Smiling. Everyone is smiling. There is not a single frown detected. Every employee chirps HELLO and WELCOME with the most ecstatic grins; they clap in sync with Ed Sheeran’s “Azizam” as it cannonballs out of massive speakers. The vibe: This Is The Best Day Ever.

We’re not at Disneyland or Jonestown. This is the 2025 edition of WWDC, or the Worldwide Developers Conference, an annual event where Apple unveils its flashiest new software. In an outdoor pavilion, thousands of wooden chairs quickly fill up with TikTokers, designers, and Apple employees—including two of the guys most responsible for Apple’s new update, Alan Dye and Craig Federighi, who I’ll meet later for an exclusive conversation about the day’s biggest announcement. This tech spectacle is so hotly anticipated that the many programmers who came from around the world had to submit to a lottery to gain entrance. It feels like the first day of college: a tangle of first-timers and veterans milling about in organized anarchy, a hundred accents blending together under the beating California heat.

Over the next couple of hours, Apple will announce a whole suite of new features that you’ve now heard about, including the introduction of iOS 26, the most sweeping update to its operating system (iOS) in over a decade, going back to iOS 7 in 2013. (The changes include the naming convention; the number now represents the year of release.) The nervous excitement feels particularly charged today, perhaps because of the existential moment we’re in. Apple, one of the richest companies in the world, has long dominated the world of hardware. But the rise of artificial intelligence has set the ground quaking under even the most established tech players; the pursuit of AI is happening on a much more level field that includes frenetic startups with soaring valuations. Apple, of course, has poured its formidable resources into what the company calls Apple Intelligence, which rolled out last year. Many observers were expecting that the company would announce a new, AI-powered leap forward for Siri at WWDC, and not a sweeping software redesign. When Apple punted on AI and instead announced Liquid Glass—the new translucent software design that will be used across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV—the scrutiny of the new design was particularly feverish.

Imagine the glacial glaze of a future-bass Flume song but in the form of a digital design system that manipulates the opacity so buttons, menus, toolbars and more refract and reflect the color of the pages and platforms beneath them, as if the user is gazing into a crystalline pond of Content. Across demos and multiple interviews, Apple staffers kept urging me to touch and play with it, to really feel the satisfying plop and curl of the scrollers when you tap. As Dye would later tell me, perhaps alluding to the people online who were complaining about screenshots of the new design without having tried it, “It’s one of those projects where you really have to experience it to get it.”

The presentation itself felt like the moment before a supernova: Breath sucked in as we listened to all the giant leap forwards they revealed. And then at the end came an exhale, and a dispersal: Executives ferried off to meetings, media personnel brought to briefings, developers taken off to workshops; the clouted Substackers Emily Sundberg and Rachel Karten were invited to take selfies with CEO Tim Cook. (“Tim is such a legendary, important leader. It was awesome in all definitions of the word to be able to meet him,” Sundberg told me later, adding that she went to a house party that night and hung out with Apple devs who were “even more psyched about the announcements than random people online.”) Amid the chaos, I snag a dainty parfait from the cafeteria and watch the flood of creators with makeshift studios—just tripods and mics, really—reporting instantly on the news.

It’s after this that I get to demo the new iOS. Affable Applers line up around a table and walk me and a few others through the new features like we’re prospective customers at the Genius Bar. (Except this Genius Bar has a glossy glass wall that looks onto Cupertino’s lushest vegetation.) Looking deep into the Liquid Glass screen is oddly entrancing, like turning a holographic Pokémon card in the light. Touching it doesn’t feel foreign because there’s still the basic intuitive functionality, just with an added synthetic bounce. The amount of features is almost overwhelming: there’s beat-matching audio mixing; Intelligent Order Tracking; iPad Windowing (the iPad user interface now resembles a mobile Mac); a Call Screening tool that’s like a bouncer for your ears, forcing strangers to identify themselves before you accept. The fellow journalists oooh and ahhh, lighting up when they recognize a feature that’ll suit their needs.

Some of the heavily promoted features felt less impressive to me. Spatial Scenes (which simulates depth in 2D photos, letting you tilt the screen to make the image judder) seems like a digital form of lenticular printing. But there are clear gems like Live Translation, which will be super helpful the next time I’m trying to interview a hermetic Japanese music label owner. And, back at the conference, the crowd response popped when Apple revealed that it’s opening up its on-device AI framework, Foundation Models, to developers for free, which means they can integrate AI into their apps. The online outcry over the lack of a big AI announcement seemed to miss what Dye and Federighi would later claim to me, which is that they don’t want to play the same chatbot arms race as the crazed startups. They see AI as an enhancing device: something to inject an extra joie de vivre into their interfaces.

The recurring word from the Apple people is delight, and kudos to the marketer who came up with that. Apple wants their devices to radiate joy and glee, and the angel’s in the details: You can now add emojis and colors to your folders! You can conduct polls in your group chats! You can customize the snooze duration! As a kid, my family always had Windows, but I yearned for Apple products; I was seduced by the sleek marketing and inexplicably pleasing vibe of their systems, the way they seemed so fun and pretty to use. All the cool kids at school flexed glitzy Photo Booth snapshots on Facebook and used iMovie for video projects, while I was stuck churning out low-framerate garbage on Movie Maker. This is a company full of some of the most well-paid and skilled designers in the world, and the final result conceals all the elbow grease with a simple elegance and sprezzatura. As I walked around Apple’s campus, I could feel myself flickering between my 10-year-old and 25-year-old self: the kid who would’ve geeked out like crazy to come here and the adult who fears how AI could transform our economy and our culture.

Throughout day one, I’m shuffled between “AirSpace” rooms for conversations with executives, the palatial Steve Jobs Theater, and the main Apple Park facility, a single shimmering circuit that stretches a mile long and looks, from above, like it used to be a giant alien’s jangly wristband. Just like Apple products, everything is sculpted to the micro-pixel: the floors glisten, every fleck of plant life seems amply nourished, the glass is so sleek and pristinely imperceptible I nearly walk into it multiple times. This sense of ultra-finessed order crosses over into the event management: The dozens of press members are attended to at all times by specific workers, who carry ice-cold water for you and hold your cumbersome jacket; they orchestrate trips in golf carts that cruise at the perfect safe speed. They politely but firmly inform you of exactly which hallways, sculptures, and angles of a building you’re allowed to take pictures of.

Along for the ride was a rotating cast of media oddballs, including a British reporter from AirMail with a bright red corduroy jacket who doled out the largest business cards I’ve ever seen. He played the role of earnest curmudgeon, shouldering the burden of asking executives the most pugnacious questions, like if they’re spooked by the former Apple design legend Jony Ive teaming up with OpenAI’s Sam Altman to create AI-powered hardware. (The ensuing conversation, while animated, was off the record.) There were influencers like Oren John, Shervin Smith, and Umar Naqshbandi, a creator from Malaysia who bounced giddily down the lustrous hallways.

The main throughline of my two-day trip is shadowing Dye, Apple’s Vice President of Human Interface Design, who basically oversaw the Liquid Glass revamp. Dye originally studied design at Syracuse and has done all sorts of visual work, including running design for Kate Spade and contributing art to pubs like The New York Times. He joined Apple in 2006 and has worked on a slew of projects over the years, from Apple’s product boxes to the Apple Watch interface.

Dye had a hand in Apple’s last titanic iOS shift, when it moved away from skeuomorphism, the user interface style that mimics three-dimensional objects. That was Jobs’ vision. Ive is often credited with Apple’s 2013 leap to “Flat Design,” which refers to the post-iOS 7 era of abstract, minimalist icons with no appearance of physical depth. Some have theorized that Liquid Glass, with its use of depth and layering, marks a return to skeuomorphism. But it’s not a throwback, it’s a design for whatever’s coming next—if instead of peering into a smart phone, we’re seeing software that overlays the real world, we must be able to see through that software. That could be a pair of smart glasses controlled by eye movement, like Facebook and Snap are trying to make happen. iOS 26 spans all of Apple’s current devices; perhaps it’s also designed to power new devices to come.

I meet Dye midday for a background chat on a couch, and later observe as he films social media clips with influencers. The studio was erected only days before the conference, and looks like either the coziest nuclear bunker in history or a facility for high-end ASMR recordings. A soft soundproofing rug covers the ground; three cameras capture every angle of the influencers, who are permitted a few questions. Dye dutifully compliments the repetitive queries and warmly shakes hands. In between recordings, he mainlines Coca-Cola to stay perked while Apple designer Billy Sorrentino tells me about his love for outlaw country music and cracks jokes about Dye liking the Eagles.

By the end of day one, I’m fried and nearly delirious; I look in a bathroom mirror and notice the right side of my face and bridge of my nose are already reddening from the sun exposure I got in the morning. Despite the internet critiquing the update, Apple Park’s glass walls acted like a forcefield against the haters. Inside, everything is blissed out.

Day two begins with a tour of Apple’s audio lab, which is rarely shown to the public. It’s about 10 minutes from the Visitors Center, a walk that makes me feel a bit like I’m on a pre-K field trip. Inside the lobby sit a pair of massive speakers that apparently belonged to Steve Jobs, and now serve as a monument to his love for audio.

The building is something like an audiophile amusement park. There’s a rainbow-hued room with a contraption that looks like a torture device for people with misophonia; sounds convulse out of speakers carefully placed at every angle, barraging me as I sit in a swivel chair inside. Then there’s its opposite, the quiet zone: an anechoic chamber, lined with sound-absorbing foam spikes, enclosing total, harrowing silence, in which you will start to hear your blood pumping if you stay in it alone for too long.

These gadgets and labs are used for various testing and tuning methods—AirPod noise canceling, the spatialization of audio. We’re shown how you can test your hearing with AirPods Pro 2, which could probably help the many older people in my life with auditory issues. Maybe the most striking detail I learn is that the quality of the AirPod’s built-in microphone has risen to studio-level slickness, with sharp voice isolation capabilities. As one of my fellow visitors said: Might that just eliminate the mic industry?

Finally, it’s time: I sit down with Dye and Craig Federighi, the Senior Vice President of Software Engineering (affectionately dubbed “Hair Force One” for his silver riptide of a mane). Federighi looks like he just pitched a business proposal, with a light-blue button-up poplin shirt tucked into tailored trousers, while Dye could be coming from SoHo: His dark Harrington jacket covers a knit polo above single-pleat pants. They didn’t appear to be upset by the naysayers commenting on the announcement online; in fact, they’re buoyant about the public reception. Federighi said he was experiencing an “iPad Love Day”: “We had a whole series of people that were huge on iPad, and yesterday it was a ton of people that were super fired up by the design on the phone.”

It clearly took a lot of grinding—iterations on iterations on iterations—to craft the new iOS and achieve the effect of smooth perfection. “It’s not as simple as, ‘Let’s just implement the first hero sketch,’” Federighi explains. The glass would look great in one moment then break down, or not meet their standards for beauty and legibility. Finishing the update was cathartic. “There is a moment of, I don't know, adulation where you're like, Here it is,” Federighi says. “It's that thing we saw at the beginning, right? We traveled that road.”

Dye, who looks calm and restrained next to Federighi, with his superman smiles, walks me through Apple’s internal environment. It sounds more like an art studio than a tech lab: He says they have a practice of keeping all the work exposed, meaning “big, beautiful posters all over the walls” and running prototypes that might inspire other staffers in their own work. Apple has deadlines, of course, but Dye and Federighi claim their workflow is relatively freeform; they don’t chase engagement metrics and amorphous social media “impressions.” Federighi describes the office as a “cauldron” of cross-disciplinary creativity, full of experts in all subsets of design—from typography geeks to sound experts to next-level animators.

I learn that Liquid Glass was partly inspired by Apple’s work with the Vision Pro, a mixed reality headset that superimposes pixelated entities onto the physical world. Apple seems to be making a bet that in the not-so-distant future—a world of Smart Glasses, VR head-gear, or other augmented hyperreal paraphernalia as yet unseen—it will make sense for everything (windows, toolbars, icons) to be translucent and adaptable. It’s both a cosmetic change and a functional one. It reflects the Silicon Valley desire to build technology that seamlessly slips into everyday life—to make a free-floating dataworld somehow graspable, fungible, infinitely tractable. It’s a little like the trend in architecture toward see-through buildings and open-plan modular offices—a transparency that can also be its own kind of opacity. And it goes hand in hand with a craving to make everything continuous: a world where everything syncs up across your various devices (iOS 26 has “Live Activities”) and where the functional element of the phone is now out of the way, so the screen can become wall-to-wall digital media superimposed on a dematerialized world. Almost like there’s no device between you and your Content.

The Ozempification of smartphones has made everything slimmer over the years, and Liquid Glass can be thought of as another stride toward integrating hardware and software so all that’s left is this frictionless surface. “We weren't necessarily thinking existentially,” Dye says, “but more like, how can computing sort of get out of the way? How can we provide this lightweight layer?" The reaction to Liquid Glass online missed a bigger story here: That Apple could be sneakily trying to train its customers on looking through glass. They’re laying the foundation for a possible next stage of software, where it’ll be a window onto the world rather than into a device. This would make sense for a company that, as Dye says, brims with workers envisioning many future paradigms at once, “capable of thinking multiple years out” and taking a long view on the trajectory of tech.

As I leave the Apple campus, the sun is just starting to tilt into golden hour, the perfect light glinting off everyone’s WWDC badges. Across the street, there’s the Apple Park Visitor Center’s store, a pilgrimage site for Apple diehards the world over. The line is the longest I’ve seen it in my days here, snaking around the street and getting in the way of the programmers and TikTokers trying to catch Lyfts back to their hotel. Every wrist gleams with an Apple Watch; AirPods dangle out of ears; tourist dads avidly tap their iPads while waiting for their turn to snag merch. I remember how, at various times, these products were all derided. As much as “Windows Vista 2.0” is a funny joke about Liquid Glass, it’s likely that in the long run, the deliquescent new iOS will become just as iconic as skeuomorphism and Flat Design. Soon, it could well be projected everywhere we look—ever-present, augmenting even the most trivial interactions. It’s opulent, it’s delightful—and if Apple’s track record proves anything, delight is one thing humans can’t resist.