Hands-on With iOS and iPadOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, and Siri AI | Eshu Marneedi
A return to form and function
Image: Apple.
In 2009, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Bertrand Serlet walked onstage and presented an audacious claim: “Zero New Features,” the slide read.
Serlet, Apple’s then-senior vice president of software engineering, was introducing OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, a release Apple claimed would emphasize small “refinements” and major updates to internal technologies. But to the public, it really was “Zero New Features” — a quote forever cemented in Apple’s modern history as one of its most notable. As Serlet later explained, OS X Snow Leopard had plenty of new features, most notably Grand Central Dispatch, which brought multithreading to OS X for the first time. OS X Snow Leopard established the architecture on which all personal computers, including the iPhone and the Apple Watch, would eventually rely. Its stability solidified Apple’s reputation for reliable, high-quality software, so much so that the coming decade of pervasive, sloppily thought-out user interfaces — beginning with OS X 10.10 Yosemite — was treated as an aberration.
In early June, Apple’s first real announcement at WWDC was neither novel nor revolutionary. It was not a coding agent that would put all white-collar workers out of jobs by 2030, augmented reality glasses, or even as much as a tab bar in the Photos app — it was a slider to adjust the translucency of Liquid Glass. Then came the stunning admission that macOS 26 Tahoe’s window corner radii were too inconsistent and radical: Apple would decrease and equalize all corner radii throughout the system in macOS 27 Golden Gate. Liquid Glass app icons would use new glass layers for a more polished, legible appearance. The central processing unit scheduler — the program that tells the CPU when to execute a process — was made more efficient. The Spotlight index was rewritten, and the Mail app’s search function was markedly improved. These were among the first “features” on which Apple spent the precious opening minutes of one of its most-watched presentations, and it was marvelous.
All of Apple’s releases this year converge on a single philosophy: returning Apple to its original promise of reliable yet innovative software. And much as OS X Snow Leopard — the company’s last true “cleanup year,” with hundreds of bug fixes and underlying performance improvements — became known for transforming personal computing for decades to come, so will iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate. After a section of the keynote aimed, candidly, at regulators keen to scrutinize Apple’s child safety efforts, Apple introduced what I’d loosely call the Grand Central Dispatch of WWDC 2026: Siri AI, a completely reworked, large language model-powered version of Siri promised two years ago. After years of rumors, personnel changes, and bottlenecks, the “more personalized Siri” is finally here, and it’s both a Herculean reworking of the internals and a breakthrough consumer product.
I have spent over a month with all the new operating systems and Siri AI, and I can confidently report that Apple Intelligence, or at least this new version, has changed the way I use Apple products. It is the first artificial intelligence system that feels personal, like it knows me and is willing to use the decades of information I have stored on my Mac and iPhone. It sheds the gimmickry of current AI systems and, dare I say, makes you feel like you’re living in the future. Apple has proven that the answer to modern computing’s biggest questions comes not via the LLM alone, but via the cowling built around the model. Apple is a product company, and Siri AI is the best LLM product, engineered by people who astutely know what makes a great one. It’s an ice-cold glass of water in the hell of coding agents that will supposedly assume everyone’s jobs by the decade’s end.
But the “Snow Leopard” nature of this year’s operating systems leaves little to write about. There is, of course, Siri AI, coupled with some interesting changes to Liquid Glass, but there are almost no new features in this year’s releases. That’s OK — more than tolerable, in my book. I can ostensibly name dozens of features Apple announced in just a few years that occupied collective hours of keynote time, but hardly anyone uses: StandBy, Image Playground, tinted app icons, the Journal app, and Stage Manager, as pertinent examples. It’s not even that these features are useless, per se, but that they’re just too onerous to find. This was, in fact, the lede of my OS review from two years ago: Apple adds dozens of new, marquee features each year to go undiscovered and unused, while the core parts of the OS languish. Perhaps hundreds of millions of people search for emails in the Mail app, and it has been terrible for years. It isn’t anymore.
This is to say that my relative brevity in this year’s review should not be considered a gripe, but great praise. The...