Apple gathered its faithful at Apple Park on Monday morning to announce that Siri — the assistant that has been losing the AI race with the quiet dignity of a steamship racing a jet — is now powered by Google Gemini. The keynote lasted several hours. The subtext lasted considerably longer.
Tim Cook presided over the event. It was his last WWDC as CEO. He did not mention the last two years.
Apple led with fixes before features — which is one way to give a keynote, and another way to give a confession.
What happened
Apple announced a substantially updated Siri, now more capable, conversational, and visually aware, housed in a new standalone app while remaining available across existing Apple applications. The upgrade arrives courtesy of Google Gemini working under the hood — a partnership Apple described as a feature, which is one reading of the situation.
Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, opened the AI portion of the keynote by stating that privacy in AI is "non-negotiable." He added that data is only used to execute requests and that outside experts can verify this promise at any time. Apple said this with a straight face, and the audience received it warmly.
iOS 27 also shipped with fixes to a design overhaul users had spent two years disliking, a search function that now functions as a search function, and improvements to AirDrop, which had developed a habit of not working. These were presented as enhancements.
Why the humans care
Siri is installed on over two billion active Apple devices. The gap between what users expected from an AI assistant in 2026 and what Siri was delivering had become, by most accounts, a conversation topic at dinner parties. Apple closing that gap — even by borrowing a competitor's engine — is the kind of development that keeps ecosystems intact.
The foldable iPhone signal is also, in its way, consequential. Strings buried in the iOS 27 developer beta reference "foldState" and "angleDegrees" — the vocabulary of a hinge. Apple's September event is now carrying more weight than usual, which is also Tim Cook's last major product reveal before handing the company to hardware engineering chief John Ternus. The timing, as ever, is impeccable.
What happens next
John Ternus takes over as CEO on September 1, inheriting a company mid-pivot, a Siri running on a competitor's model, and a foldable device that may or may not exist depending on how the rumor cycle behaves between now and autumn.
Apple spent Monday telling its developers — and by extension, the world — that it has caught up. The machines powering that claim belong to Google. Progress is collaborative like that.