WWDC 2026 After-Thoughts
It has been a week since WWDC 2026 happened. I have installed iOS 27 on my iPhone, macOS 27 on my MacBook, watchOS 27 on my Apple Watch, and iPadOS 27 on my iPad. After a week of testing the new operating system. I have some thoughts.
iOS 27
iOS 27 has been amazing! For the first time in many years, I actually think the beta 1 is more stable than iOS 26 ever has been. I did not experience any crashes or anything. Moreover, after waiting for about 3 days, I got access to the all-new Siri, and I must say, it is very, very impressive. I'm no AI expert here, but having some conversations with it, I feel that it is one of the fastest and most concise AIs. It was able to answer the question that most AI will fail at correctly
I gave a few of my friends the opportunity to try it out.
I got ragebaited so hard.
They were all claiming
Siri AI is just a Gemini wrapper with Apple branding
Oh my days... It is not. Talking to these uneducated people, making such wild claims. (sarcasm)
From 9 to 5 Mac:
Ben Lovejoy
Siri AI doesn’t pull info from Google’s web search or knowledge graph; it uses its own. However, Federighi is not claiming that Apple’s models themselves are not based on Gemini code. In fact, he explicitly says the four models made to run on Apple Silicon are “trained using proprietary data with reinforcement learning and refined using outputs from Gemini frontier models.” It’s likely that the biggest model is trained using both Google and Apple’s proprietary data.
So what does that mean? It seems like Apple started with Gemini’s foundation models, optimized and rebuilt them for Apple Silicon and the model sizes it needs, and retrained them with its own data, weights, and guardrails.
I am not disagreeing that Siri AI is based on Gemini, but it is different from saying Siri AI is a Gemini wrapper. Gemini is Google's own frontier models. What Apple has done is basically train its own model using reinforcement learning and refine the outputs from Gemini.
Other new features?
Siri AI was the main highlight of WWDC 2026. But there are also other Apple Intelligence features that were announced. One of which is AI in Shortcuts
I have always been fond of using Apple Shorcuts to automate things, like sending daily reminders to people in the group chat. With Apple Intelligence (using Private-Cloud Compute) in shortcuts, i decided to try it out. The first thing I did was
Create an automation that goes through my contacts, checks whose birthday is on that day, and sends me a list of them via notifications. Repeat every day at 9am
I was expecting this to fail. Amazingly enough, within 30 seconds, shortcuts produced this
Now, I no longer need to remember people's birthdays.
These are just a few of the many new features. The update also included crazy new performance upgrades
iPadOS, watchOS and MacOS
I do not have much things to say for these operating systems since the updates were mostly the same with Siri AI and performance upgrades.
Just note that if you are planning to upgrade to MacOS beta, it crashes pretty often, so think twice before updating
Thanks for reading!