Apple ships macOS 27 with the new Siri gated behind an English-only beta switch

Press Command-Shift-Space and the focused window becomes context for Siri; press Command-Shift-6 and a crosshair lets you grab part of it, with follow-on shortcuts like "add to contact" and "look up location" ^[11][12]. TechCrunch's reviewer used the Spotlight side of the same assistant to pull up membership IDs without opening files and to check the embargo date on a story in progress ^[14]. "While I don't find Spotlight as advanced as the highly extensible Mac productivity tool Raycast, it's still much better than before," TechCrunch wrote ^[15].

What people will use in week one is the reading half: a question typed into Spotlight, now scopable to Applications, Files, Actions or Clipboard, or a block of text selected and sent off to be proofread or rewritten ^[13][16]. A slide will promise the acting half, an assistant that does things inside apps ^[4].

Both halves sit behind a switch. The Verge reports that Siri AI launches as a beta and is available only in English ^[3]. Apple wrote in its release notes that "Siri AI is rolling out to users, and you can get started by turning it on in Settings" ^[10]. Nothing changes on Monday for the user who installs the update and never opens Settings.

The index is what an approval conversation will be about. 9to5Mac reports that the new Siri uses a new per-device indexing system for the user's data and lives in both Spotlight and the new Siri app ^[6]. Apple wrote that it "can draw on personal context to find things across your messages, mail, photos, and more" ^[9].

On what is underneath it, 9to5Mac says the revamped Siri was developed in partnership with Google's Gemini model ^[5]. Apple's release notes describe Siri AI as powered by Apple Intelligence ^[22]. Of the four release-day accounts, one names Gemini ^[1]. Anyone writing model provenance into an internal policy this week is sourcing it to a single publisher.

App actions need somebody else to move first. 9to5Mac says the new Siri can interact with native and third-party apps and take actions directly, taking app integration significantly further than the old Siri, and that developers "need to expose their" apps for it, without specifying what they have to expose ^[8]. The same report says beta feedback was overwhelmingly positive even though the assistant "can sometimes be slower than users accustomed to other LLM-powered AI assistants expect" ^[7].

The surface splits two ways: whether Siri is reading or acting, and whether the context comes off the local machine or off the web. Reading the local index is where TechCrunch's successes came from, and the decisions there are the Settings toggle and what the index covers ^[14][6]. Acting inside third-party apps waits on developers, so it cannot be scheduled ^[8]. Reading from the web is the quadrant whose answers change when the model behind them changes. Acting on web context is the case where a wrong answer becomes a wrong calendar entry: Visual Intelligence can add events from what is onscreen ^[11].

The update needs Apple silicon and does not install on Intel Macs, whose last big update was macOS Tahoe ^[1][2]. TechCrunch lists support back to the 2020 Apple silicon MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, the 2020 Mac mini, the 2021 iMac, the 2022 Mac Studio, the 2023 Mac Pro and the MacBook Neo ^[17].