Apple ships 20+ Apple Intelligence features in iOS 27, headlined by a rebuilt Siri

Apple shipped over 20 new features in iOS 27 powered by the next generation of Apple Intelligence, with a substantially overhauled Siri as the centerpiece. The new Siri gains broad world knowledge, personal-context understanding that spans apps like Messages and Mail, on-screen awareness of what the user is looking at, and a wider set of app actions it can execute. Additional capabilities extend to Photos (Spatial Reframing, Extend), Messages (Personalized Smart Reply), Safari, Shortcuts, and Health.

The Siri rebuild is the most consequential piece: for years Apple's assistant lagged behind conversational LLMs, and this release repositions it as a context-aware agent rather than a command parser. Onscreen awareness plus cross-app personal context is Apple's answer to the agentic assistants shipping from Google and OpenAI, but executed with Apple's on-device and privacy framing.

Notably, Apple is reportedly in discussions to pay publishers — with a possible nine-figure budget — to give Siri access to current news. That signals Apple recognizes a knowledge-recency gap versus rivals whose assistants already surface live information, and it would be a significant editorial-licensing move at a moment when publisher-vs-AI legal tensions are running high.

This iOS 27 rollout follows Apple's macOS 27 'Golden Gate' release days earlier, which introduced the same new Siri to Apple Silicon Macs (dropping Intel entirely) with a dedicated Siri app and Visual Intelligence. Together they represent a coordinated platform-wide Apple Intelligence refresh. The open questions: how well the personal-context features perform in real use versus demo conditions, whether the publisher deals materialize, and how quickly developers adopt the expanded app-action APIs.