Apple is set to overhaul Siri at WWDC 2026, reportedly powered by Google's Gemini. Here's what to expect from a landmark WWDC 2026, as all the company's software prepares to move over to v27. There will be a busy few months of betas to come.
It’s safe to say that Apple is throwing the kitchen sink at this year’s WWDC26. Tim Cook is unlikely to rock up to the Apple Park stage actually carrying one à la Elon Musk, but in his last WWDC at the helm before handing over to John Ternus, he will want to go out with a bang.
That means securing his legacy and making sure his long reign at the top is not forever associated with the botched introduction of Apple Intelligence in 2024 and the perennially misfiring Siri.
The tagline for WWDC26 is ‘All systems glow’. You can already download the official wallpaper, play the official playlist (personally I’d swerve that one if I was you), but what does the glowing up of Apple’s product line mean for users in the real world?
The headlines are all about Siri, not to mention the increasingly tangled question of who is actually building Apple's AI nowadays.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has published recreated screenshots showing the new Siri in two guises, a standalone app and a "Search or Ask" pop-up tied to the Dynamic Island, along with mock-ups of how Siri and Apple Intelligence will reach deeper into the Camera and Photos apps.
This is the AI assistant Apple promised back at the iOS 18 launch in 2024 and then singularly failed to ship. iOS 27 is finally expected to deliver the personalized, context-aware Siri that was promised in the pulled Bella Ramsey ads: one that can see what is on your screen, understands personal context, and can carry out actions inside and between apps rather than what it does now which is basically throwing you a web link and wishing you luck.
The leaked artwork suggests a dark color scheme that matches Apple's WWDC branding, and there are reports of a dedicated Siri app with an "Extensions" feature running across iOS, iPadOS and macOS 27.
So how has Apple finally managed this? Multiple reports say the new Siri leans on Google's Gemini behind the scenes, though exactly where the boundary lies between the privacy-focused Apple servers and the, well, Google-enrichment-focused Gemini ones is unclear. Nor do we know how the data will pass between the two, though Apple will probably keep the focus on on-device processing as usual anyway.
Bloomberg says that Apple will reportedly pay Google roughly $1 billion a year for a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model to power the rebuilt Siri. There is even chatter that users may get to choose which model powers Apple Intelligence, with Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT all in the frame.
$1bn might sound like a lot, but remember that Google pays Apple around $20 billion a year to be the default search engine in Safari. In comparison, it’s almost small change.
Apple will align every platform on the following year as is its most recent practice. iOS 27 looks like it will be a relatively minor release beyond all the Siri features, mainly cleaning things up following a bumpy iOS 26. That means a new layer of fluidity added just below Liquid Glass, not to mention the transparency and contrast slider that did not make the cut in iOS 26, so you can dial the effect to taste. macOS 27 reportedly leans on the same three pillars: Snow Leopard-style stability, the Liquid Glass tidy-up, and an AI-powered Safari.
More to the point, iOS 27 looks like it is bringing three generative tools to the Photos app, all running on-device. Extend is generative fill by another name; Enhance is a smart auto-adjust, cleaning up quality, lighting and color in a single tap; and Reframe shifts perspective on spatial photos, nudging the apparent camera position in post.
However, the reports are that all this hasn’t necessarily gone smoothly in internal testing. Apple may delay or scale Enhance or Reframe back depending on how its models improve before release. More reliable will be a reworked Camera interface alongside the editing tools. But, as ever, the full iOS 27 release is pencilled in for mid-September, so anything shown next week has a summer of betas to prove itself.
So much of what happens in hardware terms depends on whether Apple can get the new Siri working. New Apple TVs and HomePods have reportedly been ready for months, but Apple is sitting on them while it waits for a functioning Siri to be able to drive their equally new capabilities.
The Apple TV 4K is the most concrete rumor. It is tipped to move to an A17 Pro chip, powerful enough to run the new personalised Siri locally, paired with Apple's own N1 networking chip for WiFi 7 and HDMI passthrough. That passthrough matters for anyone running it through an AV receiver, and the A17 Pro jump would finally close the RAM gap that has held the current model back.
A refreshed HomePod Mini is expected to follow, with an S9-class chip or newer for Siri, the same N1 networking, second-generation Ultra Wideband, better sound and possibly new colors including red. A full-size HomePod has been mentioned in the same breath.
What you should not expect is Mac hardware. The M5 Ultra Mac Studio has reportedly slipped to October on the back of a RAM shortage, and there are no credible Mac Pro rumors attached to this show at all. The more eye-catching laptop rumor, a touchscreen MacBook Ultra positioned above the Pro as Apple's flagship, has firmed up this week, but the same memory shortage has pushed its likely launch towards early 2027 rather than this year.
Further out still, Bloomberg now puts Apple's first smart glasses in late 2027. Treat any of the above as a tease at best next week, with the actual on-sale dates landing later.
The last few days have seen a veritable blizzard of new rumors that include revamped AirPods settings, quality improvements for Genmoji and Image Playground, wider Apple Intelligence hooks in Wallet, Safari and Shortcuts, an upgraded keyboard with better autocorrect, and the ability to use Apple Maps over satellite.
The real test on June 8 is not whether Apple demos a slick Siri on stage. That is pretty much a given. What matters is what happens next: whether the thing ships on time, doing what the demo showed, and starts to make people want to upgrade to new phones that will run it. Apple has burned that trust once already this cycle. The Gemini arrangement, if it is real, also raises a genuinely awkward question for a company that has spent years selling privacy and self-reliance as the product. But if it gets out the gate, we suspect most users will hold their nose and find a way to accommodate it somehow.