The vibe of Apple’s 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference felt like a spouse proudly listing all the items on a honey-do-list they’d finally completed. Rather than showcase something exciting and new, Apple launched the keynote detailing fixes to last year’s “Liquid Glass” design; an overhaul of its awful search function; improvements to its Playground feature, and so on.

Perhaps most importantly, two years after promising but failing to launch a smarter Siri, Apple finally showed off an overhauled version of its AI-powered voice assistant.

But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. It was how it chose to show some things off. Many of the Apple Intelligence demoes featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time, while another camera showed off the phone’s response.

These weren’t live on-stage, anything-could-go wrong demos; they were pre-taped. But they looked far more like proof of working features than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024, when the company first unveiled Apple Intelligence and a new Siri to the world through slickly produced videos that turned out to be more promise than product.

This demonstration style was noticed, with comments on X on Monday comparing today’s keynote to those 2024 so-called “vaporware” demos.

Apple said at that time that the features would be available soon to those who upgraded to the iPhone 15 Pro and newer devices with M1 chips or better. But by March 2025, Apple admitted to Daring Fireball that rolling out the features shown via production video was “going to take us longer than we thought to deliver.” Not long after, the Cupertino company faced a lawsuit in federal court alleging false advertising over the features shown at that 2024 event — a case that carried real reputational risk for a company whose brand has long been built on the promise that its products just work.