Inside Apple’s high-gloss standoff with AI ambition and the uncanny choreography of WWDC 2025There was a time when watching an Apple keynote — like Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2007, the masterclass of all masterclasses in product launching — felt like watching a tightrope act. There was suspense. Live demos happened — sometimes they failed, and when they didn’t, the applause was real, not piped through a Dolby mix.These days, that tension is gone. Since 2020, in the wake of the pandemic, Apple events have become pre-recorded masterworks: drone shots sweeping over Apple Park, transitions smoother than a Pixar short, and executives delivering their lines like odd, IRL spatial personas. They move like human renderings: poised, confident, and just robotic enough to raise a brow. The kind of people who, if encountered in real life, would probably light up half a dozen red flags before a handshake is even offered. A case in point: the official “Liquid Glass” UI demo — it’s visually stunning, yes, but also uncanny, like a concept reel that forgot it needed to ship.https://medium.com/media/fcb3b16cc42621ba32153aff80ea1805/hrefAnd that’s the paradox. Not only has Apple trimmed down the content of WWDC, it’s also polished the delivery into something almost inhumanly controlled. Every keynote beat feels engineered to avoid risk, reduce friction, and glide past doubt. But in doing so, something vital slips away: the tension, the spontaneity, the sense that the future is being made, not just performed.Just one year earlier, WWDC 2024 opened with a cinematic cold open “somewhere over California”:https://medium.com/media/f97f45387353363264d99c341d4571b0/hrefPhil Schiller piloting an Apple-branded plane, iPod in hand, muttering “I’m getting too old for this stuff.” A perfect mix of Lethal Weapon camp and a winking message that yes, Classic-Apple was still at the controls — literally — flying its senior leadership straight toward Cupertino. Out the hatch, like high-altitude paratroopers of optimism, leapt the entire exec team, with Craig Federighi, always the go-to for Apple’s auto-ironic set pieces, leading the charge, donning a helmet literally resembling his own legendary mane. It was peak-bold, bizarre, and unmistakably Apple. That intro now reads like the final act of full-throttle confidence.This year’s WWDC offered a particularly crisp contrast. Aside from the new intro — which features Craig Federighi drifting an F1-style race car across the inner rooftop ring of Apple Park as a “therapy session”, a not-so-subtle nod to the upcoming Formula 1 blockbuster but also to the accountability for the failure to deliver the system-wide AI on time — WWDC 2025 pulled back dramatically. The new “Apple Intelligence” was introduced in a keynote with zero stumbles, zero awkward transitions, and visuals so pristine they could have been rendered on a Vision Pro. Not only had the scope of WWDC been trimmed down to safer talking points, but even the tone had shifted — less like a tech summit, more like a handsomely lit containment-mode seminar. And that, perhaps, was the problem. The presentation wasn’t a reveal — it was a performance. And performances can be edited in post. Demos can’t.So when Apple in march 2025 quietly admitted, for the first time, in a formal press release addressed to reporters like John Gruber, that the personalized Siri and system-wide AI features would be delayed — the reaction wasn’t outrage. It was something subtler: disillusionment. Gruber’s response cracked the façade wide open. His post opened a slow but persistent wave of unease, rippling through developer Slack channels and private comment threads alike. John Gruber’s reaction, published under the headline “Something is rotten in the State of Cupertino”, was devastating. His critique opened the floodgates to a wave of murmurs and public unease among developers and insiders, many of whom had begun to question what was really happening at the helm of key divisions central to Apple’s future.Many still believe Apple is the only company truly capable of pulling off hardware-software integrated AI at scale. But there’s a sense that the company is now operating in damage-control mode. The delay didn’t just push back a feature — it disrupted the entire strategic arc of WWDC 2025. What could have been a milestone in system-level AI became a cautious sidestep, repackaged through visual polish and feature tweaks. The result: a presentation focused on UI refinements and safe bets, far removed from the sweeping revolution that had been teased as the main selling point for promoting the iPhone 16 launch, “Built for Apple Intelligence”.That tension surfaced during Joanna Stern’s recent live interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak. These are two of Apple’s most media-savvy execs, and yet, in a setting where questions weren’t scripted, you could see the seams. Their usual fluency gave way to something stiffer. More careful. Less certain. And even the absences speak volumes: for the first time in a decade, no one from Apple’s top team joined John Gruber’s Talk Show at WWDC. It wasn’t a scheduling fluke — nor a petty retaliation for Gruber’s damning March article. It was a retreat — one that Stratechery’s Ben Thompson described as exactly that: a strategic fallback, not a brave reset.Meanwhile, the keynote narrative quietly shifted from AI ambition to UI innovation: new visual effects, tighter integration, call screening. Credit here goes to Alan Dye — Apple VP of Human Interface Design and one of the last remaining members of Jony Ive’s inner circle not yet absorbed into LoveFrom — whose long-arc work on interface aesthetics, from the early stages of the Dynamic Island onward, is finally starting to click into place. This is classic Apple: refinement as substance, design as coherence. But it was meant to be the cherry on top of a much deeper AI-system transformation — not the whole sundae. All useful. All safe. And yet, the thing that Apple could uniquely deliver — a seamless, deeply integrated, user-controlled and privacy-safe Apple Intelligence — is now the thing it seems most reluctant to show.There is no doubt the groundwork has been laid. And to Apple’s credit, Jason Snell notes that the company is shifting gears, scaling ambitions to something that feels more tangible. But in scaling back the risk, something else has been scaled back too: the willingness to look your audience of stakeholders, developers and users live, in the eye, and show the future for how you have carefully crafted it and how you can put it in the market immediately, or in mere weeks. Showing things as they are, or as they will be very soon. Rehearsed, yes, but never faked.Even James Dyson’s live demo of a new vacuum showed more courage. No camera cuts. No soft lighting. Just a human being, showing a thing. It might have sucked, literally or figuratively. But it didn’t. And it stuck. That’s what feels missing in Cupertino.Some have started using the term glasslighting — a coined pun blending Apple’s signature glassy aesthetics with the soft manipulations of marketing, like a gentle fog of polished perfection that leaves expectations quietly disoriented. It’s not deception. It’s damage control. But that instinct, understandable as it is, doesn’t build momentum. It builds inertia. And inertia doesn’t sell intelligence. It only delays the reckoning.Before the curtain falls, it’s hard not to revisit the uncanny polish of Apple’s speakers presence. One might start to wonder whether Apple is really late on AI — or whether it’s simply developed such a hyper-advanced internal model that its leadership team has been replaced by real-time human avatars, flawlessly animated, fed directly by the Neural Engine. Not the constrained humanity of two floating eyes behind an Apple Vision headset, but full-on flawless embodiment — if this is Apple’s augmented AI at work, it may be the only undisclosed and underpromised demo actually shipping.OS30 live demoMeanwhile, just as Apple was soft-pedaling its A.I. story with maximum visual polish, a very different tone landed from across the bay: Sam Altman and Jony Ive, sitting in a bar, talking about the future.https://medium.com/media/5cdea73d7fde0b538e038af1990afa44/hrefNo stage. No teleprompter. No uncanny valley. Just two “old friends”, with one hell of a budget, quietly sketching the next era of computing. A vision Apple once claimed effortlessly.There’s still the question of whether Apple, as many hope, can reclaim — and lock down — that leadership for itself. A healthy dose of competition, at the very least, can only help.Too big, fail too was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Content warning for discussions of sexual violence and harassment.Usually asteroids are distant features of the cosmos, occasionally crashing down to Earth or threatening the planet.Not so for former Texas solicitor general Judd Stone, who's been accused of making the distant space rocks a focal point in violent and bizarre fantasies about a coworker that he regaled to other people.Needless to say, that's wildly inappropriate and unacceptable. As 404 Media reports, Stone has now resigned from his position after a damning letter aired the allegations, which involved — apologies in advance — a phallic asteroid used as a sexual implement, like some sort of grotesque riff on a Chuck Tingle book.According to a letter sent by Texas' first assistant attorney general Brent Webster, Stone — who had at the time taken a leave of absence to defend Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in his impeachment trial — joked during a 2023 lunching with other government employees about a "disturbing sexual fantasy" that involved a "cylindrical asteroid." During the debacle, Stone described using said asteroid to sexually assault Webster while his wife and children watched.That letter, which is five pages long and full of additional allegations of sexual harassment and lies Stone allegedly told, is replete with gory details about this case that we won't regale you with.What's striking to us at Futurism, however, is the "cylindrical asteroid" of it all. Where did Texas's now-former solicitor general get such an idea, and what could it mean about who he is as a person — and, more importantly, how did it affect the people he worked with?While we don't have answers to those first two, it's quite clear from the letter how Stone's gruesome asteroid "joke" affected him and his colleagues. Along with Webster's own concerns about Stone's violent state of mind and his fear that his family could be in danger, the assistant AG added that a female employee who had been present for that stomach-turning lunch discussion had been so upset by the topic that she excused herself — only to return to japes from others at the table who said she "couldn't handle people talking about dicks."That same woman "exhibited emotional distress" when recounting the anecdote to Webster, and also told him, through tears, that she had been sexually harassed on other occasions by Stone and was concerned about the way he treated women.When confronted with the sexual harassment allegations against him, Stone admitted to them all immediately, including the bizarre asteroid fantasy. He was, as 404 notes, given the grace to quit or be fired, and chose the former.More on Texas-based misogyny: In Leaked Text, Elon Musk Harangued Woman to Have as Many of His Babies as PossibleShare This Article

There are some questionable sources underpinning Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s controversial “Make America Healthy Again” commission report. Signs point to AI tomfoolery, and the use of ChatGPT specifically, which calls into question the veracity of the White House report meant to address reasons for the decline in US life expectancy.An investigation by NOTUS found dozens of errors in the MAHA report, including broken links, wrong issue numbers, and missing or incorrect authors. Some studies were misstated to back up the report’s conclusions, or more damningly, didn’t exist at all. At least seven of the cited sources were entirely fictitious, according to NOTUS.Another investigation by The Washington Post found that at least 37 of the 522 citations appeared multiple times throughout the report. Notably, the URLs of several references included “oaicite,” a marker that OpenAI applies to responses provided by artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT, which strongly suggests its use to develop the reportGenerative AI tools have a tendency to spit out false or incorrect information, known as “hallucinations.” That would certainly explain the various errors throughout the report — chatbots have been found responsible for similar citation issues in legal filings submitted by AI experts and even the companies building the models. Nevertheless, RFK Jr has long advocated for the “AI Revolution,” and announced during a House Committee meeting in May that “we are already using these new technologies to manage health care data more efficiently and securely.”In a briefing on Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to concerns about the accuracy of the citations while evading any mention of AI tools. Leavitt described the errors as “formatting issues” and defended the health report for being “backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.” The Washington Post notes that the MAHA report file was updated on Thursday to remove some of the oaicite markers and replace some of the non-existent sources with alternative citations. In a statement given to the publication, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said “minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”See More:

Elon Musk is having a mini-meltdown on his website after The Atlantic published a damning dive into his time at the White House, leading with a mortifying description of how he was humiliated by one of his superiors.Responding Wednesday to a tweet dissing the magazine, Musk wrote, under his newly re-adopted display name "Kekius Maximus" and accompanying AI-generated profile pic of himself as a Roman centurion: "They are the past, the legacy media fading into obscurity."Illustrating how definitely not-mad he was, Musk just kept posting through it."The Atlantic is a zombie publication kept on life support by Laurene," Musk wrote, referring to its billionaire owner Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. "Steve would be very disappointed."Riffing with a user nicknamed "gork," who joked about Steve Jobs haunting Laurene from the grave, Musk posted a ghost emoji and a crying-laughing emoji.Later, he stamped his seal of approval — a bullseye emoji paired with a crying laughing emoji, take note — on a joke made by "gork" about The Atlantic's "ghosted" readership. (The magazine surpassed 1 million subscriptions last year. X's userbase has been in a steady decline since Musk's takeover in 2022, losing nearly one-fifth of its daily active users in the US.)So what has him so incensed? According to The Atlantic's reporting, Musk, once gleeful in his role of taking a chainsaw to the federal government, became an increasingly isolated figure in the West Wing during his time there, with fewer friends and an ever-growing list of powerful enemies.On one occasion, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent exploded at Musk for choosing the acting IRS commissioner behind Bessent's back."Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!" Bessent shouted, loud enough for president Donald Trump to hear, and pretty much anyone else in the halls of the West Wing.Bessent soon got his way and booted Musk's pick for IRS commissioner. The Atlantic summarized the significance of the shout-matching: "The power struggle has become a symbol of Musk's inability to build support for his approach."Musk, even by his standards, has been awfully testy with the media lately. In an interview with Bloomberg News on Tuesday, he repeatedly lashed out at the interviewer Mishal Husain for asking standard questions about his businesses, including Tesla. At one point, he called Husain a "NPC" — a video game term which means "non-playable character," in an unsubtle way of saying they're a brainless idiot that doesn't think for themselves.Musk, in an NPC-like lack of self-awareness, had something to tweet about the conversation afterwards. "The interviewer was incredibly belligerent," Musk wrote.Share This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsUnitedHealth, the largest healthcare insurer in the United States, reportedly went to extreme lengths to deny care to seniors and cut costs to pad out its profit margins.As The Guardian reports, nurse practitioners say that UnitedHealth pressed them to change patients' status to "do not resuscitate" — even after those same patients had "clearly expressed a desire that all available treatments be used to keep them alive.""They’re pretending to make it look like it’s in the best interest of the member," one practitioner told the British newspaper. "But it’s really not."UnitedHealth also allegedly tried to prevent patients from transferring hospitals, risking their health further.While the company has denied the allegations, the reporting paints an alarming picture of the state of healthcare in the United States, where insurance is treated much the same way as a tech company trying to maximize profits while cutting costs.UnitedHealth already has a lengthy track record of finding creative ways to deny people healthcare coverage, including deploying an AI that automatically denied and overrode claims for elderly patients.The company has attracted particular controversy after its CEO was murdered in December, in an apparent act of lethal anger at the injustices of a notoriously greedy and deficient system.The company has had a miserable year since then. Its shares have dropped almost 40 percent year to date, following a flood of damning reports.Following The Guardian's reporting today, UnitedHealth's stock price slid by more than six percent.The company has also been the subject of criminal and civil investigations into its practices, including medicare fraud, as Reuters reports.Last week, UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty abruptly resigned, citing "personal reasons" and drawing even more scrutiny over the company's operations.Whether the departure had anything to do with a continuous flood of bad press remains unclear. According to a whistleblower lawsuit cited by the Guardian, staffers at nursing homes were directly incentivized to leak sensitive resident records so that UnitedHealth sales teams could solicit their plans to them and their families.A patient who showed key symptoms of having suffered a stroke, for instance, was denied care by a remote and underqualified UnitedHealth employee, who suggested she was suffering from a less serious condition, according to UnitedHealth logs and records obtained by the newspaper. The delays caused by healthcare practitioners waiting to hear back from the insurer led to the patient's health deteriorating further.Per The Guardian, there have been countless other instances like it.In short, UnitedHealth seems far interested in cutting costs than ensuring people in senior homes stay healthy."How many of those people were further harmed because they never received the care that they needed?" former UnitedHealth nurse practitioner turned whistleblower Maxwell Ollivant told The Guardian. "When you just look at the percentage reductions in hospitalizations, it doesn’t say anything about patient outcomes."Share This Article

Former Bungie developers are speaking out about the problems Bungie is facing internally, and all signs point to leadership and structural issues following Sony's acquisition of Bungie, and a human resources department, or at least, a single member of that department, covering up internal issues of harassment for personal gain on their exit from the studio. Internal issues at Bungie, unfortunately, aren't anything new, but this latest slew of details comes from Destin Legarie, who published a video on his YouTube channel after speaking to former Bungie developers. Many of the comments are quite damning, and paint the picture of a Bungie that is not the same studio it once was when every first-person shooter fan on the planet couldn't wait to see what they would do next. No direct names were mentioned in the video as to who the former Bungie employees were calling out, everything was kept in more general terms with just the word 'leadership' being used to represent Bungie's top brass. All of this came about after Bungie was caught using artwork and/or art assets from another artist without their permission or crediting them for the fourth time in recent years. "Everything happening to Bungie is because of greed," a former Bungie developer told Legarie. Another quote went further, saying "Bungie's problem stem from a lack of player empathy, disconnected leadership, and a corporate-first culture." Another quote reads "Internal language shifted from 'studio,' 'games,' and 'players,' to 'company,' 'product,' and 'customers,' during the Sony acquisition," highlighting how the studio has seemingly shifted its viewpoint that making good games for players to enjoy is no longer the ultimate goal, and is instead making games that make as much money as possible. There have been negative stories about internal problems at the Destiny 2 developer for the past couple of years, and morale certainly can't be helped by the layoffs the studio has suffered. All of leadership might be part of the problem, which is what seems to be the speculation in this video, but as Legarie points out, the buck has to stop somewhere, and in the case of Bungie, that's with chief executive officer Pete Parsons. It's extremely unfortunate that the studio behind Halo and Destiny, two of the biggest shooter franchises in video game history, is facing all of this, and could see its end due to its allegedly greedy and inconsiderate leaders who have lost the plot, and the fact that if not for the studio making games that people wanted to play in the first place, none of them would be where they are. Deal of the Day

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: While using website data to build a Google Search topped with artificial intelligence-generated answers, an Alphabet executive acknowledged in an internal document that there was an alternative way to do things: They could ask web publishers for permission, or let them directly opt out of being included. But giving publishers a choice would make training AI models in search too complicated, the company concludes in the document, which was unearthed in the company's search antitrust trial. It said Google had a "hard red line" and would require all publishers who wanted their content to show up in the search page to also be used to feed AI features. Instead of giving options, Google decided to "silently update," with "no public announcement" about how they were using publishers' data, according to the document, written by Chetna Bindra, a product management executive at Google Search. "Do what we say, say what we do, but carefully." "It's a little bit damning," said Paul Bannister, the chief strategy officer at Raptive, which represents online creators. "It pretty clearly shows that they knew there was a range of options and they pretty much chose the most conservative, most protective of them -- the option that didn't give publishers any controls at all." For its part, Google said in a statement to Bloomberg: "Publishers have always controlled how their content is made available to Google as AI models have been built into Search for many years, helping surface relevant sites and driving traffic to them. This document is an early-stage list of options in an evolving space and doesn't reflect feasibility or actual decisions." They added that Google continually updates its product documentation for search online. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The bright, glitched-out, typography-forward look of Bungie's upcoming extraction shooter Marathon is one of its defining features. As it turns out, it's also partially plagiarized, according to posts shared on the official Marathon X account. The announcement comes after artist Fern Hook, who goes by @4nt1r34l on X, initially accused Bungie of using in-game textures that looked similar to her original artwork on May 15. "Bungie is of course not obligated to hire me when making a game that draws overwhelmingly from the same design language I have refined for the last decade," Hook wrote on X, "but clearly my work was good enough to pillage for ideas and plaster all over their game without pay or attribution."  the Marathon alpha released recently and its environments are covered with assets lifted from poster designs i made in 2017.@Bungie @josephacross pic.twitter.com/0Csbo48Jgb— N² (@4nt1r34l) May 15, 2025 Hook's posts are fairly damning, identifying obvious areas in Marathon's alpha map that feature only lightly altered versions of her original work. She became aware of the issue when the alpha originally launched in April 2025, according to The Washington Post, but kept quiet until now because she was advised to seek legal action. Hook ultimately decided to post about the issue because she doesn't "have enough time or money to fly out to the US to pursue an unwinnable court case against Sony." Bungie's statement claims that "a former Bungie artist" included Hook's art in a texture sheet without the rest of the art team's knowledge. The company is "conducting a thorough review of [its] in-game assets" and has also reached out to Hook to "discuss the issue" further. As Eurogamer notes, this isn't the first time Bungie has been accused of lifting the work of other artists. The developer was accused of doing the same thing multiple times during the development of Destiny 2 and its various expansions. Since the game is still in development, it's not clear how or if Bungie will change Marathon to address Hook's complaint, but the developer has until September 23 to do it. That's when Marathon is supposed to launch on PlayStation 5, PC and Xbox Series X/S.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/bungie-admits-its-marathon-alpha-included-stolen-artwork-210006323.html?src=rss

Not Back Yet Fortnite developer Epic accuses Apple of glockblocking its attempts to shoot the game back onto US iOS, then probably hit the griddy Epic says Fortnite on iOS will now "be offline worldwide until Apple unblocks it", as the corporate battle royale continues. Image credit: Epic News by Mark Warren Senior Staff Writer Published on May 16, 2025 Fortnite developer Epic recently suggested the game might become available on iOS in the US for the first time since 2020 soon, but it's now looking like that won't be happening. Why? Well, Epic's accusing Apple, its long-time sparring partner in an ongoing legal battle, of storeblocking. As we reported last week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney had launched a fresh effort to get Apple to agree to re-admit the game to its App Store following a judge issuing a pretty damning verdict against the fruit company in the latest legal skirmish between the two. This is all about payment options and the cut Apple takes of them via its store, with Epic having decided five years ago that this was something it wouldn't stand for. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has claimed it originally submitted Fortnite for Apple to review on May 9 and then resubmitted a new version on May 14 in order to include a fresh update to the game. Now, the publisher's put out the following statement via the official Fortnite Twitter account: "Apple has blocked our Fortnite submission so we cannot release to the US App Store or to the Epic Games Store for iOS in the European Union. Now, sadly, Fortnite on iOS will be offline worldwide until Apple unblocks it." To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Sweeney himself has also been tweeting, declaring in one post: "Apple’s App Review team should be free to review all submitted apps promptly and accept or reject according to the plain language of their guidelines. App Review shouldn’t be weaponized by senior management as a tool to delay or obstruct competition, due process, or free speech." This all comes after that aforementioned court verdict, which saw Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers rule that Apple was "in wilful violation" of previous court injunction that it had to allow purchases made for iOS games and apps through outside web links. It did, but then instituted a 27% commission on such purchases. "Apple’s response to the Injunction strains credulity," the court's verdict read, "After two sets of evidentiary hearings, the truth emerged Apple, despite knowing its obligations thereunder, thwarted the injunction’s goals, and continued its anticompetitive conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream." We'll just have to see how things go from here, as it looks like this fight is nowhere near a resolution that would see one victor left default dancing, or more realistically a bunch of suits going back to whatever else it is they do with their time.