John Ternus is poised to put design back at Apple’s core when he becomes CEO. After Jony Ive’s departure, finance and operations took the lead. Ternus has been working closely with the industrial design team and plans to be the public face of upcoming hardware—foldable iPhone included. Expect Apple to once again push products as much on beauty as on specs. On mobile messaging, WhatsApp for iOS is testing smooth fade-and-scale animations for sent and received bubbles. A new toggle under Settings → Chats → Animations lets beta users switch the effect on or off, matching Android’s style. And in AI funding news, Odyssey—a startup building real-world “world models” via camera-equipped people—closed a $310 million Series B at a $1.45 billion valuation. Backers include Amazon (making AWS its preferred cloud platform), AMD Ventures and GV. The role of designers and developers is shifting. AI makes narrow expertise less rarefied, so demand is moving toward “polymath architects” who juggle disciplines and guide AI tools end to end. Yet non-technical “vibe architects” still struggle: studies show they build agentic systems by trial and error, then face opaque results, decaying models and flawed mental maps of how they work. One solution gaining traction is SKILL.md—versioned instruction files that tell AI agents how to code according to team standards (CSS Grid, design tokens, accessibility checks), ensuring consistency across projects. Beyond these deep dives, a few quick hits matter too. Several AI-powered web tools now let you generate images, videos and walkthrough guides without a developer. Payments UX research highlights that tiny moments—confirmation screens, loading spinners, irreversible-action warnings—drive trust more than big features. And on the branding front, Regular Practice gave Frood a bold, colorful identity to make healthy meal blends feel fun rather than preachy. Meanwhile, Tátil Design rebranded Vanto Group around a “Third Territory” concept, using seismic-movement visuals and a fluid V-shaped logo to convey a more human, conversational consulting approach.