As delivered to us by Tech Power Up, Apple has unveiled their next generation of Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, during the Worldwide Developers Conference. Siri AI is promised to make things "more responsive, delightful, and easier to use with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27".
Siri AI is a new version of Siri integrated into iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. It can draw on personal context understanding to search across messages, emails, photos "and more". Siri AI can answer questions related to the content on a user's screen or go out to the web to get up-to-date information. A dedicated Siri app allows users to revisit a past conversation or kick off a new one. It uses iCloud to privately sync conversational history across a user's products.
The next generation of Apple Intelligence has new features in apps in order to simplify the things users do every day, like editing images in Photos, browsing across multiple tabs in Safari, expressing creativity with Image Playground, communicating in Messages and Mail "and so much more".
New Parental Controls help parents manage what their kids can see, who they can talk to, and when they have access to apps. With communication safety features, parents can require approval for each new contact their kids connect with and enable automatic interventions if explicit or violent content is being shared.
New tools for screen time habits make it easy to set daily total time allowances across Entertainment, Games, and Social Media apps. Screen Time has been redesigned to be more intuitive for parents, offering an at-a-glance view of their kids' average device usage and top apps.
Improvements have been made elsewhere, and iPhone and iPad apps launch up to 30 percent faster, photos load up to 70 percent faster after being taken, and AirDrop transfers are up to 80 percent faster. During network transitions, moving between cellular and Wi-Fi networks is more seamless, and browsing and transferring files between external drives and iPad is promised to be up to 5x faster. In Spotlight, Photos, and Mail, the search experience has been rebuilt to make it more stable and efficient to help users find exactly what they are looking for.
A new slider in Settings gives users the option to personalize Liquid Glass, adjusting it anywhere from ultra-clear to fully tinted to match their preference, and app icons have been updated to be sharper and more defined. On Mac, updates reincorporate cornerstones of the macOS design, including a more uniform toolbar across the top of apps, edge-to-edge sidebars, coloured sidebar icons "and more".