Apple unveils a Siri overhaul and a foldable iPhone

Apple unveiled an overhauled Siri, branded Siri AI, alongside its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo. The new Siri gains “onscreen awareness” to act on whatever is currently displayed, personal-context search across a user’s apps and messages, and a dedicated Siri app with synced conversation history — the assistant becoming, in Apple’s framing, a system-wide agent rather than a voice command layer. It rolls out with iOS 27 across the iPhone 18 line and the iPhone Duo, a device with a 5.4-inch outer display and a 7.6-inch inner display built around the A20 Pro chip, priced from $1,999 and shipping 23 October.

Siri AI will not be available at launch in the European Union. Apple had already said in June that the feature would be delayed there under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, after regulators declined the company’s proposed arrangement — a “Trusted System Agent” intermediary meant to let rival assistants access the same device capabilities as Siri over an 18-month rollout. The September announcement reiterated that EU users of iOS, iPadOS and watchOS would go without Siri AI and any feature depending on it, with Apple saying only that it hoped to find “a path forward” and giving no timeline.

The dispute extends a pattern from Apple Intelligence’s earlier EU rollout: regulatory friction over how a platform-level AI assistant can grant or withhold access to third parties has become a recurring cost of shipping AI features inside a gatekeeper platform, with EU users repeatedly receiving capabilities later, or not at all, compared with the rest of the world.