WWDC26: Siri AI, Agentic Coding, and Tim's Farewell

I watched the WWDC26 keynote at 18:00 BST this evening, live-posting on Bluesky like the extremely normal person I am, and came away from it in a better mood than I expected to. That is not faint praise. My default expectation for Apple events is a mixture of genuine excitement and low-grade irritation, so landing on "pretty good, actually" is a meaningful outcome.

Here is roughly what happened, and what I actually think about it.

The Siri AI Thing (Yes, All of That)

The headline — and it was absolutely the headline, to an almost exhausting degree — is Siri AI. Apple has rebuilt Siri from the ground up, and the result is something that actually resembles the assistant it should have been years ago. It is more conversational, more capable, and no longer in the habit of handing off your queries to a third-party provider and quietly hoping you don't notice. The irony, of course, is that the thing powering it now is Google's Gemini model, the result of a multiyear partnership Apple announced back in January. So the handoff to a third party is still happening; it is just more vertical.

The Look, and the Watch Situation

I will be honest about my reaction: I liked the new Siri look immediately. There is something satisfying about an interface change that feels intentional rather than arbitrary, and the new visual design for Siri — including the orb on visionOS, which I spent an inordinate amount of time pondering — felt like Apple finally committing to an aesthetic for the thing rather than treating it as an afterthought. Siri AI on Apple Watch was genuinely surprising to me. I was not expecting that. My Apple Watch SE 3 is supported — watchOS 27 draws the line at devices with the S10 chip or newer, which means Series 10, Series 11, Ultra 2, Ultra 3 and SE 3 are in, and everything else is out. AppleInsider called it "a certifiable bloodbath", and Macworld put it more plainly: Apple just made roughly a million Apple Watches obsolete overnight. The MacRumors forums have been predictably incandescent, with one user noting of the Series 9 — released just three years ago — that it "didn't even get 4 years of updates." Dropping the Ultra 1 is the hardest sell of the lot, given what people paid for it at launch. Whether this is a deliberate hardware requirement driven by AI workload demands or a mistake on Apple's part remains unclear — I am cautiously hoping for the latter, because the alternative is a difficult conversation about what "long-term support" actually means when you spend north of £800 on a watch.

What It Actually Does

The new Siri lives as a dedicated standalone app now, synced across devices via iCloud, with persistent conversation history. You can pick up old exchanges or start new ones. On Mac, it can see what is on your screen and act on it. The iPhone camera gets a Siri mode where you can point it at something — a plate of food, say — and get contextual information or actions. Register-aware message drafting is in there too, which is the feature I actually found most practically interesting: Siri can help you draft something whilst accounting for the tone and context of who you are talking to. That one I will genuinely use.

The EU Problem

Where this becomes more complicated is the EU situation. Craig Federighi confirmed that Siri AI will not be available in the EU — or China — initially, as Apple works through regulatory compliance. Federighi's framing was pointed: he said the EU's refusal to engage constructively on privacy-preserving solutions means there is "currently no timeline" for EU availability. Engadget noted there was a visible boo from the crowd at that announcement, which tells you something about how many developers in that room are EU-adjacent. I am assuming — with not much confidence — that the UK's post-Brexit regulatory regime puts us in a different bucket. This is not confirmed, and I would like it confirmed.

Capitulation or Pragmatism

The Gemini partnership has attracted a sharper critical framing from some corners. One piece described the new Siri as "a confession dressed up as a product launch" — the argument being that Apple spent years and substantial money trying to build competitive large language models in-house, failed, and is now paying Google roughly a billion dollars a year for the privilege of not having to admit that publicly. There is something to that reading. There is also a reasonable counter-argument, which is that Apple's actual value-add here is the privacy architecture, the on-device inference layer, and the system-wide integration — none of which Google is providing. Whether licensing the model while owning the implementation counts as capitulation or pragmatism probably depends on what you thought Apple's core competency was in the first place.

On the Opt-In Question

My broader take on the AI section: I appreciate that Apple's approach is fundamentally opt-in. The emphasis throughout was on privacy as a core principle, and I am glad that the design philosophy seems to be "this is a thing you can choose to use" rather than "this has been switched on for you, enjoy." I would still very much like a single master toggle that turns off the whole category with one tap, because I have no intention of engaging with everything on the list. But the principle, at least, feels right.

There was quite a lot of AI content. A significant amount of AI content. At some point I asked myself whether Apple had done anything else. The answer is yes, as it turned out.

iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate

iOS 27 is not a wildly ambitious feature release, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. After last year's substantial Liquid Glass redesign, this update reads as a consolidation pass: fixing the things that were slightly off, making everything faster, and deepening the integrations that were already there. Sidebars now extend to the edge of a window. Icons retain their colour instead of becoming opaque. There is a slider to adjust Liquid Glass transparency levels, which is the kind of thing that should have been there from day one, to be quite honest.

The performance numbers are striking on paper: apps launch up to 30% faster, new photos appear 70% faster, AirDrop transfers are 80% faster, and file browsing is up to 5x faster. I will believe those when I see them in practice, but the direction is correct. Search has been rebuilt from the ground up, indexing your entire data library across Spotlight, Photos, and Mail. That one I expect to actually notice.

macOS Golden Gate — macOS 27 — applies the same Liquid Glass treatment to app icons and brings consistent window corner radii across the system, which is a small thing that will make me irrationally pleased every time I notice it. It is also, apparently, the end of the Intel era. My first Mac is my M2 Mac mini, so this lands for me as a piece of historical housekeeping rather than anything personal — but I imagine it means something to the people who have been running Apple Silicon alongside legacy Intel machines for the past five years.

My own Mac situation adds a layer of anticipation to all of this. I am trading in my M2 Mac mini for the M4, which has a delivery estimate of 3–10 July and has apparently been sat in "Processing" for the better part of a month — which, if I had to guess, means the machine has not actually been built yet. By autumn I will be on the M4, which is the version I will actually want running Golden Gate. Right now I am waiting, which is the Apple shopping experience in its purest form.

iOS 27 supports the iPhone 11 and later, which matches iOS 26's requirements. My iPhone 15 is comfortably within that range.

Apple Intelligence Everywhere, Including Some Places I Have Feelings About

Apple Intelligence has now been threaded through essentially the entire system, and the results are a mixed bag in the way that all feature-dense AI rollouts tend to be.

The things I find genuinely interesting: Safari can now automatically organise your tabs into topics and notify you of changes to specific pages — price drops, restocks, terms-of-service updates. That is actually useful, and it is the kind of feature that makes me consider, for the first time in years, whether I might reinstall Safari as something other than a backup browser. The Home app will consolidate frequent notifications into ongoing activities rather than flooding you with individual alerts, which is a small quality-of-life change that I will notice every day. Automatic Shortcuts creation is in, which earned a genuine "yes" from me when it was announced, because manual Shortcut construction is one of those things that should have been made easier years ago.

The Passwords situation is where my reaction gets more ambiguous. Apple Intelligence will now, agentically, visit individual websites on your behalf to update insecure passwords. The privacy framing is that this happens on-device and with your explicit consent. I use Bitwarden and am not planning to switch, so most of this is null and void for me personally. But I will say — the idea of an AI agent having access to my credentials, regardless of how carefully it is scoped, is something I need to sit with for a while before I arrive at an opinion I trust. The implementation may well be fine. I just want to read more about it before I commit to "this is fine."

Apple also previewed homeOS, a dedicated OS for upcoming HomePad hardware. I do not own any Apple home devices, so I am broadly reporting its existence and moving on.

Agentic Coding in Xcode

This is the announcement that made me immediately think about what I am actually going to do with it. The assistant can simulate entire apps, and developers can choose their model and agent. The Foundation Model framework has been extended to support image input — not just text — which opens up a meaningful range of applications. Custom skills and server models are available to developers. There are also new Swift APIs in this release, which is less flashy but quietly useful.

I am curious about what this looks like in practice for someone who is primarily a web developer touching native Apple development occasionally rather than a full-time Xcode user. Craig Federighi's framing was that Xcode is "the best place" for agentic coding, which is the kind of confident claim that invites scrutiny. I am going to spend some time with the beta and form an opinion of my own, because I think there is something genuinely interesting here if it works as described.

The developer tooling section was also where I started wondering seriously about how these new Apple Intelligence APIs fit into my own stack — not immediately, but as a direction. That is a good sign for a developer conference. If I leave thinking about what I might build, the content landed.

Parental Controls and Child Accounts

The child safety features got significant airtime, and the timing is not accidental. Government scrutiny of tech companies and children's digital experiences has been intensifying, and Apple is clearly aware of the optics. The new Child Account system is mandatory for under-13s and optional up to 18, with granular controls over apps, contacts, websites, and time per category. Screen Time has evolved into Time Allowances, split across Entertainment, Games, and Social categories, with the option to block specific categories during school hours.

This is not something I have any direct stake in, but it looks like a thoughtful implementation. The ability for children to request access to blocked content rather than simply being denied it outright seems like a small but sensible design choice.

Tim's Last One

The emotional centrepiece of the keynote, in retrospect, was not a feature announcement. It was Tim Cook at the end, giving what is almost certainly his final WWDC keynote as CEO. He steps down on the first of September, with John Ternus taking over as CEO. Ternus, notably, was not in the keynote at all — which is a choice — and Cook's closing remarks were personal and genuinely affecting. He teared up. The developer audience gave him a standing ovation. His full sign-off: "Over the years, you have helped people connect, create, learn, and experience the world in extraordinary new ways. And with the incredible capabilities we introduced today, and so many more still to come, I truly believe the best is still ahead. Getting the best products in the world to deliver experiences that enrich people's lives has always been our North Star. It's been the honour of a lifetime to help advance that mission with teams whose creativity, care, and conviction continue to make a lasting difference in people's lives." He has been CEO since 2011, when he took over under circumstances that would have broken most people, and whatever you think about the company he runs, fifteen years is not nothing.

I went into the afternoon knowing this was his last one and still found it landed differently than I expected. There is something particular about watching someone say goodbye to a role they have clearly loved, even when the context is a product presentation by one of the wealthiest companies on earth. The moment was earned.

Overall: a good showing. The AI focus was occasionally overwhelming — there was a stretch where I wondered whether Apple had announced anything that was not in some way powered by Gemini — but the underlying product philosophy of privacy-first and opt-in AI feels like the right call in 2026. The Xcode agentic coding features are the thing I am most personally excited about. The EU exclusion for Siri AI is the thing I am most personally annoyed about. The Tim Cook moment was unexpectedly moving.

Everything ships to developers in beta today. Public beta next month. Full release this autumn alongside the iPhone 18 Pro, presumably. I will not be touching any of the betas.

I will be over here waiting for the public release in autumn — and, more immediately, for a Mac mini M4 to show up at my door.