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John Ternus sent his first staff memo as Apple's chief executive on September 1, calling next week's product launch "phenomenal" — but the headline feature of that launch, the rebuilt Gemini-powered Siri that Apple first promised at WWDC 2024, will not arrive as a clean delivery of that two-year-old promise. It will arrive waitlisted, English-only, and blocked entirely on iPhone and iPad in the European Union and China — meaning that on September 9, when Ternus takes the stage at Apple Park's Steve Jobs Theater for his first keynote as CEO, hundreds of millions of iPhone users around the world will watch Apple announce an AI assistant they cannot yet access.

Ternus's Day One Memo Sets the Expectation

The memo, first reported by Bloomberg and published in full by MacRumors and 9to5Mac, was brief: four paragraphs. Ternus thanked employees for their warm wishes, praised his predecessor Tim Cook in generous terms, and then turned to product with a confidence that reads as deliberate rather than incidental.

"I also want to extend my deep appreciation to Tim for sharing so much of his knowledge and experience during this transition, and more importantly, for everything he contributed to Apple over the years," Ternus wrote. "We're so lucky to have had a CEO who led with his values and with such decency and humanity. We are all better for it, and I'm so grateful he'll be our executive chairman."

Then, in the same memo, Ternus pivoted to the forward: "We have a huge launch next week that's going to be phenomenal. I'm just as excited about what lies beyond that, including the incredible products already in the works and the ones we haven't even imagined yet that we'll dream up and create together."

The gracious handoff echoes the tone Cook himself struck when stepping into the role Steve Jobs left in 2011 — a continuity play designed to reassure staff, investors, and Apple's broader ecosystem that culture survives transition. That tone was earned and appropriate. What the memo does not prepare readers for is the specific shape of what "phenomenal" will mean in practice.

What "Phenomenal" Actually Ships With

Siri AI — the rebuilt assistant Apple unveiled at WWDC 2026 on June 8, running on a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Google Gemini model via Apple's Private Cloud Compute architecture — will arrive in iOS 27 this September alongside new iPhones. But a series of constraints will limit who gets it, and when.

First, there is a waitlist. During the iOS 27 developer beta, access to the new Siri required joining a queue; beta users reported waits of up to a week before the new interface activated. Apple has not confirmed the waitlist publicly — the company's official iOS 27 marketing says only that "Siri AI [is] coming in English later this year" — but beta code and community testing both document the queue. According to Gadget Hacks' analysis, Apple has confirmed the beta timing and the language requirement but "has not said a word publicly about a waitlist gating access once iOS 27 ships."

Second, the new Siri will launch in English only. Support for additional languages is planned to follow in a staggered rollout.

Third, and most structurally significant: Siri AI will not arrive on iPhone or iPad in the European Union at launch. Apple officially confirmed the EU block on June 8, 2026, in a statement titled "Due to the Digital Markets Act, Siri AI delayed in EU for iOS 27 and iPadOS 27." The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to give rival voice assistants the same deep device access as Siri; Apple says no technically safe mechanism exists to satisfy that requirement, and proposed a "Trusted System Agent" architecture as an alternative. The European Commission rejected the proposal. Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, offered the plainest summary of where that leaves EU iPhone users: there is currently no timeline for Siri AI's availability on iOS and iPadOS in the EU. The European Commission has pushed back, saying Apple's own choices blocked launch rather than the DMA itself. Siri AI is also unavailable in China while Apple works through regulatory requirements there.

The approximate affected population: 450 million iPhone and iPad users in the EU; additional hundreds of millions in China. Together they constitute a substantial portion of Apple's roughly 1.5 billion active device users.

Why It Matters That This Promise Has Been Deferred Before

Apple first previewed a context-aware, personally intelligent Siri at WWDC 2024. The features — including the ability to understand and act on personal data across apps, analyze on-screen content, and conduct multi-step reasoning tasks — were advertised in marketing materials for the iPhone 16 lineup. They did not ship when the iPhone 16 shipped. They did not ship for nearly two years after that.

In May 2026, Apple agreed to a $250 million settlement covering eligible iPhone purchases made between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025 — buyers who had been shown advertising for AI Siri features that were not yet functional when their devices arrived. Apple denied wrongdoing. A federal court granted preliminary approval of the settlement in July 2026.

The Gemini-powered Siri debut at September 9 is the functional delivery of what Apple sold two years before. For eligible US buyers in English-speaking markets on iPhone 15 Pro or newer hardware, it will arrive — behind a waitlist, with some features staged, but arrive. For the hundreds of millions of users in the EU and China, the wait continues without a timeline.

Whether the gated, partial, English-first rollout constitutes delivery of a "phenomenal" launch or another staged preview is a question Ternus's first keynote will begin to answer — and his first earnings call, expected in late October, will need to address directly.

How Siri AI Works — and Why the Rollout Is Staged

The technical reason for the waitlist is the same reason Apple needed to license Gemini in the first place: the scale of inference at the top of Siri's three-tier architecture cannot be expanded instantly.

Siri AI processes queries in three layers. Simple requests — timers, music control, smart home commands — stay entirely on the device, handled by Apple's own on-device models (approximately 3 billion parameters on the Neural Engine). Moderately complex requests escalate to Apple's Private Cloud Compute servers, which use custom Apple Silicon hardware in stateless server nodes designed so that data is not retained and is not accessible to Apple staff. The most demanding reasoning tasks route to Google Cloud, where they run on Nvidia Blackwell B200 graphics processors built specifically for trillion-parameter inference.

The custom Gemini model at the top of this stack uses a mixture-of-experts architecture, which activates only a relevant subset of its 1.2 trillion total parameters for each query rather than firing the entire network. This is what makes the economics viable: Apple pays inference costs proportional to the active parameter footprint, not to the full 1.2 trillion parameter knowledge base. The custom model is approximately eight times larger than the 150-billion-parameter cloud models Apple had previously deployed — enough to close the capability gap with ChatGPT and Google Gemini that had made Siri look increasingly inadequate since 2022.

The waitlist exists because Nvidia B200 GPU cluster capacity at Google Cloud cannot be instantly scaled to handle 1.5 billion active Apple users simultaneously. Apple stages access to measure and manage that demand curve. The approach is consistent with how Apple rolled out Apple Intelligence features beginning in iOS 18: capacity-gated, with users joining a queue and receiving access progressively.

Apple pays Google approximately $1 billion per year for access to the custom Gemini model, under a multi-year non-exclusive licensing arrangement. Tim Cook acknowledged on his final earnings call as CEO that the company does not yet have a complete plan for the compute cost as Gemini usage scales. That open variable now belongs to Ternus.

What September 9 Actually Brings

Beyond Siri AI, the "Surprise and Shine" keynote at Apple Park is scheduled for September 9 at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET), and it will be the largest hardware moment of Ternus's career — the moment the engineer who built Apple's devices becomes the CEO who introduces them publicly.

The headliner is the iPhone Ultra, Apple's first foldable iPhone. The device is expected to use a book-style form factor with an outer display of approximately 5.5 inches and an inner display opening to approximately 7.6 to 7.8 inches, a titanium frame, and an A20 Pro chip. Because the slim profile doesn't accommodate Face ID, Touch ID will be integrated into the power button — the first time Apple's most expensive iPhone has used fingerprint authentication since 2017. Starting price is expected to be approximately $1,999, based on analyst consensus; Apple has not confirmed pricing.

Buyers considering the iPhone Ultra should be aware of a documented hardware constraint before committing. The inner display uses ultra-thin glass that achieves approximately Mohs 5 hardness after chemical strengthening, with a polymer protective layer rated roughly Mohs 2 to 3 — about the hardness of a fingernail. Standard iPhone Gorilla Glass rates Mohs 6 to 7. Apple built and shelved a dedicated stylus for the iPhone Ultra after engineering confirmed the inner display cannot withstand stylus-tip pressure without permanent marking. Samsung encountered the identical constraint when it dropped the S Pen from the Galaxy Z Fold 7. No stylus accessory for the iPhone Ultra has been announced.

The iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are also expected on September 9, powered by the A20 Pro — Apple's first chip built on TSMC's 2nm process, which uses gate-all-around nanosheet transistors in place of the FinFET design of prior generations. Independent performance projections estimate 10 to 15 percent gains at the same power level versus the prior N3E node, or roughly 25 to 30 percent lower power consumption at equivalent performance. Apple is TSMC's exclusive early-production customer for the N2 process in mass-market consumer devices. The variable-aperture camera is exclusive to the iPhone 18 Pro Max — a physically adjustable iris not shared with the smaller iPhone 18 Pro.

Also expected at the event: Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4, and a refreshed Apple TV 4K. The software side will include announced release dates for iOS 27, watchOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, and related operating system updates.

Notably absent from September's stage will be the standard iPhone 18, the iPhone Air 2, and the iPhone 18e — Apple is splitting its annual iPhone cycle in two for the first time, with those mass-market models pushed to a spring 2027 launch. This structural change affects carrier relationship calendars, holiday quarter revenue recognition, and the annual iPhone upgrade cycle in ways that analysts are still modeling.

Pre-orders for the new iPhone lineup are expected to open on Saturday, September 13, with devices expected to begin shipping during the week of September 22.

Who Ternus Is — and What His Blank Slate on Policy Means

Ternus, 51, is a mechanical engineer by training and a 25-year Apple employee by career. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a mechanical engineering degree, spent four years designing virtual reality headsets before joining Apple's product design team in 2001, and rose through hardware engineering — vice president in 2013, senior vice president in 2021 — overseeing every major Apple product line from iPhone and iPad to AirPods, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro. He was the driving force behind Apple's transition from Intel processors to its in-house Apple Silicon chips, a shift that produced the fanless M1 MacBook Air and the M-series architecture that now underpins Apple's AI strategy.

He is the third CEO of Apple's modern era, following Steve Jobs and Tim Cook — the first engineer to hold the role.

What Ternus does not bring to the position is a public record on the policy and regulatory questions that will define his most consequential decisions. As of his first day as CEO, he had no congressional testimony or regulatory record, and had not published positions on antitrust, data privacy, AI governance, or trade policy. His only documented political activity is a $2,900 Schumer donation in 2021.

That blank slate is manageable in the abstract but consequential in practice. Apple faces an active Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit over the iPhone's market position, with settlement talks ongoing as of July 2026 and no agreement reached. The European Union's Digital Markets Act standoff — which has already blocked Siri AI from EU iPhones — requires compliance negotiations that Cook personally initiated. Cook's move to executive chairman includes managing government and policy relationships with the Trump administration and the Chinese government specifically.

Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities captured the challenge directly: Ternus knows Apple hardware deeply, but "on the global stage — that's probably one of the biggest areas where he's going to have to learn on the job."

What September 9 Sets Up

The September 9 keynote at Apple Park will be the first time a global audience watches Ternus as Apple's chief executive. What he introduces — how he frames the iPhone Ultra for consumers who have never bought a foldable phone, how he characterizes Siri AI for users who have heard promises about it for two years, and how he explains the partial rollout to buyers in the US alongside the exclusion of EU and Chinese users — will constitute the first legible evidence of what kind of CEO he intends to be.

Cook appeared on stages like this as an ambassador and storyteller. Ternus will appear as the engineer who built the devices being introduced. Whether that distinction produces a different kind of keynote, or whether the format absorbs the presenter's identity, September 9 will answer.

For buyers deciding whether to pre-order: the iPhone Ultra will be Apple's most expensive iPhone ever at an expected $1,999 and up, with inner display durability tradeoffs that buyers should understand before committing. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max offer the A20 Pro chip and, on the Max, the variable aperture camera. All three models will receive Siri AI — with a waitlist and an English-only restriction at launch.

For users outside the US hoping the new Siri marks a turning point: as of today, no timeline exists for EU availability on iPhone or iPad. The same constraints that have defined Apple's AI rollout for two years — deferred promises, staged access, geographic limitations — are still present in the feature that Ternus's first memo called phenomenal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will I get the new Siri AI on launch day when iOS 27 ships?

Probably not immediately. Siri AI is expected to launch behind a waitlist — consistent with how Apple rolled out earlier Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18. During the iOS 27 developer beta, access required joining a queue, with waits of up to a week. Apple has not publicly confirmed a waitlist for the public launch, but beta code and community testing document the mechanism. Additionally, Siri AI is launching in English only, with other languages to follow in a staggered rollout. Eligible hardware includes iPhone 15 Pro and newer. More details are available from MacRumors' Siri waitlist reporting.

Is Siri AI available in Europe and other regions?

Not on iPhone or iPad in the European Union. Apple confirmed on June 8, 2026, that Siri AI will not ship on iPhone or iPad in the EU with iOS 27, due to the Digital Markets Act's requirement that rival assistants receive the same device-level access as Siri — a requirement Apple says it cannot safely fulfill. The EU's Mac and Apple Watch receive different treatment because they are not classified as "core platform services" under the DMA. Siri AI is also unavailable in China while Apple works through local regulatory requirements. No timeline exists for EU or China availability on iPhone. Full details are in Apple's EU DMA Siri announcement.

What should I know about the iPhone Ultra's inner display before spending $1,999?

The iPhone Ultra's foldable inner display uses ultra-thin glass that achieves approximately Mohs 5 hardness — significantly softer than the Mohs 6 to 7 Gorilla Glass on a standard iPhone. The polymer protective layer on top rates roughly Mohs 2 to 3, about the hardness of a fingernail. Apple built and tested a dedicated stylus for the device, then shelved it after engineers confirmed the inner display scratches under stylus-tip pressure. No stylus accessory for the Ultra has been announced. Handle the inner display with correspondingly more care than a standard iPhone screen, and be aware that repair costs for damage to the inner display on a $1,999-plus device are not yet publicly known. Full details are available on Apple's shelved Ultra stylus.

Who is John Ternus and what is his AI policy record going into his first keynote?

John Ternus is Apple's eighth CEO, a mechanical engineer who joined the company in 2001 and spent 25 years overseeing hardware development for every major Apple product line. He was named to succeed Tim Cook in April 2026 and officially became CEO on September 1. On AI policy specifically: Ternus has no documented public record. He has not testified before Congress, published positions on AI governance, antitrust, or data privacy, or appeared in regulatory proceedings. His only documented political activity is a $2,900 donation to a senator in 2021. Tim Cook retains the executive chairman role specifically to manage Apple's policy and government relationships — including the active DOJ antitrust case and Apple's EU Digital Markets Act negotiations — while Ternus focuses on product. Whether that division of authority functions as intended over time is among the most-watched governance questions of his first year. A TechCrunch profile of John Ternus covers his background in detail.