What Apple's Next-Gen Apple Intelligence Actually Does on Your Mac

Apple previewed the next generation of Apple Intelligence at WWDC on June 8, and unlike the 2024 rollout, most of what was shown is already in a developer beta with a public beta due in July and a full release this fall alongside macOS 27. The headline is a rebuilt Siri, but the features that will change your day-to-day are scattered across Safari, Photos, Shortcuts, and Passwords. Here's what's real, what runs on your Mac versus in the cloud, and where the caveats are.

One structural change first: the new Apple Foundation Models were built in collaboration with Google's Gemini. That's the engine now, running partly on-device and partly on Apple's Private Cloud Compute. If you've been skeptical of Siri's competence, that collaboration is the reason to give this version a fresh look.

Safari picks up the most useful desktop features

If you keep 30 tabs open across three unrelated projects, Safari can now group them into topics on its own. Start pulling together travel research and it collects those tabs under one heading, then keeps sorting new ones as you open them. It's the kind of thing tab-management extensions have done for years, now built in.

Two others are more interesting. Notify Me watches a page for a change you describe — a restock, a price drop, a date being posted — and pings you when it happens, so you stop reloading the same page. And Describe an Extension generates a small custom Safari extension from a plain-language description. Apple's example is a button that saves and rates recipes; whether it handles anything more ambitious is the question to test in the beta.

Apple is explicit that Safari's intelligence runs without exposing your browsing data to anyone, including Apple. That claim is worth holding them to, but it's the right claim to be making.

Photos editing gets genuinely new tools

The standout is Spatial Reframe. It uses the spatial models Apple built for Vision Pro to let you drag a photo and shift the apparent camera position after the shot — and it only generates new pixels where the perspective actually changed, so the rest of the image stays as captured. Extend fills in beyond the frame to fix a crooked horizon or change aspect ratio without cropping. Clean Up, which already existed, gets better infill on complex scenes.

One thing to know before you post anything: any photo edited with these tools carries a hidden SynthID watermark marking it as AI-modified. That's a transparency feature, not a bug, but if you do client or editorial work where provenance matters, factor it in.

Shortcuts finally lowers its own barrier to entry

Shortcuts has always been powerful and always been fiddly to build. Describe a Shortcut takes a plain description and assembles the steps for you — set tomorrow's alarm based on your first calendar event, open a specific window arrangement when you dock your iPad, that sort of thing. You describe changes in words rather than dragging action blocks around. For anyone who bounced off Shortcuts because the editor felt like programming, this is the feature most likely to pull you back in.

Passwords does something genuinely agentic

The Passwords app already flags weak and compromised logins. Now it can fix them with a tap: using Apple Intelligence and Safari, it navigates to the site, signs in, and swaps in a strong password on your behalf. This is one of the few features here that takes real action on live accounts rather than just surfacing information, so I'd try it on a low-stakes login first and watch what it does before turning it loose on anything important.

The quieter system-wide changes

A handful of smaller additions will show up whether or not you go looking for them. Automatic proofreading offers spelling and grammar suggestions as you type across the system. File and folder naming suggestions are generated from contents — useful if your Downloads folder is a graveyard of document-final-v3.pdf files. Calendar lets you create or edit events by describing them in text. And Image Playground now does photorealistic output via Private Cloud Compute, also SynthID-watermarked.

Most of these communication features — the Mail and Messages suggestions, Call Context, the intelligent file naming — are English-only at launch, so international readers should check the fine print.

Will your Mac run it

Apple Intelligence in macOS 27 needs an M1 Mac or later. The most advanced on-device features are gated higher — Apple specifies an M3 Mac with at least 12GB of unified memory for those. If you're on an Intel Mac, this is where the road ends: macOS Tahoe was the final Intel release, so an Apple silicon machine is now the price of entry.

Two more limitations worth naming. Image generation and other server-backed features have daily usage caps because they lean on Private Cloud Compute; heavier access comes bundled with most iCloud+ tiers. And there are regional gaps — the new Siri AI is delayed in the EU on iOS and iPadOS due to the Digital Markets Act, and the new Apple Intelligence features aren't launching in China yet.

Where to start

If you're on an M-series Mac and want to try this before fall, enroll in the public beta through the Apple Beta Software Program at beta.apple.com when it opens in July — but do it on a secondary machine, not your daily driver. Once you're in, the single most worthwhile thing to test is Spatial Reframe on a photo you already know well: it's the feature that best shows whether Apple's "edit without destroying the original moment" pitch holds up, and it'll tell you fast how much you trust the rest.