Apple ships iOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate and the long-delayed Siri AI

Apple's 2026 software wave arrives

Apple released its annual batch of platform updates on September 14, with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, watchOS 27 and visionOS 27 rolling out to compatible devices, according to The Verge. macOS 27, which Apple has named Golden Gate, arrived the same day for Apple Silicon Macs. The thread running through all of them is Siri AI: the overhauled, AI-powered version of Apple's assistant that The Verge notes had been delayed, and that Apple's newsroom presents as the next generation of Apple Intelligence.

Siri AI arrives as a beta and initially works in English only. Both The Verge and Apple's newsroom say support for French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish will follow in October.

What Siri AI can do

According to Apple, the new Siri is more conversational and can draw on personal context — messages, emails, photos — to find what a user needs in the moment. It has onscreen awareness, meaning it can answer questions about whatever is currently on the display, and it can fall back on the web when a question calls for up-to-date information. It can also take actions inside apps; The Verge's macOS coverage points to Messages and Reminders as examples.

A few additions go further. A "Siri mode" in the iPhone camera app lets users act on what is in front of them — Apple's examples include splitting a bill and paying friends through Apple Cash, or adding a custom pass to Wallet. Visual Intelligence lets people on iPhone, iPad and Mac ask Siri about what they are looking at on screen, and Vision Pro owners can ask about their physical surroundings just by looking at them. Write with Siri handles drafting and refining text.

There is also a dedicated Siri app. The Verge reports that it keeps an archive of past conversations, and Apple says it syncs chat history privately over iCloud so a conversation started on an iPhone can be continued on a Mac, iPad, Watch or Vision Pro.

The rest of the updates

Beyond Siri, iOS 27 adds a Liquid Glass opacity slider that moves the interface between a clearer and a more frosted look, refreshed icon designs for many built-in apps with subtle colour changes, extra-large widgets, and separate volume settings for ringtones, alarms, timers, alerts and system sounds.

On the iPad, Apple has improved file transfer speeds to external drives, sped up browsing and smoothed the handoff between Wi-Fi and mobile data. watchOS 27 brings new Workout Buddy features, a new tap gesture, Liquid Glass refinements, fresh Smart Stack suggestions and a better Find My app. For Vision Pro, visionOS 27 adds the ability to preview notifications with a glance, Control Center interface updates, Wi-Fi improvements and the option to use photographed panoramas as immersive environments.

macOS 27 Golden Gate and device support

macOS 27 Golden Gate runs on all Apple Silicon Macs but drops Intel machines, which received their final major update with last year's macOS Tahoe, according to The Verge. The Mac release also refines Liquid Glass — Apple points to improved contrast and more uniform refraction — and introduces consistent window corner radii across the system. Apple's newsroom additionally highlights new parental controls arriving across the platforms.

On compatibility, The Verge reports that iOS 27 covers the iPhone 11 and second-generation iPhone SE and later; watchOS 27 supports the Apple Watch SE 3, Series 9 and Ultra 2 and newer; and iPadOS 27 extends to recent iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPad mini and entry-level iPad models built around newer chips.

Why it matters

Siri AI is the delayed centrepiece of Apple's consumer AI push, and shipping it — even as an English-only beta — addresses the most visible gap in the company's Apple Intelligence story so far. By launching it simultaneously across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch and Vision Pro, with conversation history synced between them, Apple is positioning Siri not as a feature of any one device but as a single assistant that follows users everywhere. The staggered language rollout and the beta label mean the real test is still ahead: whether the assistant proves reliable enough in daily use to change habits. The Intel cutoff in macOS, meanwhile, confirms that Apple's chip transition is effectively complete on the software side.