At WWDC, Apple finally unveiled the long-delayed, genuinely rebuilt version of Siri — a more context-aware assistant that can understand what’s on your screen, use your personal data across apps, respond more naturally, and work both inside iOS/macOS and as a standalone Siri AI app.
The prospect of having a more intelligent Siri to talk to is hugely exciting, but there were plenty of other smaller announcements made at the recent Worldwide Developers Conference that got overshadowed by the big Siri AI reveal.
In fact, I might actually be more excited about these features than the new Siri. Here’s what I’m looking forward to most:
1. AI-powered Safari tab organization
If you’re anything like me, your Safari browser is a shocking mess of tabs. I try to close them, but they seem to breed like rabbits whenever I’ve been using Safari for more than 10 seconds. In macOS Golden Gate, Safari can use Apple Intelligence to group your open tabs into relevant topics without you having to do anything.
So, if you’re planning a trip, all your open tabs related to that topic will be pulled together into a single group. “Topics” is the word Apple uses to describe this organization. In the case of your holiday, it would likely pick a name for the topic — probably the destination — and all the open tabs would then be accessible from within that topic.
2. Natural-language Shortcuts
Shortcuts already exist in macOS, and they’re awesome. Shortcuts in macOS let you automate repeated actions on your Mac, either with a click, a keyboard shortcut, Siri, the menu bar, Finder, the Share Sheet, or sometimes from inside apps. You can use them to resize images, extract text from PDFs, create calendar events or reminders, and much more.
They can, however, be a little tricky to create. That’s going to change with the new version of Apple’s software. macOS Golden Gate is going to use Apple Intelligence to make creating shortcuts easier. Instead of building fiddly automations manually, you can simply describe what you want using natural language and Shortcuts will build it for you.
3. Improved Photos editing
Clean Up, Extend, and Reframe are coming to Photos to make editing pictures on your iPhone a whole lot easier, thanks to Apple’s on-device AI models, which can enhance your photos in ways that wouldn’t be possible without AI.
First, Clean Up is already part of Photos and is useful for removing distractions, but it’s getting a big upgrade in the next OS. The old version could get tripped up by busy backgrounds and complex textures, but the new version is much more adaptable and works on old photos and photos not taken on an iPhone.
Next, Extend is a way to add more background to any photo, or adjust its aspect ratio. Apple Intelligence simply fills in the new areas after the fact.
Finally, Reframe looks like a very powerful way of improving your photos. It uses Apple’s on-device AI model so you can change the angle a photo was taken at — just drag your finger around on the image in real time to change the angle the camera was pointing in. It looks a little bit like magic, and it’s very cool.
4. AirPods custom EQ
This may look like a small feature for AirPods owners, but it’s a big quality-of-life win, especially if you’ve ever wished that AirPods had more personal sound control, so you can adjust the sound to your tastes, not Apple’s.
So what does it do? Well, you’re able to adjust bass, mids, and treble, although it doesn’t give you exact frequencies or a numerical scale showing how much you’re affecting them. The good news is that older models like the AirPods Pro 2 will support Custom EQ, as well as the newer AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods 4.
5. Smarter parental controls
I don’t know if these features are “smarter” or simply “less confusing,” but I’m all in. Having tried to set up parental controls before for my children on iPhones, I’m in favor of anything that makes the process less tortuous.
Features like the new Ask to Browse, where a child can ask if they can look at a particular website before you grant permission, sound like they’re just making everything easier for the parent to set up. Ask to Buy is another feature that sounds self-explanatory, and exactly what busy parents need. Time Allowances for entertainment, games, and social media also look great and give a handy starting point for concerned parents.
These aren’t the AI features you’re looking for
A lot of the new features I’m looking forward to here use AI, but they are benefit-first features rather than another excuse to use AI for something nobody actually wants. Siri AI may well be a great step forward for the next generation of Apple devices, but there are plenty of other ways that AI is going to benefit Apple users too — and some of them might turn out to be more useful in everyday life than talking to Siri.
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