Apple is just about to come into season. With the start of WWDC and the announcements expected over the next few days, our attention will turn to the new crop of Macs, which existing models will be supported by macOS 14 later in the year, and what that promises.

For developers and those of us who study macOS internals it marks the start of over three months of beta-testing, with at least one Mac committed to trying out the latest iteration of the new macOS, discovering and fixing the issues it poses. If anyone had ideas about sneaking off with family to enjoy a quick holiday together, then it just isn’t the right time of year in this orchard.

This year Apple has the challenge of putting more clear water between Apple silicon Macs and late Intel models. The last couple of years have seen a quiet ARM-based revolution, with its novel low energy and cool hardware that’s superior at handling system and background tasks on its E cores. While these new models have some special features, for many users their differences are subtle. They come down to details such as Thunderbolt support, where Apple’s chips give each port its own bus, compared with one bus shared between two ports on Intel Macs, and the availability of Touch ID keyboards for desktop models.

There’s a delicate balance to be struck, between offending existing users by locking their Intel Macs out, and luring them to upgrade to something head and shoulders better. While much attention has been focussed on the replacement for the Mac Pro, flagships that few need or could afford don’t bring the mass sales that Apple needs. Watch more carefully where Pro and Max chips are going to sell by the million.

We’re also likely to see increasing divergence in macOS. Until now, support for the two architectures has been fairly evenly balanced. System updates are already proving far quicker on Apple silicon, but in day-to-day running the most striking difference is in window management, most noticeably in handling of Help and other ancillary windows. This presumably results from differences in WindowServer and its use of Unified memory in M-series chips.

Apple has so far remained remarkably silent about AI, particularly the use of Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT and their role in the Mac’s future. Perhaps it understands their limitations better than those who have rushed to invest in them, their weakness in being essentially knowledge-free, and their gaping holes in privacy. How long the press and public will remain so enchanted by these convincing liars is anyone’s guess, but I’m hoping that their fate will be as damning as those of the politicians they seem to be emulating.

Instead, Apple continues to emphasise the usefulness of more proven and conventional Machine Learning (ML). Apple silicon chips contain dedicated hardware including a Neural Engine, and macOS now has extensive support for on-device ML, so preserving privacy. This is demonstrated in recent advances in image recognition tasks, and should extend into other domains. Of course there’s nothing to stop you from consulting your favourite LLM, but that isn’t likely to be integrated into macOS, and there’s no reason that it should be.

There’s also more to do for the human interface, with the maturing of Stage Manager. Like Dark Mode before it, Stage Manager has attracted plenty of fans, and with further improvements could become an acquired taste for even more. I find it exciting that, so many years after the Mac’s classic human interface, Apple is still exploring new ways to interact with computers.

Thankfully, the dire predictions that some had forecast for System Settings have proved false, but it still has plenty of shortcomings to be addressed in macOS 14. It’s also a good example of the growing conflict between Apple’s more traditional AppKit interface toolset and those slowly being added in SwiftUI. Sooner or later Apple is going to have to resolve those and re-unify the macOS interface.

I’m sure we all wish success to those Apple staff who’ll be telling us about the fruits of their labours, during the one week of the year when Apple does the talking.