Will Apple get on the bus?
January 11, 2026 at 9:51 PM by Dr. Drang
Do you remember the Acid Tests? Not Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests; even I’m not old enough to remember those; I only read about them in Tom Wolfe’s book. No, I’m talking about the tests that checked browsers on how well they complied with web standards. Back in the mid-aughts, Apple talked a lot about how well Safari and WebKit did on these tests, in contrast to Internet Explorer. I was reminded of this while listening to the most recent episode of Connected.
In the show, Myke Hurley’s risky pick was that by the end of 2026, Apple will not have shipped Apple Intelligence features equivalent to those shown at 2024’s WWDC. You can use Overcast’s convenient web interface to listen to his pick. The part of his pick that reminded me of the Acid Tests was this, where he explains why he thinks they’ll be delayed furthur:
I think they will not commit to App Intents as the way that [actions across apps] works, and that instead they will move to MCP… They need to go into an open standard that everybody else could potentially use, that there is more incentivization to use, and use that as a way to make this work.
You may think that shifting from a home-grown system to an open standard is not Apple’s way, and it certainly hasn’t been over the past 15 years or so—quite the opposite, in fact. But in the early days of OS X, when Apple was struggling to re-establish the Mac, one of the groups it wanted to appeal to was the growing number of web developers who wanted to work in a standard Unix environment, but one with a friendly face. Remember when System Preferences had a graphical UI for controlling your local Apache webserver? Remember when /usr/bin was filled with interpreters before you installed Xcode? Those were part of the same mindset that touted Safari’s Acid Test score.
This doesn’t mean that Myke is right and that Apple will embrace a standard it didn’t help create. It just means that Apple used to see the value in using standards to catch up when it’s behind. The question is whether it will remember that after so many years of success.