Transform any Youtube video URL into a readable transcript

WSJ’s Joanna Stern sits down with Apple software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak at WWDC 2025 in Cupertino to talk about the future of AI, what happened to Siri, the new Liquid Glass redesign, iPads vs. Macs, tariffs and more.

Chapters:
0:00 AI and Siri delays
12:21 Liquid glass and iOS 26
15:37 iPad vs. Macs
17:44 Future of computing and AI devices
20:00 Tariffs and iPhone pricing
20:49 What’s next for Apple?

Tech Things With Joanna Stern
Everything is now a tech thing. In creative and humorous videos, WSJ senior personal tech columnist Joanna Stern explains and reviews the products, services and trends that are changing our world.

#Apple #AI #WSJ …...more
...more
Show less

Headlines:

• AI and Siri delays
• Liquid glass and iOS 26
• iPad vs. Macs
• Future of computing and AI devices
• Tariffs and iPhone pricing
• What’s next for Apple?

Transcript:

• Craig, Joz, thank you so much for sitting down with me at your big developers conference. - Thanks for having us. - Yeah, it was a big day yesterday. - Huge. Huge, - Huge day. - Huge. - So, I do wanna get to what you announced yesterday, and some of the big announcements. I wanna talk a little bit about last year's WWWEC. - Yeah. - Start there. Last year you announced a smarter AI-driven Siri. Where is she? - Yeah, well, you know, back then with Apple Intelligence, I think we spent about 40 minutes on Apple Intelligence in 100-minute show, Siri was building on Apple Intelligence. We had about, spent about eight minutes of on Siri there. Four minutes of those we were able to ship this year. In four minutes, we didn't. So we were able to deliver a great new Siri UI`. New features like typing to Siri. Siri understands, does fluency better. Siri understands conversational context better. Siri understands product knowledge better. But there were a couple of really significant features that we weren't able to get to. And we had laid the foundation with Apple Intelligence, with a semantic index with on-device, really powerful on device large language models that power a bunch of other features in Apple Intelligence with breakthrough private cloud compute of intelligence there. And all of those, and a semantic index that we use in lots of features like searching your photos with natural language, which of course we delivered, which all are foundational to new capabilities we wanna add to Siri. We had a really two-phase plan, a two versions of an architecture to deliver a great Siri. And as we got into the conference, we had V1 working to do basic capabilities that we showed off at the conference. So we had some real software. We were able to demonstrate there and show what was coming, but it didn't converge in the way quality-wise that we needed it to. We had something working but then as you got off the beaten path, and we know with Siri it's open-ended what you might ask it to do, and the data that might be on your device that would be used in personal knowledge. And we wanted to be really, really reliable and we weren't able to achieve the reliability in the time we thought initially we could get it done by the end of the year and then by the spring. And when we realized in the spring that it just wasn't gonna hit the Apple quality level, we had to make the announcement that we were gonna move on to V2 of our architecture that really had the legs to get us to the quality that we want for our customers. And that we'd be announcing when it was ready, we'd be announcing it. And so that's where we are today. - But there was a working version of this. - Oh, yeah. Yeah. - This wasn't just vaporware. - Oh, no, no, no, no, of course. No, we were filming real working software with a real large language model with real semantic search. That's what you saw. - Yeah, there's this narrative out there that, yeah, it was demoware only. No, it was, again, something we thought as Craig said, we'd actually ship by later in the year. And look, we don't wanna disappoint customers. We never do. But it would've been more disappointed to ship something that didn't hit our quality standard that had, you know, an error rate that we felt was unacceptable. So we made what we thought was the best decision. I'd make it again, so. - So two parts of this that I wanna unpack. I mean, one is that you marketed it though. You showed this. - Yeah. - How did that happen? - Well, again, as Craig said, we thought we were gonna deliver it by the end of the year. That was our plan. So in October, we had one round of that Bella Ramsey ad that showed one of the things that we could do with Apple Intelligence. We had a whole series of things, and this was one of 'em. We expected it. And there you go. - Yeah, I think most of our marketing really, and I mean, I'm not the expert here, but was about Apple Intelligence. And we had, I don't know, 20 different capabilities of Apple Intelligence. And our, as I say, like even in what we were saying in the event, you'd swear in retrospect, if I'm to read what people write, that our entire event last year was about Siri. As I said, 4% of the minutes in our event last year were about the parts of Siri that we didn't deliver. The 96 other percent of that event was about other things. And most of Apple Intelligence was about all sorts of powerful capabilities that we shipped. And so, yeah, we've been marketing Apple Intelligence a lot because we think both it's great now, and it's a huge foundation for the future. If every time you hear us market Apple Intelligence, you hear in your mind chatbot, which of course, we were 100% not thinking, and saying that was what we thought Apple Intelligence was or what the future of our platform was. Well, then you're gonna think this, but that in fact isn't what we were doing. There was a Bella Ramsey ad that was specifically about Siri, but you know, by and large, we've been marketing Apple Intelligence. - Yeah. And there's over 20 features that we did deliver. So we delivered almost everything that we promised. That was something we didn't, again, and Craig explained why. - It's great that you set this high bar, but you're also Apple. I mean, you've got more engineers, more cash than most companies, maybe any company. Why couldn't you make it work? - I mean, this is new technology. I think when it comes to automating capabilities on devices in a reliable way. No one's doing it really well right now. And we wanted to be the first, we wanted to do it best. And like I say, we had very promising early results in working initial versions, but not to the level that as we began living on it internally, and feeling like, this just doesn't work reliably enough to be an Apple product. So this stuff takes hard work, but we do see AI as a long-term transformational wave, as one that's going to affect our industry, and of course, our society for decades to come. We wanna get it right. There's no need to rush out with the wrong features, and the wrong product just to be first. We ultimately want to build the right products for our customers. - So many people associate Apple and AI with Siri. - Mm-hm. - Since +10 years ago now. - Sure. - And so, there is a real expectation that Siri should be as good, if not better than the competition. - Oh, and I think ultimately it should be. - But it's not right now. - That's certainly our mission. Yeah. But that's our mission. You know, we set out to tell people last year where we were going, I think people were very excited about Apple's values there experience that's integrated into everything you do, not a Bolton Chatbot on the side, something that is personal, something that is private. We started building some of those and delivering some of those capabilities. And we do wonderful semantic photo search right now. You know, we do all kinds of tools that are directly integrated into how you use your device. I think people are excited for that future. And in a way, appreciate the fact that people really wanted the next version of SIRRI. And we really want to deliver it for them, but we wanna do it the right way. - When's the right way gonna come along? - Well, in this case, we really wanna make sure that we have it very much in hand before we start talking about dates for obvious reasons. - And will that include these features that you had previously announced and more, I mean, is this the effort to make Siri this more interactive AI companion? - Sure. Well, I mean, look, on the one hand, I would love to to dish about my enthusiasm for our future plans, but that's exactly what we don't want to do right now, right? - Makes sense. - To you know, misset expectations. We wanna deliver something great that you and all of our customers really appreciate. - You have mentioned Apple Intelligence a lot. And you know, to be honest, I'm not really a big user of Apple Intelligence. I'm using a lot of your competitors' products. Can you or will you keep up with that competition? - Well, again, it is important to realize our strategy is a little bit different than some other people's, right? Our idea of Apple Intelligence is using generative AI to be an enabling technology for features across our operating system. So much so that sometimes you're doing things you don't even realize you're using Apple Intelligence or you know, AI to do them. And that's our goal. Integrate it. Make your products that you use every day, make the features you use every day better. Not even have to think about, there's no destination, there's no app called Apple Intelligence, which is different than a good chatbot. Which again, what I think some people have kind of conflated a bit, like, where's your chatbot? We didn't do that. What we decided was that we would give you access to one through ChatGPT, because, you know, we think that was the best one. But our idea is to integrate across the operating system, make it features that, you know, I certainly use every day. - And I think, I mean, AI is one of those massive technol technological waves like the internet, like mobility. When you look at the internet, I don't think anyone was saying, "Gosh, Apple, I find myself using amazon.com. And I'm not using, you know, I use that a lot. Why don't you have one of those? I find this web search thing really useful. I'm enjoying, you know, streaming cat videos. I find this useful. Why is this not in your product? Well, of course the internet was vast. It was opportunity for many, many companies for users to do a wide diversity of things. It was also huge enabler for Apple. And I think Apple made the internet accessible in a lot of ways, more than more than anyone. And it was super empowering for our customers and for our products. But that didn't mean that every experience that you might take on necessarily is gonna happen inside of Apple or ultimately happen with the Siri. They're gonna be places where hopefully Siri is a huge, and maybe ultimately indispensable part of your daily routine. But that doesn't mean it's a problem if you are using something else for other tasks you wanna do. - I do wanna get into iOS 26, - Yeah, yeah. - And some of the new operating systems. But staying on AI for a second, you do have some more of OpenAI and ChatGPT threaded through, it's specifically in visual intelligence. When are you guys thinking about using your models versus another company's models like OpenAI's? - Well, we do already. So today, when you use writing tools, and say you wanna make something more concise, put it in a bulleted list, create a table, or even give an ad hoc command on how you wanna modify something into being, you know, haiku or something like that. That's all using Apple's models in private cloud compute. And so we're using our models for more and more. We use them for some of our visual intelligence experiences as well. But ChatGPT offers some really great capabilities. And so we have integrated more and done some really powerful things with them. As you point out, they're available in visual intelligence, which is now available not just for things around you with your camera, but also things on your screen. But we also integrate lots of other tools into that flow. We also make ChatGPT's image generation capability available both inside of Image Playground, but also since you can pull up that image generation capability inside of all sorts of apps, Apple apps and third party apps, you also now have access to ChatGPT's image generation right there in the flow of using those apps. So, and we announced some really exciting coding tools actually in Xcode that got, you know, huge reaction from our developers yesterday where you can use ChatGPT as well as other models like from Anthropic to do coding in Xcode, which is fantastic. So we will keep building up the capability of our own models, but we see lots of people doing other exciting things with theirs, and we wanna make sure our customers can access the best of everything. - You know, looking ahead, does Apple want to be the company making some of these models? Would you like to have some of the capabilities that OpenAI has in their models or philanthropic central to Apple living in Apple's models? - Oh, I mean, we already are, in fact, we published a paper again this year describing our latest releases of both on-device models and our private cloud compute model. Both have undergone significant architectural and enhancements. Our PCC private cloud compute model is much larger and more powerful and is GPT-4 o class in many regards. So this is something absolutely that's what we've been doing. - Okay. - But our goal again, is not to create another Chatbot, right? It's to integrate these capabilities across our operating system and our features. - But that powerful intelligence behind those capabilities. - Exactly. Yeah. - Let's talk about Liquid Glass. - Oh, yay. - You guys really like glass? - We do. - It's a nice material. Why do you love glass so much? - Well, I think the glass, you know, we could have gone with, you know, ancient brick or teak wood or something as a material. - Yeah. - But it turns out glass has some really useful properties when it comes to user interfaces and especially the kind of adaptive glass we were able to build into the product. You know, what we really wanted is, as our displays have gotten both larger, but also with these rounded edges, we wanted to make your content feel open, like it owned the entire screen edge to edge glass allows us to put controls inset, concentric to that experience that on the one hand feel almost like they're not there. Like your content just owns the screen, which is wonderful, but at the same time, define space in a way that, "Oh, I know what the buttons are. The controls are extremely clear." Glass also is wonderfully adaptive. It both can transmit through translucency, the background, but we can adapt its properties so that you get contrast to be able to see the content of both what's behind it, and what you're trying to read. And so Glass is just, has these wonderful properties for being part of the UI and it just looks super cool. - Why do it now? - Well, we've gotten to the point where the hardware has evolved both the processing power to enable us to do this glass, like doing refraction of content that's far away from the glass, along the edges of the glass, transmitting content through the glass. This is all computationally intensive, but we have now the power with apple silicon to do this across the breadth of our product line. So that's step one. But we also have these amazing displays. Some of them high definition are HDR displays that allow us to show spectral highlights on glass. And then the screens have gotten larger. The ID has changed to the point where that centricity was a real driver. All the factors came together to enable us to take a big step forward. And then we also saw the opportunity to bring something consistent across our entire product line, something universal. And it's taken years from, if you look at the starting point of iOS and macOS, and how, you know, far apart their origin was as an interface, and how over many years we brought them together, uniform-type faces, starting to bring together the design language to where we really could have a single design that spanned across our whole product line. That was now in reach. And this year we were able to deliver on it. - And it's probably worth saying too inspired by the years of work that the team put in Vision OS, right? And what we learned from that, how much we liked that, how much users loved that, you know? So certainly there was inspiration at a design level for that. - You mentioned bigger screens or making this screen feel bigger. Is this a sort of a precursor to a bigger screen iPhone? (interviewees laughing) What about a foldable iPhone? I feel like this would look very nice on a foldable iPhone. - It's so large right now. Geez, it's so nice. - Well, yeah, that's why you fold it. - It's nice. It is nice. - That's why you'd fold it. - It would break it, wouldn't it? I don't know. - No, no. You would make a foldable iPhone. It's not something you're thinking about? - No. - Who's is this? - I did wanna talk about a little bit about the iPad OS. - Yeah. - And that seems like a real move to trying to make the iPad more of a computer. But as you know, I've long asked, you've got an iPad with iPad OS. - Love it. - You've got Mac, Mac OS. - Love it, yeah. - Why not? Why not think about bringing these two things? - Both are super popular and both doing great. - Never gonna bring 'em together. - They're great. I mean, I think I love 'em both. I think everyone, if they can should own both. And they are products that come from just different places. Their center is different. They share a lot in common. And I think we all love using them both in their distinct and and overlapping ways. But the Mac has always been optimized for keyboard and track pad or mouse. High precision, fine targets on the UI. iPad, it's the ultimate touch device. You're just holding computing in your hand. It's wonderful to interact with directly. But there are things about them as the iPad has grown, larger screens, more powerful computationally, where our customers have wanted to do more with iPad. I think we've all found ourselves going from using it for, you know, a lot of sort of consumption and a little bit of productivity into a lot more productivity. And as we reached for the ways to do that in a way that was true to iPad, we found that with some of the idioms of the Mac, they actually translated over pretty well. And so we've wanted to be consistent where it made sense, but really embrace what's unique about iPad at every step. - So what you're saying is there's a chance you're gonna bring these things. - That is an interesting interpretation, Joanne. Yeah, that's what I'm hearing. - I still remember the slide behind Craig. I can't remember what keynote it was, but I think we put the word no in about as big. - It was the biggest typeface we could find. I'd like to take a moment to briefly address this question. No! (audience laughing) - So the answer is no. - That's correct. - Do you have a Mac with a touchscreen in those buildings? - I don't see one. - A lot of the updates yesterday were to what we might call more traditional computing, right? The track pad, the touch screen, Liquid Glass being a different way to interact with the touch screen. - Yeah. - What are though is the future of computing to Apple when we look at AI integrated, and the ability of voice, and having computers do more for us- - Yeah. - Versus us doing the computing. - Well, I mean, I think it is a multimodal future if you wanna use the technical term. I mean, we as as humans are very visual creatures. We are defined by our desire to manipulate things with our hands. We also have the capacity for language and speech. And so, you're going to want to use all of those capacities at once. Sometimes you're going to want to speak to get something done. Sometimes you're gonna wanna reach out, grab the wheel, touch it, manipulate it. We see the ultimate future is one in which you're seeing and you're interacting, and you're touching and you're speaking. And the device is able to take direction from you, but you are able to show it what you want. You are able to get what you want directly. Just as we interact with the natural world. - What about other devices to do that? You probably saw that Johnny Ive is linked up with OpenAI to create some sort of future AI device. - Yeah, I don't know what that is. - I don't either. Yeah. - Is this a space that Apple's looking at? Is this a space that goes beyond what you have in the current lineup of devices? Something that is more personal, maybe you wear it glasses. - I think, I mean, I think we have some extremely personal wearable devices. If you want something that's aware of your environment with audio, I think you're wearing one right now on your wrist. If you want something that you can capture the environment with and see, and also receive visual content, you might just have one in your pocket right now. Are there other form factors that can make sense to AI? Sure, but pretty hard to beat something that's with you all the time and glanceable. Or, you know, provides a nice screen that you can interact with. So yeah, I don't know what they're working on. - There's been a lot of other issues in the air facing Apple. One of the big ones is tariffs, and the threat of tariffs increasing the prices of Apple products. Jos, I'll ask you, are we gonna have a more expensive iPhone? - Well, clearly, you can imagine we monitor this every day. But certainly nothing to announce now is we're all seeing where things settle out. And obviously, we're focused this week on all our great announcements across all our platforms, and including Apple Intelligence. - And those software upgrades are free and untariffed. - Yes, that's very true. You heard that here first. - But specifically on marketing. And if you have to increase prices, that must be a tall order to figure out how to market a more expensive iPhone. - I'm again, premature to say at this point, certainly nothing to talk about. - You don't have teams working on that. - We monitor it, as you can imagine. We'd be crazy not to, but nothing announce. - Okay. You both combined, I believe have almost like 70 years of working at this company. - How old are you, Jos? - Oh, my God. (Craig laughing) Did you really have to go how old we are, Joanna? - Yeah. And. - Yes. - I will tell you a breaking news. I did my 39th anniversary at Apple yesterday. - Wow. Yesterday. - Oh, yeah, yesterday. Can you believe that? - [Joanna] Wow. - Yeah. - We didn't even get you a cake. - Well, a year away from 40. I just want you to plan. It was a little planning time to make sure. - No, we got the Liquid Glass cake, which by the way sounds like a little bit like a vodka. (all laughing) - I think I'm in. (all continue laughing) - But, so, I'll ask the question again. Between you both, you have, I believe, around 60 years of experience at this company. - [Craig & Greg] Yeah. - You've seen the company go through highs, through lows. Where do you think you are right now? There's a lot of sentiment that Apple is on its back foot here. - Well, I think you're right to bring up that perspective, because I think when you have been through different waves. You're very accustomed to the ups and downs. And I think we're feeling really good right now. - Yeah, look, I hate to be naive, but I remember Steve had come back. And he told us, "Look, what we have to do is create great products and tell people about 'em." And if we do that, everything else will work out. And it turns out that is kind of the case. And we create great products, and we think our products are exceptionally great right now, and keep getting better. We're out here talking about 'em, telling people why that's the case, and everything will work out. Right now, the business is strong. People are loving our iPhones. The Mac has never been more popular than it is now. iPad has been growing and it's extremely great. You know, everything we're doing is trying to make great products. Everything you saw yesterday was again, how we use technologies from design to AI, to the other feature work we did to make our products better. And look, we're already coming from a place that every single one of our hero products is number one in customer satisfaction, in its respective categories. And we just wanna make it better. Wanna keep making it better. And that's what we do. And again, I'll hang onto that naive theory that if we build great products, and tell people about 'em, everything else will work out. - And yesterday was a really exciting day. You know, we've been working on, for instance, the new design and many of these capabilities. And to get them out in front of an audience, and see just how... You could feel the energy. You could feel the excitement about how much people care about these platforms, love these enhancements. And so you feel that. And then, in our case, we know what's coming. We're also excited about the great products we are building. It feels good. - I have to end on this. - Okay. - "Slow Horses" or "Severance"? - Oh, my God. I love 'em both. - Yeah, they're fantastic. - Love them both. And I truly love them both. - Yes. - I would say (inhales deeply) "Severance" number one. - Yeah. - But "Slow Horses" is up there. - Phenomenal. - iPad or Mac? You have to choose. - Oh! - Well, see, like so many of our customers. - For what? - I choose both. - Oh. - [Greg] You didn't say I couldn't choose both. - Texting style, individual, text, or big paragraph? - Oh, well, again, it depends if you're on your Mac or not because you can always tell somebody's text you from the Mac because it's text return. Text return. And they all come across separate versus on my phone. I type them all as one-one. - This rapid fire- - I'll admit. - Is not working. - I'm big paragraph guy. - Yeah. - All right, well, this rapid fire is not working. - [Craig] Oh, I'm sorry. - Thank you, guys. (all laughing out loud) Thank you guys for sitting down and talking. - Well, thank you, Joanna. - Thank you, Joanna.