THE MACSPARKY DISPATCH

Hi Friend,

I got beta access to the new Siri AI and the first thing I asked was, “Can you check the weather for where I’ll be this weekend?”.

I’m going on vacation. I never told Siri that. It read my calendar, figured out I’d be in Hawaii, and gave me the forecast. Old Siri would have read me the weather at home, or handed me a list of web results and wished me luck.

That one answer tells you most of what changed.

For years, the truth is that Siri made a fine kitchen timer and not much else. That’s no longer true. I spent my first hour with the new Siri running it through real tasks, and it handled a lot of them.

I asked it to add a calendar event. It asked me which calendar I wanted it on. That’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of small thing old Siri never bothered with.

I keep an Apple Note about putting solar on my house. I asked Siri to find it, and it did. Then I asked whether California’s solar laws have changed since I wrote that note. It went and researched the answer, then told me how they’d changed. It found my note and then updated it from the web, all without me touching the keyboard. That’s new.

The one that got me was the email task. I told it I’d ordered some shirts a while back and asked it to find the email. I specifically didn’t tell it the vendor name. Siri found it, REI. Then I asked it to take that receipt and build an Apple Note with all the transaction details. Done. Two apps, one spoken request, no typing.

It wasn’t all wins. I asked it to set a reminder to research solar again next weekend, then asked it to drop a link to the Apple Note into that reminder. The reminder showed up. The link didn’t. A few of my requests just stalled out. It got stuck.

World knowledge held up better than I expected too. It knew the Dodgers lost, when they play next, and who’s pitching tomorrow. The old Siri would have shrugged and offered me a search.

This is a real improvement, and I want to be clear about that. Siri with context is a smarter Siri, and you can see the shape of it in these early tests. The weather answer worked because Siri could see my calendar. The note answer worked because Siri could see my notes. Context is the whole game.

Which is exactly what I can’t stop thinking about. How much context will Apple actually allow?

Letting Siri read your calendar and your notes is one thing. Those are Apple’s own apps, on Apple’s own terms. The harder question is what happens with everybody else’s apps. The tasks that impressed me most were the ones that crossed from one app to another. If that only ever works inside Apple’s walls, it’s useful. If outside developers get real, deep access to the same context, it’s a different product entirely.

Developer buy-in has never been a given with Apple. They’ll need to hand developers a reason to show up, and developers will need to trust that the floor won’t move under them in two years. I don’t have an answer there yet. We’re just days past the keynote. Nobody has had time to push on the edges.

Part of me also feels like this is Apple arriving where they should have been a couple of years ago. Context-aware assistance isn’t new. I run a whole Field Guide on building an AI assistant with deep personal context, and what I can do there runs circles around what Siri pulled off for me today. I didn’t expect Apple to match a full Cowork-level harness on day one, and they didn’t. But the gap is real, and it’s worth saying out loud.

So what I’m watching now is whether Apple keeps its foot on the gas. What shipped today is a good start. My worry is that “good start” quietly turns into “good enough,” and the effort slows down right when it should be accelerating. Context-aware assistance isn’t a feature you ship once and check off. It’s something you keep pushing, year after year, app by app.

I hope they push. The bones here are good, and that’s not something I’ve been able to say about Siri … well … ever. For the first time, I’m curious what it’ll be able to do next month instead of resigned to what it can’t do today.

Your pal,
David
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This Week in MacSparky Labs

WWDC landed this week, and we spent it together inside the Labs pulling apart everything Apple announced. A few of the things members got this week:

• A bonus meetup minutes after the keynote, while everyone was still reacting in real time
• My first-look video on the new Siri, with the real response times left in
• Our monthly Labs meetup on the WWDC announcements
• A hands-on video testing the new Apple Photos AI editing in iOS 27
• A deep dive into the summer betas, and what's worth installing where
• This week's Lab Report podcast on what Apple actually shipped

That was a single week, and the Labs run like this every week. If that sounds like your kind of place, come join us.

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This week's newsletter is sponsored by Eternal Storms Software.

My thanks to Eternal Storms Software for sponsoring MacSparky this week. This small Vienna shop has been building thoughtful Mac utilities for years, and instead of spotlighting one app this time, they're offering MacSparky readers 25% off their top utilities altogether with the code MACSPARKY25.

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