The iOS Weekly Brief – Issue #66
Apple hikes device prices, local AI with Foundation Models, Swift 6.4 concurrency, item-based alerts, toolbar control, building a macro from scratch, and Swift Package Index joins Apple
We live in a world where AI is making everything go a little crazy, and the strange part is how it now touches things that seem completely unrelated to it. On top of our Netflix and Spotify subscriptions, most of us now pay for a few AI tools too, and now even the price of devices that have nothing to do with AI is going up. This week Apple raised prices across a bunch of its products, even MacBook Neo 😱. Its whole appeal was the price. It was such a great, affordable way to step into the Apple world, and I could not stop recommending it. Now it starts at $699 instead of $599, and that magic feels a little less obvious... Apple blames the memory chip shortage, with AI data centers eating up supply, so this is probably just the start.
New betas also dropped this week, so if you are testing, keep a close eye on crashes showing up on iOS 27. The public beta is coming soon, and once it lands there will be a lot more users on it. Sure, you can say people chose to install an unstable beta and that is on them, but it is also on us. Do not forget your own side of this, make sure your app behaves well even on the betas, because those crash reports land on you too.
What’s New
Design kits for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27 are here
Apple already shipped updated design kits for Figma and Sketch for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27, with refreshed Liquid Glass. I always lean on standard UI components because I trust Apple's designers, and even when we customize, building on top of their defaults makes every new iOS release so much easier to survive.
Releases
Must Read
Swift 6.4: What’s New in Concurrency
Some of these Swift 6.4 changes we already touched on in the last issue, but Antoine packed all of them into one clean overview, and that's exactly why it's so useful.
Getting started with Apple’s Foundation Models framework
If you’ve wanted to try Apple’s Foundation Models framework but never found a starting point, this is the place to begin. I believe local models will only get more popular over time, since they just work, cost no tokens, and need no extra connections, which makes them great for the kind of trivial AI tasks most apps have, and Apple’s approach makes this easy to adopt.
UIKit for scroll performance!? Real engineers use Metal
Jacob Bartlett clones Apple Photos and chases a smooth 120fps, and the lesson is that even UIKit, which is usually great for scrolling, starts to break once you push thousands of visible cells on screen at the most extreme zoom levels. His fix is to keep UIKit for the scroll physics but give all the real rendering to the GPU with Metal. In all my years I have never had to build something like this, but it is great to know the option is there when you hit that wall
Quick Read
SwiftUI’s new item based presentations in iOS 27
@State private var invoiceToDelete: Invoice?
// Dialog appears when the item is non-nil, and resets to nil on dismiss
.confirmationDialog("Delete Invoice", item: $invoiceToDelete) { invoice in
// actions
}Taking control of toolbar items in SwiftUI
.toolbar {
// .topBarPinnedTrailing pins the item to the top trailing edge
ToolbarItemGroup(placement: .topBarPinnedTrailing) {
Button("Action 1") { }
}
// ToolbarOverflowMenu hides these items in an overflow menu by default
ToolbarOverflowMenu {
Button("Action 2") { }
Button("Action 3") { }
}
}
// toolbarMinimizeBehavior hides the bar when you scroll down
.toolbarMinimizeBehavior(.onScrollDown, for: .navigationBar)Video
Swift Macros Demystified: Build a Freestanding Expression Macro
Stuart builds a Swift macro completely from scratch, starting with the boilerplate Xcode gives you and explaining every piece, until you end up with a #URL macro that validates the string at compile time and even shows clear error messages instead of the cryptic ones. I really value this kind of content because it goes deep into how things actually work, not just what tool exists.
Toolbox
Swift Package Index has officially joined Apple to build a full package registry for the community, and it's amazing to see such a long-running independent project rewarded this way. And it explains why Dave Verwer stepped back from iOS Dev Weekly to go all-in on it.
iOS Job Market (USA)
36 new iOS positions this week (-25% vs last week · +0% vs last month)
Senior / Mid / Junior — 14% / 81% / 6%
Most wanted skills: SwiftUI 47% · UIKit 22% · MVVM 19% · Combine 11%
This week’s picks:
iOS Developer at Aircraft Performance Group (Argyle, TX) — Swift + SwiftUI + Objective-C with automated testing and App Store release management, notable for an explicitly AI-native dev workflow (Windsurf as a primary tool); APG builds runway analysis and flight planning software used by commercial and corporate airlines worldwide → Apply
iOS Engineer II at Expedia Group (Chicago, IL) — Swift + SwiftUI with AI/ML feature integration in a large-scale distributed travel platform (Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo); preferred quals call out Xcode expertise, CI/CD for mobile, and on-device AI toolkits. $111K–$155.5K → Apply
iOS Software Engineer 2 at Garmin (Chandler, AZ) — Swift + SwiftUI + UIKit for commercial aviation products; role spans new feature design through peer code review, with a path to tech lead on derivative projects → Apply
Weekly Poll
📊 Last Week’s Poll Results
Does your app support landscape mode?
Top Answer: Yes, fully adaptive
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