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iOS 26 Speculation Thread

I love it.

iOS 19, watchOS 12, macOS 16, visionOS 3… it’s a bit much. Having it all be uniform makes a lot of sense to me.

Wonder if they’ll keep giving macOS California located-based names or if that’s gonna stop…
 
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tomtad said:
I was similar to you when round icons were first mooted however I've now come round to thinking this will actually happen. Everything seems to be pointing that way:
  • Apparently the redesign was scheduled to be launched last year with iOS 18 but it was pulled at a late stage to focus on Apple Intelligence features. It's notable that the revamped Control Centre which did launch last year has circular icons, was this originally planned to launch alongside the new 'solarium' interface?
  • A major focus will be to unify interfaces between platforms so presumably icons will be included in that, and WatchOS and VisionOS have circular icons.
  • The 'solarium' interface is supposed to be inspired by VisionOS which has circular icons, and it's notable this was Apple's last platform to launch less than 2 years ago so represents their most recent thinking UI wise.
To me there's quite a bit there which points towards this new, unified interface, going with circular icons.
Click to expand...
And I’d like to also point out that solarium makes reference to a place covered in glass, but also where the Sun illuminates everything. Sol = Sun. And the Sun is circular (okay, I’m stretching it a bit, it’s actually spherical, but that would be another point towards circular icons).
 
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Populus said:
And I’d like to also point out that solarium makes reference to a place covered in glass, but also where the Sun illuminates everything. Sol = Sun. And the Sun is circular (okay, I’m stretching it a bit, it’s actually spherical, but that would be another point towards circular icons).
Click to expand...
Nooooo!!!! 🤦🏼‍♂️. That is stretching things waaayyy too much. May I also point out that most solariums are made of square or rectangular sheets of glass, and the whole structures tend to be a bit squareish, so the icons will likely by rounded squares (squircles) or rectangular…
 
Kal Madda said:
Nooooo!!!! 🤦🏼‍♂️. That is stretching things waaayyy too much. May I also point out that most solariums are made of square or rectangular sheets of glass, and the whole structures tend to be a bit squareish, so the icons will likely by rounded squares (squircles) or rectangular…
Click to expand...
Nah, solariums have rectangular sheets of glass as you said. So Apple is borrowing Windows Phone tiles. NOOOO!!
 
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I think it makes sense to unify the version numbers. It’s getting to be tedious trying to keep all of the different version numbers straight. I’m a total Apple nerd, and I even have a hard time remembering sometimes what the version number for things like watchOS and macOS are. So I think unifying the numbers would make a lot of sense.

One thing I would like to see in addition would be all of the platforms sharing a name like the ones currently given to macOS. So it could be iOS Sequoia, iPadOS Sequoia, macOS Sequoia. I don’t think though, writing that out, maybe that would be too confusing. I guess it shouldn’t be any more confusing then them all sharing the same version number… 🤷🏼‍♂️

I’d also like to see them share a wallpaper style similar to the current macOS landscape ones. They could even be different parts of one scene so that they could all coordinate, and when Apple puts them all together in mockups, they could all form a scene! I think that would be super cool! 👍🏻
 
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HouseLannister said:
Apple was forced to put a number on it in the EU, so they said 5 years of support via security updates.
They still tend to give 5+ years for full OS releases anyway, but that might change. Those older 3 GB and 4 GB RAM devices are just hard to support without slowing innovation. I don't think we will see any surprising cutoffs with iOS 19, but we could get to a point in a couple years where those older devices just get security patches and that's it.
Click to expand...
Apple are doing a good job in supporting devices, especially in terms of performance. Could of course always get better but still old devices such as the SE2, XR and similar are running great on the latest OS. Helped a neighbor out yesterday with her Samsung A04s that was released in 2022, it struggled badly on Android 14 which is the last OS that device will receive.

Since both Android and Apple's devices can't use other OS such as a computer I'd happily see a change where EU forced them to support OS versions with security patches for 10 years.
 
Populus said:
I don’t care what they label it, or if Siri works better, as long as they release a stable operating system without the numerous bugs and glitches that are plaguing the current version.
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iOS and iPadOS are fairly solid IMHO. Stable is just a term for saying a seed is unchanging such as a point release to the general public. Now that we are soon going to see what the future OS's bring that they sidelined all the iOS/iPadOS advances for the year its more of what different for us at WWDC 2025 on June 9th.
 
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www.macrumors.com

Apple Executives Won't Be Appearing at This Year's WWDC Episode of The Talk Show Live

Since 2015, Daring Fireball's John Gruber has hosted a special live episode of his The Talk Show podcast from WWDC each year, with senior...
www.macrumors.com www.macrumors.com
Another sign along with the renaming of the OS’s that Apple is embarrassed concerning what has been dubbed as vaporware to AI implementation this last year that by March the commercials for AI were staged not functionally real. So Apple doesn’t want to discuss this last’s years instead renaming the OS to avoid comparisons.
 
Maybe its to please the EU, now Apple can claim they have supported some devices such as the XS from iOS 12 to iOS 26, that's +14 in terms of numbers.....that's unheard of.
 
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Steam has SteamOS but I don't think they will rename everything as just AppleOS but it could happen in the future.

They could bring back the name iPhoneOS and stop the Cisco licensing.

iPadOS
iPhoneOS
macOS
tvOS
visionOS
watchOS

Drop the numbers from Apple devices name.

iPad
iPad Air
iPad Pro

iPhone
iPhone Air
iPhone Pro

MacBook Air
MacBook Pro
 
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Realityck said:
www.macrumors.com

Apple Executives Won't Be Appearing at This Year's WWDC Episode of The Talk Show Live

Since 2015, Daring Fireball's John Gruber has hosted a special live episode of his The Talk Show podcast from WWDC each year, with senior...
www.macrumors.com www.macrumors.com
Another sign along with the renaming of the OS’s that Apple is embarrassed concerning what has been dubbed as vaporware to AI implementation this last year that by March the commercials for AI were staged not functionally real. So Apple doesn’t want to discuss this last’s years instead renaming the OS to avoid comparisons.
Click to expand...
The renaming is because the current naming scheme is getting tedious, and they’re unifying the design language/branding of the OSes. There’s no evidence to suggest or believe that they’re doing so because of AI delays, or that the AI features are “vaporware” etc… Evidence clearly suggests the features exist and are in development, but not ready yet for the public.
 
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