At some point this fall, unless he has somehow gotten his hands on a pre-production sample of the glittering gold Trump phone he announced earlier this week, the president of the United States will wake up and find that his iPhone looks slightly unfamiliar and performs a little differently.
The numbers on the time display will be thinner and more elongated, and there will also be a new effect on the screen as you navigate through functions with your finger. Apple calls this Liquid Glass, and it’s difficult to describe, but it’s like your finger is producing a moving blob somewhere between a giant raindrop and a rounded piece of transparent Jell-O.
The same day the president starts asking his people why his phone has gone wonky, Vladimir Putin will almost certainly be doing the same. Although we don’t know that he has an iPhone, it’s highly unlikely he doesn’t, because almost everybody important and successful in the world—and trust me, that’s as ugly to write as it is to read—has one.
The thing is, although there are some very good non-Apple smartphones around—the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra or the quirkier Nothing Phone (3a) Pro, for example—the latest Apple device is always the best, the most desired, the most expensive, and, uniquely for a luxury good, also the most common. There are, indeed, close to two billion iPhones in current use, meaning one-quarter of the world has one.
Bear in mind that “having” a cell phone isn’t like owning a Bang & Olufsen or a KitchenAid or a Wilson tennis racket, all supreme products you might use from time to time. That one-quarter of humanity typically unlocks or checks their iPhone between 60 and 100 times a day, performs around 2,600 interactions, and spends three to five hours gazing into its oblong screen.
It is hard to think of any object, brand, practice, or belief, either modern or ancient, as deeply embedded in humanity as the iPhone, introduced by Steve Jobs at the Moscone Center, in San Francisco, on January 9, 2007. Changing how this one object looks and works is as significant, I would argue, as the Vatican deciding on a rebrand—changing the proportions of the cross a little, say, or giving Jesus Christ muttonchops.
I will discuss in a moment what changes to the iPhone—and all the other Apple screen-based devices going back to 2017 or so—were announced to 2,000-plus of us technology geeks earlier this month in the sunshine outside Apple’s sumptuous flying saucer–like headquarters, on the occasion of the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC, or “DubDub,” as regular attendees call it).
But if I may speculate on one other thing, we can also be pretty sure that every iPhone user will be faintly irritated by the fall changes to their devices, which will have upgraded from the current operating system, iOS 18, to a new one, iOS 26.
Among the most vexed by iOS 26, I would suggest, are the makers of any movie or TV series already wrapped and slated to appear next year. The iPhone is a key prop in almost every drama, but soon each sequence featuring one will look just slightly out-of-date.
Invariably, though, we quickly internalize change and soon start to find the way our iPhone used to look rather quaint. But annoyance at technologists’ monkeying around is, I think, part of the early-21st-century human condition.
So, what are the changes just announced at WWDC? There were hundreds of them, and some will be of no interest to most of us. (Any readers here who like to create their own emojis? I thought not.) And other modifications are significant but didn’t excite me—sorry, but I’ve been hanging out at the Apple Park with the lovely, optimistic people there, who tend to overuse the word “excited” a bit.
Things that are thrilling for me? The best of all is that iOS 26 will be able to filter out calls and texts from unknown numbers. Callers will be asked to state their business, and then you’ll be given the option to take the call or not. People texting from unknown numbers will have their messages consigned to a folder to be deleted or responded to at your leisure. These features will, I hope, utterly decimate the telemarketing industry—and long may it remain decimated.
Another fine thing: iPhones will now be able to silently monitor hold music until “an agent becomes available” and then let you know. What an advance!
And another I love—one of the many benefits of Apple’s widely disparaged artificial-intelligence system, Apple Intelligence—is that you will be able to tell the Photos app by voice what you’re looking for. “Can you find the guy I met in Spain with a mustache, I can’t remember when?” This is the kind of thing I try to do daily. And with 18 years of iPhone photos on my phone (57,000 or so, to be more specific), it’s almost impossible to scroll through them all.
Live Translation is another promising Apple Intelligence feature. You will be able to have FaceTime calls with people who don’t speak your language. The late Skype had that, but it wasn’t great. This will likely work, and will live-translate text exchanges, too.
In the same vein, I love a new gimmick, and lyric translation in the Music app is just that. As a result of many happy times in China, I have a lot of syrupy Mandarin pop songs in my library, and no idea what any of them mean. Seeing the translated lyrics on-screen will be sweet.
A further excellent new feature is a simplification of the Camera app. At present it’s a mess—you often find you’re videoing when you want to take a still and so forth. That’s been wonderfully clarified, and such annoying mistakes should no longer happen.
Things I’m not so much excited by but that will be pleasing nonetheless? The Liquid Glass thing. This has taken a fantastic amount of effort over years by hundreds of people, and Apple is extremely proud of it. All around Apple Park are big signs proclaiming “Hello” in a Liquid Glass–like style.
I’m not sure laypeople will be excited by this new Apple look, but it is very pretty, and I think it will be useful, too, making navigation even more intuitive and satisfying. The new lock screen, which already looks fabulous with the new, longer numerals, will lend a 3D effect to your wallpaper photos. That will be quietly lovely. And, oh yes, you will be able to set your own background wallpaper for different Messages threads. Kind of cute.
Given my fascination with the cultural dominance of the iPhone, I have often wondered whether the people at Apple are aware of how their momentous changes will be received as they’re toiling away. To know your efforts will irritate—and, later, hopefully delight—everyone from the president to, probably, Bob Dylan must be quite something.
So when I was introduced to Alan Dye, the vice president of human-interface design at Apple Park, I had to ask him if he’s aware of this particular variety of consumer fatigue. A cool guy of a certain age who has spent 19 years with Apple—I had imagined Apple V.P.’s would all be about 30—Dye totally gets it and makes sure his small core team always remembers it. Dye’s designers brief hardware and software experts across interaction, ergonomics, graphics, motion, animation, sound, haptics, color, and type.
“It’s an unbelievable responsibility, we never forget it,” he said, “to make products that help shape and improve people’s lives, give them tools to express themselves and communicate.”
“I sometimes talk to the team, and I’ll say, Hey, we’re sitting in this small room, just a group of us around a table. And we have to be our harshest critics, because when we say we’ve got something right, that’s going to then begin this chain reaction here at Apple, where our software engineers are going to spend their year working on one small portion of it. Then teams in Apple Retail are going to start to think about how to tell the story … and then at some point, 2.4 billion people are going to start to use it, right? It’s almost overwhelming to think about that.”
I wondered if he, maybe the world’s most influential human-interface expert on the one hand and a fellow near geezer like me on the other, is prone to getting irritated at other technology products when their interfaces are redesigned for seemingly no reason. Or is there a bond between people who monkey about with such things for a living?
“Well,” he said, “I am human, so, yes, maybe, on occasion.” He didn’t seem to want to be drawn in any further.
I’d love to have known one change that riled him. But the impression was that Alan Dye is probably more tolerant—and likely smarter and more adaptable—than most of us.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
