WWDC26 turned out to be one of the most loaded Apple keynotes I’ve followed in years, and the weight of the moment was impossible to miss. Tim Cook took the stage for his last keynote speech as CEO before handing over the company to John Ternus on September 1st, and he did it while trying to convince us that Apple’s AI mistakes are behind it. Two years of broken Siri promises hung over the entire system. I went in skeptical and came out more interested than I expected.
Siri, take three
Apple has called the redesigned assistant a completely new version of Siri, and the voice is more conversational, more competent, and more personal than the version we’ve been stuck with. Voice can be tuned for speed, clarity, and pronunciation, a small touch that tells me Apple wants Assistant to feel less efficient. There’s also a dedicated Siri app, designed to handle back-and-forth and let you scroll through past conversations like a proper chatbot. I find that last part very telling, as Apple dismissed the original launch of Apple Intelligence insisting that it was not interested in building one.
Engine replacement, and last effort payment
The most important decision resides under the hood. Apple’s new Siri and a large part of Apple Intelligence are now running on Google’s Gemini, the product of a deal struck earlier this year. For a company that likes to have a bunch of everything, relying on a competitor’s model is a surprising concession, and it tells me how far Apple felt.
The internal story is also important, because it is reported that Apple gave Siri to Mike Rockwell, the executive behind Vision Pro, after concluding that his assistant had followed the industry for years. Apple is also paying for this gap literally, as it has agreed to pay a fee of $ 250 million in connection with claims of misleading consumers about Apple Intelligence. That price tag is the context I always come back to whenever Apple promises me a smart assistant.
iOS 27 and the Liquid Glass dial
iOS 27 reaches all the way back to the iPhone 11, a generous support window and a smart move while Apple rebuilds trust. The title change for me is small but long overdue, a transparent slider that lets you dial in how the interface looks. Liquid Glass arrived with iOS 26 and fielded strong complaints about usability, so giving users control instead of forcing the look is the right call. Performance and design polish round out the update, alongside improvements to Screen Time.
macOS Golden Gate 27 and the end of the creative era
macOS Golden Gate 27 brings the same invisibility slider to the desktop, along with tighter window corners and color restoration for sidebar icons. To me that reads like Apple is quietly going back on some of its bolder visual choices. The redesigned search now indexes everything on your machine and brings up new files almost instantly, and that’s an improvement I can count on every day.
The bitter part is that Golden Gate is shutting down Intel Macs for good, leaving those machines with three more years of security patches and nothing else. Federighi also revealed that Apple’s California location names are coming to an end, which came as a quiet farewell.
iPadOS 27 inches closer to a laptop
iPadOS 27 is all about speed, with apps said to launch 30 percent faster thanks to intelligent preloading and quick switching between them. Safari gains an Organize Tabs feature that automatically groups your open tabs by title, which sounds like a bit of a raft. The same assistant improvements and Screen Time changes place here as well. None of it is bringing back the iPad, yet the steady march toward another true laptop continues.
Screen Time is finally growing its teeth
The parental control overhaul may be the strongest non-AI news of the day. Apple relies on guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which includes a warning that children under the age of 13 should stay away from social media, and build features around it. Parents get tighter control over who kids can message, what apps and content they can access, and recommended time limits, as well as Ask to Browse approval flows that automatically change for accounts under 13. The new Declared Age Range API also allows apps to adapt to a user’s age, which may fluctuate in the App Store.
AirPods EQ and a generative twist on images
A few small updates caught my eye. AirPods finally get a custom equalizer in iOS 27, so you can shape the lows, mids, and highs yourself instead of staying with Apple’s preset profile, and I’ve been wanting that for years. Photos, on the other hand, take a generative AI that can fill in the gaps in the image and change its perspective. That second feature sits comfortably with me, since Apple once argued that photography should capture something that actually happened, and now it’s giving us the tools to create parts that didn’t.
My honest reading
The skeptic in me is difficult to silence, because Apple has stood on the same stage and promised an intelligent assistant that has never been seen. Betting on a return on Google’s Gemini is a gamble, and most long-time users have already sounded horrified at the credibility and hallucinations. Still, the opacity sliders, redesigned search, custom EQ, and Screen Time tools for adults are solid and ready to ship, suggesting the company is listening to its critics.
My cautious verdict is that Apple has done enough to restore trust protection, although the real test comes when the assistant ships in the fall rather than today.
Grigor Baklajyan is a technical copywriter at . His contributions include product reviews, buying guides, how-to articles, and more.