The WWDC features I’ll actually use

The WWDC keynote wrapped a couple of hours ago. If you want the full firehose, neowin and 9to5mac have the rundown. What I do is wait for the grid of fifty Apple Intelligence features to stop scrolling, then ask one question: which of these will I actually touch next week?

This year, two will.

Safari finally watches pages for you

Apple just shipped the feature I’ve hacked around for years.

The one that made me sit up is Notify Me in Safari. You point it at a page, tell it what to watch for, and Safari pings you when the page changes. Apple’s demo was a summer-camp registration page that wasn’t open yet: you tap Notify Me, type “when registration opens”, and you get told the moment it does.

I’ve been doing exactly this for years with VisualPing. Watch a page, get an email when something changes. It works, but it’s clunky and email-heavy: you live in a separate dashboard, and every update lands as one more thing in the inbox.

Notify Me is native, on-device, and lives in the browser I already use. For casual “tell me when this updates” cases, it replaces VisualPing outright. I’ll keep VisualPing for the heavy jobs — watching one region of a page, history, schedules — but the everyday case just moved into Safari, where it should have been all along.

Passwords that fix themselves

The second one is quieter and I like it more for that. Automatic password upgrades: the Passwords app will take weak or reused logins and quietly strengthen them, and move eligible accounts to passkeys, without you running a manual audit.

That’s the right shape for a security feature. The ones that work are the ones you don’t have to remember to use. I’ve done the manual pass through a password manager’s audit screen. It’s tedious, so it doesn’t happen often enough. Handing that to the system is exactly the kind of boring, useful thing I want from an update.

The catch

Here’s where I have to be honest. A good chunk of the keynote’s best Apple Intelligence features — the dedicated Siri app, the expanded Visual Intelligence, the writing tools, Siri in the Camera — aren’t coming to the iPhone in the EU with iOS 27. That’s a whole story of its own, and it’s the next post.

Fifty features. Two I’ll switch on the day they land. For a keynote, that’s a good hit rate.