WWDC24: One feature we want to Apple to announce for each OS

It’s official—WWDC will kick off on June 10 with Apple’s biggest keynote of the year. As always we’ll get a preview of what to expect from Apple’s OS updates coming this fall. That’s iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS—and likely some surprises along the way. With less than three months to go before the big event, it’ll be here before we know it.

iOS 18: Siri

It’s hard not to be excited when you hear that this is going to be the most ambitious iOS update in a very long time. Apple’s big AI push seems great and has me wishing for all kinds of neat features in lots of apps.

But if I had to narrow it down to one feature, I would have to say: Siri. Siri may be part of every Apple product, but it’s inexorably tied to the iPhone. After becoming the poster child for digital assistants with the iPhone 4s and sort of entering the collective consciousness as “AI” before “AI” was all the rage, it has become something of a blemish for Apple. Despite some real significant improvements in the last couple years, it is often ridiculed online for misunderstanding users and giving weird results. 

For Apple, Siri is AI and AI is Siri. It is, in a very literal sense, AI personified. Siri has to make people say “wow” again, like it did when it was new. It needs to be something above and beyond the current state of the art in phone assistants. It’s going to take a lot to change the minds of the many millions of people who have “given up” on Siri after years of underperformance, but more than anything else, that’s what I want out of iOS 18. —Jason Cross

iPadOS 18: Multiple users

I’ve wanted this one for as long as Apple’s been making iPads—please please please let us have more than one user account on our tablets. Like Macs, iPads are communal devices and we’d love to be able to share ours with our spouses and kids without having half of the apps tied to our Apple ID.

Ever since Apple split iOS and iPadOS, multiple users seemed to be a no-brainer for the iPad, but each passing update has arrived with a lock screen instead of an iPhone instead of a Mac login screen. I’m hoping this year is when things change. —Michael Simon

macOS 15: Dynamic Notch

OK, I’m pretty sure this one isn’t going to happen, but I’d really really like it to. On our iPhones, the Dynamic Island is a great way to quickly see things happening in the background—on our MacBooks, a Dynamic Notch would be an awesome way to multitask on our MacBooks.

It would work largely the same way—apps that are doing something in the background would populate the notch, with small interactive screens descending when clicked. It would take some getting used to and obviously need tremendous developer support, but hey if someone at Apple thought Stage Manager was a good idea, surely this could work. —Michael Simon

tvOS 18: Customizable TV app

Some of what I want most on my Apple TV has nothing to do with new OS features and more to do with company policies. Like Netflix supporting the TV app so it’s in my “Up Next” queue, or game streaming apps such as Xbox Cloud Gaming or GeForce Now (Apple allows these now but the company’s policies around how games are sold still draw ire from developers).

I think the TV app itself has gotten worse over the last couple of years, though. With auto-playing trailers and a heavy preference for pushing Apple TV+ content. I have to scroll past many categories of Apple-only content before I get to the “New Shows and Movies” section where stuff from other services is mixed in. As a platform, tvOS pushes Apple’s own services so hard that I’m surprised it wasn’t specifically mentioned in the Department of Justice’s recent antitrust lawsuit. —Jason Cross

My ideal tvOS change is simply to let users customize the TV app home screen, choosing which sections to show or hide and in which order. —Michael Simon

watchOS 11: Notes app

watchOS has undergone numerous changes over the years, culminating with its largest overhaul yet in watchOS 10. So we don’t expect many major changes this year, but we are hoping for one—a Notes app. We don’t know why Apple didn’t include a companion Notes app in watchOS 1 or why it hasn’t added one since, but the ability to speak and store notes on the go is sorely needed. —Michael Simon

visionOS 2: User-anchored windows

The second release of visionOS needs to be a big change from the first. A real customizable home view, lasting widgets, way more tools for developers, faster/better hand tracking, shared spaces and virtual objects, and lots more. 

But if I have to pick just one thing, it would be for the ability to anchor windows to the user rather than to the space. Let me “lock” a window to me and have it follow me around, floating in the same relative position around me as I move. —Michael Simon