8 Things Apple Announced At WWDC 2026

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Apple’s annual developer conference tends to produce more slide highlights than actual changes to how people use their phones. WWDC 2026, held on Monday at Apple Park, was different solely because there were enough of them across enough product areas to suggest a company that has, finally, caught up with its own ambitions.

Siri Gets Rebuilt — With Google Under The Hood

The headline announcement was Siri AI, an entirely new version of Apple’s voice assistant, described by the company as profoundly more intelligent, knowledgeable and capable.

The new Siri can hold multi-turn conversations, understand what is visible on your active screen, draw on personal context from your messages, photos and notes, and take actions across third-party apps without requiring you to navigate between them. It has its own dedicated app, with conversation history syncing across devices.

Powering it are Google Gemini models — a partnership Apple confirmed during the keynote, with Bloomberg and MacRumors reporting the deal is valued at around US$1 billion a year.

The architecture combines on-device processing with server-side computation through Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, with Gemini handling tasks that require more advanced capability. Apple did not disclose the commercial terms publicly.

For context: the Siri being described here is largely what Apple promised in 2024. It did not ship then. The demos on Monday were considerably more convincing. Whether the product matches them remains to be seen when iOS 27 releases in the autumn.

iOS 27 Runs All The Way Back To The iPhone 11

iOS 27 supports every iPhone that ran iOS 26, extending back to the iPhone 11 — the widest device compatibility Apple has ever offered for a major update.

Performance improvements are concrete as apps are expected to launch up to 30 per cent faster, photos to load 70 per cent quicker, AirDrop transfers to run up to 80 per cent faster, and external storage file transfers are up to five times quicker.

A smarter CPU scheduler improves multitasking across older devices.

The important caveat: Apple Intelligence and Siri AI require an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, or a device running Apple’s M-series chips.

Malaysian users on older hardware get the performance gains and most of iOS 27’s new features — but the AI layer is reserved for more recent models.

Third-Party AI Models Can Now Live Inside Siri

iOS 27 introduces Extensions, allowing users to set a preferred third-party AI model — including Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini — as their default assistant within Siri, accessible through the Apple Intelligence and Siri section in Settings.

Apple provides suggested prompts and download links for each service. This positions Siri less as a standalone product and more as a routing layer for whichever AI a user prefers — a meaningful shift from the closed assistant model Apple has operated for years.

The Photos app is receiving Clean Up, Extend and Spatial Reframing. Clean Up removes distractions from busy images. Extend generates additional visual space beyond the original frame — useful for fixing compositions where a subject was clipped. Spatial Reframing lets users shift perspective as if the camera had been repositioned before the shot was taken.

Apple framed the tools as aids to composition rather than reality replacement, though the line between the two will inevitably be tested by users.

Safari And Core Apps Get AI Woven In

Safari gains tab management by topic, webpage monitoring for updates, and the ability to generate custom extensions from plain-language prompts. Messages, Mail, Calendar and Shortcuts are all receiving AI-powered features aimed at reducing the number of manual steps involved in common tasks.

None of these are new concepts in 2026, considering Google and Samsung have offered comparable features for some time, but their integration across Apple’s own app ecosystem, using personal on-device context, is more coherent than what either rival has shipped.

Parental Controls Are Finally Serious

Apple expanded its child account tools substantially. Parents can now require children to request permission before visiting a new website or messaging a new contact, set time allowances per app category, restrict usage during school hours, and trigger an immediate device pause. For children under 13, Ask to Browse and Ask to Buy are now activated by default.

Communication Safety has been extended to block graphic violence and gore in shared images and videos, and developers can now request a child’s broad age bracket without requiring an exact birth date.

The feature drew notice from industry observers, with some noting that the controls also happen to constrain competing social media platforms — a competitive side-effect Apple is unlikely to have overlooked.

Liquid Glass Gets A Dial

Last year’s Liquid Glass design overhaul divided opinion sharply. Apple’s response was not to reverse course but to add a transparency slider in Settings, letting users adjust Liquid Glass elements from ultra-clear to fully tinted.

App icons have been redesigned with more layered depth, and readability has been improved across the interface. It is the kind of update that rarely makes headlines but will register immediately for the significant portion of users who found the original implementation difficult to read.

Tim Cook’s Last WWDC — And What Comes Next

Tim Cook confirmed at the close of the keynote that he is stepping down as CEO on 1 September, handing the role to John Ternus, currently Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering.

Cook reflected on his tenure warmly, describing his time at Apple as the honour of a lifetime. Ternus, who did not appear during the keynote, is a hardware executive inheriting a company in the middle of its most ambitious software push in years — an interesting combination of strengths and gaps to navigate.

Apple’s share price fell close to 2 per cent following the keynote — a familiar post-WWDC reaction that reflects investors withholding judgement until products actually ship. A public beta arrives in July. The full release follows in autumn, alongside the iPhone 18 series.

Malaysia is not among the restricted markets, meaning all features available at US launch should arrive here on the same schedule.

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