Updates include a new souped-up Siri, lots of iOS enhancements, and some inkling on how an AI partnership with Google has come to power Apple’s products.
Apple CEO Tim Cook.Photograph: David Paul Morris/Getty Images
Apple held its annual Worldwide Developer Conference today. WWDC is the event in which the company uses its keynote address to announce lots of changes coming to its software platforms on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac.
Apple has been chasing the artificial intelligence boom for the past few years, though many of its promised AI features across its platforms have been delayed or have not quite panned out into a full-fledged suite. To rectify that, Apple entered into a partnership with Google to use its Gemini AI as a backbone to power Apple Intelligence. After years of wondering how that partnership might manifest, Apple revealed that vision today.
Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi said that Apple’s keynote presentation would focus on three main things: platform improvements, updates in trust and safety, and a “big leap forward” in Apple Intelligence and Siri. The big focus was on changes to Apple’s Siri virtual assistant that make it feel more like a modern AI chatbot. The rest of the AI features have been implemented broadly across Apple’s ecosystem, in iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, WatchOS, and VisionOS.
This was also the final WWDC for outgoing CEO Tim Cook, who signed off on a personal note, saying, “I still believe the best is yet ahead.” Apple announced in April that Cook will become executive chairman starting September 1, with John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, stepping in as CEO.
Here's everything Apple announced today at WWDC 2026.
AI Architecture
Courtesy of Apple
When the slate of new software updates arrive in the fall, Apple’s AI models will be integrated with Google’s Gemini to enhance the conversational ability and contextual awareness of its apps. That means all of Apple’s apps that use AI—which goes beyond the Siri voice assistant to include Mail, Messages, Safari, and Photos, among others—will have a better understanding of what you’re trying to do and will be better at delivering results that feel meaningful.
These AI-powered features will be accessible in some way on all of Apple’s devices. The AI features will also be able to peer into what’s stored on your devices, what’s on the screen, and what the camera is seeing to answer questions, generate text and images, and perform the basic tasks you ask it to do.
Apple, which has long emphasized its privacy bonafides, says much of this computational labor happens on the actual device (so it will likely be limited to only the highest-performing recent hardware) and when it has to send a request to the cloud, it does so securely.
Apple’s new AI features will not yet be coming to the European Union or China; the company says it first needs to sort out some regulatory hurdles to keep its privacy features intact.
Siri AI
The new dedicated app for Siri lets you revisit old chats, just like OpenAI’s app for ChatGPT and other competing chatbot apps.
Courtesy of AppleApple has revamped Siri, with a new dedicated app on iOS called Siri AI. (The AI means Apple Intelligence here, of course.) It’s also available on the Mac through Spotlight. Apple showed a screenshot of Siri AI working on an Apple Watch but did not provide a demo.
Apple says Siri is a “profoundly more capable assistant.” And by that, Apple means that it can do lots of the same things AI chatbots like Gemini and Claude have been able to do for a while. Siri AI is more chatty, more capable of grasping the context of the questions you ask, and able to integrate with other services.
On the iPhone, Apple is putting Siri front and center, plopped right in Apple’s so-called Dynamic Island (aka the camera notch) at the top of the screen. When you trigger it via the button on the side of the iPhone, the Dynamic Island bubbles up into an animated blob showing that Siri is listening.
Apple says Siri has “broad world knowledge” that pulls information from online sources as well as your personal data stored on your phone. It has more contextual smarts, meaning you can ask it follow-up questions without having to reference your original question. It can access a variety of apps to draft messages, gather photos or videos into share folders, tell you how to get tickets to an event, and pin reminders on your calendar. It also has a writing assistant, and it can help you split a check at the end of a group dinner.
Siri also has a much more expressive voice. The demo Apple showed on Monday sounds even more like Scarlett Johansson from Her than ever before. There are several new options for voices you can choose from.
Siri is also in the iPhone’s Camera app, where it’s able to use computer vision to answer questions. Point the camera at something in the real world and Siri can tell you what it is, give you web results related to it, and so on. This works basically like Lens, a feature Google has had in Pixel phones for years.
WIRED’s Reece Rogers has a deeper dive into all the big features coming to the new Siri.
iOS 27
All of the devices will get refreshed interfaces.
Courtesy of AppleApple’s upcoming operating system will be available on any of its phones from the iPhone 11 on. This is a big deal for device longevity; last year’s iOS also offered support all the way back to iPhone 11, so this year, Apple is not depriving any currently supported iPhones of software updates.
Most of the iOS attention was given to Siri. A few standout feature updates were announced. There’s a new Perimenopause dashboard in Apple Health. Photo albums can now be shared with Android and Windows users, who can join and add their own photos from their heathen devices. Photos there are also stored in full resolution, no matter who they come from.
Apple says iOS has also just been considerably sped up. Apps load a claimed 30 percent faster, which Apple says is accomplished by preloading key app data before you load it. Photos pop up 70 percent quicker than before. AirDrop transfers get an 80 percent speed boost too, according to Apple.
Mac OS
Apple’s next Mac operating system will be called Golden Gate, but other than the many Siri AI enhancements, the company shared few other specifics about what changes are coming. It is the first Apple OS to only work on MacBooks using Apple’s custom silicon chips. As outlined at last year’s WWDC, Intel Macs will not be able to update to iOS 27.
Siri AI will be integrated on Mac as well, used in the Spotlight service where you can ask it questions and have it reference images and information directly on screen.
Vision Pro
There were a couple of small updates to Apple’s fledgling Vision Pro headset. Siri Pro can be enabled in Vision OS. When you invoke Siri, it appears as a floating, glowing orb. Fun! It can see what you’re looking at—either a screen or a physical object—and answer questions about it.
Another update is that you can also now turn your pictures into panoramas in the headset.
Safari
More interface updates.
Courtesy of AppleSafari has gotten some boosts from Apple’s AI additions. Safari now organizes your tabs into topical folders. The AI engine automatically looks at what’s in each tab, then groups together open tabs about the same subject and plops them into a folder. If you’re shoe shopping and have too many tabs open to find the best deals on shoes, Safari will lump those all into one “shoes” folder.
The browser also gets a new feature called Describe an Extension, which sounds neat. You will be able to create a custom browser extension just by telling the AI what you want the extension to do.
Home
On Monday, Apple gave some love to its long-neglected Home app. If you have smart-home accessories that send alerts, the notifications system will better understand when notifications are related to each other. It will be able to send them all in one message rather than bombarding you with reminder after reminder that a smart light is being turned on and off and on and off.
If you have compatible security cameras, the Home app will automatically arrange videos of key events, giving you short clips of the events and keeping them at the top of the page to make them easier to access. The computer vision engine can describe what’s happening in the clip too, like “Michael C. delivered a box to your front porch.”
Shortcuts
Apple’s Shortcuts app will let you generate new shortcuts just by using natural language to describe what you want them to do. The example Apple gave was if you want to let somebody know when you’ll be home from work, you can describe that request and then Apple Intelligence will use features like location, real-time Maps information, and Messages to communicate your ETA to your intended recipient.
Liquid Glass
Take it and opaque it!
Courtesy of AppleApple introduced its Liquid Glass design for its software interfaces last year, which many people called “beautiful but hard to read” because the design leaned heavily on mostly transparent windows.
Apple is making some refinements to Liquid Glass that the company says were done to “ensure exceptional readability." There is now a slider that lets you take the Liquid Glass interface from ultra transparent to fully opaque. Sidebars expand all the way to the edges of the screen, making for a wider viewing window, and icons in sidebars get their colors back. Transparent objects are easier to read and show more of a depth effect.
Photos
Apple says it has a deep respect for photography, and it has always highlighted how the iPhone’s camera is a favorite of pro photographers. However, the AI updates to the Photos and Camera apps include lots of manipulating effects for the rest of us—the ones who need some help in getting the shot. Now we can just use Apple’s tools to create the shot we couldn’t get.
The Photos app will gain AI-powered abilities to clean up, extend, and reframe pictures. These features will let you change how a picture is framed, letting you remove signs from the background or change the aspect ratio. It even uses generative AI to let you change the perspective, sliding the camera around in virtual space as if the image were a 3D creation. These features feel familiar to Google fans; Google’s AI photo tools have enabled some of these similar postproduction techniques.
Apple also has revamped its AI image-generation tool, Image Playground. This can be deployed in a variety of styles, including a photorealistic look. Like Google announced at its I/O event in May, the images it creates can be based on your existing photos, varying the style or adding new things to the background or foreground.
Read about all the changes coming to the iPhone’s camera and photos app.
Trust and Safety
Screen time for kids.
Courtesy of Apple
Time-of-day access controls for kids.
Courtesy of AppleApple spent a notable chunk of the WWDC keynote emphasizing its efforts to allow parents to control the content kids can see and the amount of time kids spend on their devices.
New child safety features let parents control which apps kids can use at specific times of the day. Parents can also select which contacts the kids are able to contact. A new feature in Safari lets kids “request” to browse a particular website; the parents get an alert and can grant permission from their own iPhone.
There are of course also some specific features coming to all of Apple’s software to protect minors from harmful content. If Apple detects a picture that includes nudity, it will blur it for the kids and flag it to the parents. It does the same with gory or violent videos.
No Hardware
The big move for the future of Apple’s hardware is whether it can launch a really good AI hardware product. There have been many rumors about upcoming hardware efforts powered by AI that may be in Apple’s pipeline, like smart glasses or the introduction of AirPods with cameras in them. Alas, there were no hardware announcements at WWDC.
