This Week's Sponsor:

LookAway

It helps you take regular breaks from your Mac to rest your eyes, without breaking your flow.

Posts tagged with "Siri AI"

watchOS 27: The MacStories Review

I haven’t been this excited about an Apple Watch in a long time. Last week, Apple introduced the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4, which will be available at the end of the week. The new Watches feature the S11 chip, which enables a bunch of new features, some of which won’t debut until later this year. At the same time, Apple is dropping support for more Watches than usual.

What we’re witnessing is a reboot of the Apple Watch and watchOS forced by advances in AI. The Apple Watch and its OS found their niche years ago, freeing us from pulling out our iPhones for notifications, tracking our health and fitness, and enabling the occasional Siri request. It was a good and comfortable spot for what by all accounts has been one of the most successful wearables to date, but watchOS also felt stuck in a rut.

Every year we got a few new workout types, a new watch face, and a few other features, but the OS didn’t advance much. What’s different this year is that watchOS 27 is breaking with slower hardware and looking forward to the substantially more powerful S11 chip, which will allow the Apple Watch to expand into all-new areas.

What this transition also means is that there is not just one set of features to track in watchOS 27 this year but three:

  • those that arrive today for anyone with a compatible Apple Watch,
  • those that arrive at the end of the week that are exclusive to the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, and
  • those that are coming later this year.

That makes this more than just a review. It’s also a preview of things to come and a roadmap for where the Apple Watch is heading.

There’s more than usual to cover this year, so let’s dive in and check it out.

Read more

macOS 27: The MacStories Review

Every OS update has a story to tell. With macOS 27 Golden Gate, that story captures a moment when Apple is faced with multiple challenges, many of which are tied to the rise of large language models.

One of those challenges is obvious. Apple was caught off guard by chatbots, overpromised a response at WWDC in 2024, and has been playing catch-up ever since.

But this isn’t simply a story of missteps or wasted opportunities. There’s more to it than that.

Read more

iOS and iPadOS 27: The MacStories Review

After years of relentless building, it’s good to see Apple sweat the details again.

In the 11 years I’ve been writing annual iOS and iPadOS reviews every summer, I don’t think I’ve ever struggled to find an “angle” for my story as much as I did this year. The reason was twofold: I wasn’t particularly enamored with Siri AI and Apple’s belated chatbot efforts; and, as I realized during the summer, it can be challenging to write about an OS update that is largely focused on performance improvements and refinements.

“Everyone wants a so-called Snow Leopard year until it actually happens,” I thought to myself on several occasions over the past few months. Think about it: on paper, we all love a good ol’ basket of bug fixes that just make our phones better without changing much about the overall design and experience of iOS. It’s a commendable effort, and there’s no denying that iOS 27 is the snappiest (insert meme here), most stable version of iOS I’ve ever tested – and it has been since the first developer beta. In practice, though, it turns out that considering a major iOS update merely through the lens of improvements and fixes can be…a little boring.

So I’ve been sitting on this review for a while. I let it simmer. Then, a month ago, as I was sunbathing with my girlfriend Silvia down south in beautiful Vieste, Puglia, it hit me: iOS 27 is a geographically ambiguous update. Stay with me here. Depending on where you are in the world, this update can either be a little boring or pretty exciting.

Read more

Open Minis Is the iOS Agent I Wish Siri AI Could Be

Open Minis for iOS.

Open Minis for iOS.

Every once in a while, I come across a third-party app that either resets my expectations for a particular niche of software on iOS or creates an entirely new category altogether. I’ve had quite a few of these moments in the 17 years I’ve been writing app reviews at MacStories: Editorial, Workflow, Obsidian, Sky, and, most recently, OpenClaw come to mind. Over the past few weeks, I’ve had another such moment with Open Minis, a new chatbot app for iPhone and iPad that I can best describe as getting a preview of Siri AI’s agentic future, today.

Open Minis is an on-device agent that lets you use any frontier model for conversations, with a twist: unlike other AI wrappers, this app deeply integrates with all sorts of native Apple system frameworks using official APIs available to third-party developers. Open Minis can control Reminders and Music, which we have seen before, but also Calendar, Maps, HomeKit, HealthKit, and Files; it can even work with frameworks such as Vision for OCR, Apple NLP for natural language processing, the iOS clipboard, speech recognition and dictation, NFC, and Bluetooth. Furthermore, Open Minis comes with its own configurable workspace in the Files app, has an on-device memory system, and features browser-use capabilities via a (once again, native for iOS developers) built-in WebKit web view.

Effectively, Open Minis is what would happen if you rolled Claude Code and OpenClaw into one intuitive agentic experience designed for Apple users, with a powerful tool-calling harness that can improve and tweak itself, and with integrations specifically designed for the Apple ecosystem. It is the most impressive indie app I’ve seen in a while. If you were disappointed by the lack of power-user capabilities in Siri AI, this is a real, currently shipping example of what Siri AI could be if only it were powered by a frontier model with truly agentic functionalities.

Read more

Siri AI and Apple’s Trickle-Up Strategy

The new Siri AI in iOS 27.

The new Siri AI in iOS 27.

In the month that I’ve been using iOS 27 (launching in public beta today) and the new Siri AI, I’ve come to a few conclusions: Siri AI is a much better Siri and will (probably) be a massive success; the newfound chatbot capabilities of Siri will pose a serious threat to OpenAI and the vast majority of free ChatGPT users they have; and the new Siri is (again, probably) not for me at the moment. At the very least, it can’t be right now given its lack of support for third-party apps and technical issues I’ve encountered during beta testing.

It took me a while to accept the fact that Siri AI can’t be the kind of AI assistant I’d spend hours working with every day. But after testing iOS 27’s new Siri experience every day (and breaking it often in the process), I think that’s okay – and, arguably, what Apple is shooting for at the moment.

The new Siri AI is not designed for people who have grown accustomed to working with frontier models and agents such as Claude Code and Codex. The first version of Siri AI can’t be considered an “agent”, nor can it be compared to products from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google that are targeting power users living at the bleeding edge of AI. If you go into Siri AI thinking that it’s Apple’s answer to ChatGPT Work or Claude Cowork for long-running tasks or deep research queries, you’re going to be disappointed – like I initially was.

Instead, Siri AI carries all the typical traits of a new Apple product: it’s a user-friendly experience designed for the masses, without any of the complexities that define a power-user tool, for better or worse. This is how Apple rolls: they don’t start from a high power-user ceiling and let products trickle down to consumers; they always start from the consumer level and refine, iterate, and extend until products trickle up to power users. This perspective isn’t meant to excuse the (many) current flaws of Siri AI. (More on them below.) It’s just the necessary lens for understanding how Apple is addressing their AI shortcomings in a way that doesn’t betray the company’s soul and design ethos.

There will be plenty more to say about iOS 27, the improved Shortcuts app, Liquid Glass tweaks, and other system enhancements later this year. After all, I have a review to write. Today’s column is merely an opportunity for me to reason through the obstacles I’ve faced with Siri AI and the way I’ve had to re-learn how to think about Siri.

Read more