Apple was never going to 'win' its WWDC keynote

Apple is increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place — and not just on Artificial Intelligence.

Here's the problem, one that may have been stretched to breaking point during CEO Tim Cook's 2025 WWDC keynote. There are people in the market for Apple products, who want and have always wanted technology that just works. They want gadgets that are intuitive to use, not intrusive. According to multiple surveys, consumers continue to be distrustful of anything with an AI label. According to the nonprofit IAPP, 57 percent of us believe AI poses a threat to our privacy.

Then there are investors who are in the market for Apple stock, who are always on the lookout for tech products that seem new. Overall, tech investors are still drinking the AI Kool-Aid despite abundant evidence — including a brand new paper from Apple researchers! — that AI's ability to reason, and to be useful in general, may have already hit a wall.

Apparently, Apple is trying to keep both of those groups happy. Result: a keynote that liberally sprinkles on mentions of "Apple Intelligence," a rebranding of many software services (including voice assistant Siri, which got just one shout-out compared to multiple mentions of ChatGPT), but failed to gin up any excitement about what Apple Intelligence can do for you.

Given privacy is a major concern for consumers, it's cool that Apple Intelligence won't send any of your queries to the company. But we already knew that from Cook's 2024 keynote that introduced Apple Intelligence. Without getting tough on dangers posed by other companies who are more reckless with your data when it comes to AI — the same way Cook once dared to call Android a "toxic hellstew" — mentions of privacy just fly by like an F1 race car.

More than anything else, Apple's updates were mere vibes. Apple Intelligence is a vibe. The "liquid glass" design refresh is a vibe. Craig Fedherigi is definitely a vibe. But tech stocks are coasting on a different vibe right now, the one OpenAI's Sam Altman has been nurturing for the last three years — including hiring Apple legend Jony Ive to create a screenless gadget. There are only so many F1 dad jokes Apple can make to compete with that alluring vision.

The Apple analyst who called the event a "yawner" because Apple did not "monetize on the AI front" spoke for the market, which drove Apple stock down from the minute the keynote began.

How Apple is being a people-pleaser

You'd think the interests of Apple consumers and Apple investors would not diverge, and for most of the past two decades they haven't. Thanks to the roaring success of the iPhone, Apple got millions of new customers for all its well-designed, highly-rated, premium price products. Investors rewarded that runaway growth by making Apple the first company ever with a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion.

But Apple is increasingly dealing with mature markets. Or in normal person-speak, its gadgets have solved most major problems and settled down into standard versions of themselves. The average user can buy an iPhone now and be reasonably confident that its superfast chipset and self-updating software will keep it future-proofed for the next five years or so. You can still rock an iPhone 11 from 2019 well into 2026; it's the oldest phone that officially supports the upcoming iOS 26.

And that's as it should be! Apple would not have earned its current level of love from consumers if it had gone any further with the obnoxious business strategy known as planned obsolescence, or if it wasn't trying to rein in the environmental impact of its gadgets. A business model that has nothing to do with selling user data means the company can crow about privacy on billboards.

But it also means Cook has to work extra hard to convince the market that incremental updates are something to be excited about — and risks looking extra in the process.

"Liquid Glass" is a case in point. Fedherigi described it as a "material" that sits atop the user interface in Apple OSes, as if the company had literally injected liquid glass into all its screens. Spoiler alert: it hasn't. Liquid Glass is just a design language that makes menus a bit more "see-through-y", in Mashable senior editor Stan Schroeder's memorable summary. Such obvious overhyping makes Apple marketing a bit more see-through-y too.

In search of a new look, Liquid Glass also adds a drop shadow to some icons — verboten at Apple back when Jony Ive was there. Former Apple executive Scott Forstall was ousted in 2012 in part because he championed this kind of design, known as skeumorphism, whereas Ive favored a flat look. Apparently Apple has extended its recycling program to include design ideas.

Apple's new call screening feature will positively affect more lives than Liquid Glass. But Android has taken the lead on that front, so Cook can't really claim credit for it; it's just listed as one of a grab bag of features in Apple Intelligence. Polls in group chats? That's also an Apple Intelligence feature. Order tracking in Apple Wallet? Sure, let's call that Apple Intelligence too.

But whether you fear AI or love it, that grab-bag approach to what Apple Intelligence actually is ain't going to cut it. Investors, who have already sent the market cap of AI-leveraged companies like Microsoft and Nvidia soaring higher than Apple's, aren't going to be satisfied with what seems like a weak commitment to the coming AI era. And so long as he refuses to explain what the market and other companies get wrong about AI, Cook will stay stuck between the rock and the hard place.