Apple released iOS 27 on Monday, and with it the long-delayed Siri overhaul it first promised back in 2024 and then pushed, and pushed, and pushed again. The new Siri is meant to be the grown-up version: broader general knowledge, awareness of what is on your screen, memory of your personal context, and the ability to actually carry out multi-step actions across apps rather than fumbling and offering you a web search. On paper, it drags Apple’s assistant from the stone age into roughly the same league as ChatGPT and Gemini.
On paper. After the number of times Apple has promised a clever Siri and delivered a stammering one, the only honest stance is cautious until proven otherwise. Apple has earned that scepticism the hard way.
What is genuinely new
The upgrade that matters most is on-screen awareness and cross-app actions. A Siri that can see what you are looking at and then do something useful with it (book the thing, message the person, pull the detail from one app into another) is a different class of tool from one that just answers trivia. Combine that with personal context, so it knows who “my sister” is and which flight you mean, and you get something that finally resembles the assistant Apple has been advertising for years.
The strategic logic is sound too. Apple’s pitch is privacy: much of this runs on-device on the newer chips, so your personal context does not necessarily get sent off to someone’s cloud. If it works, that is a real differentiator against rivals whose business models depend on hoovering your data.
Should you care?
If you are on an iPhone new enough to run it, yes, this is the most consequential Siri update in a decade, and it is worth actually testing rather than dismissing out of habit. But manage expectations. Apple’s track record here is a graveyard of demos that outran the finished product, and “much closer to modern AI” is not the same as “as good as.” Try it on the boring real tasks (cross-app actions, on-screen questions) before you believe the keynote. If it delivers even most of what is promised, Apple has genuinely caught up. If it stammers, well, we have all seen this film before.