Apple Intelligence in appleOS 27
Apple today introduced the next generation of Apple Intelligence, powered by a bold new architecture that integrates the latest Apple Foundation Models deep into Apple’s platforms and is uniquely designed to protect users’ privacy.
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The next generation of Apple Intelligence also helps power Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri.
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Image Playground offers new powerful ways for users to bring their imagination to life. They can create high-quality images in virtually any style, now including photorealistic, thanks to a new generative model that runs on Private Cloud Compute. This is a major transformation for image generation across platforms. And generated images will automatically include a hidden SynthID watermark to identify them as AI-generated.
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Now Messages offers one-tap suggestions based on the context of users’ conversations, making it easier than ever to get things done, such as creating a reminder or a note.
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Apple Intelligence powers even more enhancements across operating systems. With automatic proofreading, users receive improved suggestions for spelling and grammar as they type across the system.
Apple WWDC26 “big features”: selling a rebranded gemini.
What’s confusing about this Apple-Google partnership is that Google pretty much calls all things AI “Gemini”. The models are “Gemini”, the assistant is “Gemini”, and the feature integrations are “Gemini”. So Apple is taking pains to emphasize that they’re building atop the Gemini models, not the Gemini assistant.
Google creating the model, Apple figuring out how to integrate it and make it easy to use. Are we back to Apple and Google each focusing on what they do best?
This is my favorite Apple event in a long time.
Instead of bombarding you with a million new features that mostly feel half-assed, this feels like it’s actually catered to the user experience instead of to marketing checklists.
All of these AI additions to MacOS/iOS look like nice improvements, but somehow it all feels unambitious given the current state of AI.
But I suppose it’s better for them to underpromise given what happened with Siri last year…
As I expected, Apple is going to punt the “on-device” story for Apple Intelligence and push towards the “private cloud compute” story for the models that you’ll actually want to use. I’m glad on-device isn’t going away, but it’s clear a hybrid approach is absolutely necessary
Apple’s most advanced on-device AI model in iOS 27 requires a minimum of 12GB of unified memory, meaning the standard iPhone 17 is excluded.
The 16 Pro was explicitly sold as having Apple Intelligence-capable hardware.
Apple today said it is expanding Private Cloud Compute (PCC) beyond its data centers, partnering with Google and NVIDIA to run Apple Intelligence workloads on Google Cloud.
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All server components and software are part of a trusted computing base subject to verifiable transparency and no-privileged-access guarantees, plus Apple has a cryptographically verifiable ledger of all Google Cloud hardware that is part of the PCC fleet to mitigate the risk of supply chain attacks. PCC on Google Cloud also uses many of the same architectural security patterns as PCC on Apple silicon.
PSA: Remember that Apple Intelligence is disabled in macOS if you boot from an external drive.
See also: Mac Power Users Talk.
Previously:
- Apple Foundation Models in appleOS 27
- Photos AI in appleOS 27
- Agentic Password Updates
- AI-Generated Shortcuts
- Safari 27 Announced
- Siri AI Announced
- WWDC 2026 Keynote
- Gemini-Powered Siri Features Delayed
- Apple Picks Gemini
- White Label Gemini on Private Cloud Compute
