What new AI will we see at WWDC 27?

7 Jun 2026

It’s only a day to go until WWDC 2026, and in a way it’s kind of strange when you stop to think about it. Each year we sit down to watch a marketing video, and over the next couple of hours Apple tells us the direction it has chosen for its platforms, its developers and a surprisingly large preportion of the human race.

Apple devices are now used by roughly 1 in 5 humans on the planet. That’s roughly 1.4 to 1.7 billion people, depending on how you account for people who own more than one Apple device. The company says there are more than 2.5 billion active Apple devices in use, against a world population of about 8.3 billion.^[1][2] Around one in four active smartphones globally is an iPhone.^[3]

Which makes me wonder whether the yearly feature rollout process should be a bit more, say, democratic? But that’s a thought to explore another day…

What I’m interested in is what Apple plans to do with AI. As I see it, there are three pillars to any AI strategy Apple might have.

The first is consumer-facing features: making my phone better at understanding me and doing useful things automatically. While there are features that attempt this at the moment, they are often unreliable or inconsistent. In 2026, nobody should have to copy and paste text from a WhatsApp message into their Calendar app, manually create an appointment, and invite everyone. AI is more than capable of automating this.

2023 was the year of using LLMs to improve spelling and grammar^[4], and Apple was late to that. 2025 was the year of using them to actually perform tasks, and Apple is again late to this. I use the Reminders app to collaborate with my wife on a shared shopping list throughout the week. One of us then logs into a supermarket website and adds everything from the reminders list to the grocery basket, most of which we bought the week before (we tend to buy a lot of the same things every week but not always). As I go down the list, I’m mainly checking that prices haven’t become unreasonably high and looking out for the occasional special offer. What if Siri could notice that I’m doing this and offer to take control of my browser and do it for me? Again, the technology is capable of this, as anyone who has used the Claude browser plugin will tell you. This could be genuinely useful: a reminders app that actually executes your tasks rather than just bothering you about them! For a limited subset of life admin: things like booking car services, weekly grocery shopping, and holiday planning, I can see this being possible.

The second category is developer facing APIs. Here I think the ask is relativly simple. Allow developers to access AI models both on-device and in the cloud, automatically taking on user preferences, context and memory. I coudl go on here, but what I’m really interested in is the 3rd pillar.

The third pillar is vibe coding. The name is somewhat dismissive, but it represents the biggest change in the software industry since the World Wide Web went mainstream in the mid-1990s. It is now possible to create useful utility apps without writing any code by hand. Google has leaned into this with the latest version of Android, and Apple needs to do the same to avoid falling behind.

It should be possible to prompt my phone to make an app that shows me a map of every run I’ve ever logged, with the routes marked using a colour gradient based on the temperature on the day of each run. Or any other unique, random idea I might have. Apple needs to embrace the original vision of the Mac as a bicycle for the mind, only now it’s a motorbike for the mind. A consumer-facing vibe coding app, in the vein of Swift Playgrounds, could enable anyone to create small apps without ever needing to look at the underlying code. Those apps could then be saved to a private gallery and made available across all of their devices. The future is bespoke software, created by a prompt – that anyone can build regardless of how technical they are. I don’t think these small ‘applets’ will replace enterprise SaaS solutions, but for simple needs they will surfice. I’d like to see Apple embracing this in appleOS 27.