I am a sucker for anything new. So naturally, the moment Apple released the Developer Betas for macOS 27 and iOS 27, I installed them immediately.
The reason for the plunge was simple: the new Siri, powered by the new Apple Intelligence. Yes, yes, I get it that the new OSes deliver consistently rounded application windows (wow), more realistic glass refractions that you can personalize (wah), faster Apple Music load times (fuyoh) and more. These are all fine. (Nope, they are not.) The real meat of Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote was AI and everyone knew it.
So off I went, clearing space on my MacBook and my iPhone, and sat through an installation process best described as watching digital paint dry, pixel by pixel, on a virtual wall. The moment it finished, I summoned Siri.
Hmm. It responded exactly the way it always has. I tried a few of the routines I’d seen performed by the happy, cheerful people in the keynote. Nothing worked as shown. After some digging, I discovered, much to my disappointment, that the “new” Siri had to be enabled in Settings.
I toggled it on. It put me on a waitlist.
At the time of writing, I am still on this waitlist.
“Why can’t you wait like everyone else, until the bugs and kinks are ironed out?” asked a voice of reason in my head. She sounded suspiciously like my wife, which surprised me because the amount of fudge my wife gives about anything tech-related that excites me is very, very close to zero. For her to materialize, unprompted, inside my inner monologue meant some deep part of me already knew the answer.
But the child in me pushed back. I’d like to be among the first to see whether the promise of agentic AI on the Apple ecosystem is real. The demos are impressive: an agent with access to your messages, calendar, photos, and the internet, orchestrating across all of them to actually get things done. I also wanted to try Apple’s proprietary architecture of on-device models paired with private cloud compute, designed with privacy at the center. It’s the opposite of the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google approach, which is essentially: “give us all your queries, files, mail, and images and let us get to know you very, very well.”
So here I am, three days in, refreshing a Settings page every thirty minutes. My wife (the real one) walked past, glanced at the screen and asked what the new Siri actually does. I told her I’d let her know as soon as Apple lets me find out.
“So you cleared fifty gigabytes and installed two betas… to join a queue.” Yes. That is exactly what I did. Apple promised me an intelligent agent that can read my messages, manage my calendar, and orchestrate my digital life.
Until it ships, the most capable agent in this house remains my wife who is always on-device, privacy-focused and devastatingly accurate. And there is no waitlist; she offers her insights whether I ask or not.