WWDC 2026: All the news from Apple’s developers conference

I turned off Siri on the Mac years ago and never looked back. Similarly, I found Apple Intelligence so fruitless I never engage with it. But the new Siri AI coming to macOS 27 Golden Gate has at least got me slightly rethinking things.

I’m still early in testing Siri AI, as I’ve only had access to it in the macOS 27 developer beta for little more than 24 hours. It’s also in an early preview state on the dev beta, so there should be lots of runway for improvements before it releases later this year. I don’t even know if it’s done indexing my files and folders on our review unit M5 MacBook Air and M5 Max MacBook Pro. Unlike on the iOS 27 dev beta, there’s no “indexing in progress” box in the settings page. I asked Siri if it could tell me, but it told me to click a button in Settings that isn’t there.

The most popular camera in the world just got its first set of serious AI photo editing features, and I don’t think any of us are ready.

As far as AI photo editing goes, the new features in iOS 27 are pretty tame compared to what you can do on, say, Google’s Pixel phones. But for the iPhone, they represent a tipping point in what the native photos app allows you to do to your photos. I mean memories. I mean, I don’t know anymore.

Apple’s new Siri AI is finally here, and so far, it seems like it works. I have access and have been messing around with it, and my biggest impression so far is that Siri AI is quite curt — which I mean as a compliment.

Many AI chatbots are cheery and wordy. While a more verbose and casual personality can make a chatbot seem friendlier and more fun to talk to, there are instances of users becoming extremely attached to their chatbot of choice. People have fallen in love with chatbots. When OpenAI suddenly shut down GPT-4o, users grieved its loss, and the company brought the model back for paid users. And while some companies have dialed back their AI models’ personalities or given users options for more subdued tones, I still find most AI chatbots to be too talkative and too eager to ask follow-up questions that are clearly designed to push me toward chatting more.

Apple and Google are updating their smart home streaming devices to Thread 1.4. As first spotted by Matter Alpha and 9to5 Google, the latest spec has arrived on compatible Apple TVs in the tvOS 27 developer beta and the Google TV Streamer through a software update.

This lays the groundwork for these devices, which serve as Thread Border Routers, to implement Thread credential sharing, enabling them to connect more easily to an existing Thread network rather than creating their own.

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. This week’s issue is a special early edition tied to The Verge’s WWDC coverage. You can expect our next issue at its usual time next Friday. Opt in for Optimizer here.

Apple doesn’t like telling people what to do with their health. At least, that’s been true of its approach to the Health app and Apple Watch for the past 11 years. You can track various metrics, such as steps, workouts, and sleep quality. You can also view long-term trends — as in, whether your resting heart rate has risen or fallen in the past six months. Depending on the gadgets you have, you can also get alerted if you’re showing signs of sleep apnea, hypertension, and atrial fibrillation. But aside from nudging you to close your rings or perhaps consult a doctor if the Watch flags potential health conditions, it’s up to you to figure out what you should do with your data.

Parents want one thing, and one thing only, out of AI: to add a list of soccer games or “spirit week” theme days from an email or a poorly formatted flyer onto their calendar in one shot. And I have good news for parents with iPhones — the new Siri can finally do this.

After stumbling through its first launch of an AI-imbued Siri, Apple is trying again. The newly upgraded Siri AI can chat with you about what might be killing the roses in your yard, put together a shopping list for the hardware store, and set a reminder to lay down some compost in that flower bed. It can reference information in your email and calendar to make its recommendations or provide an actually helpful answer to the question: “When should I leave for the airport?” And yes, it can even add a list of events from an email to your calendar. I tried all of these scenarios out for myself and I saw it happen. AI Siri is for real this time.

It took a few years, but Apple finally made its AI look useful. Now millions of iPhone users in Europe are being told they won’t be getting Siri AI anytime soon, if ever — and Apple wants them to blame the EU.

Apple says its new AI-powered Siri will not launch on iPhones and iPads in the European Union because of the Digital Markets Act, the bloc’s competition law designed to stop powerful tech companies from acting as gatekeepers over their platforms to shut out rivals. In practice, the DMA requires platforms to give competitors the same kinds of data access as they themselves enjoy, with a few exceptions for things like ensuring their system is not compromised.

Apple used to question whether generative AI-powered editing features were worth the risk of distorting our perceptions of the world. Now it seems Apple no longer believes that photos should accurately capture reality. At WWDC 2026, the company announced a host of new AI-powered photo editing tools. They give users effortless powers of manipulating images that Apple still refers to as “photos.”

Two years ago, Apple launched Clean Up — an AI-powered object removal tool in Apple’s Photo app that’s similar to the Magic Eraser feature in Google Photos. At the time, Apple software chief Craig Federighi said that it was important for the company to “purvey accurate information, not fantasy.” The company seemed hesitant to provide more extensive AI editing tools, while Google and Samsung charged ahead with editing suites that allow you to add almost anything to photographs by just describing it — including explosions, drug paraphernalia, and other potentially harmful inclusions.

Apple kicked off its annual developer conference with bold promises about AI. The company, CEO Tim Cook said, would be “introducing new technologies and innovations that push the limits on what’s possible.” But its slew of announcements — centered on a brand-new “Siri AI” — had more to do with catching up.

After almost entirely neglecting Siri and punting its AI promises down the road in 2025, Apple went all in on the tech this year. It pitched Siri as an all-encompassing virtual assistant that ties together all your Apple devices, with multimodal features, a dedicated app, an all-in-one AI agent, and more. Executives emphasized privacy again and again, saying that unlike many of its competitors, user data involved in agentic tasks would be processed on-device and via “private cloud compute” and then done away with.

Most of Apple’s current AI ideas are roughly the same as everyone else’s AI ideas. A chatbot you can ask questions; quick ways to create or summarize text; bizarre, borderline creepy image-generation tools. The company spent most of its WWDC keynote playing catch-up with the state of the AI art, announcing Siri features you can already find on Android phones and in the Claude and ChatGPT apps. The pitch, in so many cases, is just “this thing you know, but on your iPhone now.”

But a few minutes after I downloaded the first developer beta of iPadOS 26 (I didn’t want to risk it on my Mac or my iPhone, both of which are too important to my daily life to install one of Apple’s notoriously buggy and battery-crushing first betas), I found one of the few ways in which Apple can make a genuinely better AI product. I opened up the Shortcuts app, pressed the Plus button to create a new shortcut, and typed “Send a text to Anna with three kissy emojis.” This is a thing I do from time to time, just to let my wife know I’m thinking of her. A few Apple Intelligence-powered seconds later, the shortcut was up and running — I tapped it, and it sent the right emoji to the right Anna. Thank goodness.

MacOS 27 Golden Gate will usher in a bunch of changes to the Mac when it’s released later this year, with its biggest new features revolving around Siri AI. But for now, using the first developer beta, Siri AI is only offered through a waitlist. So what’s available to try is mostly about how the upcoming operating system looks and feels.

Booting up the macOS 27 developer beta upon updating immediately prompts you with Apple’s new Liquid Glass slider, allowing users to set the amount of UI transparency. There’s minimal fanfare to Apple’s welcome screen, but this is reason to celebrate. On one end of the slider, it’s as seethrough as Liquid Glass gets, and on the other end the transparent accents are heavily frosted. Golden Gate starts you in the middle of the slider by default, for just a touch of frosting — perhaps a gentle admission that the original look went too far. You sadly can’t go fully opaque, but this frosted look does greatly reduce the distracting elements of Liquid Glass.

As expected, yesterday’s WWDC keynote was mostly about AI. And also as expected, Apple tried to turn its late arrival into its sales pitch: It didn’t rush into AI because it was taking its time to do things right. In this case, “right” means “with more privacy than anyone else.” It’s a good pitch — the question will be how well it holds up.

The new Apple Intelligence features and the updated Siri AI have been designed to work across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro. There’s a dedicated Siri AI app, with a ChatGPT-esque chatbot experience, new AI-powered camera and photo editing features, and the beginnings of an agentic experience that will let Siri AI interact with other apps and software on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Apple spending a big chunk of its WWDC keynote on parental controls was surprising for several reasons. But the biggest is that, despite all the airtime, it didn’t announce much new beyond a redesigned interface. Almost all the features touted already exist or are upgrades to current options. Why Apple chose to do this isn’t a mystery. You can trace the threads from the recent landmark social media trials against Meta and Google to the protesters outside the Cupertino HQ today: Apple is trying to show the world it’s being responsible when it comes to your children.

Only it’s really not. Screen Time sucks. As a mother of two whose children have had Apple Watches, iPads, and iPhones, and who are now entering their late teens (18 and 15), I’ve spent years grappling with Apple’s parental controls. In that time, I’ve gone through what feels like approximately 2,000 Screen Time passcodes and gained several new gray hairs.

iOS 27 has only been out for a few hours, and I’ve been messing around with the developer beta on my iPhone 16 Pro. I was most interested in trying out the new Siri AI, but unfortunately, I’m still on Apple’s waitlist for that. In the meantime, I’ve been poking around a bunch of features that aren’t about AI and found a lot that I’m happy with — even though this doesn’t seem to be as big of an update as in previous years, the fit and finish throughout the operating system is already great to see.

Here are a few neat things that have jumped out at me.

Apple is trying to solve one of Safari’s biggest weaknesses with AI. Safari has long lacked the robust library of extensions that its rivals have, mainly due to the stringent development requirements from Apple. But now, Apple is inviting users to essentially vibe-code their own extensions.

In a demo shared by Apple, the company showed how you can ask Safari to create an extension by describing it. “Save and track cooking recipes from around the web,” the prompt said. “Click the toolbar button to see your saved recipes and add notes to each.” From there, Safari used Apple Intelligence to generate a “Recipe Keeper” extension that’s supposed to do just that.

Every year, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference gives us a first look at what’s coming next to the company’s many operating systems. But missing from today’s keynote, apart from a single graphic listing all current Apple OSes next to a big “27,” was any mention of tvOS.

The whole structure of this year’s WWDC was different, with features delineating the presentation structure instead of sections for each OS update. But there were still major mentions for macOS 27, iOS 27, and iPadOS 27. They’re getting Siri AI, customizable transparency options for Liquid Glass, and some new child safety features. Even visionOS was included with new Siri AI features. tvOS was conspicuously absent, including from Apple’s website.

When Apple put child safety front and center at WWDC on Monday, its stated goal was helping parents fine-tune their kids’ online experiences and avoid excessive screen time. But amid a global debate over internet regulation, its latest updates also looked like a defensive move in a brewing fight against Meta and other app developers.

Apple announced an expanded toolkit for parents through its child accounts at WWDC, including a greater ability to customize kids’ allotted screen time and the ability to block gory or violent images in messages before kids see them. Raja Bose, Apple’s director of trust, safety, and values product marketing, touted some of the ways Apple believes it can be useful for kids to have access to devices. “On one hand, there’s so many benefits to your child having their own device,” Bose said. “You rest easier since you can stay in touch, know where they are, and provide them with great apps that can help them learn and grow.” But he then acknowledged the risks of unfettered access to the internet before kids are ready.

This year’s WWDC keynote was all about AI. But with all the attention on Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, the company breezed by — or neglected to mention — a bunch of cool, smaller features across its new updates. I’ve rounded up a bunch of them right here.

The new operating systems are available in developer beta today ahead of public betas beginning in July. They’ll launch for everyone this fall. And keep an eye on The Verge in the coming days and weeks ahead; as everyone starts to really dig into what’s new, we might find even more great features to look forward to.