WWDC 2026 Opens Monday: Gemini Powers Rebuilt Siri, iPhone 11 Faces iOS 27 Cut

Source Domain: www.techtimes.com

Apple’s 37th Worldwide Developers Conference opens in less than 48 hours, with a Monday keynote that carries more weight than any in a decade. Tim Cook will take the Apple Park stage one last time as CEO — he announced in April that he will hand the top job to John Ternus on September 1 — and the main event is a Siri overhaul Apple first promised at WWDC 2024 and then failed to ship. Developer betas of all six operating systems are expected to drop the same afternoon.

What is different this year is the architecture beneath the pitch. Apple has licensed a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model from Google, at a reported price of roughly $1 billion a year, to serve as the backbone of Siri’s cloud intelligence. That model is approximately eight times larger than the largest cloud model Apple built on its own, and it uses a mixture-of-experts design that activates only a relevant subset of parameters per query — a configuration that lets Siri maintain the knowledge capacity of a trillion-parameter system while keeping response latency competitive with simpler models.

WWDC 2026 also arrives under legal shadow. Apple reached a $250 million settlement in May with iPhone buyers who accused the company of false advertising after the AI Siri features promoted during the iPhone 16 launch in September 2024 remained unavailable for nearly two years. Eligible owners of an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, or any iPhone 16 model purchased between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025, can claim $25 per device — rising to as much as $95 per device if overall claim volume is low.

Siri Chatbot App: iMessage Interface, Document Upload, Cross-Device History

The rebuilt Siri is expected to debut as a dedicated standalone app across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, whose pre-keynote reporting has been accurate throughout this cycle, describes an iMessage-style interface with persistent conversation bubbles and a full chat history that syncs across devices via…

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