For most of the last fifteen years, I’ve written a few notes about Apple’s new operating systems at or around their release. So it is for 2026.
There are largely two themes for this year. AI and AI. No, I mean, AI and Boring. Or, if you don’t like AI, Boring and Boring.
But don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean “boring” in a bad way. And I’m not an AI-hater.
By “boring” I mean stable and uneventful. Since I shut down my iOS software business, I have patiently waited until the official release date and then upgraded devices in roughly reverse order of importance: iPad, iPhone and Watch, Mac. I like and want to use all my devices, but I need my work computer to… work. This year, I had upgraded everything by the Wednesday, after the release on Monday. No regrets.
At worst, the new operating systems are no worse than what preceded them. (There should be a small asterisk there. I’ll get to that in a minute.)
For the most part, there are lots of small refinements. Launching apps is perhaps a bit quicker. The Liquid Glass UI is just a little bit less annoying. Genuinely better search in Mail.
Some updates I was nervous when I saw some screenshots online, but worked out well. For example, pressing the Watch crown shows a cut-down list of apps now. I assumed that would be annoying but, actually, the apps I use are almost always there. Nice.
So boring. But in a good way.
The other theme is AI. Apple Intelligence is everywhere. On a Mac pretty much every shortcut menu has “Ask Siri” as the top option. Not great.
I like that they unified Siri and Spotlight. It always bugged me that there were two “text search” interfaces that did slightly different things. No more.
And the New Siri is… actually pretty decent? Damning with faint praise? Maybe. Is it the best AI? Nope. Is it good enough? Probably. And the fact that it has access to much of the data on your phone makes it more useful even if them LLM itself is, technically, not as powerful as, say, Claude.
My main complaint is performance. As a chatbot, it’s okay. But as a replacement for Old Siri it’s very slow. If you ask for a timer, or to add something to a shopping list, or to start a workout, it all works. Mostly. It’s still failing a bit more than I’d like. But even when it works, it’s slow.
In summary, Siri AI is better at the things that I didn’t use Old Siri for, but worse at the things I did. Hopefully this is a first version issue that will be solved soon. But it feels more likely that it will be solved by buying new hardware. I may end up using Siri for the things I never used to, though. So it’s not an unalloyed win, but certainly not a failure.
That’s nearly five hundred words already, but the long story short is that this is possibly the best Day 1 Apple upgrade in a good few years. If you’ve not already upgraded, you probably should.