Category: Apple

Apple is three weeks out from its annual developer conference, and Bloomberg is already filling in the picture. A new report from the outlet details three features coming to iOS 27: a smarter grammar checker baked into Writing Tools, a natural-language interface for building Shortcuts automations, and an AI-powered custom wallpaper generator tied to the existing Image Playground app.

The grammar checker is probably the most immediately practical of the three. According to Bloomberg, it works similarly to Grammarly, the popular third-party writing assistant, except it lives natively in the operating system. The feature surfaces in a translucent menu that slides up from the bottom of the screen, showing original text next to suggested revisions. Users can accept individual suggestions one at a time, approve everything in bulk, or dismiss the whole thing if autocorrect has already burned them one too many times. There are also controls to pause grammar checking mid-document and jump between flagged sections. For anyone who has fumbled through an important email on their phone, this is the kind of thing that quietly improves daily life without requiring much adjustment.

Alongside the grammar checker, Apple is reportedly rethinking how Writing Tools surface to users in the first place. The company has been testing a "Write With Siri" toggle that appears directly at the top of the keyboard, and a "Help Me Write" button that shows up when a user activates Siri while working inside a text field. The underlying capability is not new, but it has been tucked away enough that plenty of people have never found it. Making it a persistent, visible option at the keyboard level is a reasonable fix to an adoption problem Apple has had with its AI writing features since their introduction.

The Shortcuts update is where things get genuinely interesting for power users and casual users alike. Right now, building a useful Shortcut requires at least some tolerance for the app's logic-flow interface, which can feel like assembling furniture without the right instructions. iOS 27 apparently changes that by letting people describe what they want a shortcut to do in plain language. The app presents a prompt asking "What do you want your shortcut to do?" and a text field to type the answer. From there, the system builds and installs the shortcut automatically.

That is a meaningful shift. Shortcuts has always been one of those features iPhone users appreciate in theory but rarely dig into in practice. Reducing the barrier to entry from "learn the interface" to "describe what you want" could push the app into genuinely mainstream use, rather than remaining the territory of automation enthusiasts who post their setups on Reddit.

The wallpaper feature rounds out the trio. Bloomberg reports that iOS 27 will include an option in the standard wallpaper picker to generate custom lock screen and home screen backgrounds using AI, built on top of the Image Playground app Apple introduced with iOS 18. The framing here is straightforward: rather than browsing static options or pulling from your photo library, you could describe or prompt an image and have it generated on the spot.

Apple has been careful about how it positions image generation, keeping it largely contained to Image Playground and specific creative contexts rather than scattering it across the operating system. Folding it into the wallpaper picker is a logical expansion that keeps the feature anchored in a place where people already expect to be creative, and where the stakes of a weird or off-putting result are low. You can always just pick a different wallpaper.

Taken together, these three features point toward a consistent theme in how Apple is building out its AI layer: less about dramatic new capabilities and more about making existing things easier to find, easier to use, and more useful in the moments where people actually need them. Grammar help when you are typing, Shortcuts you can build without a manual, wallpapers you can generate without leaving the settings screen. None of it is science fiction, but that is somewhat the point.

Apple will formally unveil iOS 27 at its Worldwide Developers Conference, which begins in roughly three weeks. The full scope of what the company has planned will become clearer then, but Bloomberg's reporting suggests the software update leans heavily into making Apple Intelligence feel less like a feature to seek out and more like infrastructure that is simply there when you reach for it.

Apple has locked in June 8 for the WWDC26 keynote, kicking off a five-day developer conference that runs through June 12 at Apple Park. The opening keynote starts at 10 a.m. PDT, with the Platforms State of the Union following at 1 p.m. PDT the same day. Apple says the event will cover AI advancements, software features, and developer tools across its platform lineup, which is roughly what you'd expect from a company that has spent the better part of two years trying to convince the world its AI ambitions are serious.

The invite Apple sent to media may be doing some of that convincing on its own. The tagline reads "Coming bright up," and the design leans heavily on a bright, Swift-themed visual. Macworld noted the Swift imagery was unusually prominent even by WWDC standards, where Swift updates are more or less a given. Mashable, TechRadar, and others have read the bright visual language as a signal that AI-related announcements will take center stage. Whether that interpretation holds up on June 8 remains to be seen, but Apple is rarely subtle when it wants to set expectations through an event invite.

More than 1,000 developers, designers, and students will be at Apple Park for the opening-day events. The broader developer program stays online and free, keeping global access intact for anyone who wants to follow sessions, labs, and one-on-one meetings with Apple engineers and designers without booking a flight to Cupertino.

There is an additional layer of significance this year that goes beyond software versions and framework updates. Both CNET and CNA have described this as potentially Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote as Apple CEO, and Macworld referred to John Ternus as incoming CEO. Cook has led Apple since 2011, and if a leadership transition is in fact underway, WWDC26 becomes a notable marker regardless of what gets announced on stage. Apple has not made any official statement on that front, so the reporting should be taken as what it is: informed speculation based on signals the company has not confirmed.

On the software side, iOS 27 is widely expected to be among the headline announcements, alongside updates to macOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and the rest of the platform stack. Apple Intelligence features, including a more capable Siri, have been previewed through leaks and earlier reporting, so WWDC will likely serve as the formal reveal for capabilities that are already reasonably well understood by anyone paying close attention to the coverage.

AppleInsider offered a useful note of caution for anyone nursing hardware hopes: do not expect new Macs at WWDC 2026. The site pointed out that predictions of Mac releases tend to surface before the developer conference with some regularity and tend not to materialize. WWDC is, at its core, a software event, and Apple has generally kept it that way outside of the occasional chip transition announcement or surprise product drop. The odds favor software dominating the agenda this year.

The timing also puts Apple squarely in the middle of the annual developer conference season. Google I/O has already come and gone, and Android Central noted that Apple is revealing WWDC details in Google I/O's shadow. That framing is not entirely unfair. Google has been aggressive about AI feature announcements this year, and Apple is walking into June with some catching up to do in public perception, even if its internal development timeline tells a different story.

For developers, the practical draw is the same as it has been for years: access to new APIs, updated frameworks, direct time with Apple's engineering and design teams, and early looks at OS betas that will ship to consumers later in the fall. Apple framed WWDC26 on its newsroom as an opportunity for developers worldwide to explore tools and technologies and connect directly with Apple engineers and designers. That description is accurate as far as it goes, even if it undersells how much the industry reads these events as a proxy for Apple's strategic direction.

Mark June 8 at 10 a.m. PDT on whatever calendar you use. Whether you're a developer waiting on new APIs, a Tim Cook watcher keeping score, or just someone curious whether Apple's Siri finally catches up to the moment, this one has reasons to tune in.

Apple is bringing back the Hikawa Grip & Stand for iPhone, a MagSafe-compatible accessory that sold out within days of its debut last November. The grip is now available worldwide through Apple's online store, and for the first time, it's being distributed globally thanks to a collaboration between its designer and PopSockets.

The accessory was originally released in November 2025 as part of Apple's celebration of 40 years of accessibility work. It was designed by Bailey Hikawa, a Los Angeles-based artist and industrial designer, and built from the ground up with input from people who have disabilities affecting muscle strength, dexterity, and hand control. The goal was straightforward: make it easier to hold a phone without the constant low-grade effort most people don't even notice they're exerting.

In practice, the Hikawa Grip & Stand does a few things at once. It attaches to the back of any MagSafe-compatible iPhone using magnets, meaning it snaps on securely and can be removed without a fight. Beyond the grip itself, it folds out into a stand that props the phone up in both portrait and landscape orientations, which covers most of the situations where you'd want your hands free. The whole thing is wrapped in a soft-touch premium silicone, which is a small but meaningful detail for anyone who needs a reliable, non-slip surface.

When the accessory launched last fall, it was only available directly from Apple and only in limited quantities. It sold out in a matter of days, which left a lot of interested buyers empty-handed. That kind of fast sellout isn't unusual for Apple limited releases, but this one stung a bit more given the specific audience the accessory was trying to serve. Accessibility tools that aren't available aren't particularly useful.

The return launch coincides with Apple's announcement of a broader slate of new accessibility features coming later this year with iOS 27, visionOS 27, and other software updates. The Hikawa Grip & Stand is a hardware companion to that broader push, though it exists independently of any specific software feature.

The partnership with PopSockets is what enables the worldwide availability this time around. Previously, the accessory was sold only through Apple's own channels in limited markets. With PopSockets involved in the collaboration, the distribution footprint has expanded considerably, which should help with both reach and stock levels, though Apple has not confirmed exactly how much inventory is available. The first run disappeared fast, so if you've been waiting, "order it and then overthink it" is probably the more practical sequence here.

The Hikawa Grip & Stand comes in three colors: blue, orange, and stone. It's priced at $54.95 and available to order now through Apple's website. That puts it in the range of a deliberate purchase rather than an impulse add-on, but for users who genuinely benefit from the ergonomic design, the price is in line with similar MagSafe accessories that lack the same accessibility-focused engineering behind them.

What makes the Hikawa accessory a bit different from the broader ecosystem of phone grips and PopSocket-style attachments is the design process behind it. According to Apple, Hikawa worked directly with people with disabilities to understand how grip mechanics and phone weight interact with limited hand strength and reduced dexterity. The result isn't just a grip that happens to be accessible, it's one where accessibility was the starting constraint rather than an afterthought. That distinction matters, even if the final product looks like a premium silicone ring on the back of your phone.

For most iPhone users, the Hikawa Grip & Stand will work just like any other MagSafe accessory: it snaps on, stays put, and pulls off cleanly. For the users it was specifically designed around, it does more than that. Either way, Apple appears to have learned from the first launch that "make it and sell out" isn't a great strategy for an accessibility product, and the worldwide availability and PopSockets partnership suggest a more serious attempt to keep it in stock this time.

Simon Willison used a five-minute lightning talk at PyCon US 2026 to compress six months of LLM history into something digestible, and his annotated slide deck tells the story well: November 2025 was a turning point, coding agents quietly crossed a quality threshold that actually matters, and the open-weight models running on laptop hardware have become surprisingly hard to dismiss.

The period Willison covers begins with what he calls the November 2025 inflection point. The title of "best model" changed hands five times that month alone, trading between Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in a sequence that started with Claude Sonnet 4.5, jumped to GPT-5.1, then Gemini 3, then GPT-5.1 Codex Max, before Anthropic reclaimed it with Claude Opus 4.5. Willison tracks this with his signature benchmark: asking each model to generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle. The logic is sound. Pelicans are hard to draw, bicycles are hard to draw, the combination is physically impossible, and no AI lab would ever specifically train for it. Gemini 3 drew the best pelican of the November batch, he notes, though Opus 4.5 held the broader practitioner consensus for the next couple of months.

The pelican derby is fun, but the more consequential development from November was quieter and took longer to register. OpenAI and Anthropic had spent most of 2025 applying Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards to their models, specifically to improve code quality when paired with their respective agent frameworks. By November, the results were visible. Coding agents moved, in Willison's framing, from "often-work" to "mostly-work." That sounds like modest progress, but crossing the threshold where you can trust an agent as a daily driver without spending the majority of your time cleaning up its errors is a genuine shift in what the tools are actually useful for.

Also in November, someone named Pete made an initial commit to an obscure repository called Warelay. Willison includes this as a data point worth flagging, because Warelay went through several name changes over December and January before arriving at its final identity: OpenClaw, a personal AI assistant that, by February, had become a phenomenon well beyond what a three-month-old project typically achieves. The "Claw" as a category term took hold alongside it, driven by spinoff projects like NanoClaw and ZeroClaw. Mac Minis started selling out around Silicon Valley as people bought them specifically to run their Claws locally. Drew Breunig, as Willison recounts, joked that they had become the new digital pets, the Mac Mini functioning as the perfect aquarium. Willison's own preferred metaphor is Alfred Molina's Doc Ock from Spider-Man 2: AI-powered appendages that work fine until something damages the inhibitor chip.

The December and January holiday period brought its own pattern. A lot of people, Willison included, used the break to push the new coding agents to their limits and got somewhat carried away. His own holiday project was a vibe-coded JavaScript interpreter written in Python, a loose port of MicroQuickJS he named micro-javascript. The demo runs JavaScript in Python, inside Pyodide, inside WebAssembly, inside JavaScript, inside a browser. Technically layered and genuinely impressive. Also, by his own admission, something nobody actually needed. He has since quietly retired that one and several others from the same period.

February brought Gemini 3.1 Pro, which produced what Willison considers the best pelican-on-a-bicycle result he has seen, complete with a fish in the basket. Google's Jeff Dean amplified the moment by posting an animated version that included a frog on a penny-farthing, a giraffe driving a tiny car, an ostrich on roller skates, a turtle kickflipping a skateboard, and a dachshund driving a stretch limousine. Whether the AI labs had been watching Willison's benchmark or simply got very good at drawing improbable animals on vehicles, the output quality was hard to argue with.

April brought more developments worth noting. Google released the Gemma 4 series, which Willison describes as the most capable open-weight models he has seen from a US company. Chinese lab GLM released GLM-5.1, an open-weight model at 754 billion parameters and 1.51 terabytes in size — effective, but requiring hardware most people cannot casually afford. GLM-5.1 produced a competent pelican, though it struggled to animate it cleanly. It also, when prompted by a Bluesky commenter, generated an illustrated and animated SVG of a North Virginia Opossum on an e-scooter, complete with the tagline "Cruising the commonwealth since dusk." Willison reports that other models cannot come close to that result.

The other notable April contribution came from Qwen. The Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model, a 20.9GB file that runs on a laptop, drew a better pelican-on-a-bicycle than Claude Opus 4.7. Willison acknowledges this probably says as much about the limits of the benchmark as it does about the model, but the underlying point stands: locally runnable open-weight models have started producing results that were implausible a year ago.

The two themes Willison pulls out of the six months are straightforward. Coding agents got genuinely good enough to use. And laptop-scale open-weight models, while still well behind the frontier, have started wildly outperforming expectations. Both of those developments have practical weight, and neither looks like a temporary blip.

Apple's next version of Siri is shaping up to be, by most measurable standards, the most privacy-conscious AI assistant on the market. Bloomberg reported this week that the forthcoming Siri app will include an option to automatically delete conversation history, offering users the same retention choices already available in the Messages app: wipe chats after 30 days, after a year, or leave them in place indefinitely.

It is a genuinely welcome feature, and it fits neatly into the broader privacy framework Apple has been building around the new Siri. The assistant will be powered by Google's Gemini model, but Apple has been explicit that this does not mean your queries will be routed through Google's infrastructure. Apple says AI tasks will run on-device wherever the hardware allows, with overflow handled through its own Private Cloud Compute servers. That arrangement also comes with a contractual restriction: Apple's agreement with Google prohibits Siri from being used to train the Gemini model. Outgoing CEO Tim Cook described the partnership this way: "We believe that we can unlock a lot of experiences and innovate in a key way due to the collaboration. We'll continue to run on the device and run in Private Cloud Compute, and maintain our industry-leading privacy standards in doing so."

So the privacy story looks reasonably solid. Auto-deletion is a sensible addition to that story, giving users meaningful control over what sticks around after a session ends. For anyone who asks Siri something sensitive and would rather not have that conversation collecting dust in a server somewhere, the option to have it disappear automatically is a practical and appropriate tool.

That said, the author of the original piece makes a compelling case for why enabling auto-delete may actually work against you, and it is worth sitting with that argument. AI assistants get more useful the more context they carry. The value is not just in answering one-off questions well; it is in building a picture of who you are, what you prefer, and how you like information presented. Conversations are how that picture gets painted. Delete them and you are back to square one every time.

The point comes through clearly in how the author describes their own setup with Claude, which they use as their primary AI. Over time, through explicit instructions and implicit feedback, they have shaped how Claude responds: succinct answers, bullet points where useful, no flowery language, no sycophancy, links to sources when making factual claims. That kind of personalization does not happen in a single session. It accumulates. And Claude has apparently internalized context the author never stated directly, drawing on past queries and search history to tailor responses in ways that were noticeably more relevant.

None of that works if you are wiping the slate after every conversation. Auto-delete is, in effect, a trade: you gain privacy assurance and lose continuity. For many use cases, that is the right trade. A one-time question about a medical symptom or a sensitive personal situation is probably not the kind of thing you want feeding a persistent AI profile. But for daily use, where you are genuinely trying to build a productive working relationship with an assistant, nuking the history is counterproductive.

The practical middle ground is manual deletion, applied with some discretion. Delete the sessions that contain genuinely sensitive material. Leave the rest. Most AI apps, including the new Siri, support this approach, and it gives you targeted control without throwing out everything that makes a chatbot actually useful.

There is a separate but related piece of advice from the article that deserves attention: start a new conversation for each distinct topic. It sounds trivial but it matters. When you keep stacking questions into a single long thread, the model processes the entire conversation history every time you add a message, which burns through tokens faster. It also makes your history harder to navigate. Keeping topics separate means you can return to a previous thread cleanly, without wading through unrelated context. A well-named sidebar of distinct conversations is a much more useful archive than one sprawling mega-thread. Most AI assistants, including Claude according to the author, do a decent job of auto-naming chats in a way that makes retrieval practical.

The timing of this Bloomberg report is a reminder that the new Siri is still not here yet. Apple has been tight-lipped about exactly when it will land, and the privacy features described this week are based on reporting rather than a product that anyone can use today. But the picture being assembled is at least coherent. On-device processing, Private Cloud Compute for heavier tasks, no training on your data by Google, and now optional auto-deletion of chat history. Whether that combination delivers a Siri that is actually worth talking to remains to be seen, but Apple's privacy architecture around it looks, on paper, more thoughtfully constructed than most of what the competition has put forward.

Auto-delete is a good option to have. It is just not obviously the right default for every user, and treating it as a privacy must-have overlooks what you give up when context disappears.

Apple is planning to make Genmoji more proactive in iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, automatically suggesting AI-generated emoji based on personal context pulled from users' devices, according to Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter as reported by AppleInsider and 9to5Mac.

The current Genmoji experience requires users to deliberately choose to create a custom emoji, which may explain why the feature hasn't exactly swept the nation since its 2024 launch. AppleInsider noted that adoption has been limited among everyday consumers, though Apple executives have publicly claimed otherwise. A system that surfaces Genmoji suggestions on its own, similar to how Messages already nudges users toward conventional emoji as they type, could lower the activation energy enough to actually get people using it.

The personal context angle is the interesting part. According to AppleInsider, iOS 27 may draw on what users are typing and what's in their Photos library to generate relevant suggestions. That's a more intimate integration than simply offering a palette of pre-generated options, and it leans into the on-device intelligence Apple has been building toward.

Mac users may not be left out entirely. German outlet ifun.de reported that similar automatic suggestions are planned for macOS 27 as well, noting that emoji keyboard support on the Mac has historically been more limited than on iPhone and iPad.

Whether proactive suggestions will actually turn Genmoji into a feature people reach for remains to be seen. But nudging it into the flow of ordinary typing, rather than keeping it tucked behind a deliberate action, is a reasonable approach to getting a stalled feature off the ground.

Original source: https://kite.kagi.com/5b73205d-fb42-4ee3-87ba-854f2545e029/tech/8

Apple is planning to give Siri a significant overhaul in iOS 27, including user controls over chat-history retention that would let people automatically delete their conversation logs with the assistant. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported the details in his Power On newsletter, with multiple technology publications picking up and expanding on the report ahead of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

The redesigned Siri would function more like a standalone chatbot than the voice-command layer iPhone users have grown accustomed to, according to Gurman's reporting. Users would be able to reach it the usual way or through a new "Search or Ask" mode triggered by swiping down from the top center of the screen. The app-style experience represents a substantial shift in how Apple is framing the assistant.

Privacy is being positioned as a central selling point. TechCrunch noted that Gurman described Apple's emphasis on chat-history controls as a way company executives may contrast Siri against rival AI chatbots that treat privacy protections as opt-in features rather than defaults. Whether that framing reflects genuine architectural differences or serves as convenient cover for a product that still lags behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini in raw capability is a fair question. TechCrunch raised it directly, noting the privacy pitch could also help excuse Siri's shortcomings compared with competitors.

There are reasons for skepticism about a smooth rollout. Android Headlines reported that early iOS 27 testers have raised concerns about the accuracy of the large language model driving the new assistant. Apple is reportedly considering launching the revamped Siri with a beta label this fall, a signal that the company wants some cushion against hallucinations or sluggish performance. AppleInsider rated this outcome as likely. The beta designation would also be Apple's second such hedge on major Siri improvements in roughly two years, after the Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC 2024 faced repeated delays.

Gurman's newsletter also touched on other planned AI additions in iOS 27, including an upgrade to Genmoji, Apple's AI-generated emoji feature, according to 9to5Mac and Business Standard.

The June developer conference will be the first real look at how far along this rebuild actually is. If the new Siri ships in the fall behind a beta label after two years of promises, the privacy story will need to be a compelling one.

Original source: https://kite.kagi.com/5b73205d-fb42-4ee3-87ba-854f2545e029/tech/0