Author: David Bernal Raspall

With iOS 27, Apple has launched Siri AI, a major evolution of our favorite assistant that relies on Apple Intelligence to do far more than it could before. The leap is simply enormous, both in its understanding of context and in its integration with the apps we already use. Want to try it? Let’s see what the requirements are to use Siri AI on iOS 27.

A device compatible with Apple Intelligence

Hardware is key. Siri AI works on all devices that support Apple Intelligence, so we need to have an iPhone 15 Pro or later. Some features, especially voice customization, are also reserved for the iPhone 17 Pro and later.

With Apple Intelligence, and therefore with Siri AI, all Macs with Apple silicon, iPads with an A17 Pro or later are also compatible, as are Apple Watches compatible with watchOS 27 and the Vision Pro.

English and minimum age requirements

During these first few weeks, Siri AI requires you to set your device to English. Apple has officially announced that it will expand language support in October to French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish, but for now, Siri AI is only available in English. In addition, the account must belong to a person aged 13 or older.

Region is also a requirement

Initial availability excludes the European Union and China depending on the country or region set on the Apple Account in Content and Purchases. In Europe, Apple says it’s working on a way that will allow it to protect our privacy and security as it rolls out Siri AI.

Given that the EU requires Apple to give any artificial intelligence the same level of access to the system that Siri AI has, its arrival on the continent depends on the progress of the regulatory talks and on how Apple manages to make the case for the need to maintain certain privacy standards for third-party services.

AppleCare One Family is now official. Available in the United States, the new plan covers up to six family members’ devices within a Family Sharing group for a monthly fee. Want to try it? We can now sign up for it from our iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

Apple Support Download

One AppleCare fee for the whole family

AppleCare One Family costs $49.99 a month and includes AppleCare+, with protection against accidental damage and coverage for theft or loss for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, for up to six family members. Under the plan, we get up to six annual claims for theft or loss, shared across all members.

When we activate the plan, devices with AppleCare and those purchased during the last 60 days are added automatically. We can also add other devices manually, after they pass the required check. These must be up to four years old, while in the case of AirPods and Beats, the limit is set at one year.

The coverage extends to practically all of Apple’s product lineup, though with a maximum of six Apple Vision Pro per subscription. The devices remain covered as long as we keep the subscription active and they connect to Apple’s servers at least once every 12 months.

AppleCare One Family complements AppleCare One, which starts at $19.99 a month for three devices and lets us add devices for $5.99 a month each. It also works with the new Apple Upgrade system, which lets us upgrade our device regularly while we pay for a subscription for the current one. With AppleCare One Family Apple offers broad, predictable coverage for the whole family. An option that can be far more appealing than several separate insurance policies when it comes to keeping our devices protected.

XChat, X’s standalone messaging app, has disappeared from the App Store and Google Play just a few months after its launch. The app launched as a separate extension of X’s direct messages, it was even presented as a replacement for that feature, although they have remained available in the main app, and now it has simply vanished. This is what we know.

XChat disappears from the two main app stores

App Store Download

XChat Download

According to 9to5Mac, XChat disappeared first from the App Store and, shortly afterward, also from the Google Play Store. The removal, as far as we know, comes directly from the app’s developer, according to a source familiar with the situation, leaving Apple and Google out of the decision.

XChat launched earlier this year as a standalone version of X’s direct messages, a feature that has become more prominent on the platform. It offered one-on-one and group chats, disappearing messages and end-to-end encryption.

Everything points to a change in strategy

X has kept messaging inside its main application all this time, where even today we can still access our conversations. The disappearance of the dedicated XChat app, therefore, fits with a possible streamlining of the service, once again bringing everything back into one app and/or abandoning the possible plans to separate the social network from its messaging side.

If Elon Musk wanted to make X a superapp, one that offered all its services under a single umbrella, the disappearance of XChat makes sense. While we may be left wondering whether it made sense as a dedicated app in the first place, we’ll have to wait to see how the company’s plans evolve to learn more.

Today, September 14, iOS 27 arrives, the update Apple presented in June and that takes our iPhones to another level thanks, mainly, to the improvements in Apple Intelligence and the new Siri AI. The list of new features is long, so let’s talk about when it’ll officially be available and what to try as soon as we’ve updated.

What time will iOS 27 be available on our iPhones

Apple usually releases its major updates at 10:00 in California, so in mainland Spain we expect iOS 27 at around 19:00.

iTunes Download

We’re talking about 13:00 in New York, 11:00 in Mexico City, 14:00 in Buenos Aires and São Paulo, and 18:00 in London. Further east, it’ll be 22:30 in New Delhi, 02:00 on September 15 in Tokyo, and 03:00 on the 15th in Sydney.

iOS 27 supports a wide range of devices, going back to the iPhone 11, and it can speed up our iPhones significantly, even the oldest ones. When the time comes, we just have to go into Settings > General > Software Update to install the update.

What new features should we try first?

Once we’ve finished the installation, the best thing is to take a couple of seconds to see how much faster our apps open and how smooth the system feels. After that, we can look at Apple Intelligence, which is integrated into Calendar, Messages, and also Photos, where we can extend the edges of a photo or reframe it after taking it.

Siri AI, meanwhile, begins its rollout in English, so only if we have our iPhone set to U.S. English will we be able to activate it. Apple has stated that in just a few weeks, in October, it will expand to the other languages. Keep in mind, though, that it won’t be available within the European Union.

In Messages, you get contextual suggestions and several major sync improvements, while if we use the iPhone in the car, CarPlay gets major changes in navigation, playback, and Siri AI.

With the performance gains and even deeper Apple Intelligence integration, we’re getting an especially important update. It lets you do more with your devices, more easily.

With the introduction of the iPhone Duo, the question is: if you already have an iPad, where does this new iPhone fit? Craig Federighi has explained how Apple sees them coexisting and the answer depends a lot on how we use each device.

An iPhone that can take the place of the iPad mini

In an interview with Marques Brownlee, Federighi compares the relationship between the iPhone Duo and the iPad with the relationship between the iPad and the Mac. Over time we figure out which device to use at any given time. Apple expects something similar with the iPhone Duo, whose 7.6-inch inner screen feels very much like carrying a small iPad in your pocket at all times.

Federighi specifically mentions the iPad mini, and he puts it this way:

“From what I’ve seen in my own use over the last few months, if I start on the iPhone and then sit down and want to go a little deeper into some content, read something, this device is extraordinary for opening it up, often vertically, in fact, and moving through the content. It’s fantastic. I think people will go on finding the way to use it that fits them best.”

“But I agree that, for someone who maybe had an iPad mini or something like it, this device can very often take that place.”

Software makes the difference

Apple has designed iOS 27 around the iPhone Duo’s new physical format. As we saw when comparing the iPhone Duo with the iPhone 18 Pro, the interface takes advantage of each orientation, of each opening angle. Federighi highlights this work: it was designed from the ground up with two-screen use in mind.

That’s the key. The Duo can take on many of the iPad mini’s uses, while the iPad keeps its place for the tasks it does better. With iOS 27 and its new capabilities, Apple lets us do more, and the clearest example of that change is in the iPhone Duo.

The new Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 arrive with Audio Intelligence to turn ambient sound into useful information. Live Rewind and Siri Recap rely on the new S11 chips and on Apple Intelligence to let the watch listen continuously when these features are enabled, but what about our privacy? Apple has detailed how it protects our privacy.

With Siri Recap, you’ll get a summary of the conversation

Siri Recap can take notes on our conversations and generate a summary with the title and key points. As reported by MacRumors, Apple processes the audio inside a hardware-isolated environment and the system itself deletes it after analyzing it. Then, a condensed version is sent to Private Cloud Compute, where Apple’s models prepare the final summary.

The privacy architecture of Apple Intelligence makes perfect sense here, because the audio is physically inaccessible to the operating system, apps, and Apple, while summaries synced to the Siri app via iCloud are end-to-end encrypted. Siri Recap must, of course, be explicitly enabled.

Live Rewind lets us retrieve the last 15 seconds of what we’ve heard

By double-pressing the Digital Crown, we can retrieve a text-only version of the last 15 seconds of a conversation. To prevent it from being activated secretly, Apple explains that the watch emits a sound, even when it’s in silent mode, and shows an animation next to the microphone indicator when this feature is activated.

The text, unless we decide to save it in the Siri app, disappears 30 seconds after you lower your wrist, while the audio never becomes available.

Audio Intelligence offers useful features with very specific privacy controls. Just as we ourselves could take notes during a conversation or jot down what was just said, the Apple Watch can do exactly that, and nothing more, for us. Privacy and functionality can indeed go hand in hand.

Apple is going to bring Apple Intelligence to the places where it can make the most sense: our health. With iOS 27, the Health app turns data from our iPhone and Apple Watch into clear, easy-to-understand insights. As Apple Intelligence evolves in iOS 27, soon we’ll go from checking metrics to receiving truly personalized guidance.

Insights and Readiness: our data gains context

Insights summarizes our sleep, heart, and activity data, while Personal Guidance adapts recommendations to our activity. Readiness, meanwhile, combines activity, vitals, and rest into a score from 0 to 10 to recommend anything from rest to going all out. 

With the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, heart rate is measured every five seconds and HRV gains more detail, so they’ll benefit the most from information that can change during the day and clearly guide us on what to do.

Longevity and Health Age look at the long term

Longevity brings together heart, sleep, mental well-being, movement, metabolism, hearing, and nutrition data to see how we’re doing over the long term. 

Similarly, Health Age compares our VO2 max, resting heart rate, HRV, sleep, and biomarkers with our age to indicate our body’s biological age.

Tests, analysis, and more tracking

Soon we’ll be able to add tests and, in the United States, buy a Quest lab test with more than 50 biomarkers for $119. Meanwhile, using the iPhone camera, the Health app will let us assess our VO2 max, strength, balance, and flexibility, all with local, on-demand processing.

The new Health app will launch at the end of 2026, first in U.S. English, and will progressively expand from there. A huge step that turns our data into a much more complete picture of our health and of how to take care of it.

Apple has just taken a huge leap with the unveiling of the Apple Watch Series 12 and the Apple Watch Ultra 4. After more than one version focused on refining battery life and performance, the new models bring improvements in power, battery life, and features, and build on all of that to focus on health.

Strava Download

Much more health information throughout the day

The new Health Sensing System now measures our heart rate every five seconds and increases our HRV sampling by up to 24 times. On top of that, there’s daytime vitals tracking, the new Readiness app, and a new VO2 Max test that gives us immediate results. 

We’re moving from logging our activity to truly understanding it, and building on what we’ve already seen in watchOS 26 and confirming the rumor about continuous heart-rate monitoring, our health data takes a step forward. And it does so, to a large extent, thanks to the power of the new chips in the Series 12 and the Ultra 4, which lets us analyze information more and more quickly, including what we ask Siri for.

Siri can now help us remember what we just heard

The S11 chip also adds Audio Intelligence. Here, Live Rewind lets us pull up a transcript of the last 15 seconds of a conversation with a double press of the Digital Crown, while Siri Recap can create titles, summaries, and key points from conversations so we can look at them later. 

The Apple Watch gives us genuinely useful contextual memory, always under our complete control, and adds automatic recognition of sounds and music through Shazam.

Battery life, battery life, and battery life, above all on the Ultra 4

Compared with the Ultra 3‘s 42 hours, the Ultra 4 reaches up to 50 hours of daily use, 84 in low power mode, and up to 45 hours while recording outdoor workouts. Meanwhile, the Series 12 maintains 24 hours of battery life and now reaches 10 hours of outdoor exercise. 

Compared to the Apple Watch Series 10 and then the Series 11, the evolution is huge. Apple turns the watch into a far more capable health platform, with more context, more battery life, and more intelligence that, thanks to the power of the new chips, we get right on our wrist.

Apple has just unveiled one of the most interesting iPhone lineups of recent years: the iPhone 18 Pro and the company’s first foldable, the iPhone Duo, are here. They are very different phones, and yet similar in some ways, so we’re going to compare the two models, as far as possible.

Two ways of understanding the iPhone

The iPhone Duo comes in a foldable form factor with a 5.4-inch outer screen and a 7.6-inch inner one. The iPhone 18 Pro, meanwhile, sticks with the familiar 6.3-inch display. Thus, when folded, the iPhone Duo has 90% of the iPhone 18 Pro’s screen size, but thanks to the aspect ratio, the amount of information we can see is very similar. 

On the Duo the Dock, the menus and even the connectivity and battery indicators shift to the right edge of the device. This leaves the full main screen area for content, whether in vertical format or horizontal.

Once we open the Duo the difference is simply astonishing. Because of its proportions and dimensions, it’s basically like using an iPad mini screen, which has a 7.9-inch screen. Multitasking, use in landscape, and the flexibility of using it half-folded, half-open, right side up and upside down make the iPhone fit around us instead of the other way around.

Cameras, battery and features

In photography, the iPhone 18 Pro is clearly the more complete option thanks to its 48 MP main camera with variable aperture and the presence of the telephoto lens. The Duo, for its part, offers Split View when taking photos and special landscape and portrait views depending on how we fold the screen.

Support for the Apple Pencil USB-C is another big difference. With its iPad-like focus we can use Apple’s stylus on both the inner screen and the outer one.

Battery life goes up to 44 hours of continuous video playback with the Duo’s outer screen, 31 hours with the inner one and 36 hours on the Pro.

Price and availability

The iPhone Duo starts at €2,339 or $1,999, compared with €1,469 or $1,199 for the iPhone 18 Pro. Pre-orders for the former will open October 16, while those for the latter will open this Saturday the 12th.

All in all, Apple positions each model differently and targets a different audience: the Pro prioritizes photography and performance, while the Duo stands out for its versatility and its new way to use the iPhone.

Apple has unveiled the iPhone Duo, its first foldable iPhone. After months of rumors, speculation and educated guesses, we finally know exactly what this new iPhone will be like. An iPhone that redefines what an iPhone can be. Let’s talk about all the new features.

Two displays and a very carefully designed hinge

The iPhone Duo features a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner display, both with the same aspect ratio. Apple uses titanium —necessary given the device’s extreme thinness— and a hinge with more than 100 components in its design. By design, the display crease is practically imperceptible, but Apple also uses a nanotextured finish that greatly reduces the visibility of the crease from any angle.

On the software side, iOS 27.1 adapts apps to the open, closed, or partially folded format and lets us use two apps at the same time. With the new vertical dock and the controls on the side, near the thumb, the interface takes full advantage of the new design and expands what iOS 27 can do.

A20 Pro, dual battery, and new cameras

The iPhone Duo packs the same A20 Pro chip as in the iPhone 18 Pro, along with the new C2 modem. Each half of the iPhone also houses a battery, although iOS manages them as a single battery, delivering up to 44 hours of video playback on the outer display.

The main camera and the ultra-wide are 48 MP, and the outer front camera is 12 MP. The Smart Take, Duo Preview, and FaceTime Duo features make great use of the two displays, letting you see more people on a call or frame selfies with the main cameras, among other things.

The iPhone Duo starts at €2,339 or $1,999 with 256 GB and, if you pre-order it on October 16, it will ship to early buyers and be in stores on October 23.