iOS 27 ships Monday: Apple bets Siri on Google Gemini, EU locked out

iOS 27 arrives Monday with a Siri that can actually do what the old one could only pretend to. The new assistant reads your emails, checks your calendar, executes actions across multiple apps, and holds a conversation through more than 20 turns without losing context. None of that describes any Siri that shipped before this week.

What makes it work is Google. Apple signed a multi-year deal reportedly worth around $1 billion a year to run Siri AI on Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, a model with eight times the parameter count of Apple’s own in-house AI. User data travels through Apple’s Private Cloud Compute — meaning Google processes queries without seeing who sent them. The partnership is architecturally unusual from a company that builds its own chips, software, and AI, and it says something candid about where Apple estimated its own models stood.

The update reaches every iPhone as iOS 27 for free. Siri AI itself is more selective: the minimum is an iPhone 15 Pro, Apple’s 2023 flagship. That covers roughly three and a half generations of devices — about 150 to 200 million handsets. Earlier iPhones get iOS 27’s other improvements, including redesigned notifications and new child safety filtering, but Siri remains unchanged for them. iPhone 17 models announced this week carry a larger on-device model for faster, more capable Siri AI responses.

In daily use, the new Siri connects to your calendar and inbox once you grant permission. You can ask it to find last week’s email about a dentist appointment and move it, and it will attempt to handle that across two apps in a single request. On macOS 27, Siri AI integrates into Spotlight, turning the search bar into something closer to a task runner. Apple says the assistant sustains coherent dialogue across more than 20 consecutive turns.

The real shape of the launch becomes clear in its exclusions. Siri AI arrives in English only; French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish versions follow in October. Mandarin has no confirmed timeline. The most significant gap is European: Apple will not activate Siri AI on any iPhone or iPad in the European Union.

That exclusion comes from a dispute over the Digital Markets Act. The DMA requires Apple to give rival AI assistants the same deep device access it reserves for Siri. Apple argued it could not do this safely and proposed a ‘Trusted System Agent’ framework as a compromise. The European Commission rejected the offer, and Apple chose to ship without the EU. Mac users in the EU do receive Siri AI, because macOS falls under different DMA enforcement rules. For iPhones and iPads in Europe, Apple has given no timeline.

iOS 27 is available as a free download from Monday, September 14. The iPhone 17 lineup — built around the hardware designed for the larger on-device Siri model — goes on sale October 23. Apple’s first bet that Siri can matter will be tested in the markets where it is actually allowed to run.

Tags: Apple, smartphones, Siri, Digital Markets Act, iOS 27, Google Gemini