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As previously announced, Apple has today released 2026’s major annual updates for its operating systems, including iOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27. Siri AI—a large language model-based and context-aware overhaul of the company’s Siri voice and text assistant—is the flagship feature across all these releases except one (tvOS). The new Siri can respond in kind to natural language requests to do things like explain what’s on the screen and search the user’s past personal context and history (like old emails and text messages). It can also directly interact with applications when developers have added support for that. Other new AI features include the ability to generate Shortcut automations or Safari extensions from a prompt and additional photo editing options. There’s now a dedicated Siri app, kind of similar in some respects to the classic ChatGPT or Claude apps. Siri AI and other “Apple Intelligence” features are primarily driven by a handful of Apple-developed models, most of them labeled AFM 3. On-device, there’s AFM 3 Core with 3 billion parameters, and AFM 3 Core Advanced, a 20-billion-parameter model that “uses a sparse architecture, activating just 1 to 4 billion parameters at a time depending on the request.” On top of that, there are AFM 3 Cloud, ADM 3 Cloud (Image), and AFM3 Cloud Pro, more powerful models running on remote servers. Beyond AI Across both iOS and macOS, users now have a slider to affect how transparent or opaque the “Liquid Glass” design is across the operating system. And on the macOS side especially, Apple has made numerous small design tweaks to address user feedback, which has been accumulating since Liquid Glass was introduced. There’s nothing radically new in terms of design here, but this is a much-needed polish pass.
document fetched 2026-09-15 02:51 · canonical https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/09/apple-releases-ios-27-macos-golden-gate-27-with-siri-ai-and-liquid-glass-refinements