3 questions we still have before WWDC 2026

Apple may not be the most important company in the world right now – that’s Nvidia – but it’s still the most important company in the world. scrutinized.

Thanks to a tight set of supply-chain leakers who reveal all the features of Apple’s new products before they arrive (find the latest iPhone Fold and iPhone 18 rumors and leaks), Apple’s launch event can often lack surprises. And in a typical year, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is no exception.

But WWDC 2026 is no ordinary year, and a strange air of mystery still clings to the main point. That’s not only because we expect the AI ​​version of Siri to start, but also because we don’t know if Tim Cook, in his last WWDC as CEO, will pass the baton to CEO-in-wailing John Ternus during the event.

Will Ternus be trained on the job, speaking in conjunction with Cook? Or will he take a smaller role, as he did when he launched the iPhone Air last September?

Beyond that mystery, here are our three biggest burning questions for Apple’s WWDC keynote, which begins at 10 a.m. PT on Monday, June 8, 2026.

Will we see an iPhone Fold (or Ultra) at all?

The last time we heard about the iPhone Fold, Apple’s late-to-the-party entry into the foldable smartphone market, its official launch date was pushed back, probably until the holiday season. Given the global memory chip shortage, analysts have warned that the company may not have enough to satisfy demand until 2027.

Nevertheless, the prototypes of the iPhone Fold are there (or the iPhone Ultra, if one report is to be believed – the conflicting names are one example of Apple including an unusual amount of lockdown). Cook may think it makes sense to shock us with one early look, and clear up any confusion about the name.

After all, that’s what Steve Jobs did with the original iPhone: he gave us a peak in January 2007, long before the official summer launch.

Jobs’ strategy would make sense here, as Apple is late to the folding game – and is effectively competing with rivals with its large folding screen. Cook may also want to consolidate his relationship with Fold/Ultra, as he led the company during its development.

What better way to do that than to retrieve, just this one, “one thing” like Jobs? Ternus takes over on September 1, so any future iPhone Fold/Ultra launch event will be his baby. Does Cook want the world’s first official appearance of the Fold/Ultra to be in the hands of Ternus?

Then again, Cook’s lack of ego was one of the defining characteristics of his era. So he’s probably right about letting his big product guy take the credit (or, if the Fold/Ultra fails in any way, the fall).

Will the new AI Siri surprise us?

During the Cook years, Apple struggled with a critical balancing act on the topic of AI. On the other hand, Cook is clearly skeptical about the tech industry’s tendency to overvalue LLMs – and given that the explosive white papers coming out of Apple’s research arm clearly show that even the so-called conceptual models can’t think, he has every reason to think that way.

On the other hand, consumers have the right to expect that they can handle Siri, Apple’s creaky AI chatbot, as it has the intelligence of models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

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And that’s what we expect to find: Gemini’s powerful Siri voice assistant, as well as a new Siri program and an AI agent app store, which fulfills the company’s long-delayed promise of Apple Intelligence. You will reportedly be able to choose third-party AI tools.

An improved Siri will also appear in the camera app, offering editing options and other forms of “Visual Intelligence.” It will also reportedly be ad-free and more privacy-focused than its AI rivals, with features like automatically deleting chat logs.

Okay, but how does Cook (or Ternus) successfully demonstrate the AI ​​capabilities of the new Siri? Here the company may face a boy-who-cried-wolf problem.

Due to Apple’s, um, overzealous marketing after the first announcement of Apple Intelligence, which showed features that weren’t there, the company had to settle a class action lawsuit.

So, how can the ad within this keynote that showcases Apple’s Intelligence capabilities not give us skeptical vibes, even if they exist at this point?

Siri’s biggest surprise will be a live demo — but given that Apple hasn’t done that in a keynote since 2019 (Cook pre-recorded it in 2020), don’t hold your breath.

Will we see a ‘GenAI’ Apple website?

Regardless of how much we see of Siri, WWDC 2026 is more focused on the development of Apple’s “AI.” So how will that manifest in practice?

Another possibility is that a selection of AI apps and services will appear on the web and on Apple devices – perhaps on genei.apple.com, a website that Apple is said to have added to its domain servers but is not yet full.

Apple doesn’t usually do much on the web, but it does more than you think. All your iCloud backups and services are available when you sign in to iCloud.com, a lifesaver if you lose your phone.

A website offering the new Siri, alongside third-party AI chats and other Apple Intelligence services, would make a lot of sense, especially given Apple’s long-standing emphasis on privacy and security.

Such a site could also increase its popularity by offering ChatGPT (Apple has an ongoing agreement with OpenAI, despite the potential lawsuit) without the ads that OpenAI has begun serving.

Will iOS 27 be lighter… and less Liquid?

The real star of the WWDC show is, of course, Apple’s latest iteration of its iPhone operating system. But iOS 27 has more riding on it than many improvements.

That’s not just because of the new Siri, or the foldable software that is said to be included in iOS 27. It’s because iOS 26 was a controversial upgrade, to say the least.

Reports of low adoption numbers turned out to be exaggerated. But the discomfort was undeniable. Many users expressed dismay on Reddit that iOS 26 felt like “bloatware” that slowed down the keyboard, among other features.

Most controversial of all: the Liquid Glass aesthetic that made app icons look like cheap gel stickers, as some saw it. Of course, the rapid departure of the chief design officer behind Liquid Glass does not suggest that it was a milestone for the company.

So, how different will iOS 27 look? Is the cool glowing animation promoting WWDC 2026, in which the Siri redesign is reportedly in plain sight, a harbinger of good things to come?

Have Apple engineers spent the last year successfully filling the bloat, or making it worse? Will it end support for the iPhone 11?

Join us for Tim Cook’s Apple keynote series to find out!