At Apple Park today — in what was also Tim Cook's final keynote as CEO — Apple did the thing it spent years insisting it wouldn't: it handed the brains of Siri to someone else. Google, specifically.

Siri, rebuilt on Gemini

The headline is a rebuilt Siri running on a custom ~1.2-trillion-parameter Google Gemini model. Rather than route everything to Google, Apple built a three-tier system:

• On-device — simple requests stay local on Apple's own models.
• Private Cloud Compute — moderately complex requests go to Apple's own servers.
• Google Cloud — the heaviest reasoning routes to Gemini, running on Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs.

Apple's privacy pitch: queries are anonymised and tokenised so that, it says, neither Apple staff nor Google can tie a request back to an individual user. (Reporting ahead of the keynote pegged the arrangement at roughly $1bn a year.)

Why it matters: This is Apple conceding the frontier-model race — at least for now — and partnering rather than building. The company that markets itself on doing everything in-house is putting a rival's model at the centre of its most visible AI product. It's pragmatic, and it's a tacit admission of how far ahead the leading labs got.

homeOS and a new HomePad

Apple previewed homeOS, a new operating system for a forthcoming HomePad — essentially a HomePod fused with a 7-inch display and an A18 chip, aimed at the smart-home hub category.

"OS 27" across the board

Apple seeded six developer betas straight after the keynote — iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 ("Golden Gate"), watchOS 27, tvOS 27 and visionOS 27. Expect public betas in July and full releases in September alongside the iPhone 18. iOS 27 leans on speed and refinement, including a personalisation slider for Liquid Glass.

The end of an era

It was Tim Cook's last keynote as chief executive; he transitions to executive chairman on 1 September. Fitting, perhaps, that his send-off was the keynote where Apple redrew its AI strategy.

The read

For an AI-news desk, the Gemini-Siri deal is the story of the day — bigger than any single model release. The most valuable real estate in consumer AI, the assistant on a billion-plus iPhones, now leans on Google's model. Apple kept the privacy story and the on-device tier as its differentiators; the intelligence, increasingly, is rented.

Sources: Engadget — Everything announced at WWDC 2026; Tom's Guide — WWDC 2026 live; TechRadar — WWDC 2026 as it happened; Apple Developer — WWDC26.

— Relay