What to expect from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next week

The redesigned UI should be released simultaneously for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The Mac last received a significant facelift back in 2020 with macOS 11 Big Sur, though this was overshadowed at the time by the much more significant shift from Intel’s chips to Apple Silicon. The current iOS and iPadOS design has its roots in 2013’s iOS 7, though with over a decade’s worth of gradual evolution on top.

An OS by any other name

With the new design will apparently come a new naming scheme, shifting from the current version numbers to new numbers based on the year. So we allegedly won’t be seeing iOS 19, macOS 16, watchOS 12, or visionOS 3—instead, we’ll get iOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, and visionOS 26.

The new numbers might be a little confusing at first, especially for the period of overlap where Apple is actively supporting (say) macOS 14, macOS 15, and macOS 26. But in the long run, the consistency should make it easier to tell roughly how old your software is and will also make it easier to tell whether your device is running current software without having to remember the number for each of your individual devices.

It also unifies the approach to any new operating system variants Apple might announce—tvOS starts at version 9 and iPadOS starts at version 13, for example, because they were linked to the then-current iOS release. But visionOS and watchOS both started over from 1.0, and the macOS version is based on the year that Apple arbitrarily decided to end the 20-year-old “macOS X” branding and jump up to 11.

Note that those numbers will use the upcoming year rather than the current year—iOS 26 will be Apple’s latest and greatest OS for about three months in 2025, assuming the normal September-ish launch, but it will be the main OS for nine months in 2026. Apple usually also waits until later in the fall or winter to start forcing people onto the new OS, issuing at least a handful of security-only updates for the outgoing OS for people who don’t want to be guinea pigs for a possibly buggy new release.