Siri AI Reviews--David Pogue's 125 Tests, Ars Technica, Six Colors and 9to5Mac Agree the macOS 27 Siri Beta Works, and Name What It Still Will Not Do

Siri AI shipped on September 14 in macOS 27 Golden Gate and iOS 27, and the first week's reviews agree on its shape: the new assistant answers general questions well, finds things inside Apple's own apps most of the time, and stops at the apps and settings it cannot reach. David Pogue put 125 requests through it and published every one with a mark. Here is what those reviews found, set against Apple's September 14 announcement.

Pogue ran 125 requests and published every one

David Pogue, whose iLife '05 Missing Manual we noted on this date in 2005, wrote the missing manual for Siri AI on September 17: 125 tests across personal information, phone and app control, Internet queries, Visual Intelligence and Screen Intelligence, each printed with a check or a cross. His verdict is his subtitle, "It's a phone-changer"; Siri "failed a handful of times" and "a few other times, it absolutely blew me away." We counted his marks: 112 checks, 10 crosses and three requests marked both. The crosses cluster where Siri cannot reach. The Health app "is not yet Siri-fied," so two health requests miss. "Call an Uber" only offers to open the app and "Pay Jeffrey $20 with Venmo" fails, because, Pogue says, Siri AI "requires software companies to use different techniques." On the Mac a right-click on a folder produced the total and average of six invoices, and "Read this out loud" works on the iPhone but not on the Mac.

TidBITS called the list "the yeoman's work" and opened a reader thread to crowdsource more, and Jason Snell's Six Colors note reads the failures as a map of "where Apple needs to put its attention as it improves this feature, especially when it comes to connecting to more apps, including Health."

The Mac reviewers say it works, and list where it stops

Snell's Six Colors review of macOS 27, published September 14, says Siri AI "actually works quite well" and that on general knowledge it is "good enough that if you previously relied on Google Gemini or ChatGPT for basic questions, you probably can just use Siri and be happy." Personal data is "a bit of a work in progress": Siri searches the Spotlight index, so mail that lives only in Gmail is invisible to it, and Snell set up Apple's Mail and Calendar beside Mimestream and Fantastical so Siri could see them. One hit on his Messages archive "felt like magic"; other requests return "a bunch of PDFs that might work, good luck."

Andrew Cunningham's Ars Technica review, September 16, says Siri AI and Apple Intelligence "clear a minimum viable bar for usefulness and entertainment value that they weren't clearing before," and that the experience "is so much like Copilot or the AI answers in Google Search that it barely seems worth remarking upon." It helps with the settings that live in Control Center and pulls a week of meetings from Calendar, but asked for a photo's EXIF data it gave directions instead, and manipulating files in the Finder is beyond it. Jeff Benjamin's 9to5Mac video piece of September 17 is the warmest: "Siri is good, and not just on the iPhone, but on the Mac as well," an assistant "finally good enough to use on purpose, and not just by accident," with a gap, no memory across conversations, worked around with a profile in a Note. Macworld's guide found Siri "avoids presenting itself as human, excessive flattery and potentially harmful responses" and expects "some rough edges" from a beta.

The fine print holds

Apple's announcement calls Siri AI "a profoundly more capable and conversational assistant with personal context understanding, broad world knowledge, onscreen awareness, and even more systemwide app actions." The reviews confirm the first three and qualify the fourth: the actions work in Apple's apps and in third-party apps that have been updated for it. Siri AI is a beta, in English, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish due in October by Macworld's account. In the EU it runs on the Mac and Vision Pro and not on the iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch; it is not available in China; and Apple says server-side features, Siri AI among them, are subject to daily usage limits, with expanded access "for a fee in the future."

Our own First Look at the public beta found the same split, good at trivia and bad at finding files. Apple has been promising a computer you can talk to since the 1987 Knowledge Navigator video, the subject of our 2002 item on the Knowledge Navigator. Our judgment: the Siri Apple has hinted at for two macOS releases, by Ars's count, has arrived on the Mac marked beta, and the list of what it will not do is finally short enough to print.