iOS 27 Apple Intelligence Features Explained: What Your iPhone Gets Today, What Waits, and What Has a Daily Limit

iOS 27 is out. Apple says the update started rolling out on Monday, September 14, 2026, free, alongside iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 and tvOS 27. For an everyday iPhone owner the AI part comes down to three lists: what you get today, what Apple has pushed to later this year, and which features now carry a daily usage limit that Apple says it will eventually charge to lift. This page is those three lists. The rebuilt Siri, the headline feature, has its own page.

Key Takeaways

• iOS 27 shipped September 14, 2026. It is a free update; install it from Settings > General > Software Update.
• The Apple Intelligence features need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer. Apple's launch post lists "iPhone 16 models or later, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max," plus iPhone Air, iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max, and iPhone Duo. An older phone offered iOS 27 gets none of this.
• Available today: Siri AI (beta, English), Write with Siri and automatic proofreading, Spatial Reframing and Extend in Photos, a photorealistic Image Playground, Safari tab topics and Notify Me price alerts, Call Context in Phone, plain-English event entry in Calendar, and describe-a-shortcut in Shortcuts.
• Waiting until later in 2026: the redesigned Health app, the Apple Watch Audio Intelligence features (Live Rewind, Siri Recap), SynthID labels on AI-edited images, and Siri AI in French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish (October).
• Daily limits are now in Apple's own words. The launch-day footnotes say Siri AI, the photo editing tools, Image Playground and the cloud models in Shortcuts "are subject to daily usage limits," and that "expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future." No price, no date.
• Two carve-outs by geography: Siri AI is not initially available in the EU on iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch (Mac and Vision Pro are fine), and "Siri AI and the other new Apple Intelligence features will not be available in China."
• Two features need a newer phone than the rest: expressive Siri voices and the more advanced dictation model run only on the iPhone 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max and iPhone Duo.
• The models were built with Google. Apple says they are "custom-built in collaboration with Google and its Gemini models."

What You Get Today on a Supported iPhone

Everything in this table is in Apple's September 14 press releases as available now, on any iPhone that runs Apple Intelligence, unless the last column says otherwise.

Two features are gated on hardware inside that list. Apple's footnote says "Apple's most powerful on-device model and the features it enables, like expressive voices and more advanced dictation," run only on "iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max," plus iPads with M4 or later and Macs with M3 or later that have at least 12 GB of memory, and Vision Pro (M5). Everything else in the table works on an iPhone 15 Pro. Our compatibility guide has the full device list.

Which Devices Get iOS 27's Apple Intelligence

Apple's launch post gives one list for all five platforms: "iPhone 16 models or later, iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPad mini (A17 Pro), iPad models with M1 or later, MacBook Neo (A18 Pro), Mac models with M1 or later, Apple Vision Pro, Apple Watch Series 9 or later, Apple Watch Ultra 2 or later, and Apple Watch SE 3 when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone nearby." The Apple Intelligence page adds iPhone Air, iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max and iPhone Duo.

Three more gates apply on every device, all from Apple's requirements page, which it rewrote and retitled How to get the next generation of Apple Intelligence on September 14, 2026: free storage for the on-device models, your device language and Siri language set to the same supported language, and no Apple Intelligence at all on a device bought in China mainland.

The storage figure moved in that rewrite, and it is now three numbers rather than one:

The same page carries the sixteen supported languages (English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean) and one line that is easy to miss if you are in Europe: the new Apple Intelligence features across apps -- the photo editing, the reimagined Image Playground, the Safari features -- are available in the EU on iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27 and visionOS 27. It is Siri AI specifically that the EU does not get on iPhone, iPad and Watch, not the rest of the release.

And one number this page has never carried: iOS 27 installs on far more iPhones than Apple Intelligence runs on. Apple's iOS 27 page lists the update as compatible back to the iPhone 11 and the iPhone SE (2nd generation) and later. If you are on an iPhone 12, 13 or 14, the update is yours and nothing on the list above is.

What Waits Until Later This Year

Apple was careful to separate launch day from "later this year" in both posts, and the later list is longer than the marketing suggests.

The Apple Watch items are worth reading carefully before buying a watch for them. Apple says Audio Intelligence "requires Apple Watch Series 12 or Apple Watch Ultra 4," which means a Series 11 on watchOS 27 gets none of it, and the two headline features are beta, late 2026, English, and outside the EU to start.

Apple has since published a dedicated Audio Intelligence support page, dated September 10, 2026, and it answers the question most people actually have, which is whether the watch is listening to them. Four things from it are worth knowing before the beta arrives:

• Every one of the four features is opt-in, and Apple names the switch for each: Sound Recognition in Settings > Accessibility > Sound & Name Recognition on the iPhone, Shazam in Settings > Smart Stack > Music Detection on the watch, and Live Rewind and Siri Recap in the Watch app on your iPhone.
• Live Rewind only runs when you double-press the Digital Crown. Apple: it "doesn't continue to transcribe in the background," it shows the last 15 seconds as text, and the snippet "disappears permanently from your Apple Watch approximately 30 seconds after the Apple Watch display dims" unless you save it.
• Siri Recap can be scheduled, and it expires. You can set it by time or location ("only at work," "never at night") and toggle it from Control Center. Summaries "auto-delete after 7 days if you don't save or export them."
• Apple says no audio recording exists. "Audio Intelligence features don't create audio recordings ... There is no recording to share, forward, or produce if requested by any party, because no recording exists." Audio goes into a protected buffer in the S11 chip's Secure Exclave and is deleted after processing; Siri Recap's final summary is written by Apple Foundation Models on Private Cloud Compute, and saved summaries are end-to-end encrypted through iCloud.

The Daily Limit, in Apple's Words

The line that changed on launch day is the tense. Apple's usage limits page, published September 9, said Apple "will implement usage limits" on Siri AI, the photo editing tools, Image Playground and the cloud models in Shortcuts. The September 14 press releases say those features "are subject to daily usage limits," that "daily limits may vary by feature, request complexity, system demand, system policies, and other factors," and that "expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future."

What that means in practice today: nothing you pay for, and no number Apple has published for how many requests a day is too many. What it means for planning: Apple has now said, twice, that the free version of these features has a ceiling and that going above it will cost money. The support page adds that a feature which hits its limit "will become available again after a time out period." If you already pay for an AI chatbot, nothing here replaces it yet; if you do not, Siri AI is the first free assistant built into the phone that can do what the free chatbots do, with a cap you cannot see.

The Rest of iOS 27, Briefly

Not every headline in the update is AI. Apple's platforms post lists a slider in Settings that lets you tune Liquid Glass "anywhere from ultraclear to fully tinted," apps that launch "up to 30 percent faster," photos that load "up to 70 percent faster after being taken," AirDrop "up to 80 percent faster," full-resolution iCloud Shared Albums that Android and Windows users can join, perimenopause and menopause support in Cycle Tracking, custom EQ for AirPods, a Flyover in Apple Maps that "combines aerial imagery with AI," and Workout Buddy on Apple Watch that works without your iPhone nearby and now speaks Spanish.

For parents, the child safety post covers the same update: a new child-account setup that starts with only the apps you choose, Ask to Browse (a child needs your approval before a new website opens in Safari), a redesigned Screen Time with daily allowances for entertainment, games and social media, and Communication Safety that now blocks gore or violent content in shared images and videos. Note that Siri AI itself is off-limits to under-13s regardless of those settings.

Should You Install iOS 27 Today

Install it if your iPhone is a 15 Pro or newer, you are outside the EU and China, and you use English. You get the whole list above for free, and the beta label on Siri AI is the only stated risk.

Install it anyway if your iPhone is older and offered the update, or you are in the EU. The performance work, the Liquid Glass slider, Shared Albums and the parental controls arrive with the update regardless; only the Apple Intelligence column stays empty. Do not expect Siri to change.

Wait a week if you rely on your phone for work and would rather let a .0 release settle. Nothing on this page is time-limited except the daily caps, and those apply whenever you start.

Do not buy a phone for any single feature here. The two hardware-gated extras are a Siri voice you can customise and a better dictation model. Everything else, Siri AI included, is identical on a three-year-old iPhone 15 Pro.

Corrections and Updates

September 15, 2026: this page said three gates came from Apple's requirements page, "which Apple has not changed since July 7, 2026," and put the storage requirement at "about 7 GB." Apple rewrote that page on September 14, 2026 -- the same day this article published -- retitled it "How to get the next generation of Apple Intelligence," and replaced the single storage figure with up to 8 GB on most supported devices, up to 14 GB on an iPhone 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max or iPhone Air, and 1.5 GB on Apple Watch. The gates section now carries the revised figures, the EU statement and the sixteen-language list from that page. Three things have also been added that this page did not have on publication: the iOS 27 OS compatibility floor (iPhone 11 and iPhone SE 2nd generation and later), Apple's positive statement that the non-Siri Apple Intelligence features are available in the EU, and the contents of Apple's Audio Intelligence support page, dated September 10, 2026, which was cited in Apple's launch footnotes but unread here.