At first glance, macOS 14 Sonoma might look like a little nip and tuck, a list of minor tweaks, and hardly justification for a whole new major release. For some, that may be no bad thing, as it gives Apple’s engineers more breathing space to address more of the backlog of bugs and other problems that built during the headlong rush from High Sierra to Apple silicon, what’s seen by many as the technical debt incurred by the new platform.

If Sonoma leaves you feeling a little underwhelmed, then a breeze through some of the sessions from later in WWDC should be more impressive. Features selected for marketing in the opening Keynote and State of the Union presentations might be as deep as many users will get, but what you’ll see in apps and inside Sonoma will change much more. Yesterday I looked at how macOS security is changing more than it has for many years, and that’s only one example.

Another area of particular interest to me is virtualisation on Apple silicon. Although Apple hasn’t announced any solution to its greatest shortcoming, its lack of support for Apple ID thus App Store apps, two important new features will greatly improve apps like Viable: virtual display autosizing, and VM state restoration.

Prior to Sonoma, getting the right display in a VM has been rather hit or miss. Although shown in a resizeable window, virtual display resolutions have relied on HiDPI support and picking the best size for their crispness. Sonoma adds a simple option that should fill the VM window with the crispest possible image, even when its dimensions don’t match what’s shown in the Display settings of the VM. This solution looks ideal.

State restoration is a little more complex. When running in Monterey and Ventura, the only safe way to quit a VM is to shut it down, and whenever you want to open an existing VM, you have to start it up and log in afresh. In Sonoma, the VM state can be saved and restored, allowing you to resume the VM in a previous state of your choice. You can thus set up your VM exactly as you want it, and keep returning to that state whenever you wish.

Elsewhere there are many seemingly small changes documented that will make a big difference to Apple’s apps and many third-party products. These include improved separation between iCloud Drive and CloudKit, enabling you to disable iCloud Drive while retaining normal function in apps that rely on CloudKit to sync data. Although of greatest benefit in enterprise, where iCloud Drive is usually disabled, this should help anyone using apps that sync their data using CloudKit.

Apple’s overarching themes, apart from its Vision Pro and spatial computing of the future, were privacy and inclusion through accessibility. It’s easy to become blasé about privacy, and to assume that vendors’ claims are but skin deep. When it comes down to it, don’t all major vendors want as much of your personal data as they can get? Look inside most of what was announced and detailed at WWDC, though, and there’s so much engineering effort being put into privacy that Apple does seem true to its word.

Protections for privacy are no longer bolted on as an afterthought, but designed in from the start. Instead of joining the rush to use popular AI like large language models (LLM) off-device, Apple is pushing ahead with what can be accomplished on-device. A good example of this is its improved word completion and spell checking, which relies on on-device learning so it performs better for the individual and doesn’t phone home with details of the words you’re using. I also suspect that for most of us it will prove far more useful than those overconfident liars of LLM.

Apple’s biggest weakness remains in uniformity of protection across its services, in particular the App Stores, where it needs to be far more attentive to curating trustworthy products rather than generating revenue.

Accessibility is another area for which others make great claims that are seldom reflected in their products. Apple’s track record is good, and it continues to tackle new areas, including sensitivity to flashing lights, long-term preservation of eyesight, and mental health. But the potential jewel is its new headset; while that won’t be cheap, I can see many for whom its gestural controls could be transformative.

While I’m sorry for those who were expecting Apple to announce its first M3 chips, I’m not surprised in the slightest at their absence. Developing such complex chips takes time. Unlike with software, you can’t just throw a bunch of engineers at the task and expect magic to happen in a few months. At least this all lies within Apple’s control, as it’s no longer reliant on the scraps under Intel’s table. What we get now, as shown in Apple’s first headset, is Apple’s vision.