Following the major visual redesign in iOS 26 and the rollout of Liquid Glass across Apple’s ecosystem, the company is preparing a refinement-focused update reminiscent of Mac OS X Snow Leopard. For iOS 27 and 2026’s other flagship OS releases — including macOS 27 — Apple is prioritizing “quality and underlying performance.”
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Aiming to improve the software, engineering teams are now combing through Apple’s operating systems, hunting for bloat to cut, bugs to eliminate, and any opportunity to meaningfully boost performance and overall quality. Like Snow Leopard set the groundwork for future overhauls and new types of Macs, iOS 27 will lay the foundation for foldable iPhones and other new hardware.
On the AI side, more dramatic changes are brewing, including the long-awaited upgrade of the Siri voice assistant in iOS 26.4 and the weaving of artificial intelligence into additional apps in iOS 27. That includes a health-focused AI agent (tied to a Health+ subscription) next fall and an expansion of the AI-powered web search meant to rival both ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The AI upgrades are a gigantic priority, with engineering teams throughout the company developing them. Inside Craig Federighi’s software engineering group, Sebastien Marineau, the vice president of intelligent system experience, is working on the user-facing Apple Intelligence enhancements, and we already know that Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell is leading the Siri side of things.
The company also has teamed up with Alphabet Inc.’s Google to bring Gemini technology into its Apple Foundation Models.
MacDailyNews Take: Give us a choice of third-party AI, Apple. We’d like to be able to choose the best AI, not the third-best or worse.
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