From Switzerland to San Francisco ⇥ 9to5mac.com

Me, a month ago:

What’s the over/under on iOS 9 and OS X getting San Fransisco as a universal system font?

(The one thorn in this theory is OS X: it just changed to Helvetica Neue. Would Apple do two system font changes in two years? I don’t necessarily think they’d be dissuaded from it; I suspect the main reason OS X doesn’t use San Fransisco today is because it wasn’t finished in time, or they wanted to debut it on the Watch.)

Mark Gurman, with a brand new rumour:

Apple is currently planning to use the new system font developed for the Apple Watch to refresh the looks of iPads, iPhones, and Macs running iOS 9 “Monarch” and OS X 10.11 “Gala,” according to sources with knowledge of the preparations. Current plans call for the Apple-designed San Francisco font to replace Helvetica Neue, which came to iOS 7 in 2013 and OS X Yosemite just last year, beginning with a June debut at WWDC.

Apple’s regulatory filings for the Watch are partially typeset in San Francisco. The keycaps of the 12-inch MacBook are set in San Francisco. Publicity and marketing materials are still, by and large, set in Myriad Pro (typically the lighter-weight variant).¹ It’s not quite the One True Font I thought it might be from the outset, but it’s getting there.

When it was released with WatchKit, I tried San Francisco as my OS X system font and found it even harder to read than Helvetica Neue. I suspect this is because the version I used was optimized for the Watch; I have hope that the version used on OS X will be optimized for that system, including for non-Retina displays. I’m very excited to see how this works.

I suspect San Francisco will be fine on the iPhone because it has a similar-density display as the Watch, with similar physical text sizes.