Google I/O 2026 had nothing to say and said it badly ahead of Apple's WWDC

frizlab

I honestly did not watch the thing, but this headline got a laugh out of me (:

pingou

They announced Gemini 3.5, an AI centered search approach, Gemini Spark, Gemini Omni, smart glasses, and more, and somehow that accounts to "having nothing to say"? How high is the bar? Sure, most of this stuff is just improvement on existing things, and it's true that if you are not interested in AI then there wasn't something for you there, but are we expecting them to announce a revolutionary product each I/O conference?

jvolkman

> There's a supercut of the event on YouTube which solely shows every mention of the term "AI." It's about a minute long and by the end you want to cover your ears to shut out this sound and fury. Amateurs. Apple would never allow something like this to happen. Oh, wait: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-CPfqZgWTk

orthodonticjake

I'm trapped in Apple's ecosystem and I've been incredibly envious of the things Google is doing. So many neat features I'd love to use, but I'm still not quite ready to switch. The crazy thing to me is that so many of the things Google is doing would seem to be a slam-dunk obvious thing for Apple to lead on. For example, the context aware cursor. What an amazing idea -- a computer that understands your intents intuitively, at such a basic level. That's the core idea that fueled Apple decades ago, but apparently not so much anymore.

ChrisArchitect

Related: Google I/O https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196020 Gemini Omni https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196609 Google changes its search box https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197370 Gemini 3.5 Flash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196570

jauntywundrkind

They're finally shipping the sl2619 embedded AI board, which is cool. https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/05/20/coralboard-features-... I did find that this was a pretty big struggle of a presentation. It's hard for me to get excited about a lot of AI tech stuff. It's unclear what it does and I'd rather do it in an open source harness where there is control and observability, not some far off product I don't own running in some else's data center.

pjmlp

Actually it had plenty to say about Android development and I no longer follow it as I used to. Views got deprecated, GC improvements, R8 improvements, AI Studio can generate apps and integrate with Android Studio (back to my agents and IDEs remark from a few days ago), OpenXR improvements including Godot and Unreal, new CLI tooling for AI integrations, Android apps can expose AI tools, some OpenJDK related improvements.... And I am not even following the actual talks.

notnullorvoid

Wow that was way more Apple simping than I expected. It'll be funny when WWDC happens and Apple has even less of substance to say.