Petteri Pyyny
8 Jun 2026 15:48
At its summer 2026 WWDC event, Apple finally began its attempt to catch up after several years of lagging behind in the field of artificial intelligence, unveiling a range of new AI-powered technologies aimed at narrowing the gap with its competitors.
Almost the entire event focused on AI and how it will be integrated throughout Apple's upcoming operating systems, from the iPhone's iOS all the way to the Mac's macOS.
The company's central message was that, thanks to the announcements made today, the long-standing AI assistant Siri will finally work the way it was always supposed to. This overhaul has been anticipated since 2024, when Apple first hinted at major AI-driven improvements coming to Siri.
However, rather than attempting to build everything from scratch in order to catch up with its rivals, Apple chose to license the foundation of both Siri and the broader Apple Intelligence platform from competitor Google.
That said, Apple's AI is not simply a direct copy of Google's Gemini. Apple has extensively customized, tuned and adapted the technology for its own ecosystem, although Google's AI expertise still forms the underlying foundation.
As has been the case with product presentations from virtually every major technology company in recent years, Apple's primary message was that AI is now coming to every corner of its ecosystem.
Artificial intelligence is being integrated into the iPhone's photo editing tools, the Safari browser, Shortcuts, Calendar, Mail and the iMessage messaging platform.
Apple also introduced the Visual Intelligence concept, which bears a strong resemblance to the visual mode available in Google's Gemini on Android devices. In practice, users can point their camera at objects and ask questions about what they see.
One example demonstrated by Apple involved taking a photo of a meal and asking for calorie counts and nutritional information based solely on the image. Naturally, the system can also identify landmarks, locations and various points of interest from photographs.
At the same time, Apple significantly limited which devices will be able to access the full range of AI features.
Among iPhones, the complete AI feature set will only be available on the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone Air models. Even the standard iPhone 17 will not receive all of the AI capabilities announced today.
Most iPad users will be excluded from the full Apple Intelligence experience altogether, as the entire feature set requires at least an M4 chip and 12GB of RAM.
On the Mac side, Apple has drawn the line at devices equipped with an M3 processor or newer. Macs must also include at least 12GB of memory to support all available AI functionality.
Throughout the event, Apple repeatedly emphasized how the new AI features are designed to protect user privacy and how even Apple itself cannot see what users are doing with the AI tools.
This is achieved by running part of the AI workload directly on the user's own device (which also explains the demanding hardware requirements), while other tasks are handled by Apple's cloud infrastructure.
According to Apple, operations processed on its servers are handled in a manner that leaves no persistent traces and remains inaccessible even to Apple itself.