Apple is paying Google roughly $1 billion a year to ghost-write the new Siri, according to a Bloomberg WWDC preview Mark Gurman published Friday. The keynote lands Monday, June 8, at 10 a.m. Pacific, with more than 1,000 developers, designers, and students invited onto Apple Park for the kickoff of WWDC26.

That figure is the story. The most aggressively vertically integrated company in consumer technology is renting its voice assistant from its single largest search-deal counterparty, and Bloomberg says the underlying engine is a custom Gemini model. Last year’s Apple Intelligence rollout promised an in-house Siri rebuild and quietly missed. This year the company is outsourcing the rebuild to the competitor it spent a decade insisting it didn’t need.

Gurman reports the new Siri shows up in two forms. There’s a standalone chatbot app, which MacRumors notes would be the first dedicated Siri app ever shipped, and a “Search or Ask” pop-up wired into the Dynamic Island. iOS 27 will also let users set third-party AI services as the default for Apple Intelligence features like Writing Tools and Image Playground, a concession that reads less like generosity and more like an admission that the first-party stack isn’t winning on merit.

The rest of iOS 27 looks like an apology. Gurman describes it as a Snow Leopard-style release: bug fixes, removal of old code, performance work, with expanded Apple Intelligence hooks in Wallet, Safari, and Shortcuts, a reworked keyboard, and satellite connectivity in Apple Maps. TechCrunch adds a Photos upgrade with intelligent scene recommendations, automatic object removal, and natural-language editing, plus an Image Playground refresh focused on character consistency and richer controls.

The hardware story is quieter and sharper. AppleInsider points out that macOS 26 Tahoe was the last build to support Intel Macs, so macOS 27 (which a social-media slip suggests may be called “Big Bear”) won’t install on anything but Apple Silicon. iPadOS 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 round out the lineup, with Vision Pro still waiting for its software to justify the hardware.

The Snow Leopard comparison is doing a lot of work here. That 2009 release was Apple cleaning up after itself. Monday’s keynote asks whether Apple can clean up after itself while quietly licensing the part it couldn’t build.

Sources