The vibe at Apple’s 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference felt like a husband and wife proudly listing all the items on a to-do list that they had finally completed. Instead of introducing something exciting and new, Apple released the basic detail fixes for last year’s ‘Liquid Glass’ design. an overhaul of its awful search function. improvements to its Playground feature. and so on.
Perhaps most importantly, two years after promising but failing to launch a smarter Siri, Apple finally showed off a revamped version of its artificial intelligence voice assistant.
But the most telling detail wasn’t what Apple announced. So he chose to show some things. Many of the Apple Intelligence demos featured someone standing, phone in hand, pressing buttons or using voice commands in real time while another camera showed the phone’s response.
These weren’t live on stage demos – it could go wrong. were pre-recorded. But they looked a lot more like a proof of feature than what Apple showed at WWDC 2024, when the company introduced Apple Intelligence and a new Siri to the world through slickly produced videos that proved more promise than product.
That style of demonstration was noticed, with comments on X on Monday comparing today’s keynote to those of 2024’s so-called “vaporizer” demonstrations.
Apple said at the time that the features would be available soon to those who upgraded to the iPhone 15 Pro and newer devices with an M1 chip or better. But by March 2025, Apple admitted that Bold fireball that the release of the features shown via the production video “will take us longer than we thought to deliver”. Not long after, the Cupertino company faced a lawsuit in federal court alleging false advertising about the features showcased at that 2024 event — a case that poses real reputational risk for a company whose brand has long been built on the promise that its products just work.
Last month, Apple agreed to pay a $250 million settlement in the lawsuit, without admitting wrongdoing.
Monday’s presentation appeared designed, at least in part, to avoid a repeat. There were still plenty of fully produced feature videos, like this one showing how to customize Siri’s voice and another showing improved voice-to-text transcription. However, many of the AI features were shown in this “live” format, with someone using the feature on a real device. The implicit message is that these features work on real devices and you will soon have them.
Apple also doesn’t require users to buy the latest iPhone to get these features. The new Siri will be available through the new iOS 27 on iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max and all iPhone 16 models and later, according to the company. The current model is the iPhone 17, meaning most users who have upgraded in the past two years won’t need to buy new hardware to gain access.
It’s perhaps a concession that Apple won’t lock features behind new devices to build upgrade pressure when it promised two years ago that such features would be available on the iPhone 15.
Apple also said the new features will be available across its wider range of hardware, including iPad mini (A17 Pro), iPad models with M1 or later, MacBook Neo (A18 Pro), Mac models with M1 or later, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch Series 10 or later, Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, and Apple Watch SE 3 when paired with Apple Intelligbyen.
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