Apple's rebuilt Siri finally has a date. It also has a meter.

Apple spent its 9 September event on hardware, but the line that matters for anyone tracking AI came near the end of the press release: iOS 27 arrives on Monday 14 September, and Siri AI arrives with it. The assistant Apple has been promising and postponing for years finally has a ship date — and a long list of conditions attached to it.

The capabilities themselves are not new information. Siri AI has been in the iOS 27 betas for months and anyone who wanted to try it has. What Apple disclosed today is the commercial and geographic shape of the product: which languages, which countries, and how much of it you get before Apple starts charging.

What Siri AI is

Apple describes Siri AI as "an entirely new version of Siri powered by Apple Intelligence." In Apple's own summary it can draw on personal context across messages, emails and photos; use onscreen awareness to act on whatever you are looking at; answer open-ended questions "about virtually any topic," referencing information online for current answers; run inside the Camera app as Siri mode; and compose text anywhere you type via Write with Siri. There is now a dedicated Siri app that keeps conversations in one place and syncs them across devices. Processing is split between the device and Private Cloud Compute, Apple's server-side enclave.

Functionally, this is Apple arriving at the assistant pattern the rest of the industry settled on around two years ago. Apple publishes no benchmarks for Siri AI and makes no claim about model quality relative to anyone else, so there is nothing to compare. The bet is not on the model — it is on the index. Apple's developer documentation describes App Intents entity schemas contributing app content to Spotlight's semantic index, which is the mechanism that is supposed to let the assistant find the email about the lease without you searching for it. Whether that grounding is good enough to beat a general chatbot at personal retrieval is the question the beta will answer.

The conditions

• Beta. Siri AI ships labelled beta across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27 and visionOS 27. Apple gives no date for that label coming off.
• English first. Launch is English-only, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish arriving in October. The broader Apple Intelligence feature set supports 16 languages from 14 September.
• Not everywhere. Apple's iOS feature-availability page lists Siri AI as "not available in the China mainland and the European Union." A footnote on the same page narrows the European exclusion: Siri AI "will not be initially available in the EU on iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS." Apple does not explain why in either the press release or the availability page.
• Metered. Server-side features carry daily usage limits, with expanded access to be sold later.

That last item is the genuinely new part, and Apple's own wording is worth reading closely: "Certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits, including but not limited to Siri AI, Intelligent Photo Editing Tools, Image Playground, and AFM 3 Cloud models in Shortcuts. Daily limits may vary by feature, request complexity, system demand, system policies, and other factors. Expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future."

No number is published, and the limits are explicitly elastic — they move with system demand and with how hard your request is. Apple's own materials now state plainly that the cloud half is rationed and will eventually be something you buy. Note also that AFM 3 cloud models in Shortcuts sit inside the capped list, which means automations people build on Apple's own cloud models share the ceiling with the assistant.

Silicon, and a hardware answer to synthetic images

The iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max carry A20 Pro, built on a 2-nanometre process. Apple's figures: a new Dual 16-core Neural Engine with 32 cores in total and "double the AI processing power of A19 Pro," 50 percent more memory bandwidth than A19 Pro, and a 7-core GPU up to 40 percent faster. These are Apple's own numbers from its own testing; no independent measurement exists yet. The practical read is that Apple keeps enlarging the on-device budget at roughly the rate it needs to keep more of the assistant off its servers — which, given the caps above, is now a cost question as much as a privacy one.

The more interesting AI feature on the phone may be Apple Reference Image. Apple says the new Main camera sensor "can sign every pixel it sees"; in Reference mode the camera captures signed sensor data, and Private Cloud Compute develops it into what Apple calls an unalterable reference image, viewable in Photos alongside the edited version like a digital negative. Apple is shipping a Reference Image API in iOS, iPadOS and macOS 27 so third-party apps can display them, and says image metadata plus "upcoming support for the SynthID standard" will help users identify pictures generated or edited with AI.

Two things stand out. Apple is attacking provenance from the capture end — attesting what the sensor saw — rather than only labelling what a generator produced, which is the harder and more useful half of the problem. And it is adopting SynthID, Google's watermarking scheme, rather than launching a competing standard. The Verge reports that Reference Image will not be present at launch in the European Union, though users there will be able to develop and view reference images in iOS, iPadOS and macOS 27.

What changes for developers

Apple's developer documentation describes the Foundation Models framework as a Swift API reaching Apple's models both on device and in Private Cloud Compute, plus "any model provider with a Swift package conforming to the Language Model protocol." It supports multimodal prompts, Dynamic Profiles for swapping models, tools and instructions inside a continuous session, and an Evaluations framework for testing behaviour. In other words, on Apple platforms model choice is a runtime decision rather than a build-time one.

The caveat follows directly from the caps. An app that leans on Apple's cloud models inherits a ceiling it does not control and cannot see, defined by factors including "system demand." If you are building on the framework, the on-device path is not just the private option — it is the one with predictable availability, and it is worth designing the fallback before the metering becomes a paid tier.

What to watch

Three things, none of which Apple answered today: when the beta label comes off, what the paid tier for expanded cloud access actually costs, and whether the EU exclusion is temporary. iPhone 18 Pro pre-orders open 12 September at $1,199, with the Pro Max at $1,299 and both in stores 18 September. The software is free on Monday. The intelligence, eventually, will not be.