Hands-on With iOS and iPadOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, and Siri AI

A return to form and function Image: Apple. In 2009, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Bertrand Serlet walked onstage and presented an audacious claim: “Zero New Features,” the slide read. Serlet, Apple’s then-senior vice president of software engineering, was introducing OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, a release Apple claimed would emphasize small “refinements” and major updates to internal technologies. But to the public, it really was “Zero New Features” — a quote forever cemented in Apple’s modern history as one of its most notable. As Serlet later explained, OS X Snow Leopard had plenty of new features, most notably Grand Central Dispatch, which brought multithreading to OS X for the first time. OS X Snow Leopard established the architecture on which all personal computers, including the iPhone and the Apple Watch, would eventually rely. Its stability solidified Apple’s reputation for reliable, high-quality software, so much so that the coming decade of pervasive, sloppily…