

In the Community

Turn Nouns Into Verbs (Labs Discussion Board)
A member tied a Simon Sinek idea to the Productivity Field Guide’s Arete statements. The case for writing your values as verbs, as actions under each role, instead of nouns that just sit there. A good thread on making your values actually guide you when things get hard.

Shortcuts OS 27 (Labs Discussion Board)
Someone digging through the Shortcuts beta found a new “Interpret as Markdown” checkbox for creating and appending to Apple Notes. They ran a big Markdown test through it, and most of it works now. That kills the awkward rich-text dance we used to need.

AI Security (Labs Discussion Board)
A member who wants to put AI to work on their files, but worries about sensitive data getting loose, asked how everyone else handles it. What do you hand to Claude, what do you hold back, and how do you keep it secure. The replies are full of practical answers.

If you’re a Labs member and haven’t joined the Circle community yet, let me know and I’ll get you set up.

Coming Up

After a packed WWDC week, things settle down a little. Here’s the next live Labs session on the calendar.

June Jam Session: Network Setup and Security
Jam Session · June 25 · Pathfinder, Insider, and Member
We’re digging into setting up and securing your home network. Bring your questions and your setup headaches.

Links of Interest

A few things worth your time from my reading this week. Most of it landed in the WWDC slipstream.

The videos, podcasts, and live sessions above are inside MacSparky Labs. Join at macsparky.com/join.

Apple’s Hardware Is Waiting on Siri

It used to mean something specific when an Apple product went out of stock. The old machine sold out right before the new one showed up.

Now things go out of stock because Apple can’t get the chips, or because they’re holding back for a launch they haven’t announced. The HomePod mini has been out of stock almost everywhere for months. I get that there are supply constraints in play, but the HomePod mini?

Then you look at what the Home app picked up this year. Plain-language summaries of camera clips. Multi-camera stitching. 4K recording. These are exactly the kind of features that want a screen on the wall and an assistant you can talk to. They read like software written for hardware that isn’t on sale yet.

It seems Apple has a backlog of devices ready to go, all gated on one thing. A Siri good enough to drive them. A HomePod with a display, a real home hub, whatever the speaker-tablet thing turns out to be. None of it works without an assistant that can actually do something when you ask.

That makes this WWDC the software unlock. Apple shipped the brain first. My money is on the bodies following this fall. September, October, once the new Siri is actually in people’s hands, I’d expect a wave of new devices that suddenly make sense.

Apple Finally Owns Age Verification

I’ve been saying on the Lab Report for years that Apple needs to own the age of the person holding the device. This year they did something about it.

The piece that matters is the new Declared Age Range API. It lets an app know whether it’s dealing with a kid, and roughly how old, without the app collecting a birthday or any real identity. The device vouches for the age range. The app tailors itself. Nobody hands over private data to do it.

That’s the right way to solve this. For years the only thing standing between a child and an adult experience online was a checkbox asking the kid to confirm they’re over a certain age. We all know how well that worked.

Apple built the rest of it out too. Child accounts are the starting point, with a setup assistant that lets parents open things up over time. There’s a new Ask to Browse that works like Ask to Buy. And Screen Time, which has been a buggy mess for years, got a full redesign.

The timing isn’t an accident. Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation got real legs. Parents are paying attention in a way they weren’t even two years ago, and you don’t hear this kind of announcement at a Facebook keynote.

So I’m glad Apple did it. My worry is the follow-through. An age-range API only matters if developers actually adopt it, and parental controls only matter if Apple keeps engineers on them instead of shipping the redesign and walking away for six years. That’s the pattern I’m watching for.

For once, though, the foundation is the right one. Now they have to build on it.

HomeKit Secure Video Hits 4K. You’re Welcome.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a whole post complaining that HomeKit Secure Video was still stuck at 1080p in 2026. I never published it. I figured I’d look silly if Apple fixed it the week after I hit send.

Then the keynote happened. The Home app is getting 4K recording on supported cameras. So I’m taking full credit. You’re welcome, everybody.

The 4K is the headline, but there are more Home improvements. Apple Intelligence now writes plain-language summaries of your camera clips, so instead of scrubbing footage you get told what happened. Related clips from different cameras stitch together into one event. And you can search your recordings by what’s in them before you even finish typing.

That last one matters. The reason I’ve stuck with HomeKit Secure Video through the lean years is the privacy model. Footage gets analyzed on a hub in your house, encrypted before it ever touches iCloud, and the metadata describing what’s in your clips never leaves your devices in the clear. Search and summaries that run inside that model, instead of on some company’s server, are the version of these features I want.

Still, 4K is a welcome improvement and answers my biggest complaint.

I’ve recommended the Aqara line to people who want to stay inside Apple Home and still get decent hardware. For now, I’ll take the win. My footage is about to look a lot better, and I didn’t even have to publish the angry post to get it.

Turn Your Web Apps Into Real Mac Apps with Unite Pro

This post is sponsored by BZG Apps.

My thanks to Unite Pro for sponsoring MacSparky this week.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time in web apps. My browser has become a second operating system. The trouble is that browser tabs are terrible containers for focused work. They pile up, they blend together, and context-switching starts to feel like excavation.

Unite Pro turns any website into a standalone Mac app. You can run it as a focused window, an always-available sidebar, or a lightweight menu bar app. I keep a few tools I check constantly in sidebar mode, and it has changed how I interact with them. They’re just there when I need them, without competing for tab real estate.

The level of control is what got me. You can strip out sticky headers and cookie banners, hide floating elements, and customize typography and colors. There’s a force dark mode option for those holdout sites that still blind you at night. If you like to tinker, you can write per-URL scripts and styles with the rebuilt customization engine.

Unite Pro also adds native Mac features you’d never get from a browser tab. Dock badges. Meeting notifications. AI overlays for ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude. It handles smart link routing too, keeping links opening in the right app instead of dumping everything into your default browser. That includes sign-in and SSO flows, which normally break when you try to isolate web apps.

Your first app is free to use forever. Set it up with whatever web tool you live in most and see if having it as a dedicated app changes how you work. MacSparky readers get 20% off with the code MacSparky.

Check out Unite Pro and try your first app free

Apple Intelligence Table Stakes

Back in 2017, the night before the WWDC keynote, I wrote a short post about table stakes. I’d spent a year living on the iPad, and a lot of it still felt like swimming upstream. My argument was that fixing the iPad’s file management and multitasking wasn’t the impressive part of the story. It was the price of admission. As I put it back then, that’s the starting point, not the ending one.

In a few days, we’ll get another WWDC keynote, and I keep coming back to that phrase, table stakes. This time for Apple Intelligence.

Apple has spent two years telling us what their AI is going to be. Some of it shipped. A lot of it didn’t. So heading into June, I find I’m less interested in the next round of promises and more interested in the floor. What does Apple Intelligence have to get right just to be in the game? I keep landing on three things.

The first is that it has to be stable and reliable. We already lived through the cautionary tale here. Siri started with a good idea and a lot of goodwill, and then it spent a decade being the thing you stopped reaching for because you couldn’t trust it. An assistant you can’t trust stops being an assistant. You just quit using it. If Apple Intelligence is going to ask for a place in how I work, it has to be the kind of dependable I can build a habit on.

The second is that it has to actually understand what I say and act on what I mean. Not just transcribe my words. Understand my intent and then go do the thing. There’s a big gap between hearing the request and finishing the job, and almost everything useful lives on the far side of that gap. If I have to rephrase myself three times and then go finish the task by hand anyway, the magic is gone.

The third is the one I care about most, and it’s the one I’ve been talking about constantly in the Robot Assistant Field Guide meetups. Memory and context. I’ve come to believe that context matters more than the brain. The reason an Apple assistant could be compelling has nothing to do with raw smarts. It’s that Apple is sitting on the complete picture of your life already. Your mail, your messages, your calendar, your photos, your location, the whole thing, right there on the device. Nobody else has that. If Apple delivers on it, they win a game the other players can’t even enter.

But context only counts if the assistant can use it. It’s not enough to hold all that information. The harness around the model has to be good enough to reach into that context and actually take action with it. That’s the whole ballgame. The data without the ability to act on it is just a very private filing cabinet.

So that’s my floor. Reliable, understands what I mean, and knows me well enough to help. None of it is flashy. All of it has to be there before any of the flashy stuff means a thing.

I’m still hopeful. Apple is in a unique position. They have the data and the users to make some really transformational technology. The question is whether they have the necessary skills and resolve to reach for it. We’ll know a lot more on Monday.

This Week in the Labs — June 5, 2026

Welcome to This Week in the Labs, my Friday roundup of everything that happened in MacSparky Labs over the past week. Below you’ll find the week’s new videos and podcasts, a few of the conversations happening in the member community, what’s coming next week, and a note on whatever I’m currently chewing on. If you’re a Labs member, consider this your week at a glance. If you’re not, it’s a peek at what you’re missing. (Note: the below links are directly into the Labs community and will only work for members. If you’re a member and not in the Circle community yet, drop me a note.)

The Week’s Releases

WWDC Week in the Labs

Announcement · June 2 · all tiers
We’re spending WWDC week together. I’ll be in the Circle chat room for the live keynote on Monday, there’s a Labs meetup Wednesday to talk through the announcements, and a Pathfinder deep dive on the new betas later in the week.

I Did a Thing

Video · June 2 · all tiers
I bought something. I spent a year talking myself out of it, and then I did it anyway. Members got the full confession this week. That’s all I’m going to say about that, for now.

Labs Book Club: The Creative Act

Announcement · June 3 · all tiers
The votes are in. Our July Book Club pick is The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, and we’re meeting Thursday, July 30 at noon Pacific to talk it through. That’s plenty of time to read along, so grab a copy and join us.

Deep Dive: Accessibility Features Everyone Should Know

Deep Dive · June 4 · Pathfinder
Apple’s Accessibility menu has some genuinely useful tools that most people walk right past. I covered the Accessibility Shortcut, Back Tap, AssistiveTouch, Voice Control with a full live demo, the new Accessibility Reader in iOS 26, and more.

The Lab Report for June 5, 2026

Podcast · June 5 · all tiers
This week’s Apple news and rumors, with WWDC days away. The last read on the rumor mill before Apple takes the stage.

In the Community

HTML Report — Robot Message Board
A member built a fully linked HTML report from about 1,350 NotePlan files using Cowork — pulling from a SQLite database and embeds — in roughly 20 minutes. The file links open directly in NotePlan. The thread drew a lot of interest from folks curious about the workflow and what else it could be adapted for.

Non-compliance / Flakiness / Verbosity? — Robot Message Board
One member raised a real question about the long-term durability of skill-based Cowork workflows: are code implementations more stable than skill references, especially as models update? It sparked a good back-and-forth about how to build Cowork setups that hold up over time.

existing cowork projects transfer? — Robot Message Board
A new member who bought the Robot Field Guide hit a practical snag: they already had Cowork projects spread across iCloud — outside Obsidian entirely — and wasn’t sure how to bridge the gap without starting over. Helpful discussion for anyone who came to the Field Guide mid-stream.

If you’re a Labs member and haven’t joined the Circle community yet, let me know and I’ll get you set up.

Coming Up

Next week is the WWDC extravaganza!

From My Desk

WWDC is Monday, and I’m in full pre-keynote mode. I have opinions about what Apple should do with AI this year, but I’ve learned to hold those until we see what they actually do. If you’re a Labs member, come hang out in the chat room during the keynote. Watching it with friends beats watching it alone.

Also, behind the scenes this week, my robot assistant and I have been moving the Lab Report back catalog into the Circle community archive. Years of episodes, all landing in one searchable place. We’re not done yet, but it’s the kind of tedious job I never would have attempted before the robots showed up.

Links of Interest

The videos, podcasts, and live sessions above are inside MacSparky Labs. Join at macsparky.com/join.

Designed in California

Jason Snell and Myke Hurley just put a new podcast on Kickstarter, and the pitch grabbed me right away. It’s called Designed in California, and it tells the story of Apple across all fifty years of the company.

Jason did the research and writing. He and Myke present it together. If you’ve listened to either of them for any length of time, you already know that’s a strong combination. Jason has been covering Apple longer than most of us have owned a Mac, and Myke knows how to turn a good story into great audio.

Apple turns fifty this year. That’s a lot of history. The early Apple, the wilderness years, the return of Steve Jobs, the iPod, the iPhone, and everything since. I’ve read bits and pieces of it over the years, but I’ve never had it told to me start to finish by people who understand why it mattered.

You can read Jason’s full write-up at Six Colors and Myke’s take over at The Enthusiast.

I backed it. I don’t say that about every project that lands in my inbox. This is the rare one where the people and the subject both pull me in. An honest history of Apple, made by folks who love the topic and know how to tell a story. I want it to exist.

If you care about where this stuff came from, go take a look at the campaign and consider chipping in.

My New Podcast: Intentional AI with Chris Bailey

I’m proud to announce ​I just released a new podcast​, and I’ve been wanting to tell you about it for months.

It’s called Intentional AI, and it’s a show about using AI to actually get your work done. Not the doom. Not the hype. The practical, useful stuff that gives you your time back.

The origin story for this goes back to my co-host, Chris Bailey, and me looking, in vain, for a show like this. Everywhere we looked, the AI conversation was either about the world ending or about AI fixing everything by Tuesday. Neither one helps you on a Wednesday afternoon when you’ve got real work to do. So we decided to make the thing we wanted to listen to.

Let me brag about Chris for a second, because I get to co-host this with one of my best friends and one of the smartest people I know. Chris has spent more than a decade studying productivity and written four books about it, including ​The Productivity Project​ and his newest, ​Intentional​. He comes at this from the productivity side. I come at it from the technology side. He’s the big-picture productivity guy, I’m the big-picture tech guy, and this show is where those two paths meet.

The idea we keep circling back to is a simple one. Anyone can cook. If you’ve been telling yourself this AI stuff is too complicated for you, it isn’t. Teaching the ​Robot Assistant Field Guide​ has convinced me of that. 

I’ve watched regular people build real, useful tools, and the barrier is a lot lower than anyone thinks. You used to need programming knowledge to make a computer do serious work for you. Now the computer brings the programming knowledge. You just have to learn the ingredients.

There’s a first-mover thing here, too. Most of the world hasn’t yet realized that the donkey work of daily life can be handed off with little effort. The people who figure that out early will get the most out of it. None of that is meant to scare you. It’s early, and being early counts.

Episode 1 sets the table. We lay out why the show exists, introduce ourselves, and I close with a Show and Tell on the Circle community I built with a robot, including the part where I asked it to make the whole thing look like a Wes Anderson movie. From there, we get into the architecture, the pieces, and the tactics, one at a time.

Intentional AI is part of the Relay podcast network. New episodes drop every two weeks. There are audio and video versions on YouTube, so you can listen or watch, whichever you prefer.

You can ​listen to Episode 1 right now​ over on Relay, and you can find ​the whole show here​. You can watch the first episode ​on YouTube here​!. Come along for the ride.

Focused 257: Stephen Robles

On this episode of Focused, I’m joined by Mike and our guest Stephen Robles, the new co-host of Mac Power Users who went fully independent last October. Stephen makes the case for the generalist, the person who’s good at a lot of things instead of the best at one, and we get into why that might be the right bet in the age of AI.

From there it turns personal. We compare notes on intentional technology use with our kids, talk through what’s on the nightstand, and run a fun round of shiny new objects. I had a great time with this one.

This episode of Focused is sponsored by:

  • Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code FOCUSED.
  • Keeper: Get 60% off personal and family plans.