The keynote is over and the band has packed up in Cupertino. I’ve got betas downloading on far too many devices and I’m just hours away from having most of my Apple devices barely functional running early beta software. Here are a few notes I took during the keynote.

The Role of Apple Intelligence

It’s no surprise that Apple didn’t perform any form of mea culpa with respect to Siri and the first year of Apple Intelligence. If anything, they just leaned into the features that did ship. Moreover, if the phrase Apple Intelligence were a drinking game, you would be well and truly sloshed by the end of this event.

I still think it’s ridiculous how far behind Apple got with Siri and artificial intelligence, but I do think they may have a window of time to catch up. I do wonder, however, if that’s tenable when they only update once a year and the big artificial intelligence innovations seem to be happening weekly.

Liquid Glass

While not a surprise, Liquid Glass still looks delightful and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it. As further evidence that this will not be like iOS 7, they’ve put it on all the platforms at once. That doesn’t happen overnight.

Folders and Customization

There are some fun folder customization options showing up for the Mac that remind me of the old days of Mac customization. That feature’s also coming to iPad and speaking of iPad…

The iPad Had a Great Year

An actual flexible windowing system, a massive improvement to the Files app, Spotlight, and background tasks. It feels like the iPad power user’s wishlist finally got some attention in Cupertino. I still want to see where the sharp edges are on this feature. Moreover, it’s important that non-power users still get a consistent experience. I’m super interested to see how they thread that needle.

Shortcuts and AI

This was one of my favorite segments. It looks like Spotlight is getting some real improvements. Moreover, you can now specifically call different forms of Apple Intelligence, including Private Cloud Compute, from a Shortcuts action. The devil will be in the details here, but I am really looking forward to testing this.

visionOS Jumps

As the newest platform, visionOS continues to have the biggest yearly leaps. Sticky windows and widgets sound great. The Logitech MX Ink got only passing mention, but the idea of a pen you can write with in visionOS has me super interested.

Overall

There weren’t a ton of surprises, but Apple did have a few AI cards up its sleeve and shipping a UI update across all platforms on the same day is an impressive feat. They may have another year left assuming the AI rocket ship doesn’t leave orbit in the meantime, but that’s a big “if.” I expect they don’t need me to tell them that.