The weekend before any Apple event, Mark Gurman, Bloomberg’s star Apple reporter, usually publishes a huge roundup of all of his leaks, plus a few tidbits. Here’s his latest installment in the series:

While the design changes will make up a notable portion of the keynote, the company will also discuss its Apple Intelligence AI strategy. On that front, Apple will let third-party developers begin tapping into its large language models — the underpinnings of generative artificial intelligence. The company also is introducing iPad enhancements that will make the device better suited for office work and unveiling significant new features for the Mac.

Since Apple Intelligence first launched last year, I’ve been annoyed that developers weren’t given an application programming interface to tie into (at least) the on-device Apple Intelligence features. My preferred Mac email client, Mimestream, lacks the email summaries I have enabled in the iOS Mail app, for instance. I hope this means Mimestream and other apps gain summaries, along with robust support for Writing Tools in custom text fields, something that has plagued most Mac apps since Apple Intelligence’s initial beta launch. Few apps have the Grammarly-like text comparison feature when using the “Proofread” Writing Tools function found in apps like Notes and TextEdit; most just show the corrected text in a pop-up view alongside the original text, making it difficult to see what the AI changed.

I’m curious to know what “significant new features for the Mac” means.

The standout announcement will be a brand-new interface for all of Apple’s operating systems, including CarPlay. The new look — code-named Solarium internally — is based on visionOS, the software on the Vision Pro headset. The main interface element will be digital glass. In a nod to the code name, which won’t be used externally, there will be more use of light and transparency throughout the operating systems. Tool and tab bars will look different, and there will be redesigned app icons and other buttons. There’s also a strong focus on the use of pop-out menus, meaning users can click a button to get a quick list of additional options. On the Mac, the menu bar and window buttons will also get fresh designs.

This will probably be the main focus of the keynote since Gurman thinks it’ll be fairly light in other aspects. I agree with him, seeing the lack of progress on the AI front since last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up for anything positive. The last time Apple pulled off an operating system-wide redesign was 2020, with macOS 11 Big Sur, and while I don’t think it was disastrous, the early betas were atrocious. Many popular apps took years to redesign their interfaces for the new design paradigms, and to this day, some refuse to update to the new squircle app icons. (I’m looking at Notion.) The early macOS Big Sur betas didn’t even have a battery percentage option — it was bad.

I’m eager to install the new OSes and analyze the different button shapes and new interaction patterns. I think visionOS is gorgeous and that Apple’s other platforms could learn a lot from it, and moreover, I’m excited to have a distraction from Apple’s legal and regulatory issues around the world. I love writing and thinking about technology, and analyzing design patterns is some of my favorite nerdery. I’m not afraid of change, but I am weary of it: While the prospect of a redesign is exciting, I’m tempering my expectations because it’s more likely than not that it’ll still feel unfinished and buggy well after the beta period. This is just how major Apple OSes work. Do we really need more half-baked designs and glitches from Apple? I don’t think so, but this is the path Apple decided to take — and it’s better than arguing about browser scare screens.

The Camera app will be revamped with a focus on simplicity. Apple has added several new photo and video-taking options in recent years — including spatial video, panorama and slow-motion recording — and that’s made today’s interface a bit clunky. In iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, Apple is rethinking the approach.

I’m on the record as saying Apple’s Camera app is simultaneously one of the best-designed and most cluttered user interfaces in modern tech history. I’m glad it’s getting a simplicity update; there’s just too much going on. Way too many controls are hidden behind double taps or swipes in seemingly random places. Back in the day, there were really only two controls in the standard Photo mode: zoom and exposure. Now, there are way more, and each control has various ways of accessing it: the toolbar, Camera Control, or tapping on the viewfinder. My biggest hope is some kind of snapping feature encouraging people to choose one of their phone’s preset lenses when zooming in (like the 1×, 2×, 5×, etc. buttons at the bottom of the viewfinder). Way too many people zoom in at an arbitrary focal length (e.g., 2.6×) when they could have a better shot by switching to a preset lens.

Another preinstalled app is Games. It puts game downloading and access to Apple’s Arcade platform in one place, looking like a games-centric version of the App Store. The app has five tabs: Home, Arcade, Play Together, Library, and Search. On the heels of the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, Apple is hopeful that the new app can make its mobile devices a bigger part of the gaming industry. But this new app is unlikely to do the trick and is fairly underwhelming.

A new useless Game Center app — with no green felt background, from the sound of it — doesn’t address why Apple fails at gaming. I actually think it exemplifies it. Apple treats video games as a profit engine, while gamers treat them as pieces of art meant to be enjoyed. When Apple makes any gaming-related product, it has its eyes set on the billions of dollars of “services” revenue it can collect from in-app purchases, not the game designers and studios that spend years crafting games. These days, the App Store is filled to the brim with casino junk marketed toward children and their unwitting parents. Gone are the days of pay-once-own-forever games with no ads or pesky conversion tactics through in-game currency. Contrast that with Nintendo, whose games are artfully designed with sensible business models. People want fun consoles where game developers care more about making quality art than making money through egregious in-app purchases (ahem, Epic Games and Electronic Arts), and that’s why the Switch 2 is a hit.

Apple has been working to add Google’s Gemini software as an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which works with Siri and the Writing Tools. Though Alphabet Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai hinted that an accord was imminent, Apple has no current plan to announce such integration at WWDC (there likely won’t be any public movement on this front until the US Justice Department makes its ruling on Google’s search deal with Apple).

I think I deserve credit for predicting this a month ago, despite Pichai’s desperation. I don’t think this deal will ever actually happen due to the regulatory snafu — if it were to, Gemini would already be available on iOS. Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief, even teased it at a presser last WWDC, but it never came to fruition thanks to legal concerns. At this point, it’d be a miracle if Apple’s lucrative Google Search contract even says. I’d forget about a new Gemini deal.

Last year, the company announced Swift Assist, a feature for Xcode that could use Apple Intelligence to complete lines of code. It never launched because of hallucinations — a problem where AI makes up information — and other snags. The solution: a new version of Xcode that taps into third-party LLMs, either remotely or stored locally on the Mac. Apple is already using this internally with Claude from startup Anthropic.

Once again, there are no good-fitting words to describe my outrage at Gurman’s vagueness. All AI hallucinates, including the best models from Claude and Google, so did Apple’s Swift Assist model just hallucinate more than Claude? Or does Apple seriously think it has to make a hallucination-free AI for it to be up to snuff? And he says Swift Assist “never launched,” but it also was never announced as being canceled, so is this Gurman reporting Swift Assist is dead? There are too many questions to take any of this reporting seriously, except perhaps the “new version of Xcode” bit, which I presume to be similar to Cursor. I can’t wait for that to also be cancelled six months later due to some “snags.” (Just use Claude Code.)